With Dragon God with the editor and Memory for Loan moving ahead, I decided I'd earned a reward, so I bought a book: the first paper book I’ve bought in months.

I’d forgotten how nice it is to hold a book, feel the weight of it in my hands. I can turn the pages and put a bookmark in. I can write notes on sticky notes and place them around the edges of the pages, then close the book and look at all my tags.

Then I come across a date I want to check…

and I stab my finger onto the page to bring up the dictionary and Wikipedia…
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It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a paper book.

I finally have Dragon God ready to go to the editor. It’s taken me ages to get the music scored properly and the map drawn the way I want it, but it’s all done now. I worked on the map for most of this morning. I could add more detail, but I don’t think it’s necessary. We just need to see where places are in relation to other places.

This evening, I’ll send it all to the editor then wait and see what I have to do to fix it. I can’t wait until I’m at the stage of applying for an ISBN. That’s when publishing this book will become really exciting for me. I love that process.

Dragon God will be my first self-published eBook. I’ve published print books before (for other people), but never eBooks. I have a lot to learn. I’m deliberately not looking at the conversion and publishing process until I know I’m ready for it. I’ll forget everything I learn before I need it if I do.

I’ve also been working on Memory for Loan this week. I’ve spent quite a lot of time watching videos of shuttle re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. I’ve made the rest of it up, so I hope it hangs together believably. It’ll never fool anyone who knows what they’re talking about but hopefully they’ll forgive any glaring mistakes. I’m going to get my characters actually landed (crashed) before I stop tonight. 

​I thought I’d finished editing Dragon God and it was ready to send to an editor. I’d worked out the theme, the central idea, the inciting incident, the characters’ motivations and conflicts and made sure they were all consistent. Then a friend of mine casually mentioned some of the things they do while they’re editing, and I thought… shit, I’m nowhere near finished.
 
That’s where I’ve been the last two weeks. Dragon God has been put through the editing wringers again and come out the other side much stronger. It still needs to go to a professional editor, but I’m much happier with where it is now.
 
The next step, before sending it to the editor, is to convert the music I’ve composed for one of the legends from .pdf to .jpg, and insert it into the document.
 
I also need to finish the map. I have the map from Warrior Pledge, but I had to incorporate the eastern side of the continent as well as the Lonely Isles in the south. All I need to do now is to add rivers and towns as well as the major norrgel nests. Then I’ll do some shading to make it look real, and I’ll be good to go.
 
I might also add a few drawings of sea monsters, just because. I probably don’t need the sea monsters—the next book in the series is set in the desert and to the west—but you never know.
 
The other exciting thing I’ve been doing with Dragon God is the cover. I finally chose a cover and have it available. I’ll wait until I get a bit closer to publication before making the cover public.
 
I’m taking today away from Dragon God and I’m going to work on writing new words for my next novel, Memory for Loan. I only have about 15000 words of it so far, but I’ve been working on it for a while. Those 15000 words are in their fourth incarnation. I think the story is beginning to work now so I’ll be able to move forward—just as soon as I crash land on a planet.

I’ve spent most of last couple of weeks working on editing a finished story. I began with a full-day workshop on structural editing. Sometimes, courses I do are presented with so little organisation that I get little out of them. This wasn’t the case with this workshop. The presenter was experienced and professional and knew exactly how to engage an audience with her topic.

Not only that, she provided some really useful, practical lists of things to do when beginning a structural edit. The lists make it all so much easier to identify parts of the story that don’t work and know what to do to fix it.

I’m a pantser. I rarely begin any plotting until I get stuck—usually around chapter 4 or 5. I rarely consider things such as theme or character arcs until I’ve written most of the story and realise it’s not working the way the nebulous images in my head suggested it would. A lot of things I do instinctively. For example, my stories usually have a clear theme, but I don’t recognise it until after I’ve finished the story.

It didn’t really surprise me that structural editing began with all those things I don’t think about until I have to: Theme/essence, central event, major dramatic question.

Those are the things I’ve been thinking about this week. I’ve been asking myself:

1. What is the theme of the story?
2. What central event happens that, without it, the story cannot happen? It might be something that happens before the story starts, or in the beginning section of the book.
3. What major dramatic question will the reader ask at the beginning and hang on to the end of the book to get the answer for? This must be a closed question.

