I’ve started writing again. That is the good news. The bad news is that with 7 different novels in flight I’m all over the place…working on one for one week, and then jumping to another for a week then off to the third and fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh all in random order and for random durations. 

One of my major failings of late is not being able to focus. Needless to say I’ve not been able to stay focused for the last several years for more than a week or two at a time on any one writing project.

As an aside, my first novel — Youth in Asia — continues to sell surprisingly well given that it has been four and a half years since I published it. The novel has sold about 4,200 copies, and I’ve donated well over $2,000 from sales. Frankly, it is embarrassing to admit how long ago I published it. 

On a completely unrelated topic, my attempt at growing Giant Sequoias continues…

The Giant Sequoias

Of the thirteen seeds that came in the little kit I bought on Amazon for $7, we have three sprouts. I’m not sure if any more have started but are not yet visible, so I will prep six pots. In addition to what you see above, I added a healthy helping of sand.

As you can see in the photo below, the small tube in front of my computer is where the seeds started. I laid out a sheet of aluminum foil to empty the contents of the tube into so I don’t make a mess or lose any of the seeds.

We only found three seeds that had germinated, but we did find the other 10 seeds. As you can see below, the sprouts are small and very fragile. We are trying to keep as much of the original dirt around their root as we can.

We got the three sprouts into the pots. The other ten seeds we put on the top of the fourth pot and sprinkled the dirt that they came with over them. I marked each seed with a small white rock. Odds are low that any will grow at this point, but thought we’d give them one more shot.

I started this project on a lark, but now that they are growing I’ve been giving more thought to where to plant them on our property when the time comes. Though they reportedly can grow in central Texas, when full grown (long after I’m dead and gone), they can consume more than 500 gallons of water per day. Though we have a ‘wet weather’ creek behind our home, and I’m assuming the water table is not too far below it, and though I can plant at least one in reach of where our sprinkler covers, I can’t imagine pumping 500 gallons of water at it a day. I’ll let my descendants figure that out if it lasts that long…

Ifal

If all goes well, I figure I’ll put them in big pots next summer, probably of the 5-gallon variety. I’ll put those on the deck. Then after the trees are at least six feet tall, move them to the yard.  

Now that is done…on to Thanksgiving and more writing and editing. Hopefully I can focus on one thing at a time. 

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The never ending “show vs tell” debate came up again in one of my writing workshops. I’ve written about it before (in fact, it is still one of my most popular blogs). To keep the story short, it occurred to me that when to show vs. tell, or perhaps when to show AND tell is also partly a function of timing and characterization. This is because we have to train the reader and make sure general perceptions about what body language shows are precise for our specific and distinct characters.

In this example we discussed, the question was if saying “Frank clenched his jaw,” showed irritation. It quickly became apparent that different people — readers — perceive a clenched jaw as showing a variety of different things.

If the MC clenching his jaw is a habit that is consistent with when he is irritated, then we have to make this clear early in the story. Clenching one’s jaw could suggest several things, so we have to be precise regarding what a clenched jaw shows about Frank. For instance…

His son handed him his grade card. Frank looked at it, clenching his jaw. After ten seconds he said, “You know, Billy, I’m really irritated with you. We talked about your grades before. We even got you a tutor, but your grades have not gotten any better. You keep bragging about winning that stupid XBOX contest like that matters in life instead of spending more time on your school work, even helping around the house.”

…later in the story we can be more efficient and write…

After Billy left for school, Frank walked into his son’s room, his jaw clenching as he looked around.

…and we have a pretty good idea what Frank is feeling (and why).

I’m sure there are better examples, but the point is that though showing leverages our common knowledge, like all things in storytelling, it is just one tool. To make our characters more distinct we have to finetune (and quickly) how our characters are really distinct and how they show their distinctness so that as the story picks up speed, we can show and do it efficiently. We don’t want to have to explain during the climax that Frank clenches his jaw when he is irritated. As a reader, that would be irritating.

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To condense the story some of you know, I joined the online writing community www.CritiqueCircle.com site about 4.5 years ago (seems like a long time!) after I started writing again. In three months in late 2013 and early 2014, I cranked out a sci-fi novel, which my wife and kids liked, so I wrote a sequel in the next three months, which my wife and kids also liked. Both novels needed fresh and critical eyes, though.

I then found CC and submitted the first novel (Lonely Hunter), which gave me a ton of constructive feedback. I was delighted that some aspects were well recieved. But it was clear I had a lot of work to do.

Publishing Military Science Fiction

In parallel, I came to understand that I did not have a clue about self-publishing. Having no interest in going down the traditional publishing route again, I had more than a few things to learn.

To learn more about going to market as an indie, I paused work on my sci-fi series and dusted off an old novella. I submitted it at CC and got some great feedback, had it professionally edited, and I did all the things I could think of to ensure it did well in the market. After selling almost 4k copies of Youth In Asia, I have a clue about self-publishing (always more to learn, of course), which bolstered my confidence to keep on with my sci-fi opus.

