Completely Broken

COMPLETELY BROKEN So a few years ago now that it’s hard for me even to count them, I sat down to write a novel. Photo by me, type design by my graphic designer/daughter Alex. I’ve all the time been a devoted outliner. I want some kind of plan before I can do one thing as ambitious as write a guide. As I’ve described earlier than, I rapidly go “off script” once I truly start writing, and that define will get covered in a number of completely different colours of ink pretty quickly, but I need that define earlier than I can even begin. But repeatedly I read about different writers who simply sat down and let their characters tell them what to do, writers who discover their storiesâ€"the start, middle, and finishâ€"organically, as they went along. That seemed as weird to me in 1992 because it seems now, but I thought I should give it a strive. Maybe I’d been doing it wrong up until then. The world definitely wasn’t beating a path to my door. So I sat down to put in writing a horror novel, b ased vaguely on some random ideas for a scene here and there, and informed by my current occupation of report retailer manager. I would write a chapter possibly every two or three weeks or so, but that lasted less than a yr. Then I would step away from it completely for a year or more at a time before considering I ought to get again to that book, which nonetheless didn’t also have a title, then spend one other few weeks noodling away at it, mostly rewriting the earlier chapters. This went on for a really long time till some strange burst of motivation befell me, and for causes I don’t even recall, I decided to take a seat down and end the rattling factor, and finish it within the spirit in which it was begunâ€"stream of consciousness. I wrote the last two-thirds of the book in about two months of concerted effort. And you understand what? I thought it labored. It was scary, and unpredictable. And the title simply all of a sudden came to me: Completely Broken. Then I had folks r ead it for meâ€"at least one editor pal and two agents. They had some nice recommendation, which I did my greatest to observe, and there it was, a finished novel, for all the world to . . . see? I completed Completely Broken right around the time that Annihilation was released. I had some consideration focused on me after a short stint on the most effective sellers record, and sadly (as it turns out) Completely Broken was my supposed follow-up. Mistake. I’d just written a massively profitable darkish high fantasy and was making an attempt to comply with that up with an ultraviolent modern thriller/horror factor. It went over like a lead balloon. For a very long time I’d resigned myself to the “fact” that every one that writing was a studying experience, an train in a special kind of storytelling. Then when I began running a blog I had the groovy idea that I would give it away free on the blogosphere. But then I really didn’t do a lot to market it, and I don’t suppose fol ks actually like reading novels a chapter per week on a weblog. Enter the e-guide self-publishing “revolution” and some urging from friends to get into that, and finally, you know, it simply had to happen. So I took down the weblog, reformatted the file, and posted the e-e-book model of Completely Broken to each Amazon and Smashwords. It was fairly an experience, and I learned some very important abilitiesâ€"or more precisely, unlearned lots of what I’ve discovered over the past quarter century or so about formatting novels for publication. The e-e-book sphere was created submit-internet, submit-desktop publishing, and is built for the common tools at hand. Traditional publishing uses rather more complicated know-how designed to mimic the quaint printing processes. There will be posts aplenty here as I dissect the expertise of formatting and posting Completely Broken. I suppose that course of deserves a detailed breakdown. For right now, although, Fantasy Author’s Handbook t akes a flip into the land of shameless self-promotion. Go purchase Completely Broken. It’s less than three dollars, and I assume it’s pretty scary stuff. â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans Fill in your details below or click on an icon to log in: