Post #272 October 4 2021 “Bringing a Fictional Series to a Successful Conclusion” I am currently halfway through my current project, called The Farpool: Diaspora. This is the seventh title in my series The Farpool Stories. With one more to come, I can see the end of this series coming in the spring of 2022. The final title will be The Farpool: Destiny. I have bittersweet feelings about this series coming to an end. With over 6700 downloads across all titles in this series, it’s been fairly successful and I’m grateful to all my readers for that. Still, all things good and bad must come to an end. In this post, I want to discuss how to bring a fictional series to a proper and successful conclusion, one that does justice to the overall story arc across the earlier titles and is satisfying to readers. First, note that not every fictional series has an overall story arc. Some are just a series of independent stories with continuing characters and settings and an overall theme to more or less tie everything together. The Farpool Stories has both. Below are 5 things to consider when bringing your fictional series to a satisfying end. 1. Will the story arc be completed, coming to a satisfying resolution (assuming there is a story arc…see above)? In order to accomplish this, the story arc really should be thought out and planned for from the beginning. Not that ideas can’t change and stories veer off in unexpected directions. A series story arc faces the same needs as any fictional story. There must be characters facing a serious problem. The heroes must want or need to solve this problem. They must struggle against forces and perhaps themselves to achieve this, facing and overcoming obstacles as they do so. And in the end, your heroes must either achieve their goals, vanquish the monsters or fail magnificently while trying. With these ideas in mind, does your series bring the story arc to a satisfying conclusion? Are all these loose ends and hanging plot lines tied up or resolved…not easy over the course of a series. In my own work, there are hundreds of details I’ve had to keep track of. 2. Have your main characters grown or changed in any significant way? Or do they keep facing the same problems with the same approaches every time? Of course, in real life, people actually do this. But in fiction, especially in a series, it’s more believable if your heroes learn something valuable as the story comes to an end. They may learn what their limits are. They may learn they can exceed these limits if they try. They may learn who to trust. They may become smarter about life. They may have learned what’s really important. All these things happen to real people too. It’s just that in a fictional series, to live vicariously in your hero’s shoes and see them overcoming great, even impossible odds, with guile, cunning, wit, endurance or whatever, is particularly gratifying for a reader, who may have invested many hours in following your hero’s exploits. 3. Have you tied up loose ends, different plot lines and maintained continuity to the end? This is particularly important, as readers notice these details. “Whatever happened to Elmo when we left him on that cliff, hanging by his fingernails.” If you forget to at least give the reader an idea of what became of poor Elmo, the reader can only conclude that he wasn’t that important anyway and why the hell was he even in the story? Play fair with your readers and don’t go off gallivanting down different plot lines without providing some way back to the main plot line for the reader. 4. Have you laid the groundwork for future stories? Of course, this is not absolutely necessary, but it is smart not to burn your imaginary world behind you. You never know. I have no plans for any more titles in The Farpool Stories, but I can’t say I’ll never re-join this imaginary world, in which I have invested years of writing, research and outlining and presumably my readers have done the same. We can’t know what the future will bring and it’s just possible that enough readers will demand more stories for you to seriously consider not shutting the door on their hopes. It happened to Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and it can happen to you. 5. Is there an ultimate moral or lesson here? How is the final story to be guided to this point? Have you laid the foundations in previous stories? If they’re already in print, as mine are, then you’re constrained to follow the tracks of what came before. You don’t want to violate continuity too much or your readers will shake their heads and tsk-tsk at your ineptitude. If you did your homework and planned all this out from the beginning (allowing for unexpected changes or writerly serendipity), that final moral should now be in clear view. You just have to get there. And really, the final story should be largely focused on getting there, still allowing for the requisite plot twists and turns of a readable story in this final episode. It’s a bit of an art contorting your plot and characters to bring them to where they need to be and pull if off believably. Do make the effort. 6. Finally, saying goodbye to people you’ve lived with and suffered with is hard, even if they are imaginary. When it’s all over, give yourself a break. Go to the beach…or the mountains. No, just go to the beach and revel in that feeling of accomplishment. It’s kind of like swimming laps in the pool…it feels so good when it’s over. Take a deep breath, put your worn-down mind on something else and live a little. Then…get back to work on that next project. The next post to The Word Shed comes on October 11. In this post, I’ll let you take a peek behind the curtain on some of my upcoming projects. See you then. Phil B.

Post #271 September 13 2021 “Terra Troopers” Several posts ago, I mentioned that I am developing a new series of stories called Terra Troopers. In this post, I want to provide a little more detail about this proposed new series. The basic premise is that warfare and conflict between states has now (several hundred years into the future) migrated underground. States attack each other with subterranean vehicles called geoplanes and use this technology to create earthquakes and seismic tremors on demand. Criminals and non-state actors use the technology to extort others for money and demands. How might this come about and what might happen if it did? The initial novel is titled Aftershock and should become available in the latter half of 2022. In this story, a criminal cartel called Red Sword (with ties to the People’s Republic of China) uses geoplanes to hold entire cities and nations hostage to terrible destruction from below ground. A US Geological Survey seismologist and an Army intelligence officer believe a recent increase in quakes is not caused by natural forces. Fighting a disbelieving bureaucracy, they work to prove their thesis and find that possible recent tests of a Chinese subterranean vehicle are related to these tremors. But convincing their own superiors of this as well as confronting this new menace with effective countermeasures is difficult and forms a good part of the story. Eventually, the US Army forms an Underground Strike Command, out of existing armored divisions, to fight off Red Sword. USGC eventually evolves into US Terra Guard, which will have the same relationship to the Army as the Marines do with the Navy and Space Force with the Air Force. The series of up to 10 novel-length stories that follow will show how Terra Guard evolves and develops as well as detailing their many missions against adversaries making use of this new theater of conflict. A few of the story titles will be titles like “Geoplanes,” “Fault Zone” and “Subduction.” I have 10 titles already laid out but no outlines as yet. Aftershock will be the initial title that lays the groundwork (so to speak) for the whole series. I envision each story as a standalone novel, about 100,000 words (160-180 pages) but all part of the greater story arc as Terra Guard battles Red Sword (and indirectly China) beneath the Earth’s surface. This series will obviously depend a lot on geology, geophysics and seismology. Many of the settings will be underground, in geoplanes and otherwise. I’ll try to make the science understandable, deployed in small chunks and as accurate as I can, consistent with the narrative demands of the stories. I’ll have to do a lot of research to provide believable background for the series. As indicated above, I see these stories as likely set in the 22nd century, far enough away to provide some room for imagination and the unexpected. Major characters will include Major Jake Swift, an Army armored division officer and probably a tank commander, who gets assigned to Underground Strike Command and later becomes a leading advocate and tactician for the newly formed Terra Guard, a sort of Billy Mitchell of the subterranean world. Additional characters could Colonel Jurgen Lubeck, another Army armored forces import and Major Krystal Payne, an Army G2 (Intelligence) specialist and possible love interest for Swift. Of course, I’ll also have key figures from the US Geological Survey, and adversary bigwigs inside Red Sword and the Chinese Ministry of Defense and government. All in all, Terra Troopers will be a fairly major undertaking, if I decide to do this. As yet, I have no outlines for any story, not even Aftershock, the kickoff tale, but that should come. I’ll need detailed outlines for each story, major character bios, science background for the settings and the technology, some ideas on how Terra Guard would be organized and structured to complete its mission. In my previous series Tales of the Quantum Corps, Quantum Troopers and Quantum Troopers Return, I used the UN as the guiding agency. But in Terra Troopers, I intend to come back to the good old United States and make Terra Guard fully American, with adversaries and conflicts a natural outgrowth of events going on today (2021). Oh, and by the way, my imaginary vehicles—the geoplanes—can function as submarines in the ocean as well and could even show up beneath the surface of other worlds in our Solar System, like the Moon and Mars. Look for Aftershock at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers sometime in the latter half of 2022. I’ll keep you up updated on this big new project. The Word Shed will take a 2-week hiatus for me to spend a few weeks on a late-summer beach vacation. We’ll post again on October 4. Hope you had a great summer and a memorable Labor Day. In upcoming posts, I’ll detail how my current series The Farpool Stories is advancing to its conclusion. I’m currently writing the first draft of The Farpool: Diaspora and will conclude this series with The Farpool: Destiny sometime in the first half of 2022. See you October 4. Phil B.

