Since I finished my Intarsia project, I have not been in my wood shop, but I have jumped into the next project on my bucket list, i.e., write a book, or should I say write a half book. This project began in 2013 and was shelved in 2014. The story was taking on a life when I had a second story burst through my brain membrane. Walla, book number one, took the back seat. Space Rod lost out to BAC. Sadly, both books were tabled by 2015. Peggy began her journey with dementia, and I decided she was more important than any of my stories. In this return to book writing, I have decided to focus on completing one. Space Rod is a story that has been playing in my mind like a movie so it will be the one I finish this year.
An important lesson I have learned is that picking up a story almost ten years after it started is not as simple as I thought it would be. The initial enthusiasm that I had when I began is deeply rooted in the memory sector of my brain, and it requires a lot of coaxing to get it to resurface.
I began by editing the part I had written so long ago. I made another decision to use an editor program called Grammarly to assist with my shitty punctuation and phraseology. My logic was that if I edited the twenty-three chapters I had written, the story would become refreshed in my mind. It worked.
What hasn’t worked is recalling all the ideas I had to finish the story, like how it ends, and simple stuff like that. I am now at a point where I must go forward and struggle with what to write. I have reverted to my BLOG system of if I don’t have an idea of what I want to write, I should just start, and the words will flow. It did work for one chapter in which I tried to describe a character with all her wonderment and flaws, but when I go back to the story, I hit a wall because I don’t know how to blend the new stuff in with the prior stuff. When I BLOG and just begin writing, the flow carries me toward an eventual point that makes sense. Does that make sense? No? Not to me, either.
Another step that has consumed me is researching for the Space part. Back in 2023, when this idea first germinated, I thought the reader would believe any bullshit I wrote about space travel because space travel is a relatively unknown entity. What has happened in the past ten years is that Space X, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic have come into existence and are making space travel seem like it will be commonplace, and available very soon. That tells me that my readers will need to be convinced that what I am writing is within the realm of possibility. Up until now, I’ve taken the attitude that all things are possible, and I don’t need to answer questions about how they are possible. Anyway, this is a Fantasy Fiction story so maybe my first plan of making the reader fill in all the gaps can still work.
As I’m writing this Fantasy, I am also researching how to publish. The traditional method of submitting a manuscript to the major publishing houses seems no longer workable. These big guys are so inundated with material that they can’t handle it all, so they have trumped up an intermediate step of recommending that writers use an agent. The writer must convince the agent to read the story and to decide if he can make money on it. If he deems it worthy, the writer signs a contract to include the agent in any and all income derived. A alternate system to use is to self-publish on a platform like Amazon. Either way, the work of selling the book resides with the writer. Marketing is probably 99% of getting the public to read the story.
As I write this tome, I am considering establishing an Author BLOG or website dedicated to the book. Another BLOG will no doubt steal my effort from writing BS on this BLOG and spending all my effort on the book-selling BLOG.
The bottom line is I am better off making pictures out of wood. At least I can use the finished product to heat my home by feeding the works of art into the flames of a fireplace.
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