So I rewrote Lonely Hunter and sent it through CC again (about a six-month process), which went well. And I went to work on the third novel in the series. The third novel introduced a major new character, IrSaa.

Editing and Revising End War

As I have edited, crafted, finetuned, tweaked, and worked on parts of the fourth and fifth novels in the series, IrSaa has taken on an even bigger role and now has a cameo in the first novel and a short but important role in the second. She takes over the third novel; the fourth is just about her. In the fifth and final book, all hell breaks loose (as the saying goes), and she is in the thick of it. Even as her role grew dramatically, the feedback I’ve gotten from various readers is that they want to see even more of her. I’m good with this because her role seems a very natural fit as part of the larger story.

As such, before I wrote any more, I decided one day to scratch out a summary of her complicated life before she appeared in the series to make sure she stays in character, her backstory makes sense where it pops up, flashbacks are consistent with other plot details, etc.

A List becomes a Novel

What started as a list of bullets became a 4,000-word story, which became a 10,000-word story that I submitted to CC in a private queue. Based on the generally positive feedback and some insightful comments (and an itch I can’t seem to make go away), her backgrounder is now a 30K novella with about 10K to 15K words to go (and a lot of rewriting and editing still to do).

I find it intriguing because I’m not writing as I normally write. There is more telling, far less stage direction, it is more episodic, and there are big gaps in the timeline.

There is a more or less traditional plot: IrSaa desperately wants something, tries to get it, fails, tries to get it a second time, fails again, has a hard think about who she really is and what she really wants, reaches one more time and realizes what she thought she wanted is not really what she wants, and then she achieves what she has really wanted all along. The final battle is not the fight she was expecting, but it is a battle nonetheless.

Only then is she ready to show up in my sci-fi series. 

I’ve found it a tremendously enjoyable — if not time-consuming 
— exercise, and one that is greatly strengthening the credibility of this character (it seems to me). 

Subscribers to my Mailing List will get a copy of IrSaa’s Prelude

I don’t know that I’ll actually ever offer it for sale along with the other books in the series (at ~45k words it will be about half the length of the other novels in the series and I have no interest in padding it to make it longer…I will have covered all the ground I want to cover). I will, of course, have it professionally edited and formatted however I offer it.

I will certainly offer it up to my website followers — so be sure to sign up.

Wherever it shows up, it has been fun.

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Yet again, I was party to a discussion about traditional publishing fiction vs. self-publishing fiction. The question was if self-published authors are any good? And yet again, the discussion had several flawed assumptions:

– If you are traditionally published you write well. If you write well you will be traditionally published.

– If you self-publish, you can’t write and you did a poor job of preparing your manuscript. People who self-publish do so because they are not good enough to traditionally publish.

As in most such discussions, there is some truth to all assumptions, but when the generalizations become gospel thoughtful discussion ends. So what is the truth of the matter?

First, by one count, 70% of traditionally published authors fail with their first book and are not offered a chance to publish a second. Said another way, 70% of the time the agents and publishers are wrong about a given book becoming successful.

Second, on the other hand, we all know the many, many stories of authors whose books became bestsellers but were rejected by scores of agents and publishers.

Third, sometimes agents and publishers may just be incompetent. Speaking from personal experience, a couple decades ago I sent a full manuscript unsolicited to a highly regarded medium-sized publisher of history books and asked them if they were interested. They were trying to get into fiction. My historical novel seemed like it would be a good fit. They responded to my manuscript a month later with contracts and advances for it and two more. Obviously, they loved it. We spent about a year editing it during which time they launched about 15 more novels, all of which failed. I eventually got a letter telling me they were exiting the fiction market. So was my novel really that brilliant or just another bad choice they had made because they did not know how to discern good from bad?

(To digress and finish this story… By the time they gave up on getting into fiction, I had an agent with JCA, and we submitted my novel to a few other houses and got a couple of near misses. The consensus seemed to be “Too violent for general literature and too literary for ‘men’s adventure'”.  Cormac McCarthy, where are you when I need you?)

Even though getting an agent only loosely correlates with being a competent writer, unless your writing is a debacle, getting an agent and subsequently a publisher is really a function of odds. And I very much believe that anyone who has sent a novel through a site such as CritiqueCircle.com for community review and feedback at least twice and has had it professionally copy edited is well positioned to get an agent, the qualifier being that the more unusual the work is the more agents you might have to engage to land one. 100 may not be near enough.

IMHO the only way we will know if our writing does not suck – no matter how we publish it — is if we get generally positive reviews (and at least 30 of them) once it is published. Whether or not it sells well and generates a lot of cash is another discussion altogether.

I’ve reviewed a number of self-published books. Some were good. Some were not so good. I’ve also started thousands of traditionally published books. Many I’ve stopped before I finished because they were very poor.

We can say that on average, traditionally published books are better than self-published books. Trying to generalize that into absolute truths is foolhardy and will result in flawed conclusions. And you’ll miss out on some great self-published books.

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