Final Editing

Joyce, a friend that went to my high school, edits documents at her work and offered to edit Infused. I gladly accepted her offer since I knew that I was not a master of punctuation – I like to use hyphens, parentheses and ellipsis quite a bit. After my experience with the writing seminars, I was not in a rush to do anything more with my book, but I certainly was not going to turn down an offer by someone to help.

Since it was a volunteer job, and Joyce had a lot of things going on in her life, it took her a number of months to edit the book. I think that it was a bigger project than she had expected (it is after all about 90,000 words long) – she had read the book beforehand, but since she was conforming to the formatting commonly used for sci-fi/fantasy, she ended up having to make a great deal of changes. Many of the changes were swapping  out my medium sized hyphens to larger hyphens and removing the spaces before and after them, and putting spaces between the periods in the ellipsis, but there were many more changes too of course.

After I received the results of the editing, I let them sit for a couple of more months because I was still very pessimistic from listening to other authors. Then I finally started to slowly work through the changes.

I had sent Joyce a Word document with the novel in it and she returned that file with all of the proposed changes marked in it. Word has a nice feature that lets me accept or reject each change. Most of the punctuation changes I accepted easily (although I left some of the parenthesis as I felt that they worked better than the alternative is several places).

There were also a number of places that she pointed out awkward phrasing and performed some word-smithing. These I didn’t accept en masse. I agreed with the fact that the original wording in most of these places could use improvement, but I very often did not agree with the suggested changes. A few times I felt that the proposed change did not sound like something that I would write, so I crafted my own replacement so that the change would not stick out because it didn’t flow with the rest of the writing. Other times, the suggested changes were actually changing what was being said. This surprised me a bit until I thought about the fact that she was editing sentence by sentence, she was not intimately familiar with the story. An example of this would be where I have a character use a word that does not exist, and then a couple of sentences later I make a remark about how he was able to get away with using the word without anyone noticing. However, since Joyce was only looking at the individual sentences, she simply replaced the made up word with a real word.

I was very glad that Joyce had identified the locations of the awkward sentences, but I felt the need to make the changes with my own style of writing. Editing never ends – I’ve been informed of a few errors since the book was published. Don’t blame Joyce for letting any slip by though – I made changes that she never saw, and it can sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what the corrected version of the text will be when viewing it in Word with changes marked. After this experience I won’t be as annoyed when I find a mistake in a book that I am reading.

I have heard tales of authors rearranging large portions of their books, or of them re-writing it over several times. I did not do this. My editing changes were either grammar related, or to add a little more detail. The story was told (for the most part) in a very logical flow and I can’t think of any re-arranging that I would be happy with making.

Going to Writing Seminars

After finishing my book and sending out a few letters to agents, I went to a few talks / seminars given by local writers to try and find out more about the business.

The first one that I went to was at a local book store and was about how to make money writing books. The author had a number of books and eBooks available, but he was basically telling us that he made almost all of his money by having Google ads on his web site about how to get published. The only pieces of useful information that I got from him concerning being an author was that to have people buy your book online, you needed around fifteen reviews, and that he found the best price to sell an eBook at was $3.99.

The next one that I went to was part of a writing series hosted at our library. We performed a couple of writing exercises, but there was very little instruction given and even less about what to make of what you had done. The author had been writing for years, but caught me completely by surprise when she told us that she had recently learned in a seminar that she had attended that antagonists in book often think that they are the good guys. I couldn’t believe that she could be a writer and had not realized that. The next piece of information that she provided was that she drove a broken down car and was not making much money as a writer.

At the third talk that I went to, the writing exercises were a little better, and the author told us that in addition to writing herself, she ran a number of writing workshops, but she even with those, was not making much money. She also talked about how difficult it was to get more than just a few people to buy your book, even if you have and agent and a publisher.

