Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 174

Dual Protagonists

This is an extreme no-no in the world of writing. You are supposed to have a single protagonist.

But Rome's Revolution is not about one person. Sure, Rei is sort of the hero but it is really his interaction with Rome that makes them special. Watching her literally reborn and grow into an autonomous human being, later mother, saver-of-the-universe and finally a true telepath is part of the strength of the novels.

Rei doesn't actually grow all that much. He was a little goofier in the beginning but he retained his sense of humor throughout. Meeting Rome and bonding with her gave him a little greater sense of urgency and he does grow into a man of action.

A fact only hinted at throughout the entire books is that while Rei was very smart and resourceful, even before he was frozen, when he used the bands with Rome, they actually unlocked portions of his brain. He started thinking faster, had greater insight and eventually learned to act quickly and decisively. The bands actually changed his brain physiologically, not just psychologically.

However, back to my original premise. I maintain that these books are not about Rei and not about Rome but about the Rei and Rome system. Two people, from different eras, different cultures, who throw their fortunes in together. The Rei and Rome system has the ingenuity and self-confidence to navigate their way around a future society. Just Rei or just Rome could not accomplish all that they did by themselves.

Rome says it out loud. She says they are their own samanda now. And several times I explicitly state they are one.

So I claim to you this book is not about dual protagonists. There is only one. It is the loving, dynamic couple called Rei and Rome. What do you think?

Rei's Resurrection

In the original "You are there" format of VIRUS 5, I wanted to give the reader the sights, sounds and smells of Rei's actual experience. However, this was delayed until Chapter 2. That is considered a no-no in action/adventure novels. You are supposed to meet the protagonist in the first paragraph and find out his (or her) dilemma right away. In the original book, you didn't know about it until Chapter 4. So once again, this chapter had to go.

If the little vignette about Silas Hiram was my best written piece, then this chapter was my second best. I spent a lot of time on it figuring people would judge my writing by the first few chapters. Luckily, the first three chapters will make their appearance in The Vuduri Companion whenever I get that done.

Anyway, I wrote this chapter from the third person perspective but so close to Rei's sensations that there is a lot of tell, not show. I presented Rei cold and immersed in a green, gloppy fluid as he was warmed up. Since he was only supposed to be frozen for three centuries max, I figured maybe the sarcophagus wouldn't work so well after 14 centuries. So I had the auto-defibrillator sensors malfunction and they tried to shock his heart back to life after it was already beating.

I figured that was a rather painful experience for Rei and he was lucky that it didn't kill him by stopping his heart. That would be ironic, huh?

Anyway, the current book Rome's Revolution does have a passing reference to this in the opening chapter. Here is the excerpt:
That plus the tender spot on his chest where the auto-defibrillator had burned him confirmed this was no dream.

But that's it. An entire chapter boiled down to one sentence. More tomorrow.

Rei's Resurrection tomorrow. VIRUS 5 today.

I promised I would talk about Rei's Resurrection today and I will do it tomorrow but I realized I had to give you the structure of VIRUS 5 novels as laid out. I even created a web site called VIRUS5.COM but it never really went anywhere.

Here is the original logo of the series when it was called VIRUS 5. It was supposed to be a symbolic representation of a Stareater consuming a star.

The three novels were:
Book 1 - VIRUS 5: Asdrale Cimatir, later, Tabit
Book 2 - VIRUS 5: Bez Onquoade, later, Tau Ceti
Book 3 - VIRUS 5: Pedele Ta Asdrales, later, Earth

If I could go back and redo the whole Rome's Revolution series, I'd do it like this:
RR Book 1: Rebirth
RR Book 2: Resistance
RR Book 3: Redemption
RR Book 4: The Ark Lords
RR Book 5: Rome's Evolution
RR Book 6: The Milk Run
RR Book 7: The Vuduri Companion

Maybe I'll rebrand the whole thing some day. Kind of like how Star Wars was Star Wars until it became Star Wars, Episode 4, A New Hope. People still call it Star Wars though.

VIRUS 5 - Original Layout

Before it evolved into Rome's Revolution, VIRUS 5 (later VIRUS 5: Asdrale Cimatir) was laid out to be a "you are there" experience.

It started out with the Author's note: This story is true. It just hasn't happened yet. It then presented an astrogeophysical chart regarding the characteristics of the Alpha Centauri star system. At that point in time, it was occupied by the colonists from the Ark I and the habitable planet (later called Helome by the Vuduri) was called New Earth. I did a lot of research into this chart and now it is gone :( However, I did post the data to my Wiki if you ever want to see it.

From there, it launched into the beautiful little story about Silas Hiram (see previous post Silas Hiram, RIP). It was my most polished piece because I thought that was how people were going to judge the book. But now it is gone (see Action, action, action) but it will be back some day in The Vuduri Companion.

