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Michael Selden

Novels from The City Above the Clouds

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Status Toward Publication of The Balance

March 22, 2015 by Michael Selden Leave a Comment

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.

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