Author: aoyebanj

E________, first draft: 20,700 words

Deep as we are in the holiday season, there is no better time to express gratitude for gifts received out of the blue. In this particular case, I’m talking about blurbs.

We have reached the stage where my agent, the estimable Brady, and the good folks at my publisher, DAW Books, are reaching out to authors they know in the hope of persuading them to give my book a read and maybe (assuming they like it) provide a few lines of blurb about it.  Other than a sense, maybe, of paying it forward, there is nothing in it for the authors in question. They are being asked to give up their own free time to read a book they would not have read otherwise and then give up more of their free time to write a mini-review – all for someone they don’t know and have never met.

Despite the brazen-ness of the ask, no fewer than three established authors have so far taken the trouble to read Braking Day and come back with nice things to say. All in time for Christmas!

First off was retired U.S. Navy officer John Hemry, aka Jack Campbell, author of the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series, among many others. He said this:

“Engaging, fast-moving, and inventive. The characters and the space environment feel totally real, as do the life and death challenges that never miss a step.”

Given that these words could apply one hundred percent to his own work, I was blown away by the generosity of spirit in which they were written. He didn’t have to do this! Thank you!

And then, not long after, we received the following from Dan Moren, author of the Galactic Cold War series.

“Oyebanji crafts an amazing lived-in world aboard a sprawling generation ship, and a twisty mystery that’ll keep you guessing to the very end.”

Again, coming from someone who is no slouch in the twisty storyline department, this was more than gracious.

Last, but by no means least, is a quote from Julie E. Czerneda, a Canadian writer whom I have admired from afar for many years and who is the author of more than 20 books, including the Aurora-Award-winning In the Company of Others.

“Adam Oyebanji’s BRAKING DAY blows the airlocks off the science fiction mainstay of generation ships with a vibrant world within bulkheads that’s as convincing as it is fresh. The characters are fabulous, the world-building impeccable yet never in-your-face, and the plot is breathtaking. All I can say is this is the best SF novel I’ve read in decades and it may be the best I’ve ever read. This author is now a must-read for me, and I’m sure he will be for you. Bravo!!”

As you can imagine, this last one in particular left me speechless. For hours!

I like to joke that I can no longer leave the house because my head has swollen to such an extent I can no longer fit through the front door. But the truth is strangely and exactly the opposite. This is all very humbling. It’s humbling that there are people out there who are kind enough and thoughtful enough to do something like this. And it’s humbling to learn that you have written something that has had a profound effect on someone else. It fills you with the desire not to let readers down: to write something that’s worthy of their time.

Even if – humbly – you’re not at all sure you’re up to the task.

(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).

All things (except, perhaps, Covid) come to an end. The year is winding down, my son is finishing his first semester at college, my work on Braking Day is done. It is more difficult to say goodbye than I thought.

As some of you will know, I have spent most of my adult life working as a lawyer. Before I was a lawyer, though, I was a law student. One of the courses they teach larval lawyers is research. It’s hard to explain the feeling you get when you are first introduced to “the law,” an endless array of rules, regulations and the collected decisions of judges going back hundreds of years. Faced with so much information, it is easy to believe that the answer to every possible problem is in there somewhere. All you have to do is look.

That, alas, is not true. People, it turns out, are way more complicated than 600 years of legal lore. Sometimes the answer is in there. But usually not. Research gets you part but not all of the way. And yet, how do you know, really know, that the answer isn’t lurking out there among the thousands upon thousands of cases that you haven’t read? This is the conundrum that leads generation after generation of law students to ask variations of the same plaintive question: “How do I know when to stop?” The answer is usually something along the lines of, “When it feels right.” Decades into legal practice, I still have difficulty formulating a more useful response.

I did not think the same issue would arise when it came to novel writing. This, after all, is not an exercise where you have to track down information left behind by other people. You have complete control of the process. You think up a story, you write it down, you tinker with it to make it run smoothly, and you push it out the door. Job done.

Hah! Then your agent comes back with “suggestions” (repeat as necessary), which you dutifully attempt to accommodate. And after that your editor at the publishing house does the same thing (likewise endlessly repeatable).

After that, your “final” manuscript goes to the copyeditor who not only comes back with an intimidating list of grammatical and style-related corrections, but also points out embarrassing lapses in narrative (in my case, the sitting character who somehow opened a door). And once that’s done, you still have to read and check the final proof. The proof is the version of the book that will go to the printers. Does it match the manuscript you negotiated with agent, editor, and copyeditor? Are there any last-minute typos that still need to be corrected?

I finished proofreading Braking Day last Saturday at 6:49 am EST in my local coffee shop. On the other side of the plate glass windows it was still dark, and I had the place to myself. The proofreading, as it turned out, went very smoothly. There were a few teeny tiny nits but nothing major. There is now nothing left for me to do. I am done. Everything that remains is in the hands of the publisher, the booksellers and (most importantly of all) the readers.

I started Braking Day almost exactly four years ago, in December 2017. I have written and rewritten it at least eight times. As I sat back from my laptop and stared out the window into the darkened street, I expected to feel a sense of triumph, of deep satisfaction in a job well done. And I did. Kind of.