The last author that I heard speak was the most successful. He had an agent, had a publisher that produced his series of sci-fi books, and he sold thousands of copies of his books. But, writing was just a hobby (albeit a very large part of his life type of hobby). He made sure that we knew that only a few people actually make any real money as authors – he relied on his IT job to pay his bills. He told the crowd to write if it was a passion, if not, just give it up, because they were just going to get disappointment in return for their hard work. As a side note, when I talked to him after the session, he was surprised that I had finished writing my book – few of the people that attend his writing seminars actually get that far.

So, after listening to all of these authors, I was pretty disheartened. There was no chance of making any money, and there was very little chance that more than a few people would ever buy my book (and those probably limited to my friends). Realistically, I knew that very few people actually are successful in the entertainment industry, but it was depressing to hear it over and over again. So, I walked away from my finished novel for quite a while…

Test Reader’s Opinions of Infused

Over the span of a year, I gave about twenty-five people copies of Infused (either copies that I had printed at home, in a PDF, or in an ePub file) before it was published. Out of those people, fifteen of them read it and I received a very interesting range of feedback.

A few of the responses were not a great deal of help to me as they were basically just, “It was good.” But I did appreciate them reading it and liking it. I had one friend who was an English major that had started taking notes on my grammar issues (before the final editing was done), but started enjoying the story so much that he didn’t want to be distracted by the note taking, so he stopped – that was a nice compliment.

It was very interesting to hear the different opinions. Infused is not a normal hero story, I strove to make Geoff’s actions realistic, so there was no built in way that the reader was expected to feel. If a social outcast that felt powerless to react to the world was suddenly given immense power, I believe that he would most likely abuse that power in some ways. Luckily, Geoff is hopeful and really does want to do good in the world. But of course, not everyone’s idea of what is good is the same.

Some of the test reader’s opinions turned against Geoff early on, while some waited until later in the story, and others were still rooting for him through the end. However, everyone loved Kevin, well, almost everyone; one person didn’t like him.

Some of the other things that I heard was that it was “more of a story for guys”, that there was too much sex in the book, that the writing was very easy to read, that I should have used more elaborate wording, that the story really makes you think, that the ending is poignant, and that the ending is “like you got tired of writing”.

The interesting thing was that all of the criticisms that I heard were countered by other readers. This story really is a different experience for each person that reads it because of how they interpret it is based on their own beliefs and values.

The First Test Reader of Infused

Laura, a long time friend of ours, moved to town a few days after I finished writing Infused. She had no idea that I had been writing a book, but once I told her, she gladly agreed to read it and give me feedback. However, she had given up reading the printed page, and wanted to be able to read it on her Nook.

I only had my novel in Word and Publisher formats, but some quick googling provided me with a program that could convert a PDF file to an ePub (which the Nook could read). I had Word export the story as a PDF and then used the converter to change it to an ePub file. Once I had that file, I sent it on to Laura.

After she had a chance to read Infused, Laura and I got together to discuss her thoughts on it. First off, she told me that she had reviewed many scientific papers for friends in the past and, since she always wanted to have something good to say, she would normally start off by commenting on how nice the document looked and how good the typing was. However, she was not able to tell me that since the process of converting to a PDF and then to an ePub file had not gone well, and many of the sentences ended up with line breaks in the middle of them for no reason. I later found a program that would let me visually edit ePub documents without having to have blind faith in a conversion tool, and it looks much better today.

After that was out of the way, she next asked me if I realized that a lot of people were not going to like Geoff. I told her that yes, I knew that some people would not like him – the story was not written with the main character being an epic hero that always did what was right, it was meant to be a realistic story about an unrealistic subject. We then talked about the story in depth for a few hours. In addition to her opinions on various parts of the story, she also gave me a few details such as specific hormones that I should name in one part of the story and the name of a really fast acting poison to have in another part.

Overall, she liked the story very much, and she found it very straight forward and easy to follow – except the last paragraph. The meaning of what Geoff says in that paragraph had not been as apparent as I had thought it would be, so I added in some additional text to clarify what was being said.

