Sanctuary -- Cover Reveal

Workaholic Mercy Smith leads the team that is building the fastest space shuttle ever. Now her friend Red wants to steal the unstable Tetra-1 before all the bugs are worked out. Red needs the information from an orbiting alien artifact to save earth. Mercy volunteered to ride along to prevent the prototype from exploding. She didn’t count on the missiles, lasers, spies, or cute guys that would try to distract her. After landing on the artifact, she discovers there’s a new world inside, one they name Sanctuary. She will rely on her wits and vision to face a series of dangerous challenges that test whether humanity is fit to enter its next phase.

This third book of the Jezebel’s Ladder series is an alien-encounter and coming-of-age story in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke.

From Inspiration to Perspiration

Thomas Edison was famous for saying that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Most people have had an idea for a story, but few every see it through because it’s a lot of work, even when you’ve been practicing for a few decades. People frequently as me how I go from a one-page idea to a several-hundred-page book. I thought I'd illustrate with an example. I'll start with a scene that inspired me.
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Shambly Town sat on the edge of the great rift. No one spoke of it, and few could look into its depths, but the ragged hole in the world affected every aspect of life on the edge.

Most citizens were huddled inside their hovels because there was a storm brewing that night. Some unknown wizard had been experimenting with deep magic, upsetting the natural order on a large scale. From time to time, purple-tinted lightning traced opal-like veins of light through the black dome of sky. The weird lightning and even the hail could be tolerated, but no one wanted to risk exposure to the magic tainted fallout that came with the rain. Even die-hard mages stayed inside.

But nothing kept Charlie from his regular visit to Goodforwhat Ales. The ten round tables in the tavern were all made from thick, rough-hewn oak and the décor was an odd mixture of late medieval and early western. Charlie took his customary booth in the dim corner that offered the best view of the room.

The only other person in the tavern was the stout, bearded amateur philosopher Miles, who rented a sparse room upstairs. Miles was dressed in a coarse home-spun tweed, and smoked a pipe while he joked and verbally jousted with the bartender.

Charlie didn’t join in. Instead, the detective ordered a mug of his usual and fretted about the incomplete fragments he had from his current case. His last trip to the lower realms had been particularly disturbing, and he couldn’t talk about it with anyone here. Enormous things in the undergirding were orbiting this place, and obscure omens had taunted at him. After staring at the wall till his drink was flat and warm, he decided to pay a visit to the Protective Order to discuss his suspicions.

When he stood, the barkeep said “Are you sure you don’t want to wait out the storm in here?”

Charlie pointed to his green protective cloak and its brooch made of wrestling brass snakes. “I’m covered. Nothing can get through these.” To be extra cautious, he pulled the hood tight around his face.

Distracted, he took a quick glance out at the street to look for ambushes before he pushed through the swinging doors. With his first step, his boot sank deep into a puddle of the magical, rainbow-colored fallout. Then Charlie disappeared completely, before the expression could change on his face.

An imbalance had been created. Silence reigned for twelve heartbeats. Then with a thunderclap, in the exact same corner booth and outer clothing the previous patron had occupied, a younger, more confused man appeared. The young man struggled to remain upright and make sense of his new surroundings.

Despite the loss of a steady customer, the barkeep said in a bland tone, “Greetings, mage. You must be Charlie’s replacement.”

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To get from a new idea that excites me to print starts with six to eight weeks of brainstorming to get enough critical mass. Sequels take much less effort once the world is established and result in higher sales, which is why they’re so popular. So in outlining this effort, I want to leave that door open. My target for solid notes and sample scenes before beginning any novel is about 20,000 words. I also like to have two pages of maps. I start by determining the type of story this will be by listening to the raw pages—you’d be surprised how much they say when you ask them. The initial idea is a spark of holy fire, and it’s your job to feed it until it’s a blaze.

