Tag: sunlight

I give up

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

giphy-1Last night, I completely cracked the plot of the Skylights sequel wide open, for about the fourteenth time since finishing the original book– only this time it involves going back to the original draft of Sunlight that I got like 40,000 words into and then had to bail on, because I finally figured out how to make it work.

At this point the sequel to that book is going to be a foreword, 300 blank pages, and then the words “And then they all died” on page 301, because I am having that much trouble getting the plot to cohere.

In other news, despite the fact that I’ve put in notice at my job, there’s still a corporate visit next week and for some reason apparently I’m still expected to, like, do stuff around the store– I guess they don’t just pay me to sit on my ass and look at my phone for five weeks, or something nuts like that?  So I’ve been insanely busy at work for the last couple of days and tomorrow does not look like it’s going to be better.  I literally dusted every end table and coffee table in the entire store this evening.  Tomorrow I have to do the TV stands. I am crabby and sleepy and I have not had much brain left for bloggery when I get home.  I will, I hope, break myself of this habit tomorrow.

Seriously.  Email me some problems so I can do an advice column.  Otherwise I’m just gonna fictionalize the whole thing and that’s gonna lead to issues.

Want to read an excerpt from SUNLIGHT?

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

There’s a new post up over at Patreon with something no one has ever seen before!  Isn’t that exciting?  Join the ranks of the elect for just $1 a month!

An unfortunate announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

to-do-list-learn-goal-failure1.jpgOkay.

I discussed this a bit the other day, but it’s official now: Sunlight is on hold, and when it comes back it may not be Sunlight anymore.  I remain deeply unhappy with the manuscript as it currently exists, and it badly needs a massive restructuring.  Basically a page one rewrite.  There are bits of it I can salvage, but even those are going to need restructuring and moving around.

So I’m putting it aside for a while.  The new goal– and I think this is possible, but y’all know how I am about hitting my own deadlines– is to have the next Benevolence Archives book available by IndyPopCon in June.  That’s going to be crazy tight, I’m not gonna lie.  But I’m already 1/3 of the way to my target wordcount for it, so it’s not impossible.  I still want the Skylights sequel out in 2016, but it’s going to have to be later in the year.  I need to put it away for a while to get a clearer perspective on where I want the story to go.

The good news is that I’m really happy with the stories I’ve written so far for Tales from the Benevolence Archives.  This is good stuff.  You’ll like it.  I promise.  🙂

It’s Utterly Normal Wednesday!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Writing9 Comments

tumblr_inline_ny6d6eV4D51tyv8ib_1280I am being That Guy and I have commandeered a table at a Panera and spread out with my laptop and various other digital accoutrements.  Annoyingly, I have forgotten headphones.  I should have remembered headphones.  But staying at home all day every day is starting to seriously fuck me up and if Getting the Hell Out of the House means that I need to spend more time staring at my laptop in a coffeeshop and less time in front of my desktop, then fuck it, that’s what I’m going to do.

Super Tuesday baaaaasically worked out like I thought it would.  The only place where I was really surprised was Bernie winning Oklahoma, and Bernie winning a state that’s 93% white shouldn’t be surprising– I just basically forgot it existed and lumped it in with the rest of the south.  Seeing Cruz win Alaska after Palin endorsed Drumpf was weirdly satisfying.  The Republican race will stay the same until at least Florida.  We’ll see if Rubio keeps giving victory speeches after Drumpf beats him in his home state.  You’re not Walter Mondale, dude, and just winning Minnesota and nowhere else doesn’t look good on you either.

I’m getting really worried about Sunlight, guys, and unless there’s a mental breakthrough in the next couple of days I’m going to put the thing on hold and shift my attention to other projects– namely, Tales from the Benevolence Archives, which I can imagine having out by June if I push hard at it.  I wanted Sunlight done in time for C2E2.  C2E2 is in twelve days, I’m not yet at the 2/3 mark, and I’ve written not a single word in the last, I think, three weeks.  The manuscript simply isn’t working in its current form and I’m pretty sure it needs a page one rewrite, because the corner I’ve backed myself into is not going to be salvageable by regular edits.  There are bits of it that can be saved, I think, but right now the whole book is treading water on its way to book 3, and that’s not acceptable to me.  The book’s just not good enough in its current form, and I don’t think I can save it with an action-packed last third, because the way it’s currently structured an action-packed last third doesn’t even really make sense. Right now if I wanted to I could have the book done in 10,000 words, easily. There’s nothing wrong with a 55K novel, especially in the age of the internet where most of my sales are going to be ebooks anyway, but there’s lots wrong with a 55K novel where not much of anything  happens, and that’s about where we’re at right now.

I can even do the damn series as a duology if I need to– there’s nothing sacrosanct about the idea of a trilogy– but if I decide that books 2 and 3 need to be one book, I still need to do some serious rewriting, as I don’t want the book coming out at 100K words.  Skylights came out just over 80,000 words, and that’s about what I’d want the sequel to be.

