Advice to Neophyte Writers: Don't Try This at Home!

       

Cover of Part One

       I'm getting good results after publishing The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars, Part One: Eagle Ascendant.  I've already had six reviews, all of them 5 star.  It seems my friend Neil Aplin was right in maintaining it would be a success.  I had my doubts about publishing any of the book, because the entire piece is way longer than any book should ever be.  Neil didn't think so -- he read it in manuscript and he wanted it to be even longer, and it was his enthusiastic support that convinced me to publish the beginning of it.

       Part Two: Wounded Eagle is in the works; I'm revising like mad, trying to shorten it.   Part One is a long book, but at least it covers the first 31.5 years of Capt. Nikalishin's life.  Part Two only covers 2.5 years and it's even longer than Part One.  There will be at least six more parts after that so you see my problem.  The ultimate conclusion isn't even written yet.

       You might be saying, how in the world could you let this happen?  I've written a bit about my writing history before, but now I have new readers and Facebook friends who may not know how my writing came about, so I need to construct an apology, in the sense of a justification.

Sneak peak: cover for
Part Two (tentative)

        I've always been inclined to write long.  In college when the professor would assign a 20-page paper, the other students would be groaning -- how would they ever be able to make it that long?  And I would be wondering how I could keep the paper under 40 pages.

        I started to write fiction after I read Tolkien in 1969, and I had no real thought of publishing at that time. I simply found the act of writing to be tremendous fun.  So I wrote my first endless story. It was somewhat Tolkienesque imaginary-world fantasy and it was my million-word learning process.  It will never be finished and I will never publish it, but in case anyone is interested, my novel Children of the Music was written as a prequel to that long piece.

       From 1983 through 1999 I took a hiatus from writing because of family responsibilities.  Then in January of 2000 I bought my first computer, which made the act of writing infinitely easier.  And I had a sudden surge of literary inspiration, beginning with "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" (a novella! Amazing!) and then The Termite Queen and the rest of the termite stories (I've discussed them plenty elsewhere, mostly on my other blog The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head).  I completed the sixth volume of Labors in July of 2003, so you can see that I wrote furiously for those 3.5 years.  By that time I was a little tired of termites and even though I needed one more tale to complete the Quest, I wanted to do something else for a while.  (I did manage to compose the sequel volume for the Ki'shto'ba tales in 2015 while I was on chemo.)

       I should say that during this time I also never contemplated publishing -- I was simply enjoying myself too much.

       And then I got the idea for The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  I had invented the Bird People of the planet Krisí’i’aid, along with their language, for The Termite Queen, and I decided it would be interesting to write about the first contact with the Krisí’i’aida, which had occurred a couple of centuries earlier.  How about writing a biography of the spaceship Captain who made the first contact?  This would also give me a chance to develop my future history to an extent greater than I had been able to do in TQ.  I never intended for the piece to be so long or so detailed, but it was one of those stories that just grew like a clump of mushrooms.  And again, with no intent to publish, I paid absolutely no attention to the length. (A really serious mistake -- again I say to beginning writers: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!)   I started writing in November of 2003 and worked on that thing until January of 2011, when it suddenly hit me that I was 70 years old.  If I ever wanted anyone else to read my books, I'd better suspend writing and focus on publishing.  So I began to work up "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," self-publishing it in November of 2011, and that was followed by The Termite Queen and the Ki'shto'ba series -- and the rest is history, as they say.

       So what was I going to do with all that manuscript for The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars? (By the way, that was not the original title, but I don't seem to have recorded the original title anywhere and unfortunately I can't remember what it was.  Once I thought of MWFB, it seemed perfect and I never looked back.) I decided to publish excerpts from the book on my blog -- those excerpts are still here, on this very blog, but they've been radically altered in the final form of the book.  My friend Neil Aplin was mesmerized by those excerpts and so I agreed to email him longer pieces of the book.  He continued to be crazy about it and finally he convinced me to begin to working over the piece for publication.

      At one point I considered getting a professional editor to shorten it.  I'm sure a professional could do that -- just take shears and whack away.  But then it wouldn't be my book and I think I would have an apoplexy trying to deal with that person no matter how tactful and truly interested they were. Nope, that doesn't work for me.  I'm not concerned with becoming a bestseller, and it costs me nothing but time to self-publish, especially since I do my own covers.  However, I do like for people to read what I write and enjoy and comment on it.  I'll take my chances that the lengthiness may exhaust my readers' patience.

