August 2021

I have no more excuses – I just suck at updating my website. I’d much rather be writing books than talk about my writing (which, coincidently, is also why my books are not found on any store shelves, but that’s for another time). So, what’s been going on, you didn’t ask?

I wrote another book.

This one takes a little bit of explaining. When I had a friend beta-read Limits, she said that she would like to know more about the male lead named Alex. After all, he prefers to be alone on his spaceship and shun people, so she wanted to know why. This got me thinking. Originally, Limits was supposed to be a one-off. Then came Rising, which, while set 100 years earlier in a universe parallel to ours, forms the basis for the technology that is used as the backdrop for Limits. But now, here was this friend who wanted to know more about the leads, or at least about Alex. So I wrote a book about him. My intention was to explain that Alex ends up alone because he feels that he’s already lived the life that he’s supposed to have, or at least had a shot at it, and now, due to promises made, he’s just living out his life alone.

Sadly, the book went horribly off the rails. Originally I didn’t think so, but when it was pointed out to me by my best critic, my muse, and one of the most intelligent people that I know, trust and respect (yes, my wife) after she read the first draft, I had to agree with her. That first draft was intriguing yet unnecessarily sexual, poignant yet missing its intended mark, and, most importantly, vastly different from Limits and Rising. Not in the characters or even the locations, but in the way it was presented. I had taken what was supposed to be a sweet story about love found and lost, and turned it into a cheap version of Fifty Shades (albeit with proper grammar, as opposed to that pathetic attempt at soft-core porn). The bottom line was that I completely lost out on what the story was supposed to be. I had written the book in about four months, which is about right considering that it’s roughly half the length of Limits. Learning to understand what was wrong with it took a few weeks, and then I set off to peel away the unnecessary bits and leave what really mattered.

I’m a story-teller, but in a different way. I like to create characters, but then I put them in a situation and have them tell the story while I try to keep up with writing down what they’re saying and doing. I know that seems weird, but it works for me. It’s quite rare that I have to tell my characters what to do; usually, they tell me. Where this book went wrong was that I had been telling them what to do, what I wanted them to do. I didn’t want to start over, because many of the things that they did were quite good. But I did have to change some of the things they did. Quite a lot, actually. As I had never had to do that before, I found myself having to learn how to drastically edit a story, and that took time. Four months, to be exact – longer than it had taken me to write the original story.

I still have that original version. It wasn’t bad by itself, and I liked exploring how to write intimate scenes, something that I had never really been very good at. But the problem was that with Limits, then Rising, and now Alex (the name of this latest book), I had created my own little universe (“The UF Universe”). And when you do that, everything has to fit into place. You can’t create something that would be perfectly acceptable on its own but doesn’t fit in with the others. I learned a few valuable lessons with this book. One: give your characters boundaries, and make sure they stick to them. Two: if you want to explore different subjects or writing styles, do that in a book that’s not a part of a series. Three: changing what ended up being the main story in your book to what it should have been all along takes a lot of editing. And Four: I hate editing.

This evening, I finished editing that book. I have sent it off for a first read, and am nervous – scared even – but also looking forward to how the changed version is received. I’ve been working on it for over seven months, which for me is actually a pretty long time considering it’s not that long of a story. I’ve read it over and over and over, each time carving out what didn’t below, adding what it should have been, and then re-reading it make sure it worked. I’m keeping my fingers crossed about that first reaction. In the meantime, I already started the book about the other main character in Limits: Cres. After all, if he gets his own book, why shouldn’t she? I just need to make sure that I tell her what she can and cannot do. After all, it’s all about limits…