In September of 2007, I started this blog
with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how
little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, In April of 2014,
I figured I’d gotten enough publications that I could share some of the things
I did “right”. I’ll keep that up, but I’m running out of pro-published stories.
I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off
of it, but someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write.
Hemingway’s quote above will remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing
output and sales, but I’m adding this new series of posts because I want to
carefully look at what I’ve done WRONG and see if I can fix it. As always, your
comments are welcome!
ANALOG Tag Line:
Would you be willing to give up your life for something you weren’t sure
you believed in?
Elevator Pitch (What Did I Think I Was Trying To Say?)
Noah Bemisemagak ran
from a horrible incident he’d precipitated as a teacher to an interstellar
situation that’s not that different from the one he’d fled.
Opening Line:
“No one ever bothered to ask.”
Onward:
“Going to the
Shabe Captain’s lavish dinner party was the only way Noah Bemisemagak could leave
behind the Guru Suicides and the Humans and Sentients who obsessed over them.
His path to Mars, interstellar space, danger, and martyrdom led first through
this dinner party. He closed his eyes. If Earth Government had given him a
choice between the party and leading a group of extreme biker teens on a first
contact mission with aliens who looked like Hallucigenians on steroids while he
drove a wheelchair, he’d have taken the wheelchair and the teenagers. They
hadn’t.
“Nowhere in his application to Shabe-Human Contact and
Debt Reduction – SHuCADRe, the Cadre for short – did it bother to ask if he
enjoyed parties. He didn’t.
"In briefs on the bed of his two-room suite, he snorted. No
sane adult would have given him the chance to work with teens, bikes, and
wheelchairs. Four of his students had
killed themselves jumping from the upper levels of the Minneapolis-St Paul
Vertical Village with badly home-made hang gliders. He was the guru who’d
written the query markers leading to their unguided experiment. His poor
judgment was common knowledge. That the kids had hacked into the query marker
trail of a student who had the skills and support necessary to do all of those
things successfully was much less well known. Nine years after the event, no
one bothered asking. That may have been because the middle seven of those
years, he’d been drunk or stoned.”
What Was I Trying
To Say?
If only I’d done the
tag line and elevator pitch BEFORE I wrote the story, I might not have had so
much trouble reigning it in. In fact, I think I’m going to go do that for my
current work in progress right now…
The Rest of the
Story:
Noah does WAY too
much after this point – he runs into a survivor from his past and her guardian,
he’s introduced to a BUNCH of weird aliens, meets a good kid named Dale who is
WAY more than he appears to be, a political situation where an Iroquois Republic
and First Nations Vertical Village wants to secede from Earth and have its own
representation in the Unity, the beginnings of the United Faith In Humanity
pogroms, the four Divisions of Earth’s united government, fractures in the
Shabe (aliens to whom Earth owes a deep debt), interstellar politics, religion –
Human and alien (and my main character is a Christian), the tenets of the United
Faith in Humanity, introduce a new aphorism: “‘Never read into an alien,
Human intent or purpose.’”, Noah gets lost, meets objections to his work at the
Voyageurs Gray Wolf Institute, “just happens” to see the kid being kidnapped
(did I mention the kid was in a wheelchair???), nine pages before the end of
this “story” we come to the mystery, introduces ANOTHER key concept of the
alien associations Humans find themselves in: “As you are Sentient-but-not-Sane, the ritual practices laid out by our
beliefs are safe from exposure to public judgment or censure as no Sentient
member of the Unity would take anything you told them to be truth. Your
observations of our worship service may instructive and allow you to lead the
evolution of your people into Sentience.”, he witnesses an alien communion
service after sacrificing his own body in place of the original handicapped
victim, saves her life and is promoted to Sentience by the aliens, almost gets
arrested for kidnapping the former student, the Shabe Reformation, and finally –
how does all of this connect together…and finds out Dale is a major in the
Combined Forces of Earth assigned to ALL of the issues above…
End Analysis:
This is a blueprint
for a series of novels, so there’s NOTHING that can be done to save this story
because it’s three or four novels; prequels to my novel, OUT OF THE DEBTOR
STARS (which I will soon submit to Baen Books…where it will stay for a year)
while I look for another agent.
Can This Story Be
Saved?
In a word, “No.” It’s
not a story.
“But…”
It can be broken
into novels and I can tell just the one story without all the rest wrapped
around it. I like Noah. I like Dale. I can slim it down to that simple story
and Noah’s meeting with the weird alien Ybrayith. We’ll see if I do.
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