Stunning New Sci Fi Cover - Project Xerxes
The new cover for Project Xerxes is here! A delve into the cover making process. A treatise on why Britta and other protagonists in fiction must suffer.
First, a big salute to our Veterans out there! Thank you for your service.
This will be our first Thanksgiving with our new roommate, who will be arriving next week. I'm excited because she's a turkey eater, which means we now outnumber the non-turkey eaters. 🦃 This will also be the first time we've had 5 people living in our modest house. She's absolutely wonderful, though, so I have a feeling we'll do just fine. Wish us luck!
In other exciting news, the first draft of Project Xerxes, a stand-alone prequel to the new Lost Colonies series, is done! It clocked in at 31k words / ~120 pages, putting it solidly in novella territory. To celebrate, the feature image for this month's newsletter is the brand-spanking new cover. As always, my subscribers get the very first peek, so feel free to taunt your friends. 😁 Scroll down for more about why this cover fits the story so well.
I've also completed the second draft of Enigma (Lost Colonies Book 1). Yay! Next in queue is starting Book 3 of the Timeless Keeper Saga, which at my current pace should put its release in the middle of 2024. Enigma is an adventure like none I've written before. So much happens to the protagonist that I had to take extra measures during the edit to ensure I hadn't missed anything for continuity. Read the "Why Protagonists Must Suffer" feature below to see how I handled it.
Lastly, I had a flash of inspiration a few weeks ago for a new standalone science fiction story—one of those moments where I had to drop everything and outline it before it burst out of my head in a messy explosion. Thankfully I got it all down without my wife having to call the paramedics. Not sure yet if it will be a novella or full novel, but I'll hopefully start on it next year, along with Book 2 of the Lost Colonies. At least I'm never bored!
In this newsletter
- Project Xerxes Cover — "Like a Glove"
- Why Protagonists Must Suffer
- Free Books, Sales, and Events
- Currently Reading
- Other Authors You Might Like
Project Xerxes Cover
"Like a Glove"
Novels are complex beasts at the best of times, filled with humor, horror, adventure, romance, fantastic settings, and so much more depending on which page you're reading. The hardest part about choosing a cover is deciding on a single image that captures the essence of the story.
Project Xerxes is no exception. It's science fiction, action, and a touch of romance set in a city 10,000 years in the future on a different planet. The story is full of humor, but also drama and a few touching scenes. Above all, though, it's a light exploration of humanity's not-so-bleak future among the stars (quite a change from Holtondome, I know!), and a glimpse into the depth of Lost Colonies universe.
Because it's a novella, I opted to purchase existing artwork instead of the more expensive route of commissioning custom art. Thus began the exhaustive search through thousands of sci fi covers across the billion or so premade cover websites (no, the math doesn't check out there, but you get the drift).
Most sci fi covers are dark. Really dark. They convey the vastness of the universe through lonely space scenes, or use the time-honored moniker of a starship, sometimes a fleet of them. And astronauts. Oh, the space suits! Can't be a space story without them, right? Apparently not, because half the covers on the stores seemed to feature them.
And so when I finally spotted this bright, cheery rendition of a futuristic city, replete with blue sky, trees, and a general solarpunk vibe, my scrolling screeched to a stop.
That. That was how I wanted readers to feel during the story. How I felt when I wrote it.
Five minutes later, the cover was in my cart, purchased, customized, and downloaded. I might still tweak the tagline at the top (let me know if you have feedback) and tweak the font size / alignment, but otherwise it hit the bullseye.
Enigma will probably receive custom art because I frankly don't believe a pre-made exists that can do the stylized science fantasy tale justice, but this time I got lucky. Hope you like it, too!
Why Protagonists Must Suffer
I don't consider myself a sadist. Most of my career has been coaching others to be their best, and creating energized work environments that make people actually want to get out of bed in the morning. As a facilitator, I specialized in conflict resolution at group and individual levels by modeling constructive criticism techniques and encouraging good old-fashioned communication. You got a problem? Talk about it! 'cause it ain't going away by itself.
Authors have the opposite problem. We want our fictional kids to get along. And left to our own devices, they might. But "more conflict, more conflict!" is what we hear from editors, and they're absolutely correct. Who wants to read a story where characters sing "Rainbow Connection" in perfect harmony right through to the sparkling end? Conflict creates struggle, and struggle keeps the pages turning while we root for our favorite protagonists to dig themselves out of their sometimes self-excavated holes.
Of course, there are different kinds of struggle. In romance novels, characters struggle to connect emotionally. Horror protagonists struggle to conquer their own fears. Action protagonists face staggering odds that push their training and physical abilities to—and often past—their limits. Post-apocalypse characters are in a daily struggle to survive their harsh environment. Adventure heroes struggle to reach their lofty destination through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered (thank you Labyrinth). Mystery protagonists struggle to right some wrong by finding out whodunnit. And so on.
Novels aren't constrained to just one type of struggle, either. For example, Angels in the Mist combines romance, horror, action, drama, and a touch of mystery, layering Anne's struggles so thick that it's a miracle the poor girl can breathe. She does, however (okay, mostly. No spoilers), giving us more and more reason to cheer for each electrified barbed-wire hurdle she clears.
But is there such a thing as too much struggle? When writing Angels in the Mist, I honestly didn't know if I'd crossed that line, but readers reacted well. That said, I didn't think I would ever put another protagonist through the devastating circumstances that I inflicted upon Anne.
That fantasy ended when I began the second draft of Enigma, where I realized I absolutely had.
