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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