Bob Blanton's Blog: Writing Delphi in Space, page 4

Still plugging away

All four books are in the top one hundred for science fiction.  WOW!!!

I'm working hard on the next two.  My editor hasn't killed me yet for all the comma splices I leave in.  She's given up on getting me to spell things right:)

Still shooting for late January for book five, she's editing away, but I make the job hard, or so she says.

Book six is plotted, and I'm three-quarters complete with the first pass.  I'll have to have this one beta read a few times.  It's getting sticky to keep all the pieces moving in the same direction, to keep it interesting,  I hate a blah-blah-blah section in a book.

If you want to connect, comment here, or email me at delphi.in.space@gmail.com.

Keep on reading

Bob

Science Factoid - 1

Did you know that the gravity on Saturn is less than the gravity on Earth? Weird, huh, but it's because gravity is defined as the gravitational force on the surface of the planet. Saturn is ten times more massive than Earth, it is also one-tenth the density while being ten times bigger in diameter.  So the math works out that Saturn's gravity is 9 m/s2 vs Earth's 9.8 m/s2

Home Stretch

Today, I made it to #28 in SciFi Authors, we'll have to see if it last. I've been holding steady around 68 for the last week. Sales are amazing; I don't know what I'm doing right, but I'll keep pretending if you will.Our house is on a charity home and garden tour today, I'm sure you don't care, but it means that tomorrow my Editor will finally get back to the next book. I hope to publish it in mid-late January.Book 6 is still kicking my ass, but I think I'm getting control of it. Look for it in March.

Is the really happening?

Wow, I just made it into the top 100 Science Fiction Writers on Amazon.  Wonder how long I'll be able to hold onto that spot.

I have all these red marks on my body from pinching myself.

Wow, I just made it into the top 100 Science Fiction Writ...

Wow, I just made it into the top 100 Science Fiction Writers on Amazon.  Wonder how long I'll be able to hold onto that spot.

I have all these red marks on my body from pinching myself.

Don't write yourself into a corner

For Delphi in Space, I really wanted to avoid painting myself into a corner, so I decided to write the first three books before I published anything.  Also, I’ve read that readers tend to postpone starting a series without at least three books in it.The mistake I made in the Stoneseries was giving the main character too much power.  If your character is a superman, it’s hard to come up with tension and crises that are believable.  I teeter on the edge of that in Delphi in Space.  I’ve had to go back and modify the first three books numerous times to balance out the plots I wanted for future books.  Winging it on how many people were in the crew, and things like that, came back to be an issue when I was working on the fifth book.  I had to go back and fix up all those numbers.I’ve worked hard to keep the science reasonably believable, but sometimes it’s easy to blow it.  A math error can really make the writer look foolish.  I kept trying to figure out why my acceleration of the fighters kept coming back with nearly the same numbers as I adjusted it up/down.  X= 1/2AT2really does mean that time is squared, so it’s the most important element.  Acceleration is just a multiplier, so having the ability to constantly accelerate really overwhelms the acceleration.  But it does take lots of reaction mass.I have a spreadsheet with all of my assumptions on it, at least the ones I think to write down.  It really helps when I hit an “oops.”  I can backtrack and figure out what else that affects.

Tools I use and recommend

Writing: I use ‘MS Word’ to write my books. It does get cumbersome and slow when over 50K words, but I already have it, my editor (my wife) knows how to use it, so I stick with it. ‘Scrivener’ is recommended by lots of writers, they like it, they get $ to advertise it, but I haven’t tried it since there are only so many tools one can use.

Publishing: I currently only publish on Amazon. I started out using ‘Kindle Create’. It’s actually pretty good. I did the first series with it, but it would not let me format the chapter titles the way I wanted, so I found a tool called ‘Sigil’, it’s techy, but that’s okay with me. It lets me do exactly what I want since I’m actually editing the HTML that the ebooks use to display books. My nephew uses http://publishxpress.com/. It seems to work pretty well, I looked at the code for his book and it was very clean.

Editing: The bane of all writers is editing. It’s hard because you know what you meant to write, so you keep reading what you intended to write instead of what you actually wrote. You have to have a separate editor to review your work. I use three tools: ‘Word’ has a spelling and grammar checker, it’s pretty good; ‘Grammarly’ is free and it works well, although it has a small max word limit so I cut and paste my chapters one at a time (I don’t think the paid version is worth it if you’re writing fiction); and ‘Hemmingway’ which lets you know when you’re writing over your audience’s head. Not a problem for me, I keep getting scores down to the 2nd-grade level. I use ‘Dropbox’ to coordinate with my editor, plus it provides a backup and version history. I’ve had to go back a few versions to find something I accidentally erased or incorrectly changed. A real lifesaver.
Feedback: Get some feedback before you publish your book. It’s amazing the assumptions you make that turn out to be wrong. Much easier to fix before you publish. ‘Storyorigin’ provides tools to help you find people who will give you feedback. ‘Goodreads’ has a beta reading group that will help you out. ‘Goodreads’ will also help you get some reviews to get your book off the review floor.

How I got started.

As my profile says, I’m an avid reader. I like lots of genres: historical fiction, mystery, spy thrillers, and my favorite, sci-fi. But when I’m daydreaming, I’m not thinking about being a spy, those guys get killed; or a detective, too many late nights on stakeouts plus they might get killed; and I don’t believe in time travel. When I daydream I think about what thing I might invent, I’m an engineer; or a superpower I might have and what I could do with it, still a little boy at heart; or why some alien would contact me to take him to my leader:).

I’ve always thought it would be cool to write a book, but a few attempts never really went anywhere. Then my first book, Matthew and the Stone, kind of wrote itself on a long flight to Singapore. I actually wrote it in two weeks after the trip; it was all mapped out in my head.
The Stone series was like my practice series. It never took off; I didn’t put much effort into advertising it. I made a few mistakes, wrote myself into corners I didn’t know how to write myself out of. But it was fun to write, so I started planning a new series, Delphi in Space. So far it’s doing great, not exceeding my expectations since when I dream, I dream big, but doing really well; not sure if it’s just my friends and family buying, but I think I’ve run out of them by now.

Now, for those of you not in the writing clique, there are two types of writers, pantsers and plotters. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants; my mom was a complete pantser. She always said the characters took over the story and wrote the book. I started out as a pantser but then figured out that I need to write down the plot to keep things straight. Now I take a starting point, daydream awhile, and when I think I can see an end point that makes sense, I put together a plot and start writing, still mostly in my head. When a plot materializes, I lay it out and then put in some critical details and really start writing. Once in awhile the plot changes on me. Once, I had to split a book into two books. But I was having fun.