Post #270 August 30 2021 “How Many Pages Should I Write Today?” Every writer faces the same question when he or she sits down at the computer in the morning: how many pages, how many words, should I write today? This is basically a matter of scheduling. For writers of novels and non-fiction books, it goes without saying that there’s no way you can do the entire work in a day or a week, probably not even in a month. You have to divide it up into chunks, mainly because you’ve got other things to do with your life along with writing. Case in point: I’m currently working on a science fiction novel called The Farpool: Diaspora. I anticipate that when the initial draft is done, it will come in at somewhere around 220 pages, when formatted for Smashwords.com. Each page runs on average about 400-500 words, so we’re talking about 115,000 to 125,000 words in total. Now, how to divide that up.... I’m doing 3-5 pages a day. That doesn’t sound like much. But it leaves me with time for other tasks and projects. Writing 3-5 pages a day takes me about 1-2 hours, depending. But it’s 15-25 pages a week. Divide 220 pages by 20 pages (on average) and you get 11 weeks, roughly about 3 months. Add another month for editing and re-writing. At the rate I have chosen, I can do a finished draft of The Farpool:Diaspora in three to four months. Plus I can work on other things and have a life. Could I write more? Of course I could. But you should choose a rate that is comfortable and sustainable over a long period, since it’s unlikely you can finish a novel-length project in a few weeks. There are some writers who bat out a draft in a single marathon session of a month but I’m not one of them. I take longer and take my time and try to do the thing right from the beginning. One the most important aspects of this writing process for me, when engaged in a lengthy work, is “staying in the story”, mentally. I find that a daily regimen like I described above is a great way to do that. Even away from my desk, I find my feverish brain cogitating on the next scene, the next sentence. Sometimes ideas for snatches of dialogue or plot variations will come to me when I’m working out, mowing the lawn, eating dinner, watching TV. I want that. Every writer approaches this differently. I’m also a detailed outliner and planner, when it comes to writing a novel, or writing anything. I’ve covered some of this in earlier blog posts, but I work from the beginning to build a fairly detailed outline, with character sketches and setting and background details readily at hand for the actual writing. Sometimes my outlines and sketches are detailed enough to be lifted and pasted into the novel text as is, or with little change. That makes life easier, as long as it advances the story. The story is everything. I’m even occasionally included an Appendix of some of this material at the end of some of The Farpool Stories, for readers who just can’t get enough detail on my imaginary world and its people. That’s a little peek behind the curtains at the logistics or the mechanics of daily writing life. I plan to do more of this sort of thing again. The Word Shed won’t publish on September 6, owing to the Labor Day holiday. My next post, on September 13, will cover details about a projected upcoming series called Terra Troopers, which should debut at Smashwords in late 2022. See you in 2 weeks. Phil B

Post #269 August 23, 2021 “Starting…” In recent days, our house has had issues with our 17-KW generator not being able to supply enough power to our AC compressor whenever the generator is running. It seems that the compressor requires about 115 amps for startup and 45 amps for running. This is at the maximum capacity of the generator to supply. We’re working on getting a new generator. Which leads me to the idea of what it takes to actually start a new novel. In the last week, I have done this. I have started on the newest novel in my Farpool Stories series. It’s called The Farpool: Diaspora and I hope to make it available in mid to late fall of 2021. Any start of a book-length work requires energy, just like our AC compressor. Along with energy, such an effort needs optimism, hope, attention to detail, determination and some kind of plan. Whenever I start a new novel, I feel a sense of infinite possibilities, and I’m not talking about that last glass of Riesling I just had. It can be a bit overwhelming. The best way I know to get a grip on that feeling and not be intimidated into putting the start off for another day is to have a detailed outline readily at hand. A few character bios wouldn’t hurt either. Structure makes the writer’s literary universe seem just a wee bit less intimidating. No race is ever won in the first few steps but the race can be lost in those steps. In the most recent Olympics (Tokyo 2020), one track and field hurdler missed his very first hurdle. He tried to finish but winning was naturally out of the question. Getting off on the right foot is important whether you’re running hurdles, swimming a 50-meter sprint or starting a new novel. It’s important not to be discouraged by the magnitude of the task before you. Most of my novels end up over 200 to sometimes 250, even 300 pages. You’re not going to be able to do that in one day. Just do a few pages every day and keep at it. Print out what you’ve done. If you’re like me, you enjoy the visual sight of pieces of paper mounting up, a tangible reminder of your progress. In anything involving a sustained effort over many weeks or months (or even years), discipline and persistence are key. There will be days when your resolve and energy flags a little. That’s okay. Don’t hyperventilate. Give yourself a day off. Then get back to it the next day. It doesn’t hurt to be OCD, like me. Writing 3-5 pages a day has now become, after many years of this, just another daily part of my life, like brushing teeth or eating lunch or working out. When that happens, you can say with some confidence that you’re actually a writer. After a month off from finishing The Farpool; Plague, it feels good to be back banging out 3-5 pages a day. Although I needed the time away from writing, it feels like an important part of me has reawakened. In the first week of my effort with The Farpool: Diaspora, I finished 25 pages of the first draft. I feel pretty good about that. The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 30, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post # 268 August 16 2021 “Wookies, Muggles and Other Made-Up Words” “Litor’kel ge.” This phrase comes from my made-up Seomish language, which appears in all of The Farpool Stories. It means something like “go with the flow,” or “may the currents be with you.” One of the great joys of writing (especially fiction) is the chance to make up words for effect. But as with chocolate candy and daytime television, you have to be careful not to overdo it. Too many words made-up can really make reading a story a struggle. Just look at Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, if you don’t believe me. Writers of fantasy and science fiction are probably the most accomplished at using made-up words and even whole languages in their stories. For The Farpool Stories, I even included an appendix in many of the titles that explained how the language of the sea-going Seomish people came to be. Check out the text below…. The Language Seomish is designed phonetically to carry well in a water medium. Hard, clicking consonants are common. The ‘p’ or ‘puh’ sound, made by violent expulsion of air is also common. Modulation of the voice stream, particularly at high frequencies (sounding much like a human whistle) produces the characteristic “wheeee” sound, which is a root of many words. Translation from Seomish to human languages like English requires some inspired speculation, since so many Seomish phrases seem to be little more than grunts or groans, modulated in frequency and duration. A good example is the Seomish word for Earth…Urku. After the Kel’vishtu (the Great Emigration), thousands of Seomish found themselves in the oceans of Earth. Despite differences in chemical makeup, temperature and salinity, the oceans of Earth haven’t caused great changes in the basic dialects of the Seomish language. Most Seomish words are grouped according to several characteristics: (1) Who is speaking (the personal); (2) who is being spoken to (the indicative); (3) state of mind of the speaker (the conditional); (4) the kel-standing of the conversants (the intimant). Each classification has a set of characteristic pre-consonants, to indicate the nature of the coming words, etc. Thus: 1. k’, kee, t’ 2. tch, g, j, oot 3. m’, p’, puh’ (both anger, dislike, distaste, etc), sh, sz (both joyful) 4. each kel identifies itself with a unique set of capitalized consonants, like a vocal coat of arms. Example: t’milee, or CHE’oray…Seomish versus Timily or Chory…English. Okay, so you don’t have to go to this great a length in your work. But it is fun. The key thing to remember, though, is when and where to insert made-up words. A little goes a long way. Just ask J.K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter stories. Here are some informal guidelines to consider when you want to insert a made-up word or phrase. 1. Are you trying to replicate a sound? In The Farpool Stories, I have a translation device called an echopod. I wanted to simulate the screeching and scratching it sometimes made when translating, so I introduced this: Shkreeeaaahhh. Hopefully you get the idea. 2. Use made-up words to inject realism. In The Farpool Stories, my characters are all marine creatures, like talking fish. Nobody would believe it if they all spoke in the King’s English (though there may have been early Star Trek episodes that did things like this). 3. Use made-up words to emphasize difference, even alienness. Once you meet the Seomish people and hear them conversing in their own clicking, honking tongue, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. 4. Always provide context nearby, in proximity to your made-up words. Take ‘muggle,’ from the Harry Potter stories. J.K. Rowling uses this word in context, so you know it refers to non-wizard folk. Some of her wizards even explain this to those who might not understand. Doing this in context is better, because it’s less jarring to the reader. Even if you didn’t know right away what “litor’kel ge” meant, you could discern the meaning from how the Seomish use it, as a sort of term of endearment or encouragement. 5. Keep the number of made-up words and phrases to a minimum. Space them out over several pages. Insert them into sentences and paragraphs where they are surrounded by English words for context. Judicious use of alien words will help the reader know that these are aliens or different kinds of people being described without interfering with the flow of the story or making the story unintelligible. Your reader will make the connections in his or her mind. Remember, your readers still speak and read English. Making up new words is the fun part of writing. Just don’t go overboard or become too enamored with the made-up words that you forget the story itself. Great as Frank Herbert’s sf novel Dune is, it sometimes takes the made-up language and words a little too far. If you can’t read and enjoy the story without having a dictionary nearby (even if there is one), you’ve gone too far. The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 23 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post # 267 August 9 2021 “Chapters and Parts: Organizing Your Story” Virtually every book published, fiction or nonfiction, is divided into parts and chapters and other sections. While the publishing industry has its own guidelines on how this should be done, in this post I want to talk with you, the writer and author, about how to organize your story in ways that make sense…to you and the reader. Stage plays usually have three acts. Many teleplays for TV have 4-act structures. Let’s say you have a plot or outline of some kind. You have a narrative that starts off, builds to some kind of climax and then ends. How should it be segmented into chapters and parts? And what’s the difference between parts and chapters anyway? First off, let me say I’m not a fan of using parts instead of chapters. To me, a part is a major shift in the narrative, a major discontinuity. It’s something that chapters can do just as well. If you google the difference, the results tell you that a chapter is the details of an event, using context, characters and action. This search also produced a result telling me that a part was a subdivision of a chapter, though I’ve seen it the other way around just as often. One search result claimed that chapters were primarily used to make a book more user-friendly, which I think is true. To try to clarify this, let’s put some structure and guidelines to our discussion about structure and guidelines. I can think of 3 reasons why a chapter break (as opposed to a scene break inside a chapter) might be useful. 1. A chapter break can imply a change in location. One chapter might show events and actions in Casablanca. The next one might be on Mars. The chapter break reinforces in the reader’s mind that what is coming is different in an important way. This helps prepare the reader mentally and emotionally for a major shift in the narrative. 2. A chapter break can imply a change in time. Perhaps Chapter 1 takes place today and Chapter 2 is a flashback, showing events in the past. Or perhaps Chapter 2 is just a few days or weeks ahead. We’ve all seen films where the passage of time is graphically illustrated by spinning clock faces or newspapers flying around. These are like film versions of a chapter break. In my work, I like to begin each chapter with a little insert that indicates the place and time of the upcoming action. 3. Chapter breaks can also imply a change in character. Chapter 4 might be dealing with our hero Joe Blow and his efforts to fend off the evil Tralfamadorians (with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut). Chapter 5 might then be a depiction of Joe’s girlfriend Frieda and her efforts to grow more magic crystals to empower Joe and his superhero friends for future battles. Of course, the chapter and the narrative in general can switch back and forth. In fact, this is a good way to build tension in the narrative. But a chapter break would be a good choice in one chapter that deals mainly with Joe and the next one dealing mainly with Frieda. It separates the two in the reader’s mind. Chapters allow the storyteller to manage multiple plot lines and keep them straight more easily. Imagine a stage set in a stage play. After one scene, the lights dim and stagehands move furniture around to new positions. That’s a kind of stage version of a chapter break. I develop chapters in my stories at the tail end of my planning. First, I write down a ‘sequence of events,’ a list of things I think should happen in the story. Then I group them into whatever groups seem logical. Those groups become my chapters. In years past, I even made a table for different plot lines and wrote down in each column (row by row) what happened in that plot line. Then I would make chapters by grouping the table cells across the table into logical units. I don’t do this anymore, since I can usually get a sense of narrative flow just from my original sequence. Just remember this: chapters imply continuity and chapter breaks imply a change in that continuity. Longer books, fiction and nonfiction, need the flexibility that chapters bring to keep the reader’s interest and manage all the pieces of the narrative, forging them into some kind of coherent whole. Use chapters wisely and they’ll contribute much-needed structure to your story. Use chapters poorly and they’ll interrupt and poison the reading experience. The choice is yours. The next post to The Word Shed will come on August 16 and deal with made-up words and when to use them. See you then. Phil B.

