What’s going on?
In today’s turbulent publishing world, one thing has come through from all the proponents of any of the possible publishing scenarios: Your content has to be the best you can make it.
Seth Godin keeps saying you’ve got to ship (your product). We all agree nothing in this world of ours is perfect, and to keep polishing it to “perfection” rather than shipping gains you nothing.
In my post on Pants and Blueprints, I explained how I wrote the Sorcerer series. Not the best structure in the world, for sure. Almost all the conflict is covert, especially the external conflicts. There’s some character arcs, but not a lot.
My brother keeps urging me to get the novels onto the Kindle. Before I do that, though, they need to be re-written to fit into the accepted story form of the Three Acts, with visible conflict and at least some character arching.
To compound the issue, there are four novels which have to be re-written and aligned with each other. I originally wrote these between February 2005 and October 2007. Re-writing the four of them is not a trivial task, but I think it has to be done. There’s also two more Chinese/Scottish curses to cover, too: Attention of Authority and Get What You Want. These may require 2 more novels. We’ll see.
Planning the Plan
First, what standards to use. I’ve got to use standards, otherwise there’s only the seat of my pants to check my work – and you know what I think of that. So, here’s the references I’m planning on using:
- Larry Brooks’ works on Story Engineering (it’s on the way here now), the Six Core Competencies and designing a series.
- Sun-tsu’s Art of War (need to finish the study).
- Randy Ingermanson’s Fiction Writing for Dummies.
- Steve Manning’s Write a Book Now (constructing scene blueprints).
- Tons of other articles I’ve absorbed over the past couple of years.
First up in the tools is a Word document on the overall series. This contains:
General
- Genre
- POVs
- Tense
Concepts/What-Ifs
- Lots of these.
Conflicts
For each novel:
- Inner (character)
- Outer
Stakes
For each novel. Both inner and outer.
Plots/Subplots
For each novel -- general
Theme(s)
Storyworld
- Hard limits -- Those which cannot be passed, such as "Paranormal abilities based on native 'spirit power.' However, can link with other spirits to share power."
- Soft limits -- Those set by the characters, such as "Don’t try to probe one of us. Not polite."
What do you think?
Note: if you invest in the series, I will offer a no-cost upgrade to the latest electronic editions as they become available. Save your receipts.
While yet in the future, the question will arise: Do I publish each novel's re-write when it's done or wait until they are all done? As a reader, leave me a comment on which you prefer.