Worse, Enigma didn't have the fantastical urban fantasy / paranormal elements of The Z-Tech Chronicles that made it easy to wave away critical injuries, or even mild ones. Britta is only human: cut her, she bleeds. Cut her badly enough, she bleeds to death—quite literally end of story.
The biggest problem was that Britta found herself facing even deadlier scenarios than Anne, who among other things had the Z-Tech crew at her back. As the story progressed, Britta accumulated injuries that increasingly hampered her ability to overcome adversities that would have been challenging even at full health; afflictions she could not have realistically shaken over the relatively short timeline. In fact, the list became so long that during the second draft I had difficulty keeping track to ensure she hadn't inadvertently performed some physical feat she technically couldn't.
Part of Enigma is also a survival story. In those chapters, Britta can't just run to the store for supplies. She has the items she arrived with, and that's it—and those change from scene to scene. Forgetting a single one could break the sense of immersion when, during her struggle, the reader thinks, "But she has X! Why didn't she just use that?"
If I were playing a role-playing game, the solution would be easy: keep track of everything on a character sheet. Mark her afflictions and inventory in pencil, then add or erase as the situation changes. Well, that works fine and dandy in a forward-only scenario, but not so much when you may need to adjust any point in the story and don't want to have to re-read from the beginning every time just to verify the contents of her pockets.
A spreadsheet could have addressed the problem; it wouldn't be the first time Excel had saved my bacon by keeping my play-by-play accounting honest (yes, readers actually have checked my numbers and called me out on mistakes). The problem is cross-checking an external document against a work-in-progress manuscript is tedious and, in the worse case, dangerous because the external doc can be easily lost a year later when you return to make changes.
Enter Scrivener's "Notes." This awesome feature enables freeform text to be attached to every scene. It doesn't do calculations like Excel, but it does keep everything in one place. For the second draft, I created a bullet list of Britta's inventory and afflictions carried over from the previous scene, then added to the end what had changed in the current scene. I then copied that list to the next scene, incorporated the changes, and used it as a reference for accuracy. Rinse, lather, repeat. Thankfully, my detailed list caught very few errors, but it did catch some. Most importantly, though, I slept better knowing I hadn't completely botched my first attempt at writing survival.
It wasn't until I saw Britta's long list of affliction spelled out in clear bullet points, however, that I questioned whether I was the empathetic person I'd always believed, or a true sadist. What sort of sick mind came up with this stuff? Who would intentionally inflict such woe upon another human being?
Authors, that's who.
Every defeat broke my heart. Each new injury drew me closer to this girl who, despite her incredible spirit, couldn't always hold it together.
But she had a goal: warn the colonies about an ancient threat at any cost. Everything else came a distant second, including her comfort, her health, and her very life. How could I not cheer for such selfless determination, especially when the odds are stacked so high against her?
And that is why we make our protagonists suffer. If struggle is the secret ingredient that makes victory taste sweet, then it is their backs that break carrying the sugar. Their setbacks and pain only make their increasingly inevitable success that much more glorious when it happens, a glory we as readers share as if it were our own only because we suffered right alongside them.
So if torturing my protagonists marks me as a sadist, then I'm a sadist, because I can tell you for a fact that Britta is far from the last protagonist who has ample reason to hate my guts.
You're welcome.
Free Books, Sales, and Events
- November – Science Fiction Series Sale. A collection of... you guessed it, science fiction series, including Agrotharn: The Interstellar Semi-Barbarian! Exclamation mark is seriously in the title.
- November – Urban Fantasy Freebies. Free-to-download books with covers featuring everything from shirtless guys to fully-dressed magical women to... Nope, just those two things. Can you guess the intended audience?
Currently Reading
I finally finished Wool, yay! For inspiration, I'm now re-reading Gideon the Ninth. Three chapters in and it's already influencing my writing in positive and snarky ways. Love that book so much.
Wool
Finished at last! Wool (Silo Series Book 1) is a post-apocalyptic exploration of humanity in an extended pressure cooker. While I disagreed with some of the premise and struggled with a few mechanics, I enjoyed Wool enough to recommend it.
Click below for the full review.
My Books
Timeless Keeper Saga
On a war-ravaged Earth no longer able to sustain life, a half-blind dome farmer and a mysterious city dweller may hold the keys to humanity's fate.
The Timeless Keeper Saga is a science fiction dystopian thriller series about forbidden love, mysterious ancient artifacts, hidden powers, and the indomitable human spirit.
The Z-Tech Chronicles
In the face of a rising, ancient evil, a traumatized San Francisco waitress may be the only thing standing between humanity and oblivion.
The Z-Tech Chronicles is a science fiction / urban fantasy saga that follows Anne Perrin on her journey from a traumatized waitress to becoming more than she ever imagined.
One Man's Trash - A Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy Story
Croft Winder grew up believing that love is blind.
It wasn't until he took his fiancée on a little vacation to the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy, however, that he learned it can also be downright insane.
Will the wonders of the Truck Stop save their relationship or send it to the executioner’s block? Not even the ancient Delphians could have guessed.
One Man's Trash is a cozy sci fi romance set in the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy universe.
Dragon Assassin - A Steamy Shifter Romance
Half dragon. Half human. All woman... and all killer.
Humans think Charon is a monster. Dragons consider her an abomination, condemning her to a lifetime of isolation.
Now her half-breed body is changing in ways she doesn't understand, torturing her with strange desires. Her only hope may lie with a handsome young assassin who, in courting her, might be getting more than he signed up for.
If you're into sexy shape-changing half-dragons, suave assassins, absurd anatomy, and steamy female-led relationships, then this thrilling paranormal romance adventure is for you!
