Month: July 2025

For the current WIP (Food: Generation Mars, Book Four), I also have couple people providing sensitivity notes. This is a new thing for me. 

There are some delicate cultural interactions necessary to the plot. I think they’re ok, but I’m an upper middle-aged white guy, with all the blinders that entails. I don’t wanna mess this up.

image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tsaag_Valren, license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

I was not completely truthful in the last post. I use editors, sort of. When the time is right (gut feeling), I give the manuscript to my wife.

She will point out areas that still feel sketchy, logical inconsistencies, beats I might have missed or that can be reinforced with a little nudge here or there.

After manuscript updates, I pass it by my daughters for similar feedback.

Between all of us, I feel we have enough reading experience and command of the English language that the resulting manuscript is tight. Then I have a couple of months to polish it while my illustrator works his magic.

#CraftingGenMars 10

Now, for a controversial reveal: I don’t use editors. I will say this is for financial reasons, and that is certainly true. But it’s not the only reason. 

I don’t really want anyone else’s opinion on my work, whether developmental, line, or copy level. I mean, I want readers to like it, of course. But only if it’s mine, warts and all.

I realize that this approach is made possible by the fact that this is a hobby for me. If I were relying on my books for income, I might follow a more conventional path. But then again I might not.

I will admit that this has become increasingly difficult as my books have gotten longer.

I drink coffee. Not an unreasonable amount, but… enough. And I’m picky about it. 

I have a nice, midrange espresso machine, and I roast my own beans using a handcrank popcorn popper on an old white gas Coleman stove.

I steam the milk right in the mug, then pull a double into it. The result is what I call a snakebite cap. Not exactly art, but function over form. I don’t have time to play with milk; I have writing to do!

I don’t know if this helps my writing, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

At this point, I’m keeping track of word count. I’m not strict with myself. I don’t have to be. The enthusiasm is raging and watching that count go up each day is enough. Sometimes I post about it. 

For one book (Shelter), I experimented with daily social media posting of word count updates, along with an image that was somehow relevant to whatever I had worked on that day. It was kind of fun but also a distraction. Now, I just post occasionally for milestones.

Because I tend to be sparing with words and flesh out as I go, my word count rarely goes down, instead climbing steadily, even after multiple rounds of editing.

image: Edited from public domain image at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Word_Count_h_650.svg

What follows is weeks, months, a year, more (in the case of this book) of painting, resketching, more painting, more research, resketching, painting. This is when the UnusedFragments folder comes into play.

Whenever I tinker with a scene, I have Scrivener Duplicate it first and work on the duplicate. Then I move the previous version to the UnusedFragments directory. 

Scrivener adds an incremental number suffix to the scene name when you Duplicate. So, what I end up with is an archive of all the versions of every scene. For a project like Food, this directory is getting ridiculously large. I might rethink this for the next book.