It’s been more than a week since I last posted. Sorry, I have been busy with the Thanksgiving and Christmas season obligations.
Today I’d like to announce the publishing of both books of the Time Trinket series of paperback and eBooks of each: “The Time Trinket” and “The Time Duplicate,” science fiction novels involving time travel. This represents the culmination of an arduous and time-consuming journey begun when I set out to realize my lifelong dream of writing a novel.
I have written two non-fiction books before: “I Had a Dream” and “Gringo Stories”. I have to admit that writing the novels was easily ten times as much work. In both of the non-fiction books, the work was rather linear, collecting and ordering lists of stories that I might include and editing out the lower-impact stories to prevent the books from becoming excessively large. The most difficult part was editing in response to my editors.
However, writing the Time Trinket series was much more involved. I began by developing the plot. I used the “Snowflake” method to grow the plot. The first step of that method was to develop a one-sentence summary of the story: “An evil scientist pursues an amateur pickpocket backward through time to recover a stolen object.” Then, to move forward, I had to decide on a story arc: The Time Trinket is a “Man in a Hole” story arc, and The Time Duplicate is a “Double Man in a Hole” story arc. I had to decide on characters and develop character analyses of each. I also had to develop scenes with suggested pictures and descriptions. All of this was facilitated by ‘Scrivener’, a fantastic novel management program. Finally, before writing a single word for each novel, I had to detail the scenes. I did this on an electronic spreadsheet from ‘Open Office.’ The spreadsheet for “The Time Trinket” had over 27 columns and 70 scene lines. The spreadsheet for “The Time Duplicate” had over 27 columns and 65 scene lines. Finally, I used “Pro Writing Aid” to help in drafting the novels. The novels took countless hours of editing and reviews. It was an arduous journey to get the novels to the publishing stage. That journey was difficult and trying, but it was a journey of love. I would do it again in a heartbeat.