It’s been a while since I stepped away from all things blog and social media related. December 2018 came around and I felt like I needed to avert my gaze from the internet for a time. But I’ve remained busy, so today I’ll take a moment to share with you what’s been going on.

Grim Curio

Grim Curio is my current major work in progress, a novel about the refugees in the last city on left earth after three calamities ravaged the planet. Last year I sent it out to 15 beta readers, received excellent feedback, then set the novel aside for a while to get some perspective.

In that off time, I wrote Peculiar Case, but when that work finished, I returned to edit Grim Curio and have been hard at work ever since. The edits are going slow but well. After editing and reading the first quarter of the novel several times, I feel like it’s almost in a finished state.

So that leaves three quarters of the novel left to go. Here’s the kind of changes I’m making:

More explicit communication of themes

I’m being more explicit about my themes. There are lots of themes that touch on the current state of the world, but turn them on their head. I didn’t shy away from controversial topics in the earlier drafts, but now I’m making everything explicit.

Readers of the latest edits have really responded to this, and it seems the direct nature of the themes makes them take a second to think not only about the state of the world of Grim Curio but about the state of the real world as well, which is what I want. It’s entertaining but hopefully will shift something in your brain if I do my job right.

Seamless transition between narration and character thought

One goal of mine was to make the reader feel like they intimately understand the main characters. I want you to feel like you’re in their heads, but I also hate italics as thought markers in other novels, and I feel like jumping from narration to internal thought is jarring in most novels.

So I came up with a stylistic solution that I’ve never seen done before and I’m really proud of. In the current edit, I’m spreading this style of internal thought through seamless narration shifts throughout. It takes a lot of thought to make it work but it’ll be worth it in the end.

Adding scenes where there seems to be a gap in the story or logic

This is an obvious one, but occasionally the jump from one scene to the next is jarring. In the previous draft, the reader would need to piece together what might have happened to get from one scene to the next. This issue wasn’t prevalent throughout but there were definitely a few times where it pops up.

In most cases, a paragraph or two seems to solve the issue, but in one major case I’m adding an entire new chapter. As you might imagine, this is the most time consuming part of the edit as new scenes take several pass throughs and edits themselves in order to be brought up to snuff with the rest of the novel.

Removing some experimental narration

In the earlier drafts, I had many cases where I was trying something new. I wanted to create an atmosphere where the narrator could occasionally address the characters as if a character itself. While I enjoyed it, it was clear my readers we very split on these bits.

It was an experiment after all and it looks as if the experiment failed. So I’m rewriting these scenes to follow a more traditional style of narration. Perhaps another day in another novel I’ll be able to perfect this, but for now I’m cutting my losses and moving on without this element to the novel.

So that’s what’s been going on with Grim Curio. But there’s another novel I have up in the air, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it, so let’s take a sec to talk about Peculiar Case.

The Peculiar Case of the Luminous Eye

I had planned on documenting the publication process of this one and I dropped the ball when I stepped away from the internet. So here’s what’s happening with that.

Last year I published Peculiar Case on Patreon before I sending it out to publications. I learned something through that process. Apparently, publications consider having something published on Patreon as “previously published” and most won’t accept it at that point.

Currently, it’s still readable to patrons on my Patreon page. For now, I’ve stopped sending it out to magazines. I have two options with it, self publish or keep it in my back pocket until after Grim Curio is published so I have a nice follow-up novel. I’m leaning towards the latter.

So Peculiar Case is out there for you to read if you want to be a patron, but for publishing purposes, I’m holding off for the time being while I strategize my publishing career. It’s a bummer, but I think to wait, in the long run, will work out to my benefit.