Friday, as I was driving home from work, I thought, “I have about 20-24 hours of work to do on my manuscript to have it ‘submission ready.’  I also have my query letter ready, but I need a synopsis – however long that will take.”  [yes, I think that way - full sentences with single quotes in the middle]  That was Friday evening.

Between Friday night, Sunday, and Monday, I spent about 16 hours on my manuscript, The Open Door, and only got about a forth to a third done – so much for my quick timeline.  Well, revised estimate: 40 hours to go plus the synopsis. 

It seems like 40 hours of editing should blow by in just a week and a half, but it won’t.  Ever since Donovan was born, I have had trouble getting in more than two hours of writing or editing per weekday and three hours each weekend day – and I don’t edit on Wednesdays because of other commitments: critique group and weekly blog post. 

I was really hoping to submit in mid-May, but I know quality is more important than a made-up target date.  The true goal is being published.

Wish me luck!

Oh, by the way, if you have any good online resources for writing a synopsis (including good and bad samples), I would love to know the links.

The last two days have been good to me. 

• I have edited two pages of The Open Door and have written about a thousand words on my anthology entry.  The anthology entry is a dooms day story. 
• I had my yearly eval at work.  Everything looked good.  I am still employed.
• Lis has not been having the contractions close enough together to make us sit by a clock timing and wondering, unlike Tuesday morning where we lived by the clock for a while.

Today is a good day.  I finished the draft of my second novel yesterday afternoon and still have that draft this morning.  I have been looking forward to this day for a long time.

Nafarious’ personality and physical characteristics first hit paper on 1/16/08, 23 months ago.  More characters and storyline developed over the following weeks and months, but no story.  Other projects came up since then (The Easter Experience, Spring Meets Winter, my web page, the opening of Chimree Republic, painting the baby’s room, etc), but I have always found time to play with these characters and this storyline. 

A couple dozen chapters found their way into my computer during that first year and a half, but they were problematic.  The 2009 Central Coast Writers’ Conference helped root out those difficulties.  On October 7th, I put everything else aside to devote myself to this story.  The last two months have been a rollercoaster ride.  There were already great characters and an overall course for them to follow, but the interaction of the characters brought out life that I didn’t foresee.

I was proud of myself when I wrote my first book.  Today’s feeling is different, I am proud of this book.  There are a lot of writing problems that will need to be worked out – it’s a draft after all, but it is a far better work that my first.  The climax is harder hitting.  The characters are better developed.  There is a lot still to do, but I would have bought and read this book as a teenager.  I hope my proofreaders (family, friends, and fellow writers) agree and, eventually, my target audience.  I also hope I can always improve this much between projects.  Those are worries for another day.  Today is a good day.

I was running into problems with consistency with a few of my infrequent characters in Passages of Consequence: The Open Door, so I created this cheat sheet.  While not detailed enough for main characters, this is a good, rough, one-page sketch for working with minor or infrequent characters.  So far it seems to work fairly well for me.  Use at will and, if you get a chance, tell me how it works for you.

Character Sketch PDF

It’s been a little while since I last wrote.  I have been focused on finishing my second book by Veterans Day.  I already have a team of readers combing through the opening chapters and I want to have editing done by Thanksgiving.  I was put on this path from the Central California Writers’ Conference at Cuesta College (Oct. 2-3).

Passages of Consequence: The Open Door was about 1/3 done before the conference, but work on it had stalled.  I was having problems with how I wanted to approach different scenes.  My outline followed two parallel stories, related stories that did not intersect, that of a hostage and a target.  From both angles, you get to know the assassins and, well, they’re the interesting part – this is SciFi after all.  That outline just hit the shred-and-recycle pile. 

Based on conversations at the conference, my storyline has been trimmed down, the timeline flattened, and the best two-part chase scene ever written (not that I am biased) re-imagined.  I threw out 32 of my 88 original pages, demoted the target from a major to barely-there character, and stitched up some of the holes.

Now I’m working toward my ambitious goal of 11/11.  I have had this goal since the evening of Tuesday, the 10/6 – driving home from an FSFW meeting.  Thursday night I finished my new outline and corresponding milestones.  By the end of Friday, I was already behind.  The three-day weekend brought me back to where I thought I should be, but I have since fallen behind again.  Long nights are coming.

If my posts don’t appear as often as they did in late summer, it is because I am putting pen to paper.  I hope to get up a post a week.

