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If you’ve just spent thousands of hours crafting a story and dialogs and narratives, it’s important to get the right kind of help to make sure your book(s) achieve their best potential.
—Developmental editors can act as a sounding board to identify holes in your plot, or to highlight weakness in your writing, or your characters. It’s the first step for me to have an experienced developmental editor throw darts at what I’ve written, while not necessarily expecting the book to be 100% complete.
—Beta Readers. You need readers, preferably from the demographic group you’re targeting, although this isn’t necessarily a requirement—it helps. Beta readers’ comments help you to see where you haven’t been clear, or where the story lags or doesn’t make sense.
—Editor / Copy Editor: Absolutely essential. You’ve read your story a hundred, or several hundred times. Believe me, you no longer can see the errors, or the residual weak elements. The editor can suggest areas to be changed and he or she is the main defense against releasing crap.
—Artist: the cover is a part of the book, and getting the main graphic elements to match the story is a big help toward making a complete story. I like the graphic element to also tell the story in a symbolic way, although this isn’t essential
—Designer: The designer does the interior layout and—perhaps—the cover layout for your book. The designer may or may not have generated the main graphic element, but they make both the fonts and the cover look good.
—Proof Reader: Also absolutely essential to catch those last minute errors, he or she also checks the designer’s errors.
Writing the manuscript is a rather lonely affair, and you’re pretty much on your own, but turning the manuscript into a book is a team effort, and—of course—you are a part of every collaborative effort. There are usually back-and-forths at every step, because—in the end—the book needs to fulfill the vision you had for it.
For me, a book is a 1 to 1.5 year effort, but then the way I write is nauseatingly iterative, and some people can turn out a good manuscript in jus a pass or few. My first book required 200 passes and my second, over 20 major rewrites with an even greater number of polishing passes. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

I created a new web page, where I will add details and (later) excerpts form my newest book—the one I’m working on now.

I AM is a story of love, loss, and tragedy, and explores the life of a college student as she learns to cope with the things happening to her, and as she watches her own impending doom.

https://michaelselden.com/other-stories-in-the-works/i-am/

Tuesday Talks is a discussion group on GoodReads—readers who discuss different aspects of books: point of view, or settings, or whatever.

This week’s topic is on influences, as in what has influenced you? It’s a huge subject. influences include can the people one knows, as well as authors and books—even performance art.

For me the list of books that have affected me is far to large to single any one out—and the same applies to authors. For people, I’d have to say my mother was a big influence, since she began reading serious books to me before I could read, and I learned to read very early—somewhere in the 3 to 4 year old range, just after we’d moved to Berlin in 1961.

When young I read all the usual things, including people like Twain, but I also moved  into science fiction, too. I can remember mowing my way through series of books by the same author, but few stick out as significant events. Later in life, I combined an interest in writing with reading to sharpen my  writing skills. I can remember going through all of the Hemingway books at the library and then moving on to Steinbeck and others. Later, I read things like Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Bradbury . . . To prepare for writing a YA book with a female protagonist I systematically worked through novels, mainly written by women, with a strong female protagonist—220 books in 2011. But for me, it isn’t the plot that necessarily draws me to a book. It’s as much the tone and feel that the author creates, and how well he or she uses imagery and events to play on emotions. The plot has to be there, of course, but I think of writing as an art. and art is as much as feast for emotion as it is for intellect—more than just the story, but how the story is told and how deeply the author can draw readers into the world created. A story can be clever but, for me, without these “tactile” elements, it falls flat. I’ve read Asimov, of course, and his stories are amazingly inventive, but I’ve often found that his characters to lack an emotionally complex dimension. I can read his work and appreciate it—the Foundation trilogy, for example, was a tour de force—but only a few of his characters there were sympathetic. At the same time, in Jane Austin’s books, it might at first seem more difficult to relate to the characters, both because of the language and because she writes about people in the propertied class of England, but these people are imbued with depth, even her flawed characters have redeeming qualities.

I rambled on above to illustrate how hard it is to isolate one’s influences to this or that author or book. Literature is kind of like the universe—complex and too enormous to capture in a few words.  I feel we are influenced by so many things that it’s  hard (and unfair) to name just a few.

Tuesday Talks Discussion Group on GoodReads. I saw a reference to this group when reading a member’s blog—it sounded interesting, as did the topic.

First Person or Third Person: Which do you prefer?

