Fiction and Non-Fiction
If you’re anywhere near Auburn, Alabama you may have heard about the destruction of the eagles nest by a housing developer. The situation is now under official investigation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Apart from that it was a fairly quiet week. I did get The Head of the Serpent published but didn’t make much progress on the sequel. I expect this week to be better.
This past week, I reached the milestone of having written over a million words of publishable fiction.
I remember when I first began tracking my word count how one manuscript page – about 250 words – seemed a huge hurdle to reach every day. Now I’ve developed the writing muscle, and it doesn’t seem such a challenge.
At first glance, a million words sounds a lot, but I wrote those words over a six year period. I have a long way to go to emulate writers like John D MacDonald or Dean Wesley Smith for whom a million words is the annual target.
Just to help with the math on this, a million words a year is an average of about 2,750 words a day. I don’t think I’ll manage the next million words by the end of 2025. In the same way you don’t leave your doorstep and run a full marathon without preparation and training, making that leap to a million words a year requires similar planning and preparation. Not least in the planning is what to do with those ten to twenty books you write in that year!
As I said, I don’t think 2025 will be a million word year, but I should certainly be able to write the next million words in less than six years.
This past weekend, I finished the copy edit read through of a novella titled The Head of the Serpent. It will be the first of a trilogy, and the second is already well under way.
Nothing special, you might think, except this one is different. I first had the idea for this story over thirty years ago, before I even moved to the United States. In that first iteration the story was driven by political events at the time.
As with life, there is change. What seemed new and shiny at one time soon became old news. Over the years I’ve put the idea aside, picked it up, made changes and set it down again.
In September, I picked up the idea again, shook my head at some of those early chapters and removed all the “big” world events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan – and tightened it down to the characters in the story. They have always been consistent, although their backgrounds have changed.
After all this time, you’d expect the story to write itself, and in many ways it did, although there were still a few incidents that took me by surprise as the story unfolded.
The goal is to finish putting the copy edits into the manuscript, and publish by the weekend. This one has been a long time in the making, but I’m pleased it’s finally here.
Over the past few years my production cycle – that’s the work I do between finishing the story and pressing the publish button Amazon, Kobo etc. – has been pretty ad-hoc. As I finish a story, I think about editing, covers, and sales copy.
That wasn’t really a problem when I was publishing a novel a year.
This year it’s been two novels, and I have on my desk a novella and a short story collection waiting to finish that production cycle, with another novella planned to finish by the end of October, and a third one by Christmas.
Those two published titles I mentioned last week still aren’t published!
I had an inkling this might be a problem when the manuscript for The Corpse in the Courtyard sat gathering dust for nearly two months before I got to the final read through.
It’s a problem I’m glad to have. It means I’m starting to hit some of the word count and project goals I’m aiming for. It also means my production schedule needs more planning than just an ad-hoc set of activities.
This last week has been fairly quiet. I wrote most of a Jacob short story with no real idea who the killer was, or how it ended. That was until late last night. I have to make some changes for consistency but nothing too heavy. My expectation is to finish the story tonight or tomorrow.
There’s been a lot of publishing energy going on as well. I’m about a third of the way through the final read on a novella. The cover and sales copy are all done so publishing will be soon after I get the corrections put into the manuscript. In parallel, I found several stories with the same protagonist. I finished the cover and sales copy yesterday.
The introduction is next on my to-do list after the Jacob story. By the end of the month, I should have two more titles available.
Thrill Ride 7 – Adventure is now available with one of my stories about that Babylonian bad boy, Nidintu.
You can get Thrill Ride – Adventure here: https://books2read.com/thrillride-adventure
Make a wildfire your ally. Tread softly with the French Resistance during WWII. Extract an informant from the dangers of the Babylonian streets. Sail the Atlantic, float down a river, or take a fishing boat far out to sea. And you can always fight the Phoenicians with the least lucky Viking ever born.
My short story Making the Way Home is included in this issue of Thrill Ride Magazine.
Thrill Ride 7 arrives on September 21. You can preorder your copy on amazon at:amazon.com/gp/product/B0CWCPJZM5
Sometime in the middle of July, I started the book Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz. I bought the book because it looked to be about the Marine General Smedley Butler, and his experiences leading up to the time he was invited to join a proposed coup against then president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I had two reasons for picking up the book. First was to learn more about Butler, and his apparent involvement with the coup. Second was to get a deeper understanding of the series of small actions in the Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century referred to as the Banana Wars. I knew a little about the Banana Wars from a visit to the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico some years ago, but outside of the documentation in the Marine Corps Archives, I hadn’t found out much about the Banana Wars, or the planned coup.
In the back of my mind was a novel, or series of novels about Marines in the Banana Wars with a central character present in all the books. I fully admit the idea for this came from my reading of W. E. B. Griffin’s series The Corps and his main character Ken McCoy. I even wrote an opening chapter about the 4th Marine Regiment deploying to Dominica from New Orleans.
Katz’s book jumps from relating one part of Smedley Butler’s service to that same area today – the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti etc. – and documenting the failings and excesses of the US as an Imperial power.
I haven’t yet read enough beyond Gangsters of Capitalism to form a proper opinion on Katz’s view of the history he tells. However, there was enough there for me to pause and think about the Banana Wars series. If I write the stories without reference to the excesses that took place, and which were apparently condoned all the way to the White House regardless of its occupant, I’m painting a false picture of the times. A picture that’s likely unjust to everyone involved.
Dean Wesley Smith reminds me regularly that writer’s are, at heart, entertainers. Staying anywhere close to reality means these stories wouldn’t be entertainment. So, for the moment, the Banana Wars idea is on indefinite hold.
It took a little longer than intended, but The Corpse in the Courtyard is done with final edits and was published this past weekend. Follow the link to get the book at your favorite digital store.
This past weekend I received some feedback on The Corpse in the Courtyard from one of my first readers.
I found the prolog hard, she said. There were time when you used a comma and I expected the word and after it. Did you do that deliberately?
As an example, I wrote A part of Jacob wanted to relax, walk across the courtyard The expectation was relax, and walk.
Writing that way was a deliberate choice. I came across the technique while studying the Eve Dallas novels by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts). I liked what she did and how she did it, and decided to experiment with the technique about the time I started writing The Corpse in the Courtyard.
Dean Wesley Smith describes using many craft techniques – tags, power words, etc., as sprinkling a spice in your writing. It adds depth and flavor when done right. If you do it wrong, it can pull the reader right out of the story – just like that mouthful of cayenne pepper when you used a tablespoon instead of a pinch.
So I went back to the Eve Dallas books, and then my manuscript.
Essentially that’s what I did in the prolog. Instead of sprinkling the technique through the pages as J.D Robb did, I spooned it on thickly in just about every other paragraph. Because I was now reading the story from a different perspective, I saw what I’d done and felt how clunky the story flowed. Not good as I could lose a reader in the first four or five pages, and they would never know why they didn’t feel at home with the story.
It didn’t take long to make some changes that improved the flow of the opening. Now I have to read through my current work-in-progress and make sure I used sprinkles and not spoonfuls.
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