Pulses: Righting by Rewriting

At the insistence of my sister, I did some major editing and rewriting on my first novel, a science fiction piece called Pulses. It was overly long—240,000 words. I later pared that down to a mere 194,000, but it was still a mess. I had written it while on active duty overseas and had little time to research how to write a novel. Still, my sister had liked it. But, then, she was my sister.

Against my better judgement, I put it out on Amazon a few
years back. Some liked it, but many were harshly critical. And rightly so. They
pointed out it contained too much technical stuff. And was just, well, not easy
to follow. Several of the more helpful critiques pointed out the need for a
complete editing and clarification of links among the plot elements. I had
thought at the time that readers would like to puzzle over the interconnections
and unspoken parts to piece together the plot intricacies. In my own mind, all
the clues were there to allow the reader to figure out what was taking place.
Wrong!

So I have now broken it down into a trilogy to make the whole thing more digestible for the poor reader. Smaller bites, so to say. The first book is titled Pulses, Part One, The Sentinel. The second, Pulses, Part Two, The Pilot. And the last, Pulses, Part three, The Final Protocol. In the process, I tried to clarify all the plot areas previously left to the reader to figure out on their own—and my sister claims I have now done that. To her satisfaction, at least. And she claims to be an average reader with no particular interest in science fiction.

Unfortunately, in order to make the trilogy available in Kindle’s KOLL (Kindle Owners Lending Library) and KU (Kindle Unlimited), where readers can read it for free, I had to put a minimum price of 99 cents on each of the trilogy e-books. That raises the price for those who want to download all three e-books. Still, if they download Part One and don’t like it, they won’t feel compelled to read the whole thing, nearly 200,000 words, just because it’s on their Kindle. So they’re still out only 99 cents. Anyway, I hope this effort has produced an easier-to-understand ending and a smoother, more enjoyable read for those not interested in technical details. Though there are still a few for the hard core science fiction fans that want a reasonable explanation of how things work.