Tagged: Divided Man Series

Keeping Busy

r-avatarA quick progress update from the writing cave.

In addition to the ongoing prosification of Son of Science Novel, this week we began a read-through of our next release.

Tenpenny Zen is scheduled to come out in March. It’s book two of the Divided Man series, following Miss Brandymoon’s Device. (which was released last month — did you get yours yet?) The manuscript has been edited a few times already, but we feel it needs one more polishing pass before we put it out there. The first step is to reread it, so it’s fresh in our minds. Once we complete that, we’ll have to park Son of Science Novel to focus on revisions to Tenpenny Zen.

And we’ll take this opportunity to wish you Happy Solstice!

Wordcount is Happening

r-avatarThings tend to repeat themselves, here in the writing cave. It’s natural for a cycle to emerge, given that we consciously follow a process that we’ve honed over several projects. But what’s interesting is how the unplanned things also seem cyclical. Falling down the research hole when we’re supposed to be writing? Check! Both Jen and Kent have resumed everyone’s favorite form of procrastination. (Okay, playing mindless games and messing around on Twitter are also popular choices here in the writing cave. But research has such a sheen of respectability. Ooooh, shiny!)

What are we researching? Well, that’s need-to-know. For now we’ll only classify our studies as diverse and rewarding. Hence, their effectiveness at slowing down the actual writing.

Despite such impediments, we are making progress. It’s not as fast as we planned, which come to think of it, it never is. And even though it’s absolutely, positively, not a competition, Jen does have a bit of an edge if you score things by words, although Kent is ahead by one if you count scenes. We might require adjudication to settle that one. Probably smarter to just keep writing.

Another source of distraction is the launch of Miss Brandymoon’s Device. (We might have mentioned, but in case it slipped our minds — it’s available free from our site as well as at Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.) We got the first hard-copy proof yesterday and we can’t stop fondling it. My, oh my, that’s a sexy book.

Spooling Up the Fiction Engines

r-avatarWe may have mentioned our novel launch once or twice in the past few weeks, but in case you missed it: Miss Brandymoon’s Device is available! For FREE! Right NOW! Go download it, we’ll wait.

You’re back? Great. Before you go immerse yourself in our book and forget about the outside world, we’ll give you a quick update on our activities in the writing cave.

Son of Science Novel is next on our agenda. We thought we were ready to write it. It’s been discussed to death, outlined thoroughly, and broken down into scenes (at least the first act has been). We know the characters and settings pretty well, have reference photos for inspiration. From the outside we look overprepared.

But from the inside we’re still finding gaps in our knowledge. The layout of the not-so-abandoned-after-all cold war doom factory will be important not just in this early scene, but in blocking later scenes as well. We need a floor plan now so we don’t write in errors that we’ll need to fix during revisions. Kent fires up Illustrator and puts his brain in Dungeon Master mode!

Do we really need to write a whole scene wherein Boss tells Underling to recruit Heroine, when we can simply show the recruitment? Will readers question Underling’s motivations? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Jen puts on her Problem-Solving hat!

Some of this might look like procrastination, what with the multiple visits to Pinterest and the innocent google searches that turn into bottomless research clickholes, but it’s all valuable. It’s all immersing us in the story world, one we haven’t visited for a while. The better prepared we are, the less we’ll need to change later.

And as everyone knows, it’s dangerous to go alone. For us, having a writing partner makes the journey less perilous.

mbd-cover-cropRead a description of Miss Brandymoon’s Device

Read a sample

Get it free from Amazon

Get it free on iTunes

Get it free at Barnes & Noble

Get it free at Kobo

Cover Reveal: Miss Brandymoon’s Device

r-avatarIt’s one week until launch day for Miss Brandymoon’s Device, the first volume of our Divided Man trilogy! We’re very excited and proud to reveal the cover design Kent created.

Feast your eyes!

mbd-cover-crop

Miss BrandyMoon’s Device: A novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp.

