“Editing Your Own Work…the End of Tales of the Quantum Corps”

Recently I finished the first draft of Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin, the ending story in my series Tales of the Quantum Corps.  Now it’s time to review and edit my own work…something akin to flossing your teeth.

The story came in at about 150 pages.  That surprised me a bit, from the outline.  I thought it might be closer to 200 pages.

First order of business in editing your own work: take off the rose-colored glasses.  You have to learn to read the story like a first time reader and be ruthless with your precious words and delicious turns of phrase.

Ask yourself this:

1. Does the story flow?  Does it move along?  Why or why not?  Maybe you linger too long describing some place or scene.  Cut out useless descriptions and get the story going again.  What happens next?  In all my stories in Tales, I wanted to have a lot of action.
2. Are you interested in knowing more about the main character(s) and finding out what happens to them?  If so, great.  Keep going.  If not, why not?  Maybe the reader needs to know a little more background about these people…a brief flashback.  Why do they act this way?  Was it a drunken father who abandoned the family?  Was it the death of a brother?  A sadistic math teacher?  Lay this on thinly but it might give your character more to hook readers.
3. Do the twists and turns of the plot surprise you?  As the author, real surprise in the story may be hard to achieve.  But take a reader’s point of view, if you can.  Surprises and unexpected plot twists can really grab a reader if done right.
    
   Of course, it stands to reason that you’ll always be correcting misspelling, awkward phrases, etc as you read.  And please do Spellcheck at the end, because you’ll never catch everything.  Sometimes, when doing Spellcheck, I find myself intentionally leaving a misspelled word for a reason and that’s okay.  Just make sure you have a story-telling reason to do that. 
    
   One of the challenges of writing and editing this series is the fact that it is a series.  I’m somewhat constrained by what has gone before.  I’m trying to make sure the story stands on its own as a story, but I don’t want to explain or recapitulate everything done in the previous six novels.  It’s a juggling act.
    
   Another challenge to authoring a series is making sure to wrap up all the loose ends of the plot in the final tale.  To do that, you sort of have to keep score.  In my final story in Tales of the Quantum Corps, I have additional challenges in that my main character, Johnny Winger, has actually changed physical form and is not a normal human being like you and me, but rather a swarm of nanoscale robots configured to resemble a human being…or anything else he wants.  It’s been fun and hard work to imagine what life would be like living this way.  Somehow, in this final story, I have to convey what life is like as an angel (my term for a para-human swarm entity), advance the story of what happens with this as a key fact, and close out the story of what happens to him in the end. 
    
   In my review and editing, I’m trying to be as critical as possible as to whether I have achieved these ends.  I’m finding that I may need to add more to the story to bring this character, who has been a continuing character, to life in all of his predicament.   I want the end to be a satisfying conclusion to all the adventures Johnny Winger has gone through before and perhaps even to show some change or growth in Winger as a result.
    
   The Muse.com has some good tips on editing your own work.  Here are five (from Caroline McMillan):
    

1. Print out your work (this helps simulate a fresh or ‘outsider’ perspective, which should help you edit)
2. Take a break (put some emotional distance between creating words and editing them)
3. Read it out loud (this is a really good idea)
4. Pretend you’re the audience (already covered above)
5. Be ruthless (ditto)
    
   On first read of Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin, I have a little more work to do.  That’s normal.  That’s why we edit. 
    
   With any luck, I’ll be done by the end of March and you can look for this story to be uploaded to Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers in April 2017.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes in February.

See you February 6.

Phil B.

 

“Creating Empathetic Characters”

In this post, I want to discuss some tricks of the trade regarding creating empathetic characters.  Empathy is defined as understanding, sympathy, compassion or identification with someone or something.  So an empathetic character is one you can relate to and one in whom you might see yourself doing or saying the same things.

Authors create empathy for their characters by building a connection between the reader and the character.  You can do that with conflict, personality and a dose of simple humanity.