For Dragon God, the book I’m editing (again), the answers are:

Theme: Good vs Evil, True Love Conquers
Central Event: The Lunar Eclipse (from Warrior Pledge)
Dramatic Question: Will Gaelan find and win his Concubine? Will Fisher be able to build a new, peaceful life for himself?

Where to from here?

I’ve been working on a scene map so I’ll finish that. I do scene maps for every book I write but I usually use them to check things such as POV balance, character consistency and emotional depth. I need to take it a step further and check the three major things against the scenes.

That’ll be one of my jobs over the next few weeks.

As I read a book of poetry I bought this week I have a definite feeling I should be sitting on a bean bag in an obscure, sweetly-smoky club that has walls hung with batik and beaded curtains. Nearby, someone would be playing an oud or a lute while the poet reads their poetry aloud.
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Poetry isn’t usually my thing. It’s not something I read regularly or have a passion for analysing, so I’m unpractised, but I’m a reasonably intelligent, well-educated person so I should be able to understand a few poems, right? 

Wrong.

At least it is with the poems I’ve read from Luke Beesley’s anthology Jam Sticky Vision. One positive: the titles all sound interesting. I can see how a person would be living their life, see, hear or experience something, and simply have to write about it. All the words make sense, I see the images the poem describes (in some cases), but at the end of every poem, I look up and say, “What?”

I kept reading and will continue to do so until I reach the end of the book because, surely, I’ll begin to see through the miasma of run-on sentences, unfinished phrases and disconnected words to the meaning beyond. Call me plebeian, but I can’t see how a collection of random nouns and adjectives, with no articles, verbs or participles, invokes an understanding for the purported topic.

NB: This is not a review of this book I bought, or the poems I’ve read. I’d have to understand them to review them. The lack of understanding is mine, not a fault of the poet.

This man has won awards: multiple people out there think his writing is good. I attended a workshop presented by him several years ago at a writers’ festival. It made a lot of sense and I produced some interesting work.

So I’m not giving up yet. There must be something in his poems that I’ll be able to connect with, or at least make sense of. I’ll keep looking for it until I finish reading the book.

Has anyone written a beginner’s guide to Beesley’s poetry? I think I need one.

I'm writing, so I'm trying to broaden my reading. It stops me unconsciously copying from other authors and also gives me inspiration and ideas to make my writing better. Last week I read science fiction. This week, I’ve been reading poetry. During the week I decided to read Australian poets, regardless of how tempted I’ve been to read Edgar Allen Poe and Wordsworth as they’re two of my favourites. So, Australian poets it’s been.
 
I started with Oodgeroo Noonuccal, just because. She manages evocative images and emotions with a few spare words, and none of it needs deep analysis unless you want to spend the time with it. Her classic, Son of Mine, with its clear decision to focus forwards and not dwell on past wrongs always wrings the emotions in me. The Last of His Tribe is another favourite: such a casual telling of a life disregarded, but evoking the emotions of an entire race. Of course, as soon as I read Corroboree, I had to slip to We Are Going. Those two are linked like bread and cheese and must be read in that order. From there it was a short slide to Judith Wright’s Bora Ring.
 
The contrasts between the two poems highlight the contrasts between attitudes. Noonuccal feels the loss personally. Her people are gone; we’ve all lost something precious and we must acknowledge that. Wright feels it as something a little sad that happened to someone else and can’t be changed: Oh well, let’s move on now. Those two poems (three if we count Corroboree) together tell the tale of Australian history, and the attitudes prevailing, still, today.
 
From there I slipped into some Bruce Dawe and Thomas Shapcott; a different perspective of the country. Their work is known to me as well, still a homecoming. (I met Shapcott a lifetime ago when I first started uni. That was probably my first ‘fan-girl’ crush. It lasted all of three hours – the duration of his lecture, discussion afterwards, and the walk home to my reality.) I’ve been thinking about analysing the political and social environments at the time of their writings to see what correlations I can draw. Just because. It’s not as if I have nothing else to do.
 
So that was the comfort zone. Now it’s time for something a little different. I want to read some things by Luke Beesley and Kim Chen Boey. It’s not as simple as doing a search and downloading onto my ereader for them. I’ll have to buy an actual paper book to read them. I’ve searched the local independent and chain bookstores online. A couple of them have one or two books by Beesley, nothing by Boey. The only book I’ve been able to find by Boey is a travel memoir. Otherwise, I have one poem from a mixed anthology. Just one.
 