Since Daniel is a troubled sixteen year old boy, the result will be a YA fantasy that my son could read. This means the final length should be 60-80,000 words. My working title is one that I vaguely recall from Lovecraft and a 1980s pop tune—Behind the Walls of Sleep. This title tells people it’s about a dream world, exclusive, and hints at something dark in the depths. The fantasy element of this story will be a metaphor. At the start of the book, Daniel doesn’t like his life. In fact, there is a hole in the world that everything revolves around, but no one talks about. Some traumatic event, probably a fatal accident or disease, has forced him out of childhood prematurely. In the map or Astra, his travels and the places of power underscore that he is orbiting the hole without realizing.

Daniel doesn’t fit in where he’s been moved, and underachieves at school. Dreams are his escape. My notes summed this up as, “Astra is the place we go where we can be ourselves.” In dreams, he has power and the illusion of control. He ignores the storms and the odd magic that caused the death of his predecessor. All we know about his powers at the beginning is that the storm makes him different. Later, we learn that he can teleport anywhere in Astra that he has seen. He also has a knack for finding things. These talents will make him useful to powerful people. This sort of character is normally non-combative, foolishly fearless, and will tend to become either a sneak thief or a detective.

I’ve seen one other scene clearly at the end of the story: he’s tied to a wheelbarrow by someone in a ram’s head mask, about to become a sacrifice. This is clearly the villain responsible for Charlie’s death at the beginning, the case he was investigating. Daniel overcomes him by sheer luck, using a memory stone to complete a spell that he heard earlier. We just have to find our way from point A to B. To underscore his journey, we’ll take a year, transitioning from his emotional winter to summer. Jaded skeptics will noticed that each Harry Potter book takes place over a one-year span.

Gaining confidence and strength, Daniel meets many people in Astra, both good and evil. He plays with both, refusing to choose one action or the other. We’ll show the two major organizations: the good Protectors, and the evil Circle of Deception. I chose Foxglove, a seemingly harmless shape shifter to be the face of this organization. Daniel runs errands and delivers messages for both sides as he learns the land, recording his memories on small stones. As a teleporter, the extra memory of locations and messages is the bread and butter of his business. The tone of this section is rather like a series of beginning D&D or Warcraft adventures.

The Circle works rather like the mob, trying to expand its influence in both worlds through extortion and secrets, but Daniel doesn’t see the dark side at first. In fact, the villain may help heroes to hunt down another member of the Circle who committed a heinous act. Foxglove tells Daniel, “Astra is like college. Meet others like yourselves, and expand to become what you were really meant to be. I can take you to that next level.” Eventually, Daniel is lured in and agrees to something new—delivering a message from Foxglove to a witch in the real world. The witch commits suicide soon after. Daniel returns to rage at Foxglove who invokes a contract or disease to bind him. He passes through a dark period, unable to leave nightmare. Here is where I must have another powerful anchor scene. I believe that he overcomes this binding by merging with a werewolf that represents his anger. He may also need to help someone else in order to leave his dungeon. I’m not solving right now, just sketching.

The violence and frequency of the magic storms increases, but the freed and stronger Daniel still doesn’t commit fully to the Protectors. Instead, out of guilt, he tries to protect the granddaughter of the witch from the Circle’s power in both worlds.

Eventually Daniel has to face the disaster that created him. Since he doesn’t investigate soon enough, the Protectors are thrown captive into the wizard’s basement, killed, or misdirected. The high wizard, one of the people he’s known all along, decides Daniel’s very entrance into Astra stole what was necessary to complete his master spell. The wizard lures him in as a friend, and lays him out as a sacrifice—scene two. Daniel can’t directly free himself, but taps his memory stones to open the door to the wizard’s basement and what he fears. Something from the basement distracts him for just long enough for Daniel and the Protectors defeat him. In the end, Daniel is invited to fill the gaps in the protective order, and the witch’s granddaughter reveals her Astral identity to him. They have the potential for a relationship but nothing explicit, leaving the door open.

The hard part of this story, the part that prevented me from writing this story already, is the mechanics—world building. The potential for adventure is unbounded, but the rules need to be established early on or it gets absurd fast. To compound the difficulty, I need to make sure my approach is new and original.

