The Making Of the Novel “Awakening” Part 1

The Making Of the Novel “Awakening” Part 1
A mostly accurate timeline…

The Years 2018 to 2024.
It all began with an idea that had been quietly stirring in my mind for nearly a decade. I envisioned a story about a lost human super-civilization, seen through the lens of a man from our distant future. The ruins left behind by humanity beg a single, haunting question: What happened to the world? That question was my starting point, and it too formed an image in my mind of a lone man gazing across a ruined apocalyptic landscape, reclaimed entirely by nature.



Early Visions
I went to San Francisco to meet up with my good friend Rad at Yerba Buena Gardens, to catch up on life and the projects we were each working on. Rad and I go way back to the late nineties. These days, he’s a full-time dad, a full stack programmer, a startup owner, and a dedicated woodworker. Both of us are seasoned pros in the tech world, but with passions beyond the industry. For him, it’s woodworking and coaching; for me, it’s motorcycles and writing. Together, we maintained an investment club on his Discord. I told him that getting laid off had made me step back and reevaluate what really mattered in my life. I told him about the plot early on, shared a few of the story elements I was playing with. He was intrigued and encouraged me to write it. We ended up talking for hours, the way people did before screens and algorithms dominated our lives. That’s how we usually connect rarely, but deeply, with long stretches in between.



Meeting up in SF
I was working a relatively shitty dead end contract in San Francisco, with no hope of going full time. The place was miserable, scarred by some internal nuclear fallout that had left everyone wounded long before I ever arrived. Even routine tasks, like working in a co-location outside “our side” of the building, was treated like betrayals. The pre-merger crew barely tolerated the newcomers, clinging to old corporate tribes. It was a classic toxic workplace saga, not worth more than a mention here.

Back in 2018, Awakening was all I could think about. It didn’t matter where I was, at lunch, stuck in traffic, when an idea struck, I’d save it on my phone. Speech-to-text became my go-to tool, letting me capture thoughts on the fly. Later, I’d transfer them over to my working whiteboard to flesh out the ideas.



Working Whiteboard of Ideas
I started working on the rough draft on March 23, 2018. I knew grounding the reader with a clear sense of time and place was crucial to bringing Awakening to life. My boss we’ll call him “Sam” was a big science fiction fan, so I shared one of my earliest drafts with him. When he returned it, his feedback blew me away. The notes were more detailed and insightful than anything I’d gotten before, even from the editor I’d hired on Reedsy.com for $1,800. I took all of Sam’s notes and addressed each of his points one by one. It changed the story but surprisingly made it better.

So much so that I started sharing it with anyone I could, friends, colleagues, family, anyone that was willing. All I wanted was honest feedback. My closest friends read it, others said they did, but I knew they had not. I could see who was accessing the cloud folder and who was not. I have to admit it was upsetting, I looked around on Reddit to see if anyone else was experiencing what I was.



People said they were interested, but even after a year of leaving the share folder up they never touched it, not even once. Then one day I was talking to one of my close colleagues, I told him I was working on a science fiction novel he told me that both he and his wife enjoyed science fiction so I shared an early draft in the hopes of getting some feedback that I could use to improve the story. To my surprise, I did get some feedback, but it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. After some time, my colleagues’ wife sent me a response for the sake of privacy we will call her “Ina.” here is what she wrote;

“I am just not sure how to approach this. My feedback would not be appropriate in this case because I am just not a big fan of this type of writing. Neo-baroque: heavily ornamented and structurally overloaded. These things are fun to write, but you have to have an appreciative audience who find it equally fun to read. Once again, it’s just me. If a sentence takes an entire paragraph, it’s almost always structurally overloaded. Details are heavy. Vocabulary is heavy. I understand this is all intentional, I just won’t be able to appreciate it.”

In my mind this was a somewhat polite way of saying; “I think your writing is shit.” Needless to say, I spent about five months rewriting everything from scratch…

The Making Of the Novel “Awakening” Part 2: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

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