Hello friends!

Today I’m going to talk about my writing process. In NaNoWriMo parlance I am known as a plantser. A hybrid of a planner (one who plans everything) and a pantser (Fuck it, we’re doing it live!). That is to say, I start with a vaguely detailed plan, and I then just write what comes to mind.

The first step for me is coming up with the idea for a novel. I let it germinate in the back of my mind, adding bits and bobbins of ideas and improvements until I feel like I have a solid handle on things. This can take anywhere from days to years. At some point, I realize that I am human and need to secure some of these ideas from the perils and pitfalls of memory. I start writing down the worldbuilding information; the history, geography, commerce, and more.

Historically at this point, I wait until NaNoWriMo to do anything else. For me, the solid goal of 50,000 words gives me something to shoot for. The gamification of recording my written words at the end of the day and seeing my progress is a nice carrot. The first thing I write is a very rough outline. I am talking extra coarse. Sixty grit sandpaper rough. I literally write down a list of chapters, and then think through the story in pieces.

Pallas Lost, for example, my initial planning looked like this:

Chapter 1: Scout finds mystery ship.
Chapter 2: Scholar has trouble.
Chapter 3: Scoundrel has trouble.
Chapter 4: Scholar looks up information, decides to travel.

And so on. Pretty rough, right? That really is the actual words I used. Once I have scratched out the outline, I write the entire story. Starting at chapter one, I just write the words as they come to me. I never really know where the story is going to go, but I keep things pretty close to the rough outline. I try to keep each chapter to a certain viewpoint or story beat, no matter how long and short that may be.

I’m trying a different tack for Pallas Found. This time, I wrote a synopsis of sorts, where I wrote a sentence or two for each chapter in a massive paragraph.  It worked fairly well, until about three-quarters of the way through the book. At that point, the story was telling me to go a different direction, and I listened, invalidating a lot of the synopsis and chapter outlines. It’s also a lot longer with more chapters than Pallas Lost.

Once the story is finished, I let it languish for a while as imposter syndrome kicks in. At some point, weeks or years later, I let my wife read it. As she reads, I start reading it with fresh eyes, editing and changing as I go. By the time I’ve finished that, she’s finished doing the same, and I incorporate the changes as I see fit.

Then comes the real nerve-wracking part: Alpha readers. I put a call out to my friends for anyone who has the time and bandwidth, and I send them a copy of the novel with a list of questions to answer. Some of them answered the questions, some ghosted me, and some went through and did their own editing!

When I get all of the copies back, I go through the novel once again with those comments and edits in mind. When that’s done, I get Beta readers involved. This is the same as the Alphas really, I just label them according to which wave they are in. I’ll do a wave of Gamma readers too. By the time that’s done, I’ll have at least 10-12 takes on my novel in addition to my wife’s and mine.

For Pallas Lost, this is when I wrote a query letter and started querying. I likely won’t be doing that with Pallas Found. That’s a story for another day though.

To change course, finally, I am trying to suss out what to blog. I plan to post weekly, but I wonder what you, the audience, would like to hear about. Do you want me to post snippets of stories, tales of my time in the querying trenches, writing widgets and advice, or something else? Please comment on this post and let me know what content you crave.

Thank you!

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I started a blog. I didn’t have any imaginings of a following, or any real idea of what I wanted to say. What I did say was full of fire and fury, the incandescent ramblings of an angsty teen. The polite thing to say would be that I was full of passion. Like most teenagers, definitely more full of passion than sense. This blog will be anything but that.

My aspiration for this blog is to have a space to share my thoughts, processes, and ideas going forward. Everything from world building, short stories, or even novel ideas. As this is the first post, I thought I’d keep things simple. I’ll start with the story of the beginning of my first novel.

All my life, I have imagined environments, worlds, and scenarios pretty much all the time. I have a string of half-idealized, half-completed, and half-impressive creations in my wake. I’ve always wanted to change that.

Just over ten years ago, I had one of those half-impressive creations in mind. I was regretfully inspired by the chaos and calamity of the coming climate crisis to consider where the future could head. So, I extrapolated and imagined what I could. What I came to was the conclusion that humanity needed to expand to advance. So my science fiction novel would start with leaving Earth behind.

Every good science fiction novel acknowledges that humanity has always been flawed and fragile, so there had to be a mishap in the grand plan. What mishap could be worse than the flagship colony ship going missing? That led to the rest of the colony ships having to find a place to crash land. I thought it would be extremely likely that without the leadership of the flagship, humans would balkanize upon arrival. This created the Fifteen Systems.

In November of that year, 2013, I decided I would write down the story of the lost colony and the Fifteen Systems, and so I made my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I failed miserably, barely scratching out five chapters. None of the characters, planets, or ships had names at this point.

Ten years later. It took ten years to finish writing, editing, and polishing the manuscript to the point I could read it in my sleep. I’ll blog more on this process later.