A Novel Ending

A funny thing happened on the way to the ending…

I’m loving my new being-an-author career, despite my inability to earn a living from it. (Yet?)

One of the things I enjoy is that each book feels like it comes with its own unique challenges.  I hope that means I’m learning as I go along.

For the current book in my Leeth Dossier series, Lost Girl (#5), there were two challenges.  The first was my feeling that on the subject of plot, I fly too much by the seat of my pants, so the whole journey from start to end is like a billy-cart racing downhill out of control.  Exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking.

Looking back through my revision control files, I deduce I started writing the Lost Girl segment of the story back in Apr/May 2009.  I wrote a chunk more in Jan 2015 before posting the chapters for review on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror over a few months and receiving valuable feedback.  By Oct 2015 it had grown to about 25,000 words.  I think that was when I set it aside to devote all my energy to completing the earlier books in the series.

That took five years.

So, for book #5 I was starting with a broad idea of the story, 25,000 words of draft, and thanks to a discussion with Jon Marshall one night, a good feeling for the theme of the novel.  I also wanted to try a hybrid approach to plotting.

Pantser or Plotter?

I love the organic surprises and creativity that comes from flying by the seat of my pants, but at the same time, having watched his video Misconceptions About Rewriting, and from my own experience in algorithmic development, I deeply understood the value in at least high-level planning.  So I hoped that creating the bones of a plot might work well, since it would only be a sketchy outline and thus pretty painless to change it if the story started going in a different direction.

I started reading John Truby’s “The Anatomy of Story” in early 2019, reaching a quarter of the way through before getting distracted. (I see there’s also a video interview here.)  The book and advice is fine, but it wasn’t sparking any flames for me and I set it aside.  (I do intend to return to it and finish reading it though.)

I’d downloaded a free writing book from Daniel David Wallace titled “How to Write Better Sentences”, and watched some of his videos, and liked them, so when he offered a course on his character-driven plotting course in December 2019 I decided to sign up for it.  I did that diligently from mid Dec 2019 to end of Jan 2020, and was very happy with the outcome.  I had lots of ideas for how the plot would unfold, all of course driven by the characters, which is how I have to write.

The problem that remained was that I only had a satisfying end.  I think you also need the ending to be unpredictable.  I (still) don’t know how you plan that.  For me it’s just happened by luck or inspiration, and I was still in the same position, lacking that final piece of the puzzle.

As I’ve written on several occasions now, I’ve really come to trust Unconscious Thought Theory.  It’s an excellent way to use the full power of your mind and surprise yourself.  So I carried on writing, always with the lightly-plotted ending in mind, and things flowed along pretty well.

Now, because the World Science Fiction Convention was to be held in New Zealand in July/Aug 2020, a place I’d wanted to visit and a convention that seems exciting, I planned to attend.  I booked my travel and accommodation, with the goal of publishing the book late July and maybe even launching it or promoting it in some way at the WorldCon.  To do that I needed to send the MS to Dave at ThEditors.com by E/April.

So I was trying hard to meet a deadline of E/March to have a good 1^st draft of the MS.  I was extremely lucky to be little affected by the unprecedented Australian bushfires of 2019, but no one could remain unmoved by those events - from the heroism of our fireys and communities ( (even this Aussie speculative fiction anthology put together for fire charities: Stories of Hope), to the jaw-dropping failures of our so-called political leader to actually lead.

There was also the ongoing drama of the Democratic run-up toward the 2020 US presidential election, which I had grown addicted to (since the US has an inordinate impact on world affairs, and I could see what a turning point the 2020 election could be, with luck).  Then of course, the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, making the insignificance of my own efforts even clearer.  Now, I may not be as stubborn as Leeth, but I am stubborn, so I carried on.

Like the period after the death of my wife Stella in Dec 2014, my writing sustained me and kept me positive. So for that reason as much as any I stuck to my plans.

Which brings me to the part of the story which most surprised me — and in the end delighted me.

How did it go in the end?

Approaching my deadline, I had set myself a (120,000) word count limit to try to hold myself to, to keep the book a manageable size for all concerned.  And as the days fell away and March 31 approached, it looked like I might just do it.  But when the days dropped from three to two to one and I arrived at the cusp of the ending, I’d run out of time and still didn’t know fully what the ending would be.

