Tagged: Divided Man Series

Less is More

There’s a certain joy that comes from being in total agreement with someone, and we recently got to experience it a whole lot. During last week’s lengthy power outage, we whiled away hours and hours listening to an audio book, and holy shit you guys, it was terrible. It was way too long, and the focus was on all the wrong parts of the story. We had to stop the book numerous times to voice our many objections.

This book was painful for us, but it did spark some fun discussions. They weren’t arguments because we were in fierce, burning agreement. But we were both quite passionate, and voices were raised. It was cathartic.

Also educational.

As we mentioned recently, we struggled a little bit with just how much spectacle we wanted in the finale we were editing. The dust had settled, the darlings were buried, the ego-bruises were being iced, and then we listened to this load of hooey and suddenly felt much more confident about the amount we cut.

The protagonist in this audio book finds himself alone in an allegedly spooky setting, and proceeds to run around for what felt like hours and hours of listening time, not interacting with anyone else. It’s just this seemingly endless string of “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” and it carried all the excitement you would expect from a stranger on the bus telling you about the dream they had last night.

It taught us to use care when sending a protagonist off on a solo mission. Most compelling conflicts arise between characters, so with only one character on the page you’re setting yourself a challenge to hold reader interest. They say getting there is half the fun, but we needed to make sure that the journey didn’t overshadow the destination and what happened there. And now we’re in fierce agreement that we’ve got the right balance.

Victory!

We talked a few weeks ago about Jen’s obsession with size. Ahem. Let’s try that again. A few weeks ago we talked about Jen’s preference for all of the books in a series (and all of the chapters in a book) being approximately the same size. It’s a battle she’s been fighting on two fronts: trying to make Son of Science Novel big enough while simultaneously trying to make the third Divided Man book small enough.

But now we have a victory to announce! Huzzah! While the two of us work on writing SoSN at night, Jen’s spent her daytime hours taking her machete and blowtorch to Elsewhere’s Twin. Being third in line it’s had fewer editing passes, and it shows. Well, showed. It was too long, which in addition to making Jen’s eye twitch, meant it wasn’t the best book it could be. Now it’s had a trim and is 21,000 words shorter which puts it right in line with its two siblings in the series, and gives Jen a warm fuzzy feeling.

For the most part the edits were non-controversial, even if they were kind of major. For instance, there are now two fewer characters. We lopped out a couple of scenes. At least one scene got its point of view reassigned which meant Kent got to do a full rewrite. It’s been a whole thing. Even with all of that, most of our darlings escaped the firing squad.

That is, up until the final couple of chapters.

The finale in this one is kind of huge and there was disagreement in the writing cave about the desired degree of spectacle. Everyone’s favorite intrepid coauthors had hoped to have these edits done before last weekend’s planned family madness, but that didn’t happen. So we set it aside with every intention of diving in on Monday and finishing it up. Mother Nature had other plans though, and we lost power for 47 1/2 hours. Not that we were counting.

So, in addition to falling behind on email, and losing our 400+ day streaks in Duolingo, we lost all momentum on our writing projects. Grumble grumble.

But now we’re back on track. Kent got out his own machete and we menaced each other over the penultimate chapter, which is now resting comfortably. Neither of us sustained any lasting damage. The manuscript is still in need of smoothing and fine-tuning, which we’ll address in a month or so. Our publishing schedule leaves us time for at least two more drafts, and we’ll definitely take advantage of that.

We do it all for you, dear reader. All for you.

Yin And Yang

Good prose is often described as “efficient.” Eliminating extra words helps the reader by letting the author get out of the way.

Conversely, “designed by engineers” is, at best, a backhanded compliment.

Your text has many jobs to do, but it can all be summed up in terms of form and function. Functionally, text must convey a semantic payload. That is, meaning with a little m. On the flipside, the form of the message is your style. It’s the flavor that makes your work uniquely yours. Both are important: have something worth saying, and then say it well.

Where to draw the line between spare and terse is subjective. It’s also genre-dependent, and at the mercy of fashion There is no one right answer. Writing clean isn’t about brinksmanship, skimming the event horizon of a flat voice. It’s about not burying the message under ten feet of fluff. (Or substituting prolix phraseology for actual content.)

Blurry lines become a bigger concern when you write with a partner. What if one of you suggests taking out “some extra words,” referring to a passage that’s essential to the other’s identity as a human being? Not that it’s been that extreme, but this issue is relevant in the writing cave lately. Jen is nearly three-quarters of the way through an editing pass on Book Three of the Divided Man series, and it’s a manuscript that hasn’t been workshopped as much as the other two. Translation: there’s a lot of cutting to do. Kent is, for the most part, on board with those cuts. Really, 99+% of them are things he agrees with, even when the overabundant descriptors being excised are things he lovingly placed there to begin with. When it comes to that sub-one-percent, though, he takes a stand.

