Archives for February 2018

Who are your favorite supporting characters?

February 12, 2018 By K. D. McAdams

Sorry I didn’t post here at all last week. Everything caught up with me – wisdom teeth recovery, super bowl hang over, snow days, people home sick you name it.

I tried to stick with my daily word count, but even that slipped. It was one of those weeks where getting showered and dressed were big wins, everything else was gravy. As a result I’m thinking about changing my release plans for the Off Earth Series. I haven’t completely decided but I will this week.

For those following along for the numbers update on the Off Earth Series progress –

Book 1 – They Awake
Target release date – 4/13/2018 Behind schedule – considering shift to 7/6/2018
Last weeks word count/target – 7,722/22,000
This weeks word count target – 12,000 words
Total words/projected – 76,579/95,000

The story is coming along well, but I was supposed to be revising last week and sending to beta readers this week. That probably is my answer to shifting the release schedule,but I’ll know for sure at the end of the week.

Who is your favorite supporting character?

With the trailer for Solo dropping last week I was thinking about how he is one of my favorite characters of all time. It made me realize that I’ve almost always been a supporting character kind of guy. So I was wondering, who are your favorite supporting characters?

In Battlestar Galactica I was always a Starbuck guy (even before Starbuck was a she). Maybe it was Dirk Benedict though because I liked Faceman on the A-Team more than Hannibal.

In Star Trek I’ll admit to being a Kirk fan. I like Scotty and Bones, but they aren’t cool enough to take away from the Captain. I didn’t like Spock and now that I’m older I think that’s a testament to Leonard Nimoy being amazing as a Vulcan. Sulu and Checkov didn’t get enough air time in the original series for me to care much one way or the other.

In The Hunger Games, Haymitch was my favorite character and I wouldn’t mind seeing something done with his back story. This was true in the book, before even seeing Woody Harelson play him in the movies.

Tris was not my favorite character in Divergent. Four wasn’t either, but I did like Christina and Peter.

Harry Potter feels like it has the biggest selection of supporting characters that are likable. I don’t dislike Harry and it might be another sign of my age, but I think Dumbledore is awesome.

I think that one of the things that makes a series great is the ability to become invested in multiple characters. Anytime we talked about favorite characters from books or movies in our house the best stories require the longest thought. When the kids, or myself, don’t automatically select a main character as the favorite I know the story teller has created a compelling world.

So who are your favorite supporting characters? What are some stories that have a great team where you are fully invested in the outcome for each of them?

End of life notice

February 2, 2018 By K. D. McAdams

The tiny mechanical creature lay motionless on the gravel path. It didn’t return to the base station last night but the empty battery had to be a symptom of a larger ill.

This particular bot wasn’t mission critical for human life, but without it the flora and fauna in Capability Park on the moon were going to be stressed. Last time this guy had an outage they lost over fifteen percent of the plants growing here. The losses were only recovered a few months ago.

Sean Reynolds was frustrated that they weren’t preparing for the loss of this device. He knew the bots and systems that worked to sustain life in the park and the machines knew the plants.

Scooping the aluminum body off the ground he was amazed at how light the package was. This bot was built over forty years ago and designed to crawl along the hull of a ship and look for defects and make minor repairs. Ines Nazca modified to be one of the first agro-bots.

It was due for replacement about twenty years ago, but the problem with a lot of the older artificial intelligence was that no one knew how they learned. This bot, George, learned more about the variety of trees and plants in the park than any human even considered.

[Read more…] about End of life notice

5 Steps for growing your series idea

February 1, 2018 By K. D. McAdams

I normally try and post these on Wednesday, but having my wisdom teeth out last week has really thrown me for a loop. Sorry this is late, but I look forward to being back on track next week.

In the last post I shared how I decided my idea was worthy of expanding into a series. Here I’ll go through my process of building enough reference material and ideas to actually form the foundation of a series.

There is a difference between a story idea, a novel idea and a series idea. Some story ideas are great but only have a few thousand words in them. Other stories can naturally grow into a longer work and become a novel. Taking a concept from an idea into a multi-book series requires you to think beyond the traditional steps of planning a book.

Even though I validated my idea and was confident that I had more than one book I didn’t have any concrete thoughts about the story arc or what the characters real journey was going to be.

Having made plenty of mistakes when it came to writing my first two series I wanted to do better planning my new Off Earth series before I jumped in and started writing. The challenge is that you have so many thoughts and ideas floating around in your head, how do you start making sense of them?

Here are five steps to take for expanding your idea into a series.

Think on it. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. When I have a new idea that excites me for a couple of days I want to jump in and start writing. But what happens when you scratch that itch? It’s easy to finish scratching and then forget about it.In my case I started to obsess over what could pose a threat to Earth and force this character to change his goal of living on the planet to saving it. I also thought about back story quite a bit. How did this character end up orbiting Earth, and what was the society and economy like that had him feeling trapped there.
Write on it. Don’t start writing the stories, but write out your thoughts and ideas. This should be a brain dump where every possible character and scenario is spit out onto the page. Spelling doesn’t matter, grammar doesn’t matter, and punctuation is irrelevant. It’s brainstorming 101 and some if the ideas will never make it into your series, but others will become the foundation of your characters and your world.I spent 3 hours on 5 consecutive days brainstorming ideas for the OEI series. Some of them have already been rejected and others have become key elements. After 15 hours of free writing I had plenty of content, conflict and mystery to start coming up with a story arc for the main character and the people living in this world.
Research it. Is anyone else writing about this idea? Are there real world equivalents or parallels to your idea? Even if you’re writing fantasy or science fiction you’ll want elements of reality woven into your characters and your world. Your characters have to be believable no matter what setting you have them in.Doing research will help you to understand what realistic characters look like and how much detail you’ll need to invent if you’re straying from an actual setting. To my surprise I found out that there are companies already working to mine asteroids and manufacture items in space. Their websites are full of inspirational ideas and issues that can cause conflict.You also want to understand other books in this genre. What aspects do readers enjoy or dislike? Never copy another story, but know how your story fits into the genre.
Embrace it. If you’ve gotten this far, this is your idea. Own it and love it. Many times this is the stage when self-doubt starts to creep in. Yeah you’ve thought about the idea and done some free writing, there is a market for it, but…Don’t get stopped by the but. You’re writing this series and you need to be excited about it. I always tell aspiring authors that if they love their idea and write with passion, readers will be able to tell. Dig in for the hard work but get excited about what you are going to create.
Talk about it. Don’t shy away from your idea. I get asked and hear other people ask “What’s going on?” all the time. Tell them! Say I’m writing a new series and I’m really excited about it. Their feedback may not shape your work in major ways, but you never know when a friend or acquaintance will share that one tid-bit of information that puts your story over the top.It’s also a way to start finding readers. You don’t have to sell, but if an acquaintance knows you’re writing and they’re a reader they will ask you how the book is coming. If you keep them posted they may be willing to buy your new release when no one else will. Every sale in the early days helps.

At this stage your story idea is big. It’s ready to get planned and plotted and you need to prepare to shift your focus to actually writing the story in a way that makes sense.

I’ll share a few thoughts on plotting and planning in the next post.

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I started work on my new series in October 2017. With my commitment to full time writing I expect to be working on the first three books in this series for 9 months.

Over the coming weeks and months I’ll share with you my thoughts, notes and tips for each step. You can easily follow along by joining my mailing list. In return I’ll send you a copy of my Successful Series Writer Manifesto and a weekly digest of posts.

If you want to see how I’m communicating with readers, hop over to the For Readers section of my site, or sign up for my Sci-Fi mailing list..