Post #266 August 2 2021 “The Last Page” In the previous post, we looked at how to write a compelling first page for your story. I introduced an acronym called A-T-P to keep you on track as to what’s important. But, clearly, the last page is just as important, if not more so. Below, I’ve included the last few paragraphs of my most recent sf novel, The Farpool: Plague, now available at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers…. Below the waves, circling around the foundation and the outer vortexes of the SPACETRAIN farpool, Charley Meyer finally came to a hard decision. As fast as she could pull, she headed back to the breakwater and the steps up to the Paseo. On Calle Vortice above the promenade, she messaged for an autocab to Quito, using her Farpool pass as payment. Two hours later, now in the capital city, she left the autocab at Mariscal Sucre hyperport and purchased a hyperjet ticket to Bermuda. The flight lasted two hours, with two stops…Miami and New York. Once she had reached Bermuda’s L.F. Wade International at St Georges, she rented a jitney and sped over the hills and narrow twisting lanes of the island to Great Sound Beach, to a marina she knew about, other side of Hamilton harbor. From the jetty, ignoring the curious stares of outside diners and early evening strollers, she ditched her Farpool uniform and went full commando. She did a racing dive into the cold waters of the Sound and headed north, descending, sounding off the Mid-Atlantic Ridge off to her right to get her bearings. It had been awhile and she couldn’t run the risk of getting lost…or running into a Ponkti fleet assembling. Unerringly, feeling more and more that this was the right thing to do, she headed north by northeast, for the Muir seamounts. For Keenomsh’pont and what was left of Muir City, ready to man the barricades if she had to. Ready to defend her people from the coming onslaught. Okay, so that’s the excerpt. To me, your last page has to accomplish several things, most importantly including wrapping up the story in some kind of satisfying conclusion that makes sense, seems inevitable (after the fact), and secures all the loose ends. Many and maybe most last pages, or story endings follow one of three approaches. 1. Everybody lives happily after ever (the hero achieved his goal or failed magnificently) 2. The evil goes on 3. Some kind of big confrontation is coming (later, perhaps in another story) I believe most people would say the excerpt above fits #3 best of all. I did several horror stories years ago in which I used #2, pretty common in those types of stories. To be sure fiction and stories are emphatically not real life. Real life is messy, confusing, repetitious, mostly boring except for moments of terror and always unpredictable. Fiction is a condensed form of real life, where the operative term is verisimilitude…resemblance to the truth. In fiction, the storyteller guides what happens, and does so in such a way to bring matters to a believable conclusion, which hardly ever happens IRL. Having said that, the way a storyteller concludes his story has a lot to do with how his readers or listeners will remember and regard the story as they ponder it later on. “He got what he deserved.” “Wow, I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that.” “She was incredibly strong and brave…maybe there’s something I could learn from her example.” Decide ahead of time where you want the story to go and how you want it to end. Some writers do the story ending first and work backward (not me). Some insist they don’t know how the story’s going to end until they get to the end (don’t believe them). Once you have a general idea of how all the events are going to turn out, then you can script the narrative to arrive at that place in some kind of fashion that makes sense, is believable, and satisfying. I can’t emphasize that last sentence enough: if your ending isn’t believable and satisfying at some level, the whole story will seem a waste of time to your readers. The last page or the ending is the icing on the cake. It’s what everything in the story is working toward. In the past, we might have called it the moral of the story, the thing that’s important for the reader to remember. Give your last page some extra thought. Then steer the ship of your story on that course from the beginning, understanding there might be a few detours and storms along the way, and maintain that heading. Your story and your readers will be better off for it. The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 9. See you then. Phil B.

Post #265 July 26 2021 “First Paragraphs, First Pages” Everyone knows that first impressions are critical. It’s just as true in storytelling as in meeting someone for lunch. In this post, I want to describe a little technique I use to make sure I cover all the bases for making a good first impression on the reader. Following is a major part of the first page of my newest sf novel The Farpool: Diaspora, coming later this year…. Three days and a handful of hours after arriving in Jupiter orbit through the Atlantic Farpool, Europa Clipper had put in at Gateway Station for some light maintenance work and re-provisioning. Alicia Wu and Evgeni Kotlas were sitting at a table in the ship’s crew’s mess, nursing a few beers. Kotlas fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. “Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” Wu said. “With hair—“ Kotlas pronounced himself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.” “You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for Farpool school.” It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles. “Ten seconds to separation,” Sonora called. The captain scanned her boards and instruments, pronounced herself satisfied with what she saw. Europa Clipper was docked at the forward nose port of Gateway Station, a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Alicia Wu had termed it. “Three…two…one…separating now—“ There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Sonora pulsed Clipper’s aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the Station. Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As Clipper backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three-and-a-half-day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation. Okay, so that’s an excerpt from the first page. I want to introduce a little acronym to help you as a storyteller remember to attend to the most important things in your first paragraphs and the first page. It’s called A-T-P. 1. The most important thing you can do as a storyteller in your first page is capture the reader’s attention. That’s the A in ATP. If you don’t grab the reader by the collar right off the bat and say, “Pay attention…this is important!”—you may never get them to enter the imaginary world of your story. 2. The next part of the process is to set the tone. This is the T. Or call it atmosphere. Is it a menacing tone, with overtones of foreboding? A happy, expectant tone? Is it a critical, rational, explanatory narrative? Do this with well-chosen words. 3. The final part of our acronym is to create a problem. This would be the P. Set up a conflict. Create some kind of barrier or obstacle for our hero or heroes to overcome. And make it important to the hero, maybe even life and death. Let’s look at my excerpt and see how I did on these three dimensions. Capturing Attention: Right away, I establish that this is Jupiter, not some farm in Iowa. It’s quite a sight, but with serious radiation dangers. And with an expectation that our heroes are going to be descending into that hard radiation bath, there are intimations of danger coming. Also, the title of the ship and the final paragraph of the excerpt show that our intrepid crew is headed for Jupiter’s moon Europa. They’re not headed to the QuikTrip for a smoothie. Setting Tone: Look at some of the words…cauldron, seething turbulence, fry your hair, cracked golf ball, dimpled and rutted. These are not happy, joyful words. They imply danger, a bit of menace, the possibility of unexpected occurrences, hazards and perils and risks aplenty. Our heroes seem to brave but determined people. Which raises a question: why are they doing this? Creating a Problem: Re-reading this excerpt makes me think I could probably do better along this dimension. I should make their central problem more explicit in this first page. The existence of hard radiation and the obvious dangers of what they are doing are part of the problem. Actually, a few paragraphs later, we realize our crew is headed down to the surface of Europa to start boring through its ice surface to the sub-surface ocean below. In editing and re-writing this section, I may well make that more apparent earlier in the text. So, that’s A-T-P. Use this little moniker to guide you in beginning your story in a compelling and engaging way. If you attend to these initial details in telling your tale, you’ll find your readers will be more likely to be sitting on the edge of their seats, wanting to hear and read more. The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 2. In this post, we’ll take a look at what’s important on making a good last page for your story. See you then. Phil B.

