Aurora Redress Rewrite Finished

Of course, anyone who understands anything about writing a novel understands that "finished writing," or in this case, "finished rewriting" only means that I finished the rough draft. The bazillions of content edits and copy edits are still to come. But, once I do the first pass-through with the spell and grammar checker, it is ready for my beta readers.

I thought this was going to be a small novel word-count wise. Last time I worked on Aurora Redress, the novel stood at 73,800. Today, I fleshed out a few sections more, more notably I introduced one of my key theories behind how people get from one time and place to another. I wrote 3,400 words all in one day today for a total novel length of 77,200. Not bad.

Broke Through Chapter Six

Whoo-Hoo! Between the triple-digit heat hovering between 104 and 108 degrees and Chapter Six of Aurora Redress acting as a writer's block, I have not accomplished much on my novel. But today, I woke up cool and relaxed, the outside temperature never reached over 99 degrees, the inside stayed cool and comfortable and I wrote over 2500 words, including completing Chapter Six and fine-tuning some other chapters.

I am now into the portion of the book that I wrote earlier as part of Aurora Rescue, but pulled out due length. However, because I pulled bits and pieces of some of these chapters out of my original manuscript to round out and complete the first novel, I need to make sure that what is left in Aurora Redress flows and has no gaping holes.

I will soon get this next portion out to my test readers for their input and editing. (Hint! Hint! I am waiting for your feedback on the first section, readers.) However, except for a few short breaks, I have been writing for ten hours. I am calling it a day. A good one, but over as far as writing goes!

Rats! Gotta Rewrite 'Cause They Won't Buy It

I just can't do it. I have a really good story with Family Secrets, but there is one element that I am now convinced just will not work for most readers. I came to this insightful conclusion after reading yet another book written by a combat veteran of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The memoir is titled The Blue Cascade by Marine veteran, Mike Scotti. The language and the emotions shared by the author are raw, but real. Many of his statements express his frustration over how the press has romanticized the war and the returning warriors. We American citizens not only do not comprehend what they have been through or how it has impacted their lives, we do not really want to. For the majority of us, while our military are in combat risking life and limb and regularly witnessing scenes of horror, for us at home, life goes on as if there is no war. We do not care how difficult it is for our returning service personnel to return and adjust to civilian life, especially for those in the national guard and reserves and their families. Because of their unique position of dual civilian/military employment, they have fewer options when they return from combat, especially if they are unable to return to their civilian jobs.

Although the author is not shy about expressing the desires of many of his fellow Marines to find women and get laid, he states that in the Corps, adultery is strongly frowned upon. I don't know if the same thing is true for the Army, but I have read where studies show that the divorce rate in military families is lower than that of the general population.

I finally acknowledged the feeling that I have tried to rationalize away for several months. Casting Jennie's husband as  a combat veteran who is unfaithful and demanding a divorce just does not work. Many readers, as well as agents and publishers, will not response favorably to that negative portrayal of an active-duty soldier, even if there are those instances where scenes like the ones I described in this novel do happen. As much as I would like to offer moral support to those military wives who find themselves dealing with difficult marital problems with their combat veteran husbands, the Gerald character as written would be too unpopular. The readers, the agents and the publishers -- they just ain't gonna buy it.

So, Rats! Here I have been sending out queries, and here I am struggling to do the final-final fine-tuning copy editing of the last half of the manuscript, and here I now need to do a rewrite of Gerald's character. I can put him in another traveling occupation where I know a lot of adultery takes place and where his occupation by itself will not make him a sympathetic character when he is behaving like a jerk.

Unfortunately, I need the modern combat warrior connection to make the Mike in Vietnam scenes work the way I want them too. Maybe Jennie needs to have an older brother deployed to Afghanistan. Maybe a twin? I will need to think on that, but I need to do so quickly.

This Side of the Moon

I finished typing into the computer my short story collection that I actually wrote twenty-five years ago and titled "Mom and Walt Stories." It was on my computer at that time--something before Windows 95--but I did not keep the file updated as I bought newer technology and programs. So, using my dot-matrix (How old is that?) print-out, I input it again.

