I haven’t posted in the last few months because time has been strained. My sister passed away in January, and the family has been coping with that. I’ve continued work on A Togahan Returns in quiet moments, and hope to release it before autumn. I hope to post more regularly (even briefly) in the coming weeks. Thanks for being patient.
~Pete
Anyone in the Boston area! This weekend, I will be at the Boskone 50 convention (http://www.nesfa.org/boskone/), and reading from A Togahan’s Tale in the Independence room on Sunday at 12:30 pm! If you’re at the convention, please stop by. I promise an action-packed scene! (I’ll even do voices…)
Right now I’m immersed in editing A Togahan Returns, the sequel to A Togahan’s Tale. I’m sifting each chapter sentence by sentence, trying to trim up the language and make it flow better. After that, it goes to the copy editor who will find the thousand tiny things I missed. I’ll fix those, format it for one or more e-readers, and then release it sometime in 2013.
In order to make the most efficient use of limited writing time, I wrote up a schedule in Excel to keep track of my progress. I set reasonable milestones based on the time I know I’ll have available. There’s some buffer in there to account for holidays, sick days, and the unexpected delays.
When I’m behind schedule, as I am now, I’m tempted to rush through a chapter in order to catch up, but I have to resist this temptation. While I might get the satisfaction of checking off another item on a long list, I haven’t really done myself, or you my readers, any favors. The whole point of the editing process is to improve the quality of the manuscript so that my readers are not distracted by errors, and can truly immerse themselves in the story.
So the schedule might slip, and A Togahan Returns may be delayed a few weeks. But I know that when I hit those milestones, they mean something, and hopefully I’ll have entertained you with an engaging story.
People sometimes ask me, “How do you get started writing a novel?” Getting started can be the hardest part of any writing endeavor. You know what you want to write, but how do you launch it? Where do you start the idea, and how do you flesh it out? You may exhaust several false starts only to become stuck almost immediately.
Every writer has their own process, and what works for one may not work for another. Some writers like outlines, others prefer to just dive in with a quirk or a conversation, and see where the story takes them. Some have formulas, or just a premise, and some simply wing it. For me, it starts with an idea, a connection between two things that I hadn’t considered before, and then I make a lot of maps.
Yes, maps.
That’s right! Through zero effort on my part, A Togahan’s Tale is now available on Amazon.com in India. If you have any friends, relatives, or even mere acquaintances in India, tell them, “Hey, I know this guy who published a sci-fi e-book. You should check it out. Here’s the URL: http://tinyurl.com/cyhcz3n.”
One bit of feedback that I’ve gotten from a few readers is that the races could use more description. While you may have gotten the sense of size, skin tone, or other features, a vivid picture of each race was lacking. I honestly struggled with this. I have detailed notes of each race’s characteristics (including terribly geeky, latin sounding classification names), but I didn’t want to slow the action with excessive exposition. I explored the details that mattered, but otherwise focused on moving the story.
Inspired by Hugh MacLeod’s successful Stormhoek promotion, I’m inclined to make a similar open offer:
The first 500 bloggers or book reviewers who send me a link to their site will receive a free copy of A Togahan’s Tale with no strings attached.
That’s right, if you maintain an active blog of any sort, or review books for a living or as a serious hobby, send me a link to your page, and I will send you a gift code for a free copy of A Togahan’s Tale. You can read it or not, review it or not, slam/praise it or not, or even re-gift it to someone you love (or not). All I ask is that you send me a valid link.
I’m sitting here in my attic, mulling over ideas for my first entry – some clever, pithy piece I had hoped – but I’m coming up dry. Instead, I’ll tell how we got here, and we can be clever later.
I’ve spent the last fifteen years writing science fiction and trying to get published. This site, this blog, and the novels are the result of thousands of hours of brainstorming, story mapping, writing, editing, revising ad nauseum, then formatting for e-publishing and finally, the release.
The Togahan series started from a very simple, somewhat nerdy premise: Why, in thousands of years of fantasy history, do most stories remain locked in medieval technology? What would happen instead if their technology progressed along their racial lines, i.e. if your stereotypical elves developed spaceships, how would they work? What if magic were explained as a science? I sat down for a year and filled a notebook with ideas and (very bad) sketches before a story began to emerge. I mapped out most of the story, and then got to hammering away at the computer. Sometime later I had a first draft, which honestly stank. I revised it. I revamped it. I had it edited by a good friend, and then revised it again.
Seriously, I’m lost here. Writing the story was easy. Editing was arduous, but I understood the process. Marketing? No clue. I know there’s a bunch of people out there who’ll find the Togahan series interesting, but how do I reach them? And more importantly, how do I achieve this without spamming the world? Conventional wisdom says to create a web page, a blog, a twitter feed, a social networking page or two, but then what? I’m shooting for the same viral popularity that another 1,000,000 writers are. How do I ascend that virtual slush pile? I think the first step is to figure out who my readers are, then figure out how to reach them.
Who are the ideal Togahan readers? They’re not locked into a single genre, but enjoy fast paced sci-fi of any flavor, fantasy from time to time, the occasional spy yarn, contemporary supernatural, and gritty non-fiction.
I am not claiming that ATT is all of those things. I’d call it “sci-fi Mafioso”, but you could probably pigeon-hole it as “space cowboy”. ATT’s sequel, A Togahan Returns is more “progressive fantasy” where the lines between tech and magic are blurred, and you don’t really mind. In fact, I would call the entire series progressive fantasy, because it’s based on a simple premise: If you took your typical fantasy world and watched the races develop technology for 2000+ years, what would it look like?
Anyone intrigued by that is my ideal reader. Now, how do I get them to buy my book? Please tell me what you know.
I finally have a release date! A Togahan’s Tale will be released on the Kindle on May 23, 2012, barely three weeks from now. I plan to have a first day sale, so stay tuned for the details. There’s a lot of ducks I need to line up between now and then…
