To Revisioning and Beyond: Remaking the The Franchise

A few years ago, I wrote a superhero book that was completely different from I, Crimsonstreak. Whereas Christopher Fairborne gives the genre the tongue-in-cheek treatment, this other book (The Franchise) takes a more serious look at the world of superheroes. It's a mix between The Firm and Watchmen set in a retro-futuristic 1960s with pulp heroes thrown in for good measure.

I really believe in this book and its concept. I've worked on it off and on for several years. Based on a pitch, I had an agent request it in 2010. The agent passed.

I've learned a lot more about writing and publishing since then. I'm far from an expert--just ask my publisher about the draft of II Crimsonstreak I submitted--but I'm a better writer than I was in 2010. When that agent passed, I took it hard. It was early in my writing journey, so I felt that was it. The Franchise was a terrible concept and would never work.

After I, Crimsonstreak came out, I started playing with The Franchise some more. I added a new character who's so essential to the book that I don't know how I wrote it without her. I fleshed out the setting--an area I tend to struggle with. I tried to make the main character more of an active part of the story instead of a character who was simply driven by the events around her. I wove in more backstory and added another layer to it.

A draft that was 75,000 became 80,000 words. I didn't cut content as much as I rewrote large sections of text. I created snippets of newspaper copy and text from a company handbook (a concept familiar to anyone who's flipped through Crimsonstreak and its appendices). More satisfied with the direction of the book, I needed a second opinion.

I sent it to my Beta Reader Extraordinaire. This wasn't a high-priority project--I was working on III Crimsonstreak and didn't need immediate feedback--so I told him to take his time. Because he's either partially insane or really, really good at what he does, he sent me pages upon pages of notes. These included suggestions on character arcs as well as things to look at in each chapter.

I went through the feedback and it became clear to me that simply "rewriting existing parts of the book" wouldn't work. Not only did I have a plot MacGuffin that I didn't like, my protagonist still wasn't fully-formed. A major supporting character also ended up being a bit shallow. The novel got too talky at points, so it needed another bit of action. The new character added to the book deserved more scenes and needed to be interwoven into the fabric of the story. The supporting characters--and there were a lot of them--needed to be more memorable.

So, while I haven't been writing anything "new," I have been adding to The Franchise. I'm not ready to give up on it yet because I feel there's a fantastic book hidden in there. The narrative needs to be pulled apart, rearranged, and given several more generous coats of polish. That's what I'm doing now.

In addition to rewriting large sections, I've trimmed a bunch of words and added new scenes. The current draft stands at about 91,000 words. I'm about a third of the way through this latest revision.

It's not always easy to finish a draft of the book and forge ahead with more revisions, but the more you do it, the less you dread it. I've gotten to the point--after getting over the initial shock of "the draft isn't perfect"--where I enjoy revising.

To revisioning and beyond!

II Crimsonstreak revisions and notes on III Crimsonstreak

I'm wrapping up the last book in the Crimsonstreak series. I didn't set out to write a trilogy...it just kind of happened. Currently, the end of the book feels a little too much like the end of Peter Jackson's Return of the King. By that, I mean there are several plot threads/character moments to resolve. A few character threads got lost throughout the first draft and will need to be added during revisions.

It's tough saying goodbye to these characters. I'm not saying I'll never revisit them (in fact, I have an idea for a book based solely on Mortimer P. Willoughby that traces the history of Morty and the various Crusading Comets), but I'm going to take a break from this particular group of superheroes. I can't say much about the book (or II Crimsonstreak for that matter), but Christopher Fairborne goes on quite the journey. He has to learn to say goodbye and let go of many of the people close to him. So, as he says his goodbyes, I say my own to those characters. The ending packs an emotional punch...and I hope it translates for readers.

III Crimsonstreak is a long way off, though. That manuscript will have to be revised, I need to come up with some appendices, and my Super Beta Reader will have to Super Beta Read his way through it. Even in the best case scenario, in which I turn it in at the end of summer, we're looking at we're looking at a spring/summer release. But I'm getting waaaaay ahead of myself.

