“Editing Your Own Work…Halfway Through The Farpool: Exodus”

Recently I finished the approximate halfway point of my current sf novel The Farpool: Exodus.  Usually at this point, it’s time to review and edit my own work…something akin to flossing your teeth.

The story so far is at 135 pages.  That would put the finished first draft somewhere in the vicinity of 230 to 250 pages…about right for this kind of novel length work.

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 of the Farpool, 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.  In my Farpool stories, remember, some of the main characters are aliens…talking marine creatures.  Here’s where your background notes come in handy.
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 two 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 Farpool, I will surely have additional challenges in that my main character, Chase Meyer, has actually changed physical form and is not a normal human being like you and me, but rather a modified amphibious hybrid able to live and breathe air and water…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 amphib (my term for this modified para-human 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 Chase Meyer and his girlfriend Angie Gilliam have gone through before and perhaps even to show some change or growth in Chase 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 The Farpool: Exodus, I have a good bit more work to do.  That’s normal.  That’s why we edit. 
    
   With any luck, I’ll be done by the end of February and you can look for this story to be uploaded to Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers in April 2018 at the latest.
    
   The Word Shed will take a two-week break for the upcoming Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The next post to The Word Shed comes on January 8, 2018.

See you then and have a great holiday time. 

Phil B.

 

“Book Titles: What’s in a Name?”

Every book has a title.  Some are good and some aren’t.  What makes an effective book title?  Let’s explore the art of giving a title to your book.

First, let’s ask a question.  What purpose does a book title serve?  I can think of several.

1.  Identifies the work.
2. Captures the story in a few words. 
3. Grabs the reader’s attention.  Brings the reader in.
4. Sells the book.
5. Genre compatibility

 

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

1. Identifies the work. This should go without saying.  You want to select a title that positively and uniquely identifies your book.  Name authors don’t have this problem as what is really being sold is the brand name of the author.  Your title should identify the book along several dimensions (see #5 below).  Is it science fiction?  Mystery?  Romance?
2. Captures the story in a few words, maybe even one.  My best-selling book (in Smashwords downloads) is called Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor.  Not a few words but it does identify the main character and a key location or element of the story.  One of my latest sf novels is entitled The Farpool.  Probably a better title.  Punchier and with a word that you don’t see or hear very often.  Which leads me to….
3. Grabbing the reader’s attention.  Here’s one title I like because it immediately grabbed my attention: Freakonomics.  It’s a juxtaposition of two words that aren’t normally put together.  It seems just wacky enough to make you want to look a little closer.  By the way, one-word titles are all the rage now:  Twilight, Endurance and so forth.  Be careful with this, though.  Your word choice should reflect the story in some way, and ideally, it should offer an unusual perspective or angle or alternative use of that word, maybe in a way you never thought of before…something to get the reader thinking: “Hmmm, maybe I should look at this more closely.”
4. Sells the book.  The whole purpose of a book title (and it should be amplified and work well with the cover too, by the way) is to sell the book.   Readers want to know what to expect when they see your title.  You probably wouldn’t name your science fiction masterpiece Galactic Love.  Love is a word associated with romance, not sf.  Frank Herbert named his best-known book Dune, which is a great title.  It neatly captures images of lots of sand, deserts, brings to mind the kind of cultures that develop and live in deserts, the importance of water, etc.  This one simple word carries quite a punch and performs multiple duties in identifying and selling the book.  It doesn’t hurt that it’s a great read as well. 
5. Genre Compatibility.  This idea is alluded to above, when I mentioned how you wouldn’t normally put “Love” in the title of a science fiction story.  Readers want to be reassured that what they’re potentially buying is what they expected.  Titles help provide that assurance.  One way to do this is to, as an example, go through the science fiction section of your local bookstore or your favorite web site and list common words in the titles.  That’ll give you some idea of what words to use in your titles. 
    
   As an example, here’s a list of Arthur C. Clarke titles from my bookshelf, right beside me:
   2001: A Space Odyssey
   The Songs of Distant Earth
   The Fountains of Paradise
   Rendezvous with Rama
   A Fall of Moondust
    
   What do you see in common with these titles?  References to space, earth, cosmic things.  And if you look at the covers of these books, you’ll see images of Earth and astronomical settings. 
    
   Think of Carl Sagan’s wonderful novel Contact.  It’s one word.  It implies extraterrestrials and aliens and a whole syndrome of thought that surrounds these subjects.  And it works with the cover too: some editions show huge radio telescopes and stars in the background.  There’s no doubt what you’re getting when you look at this book or buy it.
    
   Titling books, fiction or nonfiction, is both art and science.  It isn’t hard to generate titles.  Lots of writer web sites will do that.  The art comes in when you choose your title to meet the 5 conditions I’ve listed above. 
    
