Finn and Elara: Exploring Boundaries in a New Realm

Editing, Editing, Editing…when do I get back to writing?

I am happy to say I’ve finished my editing and re-write of sections of A New Past to create a less explicit version of the story. I’m not getting the final formatting sorted out and posted on Amazon for publishing. 

It’s been a lot of work to re-work sections of the novels to make them suitable for a younger readership. Just to be clear, they are not into the YA category, quite, but they are also safely in the PG-13 or R category for US readers. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been kicking around ideas and snippets for other work, both explicit and mainstream. I have one mainstream story that I think will be my next focus before jumping back to writing a sequel to Technomancer. I’m capturing ideas about that sequel as I work on this other project. To keep readers here interested, here is a short excerpt of the draft opening to the next chapter in FInn and Elara’s tale.

Seeing the end of a world was sobering.

Finn looked out from the ship sailing steadily toward the point the sun had risen from, but knew they would never reach the point. The ship would reach A point, but they would get there through some quantum, or magical, mechanism which would reposition them elsewhere on the surrounding sea. 

For months, he had searched to unravel the mysteries of the world he now lived in with Elara. For months, he had struggled with the strange topology of this world. Now, he had proof with his own eyes that it was not a world. Realm was an apt descriptor. With his new goddess-given sight, he could see the fluctuations that defined the end of the world, spreading like a fountain from to flatten against an unseen barrier and bend back toward the land. 

It was literally the boundary, edge, or border of this world. 

What lay beyond it was unknowable. All the magical and quantum energy from this realm was reflected by that impenetrable barrier. It was the end.

“What do you see?” Elara asked as she moved to stand beside him at the railing of the small sailing ship they had hired.

“The end of the world,” Finn muttered. 

She looked at him in alarm.

“What do you mean?”

“The edge, the boundary that marks the limit of our travels.”

She looked ahead. “I don’t see any barrier.”

“It isn’t meant to be seen, but it is there. I can see the flow of magic, the quanta that make magic, bend back toward us. Nothing of this world or mine will penetrate that to see what lies beyond.”

Elara slipped her arm into his, hugging him as she liked to do when they were alone together. “Is that so bad?”

Finn shook his head. 

“It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s not good. It means I need to shift my thinking. Realm is a good description for this place called the Enchanted Forest. I suspect it fits the other Realms you know of as well.”

“And?” Her Lunar intution let her know there was more.

“And, that means a large group of my theories and ideas for being able to travel back to my home will be fruitless.”

“So you’ll consider other ideas. You’re a brilliant man, Finn. Malachi was able to send me to your world, and bring both of us back here, so there must be a way to accomplish your own return. Don’t give up so easily.”

Finn chuckled. “Since when did you turn into a cheerleader?”

Technomancer is available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited now.

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Secrets, Surveillance, and Survival in Technomancer

An excerpt from Technomancer.

“Elara!” Finn called out sharply as he watched one of the feeds from the neighborhood spy-cams he had set up. The three-person team in cheap business suits were too well organized to be random pollsters. He watched as they stopped people on the streets, showed them a paper, and then asked a couple of questions before moving on.

“What is it, Finn?” Elara asked as she sauntered into the living room with a towel around her shoulders. She was wearing the loose t-shirt and silken lounge pants he had purchased for her, looking much too attractive to be a fugitive from the government.

“I think people are looking for us,” he said as he watched the video. “This group is two blocks over, but they are looking for someone.”

Elara leaned in, looking at his phone with him.

Finn breathed in her scent. It was pure and clean, not some fragrance of soap he had stocked, but her own intoxicating smell. Finn shook his head. Now was not the time for distractions.

“We should get going,” Finn said.

Elara looked at him. They were almost ready anyhow. “I’ll get changed.”

If you want to learn more about Elara and Finn’s struggles to evade Big Brother, check out Technomancer, available now on Amazon.

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How to Edit Explicit Content out of Your Novel

Last week I shared a little about hitting a wall in my writing and some strategies to overcome partial blocks. One of the things I mentioned was performing a re-write on “A New Past”. I did a little analysis to see what would be involved in stripping out the explicit content and came up with about 15% of the book needing adjustment.

I’m happy to say it was not as drastic as I thought. At 186,000 words, 15% would be roughly 27,000 words to be edited or cleaned out. I’m happy to say the first re-edit is done, with the revised story sitting at approximately 174,000 words, which is about a 6.5% reduction.

How did I do this in such a short time?

