Topic: VQF

Although the Big Crash scrubbed Laurie off the face of the planet revisions are on-going.

A structural issue I face is how to end it where she blows up the ship.

The explosion occurs at the 36k mark. Slightly more than halfway. I've retooled the story to show the lift crash that "Kills" Alice, effectively adding a fourth woman to the cast. The ensuing antics are good for around 15k, netting me 51k. Another 15k would round it out nicely. That's ~ 10 chapters. Hard to pad that much.

One idea is to add an indoor rail. Due to poor maintenance it tips on the doors (bad design) trapping characters in.  I feel like that's a good 3k But it'd be a diversion at best.

Don't wanna pad the chase scenes or increase the #

Any suggestions?.

Quote Post 1

2 Reply by Dirk B. (edited by Dirk B. 2024-05-01 01:18:17)

Re: VQF

Unfortunately, it's been so long, many of the story details have slipped my meds-addled brain. Did all of the above events occur in the last book? I thought her blowing up the ship was near the end of one of the earlier books, after which she drops into the planet's atmosphere and becomes a synth. No? I don't recall the individual books being that long.

Regardless, 15K is definitely a lot to pad, which could make it drag. Seems like you need to add another act. Something worthy of ten chapters without feeling like filler.

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Re: VQF

She blows up the ship at the end of book 2. Every publication contains 4-5 books each with a 10-chapter arc. What I've done is expand the 10-chapter arc into 20 chapters and wondering how to get it to 30.

Mind you, this is early in the v6 rewrite (Oh, please let there not have to be a v7). Alice is shaping up pretty strong, and she's tying in the generic members of the ship's crew Laurie never had time to interact with. She may well be good for half of the needed 15k by herself. Will have to see.

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Re: VQF

I forgot to ask: How is your approach of releasing everything as ten-chapter novellas doing as far as sales go? Are people buying the sequels?
Just curious.

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Re: VQF

I take the 10-chapter arcs and bind them into full stories. So each release is 40 or 50 chapters (usually 50).

So VQF (all 4 books) would be released as one volume. Each volume with segregated parts and very few characters allowed to move from one book to the other. eg telling Ship story... done? Ok, blow up the ship, reset all the NPCs and move to the next tale.

So, re your question, J3nna was a volume of five... readers didn't have to buy a chain of sequels. In theory, one could read J and see Kimberly in there and migrate over, but cross-sales have been poor. Ever since covid hit, sales (and cross-sales) have been terrible and haven't recovered.

I'm unworried by this, in case you're wondering about the cold, hard facts. Im surfing to the next market-high with a nice back-catalogue ready to sell

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Re: VQF

OK so far,
Starting-point: 36k
Alice and her capers are trending to 12 chapters ~ 15k
Added main villain from second half ~3k
Added the hidden villain who was auctioning the MC ~3k
Added a fifth woman, an android pretending to be a robot ~2k
Preacher (for the New Revised Enduring Bible? lol) ~1k

I'm at 60k not counting all the new interactions provoked by the new faces. Could hit 70 on just the miscellany.

Quite happy with this

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Re: VQF

Is this your normal approach to writing? Write a core story, then pad it until you reach the needed wordcount? Are you sure the additions won't feel like padding?

To be clear, I'm not lecturing. Just curious.

The Connor trilogy began with the twist at the end of book 1 in mind. Then I built the story around that, which grew quite naturally into an end times trilogy.

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Re: VQF

I wouldn't call it normal, but a few of them need it, evidently.

My romance stuff has largely been accepted on some other site with reviews suggesting minor tweaks etc. But the angel stuff has been hit by every review as not having enough padding. So I'm carving it up, pruning out some of the curve-balls and replacing it with filler.

Not filler per se, but more points for the protag to breathe and point at the horizon.

Reapplying that to VQF, I can predict what they would say: Make the most memorable moment the climax. That means finding a way to make the explosion part of the ending.

Note also in the current form, I didn't really have room to fully explore the second half, vis-à-vis what it means to have become effectively immortal. What it means to now be prone to a mundane computer virus. I never had time to circle back to Speeder's cryptic comment "You won't know the difference until you try to have sex"

So splitting it in two means the new-body part has room to fully develop. It's just a bit pf pain for the first half.

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Re: VQF

As for feeling like padding, that's the interesting challenge. The stuff with Alice (culminating in the elevator crash) so far doesn't feel like it from my admittedly biased position. I've allowed Alice to grow naturally, driving her own agenda. Will be sorry to splatter her, but of course, the show must go on. Her disappearance was certainly the original version's reason that Laurie starts to investigate discrepancies, the act of which which unravels everything. So adding the person behind the disappearance feels natural.

Stealing the central villain from the second half and placing him on the ship allows Laurie's character arc to proceed.

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Re: VQF

The ship's axe-murderer is 10x better now too.

I've added hints of him in two spots (ex: mysterious hulking shadow from odd direction when all characters are accounted for) and given MC plenty of time to wonder who that is.