Post #264 July 19 2021 “Promoting Yourself as a Writer” Many of the posts I’ve made to this blog over the last few years have been related to the mechanics of writing and storytelling. But to be a real success as a modern author in today’s hyperchaotic literary marketplace, you have to network, promote and market yourself and your ‘brand.’ This is something that doesn’t always come naturally to many writers, who are often disposed to be somewhat loners and introspective, though not all of course. But I’m that way. I want to spend the next few posts looking at ways we wordsmiths can dive into the modern world of commercial writer promotion and networking and make our brands better known and successful. Toward that end, I’ve come up with five ways we can do this. 1. Start a blog, like The Word Shed. I started this blog back in late 2015. Now it’s mid 2021. Creating and managing a blog is an easy way to make yourself known and approachable to potential readers. Engaging with your readers is really what it’s all about these days…understanding what they like, what they don’t like, answering their questions, arguing about details and plots and characters, etc. Your blog should steadily encourage others to post and as the blog manager, you should try to answer as many of these posts as possible. Running a blog is like creating and nurturing a little ecosystem of readers who read and write each other, all gathered around an interest in following and supporting you as an author. This is a potentially rich source of readers and growing your readership is what every author should be aiming for. I’ve seen my own grow since 2014, when my work first appeared online, to over 48,000 downloads. 2. Build and maintain an effective web site. This is one area where I could improve. I do have an author’ website. It’s at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt. But it needs updating badly as it doesn’t show but a fraction of my work. A good author’s website should offer a nonstop library-bookstore of all the author’s available work. Mike Shatzkin, of Digital Book World, offers this checklist: – List of all the author’s books, listed chronologically and by series – Landing page for each book, including the cover, a description, reviews, excerpts, links to retail sites and other important metadata that would help readers discover the title and decide to buy – Contact page so readers can easily send an email and get a response – Email capture – Social media buttons, so readers can easily sign up to follow the author on Twitter, etc. – Calendar with upcoming publication dates and scheduled public appearances – Page with links to articles and reviews by the author, as well as references to the author on blogs and in the press In addition to these things on an author website, Shatzkin recommends that authors all should have: – Up-to-date Amazon author page – Google Plus page (which is crucial for effective search engine optimization strategy) – Twitter and Facebook (optional) Seems like a lot of work but I believe it’s worth it, to give your readers a place to browse your work and make selections…and most important, to keep them coming back wanting more. 3. Join a writer’s group, or a critique group. I did a few years ago and it was a great decision. To hang out with people who loves books and writing and who are slaving away on their own projects, to give and take constructive criticism and tips and suggestions and pointers, is priceless. It makes you realize you’re really not alone in what can be a lonely occupation. Moreover, it’s a great way to network and meet people. The group I’m in meets once a week, every Wednesday and we are always doing some kind of writing and bringing something current to read. My group keeps me on my toes and doesn’t let me lag behind or slack off. 4. Attend writers’ conferences and conventions. Yet another way to meet and network. Plus they can be just plain fun. This may require travel, and so incurs the cost and time involved in that. But done expeditiously, with proper expectations, conferences and conventions can be a great outlet for your creative juices and may well inspire you with new ideas and new friends. Writers are actually human beings and have social needs just like everybody. Some of the best conventions are genre-related, like Mystery Writers of America or Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers and their World Cons. 5. Write reviews. In my own work, I’ve seen spikes in my downloads after recent reviews, spikes even in works not being reviewed. Good reviews and ratings are priceless but even bad reviews make your work noticed and notice is what it’s all about. Readers’ attention is a limited resource and it’s getting harder and harder to capture your share of that. Writing and receiving reviews (for Goodreads and others; there are dozens, if not more) is a great way to achieve notice, even notoriety. You may well find that your willingness to review another writer’s work can translate into others’ willingness to do the same…quid pro quo. Networking and promoting your author brand is essential in today’s literary marketplace and anything you can do along the lines of my five suggestions will help gain you the notice and the readers that we all want. The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 26 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #263 July 12 2021 “Five Reasons Why You Should Judge a Book by its Cover” In this post, I want to cover some reasons why book covers are so vital to selling books to readers, whether the books are print or ebook. We all judge books by their covers…because we have to, for some very good reasons I’ll enumerate. 1. A well-designed book cover represents the story in a condensed form. It encapsulates and projects the essence of a story in a way that you can take in instantly. 2. A good book cover appeals to your emotions or evokes a feeling. The cover should talk to your readers through typography, imagery and metaphor. Using my cover above, what feelings are evoked when you look at it? If I had done my homework right, you would be feeling a sinister presence right about now. Swamps are always scary places, where creepy things crawl out of the vines and grab your ankles. Skulls evoke a sense of dread, even death. Red type might make you think of blood and gore. 3. A good book cover should grab your attention immediately, even subliminally. You’re intrigued. Getting noticed in a crowded bazaar is a challenge for any author. Whatever you can do to intrigue the browsing buyer is usually a good idea…it’ll make them take a look, maybe even a second look. That’s what you want. 4. We’re already programmed by evolution to look for human faces and forms. Not all covers have people on them, but many do, even most of them. Why? Because we instinctively respond to human faces and forms…even dead ones. 5. The cover does something unexpected. Like Salvador Dali. I always think of Dali as the master of creepy art. You look at one of his paintings and you find yourself saying, “No. That just can’t be.” We’re used to patterns and Dali was a master at taking a simple visual pattern, something we see all the time, and inserting some object or twist that immediately jars you. You cock your head and rub your eyes, disbelieving. A good book cover often has something of the same effect, hopefully not as creepy, but enough to make you look twice and study it. 6. A good book cover should also be visually pleasing. Less is more. Simple and minimal. I have too many separate visual elements in my cover above, although I think your eye is naturally drawn to the skull. Maybe just the swamp alone…. 7. Here are some more tips I found from Writer’s Digest… 10 Tips for Effective Book Covers By: dmatriccino | February 17, 2011 As more authors opt for independent publishing routes, I’m getting more questions about secrets to good book design, production, and layout. Here are the 10 biggest things I learned about book cover design. Remember: Most people in book publishing believe that a cover is a book’s No. 1 marketing tool. 1. The title should be big and easy to read. This is more important than ever. (Many people will first encounter your cover on a screen, not on a shelf.) This is such a well-worn cliche of cover design that I have a designer friend with a Facebook photo album called “Make the Title Bigger.” 2. Don’t forget to review a thumbnail image of the cover. Is the cover compelling at a small size? More people are buying books on a Kindle or mobile device, so you want the cover to read clearly no matter where it appears. You should also anticipate what the cover looks like in grayscale. 3. Do not use any of the following fonts (anywhere!): Comic Sans or Papyrus. These fonts are only acceptable if you are writing a humor book, or intentionally attempting to create a design that publishing professionals will laugh at. 4. No font explosions! (And avoid special styling.) Usually a cover should not use more than 2 fonts. Avoid the temptation to put words in caps, italics caps, outlined caps, etc. Do not “shape” the type either. 5. Do not use your own artwork, or your children’s artwork, on the cover. There are a few rare exceptions to this, but let’s assume you are NOT one of them. It’s almost always a terrible idea. 6. Do not use cheap clip art on your cover. I’m talking about the stuff that comes free with Microsoft Word or other cheap layout programs. Quality stock photography is OK. (iStockPhoto is one reliable source for quality images.) 7. Do not stick an image inside a box on the cover. I call this the “T-shirt” design. It looks extremely amateurish. 8. Avoid gradients. It’s especially game-over if you have a cover with a rainbow gradient. 9. Avoid garish color combinations. Sometimes such covers are meant to catch people’s attention. Usually, it just makes your book look freakish. 10. Finally: Don’t design your own cover. The only people who should consider designing their own covers are professional graphic designers—and even then, it’s not advisable. Bonus tip: No sunrise photos, no sunset photos, no ocean photos, no fluffy clouds. So there you have it: some ideas on book covers. The next to post to The Word Shed comes on July 17. In this post, we’ll look at some good marketing tips for ebooks, from my own experience. See you then. Phil B.

Post #262 June 28 2021 “Plague is Done; Get Ready for Diaspora!” In the last few days, I have completely finished my latest book in The Farpool Stories. It’s called The Farpool: Plague. I plan to upload this new title on 2 July 2021. Look for it in the days to follow, at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. The next title in The Farpool Stories is called The Farpool: Diaspora. Almost all prep work is done and I expect to begin writing the first draft on or about 9 August 2021. With luck, this title will be done and ready to upload by the end of 2021 or early into 2022. Following is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Chapter 1 Aboard Europa Clipper Jupiter Orbit Insertion January 5, 2210 (Earth U.T.) Three days and a handful of hours after arriving in Jupiter orbit through the Atlantic Farpool, Europa Clipper had put in at Gateway Station for some light maintenance work and re-provisioning. Alicia Wu and Evgeni Kotlas were sitting at a table in the ship’s crew’s mess, nursing a few beers. Kotlas fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. “Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” Wu said. “With hair—“ Kotlas pronounced himself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.” “You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for Farpool school.” It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles. “Ten seconds to separation,” Sonora called. The captain scanned her boards and instruments, pronounced herself satisfied with what she saw. Europa Clipper was docked at the forward nose port of Gateway Station, a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Alicia Wu had termed it. “Three…two…one…separating now—“ There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Sonora pulsed Clipper’s aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the Station. Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As Clipper backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three-and-a-half-day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation. Miriam Sonora was glad Clipper and Gateway both maintained active rad defensive shielding and emitters. Otherwise, they would have all been fried to cinders days ago. For several days after departing Gateway, Europa Clipper coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Sonora passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Clipper dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor. After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Wu and the rest of the crew that came by the crew’s mess watched the scenery below for hours at a time. Wu found herself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. She could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes. In time, Clipper made her way into orbit about Europa. Clipper’s pilot, Reynaldo Diaz, joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them. “Gives me the creeps,” Casey Winans said. She shuddered involuntarily and sucked at her drink. “All those cracks are seams in the ice plates,” Belket klu kel: Om’t marveled. “And to think that’s where we’re going, right into one of those seams.” “And below—“ added Sonora. She decided it was time to finish up their final briefings and get ready for the landing. “All right, boys and girls, all hands lay aft to the Service deck. I want to go over last-minute details before we head down.” The briefing lasted half an hour…. Okay, so that’s the excerpt. I hope you’ll like the final result and I hope the excerpt whets your appetite to learn more about the world of The Farpool Stories. My final title in this series, after Plague and Diaspora, will be called The Farpool: Destiny (likely available sometime in the middle of 2022). That will make a total of eight stories in the overall arc. That’s enough for me. The Word Shed will take a brief hiatus for a mid-summer vacation next week. There won’t be a post for July 5, due to the holiday. The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 12, 2021. See you then and have a great holiday. Phil B.

