Redrafting is obviously a big deal. You can add and polish enough in the later stages that you can turn a relatively weak story into something really great.
This video is from a few months ago when I was in the later stages of editing my novel, Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I found a couple of significant mistakes and managed to improve the flow of those chapters quite a bit.
Honestly, I resisted doing this for a long time, but I figured that, as I was finishing up the first full-length novel in the series, that it made sense to finally get a real cover for my first novella, The Hyacinth Rescue.
Stupid me, I made a post on Monday that said (New Release!) in the title but I ended up looking over my final draft one more time on Tuesday and found a couple more tiny things to change.
Now, finally, The Chasm of Color is out in e-book form!
I'm trying to figure out Amazon's print on demand stuff, so I'll add posts for the paperback and hardcover versions when they come out.
For updates, join my mailing list! You can choose whether to get only emails for Chasm stuff or hop on the general list:
 |
| The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash. |
The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.
 |
| Part of my cover photo, edited from a picture by Matt Donders, courtesy Unsplash. |
My next work is another fun bit of science fiction, with another reference to the luminiferous ether, as in What the Soul Still Fears! However, instead of a story set in the modern day, The Chasm of Color takes place at around the same time as the Michelson-Morley experiment, in the late 1880s.
The protagonist, an assistant professor at the fictional Lexington University, has read the Michelson-Morley paper but is not convinced. However, he is unable to figure out a good reason for his uneasiness, until one morning over a year later...
Just finished the fourth draft of my first novel! At 77k, it's still a fairly short novel, but way better than the ~50k of draft 1.
Also, I'm really starting to like the book.
In my earlier post, A New(-ish) Way to Plug, I said I was making some short teaser videos featuring excerpts from some of my short stories, and my initial idea was to throw these on Twitter or use them to make Facebook ads.
Well, I've completed a few of them, and here's what I've learned:
 |
| Just a little bit of me editing like a goober. |
Well, phew. About a week ago I finished the rough draft of what (I think) will be the last chapter of my first novel.
I'm writing a longer story about the Misevelin Salvage crew, an adventure where they are trying to get to the bottom of a very strange event that has everyone worried: the appearance of an empty lifeboat near the orbit of Markledge (the planet where Aric & co. are based).
Just finished the first draft of a cosmic horror novella I've been working on the past while. I had an idea I liked, thought it would make a good short story, and I was 6000 words in when I realized it was going to be significantly longer than I originally thought. The full story comes out at a little under 20000 words.
One of the quirks of my fiction so far is that I've deliberately avoided writing villains. For one, I'm trying to world-build a place where aggression and banditry of all sorts are rare. For two, I find situations of man vs. nature or man vs. himself much more interesting, personally. I love writing about intelligent people faced with a difficult problem figuring out how to overcome and succeed, and I felt like those sorts of situations were better ways to introduce and develop characters, rather than having some obvious evil for them to rail against.
Just a little progress report, but I figured what the heck. That full-length Misevelin Salvage adventure I'm working on, I've got drafts of the first six chapters, coming out at about 17000 words so far. I'm probably only about a quarter of the way through, maybe a little less.
I just finished writing detailed outlines of the next two chapters, so those are on the way in the next few days.
Just finished the first draft of that Samson novella. I like the flow of the plot but I think the phrasing is going to need some tweaking before it's ready for prime time. Came out at about 20000 words. And of course I need to source a cover, and I'm having real trouble even figuring out what I think a good cover for this would be. The main story elements don't really jump out at me as suitable for a cover that will not be terribly misleading. Hmmm...
I'm making some fun progress on my new novella. I'm about 10k words in and really enjoying it. Lawrence George Samson is a character I introduced in my short story "Old Forests and Older Things Within," (also available at Smashwords for free in a variety of formats) and he's my take on a pulp hero. Forced into hiding after an incident that consumed the rest of his scientific team, he's put together a good suite of skills and technology to root out and extinguish all sorts of nasty creatures that threaten mankind.
Just finished the first draft of a new novella with some of the same characters from The Hyacinth Rescue. It comes out at a little under 22,000 words. I tried to sneak in a little world-building as well as some fun twists and turns. Now comes the part where I go through it a few times and add details, reduce fluff, and clean things up!
Edit: Missed Contact is out now! Preview it on Amazon!
Ten thousand words into a new novella. Probably a novella. I probably won't keep going on it until it's novel length, based how far along I am on my plot outline.
It's interesting. Getting back into longer pieces takes a lot more focus. The first few thousand words of a new story flow enthusiastically, but after that, it takes a little more drive.
The new piece is a new adventure of the three main characters from my first novella, The Hyacinth Rescue. It's still available on Smashwords and I think on Amazon too, and it still has my crappy hand-drawn cover. Smashwords is the better deal, because you can pay whatever you want for it (even $0).
The thing about these is that I have a reasonably detailed world built behind them but I don't want to just write worldbuilding exposition, so I had to find a way to sneak some in. So, in this new story, I've got a new character who has a few things to say about the world and its history.
My goal is to finish the novella in the next few weeks, hopefully in early December.
Edit: Missed Contact is available now!