Your writing partner can help you rein in your verbosity, or provide the missing sizzle for the steak. You can do the same for her.

The Circle of Life

Earlier this week we launched our latest book. It’s called Tenpenny Zen — perhaps you’ve heard of it? Now that all of the champagne corks have been swept up and the fancy alcoholic milkshakes have been drunk, it’s time to look ahead.

As we’ve mentioned in other posts, it’s important for us to keep several projects in motion. When a draft of a novel is resting before editing (or between editing passes) we need to have different works to turn our minds to. Publishing the Divided Man Series means we have less fodder for that. We’re currently sitting on 4 novels that are at least at the first draft stage, so we’re not in danger of running out. Yet.

But as Jen finishes up the major edits of the final Divided Man book and we look ahead to pushing it out into the world this fall, we start to become a little bit nervous. If we don’t plan ahead, we will run out of finished novels to rotate between.

For quite a few months (in between editing and polishing the Divided Man books, and designing their covers, as well as writing Son of Science Novel) we’ve been batting around ideas for our next story world. The Divided Man books are done, at least for now. The Science Novel series is plotted to the end, and that’s what we’re working on. The Music Novel series is 2/3 done. What comes next?

I hope it’s not too spoilery if we say Ghosts. Ghosts are next. We’re both drawn to the general concept of a ghost story, but it took a lot of brainstorming to figure out how to put the Rune Skelley twist on it. We don’t want to tell a standard ghost story. There are a lot of writers out there who do that very well. So how to take some of those tropes and make them our own?

As is often the case with us, inspiration came from an unusual source. In this case, an article on Cracked. We’re obviously not going to say here what the article was about, but when Jen read it, a whole Vegas Strip’s worth of lightbulbs went off. There were a few fascinating nuggets in the article that acted as a catalyst to bring together almost all of the nebulous ideas we had floating around. It all crystalized into the most beautifully twisted story world. Jen typed it up and sent it off to Kent at work, and it sparked his fevered imagination, too.

We spent a good chunk of time that should probably have been spent writing Son of Science Novel bouncing ideas off each other and getting very excited. It felt great!

The circle of life continues.

Tenpenny Zen – First Chapter Sneak Peek

Tenpenny Zen won’t make its illustrious debut until Monday, March 20. That’s an agonizing 3 days away! We know that you will spend your weekend at home, staring at the clock, desperate for something — anything! — to make the time pass faster.

Don’t fret, faithful reader. Rune Skelley has your back. Here, for the eyes of none but the elite minority of humans known as “Internet Users,” is a sneak preview of Chapter One of Tenpenny Zen. Treat it as the holy relic it is, read it over and over until you have memorized every word, and then, come Monday, you will be primed for the full experience.

Dig in!

Tenpenny Zen

a novel of sex, cults, and an interdimensional henge contraption

Chapter One: Nice Town

Control subject EE may be exhibiting the traits we hoped to see in Group Sigma. Work continues toward establishing a reliable set of tests and measures for subject EE, but several measures are already in place, including surveillance gear in the school and the house.

Project Lullaby archives, 1962

JUNE 1973

Strapped down on her back on a black slab, Ester Elizabeth Finch felt like the dead frog from last year’s biology class. At least this year she’d be taking chemistry. Plus she’d turn 18 in November and her dad could no longer drag her to this asinine research program.

At first today seemed like the same familiar nonsense. Friendly but vaguely creepy men in white coats wanting her to guess what playing cards they held, make the marble roll, tell them what color light was shining on her hand within a box. Hypnotizing her and interviewing her about weird stuff she didn’t know while a lie-detector ran off its record of the answers she made up.

But then they wanted to give her a physical. A complete physical.

They apologized that no female nurses had clearance to examine her. When the doctor left, she couldn’t find her clothes. She was still wearing the stupid hospital gown.

Next they told her they needed a scan. It was a very sensitive machine. Any little movement would mess it up, so they needed to strap her down. They attached electrodes to her temples and forehead. It had now been over 15 minutes since any of them said a word to her. About half a dozen very creepy men in white coats drifted around the chamber, looking at the consoles and conferring excitedly, green-faced in the glow of their data screens. Ester caught isolated fragments of their speech.

“…resolution is awful compared to x-rays, but it images soft tissue…”

“Did you calibrate this scope?”

“…dripping serotonin today?”

“No. The synthetic.”

“…got it on-scale now. Jesus.”

“Hold off on that drip. We’re not…”

“…that can’t be right…”

“But the instruments agree. It must be.”

“Dial back another couple pegs. The synth has quite a kick.”

One of the men pushed an IV stand over to Ester’s left, and dabbed her arm with a cold swab before inserting the needle. He twisted the valve to start the drip, tossed a heartless little grin down at her, and strode off.

