I’m thinking ahead here but I’m going to be wanting some first readers in a few months (I’m pencilling in Easter) but where do they live?
For my first novel, Railroaded, I printed out ten copies of the third draft and handed it out to people; My Mum, Dad, three friends, a daughter of a work colleague who ran a small reading group, an ex-girlfriend and a local activist I found on the internet!
Yeah, that’s right, only 8. I’ve still got 2 copies sitting here because I really couldn’t find anyone else.
I like it when I see a future idea I had being brought into some kind of reality.
No ideas are original, so the idea of a road generating power via solar panels is not ground-breaking in itself but still, it means I’m not a dribbling idiot…which is always nice to confirm.
I get ‘Popular Science’ magazine every month and this month there’s an article, ‘Environmental Visionaries: The Solar Roadrunner‘. About a company, Solar Roadways, who want to ‘cover all concrete and asphalt surfaces that are exposed to the sun with Solar Road Panels‘.
I’ve briefly mentioned this before, ‘Self-Sustainable and Carbon Neutral Car Travel‘, and this newer article doesn’t really say anything new just that the project is still going ahead with a few little targets to get it live and achieving a critical mass by starting out in McDonald car parks.
I think a better way of generating power AND being beneficial to the customers would be to install hamster wheels in a McDonalds car park and have them running round, powering the deep fat fryers.
I thought I’d put some of the chapter planning notes I make online. There’s no tips or advice because who the hell am I to do that, this is just to put it out there as I haven’t seen anyone else do this so thought it could be interesting.
Reading blogs and magazine articles featuring the writing process from many different authors, you get a wide range of advice about planning from ‘I totally wing it‘ to ‘I mercilessly plan and research every detail before I even crack open the laptop‘.
I’m kind of in the middle. I can’t start without a basic theme or a general direction I want to head into. After I got that, I research the theme and tentatively create characters and situations to convey some sort of central theme and direction. Once that’s done then I usually only plan a few chapters in advance. This is so I a) know the chapter I’m currently writing, b) know how the current chapter will lead into the next and c) leaving more advanced chapters unchallenged means the novel has the flexibility to go where the story dictates.
I’ve only completed one novel and about a fifth of the way through the second (5 chapters/11,500 words), but so far I find that their story arcs arrive in about 5 or 6 chapters chunks. I’m currently at the end of the first chunk of ‘Broken Branches’. I suppose this is the introductory chunk; introducing the main themes, the characters and their dilemma’s.
So what do the notes look like?
Here’s the third chapter of my novel, Railroaded, which means the first three chapters are now online, the requirement of most literary agents. So now you can read the opening to this novel, put yourself in an agent’s position…and send me a rejection.
I’m blaming the cover letter at the moment.
You can read the first chapter here.
The huge sprawling office complex of The Pharmara Corporation stretched across the entire 15 mile brow of the hills overlooking Wigthorn. Deemed an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ by The World Heritage Foundation in the past, the trees and hedgerows once lining this landscape had been replaced by pure white buildings sealed with black solar panels, no windows or doors faced the town of Wigthorn. This was the view a Wigthornian would see if he or she looked northwards, if one were to look south across the sea towards France then the horizon would be filled with the tops of wind turbines like rows of runaway wagon wheels careering through the English Channel out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Wigthorn was a town cannibalising its natural assets in order to survive, as all towns were.
The Pharmara Corporation headquarters up on the hills of Wigthorn were only on one floor and designed to have no right angles or curves, every corner was irregular and every surface flat like a stealth fighter plane. Each department has its own building, the biggest being ‘Statistical Acquirement and Analysis’, it tracks every single item leaving the factory floor; from products and packaging to pallets and people. Every item has its own CBID tag (Constant Broadcast Identification) transmitting, via satellites, its vital statistics 10 times every second. Temperature, location, speed, humidity, human DNA in vicinity, other items in vicinity, the speed, temperature, location of those nearby humans and other items…and so it went on, every statistic was vital.
Here’s the second chapter of my novel, Railroaded. As with the first chapter, it’s a little over 4,000 words.
You can read the first chapter here.
Isaac slowly stirred and pulled the duvet over his head and revelled in the silence. Isaac had avoided the temperature controlled bed since Nicole had passed away, a guilty pleasure. Sleeping at a constant temperature had never fully agreed with him but it was a compromise as Nicole also wanted the media display playing in the background to help her get to sleep. This was something Isaac couldn’t abide, he required absolute silence to drift away so the display used to be switched off whilst the bed maintained a constant two degree’s above body temperature. Now everything was unplugged.
An interesting article on the Telegraph site, ‘Advertising is getting personal‘, about how companies are better utilising technology to track customers and offer them an improved service.
Of course, companies have always tried to do this but with more powerful technology at cheaper prices, the amount and type of information they can gather increases.