The book then announced it was 1318 years later which was enough to tell you we were far into the future. Once again, I launched into the astrogeophysical data for the Tabit system. You can see it here if you like.

Finally, it was on to our story. I know people like action so I intended for the first real chapter to be dramatic. In fact, I envisioned it as the opening scene of the movie, but that hasn't happened yet.

My biggest problem was: in writing you are supposed to show, not tell. But the Vuduri don't speak. There simply was no dialog. Just a lot of telling. My only hope was to write it "cinematically" so you felt like you were at the movies.

There were several take-home lessons from this chapter.
- The Vuduri really were from the future
- They had conquered FTL travel
- Their method of towing the Ark II laid the groundwork for Rei's transport of the Ark II to Deucado
- Rei was picked at random as their test subject. (Not really!)

Tomorrow, Rei's Resurrection

Publishing in paperback

Publishing a book as an e-book is very satisfying but is a book really a book if it isn't a book? I set about learning what used to be known as vanity press publishing but is now called simply self-publishing.

The simplest, best alternative is CreateSpace which is owned by Amazon. You can't beat the deal. The whole process is free and when you are done, they list the book on Amazon for you. If you pay a little more, they submit it to Ingram, one of the world's largest book distributors, and now scores of people (and bookstores) are selling my books.

The only catch? It is called POD or Print On Demand. Which means nobody can put them on their shelves because they are only printed when ordered. No big deal right now. Maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, CreateSpace walks you through the process, complete with proper Word formatting guidelines. The only tricky part was the cover. Here are the covers that Bruce created. They are awesome!



 

But they have to be high-resolution, wraparound and you have to use amazing mathematics to figure out where the spine is going. Off by even a hundredth of a inch and the cover looks askew. Both the book and cover have to posted as PDFs but really, in the grand scheme of things, that was the simplest. I use a PDF-printer called BullZip and it works great.

For Rome's Revolution, it took us three full passes through the proofing procedure until we got it right. But then it was done. And I sold some! It is pretty cool.

(Trying to) Publish in iTunes

After I successfully published Rome's Revolution on Amazon and for the Nook, it was time to take on the iTunes store. Do you think you can just upload your book like the other two web sites. Nope. You need a Mac, which I don't have (thank you Steve!) and iTunes Producer. It took us two weekends and lots of error messages before I discovered that my books didn't pass Epubcheck which is the industry standard.

I went back and used a program called Sigil to examine the internal structure of the Epub format and discovered that Calibre was inserting some tags which were not legal. Sigil would allow me to manually remove them but I wasn't about to do that for every chapter every time I revised the manuscript. So I cheated. I wrote a program in Visual FoxPro which read in the entire HTML version, stripped out the illegal tags and then wrote it back to disk. By using the Epubcheck, I knew the next time I submitted my book to iTunes, it would pass.

One more weekend and voila, it went up. I got a rip-roaring big warning from Apple that my cover was not big enough (it was 800 x 600). However, it was just a warning so I ignored it. I wasn't planning on using that cover for the paperback anyway. Once the book went live on iTunes, it was time for Kobo. Kobo is a snap. It takes an Epub directly. Easy Peasy.

Then Smashwords. Oy. What a nightmare. Smashwords was created long before anybody had tools to create e-books directly and they were going to be the world's conduit to Amazon, B&N, etc. Their processor is called the "meatgrinder" and boy is it named correctly. It mangles your manuscript, loses fonts, etc. I finally decided to keep a Smashwords-only version of each book and whenever I make changes, I just copy and paste them onto Smashwords. I published there and had to wait several weeks to get approved as a Premium Catalog candidate. But then it was done.

I also used Smashwords to publish Future Past on iTunes because I ran out of ISBN numbers. If you let them publish your book, you get one for free.

So there you have it, Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo and Smashwords. I've got it down to a science now. I was able to crank out the formal e-book version of Rome's Evolution in record time. After I wrote it of course.

Tomorrow, how to (not) do a paperback.

E-publishing made (not so) easy

Since I discoursed yesterday about e-publishing, I thought I'd give you a little insight into what is involved. Keep in mind, you still have to write a book but that just requires talent (cough, cough) and a computer. It's publishing the e-book that takes a blend of skills.

First, you need a cover. I have my fabulous, incredibly talented brother, Bruce, to thank for that.
 



 


A book cover for an e-book is very demanding because it has to look great at full resolution but also look good as a thumbnail. Bruce was clever enough to figure out how to render the title and my name so that even at the tiniest scale, they were still readable.

Next you had to go through the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and remove every extra tab, space, carriage return and so forth. Word has this little paragraph mark which lets you see non-printing characters and it was tedious but doable.