Partly this was just having confidence in my unconscious to pull a rabbit out of the hat; partly it was the belief that if I didn’t know what the ending would be, it might mean that when (if?) it did arrive it would also surprise a reader; and partly it was having faith in my characters.  I also had an interesting mix of actors there at the ending.  There was the potential to have… (counting…) seven major players in the scene at the end.  Unfortunately that meant there was a huge range of ways the ending could play out.

So I think there was a certain amount of choice-paralysis at work, although it’s also possible my unconscious was simply beavering away at the complex problem I’d set it.  Of course I was also worried I might not be able to pull it off at all.  Would the ending be good enough?  I didn’t want just an exciting one, I wanted it to have emotional depth too.  So the stakes felt high to me.

And still I couldn’t seem to make much progress.  Here’s how the last several days went:

March 29: Had reached the climactic scene — I mean, all the players were on stage together.
March 30: Wrote 3700 words of the scene.
March 31: Day off, visiting Mum.
April 1: (astute readers will see this is after E/Mar) Strangely blocked, until I forced myself to design the physical location. Then: +600 words.
April 2: Wrote 3,600 words and halfway through the “action” part of the ending.
April 3: Finished the “action” part (wrote 1000 words).
April 4: Still didn’t know how it would end. I simply considered each actor and let them do their thing. Various agendas in play, conflicting, and stage fully set and conducive to just letting the movie roll. Each one being clever and true to themselves, a dramatic race to the finish with real challenges and emotional drama. At the very end of the day (11:50pm), I felt delighted. My characters had thrilled me and moved me. I’d been biting my nails more than once, and in tears more than once. 5,100 words and the MS was basically complete.

I’ve never experienced anything like that last day.  My feeling was one of excitement and satisfaction.  I made some small additions while cooking dinner (9pm), and when I sat down with it I realised I didn’t want to watch any TV as I ate, I instead wanted to dwell on those final scenes, to savour and digest it all.  I suppose it felt a bit like I’d just stepped off an emotional roller-coaster!

I still have thirty one small gaps to fill or issues to check, and then lots of work to polish it up enough to be ready to send to my editor, so I can’t really relax much yet.  But the weight on my shoulders of finishing that critical 1^st draft, and perhaps as importantly, writing a ‘good’ ending, is over.  So a lot of unacknowledged stress has fallen away, and I must say I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

I’ve written this because the experience felt really special, and I wanted to capture it. It was nothing like I’d had for the previous books.  Once again, I feel I learned a lot.  My fingers are crossed in the hope that readers will have the same opinion!

Stuffing things up

Well, this is a pretty embarrassing blog article to be writing, but it's an important public service announcement. I stuffed up.

Here's the executive summary of how it affects people who want to read Shadow Hunt (vol 3 in The Leeth Dossier): please wait an extra day before you start reading it. If you pre-ordered it, please wait for an email from Amazon telling you that a new version is available.

Here's why….

I made Shadow Hunt available for pre-order on Amazon (April 30^th, 2017), uploading the draft I had a month earlier (March 26th), while I was working through my editor's 2nd and final critique. (Or 3^rd, or 4^th, if you include the two earlier book splits!) I thought five weeks would give me a comfortable period — comfortable enough to even allow me to attend the sci-fi/fantasy convention SwanCon, in Perth, and spend a couple of days extra seeing the sights.

Which would have been all well and good if I hadn't made a couple of other errors. The first was not checking the details of when I needed to upload the final version of the book: I assumed the day before. In hindsight this was remarkably stupid, because naturally Amazon needs extra time to check the book carefully before launch. (In fact, they need 72 hours.) My second big mistake was a really stupid failure of basic arithmetic: 30 minus 3 = 27, not 28, right? Yeah, well my brain did the sum this way instead "Let's see: 30, 29, 28: that's three days. So, April 28 is the deadline."

Don't ask. Even I don't see how I could have made that error. Partly it was wishful thinking that the time counted from the end of April 30^th, not the start of the day! D'oh!

Maybe by this time I was getting tired, too, because my editing of vol 3 was taking longer than I had expected. Anyway, I completed all my edits and did my 1^st polish of the new parts, and then the 2^nd polish (a bit rushed, I admit), and sat down one hour before the deadline (I thought) to convert the book to Amazon's format and upload it. I finished that with ten minutes to spare (again: I thought) and then tried to upload. Bzzt: "locked for pre-order release checks."

Uh oh.