Going to do one more sighting, this one a blurry / grainy camera snap as he runs past behind her... enough for her to see it's a crew uniform. Then can have her go the captain but he'll be like "No one matching that description on duty" or something. When he finally shows up for the first chase scene, it's going to be such an ah-ha moment.

I feel so evil

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Re: VQF

Kdot wrote:

The ship's axe-murderer is 10x better now too.

I've added hints of him in two spots (ex: mysterious hulking shadow from odd direction when all characters are accounted for) and given MC plenty of time to wonder who that is.

Going to do one more sighting, this one a blurry / grainy camera snap as he runs past behind her... enough for her to see it's a crew uniform. Then can have her go the captain but he'll be like "No one matching that description on duty" or something. When he finally shows up for the first chase scene, it's going to be such an ah-ha moment.

I feel so evil

I like it. The axe-murderer was a great character. I can't remember his exact demise, but it would be cool if there was some way to hint that maybe he lived and got clear of the ship, without actually confirming it. Of course, then people might expect him to show up later.

Let me know if you post his revised version.

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Re: VQF

Kdot wrote:

I feel so evil

I know the feeling. I'm dying to write bad Connor (first half of book 2).

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Re: VQF

I may after many years part company with the term "Android" reverting to the more classic concept that an android is simply a (dumb) robot that looks like a human. Dumb here meaning it could be ChatGPT V 200 smart but you'll never find one chasing a butterfly because it wanted to.
For the more advanced machines maybe Quantum Independant Linear Intelligence ( " Kirin" ) after the Japanese mythos.

Quote Post 13

Re: VQF

Quantum (No meaning. Buzzword for magic)
Independent (Acts on its own - not sitting around waiting for human input)
Linear (learning model - each learning moment chains to previous, as opposed to a giant algorithm you can pour content into in parallel)
I (Intelligence)
N (I can't think of anything for this letter)

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Re: VQF

Nice, although Linear is kind of boring, but for all I know, it could be important to include it in the name.

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Re: VQF

"Linear" meaning closely mimicking human learning. No one reads two books at the same time. Or a movie and a radio program. Or drive a car while threading a needle. In theory a modern computer can do all of this without breaking a sweat. So our computers are not a linear learning model but logarithmic (accounting for heat & power)

Our consciousness tends to drift from one to the other. Even people who claim to be multitaskers, it's been proven that they simply switch back & forth at opportune times.

Eg, biological creatures are sequential learners. So linear seems appropriate.

But I'm years from publishing this, so I have time to re-invent the acronyms

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Re: VQF

Ok, now I'm really under the gun. Some other site has a deadline of Aug17 for posting full story. That's a mere 18 days, so I gotta stop foolin' around

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Re: VQF

Is that a review site? A contest?

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Re: VQF

The review site where I'm getting my spellcheck done. They have a (seemingly) semi-annual full book review thing where 2-3 users will do an end-to-end.

I posted my dark-angel book and they came back with buckets of useful stuff. They said MC cries too much (Three times in 100k words). I had thought three was okay, but for strangers to catch this independently really is problematic.

I figure I'll pen the last bit of VQF in the next 9-10 days then out it up both over there and here. It'll be a good indication if all that padding has turned it into a yawner. My gut feeling is no, it's fine but ya never know.

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Re: VQF

I had a weirdly fortunate PC crash before saving my latest round of edits. Somehow the version went back from Aug-08 to Jul-31 (evening) so 48 hours of edits. So I got to stitch back the new version with a bit of text-compare on various versions

Oddly, I caught my em-dashes were different between the versions (I found this because the paragraph length would change and I ran my compares). I tend to write without a space–like this. Reviewers suggest adding one – to give a gap and reduce confusion with hyphen.

So I corrected them to add the gap, but as I add new content I tend to flip back to my default. Oops. Maybe I should wait until final draft before tacking punctuation.

Quote Post 20

Re: VQF

Why is your em-dash so short? Mine (from MS Word) looks like so: —
Yours (copied from above) looks like so: –
Since your en-dash is likely shorter, I'd hate to see how short your hyphen is. smile

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Re: VQF

WordPerfect acutally has 4 dashes (counting hypen)

A-
A–
A‒
A—

Quote Post 22

Re: VQF

Time to get this show on the road. er-- into space

Quote Post 23

Re: VQF

Kdot wrote:

Ok, now I'm really under the gun. Some other site has a deadline of Aug17 for posting full story. That's a mere 18 days, so I gotta stop foolin' around

Apparently the deadline is the 28th but registration opens on the 17th (eg tomorrow). This is good because I have 3 mandatory chapters to pen and 2 optional. I can churn through 3 chapters comfortably by Thursday. I could rush them all on Sunday but they'll read rushed, so I better pace myself.

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Re: VQF

I should probably draw myself a map while all these locales are fresh in my head. I miraculously remembered the garden is on deck ten, but I'm reading the previous version and there's an accidental (seemingly) allusion to deck 15. Or had I meant to imply that the fight spilled down from deck ten five levels to arrive there. I can't remember why I did that.

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