 My stepfather, Walt, once worked for NASA during the heyday of space exploration, so I changed the title to This Side of the Moon. Since 2013 would be the 50th anniversary of their marriage if they both were still living, I decided publishing this piece now would be a fitting tribute to them. I have dedicated it to my mother and stepfather as well as my brother, Bob, since they are all now on the other side of the moon.

At 5,000 plus words, this is a humorous short-short, not even a novella, but something I hope people will find entertaining and reminiscent of society in late sixties, early seventies. Although I have used a certain amount of literary license, the incidences are based on actual events that I either witnessed or that were told to me by my mother. In other words, who could make this stuff up?

To give a hint of the contents, the chapter titles are as follows:
1.  List-less
2.  Snakebite Business
3.  The Late Great Vitamin E
4.  Butt You Never Say...
5.  Gut-less
6.  Anniversaries

I plan to publish it soon. First, I need to decide if I want to try to add artwork--probably black on white line drawings if I do. Before I do that, I need to work out how that would look in ebook format on Kindles, Nooks, smartphones, etc.

F

Edits for Ebooks

There is that old saying that you can pay a little now, or you can pay a lot later.

I just put my novel, Aurora Rescue, back on Amazon as an ebook. I signed up for their lending service, so I will wait 90 days before I submit it to other ebook sources.

I have noticed that when I read a lot of ebooks, the formatting is less than wonderful. I suspect part of the reason is because of quirks in the auto-format process in MS Word. Note in the sample above (I put this on edit view that allows me to see all the symbols), that there are several paragraphs. Some of them have a little arrow before the sentence starts (see green arrows), which is accomplished by manually striking the Tab key, and some have no arrows (see red arrows) which is a result of the automatic formatting. I suspect that when ebook paragraphs start flush left instead of being indented, it is because the digital file that was submitted included many or all "auto-formatted" paragraphs. Therefore, the spaces before the start of the new paragraphs are not picked up when the manuscript file is converted to an ebook file.

I know for Aurora Rescue, I went through the entire manuscript before I submitted to be sure each paragraph had the little black arrow in front. I also tried to remove any spaces after the closing punctuation of a sentence. (See the orange arrow for an example of a space after the quote marks.)

The above sample is from my newer novel, Family Secrets. Even though it is not being prepared for an ebook yet, I am making an effort as I go to be sure all the formatting is uniform. I am hoping that by "paying a little now," I will have a clean, well-formatted manuscript when I am finished. It will save me some time so I do not have to "pay a lot later" when I get down to my final editing.

Aurora Rescue Now Published

Aurora Rescue has now been published in traditional book format. It is already available on Amazon. It will soon be available at bookstores and on other online retailers.

Contractions.......Or Not

While editing Aurora Rescue, the first novel I completed, I noticed something very interesting. I did not miss the contractions.

To give a little bit of history, when I first started this novel, I received input from both my granddaughter and her mother. The one plea from my daughter-in-law was to please use good grammar. So, even though I have a lot of dialect for some of my period characters, for my main characters, I did my best to avoid contractions.

Contractions are how many of us talk, although regionally, we do not use the same contractions. Contractions are a good way of reducing the number of words for a militant publisher that insists that a manuscript be limited to a certain length based on word count. But, I realized as I edited this book for the umpteenth time that, whether reading it quietly or speaking it out loud, I did not miss the contractions. My brain must have registered the contractions that I normally would have spoken. I was very comfortable with the "will not" instead of the "won't" and "cannot" instead of the "can't."

Now that I re-read Family Secrets, I see that I used a lot of contractions in the dialogue. After all, I have been living in California's central valley most of my adult life and my characters are from the same region. I know how we talk. However, based on the lessons learned from editing Aurora Rescue, I am going back and reviewing Family Secrets to see if I can get rid of some of the contractions.

I will deal with the word count police later.