And cross all of that with the fact that I’ve been too depressed to write well most days lately.  I think I may need to go see my doctor and get my medications adjusted, but that’s a whole other thing.  I need to get this shit under control (where “this shit” refers to basically any aspect of my life you might care to name) and I need to do it soon.  I’m hoping to get at least a teeny bit of good news on the job front next week, but I’ve thought that before and the world hasn’t come through yet.  We’ll see.

Writers out there: how many of you have had to completely bail out and redo a manuscript?  How many of you have actually pulled that move off successfully?

Hey! Join the mailing list!

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

It’s been around for a while now and tonight is the first message I’ve sent out, so please don’t think I’ll be spamming you.  I really won’t.

BUT:  Here is incentive to sign up, if you haven’t already.  The first newsletter contains an excerpt from Sunlight, my next book!  It’s brief, but it’s real!   And all first-drafty and probably riddled with typos!  It’ll be awesome!

That’s more exclamation points than I usually use in a blog post.

It’s 8:25 my time right now.  The mailing goes out at 11:45 my time, so in a bit over three hours.  You have until then to sign up for the mailing list and get the excerpt.  Go go go!

On second drafts

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

510Cy7ZwEHL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_This, much like my blogwanking posts, will be of some interest to a handful of you, but the rest of you may end up wanting to skip it.

I’m at about the 40% mark on Sunlight, just underneath it, in fact.  And when you count snippets of later parts that I’ve already written (the final scene is done, for example) the bit that I’m at is probably right at the 1/3 mark of the actual book.  I’ve gotten the action in Sunlight moving a lot faster than Skylights did; a slow start is one of the more common criticisms of that book and I wanted to make sure that dangerous/scary shit was happening to my characters much more quickly this time.

I’ve hit a stall point, though, and I suspect I won’t be adding to the word count for a little while, and part of the reason I won’t be adding to the word count is because of the way I write.  I don’t do multiple drafts.  I write a thing, and then I take another tinkering/editing pass at it– correcting grammar and typographical errors, fixing clunky sentences, occasionally adding short scenes or deleting others (most frequently when I realize that characters have a conversation in Chapter 6 that they just had in Chapter 5, because by the time I got to Chapter 6 I’d forgotten they had it) and all that, but rarely the type of large-scale modification that I’d call a full-blown draft.  I know I’ve called that phase “second draft” in the past, but it really isn’t.  It’s mostly cleanup.

Once the book is out of first draft, it’s basically done.  This isn’t because I have such supreme confidence in my writing process that I think I’m perfect.  It’s because my first draft is so slow, and so roundabout and circular.  It’s because sometimes I go two weeks and don’t write a single word, because I’m stuck on the next scene and I can’t write it if it’s wrong.    While I tell other people “just do it, and fix it in second draft,” I can’t actually write that way myself.

I finally figured something important out about writer’s block: it’s not that I can’t write.  It’s that what I’m about to try and write is wrong.  So my brain won’t even let the wrong stuff come out of my fingers.

I’m at a point in this manuscript where, if I do this wrong, Sunlight will end up just basically being a remake of Skylights, and that’s really not what I want.  The stakes need to be higher in this book, and they need to be higher in a way that I haven’t quite wrapped my head around, and the structure of this book needs to be different than the first book.  And I’m at the point where those raised stakes need to be made clear quickly.  So until I figure this out, I get to sit and stare at a blank screen, because I can’t write another word until I know what the right ones are.

In which I am way ahead of myself

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

510Cy7ZwEHL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_I am telling this story primarily so that I can find the date I did this a year or so from now when I need it.

I am currently approximately one third of the way through the sequel to Skylights, a book I’m calling Sunlight.  It was originally called Starlight but I decided the new title was better so I changed it.  The series is going to become known as The Johannes Cycle (the Johannes is the name of the ship they fly to Mars on) once the second book is out.

Like I said, I have the first third or so of Sunlight in first-draft form and hope to have it finished within a month.  I also have the first few paragraphs of the third book in the Johannes Cycle written, along with the last few sentences of Sunlight.  I already know what the title of Book 3 is, too.

I still tentatively plan on Casey Heying, who did the cover for Skylights, to be doing the cover to Sunlight, provided that I can afford to pay him what he’s actually worth.  But we haven’t discussed the cover to the third book at all, and I already had a strong concept for it in mind.

Last night, in about half an hour, I sat down with an image editor and created the cover for the third book.  As in, other than some tweaks to text, it’s, like, perfect.  So I have no cover to the book I’m working on and a damn-near completed cover to the sequel to the book I’m working on.

The kicker?  I can’t tell you the title of the third book, or show you the cover, because they both constitute mild spoilers for Sunlight.  So I just have to sit on this awesome thing I did and not show anybody.

Well, okay.  I showed Casey’s wife today.  And she thought it was awesome too.  But not anybody else.  🙂