I appreciated all of Laura’s comments and suggestions; it was gratifying to have someone read my novel and to have put a great deal of thought into discussing it with me.

Infused Cover Design

As I got close to completing the writing of Infused, my mind started wandering to what the cover of my book should look like. Geoff’s use of his powers in many cases would be difficult to express in a single picture, and many of the scenarios that I thought of would not express the extent of his powers well.

I finally decided that the best scene from the story to use for the cover would be of Geoff standing on the moon looking back at the Earth. I also wanted him to be shoeless, even though in the book he was not alone when he was barefooted on the moon.

In wanting to make a mock-up of the cover I didn’t want to spend any money or bother anyone else with the attempt, so I ended up playing Geoff in the picture. I stood in front of a wall looking toward it (barefooted of course) in a dramatic pose, and my daughter took a picture of me. I later found out that we didn’t have the flash turned on, but that actually worked out better as it looked more natural in the final composition with light coming from the side and mainly lighting the top of half of my body.

Next, I looked around the internet for a picture of Earth and of the moon. I wasn’t worried about copyright since they would only be for personal use, so I just grabbed the first things that I thought might work. The satellite image of Earth that I found looked pretty good, but it was really too crisp when it was combined with the black and white lunar shot that was taken by one of the Apollo missions that I was using, so I ended up blurring it a bit.

The image editing software that I have is about ten years old, so it is fairly limited in what it can do. It took me hours of editing the picture of myself to remove all of the background so that I could overlay it on the rest of the scene. I also had to get rid of my beard (since Geoff did not have one) and I even had to erase part of the bottom of my rib cage since at the angle the picture was taken my rib was sticking out further than my chest.

Once I had the three images ready to be merged, I created a starscape by putting colored dots on a black image that was the size of the desired finished product and then I added the lunar and Earth pictures. Next, I added the picture of myself on top of that, and put the title of the book across the Earth.

The final product was not wonderful by any means, but it did get the idea across pretty well. I also realized at that point that I should have stretched the image of myself out some since Geoff is supposed to be seven inches taller than I am, but I knew that the finer details could wait until a better version could be created in its entirety later on.

Editing While Writing

My method for editing is to do as much as I can while I am writing, and not wait until the book is finished.

Normally, after I’ve written three chapters or so, I’ll go back and read them in sequence paying close attention to the content. I’ll check for flow of the story and make sure that I have not made any continuity errors. After I have finished that pass, I’ll go back and pay close attention to each individual sentence making sure that they sound correct by themselves and I’ll try to fix any spelling and grammar issues that I can. I say try because I was not an English major and being an engineering major probably put me at a disadvantage in this area.

After I have repeated the above process for three sets of approximately chapters, I will go through the process again for all of those chapters in sequence, checking the flow for a larger section of the book this time. Re-reading a larger part, and the fact that it would have been a longer time in between writing and proofing the earlier chapters than before, I tend to be able to pick out more sentences that can be smoothed out.

Once I have finished writing the entire book, I will go through with the two pass proofing method for the entire length of it. At that point, I’ll feel that the writing is good enough for some of my friends to give it a test read.

Characters and Events in Infused

One thing that you often hear being given as advice from authors is “Write about what you know.” I obviously don’t know about receiving super powers, as most other authors of fiction haven’t experienced exactly what they are writing about, but characteristics and other details come across much more believably  when the author actually knows something about them.

As an example, in the beginning of Infused, Geoff is very skinny. This came from my own experience; I was extremely skinny as a child, and I, like Geoff, would sink to the bottom of a pool if I was not constantly moving. However, unlike Geoff, by the time that I was in college I had put on some muscle and I was not quite as sinkable.

Although I gave my characters some characteristics that I was familiar with, none of the characters were actually based on real people that I knew. However, when I was writing about some of the celebrities in the book, I would sometimes have real life celebrities in mind.

Some of the events in the book were also inspired by actual events. An example would be when Kevin told Geoff about the dorm mate that had his nose injured by a drunken student. In real life, I was the one that took the dorm mate to the hospital to have his nose attended to.