In my novel The Farpool, I open with this:

Angie Gilliam squirmed a bit more but it was no use.  Something sharp was pinching her butt.  The weight of Chase Meyer on top of her made it hurt like crazy. 

“Ouch…that hurts like hell…what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry…just trying to…it’s the Cove.  Water’s choppy today—“

Angie twisted and contorted herself to ease the pressure.  That was better.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, huh?”

They had packed a meal and grabbed a boat from Turtle Key Surf and Board—that was Mack Meyer’s shop, Chase’s Dad.  They had puttered along the coast off Shelley Beach until they came to Half Moon Cove—they always did it in Half Moon Cove—and found a secluded spot a few dozen meters off shore…right under some cypress trees.  Always smelled great there.

Then Chase and Angie wolfed down their sandwiches, dialed up the right music on Chase’s wristpad so they could slam some jam properly and settled down to business.

That’s when the wind fetched up and the Cove got way choppier than it usually did.  Most of the time, you could lay a place setting on top of the water and have dinner like home, it was so placid.  But not today.

“Ouch…look…let’s give it a rest, okay…something’s not quite right…”

Chase groaned and pulled out of her, cinching up his shorts as he did so.  He lay back against the side of the boat, and turned the volume down on his pad…whoever it was screeching on that go-tone needed a few more lessons.  He checked the growing waves beyond the Cove and that’s when he spied the waterspout.

“Jeez…look at that!” 

Angie pulled up her own shorts, ran fingers through her dark brown page-boy hair and sucked in a breath.

“Wow---that’s so wicked--“

In this opening scene, we have two people, Chase and Angie, making love in a boat.  It’s not working out too well physically, due to conditions, and they stop and then they see a waterspout.  There’s conflict, in that Chase is experiencing the lovemaking differently from Angie.  We have a glimpse into their personalities: Chase wants to do the act, but Angie’s not happy with the performance and, at the end, Chase is somewhat disappointed by what has happened, and even with a song on the radio that he figures he could do  better (he’s an amateur musician).  And certainly we see their humanity, if only in the very basic act of having sex.  Then there’s the mystery of a waterspout, interrupting their coitus.  A lot going on in the first few paragraphs.

By the way, as of today, there have been nearly 600 downloads of The Farpool. 

Readers like to read about characters (I like to call them ‘people’) they care about.  People they can identify with…as in, “Yeah, I’d like to be there and do that.” 

Sometimes, a little background is in order.  That’s why I did an extensive chronological history of Chase and Angie and even a little psych evaluation on motivations, etc.  In my Notes about Chase, I said this:

Chase Meyer gives one the impression of a happy-go-lucky fellow.  He seems to be unconcerned about anything and to live in the moment.  He seems to many people, even those who know him, to be almost like a child. This isn’t true but his outward demeanor is often mistaken for childlike innocence and wide-eyed wonder at the world.

Chase is motivated by curiosity, by learning and especially experiencing new things.  Some might call him an adrenaline junkie…he likes to experience things himself.  He does get a rush out of new experiences.  He is not one to spend a lot of time studying things.  Detailed learning is not something he does well.  He prefers to do things.  He learns by doing.

There are exceptions to this.  Chase likes sea sports and he likes music, especially a genre popular in the early 22^nd century called techjam.  He’s always been intrigued by being able to make sounds and make songs.  He likes to sing.  He can find within himself the discipline to do something he wants to do, like learn to play the go-tone, jam with the Croc-Boys, and learn how to scuba dive safely.  His Dad Mack sometimes has to restrain his impulsive, somewhat head strong son.  Scuba diving does require attention to detail and following safe practices.  Mack has hammered that into his son’s head for years.  But his nature is impulsive.

Once I had clearly in mind what kind of person Chase was, and Angie too, and a little of their history, I found it easier to write to that and include snippets of background at key places in the story. 

Building a bond between your characters and the reader is a process.  Know your characters well (especially the main ones).  Put them in situations where they have to react to unusual, memorable or interesting, even life-threatening conditions.

Ask yourself what you would do?  Ask yourself, with what you know about the character, what would he or she do?