       So I think the world is stuck with something no writer is supposed to do -- an interminable novel cut into many segments, each one too long in itself.  That's why I call them Part One, Part Two, etc.  It suggests a single story rather than a series.  I made that mistake with The Termite Queen.  It was too long for one volume, but it is really all one story, and by designating the halves v.1 and v.2 rather that Pt.1 and Pt.2, I made people think it was a series and too many people have stopped reading after v.1 and so don't get the full effect.  The Ki'shto'ba books really constitute a serial rather than a series, but the volume designations seem to fit OK in their case.

So here are the upcoming volumes in the endless progression of MWFB:

Part One: Eagle Ascendant (already published)

Part Two: Wounded Eagle (being edited)

Part Three: High Feather

Part Four: Survivor

Part Five: Phenix (this is the one that requires drastic cutting -- Fathers and Demons was extracted [and will be cut] from that section)

Part Six: Rare Birds (still experimental)

Part Seven + : ??? not written yet!

       Do you think any reader can survive all that?  Do you think I can live long enough to actually accomplish the required editing?  I had some other books I wanted to write, too. Sounds hopeless! Anyway, I just wanted everyone to know how this all came about and warn them about what might be coming.  I beg your indulgence!  At least you've seemed to enjoy Part One.  Who knows?  Maybe you'll enjoy the other parts just as much!

Next on my Writing Agenda: "Children of the Music"

Known as a serpent, this antique musical instrument
looks like the trumpet that plays such a significant role
 in Children of the Music. 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Serpent%C3%B3.jpg
By Sguastevi (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

    First off, let me say that from now on most of my posting will be on this blog.   My Termitespeaker blog (entitled "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head") has lost relevance because I have now completed the series.  I had also used that blog as a vehicle to discuss myth, especially myth in literature, but I've kind of moved away from that, so I'll reserve Termitespeaker mostly for book reviews of the series.

    Today I'm going to talk about Children of the Music.  It's one of those manuscripts that has been stored in a drawer for 30 years and has now been taken out and dusted off.  That's supposed to be a no-no, but I see no point in trashing something that I believe has merit.  Here's how it came to be written.

    I started writing in 1969 and I churned out an unending manuscript over a period of years.  It got way out of control for length, because of my propensity for improvisation in the middle of books.  I always have a beginning and an end, but how in the world do you get from here to there?  And since this was the first thing I'd ever written, I kept going back and rewriting the beginning, which never made it shorter.  Finally I threw in the towel.  The book could never be finished.  I have shelves of manuscript for this book, which bore the title To Sing with the Wind (somebody once said to me, "You should just call it 'Sing with the Wind,'" but you see, that's the wrong connotation.  I'm not ordering somebody to sing (imperative) -- I'm emphasizing the process of learning how "to sing with the wind."  And yet to use the infinitive really does weaken the impact).  

    But that's beside the point.  When I gave up on my Tolkienesque first novel, with its evil sorceress, white-bearded wizard, young female heroine, and tragic young hero, I decided I needed to write a prequel.

    That prequel is Children of the Music.

   It features the past history of the two peoples who exist at the beginning of the humongous piece and depicts the families of the parents of To Sing with the Wind's hero and heroine.  And it benefited from my "million words" -- the amount you're supposed to have written before you can call yourself an author.  It turned out really well -- it had an appropriate beginning, middle, and end, and some really intense storytelling and compelling characters.  And it's a reasonable length of 118,000 words.

   Now I'm planning to publish it after some revision.  My problem is, I don't anticipate ever completing the book that was supposed to follow it.  Children is complete in itself, but it does contain some prophecies that foreshadow the main book, and it kind of leaves things hanging at the end.  Am I capable of writing a totally different book to follow it?  I somehow doubt it.  I simply don't like the book I originally wrote.  My original idea in To Sing with the Wind was to investigate a race of beings who were immortal, and somehow I don't want to do that anymore. These days, I'm not much into magic -- seers and prophecies are fine, and hints of the interference of gods, but my worlds are always real worlds, not governed by magical principles that have nothing to do with scientific reality. And my characters are always human.  (And if you say, well, giant termites aren't human ... just ask the people who weep over their story whether or not they have human appeal.)  

    But Children of the Music really does have sufficient merit to stand on its own.  Until I complete its revision, I'm going to blog about the book from time to time, and probably post excerpts.  I also have some questions I want to throw out to anyone who is interested.  But that will have to wait for another day.

    (Sorry I have no drawings yet for Children of the Music.  I do have some planned, however.  And take a gander at the great serpentine trumpet at the top of this post.)