I’ve had to think about this question in my own writing, and I’m not sure I’ve ever resolved anything/ I like both, and each has its own strength and its own weakness weaknesses.

First Person

Strength

With first person you have immediate access to the perspectives, emotions, thoughts, and memories of a character, without added explanation about how the reader would know this—fewer instances of ‘she thought’, and so forth. The reader develops a very intimate relationship with the main character, and it’s easy to be absorbed by is or her perspective.

Weakness

You only see the story, and the world, through the senses of one character. The story may be much more complex than this—important things could be happening when the character is not present, and you don’t get the perspective of other characters, except through the observations of the main character, plus there isn’t an outside narrator who can provide other information relevant to the story.

Third Person

Strengths

The entire world, all the characters, and the story is available to the reader, including information that is harder to present through the main character, who will need added dialogs and—perhaps—independent first person research to learn.

You can vary the primary perspective in each chapter or scene and the story still flows well. This is another important matter when writing—to maintain a perspective in each scene—that is, it’s written in third person, but the observations all come from one character. To change perspectives you need a shift, which can be accomplished with a new chapter or a new scene by breaking the flow with a glyph. I didn’t always appreciate how this may have affected readers—I liked the shifts in thought access, but I understand this can be hard to follow.

Weakness

In third person, the reader may feel disconnected from the characters. It can be sterile if the writer doesn’t take care. Certainly it’s far easier to connect the reader to the character in first person.

Alternatives

Hybrid

In my most recent book, I began writing it as a hybrid, first person perspective when the main character was there and third person when she wasn’t. This varied from chapter to chapter, although most chapters were first person. This can jar the reader who may not be expecting it, but it is a way to tap into both strengths. Ultimately, I rewrote the entire novel in the third person and worked hard trying to retain the same emotional content for the main character. I still think Hybrid could work, but will have to think hard before doing it again. I liked the first person intimacy—plus the broader knowledge and story it offered. Still, my editors and alpha readers sometimes struggled.

Multi-First Person

This can work, but the story needs to be broken into segments where the shifts are clearly delineated. The book “Wonder” did this successfully. I enjoyed the story and it was good to get the multiple perspectives.

Other

In the end, both of my published books and the book I’m working on now are written in the third person, although in the current book I use another trick: periodic journal entries from the main character. These are naturally written in the first person for her. Also, I have a second main character who only appears in short interludes. His segments are almost like diary entries, and are written in the first person for reasons I can’t say yet. This new book involves complicated interrelationships and a complex plot. Some of its chapters are out of sequence in time, too.

I think it’s important to experiment with alternate approaches.

The Forword Clarion review for The Balance is out and can be found here:

https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-balance/

Below is an Excerpt from the review (spoilers skipped)

“Michael Selden’s The Balance is an intelligent and engaging story about Phoebe, a psychically gifted teenager living under the rule of a strict theocracy. She is contacted in her dreams by her mother, who she thought was dead, and starts down a path of self-discovery, trying to learn more about her past and her powers. Her life, however, may have more significance than she understands. As her abilities grow she is unknowingly led toward a destiny that may change the entire world.”

…

“The Balance is a highly creative, thoroughly enjoyable book. The author leaves plenty for his characters to do in the next book, and will leave young fans anxious for the next installment.”

I had an idea for a cool new novel, or series of short stories today. Even though I try NOT to think of new plots, sometimes I can’t help it. I’ve got a long backlog of stories to tell as it is, but I think that trying to write a serialized short story will help me stay fresh as I work on “I AM”. It’s sometimes useful to have more than one thing going—it shifts your mind to new characters, worlds, and ideas, so when you come back to the other work you see things you may not have thought about.

 
I think I’ll call this story: “Escape from Chara Prime”. It’ll be a pure science fiction story—what I might call classic SciFi. I wound up documenting a whole set of new technologies for it today, as well as an idea about how that society is organized.

I’ve picked up the novel I AM again, and Im into the first draft through about 45 pages. Although I have more than that written from when I set it down, most of the remaining text is scattered through various chapters of the book—things I wrote for each part of the story so that I could pick it up again after The Balance was published.

I AM takes place over a period that straddles the fall, winter, and spring months of 2020-2021. It’s written for a New Adult audience, but I think Young Adults and Adults will like it as well. Most of the story happens near the fictional town of Long Lake, in the foothills of the Appalachians. Long Lake is a university town and both of the main characters attend school there.