Creating empathetic characters is all about hooking the reader early on, with a person who intrigues the reader in some way, caught up in a situation that tests the character and to which they have to respond or dire consequences will ensue.

Do that and you’re well on your way to success as a story-teller.

The next post to The Word Shed will come on January 30, 2017.  This will be an update on my final story in the Tales of the Quantum Corps and what it takes to edit your own work successfully…can that even be done?

See you January 30.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Dissecting an Opening Scene”

In my last post, I uploaded an excerpt from Episode 19 of my serial Nanotroopers.  In this post, I want to look more closely at this excerpt with an eye toward explaining why I chose to write this opening scene the way I did.

To begin with, we see right off that the scene takes place at an archeological dig near a Mayan temple in Yucatan.  So we immediately get a sense of place.  The two archeologists have made a major new discovery and they’re very excited.  But very quickly, we see there is a difference in how the two scientists react to the new discovery.

The female, Erika Volk, knows more about what the discovery means than Dr. Heinz Richter.  Indeed, we quickly learn that Dr. Volk is a member of a criminal cartel and sports some kind of  neural device in her head that keeps cartel members under control. 

As we continue reading, we see that Dr. Volk has ambitions to move up and become somebody inside the cartel and views this discovery as a means of doing that.

So early on, we see background, character relations, the seeds of a conflict and motivation to do something unsavory already established.

We also see that the cartel’s long-time nemesis, Quantum Corps, has a base nearby and we can presume Dr. Volk knows that nanotroopers from that base will find out what she and Dr. Richter are up to.

It seems, from what we have read so far, that Dr. Erika Volk is ambitious enough to undertake a substantial risk in bringing this new discovery into the cartel and that, if she is successful, not only will her own standing inside the cartel be enhanced, the bad guys will have a powerful new weapon in their on-going conflict with Quantum Corps.

Dr. Volk activates the device that is at the core of their new discovery and she is instantly whisked away to another time and place.  For further details, you’ll have to read Nanotroopers, Episode 19, available from Smashwords and other fine ebook retailers on January 27.

I had several intentions in writing the opening scene this way.  First, I wanted to establish a strong sense of place…using the mystery and foreboding naturally available when you go rooting around unexplored Mayan ruins in Mexico.  Hopefully, this was achieved. 

I also wanted to lay out some background for the two characters who show up in this scene.  While it’s clear that Erika Volk is the junior scientist to Heinz Richter, it’s also clear that she is more than an archeologist and knows a great deal more about this unusual discovery they’ve made than Richter does.  Moreover, she’s ambitious enough to be motivated to use this discovery to further her own position in the cartel she’s a member of.  Thus I’ve laid the basis from substantial conflict later on. 

The final thing I wanted to establish in this opening scene is that the conflict mentioned above is part of a larger conflict with the good guys…the nanotroopers of Quantum Corps, who just happen to have a new base near the dig site.  This is in keeping with the continuing story cycle of the Nanotroopers serial.

One of the challenges of doing this serial (and its older brother, Tales of the Quantum Corps), is the need to plunge the reader immediately into the action and set before them a problem that the main characters are trying to solve.  You don’t have the luxury of time and space to lay out a conflict and a problem leisurely, when you’re committed to writing a story that is complete in 40-60 pages and making it a part of a larger story cycle. 

I hope I achieved this in the excerpt you read last week.  As a reader, if you’re intrigued or mystified enough to want to know more about what happens, then I’ve done my job.  Every storyteller is faced with the same dilemma but we all go about it in different ways.

So that’s a peek behind the curtains at how an episode of Nanotroopers is constructed…at least, the opening scene, which is probably the most important scene. 

Next week, I want to look at some details of how to develop empathetic characters, fictitious people that your reader can identify with.  This is one of the most important tricks any story-teller can deploy to hook his readers. 

This post to The Word Shed will come on January 23, 2017.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

“Nanotroopers Update”

Happy New Year to all and welcome to 2017.