I know that the hole in the world leads down many layers, through nightmare to the Deep, the primal chaos that predated the world. Only by tapping the Deep can wizards forge new magic, but such experiments are always dangerous. To keep things simple, we’ll only have three levels of inhabitants: low (tradesmen), medium (college educated), and high (PhDs who add something new). [Reference Catastrophe’s Spell.] Detailed powers and levels on each person in Astra will be essential. Like superpowers in a comic book, each wizard is unique.

When someone sleeps in our world and dreams, they appear in Astra. Waking, they disappear from whatever adventure they’re in. [Reference L. Ron Hubbard’s Slaves of Sleep.] In practice, having the characters interact in such a system is difficult. For true REM, a six minute dream could be a day or more in Astra, a slippery concept. A much better model would be hackers gathering in a virtual fortress in real time. [Reference Roger Zelazny’s Coils.] To be original, I need to cover a wide range of planar issues. For example, this continuum isn’t the top of the food chain; other things passing through can run people over like a deer on the highway. Philosophies and ideas can take independent forms [Reference David Brin’s Startide Rising.] Waking world personality problems can affect Astra: insomniacs, egomaniacs, epileptics, multiple personalities, self-image, and Hollywood actors who others force believe into a certain shape. The main catalyst, Foxglove, is a coma patient. Energy to do magic will need to be addressed explicitly [Reference Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files]: quantum levels, brain wave types, emotions, and the ability to stay at the highest levels of Astra takes effort. Why do people need to eat in Astra? How do injuries heal? Can death or spells in dream cause negative effects in real life?

The final issue has to do with personal space in this shared continuum. Important people have a castle or lair that they impose on the continuum and maintain with the force of their personality. Monsters are both more powerful and more vulnerable in this place. The villain at the end can be defeated in his tower, but has the ability to hold the heroes captive inside. Just willing themselves awake won’t free them. They certainly can’t do it by the end of the ceremony.

All of this has to be hammered out in painful detail in advance for the arc to work. Once the legwork is done, I can order the scenes and layout the plot almost to the chapter. Because this is an e-book fantasy, my target is three-page, single-spaced chapters of 2000+ words each. Given our length, that makes about thirty chapters. Ahead of time, I sort the notes into rough bins based on order of occurrence/introduction.

      After all this, the actual story-writing begins. Because I write fairly fast, a first draft for a book of this length should only take two months for me to write. Then, I add two months for the beta readers and editors to give feedback and to polish the results. While they read, I pick images to tell the story on the cover of the book. If I started today, this story could be out in six months of hard work, but I’d have to reserve my free-lance experts now to guarantee my time slots.

Four Different Ways to Rate a Book

On the social networking site authonomy, I noticed something fast. Authors (including me) seldom know what's going to sell. The ratings for my books on that site were inversely proportional to the real sales. Nonetheless, over the course of your career as a writer, you can use feedback to adapt.

The 5 star method Amazon and Goodreads uses doesn't mean much to an author either. It doesn't tell us what we need to change to make a better product. Of course, the review contents can be helpful, but only if the criticism is specific and the audience wasn't misidentified. Indeed, what the current review system tells me most is, "Did I hit my audience with the pitch and categories?" Someone once mis-tagged one of my books BDSM, and those people are quick to complain when you don't show them what they're expecting! The same is true of any genre. A book I sent to a romance blog earned a D rating, but she admitted she couldn't put it down. When I moved the book to action + high-tech, it hit the top 40.

However, steering your writing career on this alone is like picking a church by the length of its name. Here are some other unusual metrics that tell me things.

1) How much does it sell in the first day of the giveaway? The second day, if you're in the top ten in your category, people will "me too". The first day tells you your curb appeal, or hit ratio: gawkers to buyers, the thing that will sell the most of your book. As a rule of thumb, the number of free copies (on a Monday for my genres) correlates to how many copies a book will sell in the first year, unless it hits one of the top hundred lists. My goal is to tweak the pitch (or even cover) until the sales exceed 600 and I hit the free top ten in my category before 5:00 pm. Otherwise, the book will never pay for itself.