   One web site I consulted as research for this post even adds discoverability as a key concern.  The site talks in great detail about keyword search and search optimization as other factors to consider, in this age of digital content and ebooks.  But that’s a topic for another time. 
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on December 18, 2017.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.
    
    

 

 

 

 

“Excerpt from The Farpool: Exodus”

One of my continuing traditions in writing and managing this blog is to give you a taste of my upcoming work.  Toward that end, as you may know, I have been working on the third book in my Farpool series.  It’s called The Farpool: Exodus and should be available for download in the early spring of 2018, probably in March.  Herewith: another excerpt….

 

Approximately, a quarter mile from the research pool at McLean Lab, a small reservoir off what the tourist maps called Vineyard Sound began stirring in a light breeze.  It wasn’t a fetch caused by wind, however.  To the utter consternation of several technicians walking along a graveled path alongside Oyster Pond Road, the waters of the Sound suddenly turned quite rough, though there was no appreciable wind.  Breaching the surface out of the churn of foam and froth, arose several humpback craft, riding the offshore currents along the shell-covered beach for awhile, before nosing themselves into the sand.  The tops of the craft popped open and half a dozen creatures, clad in glistening black armored mobilitors, emerged, stunners and prods at the ready.

Sergeant Steve Purvis had been with Woods Hole’s Uniformed Division for seven years, half of them with the Quissett Campus Squad.  It was interesting work, interesting in the same sense his pathologist friend Wally Ng talked about dead bodies…conversation you didn’t want to have at the local coffee shops, not if you wanted people to stick around.  Cops and pathologists…Steve had often joked with Wally about what it would be like to attend a pathologist convention, with all the slide shows and the jokes and the conversations in the hallways over bagels and coffee.

“Yeah, probably like a proctologist convention,” Wally always came back.  “I’d pay not to attend one of those.”

Purvis had never seen anything like it in all his years on Quissett Campus.  One minute, scientists and lab techs and admin types were strolling along the sidewalks, chowing down sack lunches at the gazebo or spinning wild-hair theories to each other in animated talks under the elm trees and the next moment, five or six wackos who looked like creatures from the Black Lagoon were waddling up out of the Sound, scaring the bejeezus out of everybody. 

Procedure said you issued challenges: Halt! Drop your weapons! Get on the ground!  Procedure said you gave the perps a chance to surrender.  Procedure said you called for backup if the situation looked dicey and then you moved in carefully. But when Purvis’s throat went dry as the creatures appeared, he forgot all about Procedure.

He’d fired several shots and the creatures…things…whatever the hell they were—had gone down fast.  Now one of them lay writhing in the shallows and pedestrians—civilians-- were starting to gather.

“Stay back!  Stay back…it’s still moving—get way back there!”

The crowd pulled back about fifty feet, while Purvis crept forward, his gun still in firing position.  The nearer creature was moving, it sounded like squeals or clicks or something, thrashing about in the sand and water, flinging up dirt as it writhed.  The farther ones were mostly in the water, smaller in size, but still—now one of them removed something from a side pouch and aimed it in the general direction of the pedestrians.

Purvis came up.  What on God’s green earth--? 

The beast—for that was what he had started calling it in his mind—was not a dolphin.  It wasn’t a shark.  It had legs and arms and what looked like armor plating.  It had holes in the armor and water was spouting out of the holes.  The beast squealed some more.  And what the hell was that device in its hands?

Purvis got on the radio, ringing up Dispatch.

“Kitty, this is Quissett Two-Five…I got some kind of disturbance down here on Oyster Pond Road…I don’t know how to describe it…I have fired several rounds—need backup immediately…and something else: would you call Division?  They’ve got more firepower…we may need some of that down here…and hurry!”

That’s when the Omtorish team lit off their suppressors.

A strong eye-blinding light went off, followed by a deafening BOOM!  It came again, the light and the BOOM!  Civilians nearby were stopped in their tracks and squealed as if the sound had injured them.  Up on the side of the road, two more arriving officers had been knocked to their knees by the concussion, but got up.  One of them—it looked like McNulty—regained his senses and went after the creatures.  And now there were at least half a dozen…Purvis stared dumbfounded as more figures emerged from the waves, at least half a dozen, all clad in the same strange gear, armored gator skin was what it looked like.

Kok’tek ordered more suppressing fire.  “Spray the area, Klatko!  Keep them down…Pelspo, get the stek’loo out and send it up!  We need to sniff out eekoti Chase quickly…before the Tailless overwhelm us!”

Pelspo was just dragging himself up out of the water and trying to stabilize himself in his mobilitor.  “Kah--!” he muttered to himself.  “It’s so hard to move these blasted things.”  But Kok’tek wanted surveillance, so he got himself upright, then dug the stek’loo out of its egg-shaped pod and flung it into the air.