As of week ending 1-3-17, my serialized story Nanotroopers has garnered 3841 downloads from Smashwords and other ebook retailers.  Episode 18 was uploaded on 1-16-17 and there are only 4 more episodes to go before this serial comes to its conclusion.

To begin the new year, I thought I would give you a peek behind the curtains of a Nanotroopers episode in progress.  Following is a 3-page excerpt from Chapter 1 of Nanotroopers Episode 19, entitled ‘Mt. Kipwezi.’

Excerpt….

Chapter 1

“An Entangled Web”

Yucatan State, Mexico

October 10, 2049

2245 hours (U.T.)

Dr. Heinz Richter hopped down off the rope ladder and helped his assistant, Dr. Erika Volk, down.  They were in an antechamber above the burial chamber, lit with small lanterns and surrounded by ornate friezes in remarkably good repair.  Stucco friezes at Kokul-Gol were rare and fragile.  Volk and Richter studied the ten-meter frieze for a moment, tracing the outlines with their fingers.

The image depicted three men, including a Holmul king, rising from the mouths of strange monsters flanked by underworld creatures, entwined by two giant, feathered serpents.  The colors and the textures of the frieze seemed to make the figures vibrate with energy in the lantern light.

“Fabulous,” breathed Erika Volk.  She probed with her fingers along a ribbon of Mayan text in glyphs at the base of the frieze.  “As well-preserved as anything we’ve found.  Look at these snake figures…”

Richter agreed.  “Just what you’d expect from the tombs of the Snake Kings…marvelous to be sure…but Erika, you’ve got to see what we found yesterday down below, inside the burial chamber.  It’ll blow you away.  Come on—“

The two of them eased their way around a corner, teetered on a narrow crevice and came to a small opening in the stone floor.  The floor was littered with broken pots and jars, all done up in late Holmul style. 

“It’s barely big enough for one person, but you should be able to slip through okay…your shoulders are narrower.  We just put this ladder in yesterday.  I’ll go first—“

Richter dropped to his knees and eased himself down the rope ladder, through the narrow opening.  Volk handed him another lantern as he descended.  She heard his boots hit the floor.

“Okay, I’ve got all the lights up…easy does it…hold on to the edge…I’ll support you on the way down—“

Carefully, Erika Volk made her way down the ladder and stood in shadows while Richter moved the lanterns around for better illumination.  The burial chamber was barely larger than a walk-in closet.

A portion of a skeleton lay on a stone bier, surrounded by tattered remnants of a shroud and piles of jade and shell beads.  Bird feathers were heaped in a wreath around the skeleton’s head.  The walls were adorned with more friezes, fantastic images of serpents, giant colorfully plumed birds, snakes and jaguars.

“Is it Yuknoom…the Snake King, you think?”  Volk leaned over to examine the skeleton’s shattered skull and face. 

“Possibly,” said Richter.  “At the very least, an ahau…one of the high chiefs or priests.  Hard to be sure until we examine it more closely.  But that’s not what I wanted to show you.  Here, take a look at this—“ 

Richter bent down below the bier, behind the skeleton’s head.  There, amid a pile of broken ceramic figurines was a small sphere, perfectly round, glowing with an ethereal light, almost vibrating.  The sphere showed no markings or texture at all. 

“We found this late yesterday…I’m not sure what the hell it is.  I’ve never seem a totem in Kokul-Gol…or anywhere around here like this.  It doesn’t fit in with any of the imagery, the pots, the figurines.  Have you seen anything like this elsewhere?”

Volk felt an electric chill go down her spine.  She had seen spheres like this…at Engebbe Valley in east Africa.  And at the Paryang monastery in Tibet. 

My God, she said to herself…another Keeper device.  But she said nothing to Richter.  Richter didn’t need to know.  Richter…nor anybody else, could ever know about this.

“No, I haven’t,” she lied.  She bent down closer but didn’t touch the thing.