It'll be enough for me to read many different words, many different ways of putting those words together and many different ways of making readers think and feel differently. Some of it might even rub off on my writing. I can hope.

I began reading science fiction when I was four. I used to sit on my father’s lap as he read, and learned to read along with him. If he was reading E. E. (Doc) Smith or L. Ron Hubbard, he’d change books and we’d read Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke instead. I’m not sure if he considered the content of Smith’s and Hubbard’s books unsuitable for a four year old or if he thought the language was too difficult for me to read. It could have been something as simple as the size of the type.
 
Either way, science fiction was my first love and, while I read other things, I always return to it. It’s my comfort zone, my safe place.
 
I’m currently writing a science fiction novel as I do Year of the Novel through QWC. One of the questions I have to answer this month is what comparable books/writers there are to my story. If this was a romance story, I could easily find an answer because romance follows the same tropes. While there are differences with each story, there are always similarities too. Finding a comparable book would be a simple as finding another author with a similar voice or style. Science fiction isn’t that easy.
 
I don’t write hard science fiction. I don’t have the depth of science background to do it justice so I don’t even try. I also like fantasy stories so my SF, as well as being soft SF, often has fantasy elements. I love space operas, so I often write entire stories where most of the action is aboard ship, with planetary landings being rare and brief. When you add in the romance as well, it’s difficult to find something comparable.
 
I don’t know of anything similar to my new story, Memory for Loan, and couldn’t find any that combine similar SF features with romance. Some Steampunk novels touch on similar aspects of Victorian England culture and pollution as seen on Tolifax but Memory for Loan isn’t steampunk. I couldn’t find a romantic space opera that had similar elements although the writing of some hard SF authors (Greg Bear, Ralph Kern, Elizabeth Moon) resonates even though the majority of their writing (that I’ve read) is set on-planet.
 
The inspiration for Memory for Loan came from The Martian (Andy Weir), mixed with Victorian England slums, a concern over global warming and pollution and their affects on the environment, an interest in the idea of terraforming dead planets to make them habitable, melded with a personal background of Star Trek, Dr Who, Isaac Asimov, E. E. (Doc) Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.
 
The premise of the series is that the planet, Tolifax, has been used as a dump for centuries. The powers on Earth have dumped everything unwanted there, including human beings (especially hardened criminals). The communities on Tolifax are finally beginning to work together and revolt but how can that be successful when the people have no power and the ecology of the planet has been all but destroyed?  The rebels set up camp, stage left, taking chunks out of the Galactic Government, centre stage, which fights dirty and for keeps. Enter, stage right, the planet whisperers, and you have the set-up for Memory for Loan.

They say to write what you know. That will give your writing greater depth and believability. It’ll be real. But how far should an author go in the pursuit of authenticity? We can’t all experience every emotion, or every action. For the experiences we haven’t had personally, we can read newspapers, journal articles, research papers. We can talk to people; friends and strangers. One thing we shouldn’t do is groom vulnerable people, make them trust us, then betray them.

It takes a lot of courage for someone who has been hurt to trust again, and even more courage to speak openly about the pain they’ve suffered. For someone to come along and use that courage and vulnerability for their own ends, without permission, is reprehensible.

I don’t usually comment on these things, and certainly not in the heat of the moment. I wait until I calm down and understand clearly what I’m thinking and feeling. I haven’t calmed down with this one; not at all. I am outraged and filled with a deep, all-consuming sorrow.
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You don’t need to use and betray others to achieve a feeling of authenticity in your writing. You only need to have compassion and empathy. You only need to respect others and understand their lives are not yours. If you can’t do that, perhaps you’re writing in the wrong genre. If you can’t imagine it, perhaps you’re in the wrong business.

The Year of the Novel continues. I’m half way through the first month and should have 3000 words written by now. I have written about 1000. Not as much as I need, but better than I have been doing so I have to be happy with that.

I’m still struggling with where the story is going but I’ve decided I need to just write something and trust that, eventually, the story will sort itself out. I’ve done as much planning as I can without planning myself to death and never writing anything.

So that’s what I’ll focus on this week—getting words on paper, whether they’re good words or absolute rubbish. At least I’ll have something to work with.

