Book Series
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.
Structure begins to suggest itself. I start creating Part and Chapter folders within the Manuscript folder and dragging the scenes into them.
I’m still sketching though. You know how an artist will often sketch a new work in pencil before getting out the paint? It’s like that.
Image: Jigsaw puzzle in progress, set on a large cardboard piece, with a box of jigsaw pieces next to it. photographer: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Balise42 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
Little by little, these scenes begin to find each other. This is when I start copying them into the Manuscript folder. At first, this folder is flat, just a jumble of scenes that may or may not be in order. I make no attempt to divide it into chapters yet.
Image: Brightly-colored jigsaw puzzle pieces in a random pile. By Hans-Peter Gauster 2017 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal
At some point, I start to feel itchy. That’s the best word I have for it. Scenes start popping into my thoughts. Characters too. Inklings of plot arc. That’s when I start using the Notes folder.
This folder contains a development diary. Each day, I create a new entry and write. Word count is meaningless at this point. I’m not even trying to write anything for the book yet. I just try to write something each day.
Early on, these entries take the form of Socratic dialogs with myself, as I work out ideas. Eventually, I start writing short scenes and test pieces for these ideas.
Image: Jack London writing in 1905, as pictured in The Book of Jack London (1921) by his wife Charmian London. The photograph is captioned “The Sea Wolf”, the name of Jack’s novel published the previous year. He is seated outside, amongst boulders and trees. From the Public Domain Image Archive.
AI plays a role in the book I’m working on, so that’s another topic I’ve been researching. In a fit of whimsy, I decided to use AI to research AI.
Wary confession: I discovered that an occasional focused chat session was a good way to work out my understanding of complex topics.
I keep transcripts of these sessions in the relevant Research subfolder. For the current book, I have sessions on AI, Earth-Mars cyclers, tethered spin gravity, Coriolis force, Mars taxi orbits, orbital proximity operations, and the Taoist concept of wu wei.
These sessions also provide me with citations for further, more in-depth research. What they don’t provide is usable calculations. AI still sucks at math. Never trust AI with math. Actually never trust AI.
AI is that friend you find entertaining and like to hang out with once in a while, but you would never have pet sit.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg (license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en)
I use Scrivener. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best fit I’ve found for my process. The ability to drag scenes and chapters around and to visualize the emerging manuscript in different ways is invaluable during development.
Much of its functionality could be handled with plain old files and folders, but that gets increasingly difficult for longer projects. Scrivener just gets more helpful as the project grows.
Of particular note is the ability to compile into different formats. I use this for manuscript printing and for digital (Kindle) preparation. For book printing, I use Scribus for layout, but that’s a topic for another day.
Within Scrivener, I keep a folder called Research with subfolders for topics that come up in the books. For the current project, I have folders for Communications, Starvation, Orbital Dynamics, Food, and Space Weapons. In those folders are links and documents and quotes.
I also keep a folder called Notes and a folder called UnusedFragments. More on those later.
I publish through my own publishing house: Noisy Flowers LLC. I came up with the name one particularly clamorous afternoon as my two daughters competed to see who could sing the loudest.
The winner drew the logo.
I’ve been buried in the development process for the next book and haven’t had much time for social media. Now that I’m over the creative hump and in the refinement phase, I thought I might post a little about my creative process and production pipeline.
Posts in this series will be sporadic and likely span months. Maybe years, I dunno. Time is erratic. I’ll use the hashtag #CraftingGenMars followed by the number in the series to keep track.
I don’t interact with other authors as much as I’d like to. I have no idea whether my process is typical or weird. If you’re an author and find something interesting, please chime in with your thoughts along the way.
Image: “Woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called “Sappho”)”, between 55 and 79 AD, Naples National Archaeological Museum