Category Archives: Cerberus

Updates about Cerberus series of novels, featuring mind reading Detective Paul Calvin

Cerberus

Four thousand words a day challenge; day four


Start: 33250
Finish: 37018
Total: 3768 words, 232 short of daily target. Average 4170 and on track for 80,000 word target by October 1st. This includes research, fact checking, and editing for grammatical and spelling errors.

Not bad considering. Have just ratcheted the first Cerberus story on to the next phase with a bizarre and ritualistic double murder. One my hero has to come back from exile and not quite solve. Because there are some things beyond even his abilities.

Am resisting the temptation to read the newspapers, because bad news always takes my mind off what I should be doing; i.e. writing.

Cerberus

Four thousand word a day challenge; day three


Late shift this evening, but I’ve been at Cerberus hammer and tongs today. The story is moving on, and I’ve spent a little time on an interlude for serious character development.

Beginning word count 28167
End session word count 32499

Close of play 4332 words
Averaging just over 4000 words per day excluding headings and formatting. Might have trouble keeping up the pace tomorrow as I have errands to run, but a break will give me time to think about how I link in the next story elements.

Update: Added a few more paragraphs after this evenings work shift. Final word count 33250. Total for the day; 5083. Birthdays and errands tomorrow, so I’ll be lucky if I make 3000 words. Time for bed.

Cerberus

The four thousand word a day challenge; day two


Fell short of the four thousand word mark today at 3617. Close, but no cigar. Yesterday was 4212, so that averages out at a shade over 3900 words, excluding headings so far. However, the story is at a natural break part of the narrative with a nicely barbed narrative hook baited.

Tomorrow I move on to the next phase of the story which is mostly in note form, so cracking the 4000 might be a little easier.

Cerberus is taking shape nicely.

Cerberus

The four thousand word a day challenge: day one

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Harper Vector are opening their books to new authors without agents for two weeks from the 1st to the 14th of October 2012. They are looking for new science fiction and fantasy authors for an assault on the eBook marketplace. I have a novel I’d like to submit, but the problem is it’s all notes and fragments, and there’s two weeks to go before the submission floodgates open.

No agent has seen fit to respond to my many missives about other work over the years, and I’m pretty sure my work has gone unread and straight into the shredder. No agent, and no publisher will even look at your work. Not even into their slush piles. However, there is a window of opportunity here, and I’m going for it. At a target of four thousand words a day starting yesterday.

Word count for the first novel in the Cerberus series started at 20338 16th September. Current word count 25982 Tuesday 18th September 08:40am Pacific Standard Time. 1500 pretty good words since 6:10am this morning. Another thousand before 10am when I go off to the day job, and another 1500 after I get home around 6pm. Add in cooking breakfasts, making tea and suppers for both Angie and I, cleaning kitchen, brushing dog, and acting as Angie’s home tech support, plus watching a movie with her, and I have a full day. Tonight’s movie fare will be the Bourne Supremacy.

I have to keep up this work rate for fourteen whole days. I’m currently out of my office and working in the kitchen almost full time. Which seems to work. Back in 1987 I put together a 40,000 word novella, ‘Machine’ from scratch in thirty days using an old Imperial Safari. So work rate isn’t a problem. Hodder and Stoughton did ask me about writing a series back then, but I felt the character of the ‘Machine’ didn’t have enough in him to justify extending the franchise. I still have the old MSS, and revisit it from time to time. Just to see if I can pick holes in it. Oddly enough, that was written in a kitchen too.

Right. 9am. Break over. Back to work.

The hardest part of bringing characters to light and bolting them into a riveting story is the opening and closing sequences. Those I have. The rest of the story is mostly a detective whodunnit with some serious sci-fi roots. I’ve also managed to get a handle on who Paul Calvin is. A psychic cop with a conscience in a crumbling society, but that is all I’m giving away on this blog.

Cerberus

Cerberus; an epiphany

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This morning I got talking to Angie about matter, and how I looked at a mundane thing such as a fist. Half an hours breakfast conversation turned into a seven hundred word intro, which finally broke a logjam of ideas stalling the Cerberus project.