Post #261 June 21 2021 “The Plague is Coming!” In the last week, I finished the first draft of my sf novel The Farpool: Plague. It comes in at 225 pages and about 123,000 words. What’s next? The real work begins. I keep a file called Next Steps for every project I do. It tells me what I have done and what still needs to be done. Below, I’ve reproduced this file for the current project…. 1. Complete any needed expansion of Story Outline, and Sequence of Events. DONE 2. Re-read all titles in The Farpool Stories for continuity with new stories DONE 3. Complete List of Major Players DONE 4. Background and personality sketches on major characters DONE 5. Details on medical/biological effects of the Purple and medbot interventions DONE 6. Write Chapter and Scene Details (2195 CE) DONE 7. Started first draft: 5 April 2021 8. Finished first draft: 10 June 2021 9. Review and edit final 10. Spellcheck 11. Book descriptions 12. Tag lines 13. Word 97 version 14. Set all text to Normal and enforce my styles 15. Verify cover format USE JPEG! 16. Projected upload date: 2 July 2021 From this, you can see I’m proposing to have this work finished and ready to upload to Smashwords by 2 July. This list is to remind me of all the things, after writing, that need to be done to finish a project. I’m currently on #9. So, there is still a lot of work to be done. And the job is somewhat more difficult in that this book is #6 in the series The Farpool Stories and there are 2 more to come. Just preserving continuity with earlier works is a big job in itself. Once the book file and cover file are in good shape, the job turns to marketing efforts. Smashwords offers a lot of recommendations on how to market ebooks. I’ll cover a few here that I like to follow. First, consider including an excerpt from the next novel at the end of this one. This is a form of pre-selling, or maybe whetting a potential reader’s appetite. Of course, this also means you have to have written enough of the upcoming work to make an excerpt. That has not been done yet…one more thing to do. Another marketing idea from Smashwords is to do your upload at a strategic time, ideally just before a major holiday, or even just on a Thursday or a Friday. The idea behind this is that it is during these periods that prospective readers will have more time to browse and come across your work. In my experience, this works pretty well. A third recommendation is to do what I’m doing right here…pre-notifying all my blog readers that something is coming. Also, you should do some of this on your web site and also on Facebook if you have an account, which I don’t yet. All of these ideas are good ways to get the word out that you’ve got something new coming and there’s even more new stuff after this. Pretty much anything that gets your name into the minds of readers is a good thing (like a review in Goodreads). As mentioned, The Farpool: Plague is title #6 in my series The Farpool Stories. As of mid-April 2021, this series had garnered 6587 downloads. That means I potentially have a ready-made audience who might be interested in any new works in this series. Anything I can do to let them know of new titles coming is a good thing. So, here’s the moral of the story: Just finishing the first draft of a book is only the beginning. What follows is at least as important to your success as doing the storytelling in the first place. Don’t skimp on it. The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 28, 2021 See you then. Phil B.

Post #260 June 14 2021 “Researching a Novel…or Just the Facts, Ma’am” Nobody writes a novel without doing some kind of research. It can be detailed and extensive or barebones, but if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better get your facts straight. Currently I’m into researching, planning and outlining for my next sf novel The Farpool: Diaspora. I’ve got electronic and real folders for character bios and backgrounds, book covers, Earth circa 22nd century, Human-Coethi conflict and Jupiter/Europa details, plus a variety of additional files and notes. At this moment, I’m developing background and bios for major characters (but not all of them). The great question for any storyteller or novelist is how much research is enough? How much detail is enough? There is a term—verisimilitude—that writers sometimes use. It means ‘resemblance to the truth.’ No storyteller tells a story with all possible details. He’d be writing or reciting an encyclopedia instead of a story. The storyteller chooses details selectively to enhance the story and give it a flavor of being real. You should include just enough detail to transport your reader into your imaginary world and ground him there, believing that all this could in fact have happened. Which means that you do enough research to provide enough detail to achieve verisimilitude. In practical terms, that means you have to do a bit more research than you ultimately might use. As an author, writing about how a character feels or might react to a situation, I want to be able to pick and choose details to explain, illustrate or dramatize the situation in such a way as to put the reader right there in the character’s shoes. Little details can matter, especially if a reader has some experience with the subject matter. When I wrote The Farpool, I used the term valsalva maneuver to describe something that scuba divers do to clear their ears and sinuses when experiencing pressure changes. The concept was relevant to the story and I had to use it accurately to maintain verisimilitude. I had to research it to know what I was talking about. And I’m sure some of my readers are well familiar with this technique and would have bitten their lips in anguish or firebombed my house if I had used the term incorrectly. I should add that I’ve never scuba dived a day in my life. Ernest Hemingway once said all writers should have a built-in bullshit detector. Why? Because all readers have a built-in bullshit detector. What about science fiction stories, where the writer is taking us to worlds and times and alien cultures that have never existed anywhere outside the writer’s imagination? Here again, the details have to read true, sound true and feel true. And they have to be internally consistent. Often, the littlest detail—what someone ate for dinner last night, how they dressed for descending into that cave, what it felt like when they landed on the icy surface of Europa—if done right, can connect with the reader in just the right way and they’ll find themselves saying: “Yeah…I can believe it would happen like that!” Author Tom Young, writer of many well-regarded military thrillers, writes in Writer’s Digest some tips to follow when researching a story: 1. Write what you know (personal experience has a value all its own) 2. You can do research on the cheap (that’s why we have Wikipedia and libraries) 3. You can find anything on YouTube 4. You can find things anywhere. Keep pen and notepad nearby during all waking hours. 5. Use all your senses 6. You can leave things out. I particularly like Young’s advice about number 6 above. To quote: “If you do thorough research, you’ll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader “overhear” the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.” In other words, a little bit of detail can go a long way if it’s chosen properly and used correctly. But it’s still necessary. You still have to do the research to dig out that little nugget and save it for the right moment in the story. Researching is ultimately about being prepared, ready to write the story with the flair and power that will grab the reader and pull them into your imaginary world and strand them there for the duration. The best stories, the most memorable stories, have memorable characters and memorable settings and details. Anyone remember the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey? The next post to The Word Shed will come on June 21, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #259 May 31, 2021 “Just One More Page: Setting SMART Goals for Writing” In previous posts to The Word Shed, I have said many times that my usual daily goal as a writer is to complete 3-5 pages. This is true for any story I’m writing, whether a novel, novelette or short story. It’s an aspirational goal that I usually achieve okay and it keeps me moving toward completing whatever project I’m working on. Which brings me to the topic for this post: how to set goals for yourself as a writer. I’m indebted to the fine folks at writers.com for the following guidelines on how to set goals for yourself as a writer…. Be S.M.A.R.T. with your writing goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Time-bound. SPECIFIC …means the goal is easily identifiable and simple. Let’s take writing goal examples like wanting to write a screenplay or a novel. If you want that kind of lofty goal, you could easily be overwhelmed because it’s not only too big, it’s also too vague. Instead, make a goal of writing for an hour a day, or a specific word-count, or page count. Be as specific as possible. Unclear, over-reaching goals are rarely attained. If you don’t set specific writing goals, you’re unlikely to reach them. It’s all about taking those larger goals and making a plan, knocking them out step by step so you aren’t overwhelmed. MEASURABLE …means you can identify clearly when the goal is accomplished or how much you have left to do to cross it off your list. If you’re setting a goal of writing five pages a day, but you’re only meeting it half the time, you either need to up your game or adjust your goal. We’ll touch more on being realistic in goal setting in the next section. Bottom-line, creating a measurable goal will help you understand how to set the time aside to complete it. ATTAINABLE …simply means the goal is realistic and you aren’t setting yourself up for failure. Note, we’ve also seen the ‘A’ be defined as Actionable. Use actions verbs to define the goal, and then act on them. Nothing kills a goal faster than failing at it right out of the gate. If you say you’re going to write 20 pages a day while working a day job and raising a family, chances are you’ll fall flat on your face, beat yourself up and possibly stop writing altogether. You can’t be a better writer if you aren’t giving yourself time to put the words on the page. But even if you do set a lofty goal of 20 pages a day, there’s no shame in readjusting your expectations. Is adjusting your goal downward giving up? No. Re-evaluating is smart (no pun intended). In war, Generals re-evaluate and adjust their strategies. In parenting, mothers and fathers always re-evaluate their skills and practices in order to raise healthy children. In our day jobs, our bosses re-evaluate us and we re-evaluate ourselves so we can get more accomplished in less time. Changing gears is part of life, and those who can adapt best, survive. There’s no shame in moving the bar for your goals to an attainable one, even if all you’re doing is writing 15 minutes a day. That alone keeps the story in your mind even when you’re not in front of a keyboard. There’s zero point in setting a goal that isn’t achievable. RELEVANT …means the goal is directly related to your overall vision of your life or career. Some people also define the ‘R’ as Realistic. If your goal is to be a successful author, you need to create an author platform, build a website, write blog posts, and still have time to write your novels or screenplays. So if you create a goal of writing a 1200-word blog post every day for your new website, you won’t have time to write the novels or scripts that actually make you a marketable writer. Set realistic and relevant goals that enhance your overall objectives instead of distracting you from them. TIME-BOUND …means you can identify a period of time a goal can be reached and be able to schedule it into your days. On-going goals are ones like “Write an hour a day.” Yes, you can say that’s “time-bound” because if you don’t write today, you didn’t meet your goal. But you should also have other truer time-bound goals, such as having an outline done in 30 days, or finishing the first act by the end of the week. Those mini-goals of the bigger objective help you stay on track and keep your motivation. The other importance of having time-bound goals is to stay sharp on the practice of how to meet deadlines Goal setting is essential to become a better writer. Set your writing goals today. And I might add that, as my goal is 3-5 pages a day, I enjoy seeing the physical stack of paper pile up. That’s a rewarding visual indicator that I’m doing something, that I’m actually achieving my goal. That in itself can be a powerful motivator. Make a plan. Set up your goals as the SMART people at writers.com have suggested and write them down on a calendar. Then get to work. The Word Shed will take a one-week hiatus for the Memorial Day holiday. The next post comes on June 14, 2021. Have a great holiday and remember our veterans and all they have done for us. See you then, Phil B