Let's talk about II Crimsonstreak. I received edit notes back from the massive revision I did on the book. Seriously, it was like performing major surgery (or at least my fictional conception of what performing surgery is like). Mastermind Kate at Candlemark & Gleam was very pleased with the edits. I have about two weeks or so to go through the additional markups and make any changes, a process I plan to start this weekend after wrapping up III Crimsonstreak's first draft.

Make no mistake, II Crimsonstreak revisions were a major undertaking. The book had a great concept, but my execution was lacking (I'll do a separate blog post about this soon). I twisted myself up in plot threads, had dodgy character motivations, and underutilized a major character. I some parts, our fair protagonist acted like a jerk simply because it was convenient for the plot.

No more.

I've fixed most of that, meaning that my biggest concern revolves around whether Falcon Gray has a beak or not. I think I can live with that.

We're shooting for an October release.

Still revisioning

I hit the "halfway point" on revisions for the third Crimsonstreak book. I put quotes around "halfway point" because I'm not really halfway finished. As I've written before, I had about 70,000 words written on the book. Then, after doing revisions for II Crimsonstreak, I realized the third book needed a fresh coat of paint and wasn't going anywhere. I trimmed 10,000 words immediately (a section that was fairly pointless) and ended up cutting another 5,000 words.

This was after I went back to the drawing board and wrote an outline that laid out the plot in great detail. Since I'd tweaked the ending of the second book, I had sections to rewrite and characters to add. Some things from the original draft stayed, some things went away. So when I say I'm at the "halfway point," it means that I'm at page 170 of my 340-page Word document.

And I still have LOTS of work to do. Once the revisioning is done, I'll have to write the darn ending. And, yes, I know "revisioning" isn't a word. Then again, neither is "Reaganing" and that worked out well for Jack Donaghy.

I decided this week that I wanted to read Jurassic Park again and write a blog post about the differences between the book and the movie. I started last night and got about 50 pages in. More on that later.

Getting closer!

It's not here yet, but I'm getting more and more excited about the release of I, Crimsonstreak. I turned in my "final" revisions this week, but we all know there's probably still at least a little bit of work ahead. I didn't make any major changes in the revised copy, which is mostly just little tweaks of different parts and scenes of the book. The bulk of the work was trying to make sure my carefully crafted background information all tied together. I'm not completely there, but it's very, very close.

One thing I like about Candlemark & Gleam is the publisher's approach to pre-orders. It's pretty cool...they use everyone's favorite crowdsourcing website, Kickstarter, and offer incentives to people who pre-order the book. There are different tiers for these extras, and some of them are very, very cool. For example--and I can't stress enough that these are EXAMPLES--let's say you kick in ten bucks. That could get you a print copy of the book plus the ebook version and a digital short story. Kick in $50 bucks, you'd get a signed paperback version, the ebook, a poster, membership card to the group of your choice (the evil New World Common Wealth of the benevolent Heroic Legion), a collection of Crimsonstreak short stories, and an archival edition of one of the newspaper articles featured in the book.

The great thing about pre-orders is the more you give, the more you get...while helping the project get off the ground.

The Mastermind (Kate Sullivan of Candlemark & Gleam) asked me today to come up with a few ideas for some pre-order bonuses. I made this rather extensive list of absurd possibilities and sent it to her. I won't share my ideas just yet, but I think we're going to have a lot of fun coming up with this stuff.

Stay tuned.

Revisions Update

All right, I declare revisions finished!

Okay, not really. I'm close, though. I did make it through all the pages and accepted/rejected changes. I read the comments (and responded to some of them) and reworked various parts of the book.

None of the notes were harsh (there was nothing saying, "Your writing stinks and you should go away"), but they were thorough. The thing you have to keep in mind while working on something like this is that these comments come from people who LIKED THE BOOK. They want it to be as good as it can be. So even when you feel a note is mildly chastising, it's not.

I want to go over most of the notes again and double-check my work.

I hope to submit my revisions to the Mastermind soon.

A few things about revisions

I have received editorial notes before for short stories, but nothing quite as intimidating as Ye Olde Professionally Edited Manuscript.

