Endings

I'm reaching the end-stage of plotting the sequel trilogy to Aetherstorm, so naturally I've been thinking a lot about endings lately. I think readers will find the ending to Aetherstorm mostly satisfying. The main conflict is resolved, but our hero, Konrad, does not exactly live happily ever after, and the antagonists are not punished in a really satisfactory way.

I plan to end the Aether Cycle on book four, the third book of the trilogy, and leave the world I've created for good. So the ending to the series has to be completely satisfying, to me and my audience.

The problem is that there are irresolvable conflicts (see the previous post). Short of genocide, there will be war in this world. I can live with that, some conflicts are not meant to end, and it gives things a certain feeling that life really does go on, unlike a fairy tale there simply is no such thing as happily ever after.

A lot of the characters will die, although it saddens me to kill them, there are some I have created who I am really going to miss, but if ya wanna make an omlette... Other characters will live of course, and I want to leave them in a better place than I found them.

The antagonists must get their comeuppance. For everyone else, life goes on, much as it was before. Anything else just wouldn't ring true to me, real life is too complicated.

Why Steampunk?

I first learned about Steampunk many years ago, when issue #4 of Girl Genius had just hit the stands. My brother is an avid comic collector and he encouraged me to read them. I found them really cool, but at the time I was busy with many other things, and the whole idea of Steampunk got put on a back-burner in my mind.

A little over a year ago, I was struggling to get my first novel out there, (which is still unpublished, with some re-writes and more experience I'm sure it will do well though) and looking for my next big idea to base a novel around. I hit upon the idea of a world of flying cities, which naturally dovetailed into the Steampunk genre. After I had some idea of the world I wanted to set my tale in I began to work on plot, carefully avoiding exposure to Steampunk other than what I already knew in the hopes of creating something truly new and innovative.

So the world evolved. A rift in the Aether caused massive mutation throughout Europe, and made it possible for people to tap a nearly unlimited energy source. The physically superior cousins to humans created were labelled Synari, and enslaved by Humans. Their population exploded as they outbred humans 10:1 and their generally obedient nature encouraged sales to cultures across the Earth. Because it was a recipient of slave labour, not a continent destroyed by slavers, Africa became far more significant than it is in our world.

But, as with all good things (well, good if you were a Human), it came to an end. The Synari decided they didn't like being slaves. Riots broke out in every major city in the world. Wealthy industrialists and politicians saw the end coming, so they created flying cities. The aristocrats, their servants, soldiers and such left the Earth, never to return. Cities with less wealth built zeppelins to escape, and those on the coasts fled to the few island chains that had been purged of Synari.

Humans cannot allow the Synari to breed too much, or develop a civilisation capable of advanced technologies, so they run aerial patrols, gassing Synari camps whenever they are found. The Synari, angered by this treatment would destroy every last Human to be free of their tyranny. But neither is capable of destroying the other, and there is no possibility of peace, because peace would allow the Synari to spread, and once their numbers grew great enough they would surely win any war between the two.

Into the greatest flying city in this world, enters Konrad. An eighteen-year-old, with a secret.

Representation

Up until now I've avoided going into any detail on my progress in finding an agent. I'd heard from several sources that talking about the search on your blog is considered bad form.

I will go through my experiences in the process in greater detail in future posts, but for now, let me just say I'm proud to announce that I'm officially represented by Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary. This is a huge step forward for my writing career, and although we still have to do edits, find a publisher and get the book out there, this is probably the biggest and most important step towards that. Only about 1/2 - 1/3 of agent represented books get published by a good publisher, but fewer than 1 in 100 manuscripts actually get picked up by an agent.

So, like Sissyphus I've ascended the peak, only to see that there's more climbing to do. Unlike Sissyphus, the end is within sight, and possibly within grasp in the near future.

First 200 words

This is my first 200 words for Blogger extrordinaire Daena Barnhart. I only found out her page through this contest, but I'll certainly be visiting her often in the future.



Title: Aetherstorm
Genre: Steampunk, 80k words
Finished, and edited, and edited, and edited. Then edited some more.

Konrad Adler wormed his lanky frame up the steam conduit, and tried to ignore the burning in his shoulders. The duct had been shut down for maintenance moments earlier and the heat was enough to suck the air straight out of his lungs. In five minutes it would be cool enough for the cleaning crew; he had that much time to sneak into Otto Dragomir's laboratory, steal a couple of vials and escape.

