...and help a struggling new author establish a "real" presence on Amazon:)
I need a few sales - and more importantly, a few Reader Reviews, to fuel my next round of Agent Queries. I'm hearing that chapters 1-4 really need excising, but I'm busy right now getting the sequel (The Wayback Machine) ready to submit to ABNA 2 - and the deadline's close!
But as they didn't really ever say "It ain't over 'till it's Over." In the world of POD, I can keep tweaking this thing forever until I get it right - IF I've got a basic vehicle to work with. I think so - but I need some outside opinions. Looking forward to yours!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Monday, December 1, 2008
Time to Fish?
...or Cut Bait?
As a participant in last year's ABNA contest, I recently received an invitation to join the second generation contest, with the entry date coming up fast at February 2nd. My first inclination was to get right to work on The Wayback Machine to whip in into shape for entry. But then, in working through the thread from last year's contestants that never left, I came across references to Authonomy. Being as how I'd just submitted my seventh draft of Mai Shangri-La to Createspace and basically decided that I was done with it except to let it sink or swim on its own merit, I decided to just have a look. Boy, did I get routed onto a alternative-destination siding!
In a nutshell, I joined up, posted four chapters from Mai Shangri-La, and waited for other authors to read my excerpts, give me a few "Attaboys" and then tell me to keep writing. Instead, I got several focussed, perceptive and mildly scathing, and most importantly, generally consistent critiques of the four chapters telling me, in different ways, that I was;
-neglecting the "story" at the expense of the "back story"
-overwriting the hell out of the story that I did manage to commit to paper
(too much description, too many adjectives, etc)
- relying on "tell" rather than "show" at almost every turn, and what is worst of all,
- committing the cardinal narrative writing sin of "infodump"
It seems that I was so passionate about the underlying messages I thought Reuben James's story were illustrating that I didn't trust his story toactually illuminate and reveal those messages. Seems I felt it necessary to hit readers over the head with my concerns for the environment, my dire prognostications for the future if we continue down the "business as usual" path, and my incandescent descriptive prose describing that dystopic future.
Talk about getting taken down a peg or five. To make a long story short, I'm hooked into posting on Authonomy at least several times a day, I'm looking at completely excising at least four chapters from the MSL manuscript, and I seem to be committing myself to an almost complete rewrite to address the concerns that the Authonomy folks have raised.
More on this new path as I follow it. The Wayback Machine's back on the back burner. Let's see if we can whip Mai Shangri-La into the shape that will garner the same consistency of critique from other writers that it has thus far - but this time with a positive spin.
Back to the drawing board!!! Who knows? Maybe MSL will be different enough when I'm done that it will be worth re-submitting to ABNA.
Stay tuned...
As a participant in last year's ABNA contest, I recently received an invitation to join the second generation contest, with the entry date coming up fast at February 2nd. My first inclination was to get right to work on The Wayback Machine to whip in into shape for entry. But then, in working through the thread from last year's contestants that never left, I came across references to Authonomy. Being as how I'd just submitted my seventh draft of Mai Shangri-La to Createspace and basically decided that I was done with it except to let it sink or swim on its own merit, I decided to just have a look. Boy, did I get routed onto a alternative-destination siding!
In a nutshell, I joined up, posted four chapters from Mai Shangri-La, and waited for other authors to read my excerpts, give me a few "Attaboys" and then tell me to keep writing. Instead, I got several focussed, perceptive and mildly scathing, and most importantly, generally consistent critiques of the four chapters telling me, in different ways, that I was;
-neglecting the "story" at the expense of the "back story"
-overwriting the hell out of the story that I did manage to commit to paper
(too much description, too many adjectives, etc)
- relying on "tell" rather than "show" at almost every turn, and what is worst of all,
- committing the cardinal narrative writing sin of "infodump"
It seems that I was so passionate about the underlying messages I thought Reuben James's story were illustrating that I didn't trust his story toactually illuminate and reveal those messages. Seems I felt it necessary to hit readers over the head with my concerns for the environment, my dire prognostications for the future if we continue down the "business as usual" path, and my incandescent descriptive prose describing that dystopic future.
Talk about getting taken down a peg or five. To make a long story short, I'm hooked into posting on Authonomy at least several times a day, I'm looking at completely excising at least four chapters from the MSL manuscript, and I seem to be committing myself to an almost complete rewrite to address the concerns that the Authonomy folks have raised.