 Its wings snapped out smartly and the device spun up its bi-rotors and took off, climbing quickly into the sky, sniffing for the scent trail of eekoti Chase.  To Officer Steve Purvis, still lying on his side, his ears ringing and bleeding, his head pounding from the suppressor burst, the sight of the pterodactyl-like creature swooping and diving and careening overhead made him figure he was dreaming some nightmare horror show of a dream.   Presently, as Purvis struggled to stay conscious, he squinted out of one eye and saw the flying beast from a million years B.C. began to circle meaningfully and intently over the roof of the McLean Lab building, a few hundred yards up the hill.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the assault team of sea monsters—for that’s what they looked like—begin to move out, clambering awkwardly up the sand hill toward Oyster Pond Road, the squad arrayed in perfect diamond formation with weapons trained outward at every compass point.

Man, Purvis told himself, this is no circus troop.  These guys are pros.

When the next suppressor burst came and the sky filled with a deafening white light, everything became a blur and Purvis passed out again.

Kok’tek led his rescue team steadily toward the building above which the stek’loo circled, having picked up the scent trail of eekoti Chase.  He was mildly surprised at how effective the suppressors had been, having leveled everything around them in a several hundred-yard radius.  He knew it was only a matter of time before the Tailless mustered greater forces.  They would have to hurry.

Eekoti Chase was somewhere inside this building and the Metah had charged him with rescuing the half-breed and spiriting him back to sea, back to Keenomsh’pont. 

I hope this is worth it, Kok’tek told himself.  He heard, then saw, the small fleet of more police cars screeching to a halt down the road and ordered all suppressors and stunners to be discharged at once.  The Omtorish were well protected in their mobilitors but the deafening BOOMS! shattered windows and set off sirens up and down the street.  Bodies littered the road and grounds as the Omtorish team crept forward, their suit motors whirring and straining in the full gravity of Notwater. 

For good measure, Kok’tek had Klensbok hang back at the rear-guard position and let loose a full discharge of maj’jeet.  Nobody knew if the toxic bloom of tiny creatures would even have any effect on the Tailless but the fog of the discharge would at least make them cautious about approaching any closer.

Kok’tek reached the entrance of McLean Lab and easily forced his way in.  Four more team members followed, while Klensbok and Potok stayed outside to protect their rear.

Inside, Kok’tek crept along the corridors, following the stek’loo’s cries and screeches until they came to a corridor labelled Research Pool: Authorized Personnel Only.  He fired one burst of his prod, and the door sizzled and smoked, and he was able to kick his way in.  Two more Omtorish followed immediately, sweeping their prods and stunners across every sector.

There were three Tailless inside.  Two female and one male.  They stood frozen in terror at the sight of the Omtorish and slowly raised their hands.    Not understanding the gesture, concluding that it was in fact a threatening move, one Omtorish fired his prod.  It hit the male, who crumpled immediately to the pool deck, twitching and shaking as he writhed on the wet tile.  The other Tailless immediately went to their comrade and bent to help.

Kok’tek had the only echopod but it was tuned to address and receive words from eekoti Chase.  He gestured to his troops who then moved on the females and forcibly shoved them both into a corner of the room, where they cowered and whimpered in fear. 

In the pool, Kok’tek saw the eekoti, limp and floating in some kind of sling.  He waded into the pool, and released Chase from restraint.

“Eekoti Chase, are you all right?”  It was clear that the half-breed was only semi-conscious, having been heavily sedated by the Tailless bastards.  He lolled and drifted, his head wobbling around as Kok’tek carried him up and out of the pool.  The chief prodsman motioned for his troops to assist him and they hung at each side of Chase, supporting him as they exited the pool.  Back in the corridor, stepping around more Tailless who shrank down and cowered in humps along the walls, Pelspo made a hand gesture and the stek’loo abruptly returned to his shoulder, folding and stowing its winds and powering down its rotors with a defiant screech, whereupon Pelspo crammed the creature in its storage pod and resumed helping Chase limp and stumble his way back to the front gallery of the Lab building.

They left the McLean Lab, picking up Klensbok and Potok, and saw immediately that the Tailless had recovered and were moving on their position in great numbers, surrounding and flanking them so that the route back to the beach and the Vineyard Sound was now cut off.

“We’ll have to fight our way back!” Kok’tek announced.  He quickly took stock of the situation, realizing with dismay that fighting in the land of Notwater was really a two-dimensional affair and they were restricted to surface operations.  Combat in the sea was inherently a three-dimensional matter, where you could dive and ascend and get around flanking maneuvers much more easily. They hadn’t trained for combat in this strange world.  Nobody had.

 Then he had an idea.

 

So that’s another excerpt from The Farpool: Exodus.  I hope you’ll like it when it’s uploaded in early spring of 2018.  The story continues from The Farpool and The Farpool: Marauders of Seome, with many of the same characters and lots of action. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on December 11, 2017.  See you then.

Phil B.