Post #258 May 24 2021 “Facebook, YouTube and Emails, Oh My! Finding the Time to Write” I am currently writing the first draft of my next title in The Farpool Stories, called The Farpool: Plague. I anticipate being able to upload this on or before Labor Day 2021. After that, I’ll take some time to prepare for the next title in this series. I like to have a little time to relax and decompress between projects. Which brings to mind a question every writer asks: how do you find time to write? I want to address what works for me in this post. Primarily, finding time to write is an issue of motivation. What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What keeps you up at night, mulling over possibilities and options? I know a fellow named Tom. He’s not a writer but he’s surely one of the busiest people I know. Multi-tasking is his middle name. He drives full time for Lyft. He attends daily to a wife who has a serious disease. For years, he attended nearly daily to an aging father in declining health, now in a nursing home. Oh, and he’s also president of our Sunday School class. How does Tom even find time to breathe? Here are my rules for being able to carve out time to do something like write. 1. Make it a daily thing. Pick a time. Stick with it. Writing should be like exercising. Even like flossing your teeth. You do these things because you know you should and you like the results. As a writer, I enjoy seeing the pages mount up. I always print what I’ve written that day. As the pile gets taller, I feel some pride and sense of accomplishment at seeing that. I get a bit of a rush…by God, I’m a writer! Here’s the proof! But the most important thing is to pick a time and a place and stay with it. Preferably every day. Make it like brushing your teeth or showering. If I don’t put down 3-5 pages a day (and I give myself plenty of time off as needed), I just don’t feel right. 2. Set a goal. I’ve alluded to 3-5 pages a day for my own schedule. That’s 15 to 20 pages a week. Assuming a genre novel is around 200-250 pages, that means you can have the satisfaction of completing a draft in about 3 ½ months. Does that mean the job is done? No, of course not. There’s still editing, re-writing, cleaning up the prose, marketing stuff, etc. But it does mean you can bang out maybe 2+ books a year. That’s a clearer path to success than waiting for the muse to strike. Take my advice: don’t wait for the muse. Blast ahead and put words down on paper. Even if you have to edit them later. 3. Give yourself permission to slide a little but feel bad when you do so. Glory in the guilt. This may be controversial, but in my experience, we live in a feel-good time and if you have worked out a schedule and a discipline that works for you, and you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad when you’re not doing something writerly every day. If and when that happens, you’ve climbed an important motivational hill. You’ve made putting words so much a part of your daily living that you can’t envision a day when you’re not doing it. I have become so good at motivating myself that occasionally, I find it hard to turn myself off. That can be bad too because it can lead to burnout. But remember: nobody’s making you do this. You have to make yourself do it. And one way to accomplish this, is to understand what motivates you to do something hard and isolating and not always initially rewarding. Hopefully, the results later will be what motivates you but everyone is different. Examine what works for you, set up a schedule and stick to it. 4. Keep a record and celebrate meeting your goals. When I finished The Farpool: Union, I gave myself a few days off and then we went to the beach. My kind of reward. When your work is (finally) done, reward yourself. Have lunch with friends. Buy a bunch of books. Go see a movie. Hike in the mountains. Whatever is rewarding. And then get back to work. In between works, I make myself spend a few hours in the office every day. I might be developing outlines for a new story, developing character bios, researching or just day-dreaming. But I always go back to my schedule and begin the process all over again. And when I see the downloads mounting up my author’s dashboard on Smashwords, that’s pretty good motivation for me to continue, because it means somebody out there thinks enough of my work to download it. Finding time to write is really about knowing yourself, as (I believe) Socrates once said. Writing is a solitary art. Only you can motivate yourself. Motivation theorists tell us that it’s the rewards at the end that provide a lot of motivation. If you believe Maslow’s theories, then that puts writing somewhere around love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization. That’s good enough for me. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 31, 2021. See you then, Phil B.

Post #257 May 17 2021 “Excerpt from The Farpool: Plague” At the beginning of April 2021, I re-started my original series The Farpool Stories. The new title is called The Farpool: Plague. So far, so good. I intend to make this available for download on or before Labor Day (September 6, 2021). Look for it. Most of the characters are new but the storyline picks up from the last Farpool story, The Farpool: Union. Below is an excerpt from this story: Chapter 1 Wright Memorial Hospital Scotland Beach, FL July 3, 2195 (Friday) Death would be a relief, Cory Everett thought, as he watched his wife Leah struggling underneath the bioshield. What was left of Leah was a shriveled, emaciated, bruised, convulsing skeleton of bloody skin and bone, consumed with late-stage effects of the Purple, an infection of unknown origin that had been sweeping the world in a global crisis for several years now. Her prognosis was grim, as there was no vaccine or cure of medbotic intervention that seemed to work. Nanoscale medbots had been suffused throughout her body for months now, yet the Purple bacteriomechs had been able to defeat or blunt them in every session they had tried. Cory closed his eyes, willing the imagery to go back to that closet in the back of his mind reserved for monsters and nightmares. He heard a door hiss open and looked around. It was Dr. Evan Wilshire. Wilshire was clad in a Level 4 biosuit, his helmet off. He carried a small capsule in one hand. Two technicians came in too. Cory knew them as Max and Elayne. “We’re going to try another session this morning,” Wilshire announced. As he explained what would be happening, Max and Elayne positioned the AMAD unit next to Leah’s bed, hooked up some tubes and lines and prepared to drop the shield. “We’ve been working with the Lab to tweak AMAD,” Wilshire told them. “New effectors, new probes, lots of new gear. It’s worked well in lab tests and simulations.” Cory glanced at the skeptical faces of his son Reuben and daughter Jessica. He knew AMAD was the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler. “Can it really make a difference now, Doc? Is there any real hope?” Wilshire forced an optimistic smile he didn’t really feel, for the truth was that Purple was an aggressive bacteriomech and every attempt they had tried with AMAD had failed miserably. “Cory, there’s always room for hope. We want to try everything that has a reasonable chance of working.” “Of course.” Wilshire always tried to be upbeat in sessions like this, even when there really was no reason to hope. “Let’s give it a shot, okay? You’ll all have to leave now. Go back to the waiting room. Have a doughnut and coffee. Let us do what we can here.” “Of course. I think we’ll just go to the chapel…and pray.” Max helped them through the door with a sympathetic smile. After the three of them were gone, he sealed the door, which hissed in response and snugged down his own helmet. Wilshire and Elayne did the same. Elayne then spent the next few minutes readying the AMAD cart while Max dropped the bioshield. A spray of light around the bed flashed. Wilshire loaded the new and improved bots into a nearby port on the cart. Finally, Elayne announced, "Okay, Dr. Wilshire… she patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Leah's skull. "Subject's prepped and ready." Max handed Wilshire the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Doctor. AMAD ready to fly?" Elayne came back, "Ready in all respects." "Vascular grid?" "Tracking now. We'll be able to follow the master just fine. I'll replicate once we're through the blood-brain barrier." "Watch for capillary flow," said Max. "When her capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up." "Like slogging through molasses. AMAD's inerted and stable…ready for insertion." The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Leah's capillary network at high pressure. Wilshire got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Wilshire's IC panel. "Ready for transit," he told Max. "Cytometric probing now. I can force these cell membranes open any time." Max used AMAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. Let’s try there, this time.” Wilshire steered AMAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right-hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, AMAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Wilshire tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid. "Ventral tegmentum, guys. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in." Wilshire navigated AMAD through the interstices of Leah's brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity…especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Purple left in her brain, he wanted to be ready. "Hopefully, the last treatment finished them off," he muttered to himself. At 1824 hours, AMAD sent the alarm. The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Wilshire studied readouts from AMAD's sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter. Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as AMAD closed in…. Max let out a whoop. "Will you look at that?" Elayne came closer, squinted at the vague, fuzzy outlines on the screen. "It’s Purple, all right. A whole colony of them. A welcoming committee, it would appear. Come to see what we're about." So that’s an excerpt from the first chapter. Look for The Farpool: Plague on or about Labor Day this year. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 24. See you then. Phil B.

