I did the hermit thing yesterday to force myself to revamp the opening to my SF novel about the aliens, and it paid off. After lots of time away from it and lots of great feedback from fellow writers, I finally figured out how to make the damn book work.

First off, I got rid of one of the four main characters. Bam. Just like that. As much as I like her -- she was in my 2nd Strange Horizons story, "Explosions" -- she had to go. She wasn't really contributing to the novel, you see. And a lot of her characteristics (poor, working-class, has a life-changing encounter with an alien, ends up at the mother ship) were too much like another character, Skin. I did like the fact that she was a tough, black, single mother, but even that runs the risk of being a cliche, I think.

But more than anything else, Shontera (known as Terri in a previous version) had to go because she was "diluting" the scope of the novel and taking away valuable time from my main character, Father Joshua, and the two other almost-as-main characters, Skin and Ally.

So now I have to go back through the book and excise all of Shontera's chapters and rework it so someone else does the stuff she originally did. It shouldn't be TOO painful. I hope. I'll have to add more stuff to compensate for the loss of her chapters, but it'll be worth it. I have a lot of world-building stuff to put into this version. And that stuff is fun.

Also, I got rid of the Prologue. Now, I dig prologues, for whatever reason, but this one wasn't working (thanks to Alan DeNiro for this and many other right-on-the-money suggestions!). So instead, I'm sending out the first 3 chapters, each chapter feature one of my 3 main characters, and I think it's a much more elegant start to the book.

Working on all these various query packages, I realized that my beginnings really suck in my novels. The problem is that in the opening chapters I'm just warming up to the topic and feeling my way into the heads of my protagonists, so... they end up a bit rough.

A lot of novelists talk about the middle being the hard part of their books, but so far I haven't had too much trouble with that. And I'm surprisingly happy with how the endings to all my books have turned out. Of course, the ending to the SF novel is quite messy right now. But I'll get to it. Soon, I hope...

So over lunch I'm hauling off 7-8 more packages to mail out, including a couple more queries for The Last of the Hand as well as queries for The Wannoshay Cycle. All I have to do now is revamp the intro to the Blackbeard novel, and I'll be set. Later!

Stories out to Publishers:
16

New Words Since Last Time:
1,500

Words for '03:
91,000

Today's Quote:
Before starting the 7:20 a.m. Mass, Father Joshua McDowell glanced out at the rear entrance to The Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii and dropped his Bible at the sight of the armed soldier standing there. He stared in guilty surprise at the tall woman next to the darkened confessional, standing in front of three other soldiers. They were almost invisible in their nanofiber camouflage fatigues and helmets. The first soldier nodded back at him, and the tip of her blue-black pulse rifle gave off a tiny red blip of light, the same color given off by the twenty-nine ships that had come crashing to Earth last November.

Surely, he thought, they aren’t here for me.