I hope to have the first draft done in a couple of months, although—the way I write—the final version probably won’t be complete until sometime next year. I tend to write in layers, and the first draft usually represents bout 5% of the total effort needed to get the book into what I consider publishable form. I categorize my revisions by their level of maturity. Draft is level zero, publishable is level 5, and I may send it to beta readers at level 3, or level 4. A single revision is a fraction of a level. Going from level 3 to level 5 for The Balance required first 6 revisions of each chapter by myself, followed by an editor’s pass to make suggestions for changes, and then another pass after I reviewed and adapted his changes. Then there were two passes by a proof reader (another editor), and a final polishing look by me again.

The Boy Who Ran required 200 passes before I was satisfied that it was ready for the editor.

I still find things I wish I’d phrased differently in both books, and I (of course) can find an error in any book, mine included.  Perfection, I think, would take forever.

M

My first order of copies of The Balance arrived today.

THE BALANCE is a Young Adult novel, set in a dystopian future. It takes place almost 200 years after a global thermonuclear war.

The Land is ruled by a theocracy—the Council of God—which drove the Order into exile about eighteen years before the story begins. The Order had brought advanced technology from the pre-war past into the post apocalyptic era using self-contained living time capsules.

Phoebe is seventeen, and the last Sensitive to have been genetically engineered by the Order—before they were either killed off or driven into hiding. She doesn’t know why she’s plagued by the voices, images, and feelings of people all around her. For her, it’s a constant struggle just to survive the chaos they bring to her life, and to hide her strangeness from others. In the Land, strange behavior is reported, and those deemed to be witches are sent to the Inquisition. She lives in a harbor town, hiding what she is, protected by her adopted father, Daniel.

The Order hasn’t completely vanished. Their ancestors had established Sanctuaries before the war, and the refugees retreated to these hideaways to survive the Purge. Now they’re plotting to restore the historic agreement that made it possible for them to share the benefits of an advanced civilization with people in the Land, and to co-exist with the Council.

Their leader, a genetically-engineered Prescient, has been aware of Phoebe, but has largely left her alone. Now he sees danger coming for her, and he also has visions that she might hold the key to a path that would help them reestablish the agreement they made with the Council, an agreement called The Balance.

There is a preview available on GoodReads, and on my web site.

There is also a GoodReads giveaway in progress. It ends July 4.

Finally, The Balance is finished.  I’m beginning to receive the production files and will be releasing them through Ingram and Amazon this coming week. It;s been a 3.5 year odyssey to reach this point, with many detours along the way, but the first of what will eventually be three books that tell the story of The Balance is here.

I took this picture last fall, just as a thunderstorm was moving in—I was on top of Grouse Point, and about a half mile form my motorcycle at the time—maybe 12 miles from home. Both the motorcycle and I got wet, but it was still a nice day.

This will be the front cover image for The Balance, although the background may change as the cover design is completed.

The Kindle version of The Balance is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. When the paperback and hardcover editions become available for pre-order, I’ll post those links as well.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X087A4S

The Balance is with the designer for layout. This is expected to take about 2 weeks. After that, it will be sent to the proof reader for a final review. While the book is being reviewed, the cover design will be completed. I have 2 images for the cover, one for the front and one for the back.

I plan to release three formats:

—Softcover

—Hardcover

—Kindle

At this time I’m not planning on an e-pub version, but will revisit this later.

M

All of the chapters have been revised and all but the last 50 pages have already been through copy editing.  Progress is being made on the cover image, and a proof reader has been lined up to do a last minute editing review, after the interior design is complete.

I’m planning Kindle and softcover editions for sure, and I’m toying with the idea of a hardcover version as well. I’ll run contests on GoodReads and on Beachbound Books for sure, giving away 10 copies for each contest.

The first ten pre-proof  sections (Intro + Prologue + 8 Chapters) are available as a free excerpt here:

https://michaelselden.com/the-balance

Right now, it looks as though the book will be out in Mid-May

On the final stretch of chapter revisions for The Balance. I’m working Chapter 43-49 & the Epilogue.
My process since Beta Read is to go through each chapter 6 times, prior to transmitting to the editor (John) for a single pass there, then another pass when the chapters return. After that I’ll go through the entire book one more time to confirm all of the physical descriptions and the timetable. After that I’ll send it out to another set of eyes for a quick proofread—before going to design and then a second proofread, to look at the post-design look of the book. I’ve received a portion of the drawing from Paola for the cover image. We’ve discussed the image a number of times over the past year.
In 2011 I created a calendar for the book in Excel and mapped each chapter out on a grid to make sure the dates and durations make sense. Since then I’ve had to adjust a few dates, since I added more to the plot in the middle. I’ll go through the grid again to make sure the dates were properly adjusted. Also, I created a history, a map, and an economic model of the Land.
I also went through the science and seemingly supernatural elements of the story to make sure that they are either consistent with physics as we know it, and / or consistent within the context of the book. I call this Rational Speculative Fiction.