I went through the novel, flagging each scene that had explicit content. I must say, some if it was relevant to the character arc I wanted to portray, so I could not just cut quickly. However, some of it was purely to put sexy-time in the book. I found those scenes were easiest to deal with. They were either cut, with a single transitional sentence covering that something romantic happened, or deleted entirely.

The problems were the scenes that are mentioned later in the books, or have some significant impact on the various character arcs. These were a little trickier to deal with. 

For example, there is a pretty graphic scene of the first time the two main characters, Paul and Jeryl, make love. Obviously, this is a turning point in their relationship, so cutting it entirely is not possible. Additionally, because there is much of their relationship up to this point building the tension for them to take the final step as a couple, I could not easily gloss over it. 

It was these types of scenes that required a lot of focus, editing, and re-writing. I’m not sure I’m done with all that yet, but I am pleased to have the first book done, and sitting for a cooling off period before I re-read and make a final editorial decision on it. 

If you’re interested in reading the “PG-13” version of the story, I’ll have some news for you in a month or so. Until then, subscribe here, or follow me on Amazon, GoodReads, or Facebook to get information about upcoming book releases.

Promote Your Book: Strategies for Amazon Success

As I shared last week, I have a review on Reedsy for Technomancer. It’s a good review (I think), but alone it has not ignited a flurry of sales.

So now what?

My next step is to promote the book through the Amazon ecosystem. This will take a couple of approaches. One is to run a Kindle Countdown Deal or Free Book Promotion. However, to run a KDP Countdown Deal promotion, books are required to be enrolled in KDP Select and to have had no price changes for 30 days. Since I uploaded a new copy of the text on March 7th, that is the data my pricing was “last changed”, meaning the countdown deal can’t start until April 7th.

The other option is to launch a Sponsored Products campaign. This seems to be a bit more involved. A mentor has suggested I use roughly 40% of my expected sales to advertise, but I’m not ready to pull the trigger on that quite yet. My other books are selling, so I’ll investigate setting up some ads, and then report back here in a regular Marketing Monday posting. 

Until then,I’ve gone ahead and set the countdown deal to start on April 7th, so if you want to get Technomancer at a discount, buy a copy then. 

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Discover Technomancer: A Comprehensive Book Review

A review of Technomancer has gone live on Reedsy today. If you are interested in learning more about the story than I have written here, check it out. Read the review here.

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Overcoming Writing Blocks: Tips to Reignite Your Muse

I’ve hit a little block on my two works-in-progress. Neither is fully blocked, in so far that I know where I want the story to go, but both are feeling more like work to write at the moment. Since the first 25k words in each came almost effortlessly, it gives a pause when it starts to feel like a slog.

How do I battle this stall in my writing?

First, as mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been listening to some podcasts and letting the skills and tools of writing inspire me. I’d give this about a 25%-50% chance of re-energizing my muse.

The other thing I’ve been considering is a re-write of “A New Past” to make it more mainstream by editing out or modifying the erotic elements of the story. I spend several hours migrating the content of Book One into my current writing tool (Ulysses) which allows me to break up the chapters into individual scenes. I’ve then gone through each scene and flagged if it contains explicit content or not.

Book One of A New Past weighs in at 186,492 words, not counting the timeline in the appendix. This breaks down into 19 chapters, and 165 scenes or sections across the book. Of those, 24 (14.5%) of the scenes have some level of explicit content. 

Re-writing 24 scenes to remove the explicit descriptions or acts does not seem too daunting. However, I’m trying to decide if it is worth it. It likely is, from a sales and revenue perspective, since it would enable me to advertise the book more effectively. 

The challenge of rewriting these chunks of the story will be making certain the rest of the tale isn’t affected. I try to make the explicit scenes part of the characters, and some aspects actually drive significant story arcs, so they can’t just be cut. 

What’s interesting, to me at least, is that performing the mundane tasks of importing the novel and breaking it into scenes and reviewing the content has given me some ideas on my works-in-progress as well.

Drop me a comment here, and let me know if you think creating a “PG-13” version of “A New Past” is a worthwhile effort. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Technomancer Review: A Unique Sci-Fi Fantasy Adventure

Excerpt from a reviewer:

Loved it! 😍

This genre-bending novel is firmly at the intersection of technology and magic, with a solid foot in each world.

Technomancer provides a unique and fascinating story line as the author weaves our technologically advanced world with the magically enhanced yet industrially deficient world of Elysia in such a way that readers may pause to consider the profound implications here. The protagonists learn to look beyond their single-focused perspectives as Finn seeks to mingle the 1s and 0s of his world with the sigils and spells of Elara’s. What would a marriage of these two worlds look like, and what would result from such an action?

