Category Archives: Writing

Is my writing process artistic and angsty enough? Maybe I need to drink more and outline less.

I was cruising my various social media outlets recently when I came across a sentence which gave me pause: “Outlines are the refuge of a hack.”

Umm…I outline. Heck, I use Excel.

Now, to be fair, I don’t consider myself a towering literary figure. I’d like to think that my work may have some underlying themes and ideas, but crashing an 18th century sailing ship into Mars is unlikely to be considered super-deep. (“Dude, the ship is a metaphor for colonialism, right? And Mars is totally standing in for humanity’s history of war and self-destructiveness. So that whole thing is, like, you know, how the imposition of cultural paradigms are doomed to failure, right?”)

Actually, I really hope someone writes that about The Daedalus Incident someday, because that’s not what I was thinking when I wrote it. I was thinking something along the lines of: “This is SO cool.” But I digress.

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Like I said a few weeks ago, a good editor is pretty valuable, and I’m quite lucky to have one such editor in my corner. I turned in my edits to Ross Lockhart, managing editor of Night Shade Books, and found that the product I turned in was much improved thanks to his suggestions. That is pretty awesome. (If you follow Ross on Twitter, you’ll also find he has excellent taste in beer. I suspect this is indeed related to his editing ability.)

Speaking of 140 characters or less: Come follow me on Twitter if you haven’t already, and spread the words to your friends, relatives, acquaintances and frenemies. Once I get up to 300 followers there, I’m going to post an excerpt of The Daedalus Incident right here on the blog. And yes, it’ll be a decently-sized bit of of the book, not the few paragraphs you’ve seen thus far.

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I’m here Wednesday at 10 p.m. Come listen in!

I’m officially enmeshed in final (one hopes) revisions to The Daedalus Incident, but I’m taking time away from the wordsmithing to make my very first guest spot on a SF/F podcast. On Wednesday, I’ll be on SupaFi64 at 10 p.m. EST to talk about the book and, most likely, a wide variety of other geeky topics. You can listen to the podcast LIVE on BlogTalkRadio, or download it later from iTunes.  The SupaFi64 gang put on a great show, so come check it out.

Meanwhile, I received my editorial letter this week from Ross Lockhart, editor extraordinaire at Night Shade Books. I had previously scoffed at the wailing and gnashing of teeth I saw from other authors about this particular phenomenon. Surely, I thought, this wouldn’t be a bad thing. One’s editor was there to improve the book, and the author by extension — not to subject writers to torture. This faith was tested slightly when I read this:

…I’ve marked up a Word file of the manuscript, highlighting approximately two hundred individual points…

Oh, boy.

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OK…now this is getting real.

The Daedalus Incident is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble! That’s right, the book is now a Real Thing that you can purchase today. I mean, it won’t be delivered until May 7, but you can purchase it today. Be an early adopter! Tell all your friends that, yes, you were among the first. When everyone starts talking up this crazy book they heard about, the one where a sailing ship crashes into Mars, you can nonchalantly lean back and say, “Yeah, I pre-ordered it.” You are instantly cool.

I’ll be updating the blog with other vendors offering The Daedalus Incident for pre-order as I hear about them, and I also expect that the book will be available in a variety of e-book formats and, yes, audiobook as well. I would also urge you to ask about The Daedalus Incident at your local independent bookseller. Let’s keep those indie bookstores going!

Of course, all this means that we now have a final cover. Here’s a nice big version of it:

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It’s OK. It doesn’t have to be perfect right now.

Not exactly rockin’ it out on a Saturday night, but that’s fine. It’s raining, it’s getting colder. I just put down another thousand-plus words on the sequel to The Daedalus Incident that, admittedly, weren’t great words. However, I’m OK with that because, in writing those words, I hit on some ideas and themes that just snapped into place brilliantly.

As you likely discerned from the title, first drafts are indeed allowed to suck. That’s because the book, as a total entity, doesn’t exist yet. There’s no real basis for comparison, because that particular story hasn’t been written until the first draft is done. How do you measure the worth of something before it’s even finished?

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