Tuesday, 10 July 2007

  • Afterword

    Spoiler Warning! The following post is a review and discussion of the finished book, and I assume throughout that anyone reading this post has already read the whole story. Please do not read any of this Afterword unless you've already finished Josh's story.

    Also, if you're really touchy about spoilers, there are some extremely mild hints about what future books in the series will be about in the "Going Forward" bit at the end of this article. The rest is safe, though, as long as you've finished Josh's story.

    Intent and Purpose
    I intend this more as a post-mortem of Josh's story than as an actual afterword that might appear in the book. Mainly, I wanted to take an opportunity to talk with everyone who's been reading Sleeping Kings, and give you an idea what to expect. I'm also going to detail some of my own thoughts on the experience of writing the story in this format. I would welcome your feedback and discussion in the comments to this post.

    One of the things I've said from the start is that, for me at least, a good book depends on reader feedback. That's why I chose to post Josh's story on a blog in the first place. And over time, reader feedback has had a big impact on this story. It's why Adrian Romero ended up being a girl, and why Carlos didn't have to die. It's why James decided to wear a bullet-proof vest, and why that didn't help him any. Those are just a couple examples, there's a ton more. More importantly, it's why a lot of stupid, unexplained things in the story got clarified and explained (and, hopefully, made less stupid). In every way, I consider the blog-post-with-comments experiment here a complete success.

    Now it's time for a rewrite. This was a first draft, and it shows throughout the text. It shows in the comments section, too, where someone would say, "No, wait, that's stupid," and instead of fixing it, I just said, "I'll change it in the rewrite." Here's hoping I stick to that promise. Lucky for me, I still have all those comments handy, as I go into the next stage of writing the story.

    I've mentioned this to several people, but my goal is to perform a really quick rewrite, and finish that before the end of July, then print out a bunch of reading copies and distribute those to friends and family. I can get different feedback that way, than what I got from people reading it a page at a time as it was written. I also think there's a different psychological effect between reading a blog post and reading a bound manuscript. I guess we'll see, in about a month.

    If you don't get a printed copy, and you want one, email me. Someday I'll be a published author and people will have to pay to read my stuff, but that day hasn't really come yet. If you're one of the people helping me make this a better story, I'll be glad to hook you up.

    Cutting Scenes
    On the topic of rewrite...it's not a small task. Right now, the book stands around 550 pages. That's hefty. It's not bad for a Stephen King novel, but I'm not sure I could entertain a Stephen King crowd. I need to cut a lot of stuff, and that'll be tough. Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen scenes that I love, that aren't really necessary to the story. The hard part is deciding when a scene that does "character building" is worth leaving in. As a general rule, it's better to just get the character built within scenes that also serve the plot. Those usually aren't as fun, though.

    Some scenes I know I intend to cut: after the characters all gather in OKC, Adam leaves, and then several days later Josh gets a call from Jack, and decides he's going to leave. When I wrote that, I didn't yet realize this book was going to be Josh's story. So Josh leaves, and I have two long scenes from Nate's point of view (when he goes to preach at his hometown church), and then a lunch scene back at the guys' apartment, and then a couple long scenes as Sarah heads home (and you can see the devastation in the world during her drive), and then I go back to Josh for the rest of the book. Well, until the epilogue, anyway.

    All of that (Nate's church, lunch, Sarah's drive) probably needs to go. I'm going to save it, and maybe use those scenes to introduce the next two novels, but it doesn't belong in Josh's story. Then again...when I was writing the book, I used those scenes to describe to the reader what the world had become. Later, Josh goes stumbling through nightmare scenes, but I described those scenes on the assumption the reader already knew this stuff was happening. So, y'know, it could be said that those scenes serve a useful purpose. I think, though, that now that I'm focusing on Josh, it's important to get rid of them just to avoid confusing or frustrating the reader.

    The Book's Structure
    Actually, the focus on Josh throws a lot of things into question. The book starts with Adam meeting Sarah, and then driving to OKC to talk with Nate. Josh doesn't even show up until what I'd consider chapter three. He's mentioned before that, but he's not on camera at all. I could easily cut the Adam and Sarah scene, except that it so perfectly establishes their relationship (I'm really proud of that scene). I could make a good argument for Nate and Adam's walk-n-talk as that establishes the world setting (it might even take the place of the prologue, if I tweaked it enough).

    Anyway, that's a lot of stuff I'm wrestling with. I could almost break the book in two, and have a book called Sleeping Kings which is about all five of them during the first days (basically what I cover in the first half of the book), and maybe have it end with Josh leaving....

    I dunno. I don't think that really works, though. For one...I wanted to write a series about Sleeping Kings -- about regular people who wake up and become heroes during a time of crisis. I didn't really want to write about the crisis. That was just secondary. But without that, I don't really have an interesting story until Josh starts doing his thing. That's what I'm wrestling with.

    In a very real sense, I'm doing exactly the same thing James did, in the story. I don't care about American Islam. I don't really care about what causes the end of the United States. I just need something doable, to get things rattled up enough that the world really does change. Then I think things will become interesting.