As a teaser, I’ll give you the beginning of my new story, Memory for Loan. This is probably the fourth beginning, and probably won’t be the last one, but I think I’m getting closer to something I’m happy with.

Now to work on the second half of the first chapter. I want that finished before the end of next weekend, so I can move forward with the story.
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One man hears the whisper
Lonnar pressed his hand against the sensor to open the lift door, pausing the action. He’d been on board the Augustus for six months, the captain in charge of nearly 3000 crew. It was his job, what he’d trained for since he was fifteen, yet it felt alien. Like he was living someone else’s life.
What else could he do though? This was what he’d always wanted. He pressed his fingertips against the pain that flared in his temples every time he thought about leaving his position. The pain was getting worse; sharp stabs behind his eyes, like pokers jabbing at him. He didn’t have a tumor; his last medical was only a few weeks ago and the pain had begun well before then.
Perhaps he should see a psych-med and… No. Any hint of mental illness with the captain would put the entire mission in jeopardy. Every order, every action, would be questioned and refuted. They’d come too far for that to happen.
And he was fine.
Lonnar took his hand away from his face, straightened his shoulders and punched the door release. The door slid open with a refined hiss and he stepped out, onto the bridge. The subdued murmur of ‘busy’ dulled his recent sensitivity, and the view of neverending stars washed over him like a balm.
Space. This was where he belonged.
“Report,” he said quietly.
His 3IC punched a few buttons on the arm control panel of the captain’s chair then stood. “All quiet, sir. The full report is now in your inbox. I’ll be in the rec room if you have any questions.” The Thrick always took over during Lonnar’s sleep period. His 2IC, the Tick, took over during Lonnar’s rest time.
“Thank you Thrick.” Lonnar sat, grimacing at the warmth of his seat. Shared. Not his. He opened the report from the previous session and began to read. The bridge was quiet, with only a few murmured comments or instructions between the crew. Lonnar liked the quiet, but it felt unnatural with twenty people around him.
The hours passed. Lonnar was superfluous.
“Captain, we’ve received a hail from the Caesar. Commander Milosovitz is ready to transfer to the Augustus.”
Lonnar didn’t both lifting his head to look at the comms officer. They wouldn’t be looking at him. “Notify receiving. Take the commander directly to his quarters. Inform me when he’s settled.” Lonnar continued reading the reports that continually landed in his feed. Through them he could monitor every activity onboard. Every few minutes he glanced at the pilot, his hands itching to take over the controls. That was flying.
“Professor Milosovitz is aboard and in his quarters, sir.” Lonnar tapped a button on his console that indicated he was still on duty but away from the bridge. He gazed around the bridge at his crew as he stood. They, just like the ‘sir’, were part of the package; part of the life that had become his after the completion of his last mission, and the promotion that followed his injury. A promotion and injury he didn’t remember. Maybe. Sometimes he thought he remembered it. His head buzzed with it every time he tried to get the facts straight, like a search array gone wrong. Stuck in a loop. Circling and circling for days until he thought he’d go mad with it. The medics thought it would always be like that, said it was normal in the face of trauma, said he would adjust to it soon. Lonnar wanted to believe them.

I love writing courses, especially face-to-face ones. I always meet such interesting people and am exposed to amazing minds and incredible ideas. It stretches my mind and forces me to try new things with my writing. I always come out writing better, writing happier.
 
Last week, I began The Year of the Novel with Venero Armanno. Week one was the overview. We touched on a lot of things such as writing habits, structure, and voice. We began looking at character, their background and conflicts.
 
We were given homework!
 
I don’t know if it makes me a nerd or not—I live on the edge of nerdness anyway (or perhaps not so much on the edge)—but I love homework. It’s a great way to see if I’ve understood the conversations during the day and to try it out on my own, and to find out how it works best for me. So far I haven't reached my set goal of 3000 a week. I'll need to write more than that to finish the book by my self-imposed deadline, but it's a good number to start with.
 
I’ll admit I’m still struggling with my story—so much so I can’t decide where to start it or what the first ten pages should show. In my head the idea is a good one, but every time I write a few thousand words, it reads like a stereotyped space opera. The uniqueness of the idea isn’t showing through.
 
I’ve thought about giving up a number of times. I’ve put this story away to think about, a number of times. This time, I want to get it written. I’m not giving up. I’ll find the way to make this story work.