Sweat ran in a steady stream down his face, heat and nerves drew moisture from him like a wrung sponge. Normally Konrad avoided anything that whiffed of criminal enterprise, he picked through refuse to sell, or ran errands for half-pennies to help his father out. That would not cover it this time though, they needed some serious coin, or he and his father would be finished.

He squirmed past the sixth access hatch. The brass wheel that opened the seventh hatch, the one leading to Dragomir's laboratory, was just a floor above. Another minute of squirming through the thick, oily air brought him abreast of his destination. Konrad reached out to turn the wheel, but the metal seared his hands. He choked back a gasp of pain and rolled his sleeves over his hands to try again.

Character Studies

Characters are the motive force behind any good story. You can have the most amazing plot, world building, write the snappiest dialogue and create prose that makes editors shrug and say, "I have nothing to say", but if the characters are flat and lifeless the story will never succeed to any great degree.

Building good characters is essential to writing good fiction.

So, what makes a good character?

They are a living, thinking, autonomous person. One of the tests for me is that my characters don't always do as I say.

They have emotional consistency. This is one I figured out only after a pile of rejects unfortunately. I knew one of the scenes near the beginning of Aetherstorm was a little out of place, but I loved it, it was clever and witty and I couldn't really place my finger on what was wrong. Then I figured it out. On page five he has the crap scared out of him, then a scene later he's all suave and clever, it felt completely out of place.

They come across on the page. This has been the toughest one for me to learn. I thought I knew what was going on inside my character's heads before I really spent the time to focus on this. One whole edit of Aetherstorm was spent scene-by-scene putting myself inside their heads and thinking, "Okay, I'm Konrad. X just happened, how does that make me feel?"


As I went through and edited for character, I found that, with Konrad (the lead) especially, it gave me a ton of insight into who he is and he changed in nature from how I had envisioned him. In my early drafts he was essentially a nice guy, caught up in something bigger than himself.

Then I started to really think about who he was. All those Psych classes I took in college began to pay off. I thought about how he lived, and where he came from. His mother died when he was a baby, and his father raised him. His mother and father were stowaways when Himmelberg first launched so they aren't even legal citizens, which places them in a sort of permanent underclass. Add to that the fact that his father had been the product of some experimentation which made him much stronger and faster than a normal human, but he and Konrad cannot use their advantages, because non-humans are automatically labelled mortal enemies of humans and killed on sight. That makes for a mess of an adolescent. He feels he's better than everyone else, but lives as the lowest of the low. That's at the core of his personality. Obviously anger and arrogance are his biggest character flaws at the start.

Over the course of the book he does a lot of things to survive that haunt him. Guilt and the fear that he's turning into exactly the sort of monster humans believe he is keep him up at night. He turns to alcohol and starts to alienate his friends. Everything got a lot darker in the re-writes, and I think the manuscript is better for it. Konrad is certainly a lot less likeable at the end of the newer drafts than he was in the early ones, but he's also more sympathetic and more real, which I think plays well into the bittersweet ending which was inevitable once all the pieces were in motion.

[Mask picture modified from a picture found at http://bobbasset.com/, the background photo is by Charles Bodi (who has an amazing collection of beautiful abandoned factory pictures at ridemypony.com)]

Contractions

I wrote Ætherstorm almost completely without contractions, against my normal inclination and style, because I wanted to give it a bit of a feel of the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells stories I've been reading lately. Now I hear back from several readers that they don't like it, it makes the dialogue feel stilted and unnatural.

>sigh< Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyhow, enjoy this cute picture of a steampunk kitten while I go through and fix all the broken dialogue.

By the way, if you're ever looking for a picture to describe contractions, such as 'it's' or 'they're', don't do a google image search for 'contractions'. The bulk of the images returned have nothing to do with the shortened forms of words.

The Cast Part IV

Lord Octavian (Otto) Dragomir

Dragomir is the villain. He is the most brilliant scientist of his generation, but like so many scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, he feels that the betterment of mankind is such a noble goal that individuals should, in fact must, be sacrificed. Today we think of the scientists who performed potentially lethal experiments on human beings as sick, twisted and evil, but not so long ago it was perfectly normal. Until the 1960s for instance, it was regular procedure at one American hospital for any woman having a gynaecological exam to be injected with a cell culture of cervical cancer, often causing that woman to develop cervical cancer herself. Dragomir is the product of that sort of thinking.