Now I’ve finally opened the floodgates into a massive story, which I’ve been trying to do for over five years. A series of eBooks about Paul Calvin, renegade cop with a psychic talent. the third in the series almost wrote itself, but I hadn’t a clue how to build the rest of the story arc. Until this mornings little epiphany.

Watch this space. 1400 words of really first class copy today, and what even my wife calls ‘electric’ reading. Cerberus has just been raised from the almost dead. Even I think it’s good.

Cerberus

Cerberus novella


Have been looking through my story notes and partial manuscripts for my ‘Cerberus’ series of Novels / Novellas. One of the thoughts occurs to me that perhaps it might be better if I kept the story length down to 20,000 – 30,000 words. At present I’m looking at throwing a couple out into the eBook market place at about $1-2.99 each. A serialisation. Like Stephen King originally did with the ‘Green Mile’.

Will be trying to follow Vonneguts eight rules for writing fiction:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Well, maybe I might play a bit fast and loose with rule 8.  A little suspense is no bad thing, and there’s nothing like a cliffhanger to spur the reader along.

Cerberus

Cerberus


Am doing a first proof on a partial MSS I last worked on five years ago. I like it, but even I can see why the project ground to a halt though. The plot is too weak. The story runs out of steam at around the 45,000 word mark. Paints a great picture of a post-anarchy South London though.

My major issue is that in spite of there being enough detail, drama, sex and violence in the narrative, there are too many loose ends. No definite direction. Apart from that its very well written and has lots to maintain reader interest, including some quite elegant character quirks. Despite that, the MSS is in need of a revamp to get the story successfully from A to Z.

I think that apart from a jailbreak, the storyline tells little of my lead characters motivations and objectives. That is the projects main weakness. He’s swept along by events and doesn’t really take control of his destiny. He’s a great Deus ex machina, but needs a little something extra. In the words of Hitchcock, a Macguffin.

Aside from that, a little extra thought will make ‘Shifting States’ ready for market. Fifteen thousand words and a cliffhanger ending, perhaps. Four to six weeks work in between putting the last volume of the Stars Trilogy together, and beginning work on Earth’s Night.

Cerberus, Stars Trilogy

Kindle, and other such exasperations

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Am currently polishing off a 20,000 word novella I’m calling ‘The Odd Machine’. It’s a first person narrative about a suburban man who loses his wife, is unfairly branded a paedophile, and how he struggles to keep his children as a family when his wife leaves him for reasons unknown, at least to him.

The Odd Machine refers to his inheritance of a bronze and quartz object once reputed to have been the heart of a ‘Death Ray’, and how it seems to be the catalyst for all his woes.

While the story itself takes the form of a single narrative spread over several years, the issues it addresses are quite current. The context tells of a farming family broken by bureaucracy. How a new generation has reinvented itself and faces, amongst others, the challenge of false arrest and public libel. While the subtext asks the question; “Who do we belong to?”

The cover art for the Kindle edition is already uploaded to Amazon, and the Novella itself will form the core of a collection of shorter fiction, to be published in hard copy format sometime in 2012. Have rewritten ‘Polish Ted’ as ‘Cold Warrior’ which will form part of the same collection, along with a bunch of other supernatural stories. Providing of course I can make time to finish the third volume of my Science Fiction ‘Stars’ trilogy, which is due in September 2012. Only 120,000 words and the collapse of interstellar civilisation to go. Then I’ve got the follow-on trilogy or possible series to write. As for the Cerberus series, well, there are a lot of episodes, but no coherent plot or story arc. That needs to be addressed.

I did consider Smashwords as a means of getting my shorter eBooks to market, but having to wait for the US IRS to give me an exemption number seemed a little too involved. I’ve only ever visited the USA once, so why on Gods green Earth do I need to get an IRS exemption? I pay my taxes here in Canada for goodness sake. So Smashwords will have to remain a closed market. At least as far as I’m concerned.