The main character, Phoebe, has certain capabilities and I struggled to create a more scientific basis of what she’s able to do in my own head, and I made a few modifications (tweaks really) to some of the descriptions.

Samuel was another character I had to deal with. For example, in the story, he’s both a universal blood donor and receiver. At first blush, this didn’t make sense, but then I researched some of the things happening today and discovered that people are already experimenting with this—successfully, although via drugs rather than genetics.
Matthew is the most speculative of the bunch, but at least I think I’ve defined the rules by which his abilities function, even if I have no clue how the fundamental ability might work—that’s TBD.

I added the mature draft of Chapter 8  (The Sister’s Eyes) today (March 12).

Progress on the final edits continues and I am still working toward a May release of The Balance. I’m planning (at least) paperback and Kindle versions for now, and am considering a hardcover edition as well, although that won’t be decided until later. Suggestions are welcome on this. I’m also debating whether to create an E-Pub version or not. I haven’t had good experiences with E-pub, although I intend to keep an open mind.

The word count for the final editing keeps changing, usually downward, although this depends on the chapter. Since the Beta Read version, I’ve cut about 5500 words from the book and broke Chapter 25 into 3 separate sections—This was the longest chapter in the book and had two natural break points.

The book was originally 86K words long (first draft), written between Thanksgiving 2011 and New Years Day (Jan 1) 2012 (over about 6 weeks). Afterward, it grew to 150K words before I started separating out more of the backstory sections taking it down to about 135K words. Later, I gradually trimmed the writing, eliminating redundancy and then I removed 3 chapters that I thought would, eventually, be better situated in the second part of the story. Currently, there are about 112K words in the book, although this may increase or decrease. I’m actually considering pulling a portion of one of the cut chapters back into the book. The intent is to offer a complete story without delving into the meat of the next part of the tale.

I plan to write the story of The Balance as three parts ( parts of book 2 are already written and the plot is fairly mature), although this book can stand alone. The second part of The Balance will be finished after I complete two other books: I AM (A Sci-Fi story set in the not-too-distant future) and DISOBEDIENCE (a supernatural thriller that spans more than one time period).

I welcome feedback.

Michael

I Plan to post the final portion of the preview of The Balance this next week sometime: Chapter 8, “The Sister’s Eyes”.

I’m working revisions and editing reviews of Part 4 of the book. Part 4 begins with Chapter 34, “The Call”.

I added Chapter 7 (The Promise) to the on-line excerpt from the upcoming book, The Balance.

I still plan to release the book in May 2015. Currently I’m working on polishing chapters 30 through 33, before sending them to John (in England). He’s working  Chapters 24-29 now.

I’ve been working to revise Chapters 24-29 this past week. While I could revise from now till eternity, I’m limiting myself to 6 additional pass through each chapter, then I’ll send them to John Hudspith (England) for an editing pass, after which I’ll apply most suggestions and then take another pass through each chapter and then another through the whole book.. There are now 52 sections (chapters) to the book. The Editing should be done by the end of March, or early April.
After this editing step, the book will go to Belle Étoile Studios (North Carolina), for Jamie to do the interior layout. Meanwhile Paola Sbriccoli is drawing the cover image in Rome. Jamie will then create the cover design(s), while the interior book goes through proof reading / editing.
Finally, I’ll take another look at the book before giving the proof editor and my comments to Jamie for inclusion, and then several versions of the book will be created:
Soft Cover, Kindle, E-Pub, and (possibly) Hardcover. ISBN’s will be assigned to each format and then a test printing will happen through Lightning Source, before releasing for publication and distribution through Ingram, and the Kindle through Amazon. I used Smashwords for the E-Pub for The Boy Who Ran, but may reconsider.
Copyright registration with the US copyright office, while not actually necessary, is already in process—it’s usually better to register, I think.

I plan to release the books in May 2015.

I added an additional chapter to the on-line excerpt of The Balance.

It can be found on this page:

https://michaelselden.com/the-balance