It was only then that I realised my stuff-up. I contacted Amazon, but there was nothing they could do: my choices were either to cancel the pre-order at the last minute (and thus prove I couldn't be trusted with the ability to manage a pre-order for a period of 12 months), or upload the revised version with the usual detailed description of changes, and request Amazon to push out an offer to all existing purchasers that a new version is available.

So I chose that 2^nd option. This means that the draft copy will only be there for a short period after the pre-order date (a day, I hope), and that people who pre-ordered will soon get the updated version.

The draft version that ‘escaped' can be distinguished from the final version in many ways:

At the end of the table of contents, the release version is noted as "pre-4" — not "1".

The Prologue is inside Part I — instead of coming just before it.

The book is 141,854 words long — not 149,450. (Yes, this is despite cutting about 10k words, too.)

The draft version has 79 chapters (+epilogue) — not 82 (+epilogue).

Something like 2,000 other changes, big and small. I won't enumerate them here, but one small example in the prologue is the changing of the sentence that begins "Yet thanks to it, no one would expect to find human remains" to "Yet thanks to it, with no bodies to be found".

I'm not going to mention any of the bigger changes, because they'd be spoilers, but for the 30 days or so following my upload of my late draft version to Amazon, I think I averaged about 9-10 hours per day working on improving the book. The changes were based on Dave's critique and some extra Q&A with him, an early beta read by a friend as those changes neared completion (thanks, Jon!), and feedback from two beta readers (Sandra, AndyK) to try to resolve a key point. So parts of the plot are strengthened, there are fewer errors and questionable parts (it all makes more sense), and is just generally vastly improved, thanks to all the feedback.

At this point I should also add that on one point, Dave and I couldn't agree (but neither of us were sure any more who was right). I also couldn't reach consensus by the beta readers. I vacillated for a while, but in the end, trusted my gut. So don't blame Dave if there's some thing (or things) about the book which you feel could have been improved: you've no doubt found a place where I didn't follow his advice!

Book 3 – Shadow Hunt – is almost ready

Still alive!

I've been silent so long (October last year!), because I've been working very hard on book three, so I thought I'd make the time to offer a short update.

When will it be published?

I wrote in the Afterword of Book 2 that I was confident I'd have Book 3 ready early in 2017. I've been trying very hard to publish the ebook by mid-March. Right now I'm getting some much-delayed other book-related work done while I wait to receive the detailed critique of the 2^nd half of Shadow Hunt from Dave at TheEditors.com — I should get that today or tomorrow. If I can manage to average 15pp/day then I'll have the updated draft ready about Feb 28. I'll then spend a week to 10 days checking and re-checking that, then upload it to Amazon. If I can manage 20pp/day, then it will be ready earlier, obviously.

I'm doing my best, and working very hard. I finished writing and polishing the draft and sent it to Dave at the end of 2016 (in two parts: 1^st half on Nov 28^th, and the 2^nd half on Dec 3^rd).

Shadow Hunt cover

Mirella, too, has been hard at work on the cover design, working from a brief I prepared last year. This image, below, is not final, and maybe I shouldn't include it... but I just can't resist giving you a sneak peek, even though it's not quite finished. (It will change just a little, but I love it already!)

(You can see the final cover over on my other blog.)

Some nitty-gritty

Dave's critique has been invaluable, as ever. We spent some time discussing his key recommendations at a high level, and I sketched out a plan, and then sat down and worked my way through chapter by chapter. I also received very helpful feedback from Jon Marshall (again!) as a beta reader of the same MS, and he found several important problems and oversights (fortunately, none hard to correct).

Incidentally, the reason for breaking the critique in two was purely a time-saving method: I could get started on the first half while Dave continued on the second half. This was only possible because he'd sort of already critiqued the whole thing twice before, because the MS has been split in two twice from Dave's feedback (that's not counting once, before, based on my own assessment). A side benefit of splitting it in two is also purely mechanical: the powerful, free word processor I use, LibreOffice, becomes unusable when the number of comments in a file exceeds about 1,500. (It must have what's called an order N² algorithm in its handling of comments, which is a fancy way of saying the time it takes to do anything rises as sharply as the up-sweeping arm of a parabola!) As it stands, before I start deleting comments, LibreOffice takes about 15 — 20 seconds just to respond to a menu click. I've added to the problem report (bug 60418), and it's on their list of things to consider. But it's not considered a big problem.