Post #256 May 10 2021 “Water Clans of Seome: Writing about Alien Cultures” One of the greatest challenges as a writer of science fiction, and at the same time, one of the joys, is writing about alien cultures. In my own recent series of sf novels The Farpool Stories, I describe a marine civilization of intelligent, sentient creatures who have created an entire civilization below the waves of the ocean planet Seome. The series involves stories of how the Seomish people interact with each other and with humans. Every sf writer approaches worldbuilding a slightly different way. In my case, I wrote a novel called The Shores of Seome many years ago (which mutated into The Farpool) and in the process created a lot of background for this world and its inhabitants. In fact, I created an Appendix containing much of this material and stuck it at the end of The Farpool. Writing a story about aliens and setting it on an alien world is a real juggling act. You want to convey a true sense of alienness without turning off the reader. You don’t want to write an encyclopedia or something like National Geographic. You still have to have a compelling story and somehow work in enough alien details to transport the reader to this other world and its people and bring them to life for the reader. In my case, I created background encompassing the following areas and then wrote extensive notes to give my background some depth. When and where I could, I worked this background bit by bit into the story. I even hit on the plot device of having a sort of universal translator called an echopod, which had some encyclopedia functions. When the human characters needed to know something and an info dump was unavoidable, I had the aliens tell them to trigger the echopod and it would spit out material from my background. As long as I didn’t overdo this, it seemed to work pretty well. I tried to keep these passages to less than half a page. Here are the categories I tried to develop pretty extensive background for: 1. The language with key words and concepts and a few notes about grammar 2. Maps (entire globe and by quadrant) 3. Description of the world itself as a planet 4. The major cities and settlements and their key features 5. The physiology of the Seomish (remember, these are talking fish) 6. The biology of Seome (other plants and animals) 7. Theology and First Things of the Seomish people 8. The Hierarchies: Government, Politics and Organizations 9. Commerce, Industry, Crafts, Trades, Science and Technology 10. Communications and formal relations between the Kels (tribes or clans) 11. Education and training 12. Entertainment and recreation, diversions and amusements 13. Home life and intra-kel relations 14. The Kels (tribes or water clans): their history, key details, etc 15. More detailed description of one kel including cuisine, history, architecture 16. A brief chronology of Seomish civilization 17. An historical timeline and key events, notes on timekeeping 18. Seomish rituals and customs Was this a lot of work? It was and most of it was done 40 years ago. I never tried, in writing the actual stories, to get all of this into the story. But by having it as background, the detail dictates some aspects of the story, such as how events might unfold one way versus another way, always in keeping with the background. This kind of detail is like a crutch in that I can always look up how one of my characters might do something and I can be consistent across a number of stories in how I describe things. An echopod in The Farpool works the same as an echopod in The Farpool: Convergence. And sometimes having this level of background will suggest obvious plot developments and natural conflicts that can be used. It even triggered me to pick up the series this year and outline three more Farpool stories. One of the greatest mistakes as an author is to try to get all of your background into the story, at the expense of the story. Story comes before everything else. I have found that a little background goes a long way. If you do your job right as a storyteller, you’ll find the reader more than willing to help out by filling in some details with their own imaginations, even if you didn’t supply the details. In fact, many readers prefer that since it engages their faculties even more…adding to their enjoyment of the story. Give your readers enough detail, well described, believable and internally consistent, to transport them to your alien world and then let the natural conflicts and the characters carry the story. You’ll even find that once in a while, something will crop up in the story that you never expected, something lurking just below the surface of your feverish brain, that is triggered by a background detail you worked out months before. At that point, you say wow! And then put it in and pat yourself on the back for having thought that up. It was all because you were steeped in the alien culture from the beginning. Maybe it is like working for National Geographic. The next post to The Word Shed will come on May 17 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #255 May 3, 2021 “When Your Aliens are Too Alien” Some years ago, I was about halfway through my last Johnny Winger novel (Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin) and it looked like I may have written myself into a corner. In this last episode of Tales of the Quantum Corps, Winger had become a disassembled swarm of nanobots, what I have termed an ‘angel’ in previous books. The deconstruction occurred in the previous novel (Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary). Now, I had to tell the story of what it was like to be a cloud of bots no bigger than atoms, a cloud that could form simulations of human beings and just about any imaginable physical structure. I may have made my main character a bit too alien. Writing a story about someone who is so different from you and me is stretching my descriptive and story-telling abilities. On the one hand, I wanted to accurately describe what it was like for Winger to be an angel. I wanted to describe it in ways a human reader could understand, so out of necessity, I used a lot of analogies and a lot of “it’s kind of like this—“text. Winger himself struggled to put his experience into words, often drawing on things he remembered from his former life as a ‘single-configuration being,” even from childhood. There are a lot of guidelines on creating believable aliens in science fiction stories. Johnny Winger is not intended as an alien but the effect is the same. One writer, Veronica Sicoe, did a blog post I saw on 7 aspects about aliens you shouldn’t ignore…here’s an excerpt… If you want to write sci-fi, or even if you’re just a curious reader, there are a handful of screwy aspects about aliens that you need to watch out for. So here’s where it’s at. 1. Aliens should be alien If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you can call it Rakumph all you want, it’s still an ‘f…ing’ duck. Giving creatures fancy names and changing their color doesn’t make them alien. If you’re on an alien planet that has purple skies, three moons and something else than oxygen floating around, you can bet your dog’s chewbone all creatures will be completely different than on Earth. Different chemistry > different environment > different evolution of life. Don’t strap a funny costume on a donkey and call it a fearsome Sharzahkrath. That’s just lazy worldbuilding. 2. Aliens aren’t humans in rubber costumes Humanoids? Really? You think the whole universe is populated by humans with wrinkly foreheads or an extra tit? Come on! Hollywood resorted to humanoid aliens because it’s cheaper to stuff an actor into a costume than to build a whole alien from scratch. As a fiction writer, you’re not limited by a production budget. Go wild! Go freakishly inhumanly outrageously alien and stun the wits out of your readers. 3. Aliens have their own history Maybe they never had a war on their planet; maybe they’ve always viewed both (or all three?) sexes equally; maybe they make art out of living creatures and eat their elder in annual festive rituals. Alien creatures will have alien–as in unfamiliar–societies and hence a very different history. They might have evolved from fungi and still reproduce through spores, each female spawning 10,000 young every three and a half cycles, who knows, but this would greatly affect their entire history, don’t you think? 4. If they were smart enough to fly to Earth, they probably know your butthole is not the most interesting part of your body Aliens that come all this way to abduct people and stick probes up their bums must be retarded. We’d be invaded by morons who got kicked out of their own society for shaming their ancestors. Why in the name of Planet Shmurp would they go there? To learn the secrets of our race? 5. Aliens that are naturally telepathic won’t even grasp the concept of language Humans have developed language because there was no other direct way to communicate. If an alien race is naturally telepathic, they will never have developed language. That has huge implications! No language means no words to describe things, no symbols to represent experiences, and no written signs either. They would be absolutely unable to grasp the concept of language, let alone learn it. Your human characters will never be able to communicate with such aliens in any simple way, because even if the telepaths could to tap into your thoughts, they won’t understand them. We think in words, we think in describable concepts, we think in relations that make sense in our language-dominated sense of reality. An alien that has never felt the need to name a thing, simply won’t understand us. 6. Aliens that can’t hold a tool won’t invent space ships Space faring slugs? Highly technological fish-like creatures? How the hell did they come up with buttons if they don’t have hands? How would they have felt the need for tools if they have no possibility to grasp them? How did they weld metal or shape a console if they can’t even hold a screwdriver? Think a bit about this one before you put such nonsense on paper. And this one…very important. 7. Aliens are subject to the same laws of physics as we are Unless you’re writing about converging dimensions, which would make it fantasy not science-fiction in my opinion—but that’s an entirely different debate (read: stay tuned for more)—your alien races will be subject to the same basic universal laws of physics as we are, like gravity, electricity, the laws of movement and so on. If you throw an alien down the well, he will fall down not float upwards. If you ram a fist into his face, he will budge (unless he weighs ten tons, in which case you’d better get the hell out of there fast). My predicament as a story-teller was how to describe the living experience of a being who is a loose collection of atoms surrounding a processor that can organize that collection into just about any form you can imagine. This being (Johnny Winger) experienced things like Brownian motion and van der Waals forces that are so far beyond your and my thinking that words were hard to find. In the next post to The Word Shed, on May 10, I’ll delve into how science fiction writers describe such alien experiences in ways that make you think you’re actually there. See you May 10. Phil B.