I have two projects going right now and it is starting to stress me out a little.  Here’s the status update:

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Passages of Consequence: The Open Door is a current day alien invasion novel featuring subplots of love, loyalty, and intergalactic politics.  In this story there are doorways that connect worlds – doorways that open and close, that can be seen by some but not others, and that each carry consequences for entrance and more dire consequences for avoidance.  A door opened on earth and group of seven came through.  This story is about these seven and the one they were sent to assassinate. 

There are some similarities in plot, structure, or characters with the Host (book), Jumper (book), Stargate (movie and TV show), Sliders (TV show), and those crazy people flying around in wingsuits.

This novel has been hovering around 90 pages (or about 1/3 complete) since, I don’t know, forever ago.  In the last two weeks I have felt a renewed interest in the work – I believe that in part to be because of Toff and the other FSFW members.  This week I polished up the first ten pages and sent them off to be critiqued Central Coast Writers’ Conference.  If the reviewer’s remarks are positive, there may be excerpts up by mid-October.

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Chimree Republic: The Cleansing features a futurist civil war.  It’s nearing the turn of the 29th century when a scared, little sulteer boy crawled unnoticed down a sewer drain in Shurefleet to escape the Chimree, winged beasts with the bodies of lions and the heads of demons – goddesses to die for, literally.  No one knew until 16 years later, The Cleansing of the Southern Grid, the second massacre by the Chimree, that there was a living witness to the Rise of the Chimree.  No one knew until the little sulteer that ran became the one that stood defiant in the face of the Chimree horde. 

I have no idea what influenced me here and there is some pretty strange stuff in this novel.  There are some similarities with Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick (movies), Minority Report (movie), Ladyhawke (movie), and, well, you can see a little bit of The Wizard of Oz (movie) and Through the Looking Glass (book) too.  However, where you are going to see a lot of the truly interesting differences in their culture and ours is by looking at the doctoral projects of scientific researchers and the hypothetical reports of climate, population, and disease forecasters.

I have about 40 pages written and a pretty detailed outline of the story.  According to my place on the outline, I am about 1/10 to 1/15 through the storyline.  I just got the first 30 pages organized enough to share with the FSFW group and I will be hearing the good and the bad this upcoming Tuesday.  I doubt I will have anything up until I am further in the novel – things are just a little too in flux as I am discovering details that need to be trickled back into the early parts of the story.

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So there you have it, my current projects and where they stand.

The main reason that this novel, Passages of Consequence: The Open Door, isn’t already in draft form is because I am having a hard time with the POV/perspective.  I have never had as much positive feedback as I have on the beginning of this piece.  However, I have written out about a third of this novel and then find myself rewriting it – changing parts of it from third person to first person and back again. 

This novel has two fairly important characters that never meet; they are never even close to each other.  One of them is the target of the assassination and the other is a sympathetic hostage of the assassins.  I know that I want third person perspective around the target – every scene around him works better that way.  However, around the hostage I am finding myself drawn to first person perspective – it often works better that way, but not always.  In the scenes that it does work better, the effect is profoundly better than third person.

Realizing that there are not many books where the main characters never meet, I am sure this storyline can handle it.  What I am worried about is how I tell the story.  I am not familiar with many successful books that switch from first to third person prospective and back again.  Based on the little info that I have given here, what are your thoughts?  Feel free to use the poll, comment, or both.

I have been attending a writing group in the Turlock area for four months now. I love the group. We are so varied and write everything from poems to children’s stories to SciFi novels to harsh realities. The eclectic viewpoints of the group always keep me on my toes – it’s great. However, there are no two people that write the same genre – not so great. Because of that, it isn’t always possible to make those higher level comments on other people’s work. (by the way, we are trying to grow – if you are interested, let me know)

I am the SciFi novelist of the group so I decided to find an online SciFi group. Instead of finding an online group, I found a SciFi writers group just 90 miles away in Fresno. So I visited and it was fabulous. People that can express themselves a way similar to myself – wait, maybe that isn’t so fabulous.

Anyhow, I will be getting a reviewed piece back from someone in my Turlock group soon. When I get it, I will tweak it accordingly and then submit it to the Fresno SciFi group. After they rip it apart I will piece myself, I mean my work, back together again and put it up on the web. So, look for more additions to my web page before the end of the month.

Looking a little more to the future, I will probably have excerpts and introductory chapters for ‘Chimree Republic: The Cleansing’ and ‘Passages of Consequence: The Open Door’ before the end of the year. I have also been thinking about a short story that would be a prequel to Chimree that might make it to the web page one day.

R. Garrett Wilson

www.rgarrettwilson.com