Take My Dare
If you read my first blog, you’ll remember that my fiction career started on somewhat of a whim or a dare. My wife Ann is a school librarian and has had a lifelong dream to be an author. She dabbled with different stories throughout her life but didn’t get serious about publishing a book until she was intrigued by a radio mysteriously beeping in our garage. As described in my earlier blog, that radio inspired her chapter book series Black Hole Radio. Incidentally, the third installment of that series is being released any day by Dart Frog Books.
Up to this point, I had never really considered writing fiction. I am a scientist with over 200 published scientific articles, but I always felt it would be a non-fiction book in my scientific field of study if I wrote a book. But just as I accidentally fell into my science field, I’ve accidentally fallen into writing science fiction forty years later.
A plot to follow
As I think back now, I would have said that I don’t know what to write if asked to write fiction. Yet, with Black Hole Radio and a bunch of bugs on Bilaluna facing a climate crisis, and my wife instructing me to write the backstory, suddenly I had a topic, however weird. While describing a draconian authoritarian who causes a climate crisis was too intense for a chapter book, it was fair game for a backstory aimed at young adults and adults. So, I had my major plotline: get Earth insects to Poo-ponic, and have them evolve as intelligent beings that build enormous human-sized cyborg insects. Then have them create the environmental conditions needed to cause a climate catastrophe. Also, some would need to escape to Bilaluna, where they were making the same mistakes. These bugs would be bright but not so wise.
Novella begets novel
So, it was a New Year’s Eve 2020 vacation trip to Puerto Plata when I planned to begin my writing adventure. The suggestions I had given to Ann for her story had a bit of an Animal Farm vibe, with the leaders of Poo-ponic becoming autocratic and ignoring a climate crisis. But rather than the classic book reflecting failed communism, mine would embody botched democracy. I had some inspiration from current failing democracies worldwide and the authoritarian tendencies of the then US president. I re-read Animal Farm on New Year’s Eve for inspiration and started my novella on January one, 2020.
Although I didn’t know the terms, I quickly discovered that I was more of a pantser than a plotter. I had a basic plot restricted to the boundaries set by my wife’s chapter book, but I didn’t have a detailed outline. Despite that, the words just flew out of me, off the seat of my pants, as they say. Half completed during the one-week vacation and the other half on my train commutes into and from work, my 26,000-word novella, Poo-ponic Plague, was completed within three weeks.
Yet, as a novice fiction writer, I wondered whether the product needed some help and tried to learn as much as I could about writing fiction. I found various online videos about fiction writing on sites like I Writerly and others and took what I learned to improve my skills. But still, I needed some confirmation that my story was worthy of publication. I took online advice to find readers and editors and got some great pointers from a couple of beta readers I found on Fiverr. Then stay-at-home orders due to Covid-19 gave me much-needed time to write.
After my novella had expanded to 35,000 words, I came across a book coach/developmental editor, Nina Munteanu, who changed my fiction writing outlook completely. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven as Nina was a fellow scientist and a Sci-Fi author who transitioned into a creative writing professor. As a fellow scientist, she understood where I was coming from and could cater her advice to my writing and research strengths and, more importantly, my weaknesses. As most scientists know, we are trained that nothing is ever proven; instead, findings only support theories. This advice often causes science writers to use a passive voice. Nina helped me get over that. But, more still, she recognized and advised me on how to fix all the deficiencies in my novella. The biggest problem was that I wrote my story like an alien historian’s account told to Earthlings. With sound advice, Nina directed me to transform my historical account into a story with considerably more dialogue and action scenes. She taught me the essentials of fiction writing through her detailed suggestions and not edits. It was obscene how many scenes Nina wanted me to add. But she unleashed creativity I never knew I had in me, and my novella expanded to a novel.
Novel begets trilogy
Fast forward to October 2021. After two rounds of Nina edits and the addition of multiple action scenes, my story had expanded to a 133,000-word novel. At this point, I changed the name to The Rise and Fall of Antocracy. While waiting for one more beta reader, I decided in the last few days of October that I would participate in Nanowrimo21, the national November writing month 2021 challenge, to write the sequel to my novel. I had no idea what my sequel would be about, except I wanted it to have a Brave New World or 1984 vibe. Good thing I’m a pantser since it required me to jump in with both feet and write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Through this exercise, I learned how much I enjoyed fiction writing and that, at least for the time, writer’s block was not a concern for me. I finished the month with a mostly completed novel of 53,000 words—mission accomplished!
After three beta reads and another round of Nina, my story expanded to a respectable 82,000 words. Again, the input I received from additional readers was invaluable. I was buoyed when one of my beta readers said if I could fix the problems in the first 3/4 of the book, it would be the best book they had ever read. Wow, perhaps a backhanded compliment, but this thrilled me since I knew what I needed to do to fix the book’s early and middle parts.
Shortly later, I had a long novel that Nina suggested I shorten by 30% and a sequel about the right length. While I was shortening book 1, I realized it might be better to break it up. I originally wrote the story in four parts I called historical epochs, with the first epoch depicting ancient history on the planet. Thus, the first epoch described how the insects arrived and how the colony survived and developed over the first generation. Since millions of years passed between the first epoch and the following ones, I realized it might be best to break the book into two parts, with the long first epoch comprising its own shorter novel. Thus, I conceived Antuna’s Story as book 1 of The Antunite Chronicles after extending the story a little. Now I had a trilogy with Antuna’s Story (45,000 words), The Rise and Fall of Antocracy (75,000 words), and Antunites Unite (82,000 words). My novella had grown into a trilogy; wow! I felt I had become an author, whether by accident or not.