For I, Crimsonstreak, real people who actually know what they're doing have taken a look at the manuscript and judged every single part of it. They've added words, deleted words, played around with the order of dialogue, and questioned the wisdom of certain plot points. They've suggested altering the timeline, clarified certain ambiguities, and made it plainly clear that the supplemental material in the back of the book wasn't something to be glossed over.

Almost every page has a correction, suggestion, or comment. Rare is the paragraph that remains unchanged because of its utter perfection.

I'll admit something: I was kind of dreading the return of my marked up manuscript. It's not purely vanity (although I won't discount that entirely). Instead, it's the overall feeling that I may have screwed up my entire story. That I couldn't pull off a clean, plot hole-free, perfect novel.

I mean, I've already done revisions. For weeks and weeks and weeks, I ate I, Crimsonstreak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes I had it for second breakfast. Elevensies. Dinner. Supper. You get the point. I wasn't looking forward to returning to that world again.

Do editors know about second breakfast?
The book was finished, right?

Of course it wasn't!

Listen, writing a book is a grind. I just finished the first draft of a new Crimsonstreak project. Some 87,000 words in just about a hundred days (what does that look like? Here's your visual). Crimsonstreak 2: Crimsonstreakier is nowhere near complete. I have gigantic holes to fill in the manuscript, both plot wise and structurally. I have characters who magically reappear and disappear. I have a convoluted ending that may or may not make sense.

It. Is. A. Mess.

Please understand something. If you're a beginning writer or a person who thinks the life of a writer is this glorious, triumphant world full of ponies (that's for you, Susan Jane Bigelow), you need to know something.

Your work isn't perfect.

It never has been.

It never will be.

A good editor will help you get it close. Sure, your manuscript may fly too close to the sun on wings of pastrami, but it will soar. That's the point.

You can't do it yourself. You need someone to help take your manuscript's latent potential and make it drip with authorial awesomesauce.

You'll get by with a little help.It starts with some beta readers who can tell you various things about your book ranging from "that's pretty cool" to "you know, that's the worst idea I've ever heard and I liked the Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher and eagerly await Red Scorpion III: Commie Reckoning."

A few things I've learned so far:

Time to talk about time. This is fairly specific to my book, but I thought I had my timeline all straightened out. However, through several different iterations of the manuscript, things managed to get a little muddled. The very first thing I did when getting my revision notes was to type out a complete timeline of the history of my story's universe. I now have that as a guideline to make sure everything works in sync.

It's not always so obvious. I know my characters. When I close my eyes, I can see their souls, their worldview, what they'd say about the BCS or changes in the Star Wars original trilogy. These things are not so obvious to readers who don't have this omniscient view of your writing world. Thus, something that seems plainly like sarcasm by a certain character may read as a "matter of fact" statement to someone else. If it confuses your editor, you'd better tweak it.

Microsoft Word is evil. Actually, Word is a solid program and one I'm very fond of. However, the "track changes" feature can be a little finicky, especially when it comes to accepting and rejecting changes. There are several points I'm still trying to accept, yet I can't seem to find the magical place to right-click. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

The semicolon lives! I take it this varies from editor to editor. However, I ended up striking a bunch of semicolons out of the manuscript after working on a short story with an editor who said semicolons were more appropriate for nonfiction. In my revisions, however, the semicolon made a major comeback. I'm fine with that; I like semicolons. Sometimes, I like them just a little too much.

The semicolon is a personal El Guapo.
When a character is the son of another character with the same name, referring to both of them as "Master Warren" probably isn't a good idea. Apparently, this gets confusing.

I could go on...but it's getting late and I still have 373 pages to read over and revise. I'm certain I'll have more to share as I continue.

And So It Begins...

I received a very important email this weekend.

Mastermind Kate Sullivan at Candlemark & Gleam sent me my revision notes and the line-edited version of the manuscript for I, Crimsonstreak. For reasons I'll not disclose at the moment, I haven't looked over the revision notes just yet.

Let's just say, however, that I'll be doing that very, very soon.