Post #254 April 26, 2021 “Copy, Paste and Modify?” Two weeks ago, I started the first draft of a new novel. It’s called The Farpool: Plague and it’s a continuation of my original The Farpool Stories. In this novel, I have been making liberal use of text and story elements from the earlier tales. In other words, I’ve been doing copy, paste and modifying things I’ve already written. Reusing text from previous stories, not all of them Farpool related. I do have over 60 stories online, with an approximate word count of nearly 5 million words. Surely, it’s okay to steal from myself to move a new story along by re-using old text? To answer this question, I’ve listed the pros (Yes) and cons (No) of this move below. You can decide for yourself whether I should be doing this. YES: 1. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel. If there is an existing scene that might work in a new story with some modifications, why not use it? 2. Copying and pasting with modifications can increase my productivity, literally, the number of pages I can complete in a day. 3. Often, I’ve found that only basic modifications are needed 4. When I do this, the effort sometimes suggests additional plot elements or complications that I hadn’t considered. 5. Re-using from earlier tales in my original series helps with continuity. NO: 1. The reader may have seen and read this text before. Re-using old text and re-purposing it could end up confusing a reader, if they recall it from somewhere else. 2. The modifications may turn out to be extensive. The new scene could be easier if I just write it fresh. 3. Writing a new scene from scratch can keep your head and your literary engine engaged and mentally in the story better. This is often underappreciated as a tool for getting pages and stories done. I have a host of tips and tricks for keeping my head in the game, like ending a day’s writing right in the middle of a sentence so as to jigger my brain back into the story universe the next day by the necessity of completing the sentence. Try it. It works. 4. Text copied and pasted and modified from another story may have unintended or unexpected effects on a reader’s understanding of your current story. The tone may be just enough different, or jarring enough to cause the reader to step back and say “Whoa…what’s happened here?” If this causes the reader to suspend their belief in the story universe, then you’re losing the reader and you never want to do anything to cause that. Ultimately, re-using old text in a new story is a judgment call. Your call should be based on… 1. The time and effort required 2. Analyzing and balancing the Yes and No factors highlighted above. 3. Doing what’s best to create an engaging and compelling story 4. An understanding that writers sometimes get a little too enamored with their own words, to the detriment of the greater story. Don’t fall into that trap. If the old text works in a new story or can be made to work, do it. Otherwise, write it new. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 3, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #253 April 19 2021 “Continuity in Series Fiction” This post covers a subject that is a little more technical and specific than many of my earlier posts. The issue today is stated in the title: how do I deal with continuity when telling a continuing series of stories. Should I even worry about this? What the hell is continuity anyway? One good definition is this: continuity is consistency of plot, characters, settings and other details in a story. Why worry about this? In series fiction, which I have done a lot of, there are three reasons why you should worry about continuity. 1. Believability and credibility. Imagine James Bond ordering a martini that wasn’t ‘shaken not stirred.’ If you write stories with characters that continue from one tale to another, you don’t want Bob to have blond hair in one story and green hair in the next. Flub-ups like that can destroy the connection that the reader makes with the author and damage the verisimilitude (resemblance to the truth) that every storyteller depends on. 2. Familiarity. If you’ve had any kind of success with a series (as an example, the five novels in my series The Farpool Stories have collectively garnered nearly 6600 downloads), you want your readers to feel comfortable with the characters and the settings and plot details if you are adding additional stories to the series (I’m doing this with The Farpool Stories). Being familiar with some of the details from earlier in the series takes some of the cognitive workload off the reader. It’s been said that some of the most successful series are infinite variations on the same theme. Another word for this is formula. Why have they been so successful? Familiarity, especially if your heroes are particularly engaging and likeable and readers can identify with them, is one reason. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to tell a crackling good story too. 3. Early success. I have had several pretty successful series (Tales of the Quantum Corps, Quantum Troopers, Time Jumpers, The Farpool Stories). You don’t necessarily want to mess with success. Maybe just tweak it a little. Sometimes, early success can seem like a straitjacket and you want to breathe a little as an artist. That’s okay. Just remember to attend to the needs and details of story continuity or you’ll lose some of those loyal readers. I’m in the middle of writing the first of three follow-on stories in my series The Farpool Stories. How do I (and or you) go about maintaining continuity in such an endeavor? 1. From the start, I made the decision to review all previous stories in this series. I re-read everything. This helped me get my head back into the story universe I had already created. It also had the secondary benefit of suggesting plot twists and turns I could craft onto my new stories. I even re-read all the character bios and details of settings, to help this process. This has worked well. 2. I had to decide how much my main characters had changed or grown. I saw some of this change in the original five stories. How far should I carry this change? Should I introduce new characters? How are they related to the original characters? What kind of trajectory of change do I envision for the main characters? Consider all these factors when attending to series continuity. 3. Keep copious notes on details. I have dozens of files, even paper notebooks, on all kinds of details involved in The Farpool Stories. Which details should I change or update? Which remain unchanged? Know your details, inside and out. Don’t describe a tropical island one way in Story 1 and a completely different way in Story 5, unless there is a good reason for that change. In series fiction, continuing details populate all the stories and readers notice inconsistencies. Plus your chance of making laughable errors goes up with each new tale. 4. Consider reprising earlier plot scenes. I do this a lot, to avoid re-inventing the wheel and to help maintain consistency. Often, when writing a scene, there will be an earlier scene that is similar. Don’t be afraid to copy and paste, but be sure to modify the new scene to make it fit the new story. You may feel that readers will grow tired of seeing scenes they have read before, slightly updated. While this is undoubtedly true, readers also appreciate familiarity at least as much. And remember, no matter how much you change or update details, and no matter how much current scenes resemble earlier ones, you still have to tell a complete and engaging story anyway. 5. Finally, consider the time frame of your new stories. Do the new ones occur in time right after the end of the original stories? Years or centuries later? This one aspect will affect a lot of what you decide regarding points 1-4 above. In the case of me re-starting The Farpool Stories, my main character in the first of the new tales is actually a granddaughter of my original heroes in the first five stories. The time frame made that necessary, but it also opened up new possibilities. Dealing with and respecting the needs of continuity in series fiction is a balancing act. You’re juggling the need to respect what has gone before and the reader’s desire for some familiarity in order to get into the story with the need to tell a fresh and engaging story in a compelling way. Maybe that’s why they call writing and storytelling an art. The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 26, 2021. See you then. Phil B.

Post #252 April 12 2021 “Kickstarting the Motivation Engine” Every writer needs to attend to his or her own motivation. There must be a million motivational tricks you can use to get going and write that story, article, essay or poem. Recently, I found a website called masterclass.com, which offered the following tips for motivating yourself to get going on that best-seller. 1. Set writing goals. If you want to complete a novel but are intimidated by the thought of writing 65,000 words, set goals that are easier to tackle. Give yourself a minimum daily word count you need to reach. At the end of each writing session, record your word count in a writing diary. If you’re blogging, set an analytical goal of how many people you want to reach with your next post. Goal setting is a good strategy for getting to work. 2. Set deadlines. There’s no better motivator than a deadline. Look at your calendar and set a due date for each chapter of your book and a completed first draft. This will light the fire and force you to put the time in every day. If it helps, pretend this is for a client. 3. Write now, edit later. An essential part of creative writing is to just get your story down. When the words are flowing, don’t stop to edit. You’ll forget your thoughts and ideas and you’ll lose momentum. Get the story down first. You can go back and edit later. 4. Find the perfect writing space. Find a spot where you do your best writing. Make sure it’s away from distractions. Turn off the TV and put away your phone. Some people find music helps their state of mind when they write. Try it, but if it’s more distraction than inspiration, keep it off. 5. Remember that the journey is the destination. The thought of writing an entire novel can be overwhelming and paralyzing. Try focusing on the writing process rather than your ultimate goal. Be in the present and enjoy the experience of writing. 6. Commit to a regular writing time. Getting into a writing habit is easier when you use time management skills and schedule a specific time to write every single day. Honor the appointment like you would any other meeting, and show up at your computer at the time you set aside, no matter what. 7. Change your thought processes. Procrastination gets the best of every writer, but bestsellers don’t write themselves. Remind yourself that the only way to become a better writer is to sit down and write. Strengthen that will power to keep temptations at bay. Stop saying, “I’ll write tomorrow,” and instead commit to writing today. 8. Join a writing group. Sometimes, writing for yourself is simply not enough motivation. Join a writing group that meets regularly so you are accountable to other people to turn in what you write. Your peers can also be a great resource for free writing advice. Join NaNoWriMo—National November Writing Month. Every year, on November 1st, people around the world commit to writing 50,000 words over the course of the month. 9. Take five. If you have writer’s block, step away from your writing routine. Go for a walk or a jog. Sometimes just getting exercise helps open the creative floodgates. If that doesn’t work, come back to it the next day. Watch TV or listen to podcasts. Tapping into other creative outlets might trigger an idea. When inspiration hits, get back to your keyboard and start typing. 10. Switch up your setting. Changing where you work can get you out of a creative rut, give you a new perspective, and kickstart your writing motivation. Get out of the house, away from your desk, and sit in a coffee shop or a library every once in a while. You might even find writing inspiration by people-watching. 11. Switch directions. When you stall out during the middle of a writing project, change what you’re working on. Switching to a new writing style can refresh your thoughts. If you’re tired of novel writing, work on a short story. If you’re a blogger, try writing blog entries or a guest post for another website. If you just need a short break, head on over to social media and write a creative tweet. Sometimes you just need to switch directions and force your brain to think of something else before you get started again. 12. Try writing prompts. A fun way to find motivation is to use writing prompts to ignite a story idea. Prompts are most often a short text passage that a writer uses as fuel to launch into a bigger story. You can also use a real-life writing prompt simply by recalling a moment from earlier in your day. Story prompts are easy to find online, but you can also be inspired by reading a newspaper or magazine to mine for inspiration. 13. Reward yourself. Using bribery for a little motivation now and then never hurts. Promise yourself a sweet treat, a cup of coffee, or some little reward for reaching milestones throughout your writing session. 14. Read a book. If you’re having a hard time finding motivation, pick up something to read. If you’re writing fiction, try a non-fiction book. Reading will turn off your creative engine and give your mind a rest. Absorbing the work of other authors can also serve as a source of inspiration and motivation for your own writing. 15. Remember why you started writing. Remember why you started writing in the first place and refocus on the story you set out to tell. Visualize your idea as a completed novel with characters and a world you created. Imagine the feeling of accomplishment when you finish. Then, sit back down and start typing. Motivational tricks are as varied as writers are. It also helps for me to realize that I’m a firmly obsessive/compulsive person. But, after I read this piece, I realized I actually do quite a lot of these things myself. Only one person can write that story you’ve had percolating in your head for the last six months. And if you don’t write it, the world will never have a chance to appreciate your genius as an artist. Get cracking. The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 19. See you then. Phil B.