Sol 3

I'm writing my second book.

It's going to be a good one.

My first one is still under edit and has yet to get traction with an agent, but I'm moving along to WWM anyway.  What I'm about to do I've never done before. Not My Circus was semi-autobiographical so although story arc had to be shaped a bit, and characters heavily augmented, I was really not making everything up from scratch like I will be doing now. So it's a little scary but also very exciting.

I'm creating this blog, as well as a scrapbook, as 'metadata' around my novel-writing to help breathe life into the project and to propel it forward to its conclusion. 

I'm also doing this to track my process so as to inform the next project. 

It'll be a celebration of what I do as well as an introspective analysis in order to develop a repeatable and continuously improving method of churning out the books. Enough of the corporate gobbledygook.

So why do I start this blog with the title: Sol 3?

Sol, of course, refers to the Martian day and, because this book is set on Mars ... you get the drift.

For the first two days of the project (Sol 1 and 2) I've faffed about with assembling my tools, begun setting up my Scrivener space as per Joseph Michael's Prewriting in Scrivener seminar. Scrivener 3 is bright and shiny as well, since I've just come from using Scrivener 2. 

Before that, I've been reading in the genre (James Corey's Leviathan Wakes, Lary Niven's Three Books of Known Space), and about loyalty networks that can exist in small, close-knit communities (Charlaine Harris' Dead Until Dark...I know, I know! Vampire romance's connection with space westerns might seem like a stretch, but I insist it isn't).

So what are these tools I'm hoping will get me through?

Larry Brooks' Story Structure Demystified

One Stop For Writers for all that good gear about character development and their plethora of thesauri and other tools

Matteo and Andrea of Sefirot's Fabula Story Structure Mapping Cards and Fabula for Kids, to help with story structure in a playful and Agile way

K.M. Weiland's masterful take on the literary aspects of Story and Character.

And all the factual stuff I have to read in my growing bunch of books on Mars and in the /mars subreddit.

So, I'd better get to it!