    Plot Changes
    There are some specific things I need to change, that came up during the course of the first draft. One major one is an item I alluded to earlier, when giving credit to reader feedback: James's body armor. I decided, some several months ago (so, well after Josh had left Camp David) that back at the time of the assassination attempts, James got cautious and decided he needed to start wearing a bullet-proof vest. Then he took Josh asside and explained all that to him, for no apparent reason. It only matters (and only to the reader with a good memory) during the epilogue, when Adam pulls out a gun and shoots James twice in the chest.

    James falls back in his chair, and says something to the effect of, "Adam, don't do this, I'm so close!" That's not just desperate pleading (although Adam doesn't know it) -- if Adam stops there, James can make a full recovery. He's got bruises and broken bones, but probably nothing too serious. Adam doesn't know, though, and it doesn't matter. For a reader who remembers that James is wearing a bullet-proof vest, there's probably a sense of frustration and suspense, since Adam chose to shoot James in the chest. For half a page, you don't know how much good that did.

    Then Adam raises the gun six inches, and finishes the job. When you know that James is wearing a bullet-proof vest, that's a much more dramatic sentence.

    More important than that, I like it from an artist standpoint. It matters that Adam went up against James and shot him twice in the heart with no real effect, then once in the head and ended him. It defines what it is about James that makes him so dangerous.

    But, to anyone who had finished the book so far, none of that happened. That's because I didn't come up with the idea of having James wear body armor until after Josh had gotten out of earshot for it. One of the drawbacks of publishing a serial novel. I'm saying this now so all of you who have read the story as it came out can understand that, and it'll be a little bit of a warning when you get to the rewrite. Long before Adam shot James, I intended the body armor part. It'll be a little bit of foreshadowing in the rewrite, but you weren't lucky enough to have it when you read through.

    Probably more confusing was the issue of Henson's helicopter. The first time Josh shows up at Wright-Patt, the general offers him a helicopter crew. Then Josh leaves heading toward the crazy governor near Pennsylvania, but the helicopter isn't quite prepped yet, so it's going to catch up to them on the road. When it shows up, it's a big deal. Josh's convoy is getting fired on by some thugs up on an overpass. Suddenly Henson arrives to save the day.

    If you go back to that story, it says something like: "Josh had expected some lunky helicopter, maybe with a mounted machine gun in the back, but this was something altogether cooler. It was a gunship, with heavy machineguns on both sides, and it made short work of the bad guys."

    But (since you've been reading the end of the novel, you'll remember this), by the end of the book, I'm making a clear distinction between Henson's helicopter, and "the gunships" which refers to the other two that they picked up (on their return trip through Wright-Patt, if I remember correctly).

    There's a simple reason for that. Hensons was never planned, and air support was never really intended for Josh. It just sort of happened. When I had the helicopter show up, I immediately thought how badass it would be, in the movie, to have a Blackhawk or Apache or whatever suddenly crest the bridge from behind and blow the baddies away. Sweet, so I wrote that scene in.

    Then, a couple pages later, Josh and his crew are trapped in the crazy governor's military base, and need to make an escape, and the most expedient way to do that is for them to pile into the helicopter and fly away. Unfortunately, that means that Josh was wrong back at the bridge -- it was a big clunky passenger transport helicopter with a machinegun mounted in the cargo section. *Sigh*

    It makes no real difference to the story, and it's a lot easier to make that change (and then give Josh a couple gunships as soon as he gets back to Wright-Patt) than it would be to write a whole scene where they abandon Henson's helicopter on the landing pad and pick out another one better suited to their needs in the middle of a hectic escape scene. So I made the decision (and Henson's sexy Blackhawk became something a lot less cool), and went on with the story.

    But I never actually changed it in the text, because it was just rough draft. So Nicki's sister Lindsey, for example, who's just now reading the story, went through exactly the same confusing transition as the people who read about Henson's awesome attack chopper the day I first posted it. That's really my fault, because it would have been an easy edit, but I just put it off until I'm done.

    There are a few things like that, artifacts of rough draft that I've already corrected in my head, but haven't changed in the text, but those two are the most egregious.

    Factual Changes
    There's likely to be a lot more issues that need changed that I don't know about. Some of them, I may already be questioning. For instance: what's the actual airspeed of a helicopter? Are any of my timeframes reasonable? Is there actually any spot on the perimeter of Fort Knox where a breach like the one I described could occur? I've seen the defenses of some military bases, but never Knox specifically.

    In fact, there's a lot of stuff in this novel that could easily be game-breakingly wrong. I'm not used to that. When I write my fantasy novels, all I have to keep track of is myself. That's...well, it's a colossal task, but I have a knack for it. I can hold thousands of years of fantasy history in my head, and pick out a single thing and make sure it fits. That's what fantasy writers do. And if I need a setting for a certain scene, I just pick a place where I've never written anything about before, and describe it however I want to.