Normally Dragomir is so wrapped up in his own work that he is completely unaware of anything that happens outside of his own laboratory. As long as he receives a steady supply of 'subjects' for his experiments there is little else he wants or needs.

He was deeply involved in the experiment which released a steady flow of aether into the world nearly a hundred years ago, but from the beginning he always considered that experiment a failure. For most of the intervening time he has worked on developing an experiment that would produce a perfect rift to the aether, which would give him enough for his experiments without having to kill any more subjects for the small burst of aether he can use as they expire.

There is, of course, more to him than I can, or want to, express here. I could write a book. In fact, I have. ;)

How Much is too Much?

I've been polishing away, snipping excess verbiage here, adding bits of plot there to smooth out the story. The other day I thought about adding an entirely new element to the world. It would add an some interesting world-building elements, but obviously it's not necessary to the plot. In the end I decided to let it go. If this book takes off maybe it will form the basis for a sequel.

All of which gets me thinking, at what point does editing start to make a manuscript worse instead of better? I'm never going to be 100% happy with everything, I know that. Even if it gets published I am sure there will be mistakes that make me slap my forehead, but at the same time I know that's okay.

I think it's ready. One more read-through and edit, and I'm moving on. I think I'll do a series of shorts next. I'll only come back to this one as comments trickle in to fix specific things.

The Cast Part III

Zylphia

Zylphia is one of my favourite characters in Ætherstorm. She is the flight leader for wing three and the best pilot aboard the zeppelin Kharkov. She is smart, tough and has no problem keeping up with the boys. She is the only woman in the crew of the Kharkov, but she doesn't pretend to be a man in an attempt to fit in (I for one am tired of that cliché). As I was writing the story I had a picture of a woman in my head, only as I was looking at pictures for this blog-post did I realise it was Amelia Earheart (pictured above).

As this is the nineteenth century she does not have an easy time fitting in to what most people see as a man's role. The term 'sexual harassment' has not been coined, and people in that era would not even understand what it means. Being the best pilot aboard and friends with the captain are all that keeps Zylphia's life from turning into a misogynistic nightmare. Even so she has to occasionally put a man in line, using extreme measures if necessary.

Since she was twelve, she has known nothing but living in the streets and living on the Kharkov. In spite of the downsides she much prefers the Kharkov and wouldn't know what to do with herself if she couldn't fly every day.

Zylphia is, of course, the love interest. She keeps Konrad on his toes, especially in the early stages of their relationship. If I were to write a prequel novel about any character in Ætherstorm it would be her, as she has the most interesting (and developed) back story.

The Progress Bar 6

Well, it's done. Almost exactly on my targeted word count of 75,000 (74,688 is close enough), and nearly a week ahead of schedule. There will be more edits, I am a tinkerer at heart, but I am happy with the manuscript.

This novel began with the idea of a steampunk world with flying cities that sprang into my mind in the bathroom one night while I was looking at nasal spray. Yes... saline nasal spray, in English it said, "full stream" (the manufacturer sells three different power levels), but in Canada all labelling is bilingual. In French it read, "jet fort". I found it amusing that the French version said something entirely different to an Anglophone mind so it stuck. That is honestly where the first nugget of an idea came from.

The idea sat in the back of my mind for a long time. I was working on trying to get my previous novel published, but in moments of frustration I turned to my steampunk project called, Going Down (terrible name by the way, even setting the sexual connotations aside). I had a pretty good idea of how the story went, with a few major holes when I started work in earnest about four months ago. Another week of planning and plotting and I was ready to go. A month and a half of writing, followed by two months of editing and here I am. Ready for the next stage.

I hope it's ready for prime-time. I feel alternately like a father, proud of his new creation, and like a sergeant, ordering his man over the top, into no man's land to die horribly in a hail of machine-gun fire.

Excerpt

Well, I'm nearly there. Less than two weeks to go and I'll start sending out some queries. In the meantime I've prepared an excerpt to submit to The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and a few other places.