This Blog Is Not Defunct! A Preview of the Sequel to the Ki'shto'ba Series

      

The Launch of Mor'gwai on the
Quest for the Golden Fungus
at the beginning of v.6.
(click for larger view)

Actually, I'm not defunct either.  I simply lost interest in a lot of things after being diagnosed with uterine cancer and having to go about preparing and enduring surgery (hysterectomy).  Recovery wasn't as fast as I expected.  Fortunately, the cancer hadn't spread, but I'm still going to have to take a preventive round of chemotherapy, which doesn't make me very happy.

 

       However, I'm back to attempting to write a little bit everyday on the sequel volume to The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head.  This post should be over on the Termitespeaker blog, but at least I've been posting reviews over there, so I'm putting this excerpt here.  I can't talk a lot about the new book because that would inevitably give away the events of v.6, The Revenge of the Dead Enemy.  However, the following excerpt doesn't do that.  It includes my interpretation of Cadmus and the dragon's teeth in Greek myth.  If you've read v.6, you know something like this was foretold by the Seer Ko'zim'tuk'zei.  In this excerpt, a tattered old Seer/Sorcerer has just given Is'a'pai'a a bag of reptile teeth - and she has a tale to go with it.

 

       “Mighty Captain-Leader, once long ago there are fortresses in all the great lands of the South, ruled by a great Champion named Pai’grin’a [Warrior (of the) East].  In those parts it is the custom to seek out holy springs and bring water to the fortress to bathe the Mothers at certain festivals.  A Seer tells Pai’grin’a to go to a particular spring for the rites of lat’nol|, but when it gets there, it finds an enormous reptile guarding the spring. ...

       “This reptile kills many of Pai’grin’a’s guards, but the Champion will not give up and fights long and hard.  Finally the reptile says to it, ‘Yield to me, Warrior fool.  You cannot kill me!  I am sacred to the War King!’

       “But Pai’grin’a does not yield.  ‘This water must be taken to the Mother, and if I return without it, I am disgraced and as good as dead anyway.’  And it fought on.

       “Finally it senses that the reptile is weakening and it picks up a huge boulder and bashes the reptile’s head.  ‘Ai-i-i, now you kill me!  You are the mightiest of Champions, and so before I die, I will give you a gift.  Cut off my head and pull out my teeth, and sow them in the soil as if you were planting the fungus spores or the seeds of fruit trees, and I promise you a great wonder will result.’  And the reptile expires with a great thrashing that in itself almost kills Pai’grin’a.

       “Pai’grin’a’s companions advise it not to accept the reptile’s gift, because such creatures are notorious for their devious natures.  But Pai’grin’a, swelled up with its own prowess, scoffs at his companions for being weakling cowards, and it pulls the many many teeth and sows them as if they were the seeds of fruit trees.  And immediately the ground begins to heave and then it opens up and out leap burly, bristly Warriors with huge jaws and a terrifying smell of invincibility about them.  They begin to attack Pai’grin’a and its remaining companions, but these Tooth-Warriors are not very smart and have little strategic sense, and when Pai’grin’a throws a stone at one of them, they do not know who threw it and they all turn and begin to attack one another.  Gradually they kill each other until only five are left, and these realize they would do better to surrender and to offer their services to Pai’grin’a instead of dying for no reason.  And that is the origin of the Tale of the Sown Warriors, who still live to this day in some part of the Lost World of the South.

       "A few of the reptile teeth are not sown, however, and as time goes by these teeth pass from Champion to Champion and fortress to fortress, until no one knows what has become of them.  But, good Easterners, one day I was foraging in a distant land – yes, I have wandered far, even as you have – and I came upon this bag in an abandoned cave-shrine, where the sea goes in and out and makes great spirit-music.  As I picked it up and peered inside, a ground-quake struck and I rushed out of the cave even as its ceiling crashed down behind me.  I brought the bag out with me and I stored the words of the cave-music in my remembering – ‘These are the seeds of the Sown Warriors.  One day you will give them to another Easterner.  Until that day comes, you cannot die.’  And so I have lived longer than any other Sorcerer ever on this world.  Do you have any more of that wonderfully delicious yellow berry that you gave me just now?”

Prepare to read the sequel to

The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head

by reading the previous volumes.

See the sidebar or go to

Amazon

Smashwords

(I would love for somebody to buy a book

at Smashwords because I just need a 10-cent purchase

in order to get a royalty payment!  Normally I use

Smashwords mainly to giveaway free books.)

 



What Has TermiteWriter Been Up To Lately?