ISBNs & CiP

Today I logged in to Thorpe-Bowker to assign ISBNs to the ebook and the print edition. Armed with the correct ISBNs, I then visited the National Library of Australia website to request a Cataloguing in Publication entry for three editions of Shadow Hunt (the ebook, the 5"x8" edition, and the 4"x7"). But again, all three 4"x7" editions are on hold until I can find a workaround for another bug in LibreOffice, that messes up the page headers. (Bug 103078)

About Vol. 3

Shadow Hunt is currently a little longer than the 1^st, Wild Thing, though Dave is recommending I cut 30 pages from one 100-page stretch. If I manage to do that, it's shaping up to be the same length as Wild Thing. I'm very happy with how the book turned out (is turning out?).

April plans

I'm also planning to attend the SwanCon this year (I've never visited Perth)! It's billed as "Australia’s longest running Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction Convention".

My next blog posts here will probably cover these topics:

• Break up that indigestible previous blog that covered too much in too much detail
• a quick intro to Scribus for preparing your book covers, given a brilliant cover design as your starting point
• setting up your Youtube author channel (mine is here)
• a rant about the new publishing world.

Over on my other blog, All About Leeth, I plan to post a Q&A from a fan (yes — I have a fan!) about the series, and especially about Harmon and Leeth's relationship.

I think that covers thing. Now to press on with some other work — like finalising the blurb, and more polishing of the new parts I've written over the last few weeks. I'm doing my best!

Brief status report

A nice lady (Amorina Rose and the world of writing with help from friends) was kind enough to enquire if everything was okay, since I'd gone quiet on this blog. And since I'd publicly declared my intention of publishing in mid-November, I needed to 'fess up and admit that I'd slipped yet another deadline. :-(

So, yes, everything is going very well, in fact. I have a few blog articles I need to write (soon), but my absolute top priority now is getting my book ready for publishing. And that's what I've been doing, and why I haven't blogged for a while. (Strewth: for three weeks!)

In some ways, I've found this round of editing and revising to be harder than the last one. That surprised me. I thought it couldn't very well be more challenging than inventing a major new plot element that fit seamlessly while turning the 1st half of the story into a properly-satisfying novel in its own right - and then writing the 60k words to Make It So. Right?

But Dave at thEditors did another amazing job of critiquing the new version of the 1st-half of the story, now a book-in-itself. Once again, at every level. Which meant I needed not just a bunch of new scenes (about 30k wds, probably more than Dave intended), and having to come to grips with cutting a lot (about 18k wds, probably less than Dave intended!), too; but also addressing I guess somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 line-comments in the MS itself. Covering the range from "dead easy, a few seconds work", to "Hmm, yeah... several hours later...". Along with some major shuffling of scenes and even chapters, which left me in a tangled mess at one point, that took a whole day to straighten out.

From which I've come to suspect that each external-edit will be unique, and bring its own unique challenges. But I'm going to take that as a sign that I'm learning, actually: that I'm finding new mistakes to make, and beginning to see things that were invisible to me before - with Dave's help. (The new things, that is: not the mistakes!)

So I've taken forty minutes to post this quick update. I've addressed all Dave's comments, as best I can, though there are now a bunch of return questions for him. And I'm about 25% of the way through my first polish of all the new (first draft) scenes and snippets I've added. Then will come a day or two of proofreading/polishing, then I'll see what Dave thinks about my remaining questions.

While doing that (and reporting bugs in LibreOffice: none catastrophic), and getting the new (final) cover from Mirella (yay!), and changing my author name from "Luke J. Kendall" to "L. J. Kendall", I realised I couldn't meet my mid-November deadline. But when I sat down and roughly scheduled the next few weeks, I saw that if I aimed to publish now on the anniversary of my wife's death last year, the 11th of December, that would be nicely fitting - as well as giving me a couple of extra days just-in-case.

So that's the new plan, and I really, really don't want to miss that one. But I have a good feeling about this deadline.

Oh, and in the end, despite the more fiery cover with the more vicious dog being better artistically and probably a better choice from the marketing viewpoint, in the end I chose the truer cover which better reflects the story. After all, since I'm self-publishing, I can hardly claim "Sorry, guv'nor. That's the Marketing Department: nothing to do with me, guv'nor!"

Here they are - front:

Grr, Blogger bug? What about if I insert that in a smaller size?...

Okay, no go. How about if I upload it directly...?

and back:

Now: back to work!