All the chatter ceased abruptly as a line of tiny green spiders began streaming down the IV tube and into Ester’s veins. Her chest constricted. She couldn’t scream.

[ Continue Reading ]

Cover Reveal: Tenpenny Zen

Mark your calendars! Tenpenny Zen, the second book in our Divided Man series, will be available on Monday, March 20.

Our books tend to defy categorization. We’re labeling this one as Cyberpunk although it might more accurately be called Shroompunk. For some reason Amazon doesn’t consider our newly invented genre legit. Yet.

And now, may we present to you the gorgeousness that is the cover of Tenpenny Zen:

Tenpenny Zen: a novel of sex, cults, and an interdimensional henge contraption.

Check back next week for a sneak peek at chapter 1!

The Home Stretch

The end is in sight for two of our current open projects, and it feels damn good. Tenpenny Zen has been resting quietly in a drawer, awaiting its publication date later this month. We’ll pick it up this weekend and give it one final read through to make sure our last round of edits didn’t introduce any embarrassing typos, but other than that the manuscript is ready. Kent spent most of this week’s work sessions hammering out the back cover copy. It’s a completely different style of writing, and we haven’t had a lot of practice with it yet. Kent persevered even when Jen wrinkled her nose at some of his early efforts, and we’re quite pleased with the result he arrived at.

With all those pieces falling into place, expect the cover reveal next week. It’s gorgeous!

While Kent was toiling away on one type of nonstandard prose, Jen was intent on another. Two nights ago she finished writing the stubs for the rest of Son of Science Novel. Up until now the ending was basically “stuff blows up.” We knew who survived and who didn’t, other big picture things like that, but now we know most of the details. Not all, obviously. That’s what the actual writing is for. But now we have the finale broken down into beats, and we know whose point of view we’ll experience those beats through. It’s a complex series of events, and having this roadmap will make the writing go a lot faster.

With any luck (and fewer distractions now that Tenpenny Zen is all but finalized) we’ll be in a good position to sail through the rest of Son of Science Novel’s first draft.

Either of us working on our own would not be able to accomplish nearly as much as we do working together. We find having a writing partner invaluable. How about you?

A Plethora of Piñatas

So you’ve just finished your first draft. What happens next?

Obviously you celebrate, but after you sober up or get back from Disney World or whatever, then what?

Then you put that manuscript aside for a while. You do other things and try to forget everything you wrote so that when you do look at it again you have critical distance.

Critical distance is among the most important skills for an author, and also among the most difficult to master. It’s what allows you to stand in the reader’s shoes, what enables your own work to surprise you sometimes. And that’s crucial when you’re ready to edit. You need to be able to see the plot holes, the out-of-character moments, and the places where motivation is thin. You need to be able to spot the story beats that are obviously contrived.

That last one can be tricky because all the story beats are contrived, obviously. You wrote them.

So, like we said, you need critical distance. How do you achieve it? Just reading something else is good, but what you want to do is fully engage your faculties. Reading is too passive for this. Nothing will restore your own work’s ability to surprise you faster than editing or writing a different piece. It’s not enough to just look away from a project for a while. You need to actively push other stuff through the system. You need to overwrite that part of the hard disk.

We’ve had a lot of success achieving critical distance by having three series, each set in its own story world. While Miss Brandymoon’s Device was resting between editing passes, we could write the Music Novel. While Tenpenny Zen was tucked away in a drawer we could plot out the entirety of the Science Novel. We’ve been rotating through those three series for a couple of years now, and it’s worked well. Now that we’re publishing the Divided Man series, though, we suddenly have fewer open projects.

It’s really exciting to have our work out there in front of people, and it feels really good to have the end in sight for that series, but it does mean that we need to figure out what our next new thing will be. We don’t want to turn around one day and find that we’ve run out of material, and we need to always have something on the back burner so that there’s always a productive way to get that necessary (dare we say critical?) critical distance.

Predicting the Future – 2017 Edition

It’s time for everyone’s favorite activity: Strategic Planning!

What do we plan to accomplish in 2017? And how hard will this post make us laugh when we dust it off and look at it at the end of the year?

Kent, Jen, and Lady Marzipan took a nice long walk yesterday, and in between long, lingering sniffs of all the mailboxes in the neighborhood, we talked about how we hope to spend our time in the writing cave this year.

First and foremost, we’re planning to publish two books this year, sequels to Miss Brandymoon’s Device. Tenpenny Zen will be out in March, with the third novel to follow in late summer or early fall. There will be a lot of busywork involved with prepping those, which will keep us distracted from actual writing. But it’s kind of necessary if we want to release a quality product. Which we do.

