Mary Sisson's Blog, page 32

Wild night

With one thing and another, I haven’t finished the betas on the next Trang novel yet, but I’ve been mulling over them and thinking about the fourth book, which I have a vague outline for but not much more. A couple of nights ago I had a really good idea for that book, and last night I basically a thunderstorm of ideas that resulted in my hopping out of bed, turning on the lights, and annoying the cat about a million times to write them down. So that was a lot of progress there, and I’m very happy about it. (My writing process is kind of a bitch, honestly—just ask my cat.)

One thing I think I have to do now is swap the titles for the third and fourth book. Trials will make more sense with the fourth book, while Tribulations makes equally-good sense for the third. It does kind of lose the whole, “Oh what trials and tribula-a-tions” thing, and it means that I will once again be laboring on Trials, but that’s OK.

Progress report

I am DONE-ZO with A Dislocated World, and it will be off to the copy editor as soon as he is ready! Whoo!

Progress report

Forgot to do this yesterday—yesterday I did fixes for the front matter, the introduction, and Part 1. Today I’m doing that for Part 2. Whoo!

Progress report

I got back the beta read of A Dislocated World (the World War II letters). It’s interesting because the questions simply aren’t that different than the questions for Trials: What’s an APO? Why doesn’t he know whether or not he needs to pay income tax? Is the Maine unit in Maine?

It really brings home something I realized in journalism school, which is that nonfictional stories and fictional stories are both stories, and should be treated as such. (This concept is really important to the movie Big Fish, and is a big part of why I liked it so much.) There is some essay, which of course I can’t find now, where a writer points out that, although science fiction is known for its world building, a problem with a lot of novels in other genres is that they don’t bother to do any world building when it would really enrich the book.

And a big part of the editing I’m doing with this nonfiction, historical book is world building. Nobody knows what the hell the ETO is anymore, nor how it differs from the CBI or the POA—you have to explain all that. You have to build this nonfiction, historical world, otherwise these letters won’t make any sense.

What else? The copy editor is available! Yay!

Progress report

I did the beta edits for the first three chapters of Trials. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it was probably the majority of the work, because a lot of the questions were about background—how is the station laid out? what do the Snake Boys look like? where do the Portal Aliens live? why is Creepy the former Host messiah?—which is great, because obviously I’m super-familiar with all of that, but anyone who hasn’t read the two earlier books, like, VERY recently isn’t going to be.

There was also an objection to the specific manner in which two of the human characters insulted each other that I really liked, because I’d been feeling like Trang’s being multi-lingual had been sort of dropped in this book, so now they are insulting each other in French. Which always makes me happy.

Progress report

I wasn’t really able to focus on Trials today, although I did get some good ideas last night. Instead I proofed the bonus content for the World War II letters, which are titled (horn toots pretentiously) A Dislocated World: Letters from a World War II Surgeon. I put the cover on the home page, too.

Progress report

I went through the beta reads today for Trials—I think I might let things marinate and work on them tomorrow. It’s kind of what I expected—both readers have read the earlier Trang books, but it’s been a really long time (I asked them to please NOT refresh their memories), so there’s a lot of questions about the basic setting and situation. So I’m going to try to figure out a way to bulk that part out a bit without making it too much of an information dump.

Progress report

I was going to start work on the Trials beta reads today, but I didn’t sleep well last night, so instead I went over the introduction & informational bits I put into my grandfather’s letters and did the front & back matter. Because it’s nonfiction, I am doing a bibliography, but because it’s not academic writing, I’m not footnoting or anything. I actually pondered doing an index for about three seconds before I remembered that it’s going to be an e-book and people can use the “search” function.

Whoot!

Finished building the bonus pages for the letters! Yay!

Progress report

I’m putting together the bonus material for the letters, and I keep hitting the surgery photos. They are seriously icky—pay close heed to the advisory on those, that’s all I can say. I uploaded them all at once so that I would have to deal with them less, but I’m still stumbling across them at random intervals, which is not excellent.