Themes of revenge, loyalty, courage, and good vs evil are interwoven with action and suspense playing out in both realms. The stakes are high, and will require significant devotion, faithfulness, and cunning. No two people are better suited for this than the unlikely pair of Elara, the priestess’ young acolyte and Finn, the world class quantum computing engineer. Chaos and order hang in the balance.

Fans of science fiction, fantasy, action/adventure, and even romantic suspense will enjoy this tight-knit novel of power, chaos, and justice.

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Understanding Character Depth Through the Lens of Who

I recently started to get caught up on Writing Excuses, Season 20 while commenting into work. Specifically, Episode 5: Lens 1 – Who. The discussion introduces “the lens of who” — which means talking about characters. This is a great refresher on making characters that are multi-dimensional by showing them through different “lenses”. A key take-away is the idea that our characters have different sets of experiences, which should mean if they each described the same think, they most likely would have different takes on the scene or event. 

While I don’t want to spoil the whole episode, there were a couple ideas I latched onto around crafting a character background or back story. The ideas were questions writers should ask and answer about their characters to give them greater depth and context for how they view the world. The questions are:

“What is the lie your character believes about the world?”

And:

“What is the truth your character is afraid to learn?”

These may be related to one another, or completely different, depending on the character, author, and story. If the author knows the answers to these questions, they can craft details that will make the character more real for the reader. Let’s see how I can retroactively answer these for one of my recent characters, without creating story spoilers.

Finn is one of the main characters from Technomancer. While it is never really said in the book, he believes that an intelligent individual of strong character can successfully battle entrenched evil in the government. This is a lie, though it is open to debate, obviously. The truth he is afraid to learn is that the rational rules of science he believes in cannot explain the world he is transported into. He struggles to learn more, observe more, and make his observations fit this worldview. Unfortunately, the things that happen to him do not actually fit into his view of how the world operates. His view does not address the reality of gods and chaos that permeate Elara’s realms., though he continues to try and shoehorn things into a scientific mindset.

I think these two elements come through in the tale, but you readers will have to weigh in and let me know if I’ve succeeded. 

I’ll be adding these questions to my Character Template available for download by subscribers. I encourage you to listen to the podcast as well as subscribe here to get the templates.

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Technomancer is available on Kindle

Technomancer is available for Kindle.

I am working with some reviewers to get more marketing material and reviewer comments, after which I will enroll it in KDP Select for three months. The KDP Select program is supposed to reach more readers, since Kindle Unlimited readers can read your book without buying the full Kindle edition. KDP Select works can also be advertised and promoted on the Amazon platform. Stay tuned for updates as these next steps are taken for marketing the book.

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Balancing Real Life and Fictional Worlds

Sorry for the break in posting. I’ve been busy working to make ends meet with my real job and fallen off the writing bandwagon a little. Now that I’m being productive in the real world, I’m ready to jump back into the fictional worlds in my head. 

I’ve been toying with two story ideas that I think could make interesting tales. Both are set in more of a modern fantasy genre with heavy elements of the real world, which means the characters, settings, and conflicts are going to have to be something readers can relate to. 

“Skipper”

The most advanced idea (I’ve gotten about 35,000 words written) tackles the trope of time-travel/reincarnation where the main character dies at the beginning of the story and is sent back to their younger self with a chance at doing things over. This is the same macro-plot I used in the A New Past trilogy. However, this idea takes a different twist where the main character doesn’t go back to their younger self, but rather to a family member in the previous generation. So, instead of reincarnating in themselves, they are born as their uncle, or father, or grandfather, etc. 

This obviously creates a possibility of them creating a paradox, which can be a form of conflict. If they change things, maybe they won’t even be born, so the stakes are high. However, there are a few other twists I’ve got in mind that may make it more interesting.

”Small Powers”

The second idea is based on a random thought about superheroes and special powers. In all of the comic book tropes, some event happens that transforms the character into a super-powered hero or villain. My random thought was what powers would look like if they were more naturally emergent. What if they were little powers that could not do all that much on their own? 

I think this has the potential to make the characters much more relatable and interesting. Obviously, if they are in our contemporary world, they will have enough paranoia to not reveal their powers unless they want to risk the government swooping in to study them, or recruit them for some secret cabal. At the same time, they will feel isolated since they can’t share what is happening to them. I’ve written about 25,000 words on this story, so it is developing as well.

Long forms

Both of these tales are running long for me. Each are roughly a third or a quarter of the length I would like the final novels to be (roughly 120,000 words or less). I’m worried I’m not editing enough as I go, but decided after grinding through Technomancer in four months at 117,000 words, that I would let my muse take me where she will.

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