Our second highest priority is knocking out the first drafts for Son and Grandson of Science Novel. We’re currently something like halfway through Son, and we’re planning to just steam ahead and write them both back-to-back (interrupted only by the fiddly stuff needed to release Tenpenny). We’re notoriously bad at predicting how long it will take us to write a novel. Jen seems to think that if we really knuckle down it should only take one long weekend, whereas Kent is more realistic and assumes it will take forever. Hopefully we’ll land somewhere in the middle and finish up by summer. Maybe.

After that, well… After that it gets a bit scary. With the Divided Man series published and the Science series resting comfortably as a first draft, that leaves only the Music series. We like the elegance of trilogies, even if we try not to officially label things that way – who knows when we might feel inspired to tell more stories set in our various fiction worlds? Currently the Music series has two completed novels, which means it needs at least one more. We have a few notes about what that third story might look like, and yesterday while we were out getting lunch and taking care of a friend’s cats we talked through those ideas and expanded a few of them. We don’t know yet what form the third Music novel will take, but we have no doubts that we’ll figure it out.

But then what? After we wrap up the Music series, we run out of map. We’ve been living with these three story worlds for a long time, and it’s unsettling to think that we might be done with all of them as soon as this year.

That might be catastrophizing a bit because it’s highly unlikely we’ll finish three novels in one year, and even if we do, there’s still all the editing.

But. But! We’re still sailing off the end of world.

So, if we’re smart we’ll devote a couple of lengthy conversations to exploring what comes next. Road trips are a fruitful time for that, which means we’ll need to plan a few of those. Where will the new year take us?

Happy New Year, everyone!

Sayonara (Not So) Sweet ’16

What a year. Politics were shit, and too many cool celebrities died.

But!

It wasn’t total misery! Looking back at our post from this time last year, it seems we more or less accomplished what we set out to do in the writing cave. Son (and Grandson!) of Science Novel are both outlined, and we’re well underway with the composition. Go Team Skelley!

Where we deviated from our plan was basically everything that had to do with Son of Music Novel. It did not get time to rest quietly in a drawer, it did not get a thorough edit. Since the other members of our writers’ group were not at a point where they had anything to share, Son of Music Novel got its critique debut a bit early. It’s been a challenge to divide our attention between the projects, but we’re managing. At least we have each other’s shoulders to cry on.

So how did we spend our year 2016 at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fictions, LLC?

In January and February we were deep in the outlining for Son of Science Novel. It’s pretty much the only thing we blogged about.

March brought our brilliant scheme to outline both sequels before moving on to prose. We did accomplish that, and as far as we can tell at this altitude, we haven’t fucked it up yet. If we can ever get out of this holiday quagmire and chain ourselves to our desks again, we ought to be able to finish up Son and roll right on into Grandson.

Along with taxes, April brought an end to the outlining, and a trip down memory lane. We cleaned out the Writing Cave and took a look at how we used to do things back in the Olden Days. Then we partook of a different kind of nostalgia, beginning an editing pass on Music Novel, which hadn’t seen the light of day in a while.

May was spent elbow-deep in the guts of Music Novel, editing like fiends. Or skilled surgeons, if you’d rather.

In June we hit a couple of bumps in the road, but our partnership (and marriage!) are as strong as ever.

Come July we were all over the place, working in all three of our story worlds at once, and beginning the preliminary work for self-publishing our very first novel, Miss Brandymoon’s Device.

Happy Anniversary! In August, our chain story reached installment 100! And we were still getting through all the throat-clearing that happens before we actually start writing a novel (or two).

September was mostly spent in the run-up to publishing Miss Brandymoon’s Device. Kent created a beautiful cover for it and both of its siblings. We did all kinds of boring behind-the-scenes technical stuff with fonts and layouts and what-have-you. Jen took care of the final pre-writing tasks for the new novels.

And then Boom! October! Book birthday! We think our new baby is gorgeous, and we hope you love it just as much as we do. Hop on over to your favorite book retailer and pick up a copy of the ebook for free! Or order a physical copy from Amazon. You won’t regret it!

Suddenly it was November. How could it possibly be Thanksgiving already? Please explain to us the passage of time. As we always do, we ignored NaNoWriMo and kept our own schedule, with got us to 20,000 by the middle of the month. Not too shabby, when you consider how many distractions we were dealing with.

Good thing there are no distractions in December, amiright? Despite a very long list of things vying for our attention we’re going to finish up 2016 with about 45,000 words in the can for Son of Science Novel. It’s not as many as we’d hoped we might have by now, but it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Jen was feeling a little disheartened that we weren’t further along, and as we worked on this Year in Review post she was able to diagnose her main issue. It feels like we’ve been working on this book for an entire freakin’ year! And that’s because we have been. But we took a huge break in the middle to edit several novels and actually get one of them out in front of people. Somehow that part had slipped Jen’s mind. But when you look at things rationally and see that we’ve only been actually writing this book since sometime in October, it feels like an accomplishment to be proud of.

So we’ll say it again, Go Team Skelley!

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for 2017.