The timing works out just perfectly; I finished my first draft of I, Crimsonstreak 2: Crimsonstreakier on Friday night. I was looking over the manuscript and really like the first half. It's fast-paced and fairly breezy like the first book. I haven't read the most recent additions to the manuscript, but I feel like it went off in too many directions and couldn't focus in the second half. The grand finale, I feel, is a bit of a letdown right now. However, that's what first drafts are for.

Still, Crimsonstreak 2 is a "backburner project." Revisions must be done to the original book first. After all, what good is a sequel if it isn't a follow-up to something that's already published? So Crimsonstreak 2 will sit for a little while. That's a good thing, though. I'll get it out of my "mindspace," which will allow me to look at it more objectively.

Let the revisions begin!

You have to see the baby!

That manuscript is...breathtaking.
Just a quick post here today.

A couple of months ago, I reviewed a book for a gentleman who kindly asked me to do so.

My review was mixed. I'll be honest: I was hard on the guy. Some would say too hard.

This was a self-published work; a pure labor of love. The 603-page behemoth had its ups and downs. I noted several positives about it, but the author had plenty to work on as well. The book needed some major restructuring and revisions. Had the author not asked me to look over it, I would've quit after about 50 pages. Perhaps I should have.

I told him not to give up; I understood the criticism would sting because I've felt the sting myself. I made sure my criticism came from one writer to another; not one person to another. That's the hardest part, I think, about critiquing. Some people wear their characters and words on their sleeves and are aghast anyone would have the nerve to say something negative about their book.

It's like the Seinfeld episode with the ugly baby (the episode is "The Hamptons," by the way).

"You have to see the baby!"

Unfortunately, the baby is ugly. In human terms, when confronted with an ugly baby, it's probably best to smile and nod and go on your merry way. If you're a doctor, call it breathtaking. You hope by the time the kid reaches five years old, he or she isn't so ugly. If the "baby" is ugly at five or six, there's always adolescence. Or college. Or...eventually...plastic surgery.

First drafts are Hampton babies. You want everyone to "look at the baby" and shower you with praise. The fact remains: your writing is stilted, your characters one dimensional, your plot less coherent than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

I've written several times on this blog about the importance of self-editing (the most prominent post here). Self-editing only takes you so far. I'm confident in my writing, sometimes to a fault. I've turned in stories only my eyes have seen...and some of those have been published. However, my beta readers have proven invaluable. They've given me insight into my work I didn't even realize, pointed out inconsistencies, plugged plot holes, and smoothed out some of the rough patches.

In one book, my reader pointed out something so profound, I now have a new working manuscript for that project. A major change to a bland character is really going to help rock this thing out. I wish I could've seen it myself...but I was so close to the book that I was incapable of doing so.

What am I saying?

Well...think of it this way: if you consider your stories to be your babies, don't. Don't coddle them, don't love them, don't shelter them from the bad things out there. Because when someone comes to "see the baby" and doesn't like what they read, your parental instincts will kick in and you'll be incapable of changing a single thing. Learn to see the beauty in your writing, but understand faults do exist. Take the advice as a writer and not as a person.

Guest Blog!

In a career first, I put together a guest blog for another site.

My friends over at Superheronation.com asked for some guest blog pitches and liked one of mine. It will be somewhat familiar to any of my readers--it's a truncated version of my post on self-editing--but it's still a neat concept.

You can check it out over at Superhero Nation.

A revision done...now what?

It's been a big three weeks for my novel I, Crimsonstreak. The manuscript has received the kind of love and attention usually reserved for a big celebrity like Butler's Blue II.

An adorable Bulldog makes every post better.
For three weeks, I've pored over the manuscript at all hours of the day (mostly between midnight and 4am, sometimes actually in daylight on the weekend). I am happy to announce that I'm finally finished.

(Sound FX: Record Screeching)

Wait, I'm NOT finished. You see, I am a mediocre onscreen editor. I'm decent enough...there are several stories I've submitted that have been accepted thanks to my onscreen editorial prowess. However, I usually print out my stories and make ye olde (fashioned) editing marks. There's nothing better, in my opinion, than the symbol for "transpose," the slash for "lower case," and the triple underscore for "capitalize." It's a wondrous world; a language in and of itself.