Here is an excerpt (from the excerpt) describing Terra do Pao, a district to the south of the volcano on the island of Pico in the Azores.

Then it was Flight Three's turn to step into the elevator. The lift swung in the breeze on the way down. Konrad's nostrils began to sting from smoke, garbage and the smell of millions of humans pressed together in close proximity.
The view was spectacular though. The setting sun cast a reddish light on the volcano to the north. The streets were already in shadow and streetlights were flickering on, illuminating the teeming masses of people and machines below.
After waving good-bye to Tinibu, Konrad, Grover and Zylphia wound their way through the busy catwalks of Terra do Pao. All manner of bizarre contraptions zipped along the streets at breakneck speed. Velocipedes, like the one Konrad had ridden north from Paris were common, some had a small carriage behind for passengers and accepted a fare for transport. There were steam cars and trucks, even a few steam-powered velocipedes which wove in and out of traffic at speeds that made Konrad fear for the drivers' lives.
Most pedestrians kept to the network of bridges and catwalks suspended about six metres above the streets. Steam pipes passed through the entire district, providing heat for the caliphos lights. In some places small leaks in the network of pipes sent shimmering clouds of mist into the night. Shops at catwalk-level sold a dizzying array of merchandise; clothes caught Konrad's eye, especially some which he felt should not be displayed in public, let alone actually worn by a woman, there was all manner of food for sale, alongside jewelry, watches, firearms, knives, swords, artwork, and a hundred other things he could not identify.

Impatience

I want to get my book out there. It is not perfect, but I am resigned to the fact that it will never be perfect.

Right now, my plan is to revise until the end of the month, then send out queries to a dozen good agents. If I don't get a very positive response (at least 2-3 full requests) I will revise further. I made the mistake last time of querying everybody before the manuscript was truly ready so I'll pull it if the response isn't good enough.

Maybe that's overly ambitious, but, if I can't attract an agent fairly quickly there must be something wrong with the book. I don't want to publish a book that sells a few thousand copies. I don't have to be the next Stephen King, but it would be nice to earn a solid living as a novelist. That's all I ask.

In the meantime I plug on, improving the manuscript a little at a time, impatiently waiting for the first round of query responses.

Maybe I'm just a rejection addict. I spent most of last year querying my previous novel, I haven't had a rejection in my inbox in a few months, it makes me antsy.

Prologue Comparison

To follow up on what I was saying yesterday. Here is a before and after on one of my prologue fixes describing a riot.

For three days the rioting continued unabated. Elsa began to worry for her baby, even though it seemed like the Institute for Science and Technology was the most secure building in Berlin. A ring of guards protected it day and night, armed with steam-guns and rifles. When the army couldn't control the violence any longer they gassed the streets. Thousands of rioting synari died alongside hundreds of humans, including the Institute guards, who had received no warning.

Simply a quick summary of events. I thought it worked but a lot of readers found it confusing and/or too distant from the action to be interesting.

Take 2 (first draft so please excuse any typos etc.)