‘Railroaded’ uses this idea by having corporations track and measure their customers and employees to the minutest of detail with every object having a small microchip emitting data multiple times per second giving a real-time picture of almost everything from actual people and their personal interactions to a sweet wrapper or a pair of glasses.
A step forward, that’s what I keep telling myself anyway.
An agent came back and asked to see the full manuscript of ‘Railroaded’, but then quickly rejected the whole thing.
I’ll ignore the obvious negative and take some positives; I grabbed the interest of a literary professional and, albeit briefly, viewed the slush pile from the outside.
She gave good feedback, some of it highlighting some points I was already conscious of and keen to avoid/focus on for Novel No.2. So having someone else comment on these aspects too means I must be ever so slightly thinking along the right lines.
I didn’t agree with everything but then that just means I haven’t communicated clearly enough. Also, for sanity’s sake, I can’t agree with everything otherwise I would just give up with ‘Railroaded’ and I’m not ready for that at the moment.
At university, a mate and I went round some London ad agencies with a portfolio of print and billboard ads we’d drawn up. One agency creative pairing were really nice and praised us, the other were OK but bland and the third tore us a new arsehole. I learnt so much and remember more fondly the agency creative that ripped us to shreds than the other two.
That didn’t happen here, she was very nice and friendly (agents DO have hearts!) but while this was the closest I’ve been yet it resulted in failure, I’ve got some valuable expert feedback, had some things confirmed which I thought I already knew and feel more confident going forward with this experience.
Well, Max Barry did a word cloud for his online novel ‘Machine Man’ so I thought I’d try the same with ‘Railroaded’…takes my mind off rejections anyway.
Using the online service at Wordle you can easily create your own, my one above is also live on their public gallery here.
Quite interesting; Isaac, Amy and Poppy are the main characters, Gerard, Estelle and Julius are other characters. I seem to use the word ‘one‘ quite a lot, I can’t remember why though.
I also use the words ‘looked‘ and ‘back‘ quite a lot, which makes more sense as Isaac, Amy and Poppy are on the run most of the time and always ‘looking back’. Maybe I should find other ways to say ‘looked back’ though…’turned behind them?’…no.
I use ‘father‘ more than ‘mother‘. I use ‘Yes‘ and ‘Yeah‘ much more than ‘No‘. I use ‘DNA‘ more than ‘Chair‘, which makes sense as DNA is a theme and the characters don’t have much time to sit down.
Now I’ve looked at it for a bit, I’m not sure what it really tells you. I suppose you only have to worry when words such as ‘Once upon a time‘ or ‘It was all a dream‘ show up larger than most.
In Railroaded I thought of an easy way people could exchange personal information with mobile phones.
The other day I came across the ‘Bump‘ iphone app that now does exactly that. Instead of pressing a button you simply turn the app on and ‘bump’ the phones together.
I admit their execution is better but I still prefer my name for it!
Just downloaded it onto my iPhone, now I just need to find a willing victim to bump with…I mean ‘exstrange’ with.
Mr Salmon Rushdie uses it and say it’s his favourite app, maybe that’s how he pulls all those good-looking, tall women?
Below is the relevant bit from Railroaded, Chapter 1…
“Look I’m getting confused here. Things aren’t adding up. Why don’t we ‘exstrange info’ then we can see where we are.”
‘Exstrange Info’ was a term used to exchange personal information on mobile devices. Each person would hold their mobile device close to each other; press a button at the same time for one second and all relevant information would be stored in each other’s mobile device, therefore rendering each other ‘ex-strangers’.
Isaac apologised and said he didn’t have a mobile device.
I’m a science fiction fan but not a die-hard nerd so I had never heard of the sub-genre of ‘Mundane Science Fiction’.
Probably not a positively eye-catching sub-genre on the face of it but the idea behind it is it only uses science and technology that is either acheivable or extremely, very nearly acheivable.
I like this idea.
Spaceships, aliens, living on other planets, sentient robots, time-travel, etc are all sci-fi mainstays but they’re also way, way, way into the future…and that’s if they’re actually physically possible.
Mundane Sci-Fi deals in facts and near future, Earth based science fiction. The wikipedia page is good, listing a few ‘laws’ of mundane sci-fi.
There’s also a great blog, Mundane-SF that keeps you updated with non-lightspeed based science fiction. On that site I found this speech which is a great intro into mundane science fiction – ‘Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!’ by Geoff Ryman
Railroaded is near future based in 2066 and I consciously stayed away from flamboyant flights of fancy and extrapolated every piece of technology on something existing today. I found it keeps the story more believable, helps shape it more realistically and therefore makes it better alround.
So I think I’d firmly place my sci-fi scribblings into the mudane category…you know, unless I think of a really great way to execute the aliens escaping from robots through wormholes idea.