       Neglecting her termites, that's what!

Neglecting her blogs, too, but that's less important

 than neglecting her termites!

 

       So why have I been so shiftless lately?  It's not the holidays, because I don't do much for Christmas.  It's my WIP, The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  I may have mentioned before that I have a beta reader for this humongous piece, and he is totally involved -- he loves the opus and keeps wanting more of it!  This has impelled me to work diligently to get parts of it ready to send to him. 

I may not draw very well,
but this really does capture
what the Captain looks like.
 

       I'm supposed to be shortening it (Hah! Famous last words!)  Actually, mostly I'm just reading it.  It's been a long time since I went through it and I've become completely absorbed, and the farther I get into it, the more intense and compelling it becomes.   On the bright side, I've not added anything to it and I actually have shortened it a little, but only by way of cutting words like unnecessary "that," and "just" and "now" (which I overuse).  I do occasionally condense a paragraph or cut a sentence, but those emendations are like grains of sand plucked away from a beach. 

       I honestly think I could shorten it more drastically, but I get caught up in the story and the flow of the dialogue (the piece is heavy on dialogue, like all my writings), and I never can achieve any distance.  Maybe after I  finish this pass-through, I can manage a more objective look.

       Another thing that the story requires is new chapterization and that I'm managing to do.  Since the book is cast as a biography, I began by heading the chapters with nothing but dates and places.   This makes it impossible to know what's going on by looking through the ToC, so I've never been able to find anything in the story.  The chapters were also too long, so I'm chopping them into shorter chunks and adding chapter titles.  I like books with chapter titles.  I think they can draw a reader in.  For example, here are the titles of the first ten chapters of The Valley of Thorns (v.3 of The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head):

 

The Marchers Muster before the Hot Gate. 11

The Hosts March South. 22

The Battle of Wei’loi’bao’cha. 32

The Aftermath of the Battle. 4

Peace Negotiations. 5

The Return of the Envoy. 5

The Evacuation of Wei’loi’bao’cha. 7

The Bite of the Tooth77

The Horn Is Broken

Mourning

 

       Now doesn't that list make you interested in reading the book so you can learn what all those intriguing titles imply?

       As I add chapter titles to MWFB, I'm also retaining the dates covered in the chapters, since it is a biography.  All this is taking some time, but it will make further revision easier.  I'm still not saying I'll ever be able to publish it because it is in fact the quintessential million-word novel -- all one humongous story.  The Termite Queen was too long for one volume, but it fit nicely into two.  MWFB will need maybe five and that's just for the part I've completed -- it isn't finished, you know.  It can't be a series in the traditional sense, which implies that each volume stands alone.  This is all one long story, just like people's lives are one long story.  You need the contents of v.1 to prepare you for v.2 and v.3, just as you need to know what happens in a man's childhood to help you understand his actions at the ages of 30 and 50.

       Just the same, I'm sorely tempted to publish the first volume, which I call Eagle Ascendant.  I takes Capt. Robbin Nikalishin to age 31 and drops him at a huge cliffhanger.  It would be a long book in itself -- at the moment it's 171,000 words.  But my beta reader was crazy about it and said he didn't think I should lose a word.  So what's to do?  Will anybody else be similarly impressed?  Only the space gods know!  If readers did take to it, it would be worthwhile plowing ahead with the project.

 

       So that's why I've been neglecting my poor little termites!  But they are still there, demanding attention!  Why don't you all go out and help keep them content while I cook this big pudding that is The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars?  You can find Ki'shto'ba and its cohorts at Amazon or at Smashwords.

 

       A footnote on the genre of Man Who Found Birds:  I almost have to call it a piece of literary fiction.  It just happens to be laid in 28th century and to involve space travel and future history, but what it really deals with is the human spirit, with all its triumphs and all its failings.  Really, all my books, including the ones inhabited by extraterrestrial termites, deal with that subject.  Mythmaker Precept No.  17: 

There are creatures on this planet [amended later to in the universe]

 who speak, form symbols, and share emotions;

these may be called human.

 

 

  9

Man Who Found Birds: In Which a Writer Confesses Her Sins

       I naturally write long stories!  Mea culpa!  No matter how good my intentions are, this is something I cannot overcome!  "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" (about 19,000 words) is the aberration.  The Termite Queen ran to two long volumes, but it never seemed long to me.  The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head was planned as a three-volume series, but I'm chopping it into at least six moderately long volumes.  This works quite well because my termites' adventures are episodic.