So now, after "revising" the novel manuscript, it's time to revise the revision and improve upon what I improved. I assure you that my revisions most likely resulted in plot holes, inconsistencies, misspellings, run-on sentences, awkward word usage, and all that fun stuff.

So now, I get to go through this:

500 pages? No sweat!
And I have some good news! After devoting a good chunk of time for revisions, I finally have a great idea for a short story. Expect the Reggie Miller Writing Continuum to return shortly!

As a bonus gift, here's a sneak peek at the chapter structure for I, Crimsonstreak. This will likely change; I noticed while flipping through the manuscript that the early chapters are relatively short while later chapter breaks are spaced farther apart.

Chapter 1 - The Clermont Institution for the Criminally Insane: Serving Evil Doers and Those in Need Since 1978

Chapter 2 - Have (Straight) Jacket, Will Travel

Chapter 3 - My Only Escape is Escaping

Chapter 4 - Look Out Chester, There's a New Cheetah in Town

Chapter 5 - Take Me Down to New Chaos City, Where the Grass is Green and the Butlers are British

Chapter 6 - Batman, Meet Robin...Please Don't End Up Like Jason Todd

Chapter 7 - Chaos Reigns & an Enforcer's Lament

Chapter 8 - A Celebrity at Central Processing

Chapter 9 - The Comet Accelerator (Yes, That's Really What He Calls It)

Chapter 10 - Chaopolis South: It's Like Chaopolis, Only Southier

Chapter 11 - Getting a Boost

Chapter 12 - Chaotic Family Reunion

Chapter 13 - Trapped Like a (Lab) Rat

Chapter 14 - Here We Go Again on Our Own

Chapter 15 - Will the Real Colonel Chaos Please Stand Up?

Chapter 16 - A Not-So-Little Caesar and an Epic Battle of Epicness

Chapter 17 - Rebuilding

I, Crimsonstreak Revision Nearing Completion

Revisions for my book I, Crimsonstreak are nearing completion! I've made it through the story part of the book. While getting rid of some redundancies, choppiness, and the like, I also added about 10,000 words to the text. The main adventure, once a paltry 60,000 words, is now more than 70,000 words. Of course, I will now have to revise the revisions!

Before I get to that...and I will get to that...I have 24,982 words worth of meta-fiction to pour through. These are newspaper articles, character bios, journal entries, and other bits of info that help round out the Crimsonstreak universe. The main task will be to organize the text into topical (and sometimes chronological) appendices, followed by edits/rewrites and reformatting (the meta-fiction has wonky formatting...some of it's in newspaper format and will need to be double-spaced).

I feel like I haven't written anything in two weeks, but revisions are just as much a part of writing as anything else. Mostly, I miss the Reggie Miller Writing Continuum.

Revising: It's Like Writing, Except Not

I don't hate revisions, but sometimes it feels like I'm not getting anything done. Many writers have progress meters that tell them when they're hitting their word counts. When I'm working on revisions, I don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything. I don't have the certified, "look what I've created!" feeling that comes when I write a story or book and step back to see, "I've written 2,000 words today."

On the other hand, I AM making progress. I, Crimsonstreak is a goofy superhero novel I wrote years ago. This was long before I knew anything about writing or publishing (or, worse yet, before before I thought I knew anything about writing or publishing). Needless to say, the book needs a lot of polish. Even after this revision is "finished," I'll still have to go back and work on it. That's the nature of writing; it constantly shifts--"finished" is a pipe dream. The first few drafts of the book came in at 60,000 words. Over the last week or so, the main adventure now has more than 68,000 words. That means I HAVE been writing, it just feels like I'm not creating anything NEW, even though I am.

My goal is to get I, Crimsonstreak up to 70,000 words (I'm soooooo close to meeting that goal). Even then, it won't be finished.

The book has about 25,000 words of non-story meta-fiction. This material includes character files, newspaper articles, journal entries, and other background information that required a fairly exhaustive timeline. Once I get through the "novel" part of the book, it's onto the meta-fiction, which needs to be indexed, rearranged, and divided into thematic appendices.

It's all very necessary, of course...but revisions make me feel like I'm running in quicksand; my feet are churning, but I'm not going anywhere...and it's very possible I'm sinking.