2) How many people who read this book rate it? I'm not talking the professional reviewers (1 percent of those contacted) or Amazon giveaways (those people are like one-night stands who never call), I mean actual sales. My favorite book I wrote gets about one review for every 14 purchases. I won't list which of my books I pulled these stats from, but the review rate (in my opinion) tells you the true number of stars--how does it spur people to respond and share with others.
5 stars = 1 out of every 13
4 stars = 1 out of every 50
3 stars = 1 out of ever 200
Notice the linear pattern? Now, I want to say something important. There is nothing wrong with a professionally-polished three star book. With the proper marketing, it can feed you nicely, but it's cotton candy, not "To Kill a Mockingbird."

3) How many people buy the sequel? Because, abashedly, the only way I know of as a mid-level writer to make a living writing is with the series effect. In my genres, a series will sell 10 to 14 times more than a standalone. Plan accordingly. The quality of the experience with book one will correlate to how many people buy the next. Your mileage may vary.
5 stars = almost 100 percent comeback, and they read your other books too!
4 stars = 70 percent comeback.
3 stars = 25 percent comeback.
It doesn't matter much if number three in the series is a filet if number one is and overcooked hamburger.

4) Returned books tell you something when there's no free giveaway that month--probably how good your hook is or how well you represented the true story in your pitch. If you have more than one return a month for a title, look for something in the first three chapters that gave someone the excuse to say no.

Rewrites

When someone writes a book, a good one goes through a lot of revisions. Every time there's a major change, or I hand a draft to an editor, I bump the version number. This helps with merging later, and theoretically, if something leaks it to the web, I know who did it. I don't mistrust anyone I work with, but Stephanie Meyer had this problem with a planned Twilight book from Edward's POV. The thing people wonder is--how can there be twenty versions of a story? One word--rewrites. I'm not OCD or ADHD. This normal for a writer. Let's count, shall we?

RAW: The first draft captures the note, the tuning fork tone I hear in my head. This version is about running, getting the arc of the story out as fast and accurately as I can. I've had instructors in short story that told me to throw everything out after this draft and recreate from scratch. I don't buy that unless the original is really short and bad. More often, it's just a gem than needs to be polished and shaped.

FIRST READ: Since I only write about a single spaced page an hour, a chapter could take two days.
The next day, I comb through the first half of the chapter for embarrassing, obvious mistakes as I recapture the sound of the note in my head. Sometimes, something that SOUNDED good coming out will be an OMG, I'm glad nobody else saw that. This is okay--the first pass is about raw emotion and drive, not perfection. Repeated phrases, missing vital descriptions, lame names, and most brain-fart grammar gets caught here.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: As my subconscious chews on something, more details arise. For example, the types of crops growing in an area, the weapons and training of an assassin, the affect of empathic abilities on a person's relationships, etc. As I think of these, anything significant gets written at the end of the file, after the ###. Often, when I have fast action later, I want to walk the reader through the area once in slow motion so they know what everything is. That means a discussion about quantum locking, the dangers of wand over-reliance, etc. When I have enough major points saved up, usually on a Monday morning or a particularly long after-midnight note session, I back insert.

RETRACKING: I continue like this until either a) family interrupts the flow for several days or b) I hit a snarl where something doesn't feel right anymore. Then I reread from the beginning of this act/section, up to 100 pages, and fix small things while I search for the problem. This is realigning to the story arc/character baseline. It's like a plumb line held up to a wall. Most often, the fix involves throwing out the last half a chapter. While I'm here, I smooth out any bumps caused by afterthoughts. I always renumber and save both versions here.

COMPLETION: When I finish the complete book, I walk through the entire story, knowing what happened. Does it flow well? Sometimes I rearrange or split chapters. Whole scenes get clipped here. Then I reread for grammar/spelling/line-edits.

WIFE: I hand this version off to my wife and get her opinion. The count is usually at v6 by the time she's done.

