Writing

I’m still working on the rough draft of Stolen Property. As of this post, I’m up to 36k words. It’s been a pretty productive weekend. In addition to the Daphne series, I added a couple of thousand words to the first book of my other series, which I’m tentatively naming Escape from the Abyss. The Abyss series will be much more gritty (as I’ve mentioned in previous posts). I put a lot of thought into the outline of that story and it is complex. I’m shooting for over 100k words for the size of the first book. I may end up with something larger than that. What makes the book larger is the number of sub-plots and the increased number of main characters. I’m only on the rough draft and I have notes of what I want to fix on the first pass. This series will have a lot of really broken characters. They will all be suffering and there will be a lot of conflict between them. This will be quite the challenge to write, but I’m not going to publish this series until it has the necessary level of conflict that I expect.

My plans for the Daphne series remain the same. I’ll produce the first five books, even if they never sell. So far, there doesn’t seem to be much interest, but I haven’t poured much effort into the advertisement yet. Plus, there are only two books available so far. Once I have a third or fourth book published, I’ll tweak the ads. Right now I’m using Amazon ads, but that might not be the best way to sell this series. If it doesn’t catch fire after I publish the next two books, I’ll experiment with Facebook ads. Once I’ve published the fifth book, I’ll let the series ride for a while and tweak the ads to see if they’ll do anything. If they do well, then I’ll start writing books six through ten. Otherwise, I’ll focus all of my energy on my other series.

Other Events

It’s officially summertime here in Utah. My wife and I are already hiking the trails. This weekend is a non-hiking weekend, but I anticipate that we’ll hit the trails next weekend. Probably something local since Southern Utah is about three hundred degrees right now (well, that’s what it feels like when hiking in the desert). The local trails are less desert and more mountainous. Instead of walking a flat trail with soaring temperatures, we get to perform steep climbs in ninety-degree weather (which is so much cooler… really).

We bought some back-of-the-truck camping equipment. We have a bucket list of trails that we want to hike and some of them are so far from civilization that we would have to hike a ten-mile trail, then drive fifty miles to a hotel. Therefore, we are planning to camp in the back of the truck after hiking. It’ll be more optimal because we’ll be dead tired when we’re done hiking. That’ll make sleeping in a sleeping bag much easier.

Some of the trails we have picked out are around twenty miles or a little more. There will be no getting around that. Before we attempt such a feat, we’ll be purchasing a lightweight tent that we can put in a backpack (Yeah. we’ll need to upgrade our packs as well). So, that’ll be fun.

What’s on my mind?

Story ideas. If you’ve read a few author sites, you’ll have come across incidences where authors are approached by people with story ideas. I used to be one of those people who thought that authors just ran out of ideas all the time. And, oo-boy, I had ideas. What I discovered is that there really isn’t an author with a dry well of ideas. Including me. The idea-generating part is really the easiest part of writing a book. Next, comes the synopsis and test. “Is this idea good enough for a story?” That’s the first hard part. Next comes the “Can I write an entire book around this idea?” The rough draft seems rather easy. For me, it does because I usually outline what I want to write. My outlines turn into notes that go into Scrivener. That turns into at least a thousand-word scene. Once the rough draft is complete, then the hard part really starts. Editing is more than just catching spelling and grammatical mistakes. The first pass requires reading with a critical eye. I ask myself if each sentence sounds right and does everything fit correctly? Then someone else has to look at it because I can read over a mistake a hundred times without catching it. That’s because I visualize the scene as I’m reading it. My mind tends to fill in blanks that I forgot to put in my description of the scenes.

My point in all of this is that the story idea is the easy part. Right now I have at least a hundred stories that I’d like to write. Many of these stories will only form around one stand-alone book, which makes them difficult to sell. I’ll still write the occasional stand-alone because I want to write these stories. They’re good stories, or at least they could be good if they’re written the right way. There are a couple of books that I took a stab at when I was just learning how to write. They’ll need a rewrite to be viable. There are a few that I restructured. The new outlines look exciting and I’d like to jump on those right away. Of course, I would never publish if I just let my ADHD run wild. Somewhere down the line, I would end up with a hundred unfinished titles. Which is how I started before I finally published my first book. Total rough-draft words to date that I’ve written come in at 915k. Only 510k of those words are inside my published books. It’s still half, but I wrote a lot of words for stories that never made it. One of my biggest mistakes, early on, was trying to write from the seat of my pants. I had no direction on earlier stories. I would just start at the beginning without knowing how I wanted the story to end. It was exciting to write that way, but I soon discovered that I can produce a book better if I have an ending figured out before I start to write. Now I try to plot out most of the story before starting. That way, I don’t write myself into a corner.

Well… Back to my writing.