Category Archives: Fragile Gods

FRAGILE GODS – Finished

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It is my distinct pleasure to announce that I have FINISHED Fragile Gods, my first completed fantasy novel (first draft only).

Though I missed my original deadline (Christmas of 2009), I did meet my revised deadline, which was June 1st, 2010.

Are you going to try to publish it?

I’m going to send queries and samples see if I get any bites.

It would be naive to assume it will automatically be published, or even represented.

Even award-winning books selling over 400,000 copies will be rejected when the author’s name is unrecognized.

And 99% of the recent success stories I’ve heard for newly published authors involve stalking agents or editors at conventions in order to buy them lunch…not impressing them with an anonymous manuscript. 

So you’re done with this book?

Not even close. There’s a lot more polish required before I’ll be satisfied.

Are you going to take us all out for lunch when you’re rich and famous?

 Sure. But less than 1% of novelists EVER turn a profit. It took me 1 year to write FRAGILE GODS, so if I sold it for a $15,000 advance, BEFORE TAXES, that’s a pretty crummy yearly salary, even assuming I could do it annually. The gulf between “finished book” and “rich & famous” is wider than the Gulf of Mexico. But I’ll make you a deal…even if I sell one book, I’ll take you out for lunch.

Do you want me to read it?

I want everyone to read it who is willing. But I prefer that: 

  1. You regularly read fantasy/scifi, or at least popular fiction of some kind
  2. You fully intend on actually reading it (within a week or so), not setting the printout on a shelf somewhere
    1. That may sound harsh, but I’m completely un-offended by NOT offering to read. People are busy, and I guarantee you that *I* have no desire to read the work of amateur writers. Why should you? But it does get my hopes up of getting feedback and criticism when someone offers to read, and you have to understand that for me, this is a major project and one of my deliverables is obtaining tangible feedback from my alpha readers.

So what’s your next project?

I am considering going one of three directions.

  1. Get more practice writing short stories
  2. Write a science fiction novel called Music of the Spheres, which so far is about a soldier who was ordered to kill a baby after a space battle, and has refused the order and is now on the run from his commanders
  3. Write my non-fiction book: Accelerate the Progress of Mankind (by using your turn-signal), which is all about boosting world efficiency by making tiny common sense decisions, such as using your turn-signal, or deciding what to order BEFORE you get to the front of the line, or using both doorways of a double-door.

FRAGILE GODS: Part II rough draft complete.

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FRAGILE GODS part II is now complete in rough draft form, and I am now going to work on the final section of the novel.

Part II will be available to my alpha readers after a cursory attempt to polish some of the rougher sections.

Some statistics and information so far:

The books three parts have finally been named as follows:

FRAGILE GODS now numbers 190 double-spaced pages at 30,509 words. It is divided into three parts and a total of 27 scenes:

PART I: Rumors of Death (12 scenes)
PART II: Salvation and Glory (15 scenes)
PART III: These Fragile Gods (TBD)

This is extremely short for modern (or traditional) fantasy, but I am aiming for a fast read rather than epic sweeping plots that require a whole trilogy or more to resolve. I’m bucking the trends of huge swathes of description and a cast of characters so large you need an index.

Only time will tell if this effort is worthwhile.

FRAGILE GODS: 50%

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Look to the right. (Not if you’re on Facebook or an RSS reader, of course; only if you’re at my actual website.) See the progress meter?

That’s right. 52%.

Beyond 25,000 words.

And almost finished with Part 2 (out of 3).

Bear in mind that this is still very early in the life of a novel. 90% of writing is what?

REWRITING.

This is 50% of FRAGILE GODS’ first draft only.

Nevertheless, it’s a very enjoyable benchmark for me. And the scene which crossed the threshhold was very satisfying to write; not merely plodding words on a page for the sake of the wordcount.

I haven’t forgotten you.

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Dr. Mr. & Ms. Reader,

I haven’t forgotten you.

Illness has kept me mostly bedridden except for general house-puttering. I have missed a week of work due to illness: Both my day job and my night job (writing).

No Dream Job

Did you know that novelists don’t get any paid sick-time? Unless, that is, you make enough on royalties that you can live off of them entirely whether you sell another project. But that falls into “independently wealthy” territory, rather than “working as a novelist” to make ends meet.

Only 1% of novelists ever turn a profit.

So far, I’m part of the other 99%. This is unacceptable. Just being an A+ student won’t get the job done in this case; I must rise above those who themselves excel.

Daunting? I don’t care.

Dear readers, please accept my apology for the break in writing. Though still under the weather, I am back in the office.

The first 50% of FRAGILE GODS will be ready for my Alpha Readers soon.

30%

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Having cleared no less than 15,000 words, FRAGILE GODS is now 30% complete (by wordcount). This is roughly in line with my plot so far also, so I consider it pretty accurate.

To this I just have to add, “Wow, that was easy.” I’ve been hemming and hawing about writing more since September (when I hit the 25% mark), and here in just a couple of days I’ve breezed through another 2,500 words. And these weren’t just scenes I happened to throw together, either; while I think they need more polish, I like the new scenes.

So what happened before?

I’ll tell you, because I suspected it and later confirmed it:

I had written a scene that I hated. Now, at first, I didn’t know I hated the scene. I secretly hated it. (Yes, secret from myself.) Like everything I write, at first, I thought “wow, that’s really cool”. (Else why write it?) But the scene was garbage. It felt like teenage fantasy with cheesy special effects and overdone character emotions and contrived relationships.

And so I hated it. And because I hated the scene, I hated the book, and I hated the project, and I hated writing, and so I didn’t write.

I finally deleted the scene. Now, my mother has preached the perils of word processing to me for many years, and it troubles her that at a single keystroke, I could destroy months of work. True, I might not like the text, but what if I change my mind later? What if I decide the deleted portion was better? What then?

So now when I “delete” large swaths of text, I don’t actually delete them. I cut them and paste them into a text dump document; my own literary landfill where if necessary, I can dig them out again later.

But I have never had to, because invariably, whatever I wrote afterward was better than what preceded. It might still have problems, but it has always been better than the original I threw out, to the point that when I’ve lost a newer draft or markup and have to re-edit, and then later find the other markup, I’ve made the same changes.

The shocking and useful lesson with my terrible scene, though, was that cutting it didn’t fix my motivation. I still hated the book. It wasn’t until I’d replaced the scene, in my mind, in my plot, with something I thought worked better, that I began to enjoy the project again.