CONTENT/DEVELOPMENT EDITOR: the person who looks at big-picture items gives me their opinion, and I adjust. v7

LINE EDITOR: Katy makes her first pass to fix details like spelling, grammar, formatting, and technical gaffs. She's very fast and invaluable, but I have to schedule her three months in advance. I do this first because, otherwise, the beta folks waste time finding grammar mistakes. v8

PITCH HONING/MAPS/SAMPLES: When I write the pitch for the story in preparation for the cover art, luring beta readers, and the snippets I would post on web sites, I sometimes tighten and polish subsections. Sometimes the cover design or a thorough map might require a tweak in the text. Instead of calling it the capital city of Intaglios, I now say "Fireton". The title is the most common change this late in the game, as it can make or break sales. v9

BETA-READERS: I don't like to release a book before five sets of eyes have seen it. That means at least two people who like this genre need to read the work, preferably four. This can take up to two months, depending on schedules of the volunteers. I bump the revision number after every set of comments. v10-13

WAITING: While I'm waiting for the others to respond, after a month on another project, I'll go back with a fresher set of eyes and adjust. Often, a scene that I loved when I wrote the book, even one that drove the whole project, gets cut here because it slows down the pace. By now, I'm holding the whole book in my head and think about it as I'm drifting off at night. I'll send out emails asking which variation people prefer. My editor and my wife want to use a tranq gun. v14

FINAL LINE EDIT: Katy makes another cleanup pass to fix problems I introduced while fixing other problems. I usually copyright this version. v15

E-PUBLISH: During the Amazon verification process, I often find small problems or adjust front matter/table of contents. v16

PAPERBACK: While formatting the paperback, I often find more quirks: unwanted spaces, indents, missing chapter numbers. v17

GIVEAWAY: The eve of the giveaway or release party, someone inevitably points out something to me. You used the N word here, the newspaper name is wrong, England uses pounds not euros. v18

SEQUEL: Before I write a sequel to a story, I reread (taking notes) to keep all the original in my head. I always find a few mistakes. I'm careful not to revise history, but I've been known to drop an excess adjective or adverb to give myself wiggle room. v19

ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY: After the story has been out for a year, I almost always reread. I have enough distance now to judge better, and I've learned a lot more about writing. It's a matter of pride. I usually cut 1000 words and fix three mistakes. v20

There you go, twenty versions, perfectly normal, nothing to see here. Move along.

Stairway to Heaven and Doorway to Winter

I just wrote the first third of "Sanctuary", book 3 of Jezebel's Ladder. I tried to follow a piece of advice I read from Steven Brust. "Don't explain why the magic works; tell me how to use it." Science on this level feels like magic. The main character finds thousands of meter-high dominoes that are levitating, frozen in place by an effect called "quantum locking." This part is true; you can watch the TED demonstration. What I provide is a button the main character can push to "unlock" the domino. Whenever it's switched back on, it freezes wherever it was placed--the ultimate engineering Legos. Mercy eventually uses this effect to build a staircase down from the main saucer into the fog "above".  She transforms from an insecure engineer to a techno wizard with her own niche. With the push of a button in the control room, she can reset them all to the original memory location. The landing zone is dubbed "Zeppelin Point." In this way, the astronauts who follow can explore the interior of the 2km sphere they name Sanctuary that has its own biosphere--rivers, caves, trees, fish, bugs, and pheasants. Fifty people could live indefinitely in this Eden.

I tried to keep the tone of the Heinlein teen space books like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Tunnel in the Sky." The universe is filled with equal parts danger and wonder. After a space battle and chase, we establish the rules for travel below Einstein's rubber sheet. I just sent that act out for edit. Now I'm writing the fall.

In subspace, the sunlight goes out, and in the artificial winter night, one of the astronauts yields to their darker nature. (Sound track is music from a celebration they throw--Smooth Criminal performed by Alien Ant Farm.) A crime is committed, and Mercy has to determine what happened and who is responsible before the aliens will let them continue their journey. This section explores the landscape of the ship as well as the team. Everyone has something to hide, and several team members are disabled by disasters.