Utte ran from the police with a crowd of fellow synari. Moments before her best friend Heinrich had been shot while trying to storm a blockade. She helped him to his feet as he stumbled, clutching at the hole in his side. She led him through the swirling mass of grey synari, up to a door stoop, out of the crowd.
“We have to get you off the street.”
“I think it is too late for me Utte.” He pulled his hand away from the wound to show her. Blood came gushing out.
“If we can get you to a doctor, I am sure they can fix that.”
“Utte, the doctors will not see me. We are all criminals to them.” He smiled at her. “They think it is only fair we should be slaves, after all we are merely sub-humans to them.”
Utte hardened her lips. “They will see who is sub-human when we storm their seats of power. They are the inferior ones. We should make them the slaves.”
Heinrich smiled. “That would be equally wrong. We should work together. Remember the first tenant of the revolution. 'All men are equal.'”
The crowd of synari in the street began to reorganize. Someone was shouting instructions at them.
Heinrich put his hand to Utte's face. “Go with them. We nearly broke through in the last attack, this time you are sure to succeed.”
“But...”
“Just go, I will die a happy man, knowing that you are about to change the world.”
Utte nodded. She wiped a stream of tears from her cheek, turned and joined the crowd as they began to advance on the barricade for one last push. She picked up several bricks that were lying at the side of the road.
The crowd began to chant, “Equality for all.” As they rounded the final corner before the barricade. They gathered momentum, picking up speed until they were running faster than a human could go.
Utte realized something was wrong. The men on the barricade were not shooting.
A moment later she realized they had fled.
Others in the crowd saw the barricade was unmanned and a great cheer arose. The headlong charge turned into a celebration. The city's last line of defense was defeated, Berlin belonged to the synari, they controlled the streets in every district.
Synari men and women cheered and danced. Utte yelled herself hoarse. She hoped that Heinrich had lived long enough to hear the celebration. He might still be alive, she decided to go see, maybe he could be saved after all.
Overhead, above the noise of the crowd she could just make out the howl of aircraft engines. She looked up to see a large aeroplane, skimming the buildings above.
Moments later she felt a spatter of liquid across her exposed face and arms, as if a sudden rainstorm had arrived. She looked up, but saw no clouds in the sky. The air suddenly smelled like a bed of geraniums.
Utte's arms itched where the liquid had hit them. She scratched and tore a strip of skin off. Her arm was blistering, the itch turned to a burning sensation as though each droplet of the liquid was on fire.
Utte coughed, she sneezed, spraying blood. She realized everyone in the crowd around her was coughing and sneezing too. A spasm of coughing wracked her body, it was so intense she fell to the ground. Blood and other things came up with each cough. All around her people fell to the ground, gasping for air. Utte choked and tried to inhale, but could not draw another breath.

To Prologue or not to Prologue

I have a three page prologue at the beginning of my current manuscript which covers approximately twenty years of family history for the lead character. It gives a bit of a world setting and sets up for some of the conflict to come.

Some beta readers love it, others hate it, so I have decided it should not stand as it is. I think the problem many readers have is that I kept it intentionally short because I didn't want to put readers off with an expansive prologue. Now I am finding that nearly all the spots in my manuscript where I breeze over things because I think the audience won't be interested in the finer details are the biggest stumbling blocks. When I go back and flesh them out into fully realized scenes the readers enjoy them much more. In my attempt to shorten things, to keep from boring my readers I have created parts that bore the readers...

So, back to the prologue. I need to figure out if it's having the same problem, perhaps instead of three pages it should be ten, or twelve. The only way to find out is to write it. Then I'll cross my fingers and hope people like it so I don't have to cut it entirely.

Anyhow, that's where I am. I hate this stage of writing, it's all second guessing myself, hoping that the changes I make are for the better. It's frustrating, because I feel sometimes like I am making less improvement to the manuscript each day that passes, but occasionally I will have a big breakthrough, or a beta reader will point to a problem I hadn't noticed before. Then I'm thankful I'm taking my time and going through it all thoroughly.

The Progress Bar 5

As I said earlier this week, I am finished the first draft. All the loose ends are mostly wrapped up, although there is certainly room for a sequel. The manuscript is 66,283 words long now. A little on the lighter side than I was hoping for. Recommended length for young adult titles is 45-80k, but I was aiming for around 75k. It seems to be expanding slightly as I progress through the second draft so I expect the final to be in the vicinity of 70k.

The second draft is going smoothly, occasionally I find places where I need to expand the descriptions or add a few details. One short section needed a complete re-write, but on the whole I am very happy, looking back on what I've written. I expect the second draft will be ready for beta readers by the end of next week, well ahead of schedule.

Hopefully it will be ready to query in another month or so. Time to gird myself for battle, prepare for the slings and arrows of the query process and let slip the queries of war!

Finished!

The first draft is finished. Sort of. It has been written to the end, let's put it that way. The climax and the follow-up, even a short epilogue. All done.

Now I am editing and filling in. As an author I tend to be very direct and to the point. Nearly every scene I have written to this point is directly relevant to the plot. But I have created a world that I hope will entice readers to stop and smell the roses now and again, which means I need to go back and plant a few. Here is a sample, I hope it smells sweet.