       But then we come to The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  It is a hopeless, unfinished sprawl, with a middle where I started improvising, bunches of characters (each of whom shouted "Hey, you, I've got a story of my own!"), and an experimental effort in a later part that I'm going to have to abandon and completely rewrite.      

       So why does this happen?  It happens because of the reasons why I write.  I want to express what's inside of me.  I don't write intending to produce a commercially popular book or to appeal to a particular group of people, like young adults or fans of a particular genre such as paranormal or horror or romance or even generalized science fiction, although MWFB does fall into that genre.  In fact, I don't really write for other people at all, although of course like any author I want my books to be read and relished. But I can't compromise my own way simply to make people buy and read the books. I can't write in a particular form on demand.  Therefore, I will probably continue on my path of sin.

 

       So if MWFB is so imperfect, why have I decided to work at least part of it  into something capable of being published?  Well, I acquired one serious fan in the process of posting early chapters on this blog.  Those posts also received many page views, if that means anything.  People did seem interested.  I've had a few other favorable comments as well.  Maybe this book could actually be my break-out piece!

 

       The book is cast as biographical fiction written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Capt. Robbin Haysus Nikalishin, who commanded the first mission to a nearby star system and while doing so made humanity's first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.  So there's my signature nod to scholarship:  the book is really authored by Prf. Tania Barden of Oxkam University in the Islands of Britan.  For comparison, The Termite Queen is laid in the 30th century, when interstellar travel and contact with extraterrestrials has become commonplace.  In MWFB, you'll get an occasional aside mentioning how things were done differently 50 years before, in the 28th century; otherwise it's a quite straightforward narrative.  I purposely tried to write a more colloquial style than what I used in TQ or in Labors (my termites are quite formal little beasties, as I've said elsewhere). 

 

       Now comes the painful part of my confession: the facts about the length.   The first 37 years of Robbin Nikalishin's life has consumed about 780,000 words, and that doesn't even get him to the stars.  I'm working on reducing that awful length, but I think this early part of his life will require three or four volumes (still undecided).  My tentative titles are v.1: Eagle Ascendant; v.2: Eagle Falling; v.3: High Feather; and v.4: Survivor.  It would be nice if I could shorten vols. 3 and 4 enough to make only one volume out of that, called Survivor.  If you've been reading my posted chapters, you'll recognize that those titles derive from the "Prologue."

       Volume One started at 179,173 words and after an initial cutting effort, it's now 175,203.  That's shameful!  I'm about to start a second pass-through, trying to look at each chapter objectively and determine if any huge chunks could be cut.  The best place to cut would be in the technical aspects -- my take on future fictional physics.  The problem here is, my fictional temporal quantum physics plays an enormous part in the unfolding of the plot, so I don't know.  I'm comforted by the fact that v.2 of The Termite Queen is 196,000 words, running to 572 published pages.  At least this one won't be that long!

 

       Now you may be saying, if this book is worth publishing, then why don't you hire a professional editor to cut it?  Arrgh!  Then it wouldn't be my book any longer!  I don't care how much better it would be -- I would have to disown it!  So I'm going to plow ahead and we'll see what happens.  The cover will be a problem, however.  No termites in this book -- it's all about human characters -- and I'm not much good at drawing anything but termites.  I might be able to do something with eagles.  If not, I might have to get some professional cover art.

       So please bear with me.  I think that in the long term you may just find this story compelling and captivating!  I know v.1 has the most exciting and suspenseful ending I've ever written for any book!

       Here is a facsimile of the title page of the "original edition," published in 2849:

THE MAN WHO FOUND BIRDS AMONG THE STARS

A Biographical Series

Issued in the year 2849 as Part of the Commemoration
of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Death of
Capt. Robbin Haysus Nikalishin
(10 May 2799)by
Prf. Tania Barden
Fellow, Brassnose/Queens’ College
Oxkam University

VOLUME ONE
EAGLE ASCENDANT

I decided to embarrass myself further
and post a cover I drew way back in 2004.
I got better at drawing faces as time went along, but these are not the best
and I have no intention of publishing with this cover.
Note that I originally entitled the early volume Ikarus.   
That's Robbin Nikalishin in the middle, of course.
Otherwise, the characters are, clockwise from upper left:
Sterling Nikalishin (Robbie's mother)
Robbie's friend Kolm MaGilligoody (horrible -- eyes aren't anything like right)
Dr. Madeline Souray (the Project's Medical Officer)
Wilda Murchy (Robbie's most enduring friend)
At the upper left is Robbie's toy space plane
and at the upper right is Kolm's medal of Mairin and Jaysus.