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Guys, this book is being weird. This is the third novel I’ve written, right? Which, I know, doesn’t make me anywhere near an expert on how these things generally go but I’m not exactly a complete novice. But I’ve never written anything like this story before, where every four or five thousand words I get ahead means I need to double back and hit “reset” on most of the last ten. I’m writing the book in circles, and every couple of big scenes in the “now” part of the book has resulted in me going back and either rewriting or adding stuff earlier in the book. It’s growing from the *middle*. My books don’t usually do that.

I’m not complaining, mind you; I’m just kind of fascinated at how the process is working on this one, and how damn stubborn the book is being in refusing to come out the way I initially intended it to.

For example, after the jump you’ll find the first little bit of the book, at least as it stands now. Why “as it stands now”? Because this is the third beginning of the book. The other two beginnings have been shoved to other parts of the book. 🙂

Standard first-draft caveats and all that, but here’s your first little look at Benevolence Archives 8, also known as THE TITLELESS.

Continue reading “More BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES musings, and an excerpt!” →

Wanna do me a favor?

I’m looking for beta readers– at least a couple, but a few more is fine– for my novel Skylights, due to be self-published in ebook form in June. It’s already in pretty good shape, but it wants for one more pass before I push it out to the universe and I figure I might as well have a couple of other folks take a critical eye to it before I release it into the world.

Specifically: Skylights is a roughly 100,000 word novel (over 400 pages in traditional paperback size) about the first few human missions to Mars. I’m looking for people who enjoy science fiction, but don’t feel like you have to have everything Heinlein wrote memorized or anything. I’m asking you to commit to getting the novel read and some sort of written critique (a couple of pages, maybe, and if you like more is fine?) back to me within a reasonable time frame– say, by the last week of April. For this I will thank you in the novel itself; I’m not actually offering any real compensation. I don’t need line edits or anything like that; my wife is a former editor and the manuscript should still be awfully clean, although if you find something and want to point it out that’s fine; I’m mostly looking for story-level critiques.

I’m planning on sending out .PDF files, but if you’d like it in some other format we can figure that out.

Interested? Let me know in comments. I don’t have any particular ideas for who I want but folks whose names I recognize are a bit more likely to be chosen if for some reason I end up with a ton of volunteers.

Thanks!