Konrad helped Tinibu and Grover out while they worked on the fourth aircraft in their wing of fighters. Tinibu dangled over the side of the biplane's turbine access hatch, held up by a thin hemp rope and a mesh of canvas straps he wore like a vest. Beneath the aeroplane, flapping in the wind, was what the mechanics on Kharkov called a diaper, a large sheet of netting, designed to catch anything the mechanic might drop by accident. Grover and Konrad stood above, lowering tools and parts on long cords to Tinibu whenever he called for them. The sun had just passed over the horizon, so Tinibu was closing up for the day.
Konrad glanced up and saw a glittering jewel in the distance, set against the dusky sky. He pointed it out to Grover.
“What is that?”
Grover looked up and smiled. “Paname. The most beautiful sky-city. I have only visited her once and I fell in love. One day I will go back. I save a bit of my pay so I can live there when I retire, find a nice French girl, settle down and raise a family.”
“That is a worthy ambition.”
The city drifted closer, Konrad could make out individual lights glowing in the sky. It had towers and what looked like bridges on the upper surface. Whereas Himmelberg was lumpy and misshapen, every line of Paname seemed planned. Konrad had never considered before that something so large could appear graceful. The entire city sparkled, like a sky full of stars, compressed to the size of a city.
The little man sighed. “It is a pipe-dream Konrad. I would need to work a hundred years to save enough, but, a man has to have dreams. Mine is La Ville-Lumière.”
Tinibu cleared his throat below them. “If you two lovebirds are just about done admiring the view, I am ready to be hoisted up.”

Ætherstorm Query

I have decided my novel will be named Aetherstorm, at least until I find something I like more. While finishing the final chapters this week I have also been refining my query letter. For those who don't know a query is an essential part of the process to getting published, the body should look something like the back cover of a published novel. Here is the body of the query for Aetherstorm.

Eighteen-year-old Konrad Adler has never set foot on Earth. On most of the planet, aether-warped animals and a dangerous sub-species of human called synari reign. Ordinary men live in the skies, safe from the dangers below, destroying the aether-warped branches of humanity at every opportunity. Konrad appears to be an ordinary human, but in truth he is like the synari, aether-warped, faster and stronger than humans.

When Lord Dragomir discovers his secret, Konrad flees by stowing away on his father's salvage gyrocopter. But the salvage operation goes wrong. The gyro crashes, killing his father and leaving Konrad stranded, hunted by both Dragomir and the synari. He will need to survive on a planet no longer fit for human life, make his way back to his home in the skies and confront Dragomir before he can truly be free.

But Dragomir has bigger plans. The flow of aether on Earth is too weak for him. He would rip a hole in the fabric of space, threatening every life on or above Earth, to create an aetherstorm.

Let me know what you think!

The Progress Bar 4

Four weeks I have been keeping track here. The manuscript has gone from a measly 9,840 words to 56,265, long enough to fit the guidelines for young-adult literature. Another 10-15k and the first draft will be almost done, I plan to backfill a little in some areas that need it, which will likely bring the total to 75,000 or so.

This week Konrad and Zylphia were doing their best to blend in with high society, thus the masquerade mask. The mask symbolizes the turning point to the final conflict, where every moment in the book starts to get more intense than the last. It is not looking good for our heroes at the moment, the shit just hit the fan and things are getting messy.

One of our heroic friends will die the next time I write, others may soon follow.

The Cast, Part I

Each Monday I'd like to share a few of the characters I have created for my book. I will work my way from the more peripheral characters to the protagonist and antagonist, starting with, Grover and Tinibu:

Grover is the first friend Konrad makes on the airship Noviy Kharkov. He is a pilot, assistant mechanic, fabricator and scrounger for Wing Three.
Short in stature, but long on mouth, Grover is friendly, outgoing and quick with a joke. He has a near total disrespect for all authority except for Zylphia's. Grover has the face of a weasel and the heart of a lion. Always the first to jump into (or instigate) a brawl, he is what we might call an adrenalin junkie in modern parlance.

Tinibu and Grover are best friends, in spite of the fact that they seemingly have nothing in common. Tinibu is a dedicated family man, carefully hoarding his pay to bring home to his wife and kids in the Azores. He is African, and one of the biggest and brawniest men on the Kharkov.
Where Grover is talkative, Tinibu rarely says anything unless it is necessary. He has a calm and steady presence which soothes the irrepressible Grover.
Tinibu is the Wing mechanic, and when Konrad joins the team the second best pilot (after Zylphia).

Both men think of themselves as Zylphia's older brothers and wouldn't hesitate to protect her, if she ever needed protecting.