More on this new path as I follow it. The Wayback Machine's back on the back burner. Let's see if we can whip Mai Shangri-La into the shape that will garner the same consistency of critique from other writers that it has thus far - but this time with a positive spin.
Back to the drawing board!!! Who knows? Maybe MSL will be different enough when I'm done that it will be worth re-submitting to ABNA.
Stay tuned...
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Really Close...
...but of course I've said that before.
More importantly, I've decided that this time, I really am close enough (I'm halfway through a "cosmetic" seventh draft polish that I think is where I'll leave MSL for now and move on to other writing projects. I'll make brief notes here about it's status, but leave it at that. I'll also comment briefly on publication progress (and possibly on sales) on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rubisr
I'm not leaving the "Mai Shangri-La" concept behind, though. Instead, I'm going to begin posting here some of the thoughts, beliefs and concerns that have driven this project for the past three years, along with the background reading and activities that have kept it alive.
Underlying everything about MSL is a concern for the state of the environment and a fear, which is growing rather than receding, that we've already passed a number of both environmental and social Tipping Points which mean that the Future is going to be about mitigating the effects of two centuries of excess and learning to cope with the results rather than preventing them.
My first posting along this line will be a commentary on Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded". Friedman's "The World is Flat" figured prominently in the original draft of MSL in how it shaped Reuben James's thinking, and the striking thing for me is how fast and how radically Friedman's emphasis has changed from touting the benefits of a "flat earth" to explaining how the flat earth concept will still be a factor in a world which is Hotter and More Crowded.
Hot, Flat and Crowded. Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Strous & Giroux, 2008
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/files/imagecache/book_midsize/files/jackets/hot_flat_and_crowded.jpg
More importantly, I've decided that this time, I really am close enough (I'm halfway through a "cosmetic" seventh draft polish that I think is where I'll leave MSL for now and move on to other writing projects. I'll make brief notes here about it's status, but leave it at that. I'll also comment briefly on publication progress (and possibly on sales) on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rubisr
I'm not leaving the "Mai Shangri-La" concept behind, though. Instead, I'm going to begin posting here some of the thoughts, beliefs and concerns that have driven this project for the past three years, along with the background reading and activities that have kept it alive.
Underlying everything about MSL is a concern for the state of the environment and a fear, which is growing rather than receding, that we've already passed a number of both environmental and social Tipping Points which mean that the Future is going to be about mitigating the effects of two centuries of excess and learning to cope with the results rather than preventing them.
My first posting along this line will be a commentary on Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat and Crowded". Friedman's "The World is Flat" figured prominently in the original draft of MSL in how it shaped Reuben James's thinking, and the striking thing for me is how fast and how radically Friedman's emphasis has changed from touting the benefits of a "flat earth" to explaining how the flat earth concept will still be a factor in a world which is Hotter and More Crowded.
Hot, Flat and Crowded. Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Strous & Giroux, 2008
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/files/imagecache/book_midsize/files/jackets/hot_flat_and_crowded.jpg
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Edging Toward Release...
...and for the record, I've given up on the "Errata" page posted back in May. After four months of wordsmithing the MS page by page, paragraph by paragraph and line by line, I've found just TOO many edits to even contemplate listing them all. The Errata page goes dead, and along with it, the Replacement Book Offer I made there. Since I pulled the MS after selling just a single copy, I don't feel that anyone's going to be cheated out of anything here.
Suffice it to say that the whole "6th-draft" experience was humbling indeed. I begin to see more clearly with every pass through the MS the value of a professional editor to identify weaknesses and errors and get the author moving on them. By the time I completed the 6th draft run-through (with the grammar checker finally turned on, to point out my many grammatical and syntactical sins:(), I had found and corrected a minimum of 2,000 errors in the MS.
Generally, my errors - so easy to see now, with the benefit of two years of "cooling off" since I completed the first draft - fall into five categories, all of which I know better than to indulge in. The big categories are;
Suffice it to say that the whole "6th-draft" experience was humbling indeed. I begin to see more clearly with every pass through the MS the value of a professional editor to identify weaknesses and errors and get the author moving on them. By the time I completed the 6th draft run-through (with the grammar checker finally turned on, to point out my many grammatical and syntactical sins:(), I had found and corrected a minimum of 2,000 errors in the MS.
