Star Liner (My novel is coming soon)

Here is my big announcement: My Science Fiction novel, Star Liner, is going to be published. I actually signed the contract back in March, but I wanted to wait to announce it until I could see enough activity to know it is really happening. Yes, it is really happening. They were not playing an April Fools prank on me. Okay, I have trust issues.

I wrote this novel during NaNoWriMo last November (If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, don’t worry, next week’s article is all about it). After whipping out the first draft in record time, I realized that the point of view was not the best (see last week’s blog about point of view). It was written in third person, but I found that it would really make more sense to write this in first person. The story needed to be told by the main character Jan Stot. Ugh! There was nothing for it but to go through the whole novel and change the point of view from third to first. I went through the whole thing once, then, (to find what I had missed) I used the find and replace tool to change words like “he”, “they”, “their”, to words like “I”, “we”, “our”. Of course I could not simply do a global find and replace. I had to look at each case. I found a lot of things I missed the first time around. Then I went through the novel one more time focusing less on point of view and more on content. But I still found an occasional deviant pronoun.

I have a long history of not getting published. When I was in college, I wrote probably two dozen short stories which I tried to get into print. Back then there were only about two magazines that published speculative fiction, so the competition was quite strong. A couple of those stories were pretty good, but I have to say, most of them were rejected with good reason.

A few years ago due to NaNoWriMo (I told you, you have to wait till next week) I started working in the novel form. I have written three, including Star Liner, that I deemed good enough to attempt to get published. Until now there was just a bucketful of rejection slips. But about when I would think about giving up, someone would mention a story like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter being rejected by twelve publishers. Hey, that could be me. Right? Right?

Anyway, I saw on Ralan.com that Copypasta Publishing was accepting sci-fi novel submissions for works under 70,000 words. My other two novels are both over that limit, but my newest one was not. So I thought, what the heck? I sent it in and they accepted it.

So I am about to embark on a ride. The ride may be fast or slow, long or short: at this point I have no idea. But it will be an experience.

Note: The novel Star Liner: The ebook should be out in June. The paperback will be out in October. More details to come.

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