Point of View Sample

Three of my books lost ALL their category labels when I updated them for a January giveaway. Evidently Amazon had serious problems with this issue in December. Without categories, people couldn't find those books easily to buy them. Fortunately, Weston Kincade pointed the problem out and sales have already gone back up. I was pleasantly surprised to see the new feature sharing what people highlight and post to Facebook from their Kindles. Seeing what people value in my writing is a real encouragement.

As a work in progress, Sanctuary, the third book in the Jezebel series, has been all about Point of View. Each chapter is about six single-spaced pages, beginning with a paragraph or two about the person providing our lens. Each chapter in the first section is roughly another hour along the action-packed timeline around our landing on the alien artifact and is designed to show how the ripples from this event spread outward.

With so little time to show a 3D character, statements with my opinion aren't effective; rather, I have to paint a picture that people react to--what the character really feels when no one is watching (other than the reader). One scientist will begin his POV with an offensive joke, summing up his mental state and frustration. Another complains about how becoming an astronaut specialist has "ruined her life" by reducing the amount of time she can spend on her real job--giving us free rein to debate the issue and describe what's happened in that life. The lens colors everything I communicate to the reader, giving opportunity to praise or judge each actor.

Here is an example from a returning character from the last two Jezebel books, code named Bermuda Triangle. The main characters literally can't risk turning their backs on her. I wanted to convey the image of someone who watches the heroes like a snake watches a bird. To her, global tragedy is just another factor in the stock market ticker. I want my ex-roomie Ron to shout, "Look out, she's behind the door!"

Amanda Mori, wife of the billionaire electronic magnate, took her entourage of bodyguards and assistants to an obscure base in the Antarctic to visit her daughter. It would be her first visit to the peaceful dome habitat known as Ward 8. Her husband, disappointed by his only heir, refused to go along to such a remote and depressing place. She only considered going because, three days ago, Kaguya’s personal nurse had sent a photo of her patient smiling. After a year of near vegetation, the change might signal an improvement in the young woman’s condition. Amanda never left important missions to others. If anyone could snap Kaguya out of this page-induced isolation, it would be her mother.

The hardest part of the expedition wasn’t deicing the vertical takeoff craft, or dodging assassins. No, for Amanda it was deciding what to wear. Since her husband joined the board of Fortune Enterprises, there would be reporters at every airport along her route. She’d alienated several of the photographers in the past. Since her role in the company had shifted from bodyguard to ambassador, fashion was crucial. She started with basic New York City tights to accentuate her still-firm legs and butt. Deep snow required knee-high boots. Cold meant layers: blouse, sweater, and a thick coat that went down to her boots. Throw in a few accessories: a weighted scarf for blocking or choking, satellite uplink earrings, and a light-weight Baretta with an extra clip of explosive tips. Perfect. She had her makeup and hair done on the plane ride to match the outfit and look more motherly.

cover reveal "Clean and Floss" plus real lasers

Renee just sent me the cover for my comedy/horror story "Clean and Floss".

Clearly, there's a lot of action going on here, just like the story.
About every three chapters, there's a new incident: car crash, SWAT officer, and then we slow down for a vampire in the basement of a British museum. Through it all, Nick Solace is an unflappable cleaner, ridding the world of any evidence of the supernatural...because there are no such things as monsters.

Book three of my Science Fiction series Jezebel's Ladder, Sanctuary, is going slowly but well. I wrote three chapters of sketch to capture the arc and point of view, expecting most of the battle to be over in two hours. Then I did research on the huge number of space launch sites, the number of satellites and space stations likely in ten years, speeds of missiles, and the range of beam weapons. One push of a button cascades to about five days of weapons exchanged in several waves. I had to plot out the location of ground stations, suborbital launch planes, geo-synchronous satellites, L1, and a couple of planned moon bases. COIL lasers, for example, at around 100kw, can knock out a missile at up to 20 km away. However, moving at mach 20, this only gives the gunner ten seconds to lock and unload. Next, I layered in signal and software warfare. Lastly, exo-skeleton and bio-enhanced hand to hand in spacesuits and drone moon buggies. These chapters will expand into several, interleaved as the heroes try to penetrate deep into the alien artifact.