Generally, my errors - so easy to see now, with the benefit of two years of "cooling off" since I completed the first draft - fall into five categories, all of which I know better than to indulge in. The big categories are;
- Simple typos and word substitutions that the spelling checker didn't pick up (their for they're, to for too, etc) This one puzzles me. I must have had the spelling checker turned off - a lot..
- Passive Voice - I had no idea I so often resort to long, contorted passive sentences ("the box was packed with/He was slow in climbing to his feet, etc)
- "Null words" - LOTS of instances where I gratuituously used "that" and "which".
- Sentences beginning with "And" or "But". Really glaring stuff! I remember writing many of these, and thinking that (see, see?) I was doing so consciously, to add emphasis to the statement. But (see again?) there were just way too many of these. Many of these were edited to create compound sentences (and note the passive voice...)
- Run-on sentences. I had no idea I was such a wordy writer (well, actually, I did, but I thought I had already addressed that...). The good folks at Microsoft must have pointed out three hundred incidences of "Long Sentence - consider revising", and by combining those "And" and "But" sentences, I just created even more of these.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
ClustrMap
I just added ClustrMaps to this site, and it's interesting watching markers beginning to come in from around the world. I guess that these are just random hits from people trolling the web for something to do with climate, weather or the environment, but they are proof that the "long tail" really does work! Now if only it'll work as well when the book's actually released in spreading the word and building a reader base. Stranger things have happened!
IF you end up at this site, do leave a comment, even if it's to dis my layout or berate me for running a blog on a book by an unknown author that's not yet even released.
On that note, the MS text for Draft 6 is now done, with over a thousand edits hopefully moving it up a notch from badly flawed and unedited to finished to the extent that a novice writer can. If you're interested in speculative fiction, particularly with an environmental subtext, watch for Mai Shangri-La available for shipping on Amazon by mid-October.
IF you end up at this site, do leave a comment, even if it's to dis my layout or berate me for running a blog on a book by an unknown author that's not yet even released.
On that note, the MS text for Draft 6 is now done, with over a thousand edits hopefully moving it up a notch from badly flawed and unedited to finished to the extent that a novice writer can. If you're interested in speculative fiction, particularly with an environmental subtext, watch for Mai Shangri-La available for shipping on Amazon by mid-October.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Another month trickles by...
...and Mai Shangri-La's still - Not!
It's been a challenging new year, both personally and professionally, and work on brining Main Shangri-La to a (tentative) conclusion has languished. It's not that I'm not working on it. I grab a few minutes every day to pore over another couple of pages winkling out more of those irritating typos, grammatical errors and compositional weaknesses. The problem is that it has been, quite literally a few minutes each day instead of a few hours. With the amount of work yet to do, it's likle to be months, rather than weeks more to bring it to conclusion.
I've got about 100 pages left to go. The first 150 pages are finished in electronic draft, but beyond that, the edits are just pencilled into my 5th draft proof copy. I'd better not lose that copy, or I'll be like Hemingway and his famous lost novel in Paris. It's likely never to see the light of day.
But no, that's not going to happen. I AM going to plow through the last 1oo pages. I AM going to get the electronic MS tweaked and sent off to CreateSpace. I AM going to finish this up soon and move on to other projects. I am...
It's been a challenging new year, both personally and professionally, and work on brining Main Shangri-La to a (tentative) conclusion has languished. It's not that I'm not working on it. I grab a few minutes every day to pore over another couple of pages winkling out more of those irritating typos, grammatical errors and compositional weaknesses. The problem is that it has been, quite literally a few minutes each day instead of a few hours. With the amount of work yet to do, it's likle to be months, rather than weeks more to bring it to conclusion.
I've got about 100 pages left to go. The first 150 pages are finished in electronic draft, but beyond that, the edits are just pencilled into my 5th draft proof copy. I'd better not lose that copy, or I'll be like Hemingway and his famous lost novel in Paris. It's likely never to see the light of day.
But no, that's not going to happen. I AM going to plow through the last 1oo pages. I AM going to get the electronic MS tweaked and sent off to CreateSpace. I AM going to finish this up soon and move on to other projects. I am...
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