These details help to give the story authenticity, and if someone were to come up to me and tell me that some of the non-power related events are too farfetched, I would probably be able to relate a true life experience to sway their opinion.

The Story Flow of Infused

When I started writing Infused, I knew what was going to happen in the first couple of chapters and I knew what was going to happen at the very end. Other than that, I have a few ideas what would happen in the middle, but nothing solid.

The majority of the story was developed as it was written by my simply asking myself "What would happen next?" I then would think about what Geoff would logically do next, or what someone's reaction would be to what had happened. For the most part, I didn't know where the story was going to lead me.

I did get hung up at one point while writing. This was when I wanted the story to go in a certain direction so that it would lead to the ending that I had planned. Because I was having difficulty figuring out how to steer the story in the direction that I wanted, I ended up skipping ahead and writing a later chapter. This was different for me because for the most part, I was writing everything in order. When I did end up going back and writing the section that I had skipped (by deciding to have a few events happen at the same time to enrage Geoff, instead of just following the logical flow of events) it caused me to have to revise the later section that I had written because cause and effect had made changes that I had not anticipated (such as Geoff no longer living in his house).

I am even more wary of writing out of order since I was reading a book last year where in one chapter, the main character's car had been severely damaged and was undriveable, then in the next chapter she drove the car to a meeting with no mention of any problems with the car. However, in the next chapter, the car was broken again and she had it taken in for repair. These chapters were clearly written out of order, or perhaps the order of the chapters was re-arranged for story flow. Either way, it was a warning to me to make sure that I don't confuse the reader with a mistake brought about by my writing not occurring in the same order that it will be read.

The Beginnings of Infused

At one point when I was in college, I saw the "The Man in the Bottle" episode of the old Twilight Zone TV series in which a man finds a genie in a bottle, but soon finds that his wishes lack enough detail in them to prevent them from being ruined - for instance, he asks for a million dollars, but after giving away a little of it, the IRS ends up taking the bulk of it.

Being a studious student, I felt that it would be a good use of my time to come up with the exact wording for the best three wishes I could think of (just in case someone decided to grant them to me). After spending a good bit of time coming up with what I wanted the three wishes to be (I am a very thorough and logical thinker), I then spent even more time working out the wording to make sure that I didn't get shafted.

Years later I decided that I would try to write a story with those three wishes being given to a college student. There was only one problem, I had gotten a degree in Computer Engineering, and was horrible at writing. I ended up writing about one page worth and found that even I didn't want to read it, it was just a bunch of disjointed sentences; this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. So I gave up.

Five years or so passed and then I saw the movie Bedazzled. That story is about another man who did not give enough requirements for his wishes and they were all ruined. This reminded me about my list of wishes and I once again decided to attempt to write my story. However, I found that my writing was still very bad, and gave up after writing two pages or so.

Another five years passed and I tried it again with no better luck. But it was harder to just forget about it though as I have a hard time getting to sleep quite often and many times I would end up thinking about how my story would begin. But, unfortunately, I was visualizing it more as a movie than thinking of the words needed to be able to describe what was going on, so I gained no useful insights.

Finally, after another five years or so, I sat down to try and write the story and wrote the first chapter - and here's the thing; it didn't suck! Apparently all those years of reading in bed had sunk in and I had developed the ability to write.

Infused Has Been Published

My first novel Infused is now available in paperback form and as a Kindle or Nook eBook.

You can find the paperback and Kindle versions on my author's page at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Lefler/e/B0081B4G0U/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1336602802&sr=1-2

The Nook version can be found at Barnes and Noble's site at:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/infused-michael-lefler/1110619637?ean=2940014359351

The paperback version can also be purchased direct from the publisher CreateSpace at:
https://www.createspace.com/3864577

In the coming weeks I am planning on blogging about my experience writing my first novel, and about finally getting it published.

Thanks for visiting my blog, and I'll be adding more soon!