Do you ever feel that way?

Revisions and Book trailers

Yesterday, I shared a publishing triumph, announcing that my short story "Gus and Mariel" has been accepted for publication in an upcoming anthology. I'll let you know the details on release and such when I find out myself.

I don't have a lot to report tonight. I'm working on my book I, Crimsonstreak. I want to do some revisions and then send this latest version out to some readers. A previous draft did okay with an outside reader (i.e., someone I don't know), but he had some great suggestions that I'm putting into the book as a whole. I can tell a major difference between the writing in this book and my short stories.

It's good to be able to spot some repetitive words, boring sentence structures, and that kind of thing. Every once in a while, I'll surprise myself with a nice twist of a phrase ("Sometimes, I amaze even myself," Han said. "That doesn't sound too hard," Leia replied) while looking over my work. But I'm making revisions, oh man, am I making revisions. I wanted to bump up the word count of the book, but I need to do it in an organic manner. I've found a way to do that and have now added about 4,000 words to the narrative in the last week or so.

The major revision is still less than a third complete; even though the main narrative of I, Crimsonstreak is relatively short, I still have to go through and edit an additional 25,000 words of meta-fiction. All that has to be categorized, too.

I get excited very easily. Once an idea comes into my head, it has to come out RIGHT AWAY! I'm not impulsive, necessarily, but when I do happen to want to do something, I get fixated on it. My current fixation is on creating a book trailer. I've been sketching out ideas and storyboards and wishing I had the tools to pull it off. Since I, Crimsonstreak features comic book characters, I'd like to use hand-drawn characters, but I don't have the skills to draw them effectively. That won't stop me. I may try to come up with something this weekend, just for fun.

Matt at Work! I Promise!

I have had, admittedly, a very quiet week on the blog. It's correlated with a fairly quiet week writing. I dedicated the first half of the week to TFT's first-ever book review, which will be up shortly. When I haven't been making notes about that book, I've been revising one of my own.

I have great dreams of turning I, Crimsonstreak into an e-book and becoming the next Amanda Hocking (rolls eyes). I'm not serious, but I am contemplating doing something a little different with this book. It's too much "fun" for a mainstream publisher. Perhaps a small press would be interested? I don't know...but I do know it needs a lot of polish. So no short stories, no big bursts of creativity, and no updates on the Reggie Miller Writing Continuum.

Revisions...it's like writing...only...not.

Quiet! Revisions Underway!

100th Comment on this post gets this logo on a t-shirt.
While I don't know where the rest of the week will take me, I'm committed to revising one of my earliest books, I, Crimsonstreak, a humorous, first-person take on the superhero genre.

This one's been sitting around for a couple of years. Let's put this in perspective: when I finished I, Crimsonstreak, I'd written a total of 120,000 words between that book and my very first. Since then, my writing output has been been much more impressive, with two other finished books and more than 35 short stories.

This isn't boasting; what I'm saying is that I've put a lot of words between I, Crimsonstreak and myself since originally "finishing" the novel (we all know, of course, that no creative endeavor is truly ever "finished"). When I was writing it, I had no idea what I was doing (in many ways, I still don't); I hadn't had anything published. While I'm not a big-time author by any stretch of the imagination, I now feel like I have a better grasp of writing in general. I can look back at this book, see its flaws, and grind them out.

After that, I'm going to need some beta readers to take a look at it and then go back for more revisions. But I can't do that until I feel the book has improved dramatically from its last draft.

The blog will probably remain relatively quiet this week (although that could ALWAYS change) because I'm working on revisions instead of coming up with something new. It's not that revisions aren't writing--writing is revising, point of fact--but it's not that exciting to do any kind of commentary on revisions...unless I find some extremely poorly-written sentence to share.

But wait...I can use the Peytonometer for this!

I, Crimsonstreak--now in the "Audibles" stage!

The Peytonometer: Not just for short stories!
My other project is a book review for someone who found this blog and thought I'd like to read his superhero novel. I'm about halfway through the book, which is about 600 pages. Either this week or next week, look for a review and an interview with the writer.