Next was the formatting so that when you publish, there is a built-in table of contents and hyperlinks that go to the proper spots. I save the book as a filtered HTML page then import it into Calibre for converting to an Epub. Then I convert the Epub to MOBI which is the native format for Amazon. I used the Kindle Previewer for that. If I converted it directly into MOBI, you don't get the nice table of contents.

Then you sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing, fill out all the stuff and publish. No, wait, you need an ISBN first if you want to distribute it worldwide. They cost $250 for a ten pack. $25 apiece. One for Amazon, one for the Nook (and Kobo and Smashwords) and one for iTunes. Then you submit, check it out in the preview, revise, resubmit and so on.

In comparison, B&N Pubit, now called NookPress.com, was a dream. I could submit the Epub directly and it only took a few minutes to post. Once again, you have to use their previewer and revise and go back and resubmit but finally that was done.

Tomorrow, iTunes. What a nightmare!

290

When I first realized I could self-publish Rome's Revolution, I started dreaming about how much money I would make when I sold thousands of copies. Kind of like when you buy a lottery ticket.

At the time, the e-book was on sale for 99 cents and I was on the 35% royalty plan which meant I made 35 cents per copy. I miscalculated how many books I would have to sell in order to make the minimum requirements to get a check from Amazon and mistakenly believed it was 290 copies.

So I started a spreadsheet called 290 units.xls and started tracking my sales. I added in a column for the paperback and then a column for the Nook and then a column for iTunes and pretty soon had to add formulas.

As I was writing The Ark Lords, I became afraid that 99 cents was too low so I raised the price to $4.99 for Rome's Revolution. This allowed me to sell The Ark Lords for $2.99 and not undercut Rome's Revolution.

Then I decided to publish a book I wrote 8 years ago called Future Past, not because it was great but because I already knew how to e-publish. So I added a third tab to my spreadsheet and then a fourth to keep totals.

Now with Rome's Evolution, I had to add a fifth tab and the spreadsheet is getting very complex.

But I still call it 290 units.xls and I am proud to say I have finally, finally sold 290 units! All I have to do now is sell 10,000 times that and the lottery dream will come true.

Act 1, Scene 1

When I started writing VIRUS 5: Asdrale Cimatir, before it became Rome's Revolution, I always thought in terms of how to make it into a movie. I called it writing cinematically but I'm not sure that's even a style. Anyway, the beautiful little prologue about Silas Hiram (see Silas Hiram, RIP) was for literary purposes only. It was meant to set a lyrical mood.

I wrote the first scene of the old book explicitly to be the scene behind the opening credits. It was the dramatic rescue of Rei's Ark II by the Vuduri tug pilots.

My thinking was the movie was going to open with Rei's resurrection by what he thought were monsters or aliens in the airlock/isolation chamber on Dara. But when VIRUS 5 got cut down and squashed into Rome's Revolution, I now think that scene would take place behind the opening credits and the actual movie would open just as the book does now... Rei awakening in the airlock chamber, seeing his sarcophagus in the corner and realizing it wasn't a dream.

I'll review the science behind Rei's freezing and awakening in a few days but I did want to mention that even though I was sad to let go of those two scenes, I think the movie will open better because you meet Rei, you meet OMCOM and you meet Rome right away. In the current form, you are presented with the immediate issue which becomes a crisis. In the older version, it took a lot longer to develop.

Don't worry though, you'll get to read Rei's resurrection scene, in its entirety, when I roll out The Vuduri Companion next year.

Silas Hiram, RIP

For somebody who was never in any of the books, Silas Hiram was the most important non-character ever. His importance was through his journal. He was mentioned in Rome's Revolution as the discoverer of the first star, Alnilam, to disappear. He later made a historical appearance in The Ark Lords, when Rei and Rome read from his journal again and gained valuable insights about the Gray vs. White civil war. The gift of his journal was the dessert at the end of The Ark Lords, when MINIMCOM delivered Virga's gift to Rei for presenting her with a genetic up(down)-grade.

There was even a passing mention of the journal in the latest book, Rome's Evolution, in the scene when they investigate the break-in at Rome's Library.

But, in the end, Silas has been escorted off-stage and out of the story. When I originally wrote VIRUS 5: Asdrale Cimatir, the entire Prologue, some 12 pages worth, was all about Silas. But then he got killed or eaten by the Piranha Rats. His story got excised from the current version of Rome's Revolution because I needed action, action, action.

Good news: I am compiling an entire book of short stories, deleted scenes and other inside information and finally, the story of Silas Hiram (one of my best-written pieces, in my opinion) will finally get its moment of glory. My working title for the last book is The Vuduri Companion but that might change after I publish The Milk Run.

Stay tuned.