…and Then There Were Four

We’re getting closer to a final draft edition of the sci-fi anthology we are planning to release on Amazon in a month or two. One thing we have been looking at is the flow and connections between the stories. Although the the stories are written by different authors and take on their own character, we want the overall book to have an overarching connection between the individual stories.

In the process of reviewing all the stories together we found a few places where we needed to build a bridge between a few stories. I had intended to just write the three stories I have already submitted, but I took up the task to write one of these bridge stories. So I am now going to have four short stories in the anthology.

We hope to have the book available for purchase on Amazon as a print-on-demand paperback and as an ebook for Kindle and other readers sometime in March of this year. Deadline is approaching! I better finish up this fourth story!

Designing a Ship

The anthology, in which I’m going to have three stories in, needs a cover design. I’m playing around in Blender (3d computer rendering program) to create the colony ship that is part of several stories in our book. It might be used as part of the cover art… or might just be for my own entertainment. Here is what I created so far…

The colony ship Providence, which plays a role in several stories in our anthology.

My Three Short Stories

I have been involved with a small group of writers (about nine of us) for a little over a year now. Some are experienced, published authors, others are new writers like myself. Author Drew Wagar has been leading, directing and teaching us how to write and publish a book through this hands-on project. We designed a sci-fi timeline, back history, and star system in which each of us wrote one or more short stories. The stories are tied together by the overall timeline and presented chronologically in a single anthology novel.

Most anthologies I have seen are a group of stories that are unrelated except maybe by a common theme or topic. This should be a fun to read since they are all independent stories but will tell an overall larger tale as a complete book.

I was able to write one larger (10k word) story and two shorter stories, of a few thousand words each, for the project. It was a learning challenge and a lot of fun.

My three stories are entitled:
• Off Target
• Shattered Worlds
• Justified Accidents

We are in the phase of final drafting, proofing, compiling, and creating cover art. The plan is to have it published as an e-book and print-on-demand paperback on Amazon in March of 2020!

Thank you Drew for teaching and leading us in this great project!

NaNoWriMo

I have taken up the challenge of writing 50,000 words in one month in the form of a first draft of a novel. I registered to participate in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) annual challenge. I’d not even heard of this before despite it being an organization that is celebrating its twentieth year. (Yeah I am a noob).

I had a concept and a partial story idea already started, so I signed up late, and I’m going to give it a run and see how much I can get done during the month of November.

A quickie fake cover image for my yet t be written story, with working title only!

Shattered Worlds: Shattered and Rebuilt

I finally had my short story critiqued by someone who knows how to write novels, and well… He said I have a good story and did my conversational text well, but my story was doing a lot of TELL and not SHOW in many places. I knew about this concept but somehow I was blind to it until Drew went through it with me and showed me where I was doing it and how I could make it better. Now it seems so obvious to me. I am surprised how I didn’t realize it before.

So this week I did some major revisions to “Shattered Worlds”. I added a lot more character dialog to replace the boring telling I had let creep into the text. I added more physical description of character actions SHOWING what they were feeling and pulled out the plopping down of overt motivations and emotions which I was just TELLING the reader.

I am sure it is not done yet, but I am feeling a lot better about it now, and I think this short advice that Drew gave me really brought some new life to my story. Really appreciate your “brutal review” @drewwagar.

Shattered Worlds

I have my short story of about 10,000 words into the secondish draft editing phase. My little sci-fi story will be a part of an anthology book project which Drew Wagar started on his twitch creative stream.

His stream started last year with him teaching us the basics of writing a novel and getting it published. After a few months he had the idea that his stream followers might like to participate with a real writing project and proposed we collaborate on an anthology that we could have published on Amazon as a digital and paperback. We have 8 or 9 new and experienced authors participating. We spent a few months designing an overall backstory and Star System where our tales will take place.

So hopefully by Next December we will have an actual book published!

if you are interested in reading about Drew… here are some links:

Drew’s Website:
http://www.drewwagar.com

Our Twitch stream project:
https://www.twitch.tv/drewwagar/

So Strange this Writing Thing

Ok, had to share this: The weird world of fiction writing:
I was getting close to the last few scenes for the short story I am writing for an anthology project, when I started noticing that I had not really defined one of my characters personality well enough. It was like I couldn’t make him talk, he was a stick figure, not a real person. He was a dead puppet. I had to stop writing and figure out who he was all over again before I could go on. After I defined him a bit more, I found out that he wasn’t who I thought he was! That was weird, so strange. He just needed life breathed into him. Very odd this writing thing. I like it!

Changing

The kinds of work I have done over the years has followed a progression, an evolving pathway that started with photography, led to print design, to writing and interviewing and added web design. This grew into website and interface design and inevitably led into the world of programming and database integration with web applications. In all that time I have loved the variety, but I find I am coming back to the thing I started with and enjoying imagery and writing again. These have been in the form of 3d modeling and redering, and in creative fiction writing. I am currently involved in a project with a few other aspiring authors of various experience seeking to collaborate on an anthology of sci-fi stories. We have been world building a place for these stories to come to life, and I have used my 3d design to bring some visualization to it as we start into the actual writing of our stories. I will post a few fun images here to tease a bit about the project.