    This is the first story (since fifth grade, anyway) that I've tried to set in the real world. And the one I wrote in fifth grade I got humiliatingly wrong. So there you go. And I'm not only writing about real places, but a real military culture which, frankly, I know nothing about. Luckily, I have a surprising number of friends who know a lot about it, and I've been calling on them frequently for material, but I could still easily have tons of stuff that's just glaringly unacceptable, throughout the novel.

    One thing that several people have pointed out: I need to figure out Josh's rank. It makes a big difference. For one, I could avoid a lot of the arguments in the story by giving him some significant level of authority, and then nobody will argue with him leading men into battle. Then again, one of my big goals for him is to show that what he's doing, he's doing by personal will, not by some external chain of command. That's why I had him go through Air Force ROTC and then enlist in the Marines. It fits his character, but it also serves my purposes.

    But, even if I'm not going to make him a Second Lieutenant or whatever, I need to know what he is. It makes sense that it would turn up in conversation (and there's several places in the dialogue where it's conspicuous that it isn't mentioned). I didn't write it into the rough draft, because I needed to take some time and research to figure out what would be appropriate. It's something I have to resolve, though.

    I came up with the Pontchartrain Bridge ambush scene about two months ago, and spent two weeks actively developing the scene in my head. Then it occurred to me to worry that there might not be a bridge over the lake that stretched as far as I needed it to. Or, more importantly, it might not be connected to a highway leading to Florida. By the time I thought to worry about that, I dreaded doing the research, and collapsing the sine wave (as it were). In my fantasy world, I can just make up a bridge, and a highway (and a map direction, if I want). Not so easy, here.

    I caught a lucky break on that one. I picked out the scene I described using Google Maps, and zoomed down to pick out the actual rooftop that Josh was sitting on to watch the fireworks.

    Actually, that whole description applies to the ambush in Indianapolis, too, now that I think about it. I figured out what I wanted to happen a long time before I bothered to check and see if it was possible. In both cases, I caught a lucky break (and made some flexible changes to my storyline to accomodate technicalities).

    I don't know how much else there is to do, though. I'm sure there's stuff in there so wrong I'd have to scrap the whole book. I'm hoping that my reading copies, and my astute readers, can sort out most of that. What I miss, I'll miss, and history can judge me for it. For now, though, I'm just trying to get the story told.

    I do want to thank each and every one of you, though, for your feedback and interest in the story. They're the only reason it's done, today.

    Going Forward
    Of course, the story isn't really done. I didn't end it on a cliff-hanger, by any means, but I did end with a promise that there was more to tell. Specifically, I promised that Sarah's story was next.

    I just want to let you know, Sarah's story won't be starting tomorrow. Or this week. Probably not this year.

    For one, I haven't really been thinking about it. I figured out the really broad strokes, but I haven't been working on the details even a little. I prefer to let a story stew for a while (generally a year) before putting it on paper. I gave Josh's story two or three years, actually.

    Actually, at the same time I decided to make book one be Josh's story (about a year ago -- right around the time he got to Camp David in the story), I also figured out what I wanted for the rest of the series. I decided to make book two be Sarah's story. She's in St. Louis, now. If you were paying attention (and have a moderate grasp of geography), you'll guess that that puts her square in the Hiz'ammat corridor. That means life on a day-to-day basis is more stable than elsewhere, but there's also a much stronger presence of American Islam in it. Should be an interesting story.

    So, I plan to write Sarah's story next. It doesn't take place within the same time span as Josh's story; it's a true sequel. The first chapter or two should sum up everything that happened to her during the months that Josh spent in the first book. The short answer: not a lot. It'll just be an overview of life in the city immediately after the revolution.

    Then the bulk of the book describes what she does to change or shape the world, and it's on a much longer timeframe than Josh's. I'm toying with the idea of ending all the books on holidays. I'd like for hers to be Christmas, but six months isn't long enough, so either I'm changing holidays, or you can expect the second book to cover an eighteen month span.

    Then the third book will cover Dave and Nate, who stayed in Oklahoma City. They work together, and from a more stable starting point (the heartland didn't suffer nearly the same effects as the rest of the nation), but they achieve the most dramatic effects (although, by the end of the series, Josh is in a pretty interesting position, too). And, of course, they're working on the longest timeframe. Their story probably covers somewhere between two and five years.

    So that gives you an idea what I'm planning for the series. I don't plan to sit on Sarah's story for a year. I'm going to be starting on a collaborative fantasy novel with Daniel sometime in September, and that'll be my top priority, but I generally do work on multiple projects at once. I might work on Sarah's story as a background project and build up a buffer of stories before I start posting here. That seems like a good idea. My goal is to wait six months before I start posting, but I might not make it that long.

    Of course, I also intend to do a full rewrite or two (or three or four) of Josh's story. I'll post updates on the progress of that here. And, as I said, if you're interested in a reading copy let me know. I do encourage you to keep your subscription to this Xanga if you're interested in Sarah's story. While you may not get any sort of updates for six months, as soon as I do start posting her story, you'll get an automatic email. So at least there's that.

    In the meantime, reread Josh's story a dozen time and make lots of comments. That'll make it a better book, and the world will be better for it. Really. I'd love to hear what you have to say.

    And, once more, thank you.

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