As soon as it launches we’ll provide info on all the ways to get your hands on it. Stay tuned!

We’re Covered!

r-avatarLast night, Kent completed the cover designs for all three volumes of the trilogy. We’re very proud of them (they’re gorgeous, in our unimpeachably unbiased opinion) and they bring us one very important step nearer to publishing the books.

We can’t wait to unveil these to the world. Stay tuned for the releases very soon!

The cover design project required about 60 hours, and produced a set of three coordinated designs. But it wasn’t anywhere close to an equal distribution of 20 hours per cover. The early stages of the process took up a disproportionate amount, and most of that went into searching stock photo libraries for the right base images to work from. Sites like Shutterstock have a seemingly infinite inventory, but we found it difficult to narrow things down to the right images. Eventually we decided to stop burning time on image searches and instead burn it on photo manipulation. Kent’s Photoshop kung-fu, accumulated over years of professional design experience, was up to the challenge.

Most authors don’t design their own covers. The publisher typically handles that, but if you’re self publishing then that puts it right back on your plate and you need to budget for art and graphic design services.  A strong cover is essential, so this is not a place to wing it. In our case, design skills came along as part of the partnership package so it made sense to capitalize on them and get the covers we really wanted.

Every partnership is unique, and the background of each partner confers knowledge that can be leveraged — whether that’s in the form of subject matter, story structure, process, mechanics, or production.

Time Flies Like An Arrow

r-avatarWoof.

Everything. Takes. Forever.

Maybe we have unrealistic expectations. Okay, that’s probably it. After all, we’ve done this several times, so of course it’ll just go faster and smoother each time from now on, right?

Jen continues to hammer away at the outlining for Son of Science Novel. It’s taking (spoiler alert!) longer than she budgeted. But it really is coming together, and now she’s nearly done incorporating all the mysterious scratches left by mysterious chickens in our various steno pads, from back when we were brainstorming the story. The process might be going faster, except she finds herself distracted by the art project happening on Kent’s side of the writing cave.

Kent continues to refine the illustration for the cover of our trilogy’s first book. It’s getting very close too, in fact, but there’s always one more tweak, one more font to try, one more configuration of the title and other text in relation to the artwork… Kent claims that he’d be making better time if not for the constant distraction of the outline being crafted on the other side of the writing cave. (Jen rolls her eyes.)

It’s worth giving your projects the time they need in order to create work that you’re proud of. With a partner sharing the load, you’ll get through the slow patches in half the time and have energy left for the fun stuff.

Places, Everyone!

r-avatarOur first three novels are set in the same made-up town, which is strongly inspired by a real place. The music novel and (son-of) are set in New York City, which despite what you may have heard is an actual, real place. For the science novel and its successors we have once again invented cities, and the locations that inhabit them.

The science novel’s locale is practically part of the cast. We never considered setting the story in a known city. When it came time to plan its sequels, though, we worked very hard at tracking down a real place that could work. Neither of us can quite say why. Given the logistical constraints of the plot, as well as some crucial geographic and climate considerations, it was proving all but impossible to choose an existing location. Plus, we wanted it to have a cool name.

The desire to name the place was probably the signal that snapped us out of it. So, today we concocted a deliciously Russian appellation for the place where we’ll be making more characters’ lives miserable, and decided where to put its map pin. In this case, “we” means Jen of course, because names are her superpower. Now that we’ve chosen this route, it’s dawned on us how strange it would have been to have books in a series follow different theories of setting and world-building.

As an added bonus, creating a location from scratch allows Kent to stretch his D&D muscles to draw up maps.

Spinning Plates

r-avatarRune Skelley likes to focus on just one novel at a time. Having to keep track of multiple story worlds simultaneously makes it harder to do any of them justice. Harder, but hopefully not impossible, because we’re bending our own rule right now.