“Don’t touch it…yet,” Richter advised her.  “Until we’re sure what it is.  It seems to be under some kind of power…like a generator.  I’m going to contact the Quantum Corps people at the base.  They have engineers there…they may have an idea what this is.”

Volk stood up and leveled an even gaze.  Quantum Corps had come to the Yucatan a few months ago and built a base called Mesa de Oro, less than five kilometers away.  There was no way she could ever let Quantum Corps know about this sphere.

She felt a faint tingle in the back of her head and she knew what that was.  Her halo, the neural implant the cartel stuck in all its operatives’ heads, was waking up.  Probably responding to the aural signal of the words Richter had just spoken…’Quantum Corps.’  The cartel’s mortal enemy.

In a few seconds, Volk had already fashioned a plan but she said none of this to Richter.  “Perhaps, you’re right, Heinz…but we should discuss this with the rest of the team.”  She chose her words carefully, not wanting to trigger the halo into waking up. 

They left the burial chamber of the Snake King and made their way back to camp, a kilometer outside the fenced perimeter of the Kokul-Gol temple.  In the fading purple twilight, they could see spotlights through the jungle canopy, highlighting the upper façade of the great pyramid. 

Richter and Volk had a quiet dinner with others of the dig team.  Knowles, Radcliff, Montserrat and the rest were bubbling over with news of their day’s work, their finds and discoveries.  Speculation and theories flew fast and thick around the mess tent, like the hordes of mosquitoes that flocked and swarmed just outside the netting all night long. 

“The Holmul were doomed…only they didn’t know it…”

“Over farming and fishing…they used up all their resources…”

“Richter, can we get a scanner into that opening…we really need spectrographic data on the Snake King…”

After everyone had disappeared, wandering about the camp late into the night spinning theories in small knots of people and the lights outside the camp were guttering low and smoking, Erika Volk stole out of her own tent and made her way back to the great temple.  She used a fingerprint ID scanner she’d filched from the main tent to let herself in through the barriers, shut down the bot swarms that protected all the entrances and found herself once again in the burial quarters of Yuknoom, the Snake King.

But she had no interest in the skeleton.

Below his head, situated in a bed of broken pottery, the Keeper sphere glowed as before, seeming almost to pulse and vibrate in the flickering shadows. 

       If the device worked as the others had, it functioned as a kind of portal.  A gateway to other places and times.  The cartel had used the other devices as a means of rummaging through the archives of their off-world benefactors—some called them the Old Ones—and grabbing what- ever secrets and schematics they could find in these short trips to bring back and reverse-engineer into weapons and comm gear and other gadgets that would give them a leg up on Quantum Corps and smash their adversary once and for all.

Erika Volk knew it was a risk but the only way you moved up in Red Hammer was to throw long and do something that gave the cartel a decisive advantage.  Maybe today, just this once, she would be the one to make the short trip and bring back the decisive edge, the ultimate weapon, the one tool or device that the atomgrabbers couldn’t counter.

Cautiously, her heart racing, Volk dropped to her knees, brushed aside pieces of broken pottery and reached out to the sphere. 

Her fingers had just barely brushed the surface when—

--there came a blinding flash of light and a roaring rush of deceleration….

Then nothing.

As Erika Volk’s last conscious thoughts drained away, she remembered feeling like this once when she and her Father were riding the Dragon’s Tail at Munich’s Spielgarten.  The same whirling images: the mountains, the boardwalk, the faces of bystanders and riders still standing in line for their turn.  A cyclone of sights and sounds and smells…snow cones, cotton candy, cold Alpine air and brats grilling…

But when she finished racing at breakneck speed down a long curving corridor now filled with polygons and cubes and pyramids and things she could never describe, and she came at last to a hard bump and things slowed down and finally stopped spinning….

She knew he wasn’t in Munich.

Or Paryang, Tibet.

Or even Kokul-Gol.

***

Okay, that’s the excerpt.  Next week, I’ll dissect this text and try to explain why I chose to write it the way I did.  Maybe you have some ideas too.  Send ‘em in.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 16, 2017.

See you then.

Phil B.