Novel #1 (Miss Brandymoon’s Device) is getting a final round of line edits, while we’re also doing a read-through on the Science Novel in preparation for outlining the sequels. We’ve already rainbowed them, and now we need to really get that world under our nails to expand those rainbows into full-fledged outlines. The line editing is happening mostly by day, with evenings available for the read-through. It seems to be working pretty well, so far.

In addition to all of that, we’re getting feedback from our beta readers on Son of Music Novel. That means we have to keep all three of our story worlds in our heads, to some extent.

Oh, and we’re doing cover mockups for our first trilogy. Shifting from verbal creative mode to pictorial creative mode is refreshing now and then, although there’s a lot of creative verbiage flying around the writing cave while we converge on a common vision for these covers.

Sometimes, practical demands force you to spread yourself a little thin. Having a writing partner means you can keep more plates spinning.

Writing Cave Status Report

r-avatarRune Skelley’s habitat has been a rather hectic place of late. In addition to the recent travel and interviews that we mentioned the past couple of Fridays:

  • We heard back from two more Science Novel beta readers with much positive input
  • Yesterday’s #PitMad kept us nicely distracted on the twitters for a while, pitching the Trilogy and the Music Novel
  • Jen analyzed the outline of Son of Music Novel and terrified Kent with the number of words we should expect to write by the end of the year to meet our deadline
  • We allocated the next handful of stubs — we will be able to work in parallel for the foreseeable future so our productivity should take an uptick (unless this jinxed it)
  • We’re shortly off to a conference, our first in a while

All the schedule disruptions, while they slow down our prose generation, are also positive things in their own right. So we have mixed feelings about them. Maybe if they didn’t travel in packs…

2014 Is In the Rear View Mirror

r-avatarOur look back in wonder at 2014 probably should have been posted last week, but this way it will stand out from all the other “year in review” posts around the internet. It’s not procrastination, it’s a feature!

We started off 2014 with a newly reorganized blog. I’m pleased to say we did such an excellent job with it that it was unnecessary to do it again this year! In other organizational news, we also launched our Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator.

In February we were busily editing the Music Novel, and were rather obsessed with its high word count. That early in the process we were still adding new material, filling the holes our beta readers demanded we fill, so the count kept rising.

In March we introduced the newest member of Team Skelley, the very distracting Lady Marzipan. As you can see, she’s a bit bigger now, but is still quite a distraction.

ladymarzipan

Lady Marzipan makes sure we take frequent forays from the writing cave to walk around the neighborhood and sniff all the mailboxes. We use the time in between smells to discuss whatever’s going on in our fiction, which in March was a lot of editing of the Music Novel.

April brought posts about the other work we had in play, the Science Novel. Our critique group was working their way through it which meant that we had to switch gears once a week from being deep in the guts of the Music Novel to remembering what the hell we’d even written in the Science Novel. To escape the stress we ran away to Europe for a quick, frigid vacation.

In May we couldn’t stop talking about how much fun we had in Prague, and the various ways we were distracted.

June brought the startling realization that the Music Novel has swelled to a whopping 187,000 words. Yikes! Time to start winnowing it back down again.

So that’s just what we spent July doing.

On August 1 we were thrilled to announce that we were done with edits on the Music Novel! As of today, our critique group is just about done with it, which means that we’ll have another round of edits coming up soon.

September found us deep in contemplation about where our writing would go in the future. We lamented not being in “writing mode” for quite a while.

We spent October editing the last book in our Trilogy, which prompted much thought about writing advice, both good and bad.

November is National Novel Writing Month, of which we still do not approve.

Come December we were finishing up edits on the Trilogy, doing a final reading of the Science Novel, and warming up for (gasp!) marketing.

So, it was a year where not a whole lot of composition happened. We kept our writing muscles limber with writing prompts, but the majority of our time was spent editing. That’s the part of writing a lot of people don’t take into account. It’s not enough to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Once the words exist, you have to poke them with sticks, gouge them with forks, and occasionally set them on fire.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for 2015. Happy New Year (a week late) everyone!