But what I also felt was a sense of regret. Not because I will miss writing Braking Day (although I will) but because there are scenes in the final version that I desperately, desperately want to have another go at. If I had my time again, I am certain I could make them better. One scene in particular, which my agent, the estimable Brady, suggested I make longer, is not long enough. I couldn’t figure out how to do it at the time and now I can. But it’s too late.

I think the truth (a truth?) about novel writing is this. A novel can never be perfect. It can only (if you’re lucky) be good. Once it’s good, you have to let it go.

And doing so will never, ever, feel right.

(E________, first draft: 18,800 words).

As close readers of this blog will know, since the beginning of Covid I have been alternating my reading between genre books that I enjoy and “posh” books (many also enjoyable) that are meant to be good for me. I have lapsed on several occasions, squeezing in a couple of genre novels before plunging into the next classic. Over the last two or three weeks, however, I have completely fallen off the wagon. After reading The Tempest by William Shakespeare (and feeling much aggrieved by the plight of Caliban), I not only read A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas but have also been working my way steadily through every single one of Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories. I am presently (re)reading Network Effect and need to swing by my local bookstore next week to pick up the latest novella, Fugitive Telemetry. If pressed on why I am doing this, the short answer would be that I love Sarah J. Maas and Martha Wells. A more honest answer, though, involves a dread of what comes next.

I don’t have a system for deciding what posh books to read next. It’s literally whatever title pops into my head, and what pops into my head tends to be titles of books that I’ve heard posh people (not me) talking about at parties, or that have been mentioned in passing in the literary and/or lifestyle sections of upscale newspapers.

Enter The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevksy. It’s Russian and from the nineteenth century, so I knew it was going to be long and (I’m guessing) probably a bit of a downer. I was OK with that, though. Winter is here. A long read with a grim beginning, middle and end is entirely in keeping with the season. What I’m less OK with is my choice of print copy. I went for the only one my bookstore had in stock: the Penguin Classics paperback. At 985 pages it is predictably massive, but the problem I have – and I’ve always had – with Penguin Classics is that I find them very hard to read. Not because of the language but because of the tiny print and the narrow margins. The margins are a particular source of grievance because, having spent far too much of my childhood reading paperbacks in bookstores without actually buying the book, I can’t stand “breaking” a book’s spine so it will lie flat on the table. Look at my bookshelves and most of my paperbacks look as good as new. Look at my Penguins and every one of them has a badly creased spine: there’s simply no other way to read them because the words start so close to the middle of the book. What has put me off starting on The Brothers Karamazov is the knowledge that the mechanics of reading the thing are going to be so unpleasant.

Which brings me to the subject of book design. Penguin Classics are presumably made harder to read because it saves paper. A lot of classics are long, they are never out of print, and Penguin always includes a lot of high-quality academic commentary, so I imagine the cumulative savings in production costs are enormous. Also (and now I’m just being cynical) because so many Penguin Classics are compulsory reading at high school and college, I can’t help thinking that design aesthetics is lower down the list of priorities than it usually is.

I’m peculiarly sensitive to design at the moment because DAW has just sent me a pdf of the proof of Braking Day for – wait for it – proofreading. This is a copy of what the inside of the book will look like when it hits the shelves in April. My job is to make sure that what’s in the proof matches what I wrote in the original manuscript. I also get some input into how it looks (awesome, by the way! Apart from changing the dedication font to something less “shouty,” there’s absolutely nothing I would want to change). The format for Braking Day is the standard hardback size of six by nine inches. The font size is such that there are 36 lines on a full page and the whole book (130,000 words) will come in at about 360 pages. A couple of DAW hardbacks I’ve plucked off my bookshelves are broadly similar.

Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, has 35 lines to the page and is 456 pages long (it didn’t feel that long when I read it!) which equates to a wordcount of (very roughly) 150-160,000.

Alliance Rising, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, has 40 lines to the page and is 346 pages long, so the wordcount will be in the 130-140,000 range.

By comparison, The Brothers Karamazov also has 40 lines to the page but those 40 lines are crammed into a paperback format of five inches by seven and three-quarter inches (I don’t even want to do the wordcount). Which looks, predictably, like this.

And if you’re having trouble envisaging the size difference between a DAW hardback versus Penguin Classics, this is what it looks like. It is significant.

All told, design can have a significant effect on how “readable” a book is. Right now, I am grateful that being a classic author is not in my future!

(E________, first draft: 17,600 words)

Book titles change for a variety of reasons. British readers, steeped as they are in medieval culture, know a little bit about alchemy. As such, they are reasonably familiar with the concept of the philosopher’s stone, a prerequisite for the elixir of life or turning lead into gold. American readers (for whom, the British will tell you, history starts in 1776) have no such advantage. Accordingly, while Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was viewed as an acceptable title in the UK, in the US it was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone instead. (Incidentally, if you want a glimpse of how nonsense like alchemy managed to survive for so long, you could do a good deal worse than read the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is a brilliant documentation of medieval fraud.)

In similar vein, it is said that Joseph Heller wanted to call the book for which he is most famous Catch-18 but didn’t want it confused with Mila 18 by Leon Uris. He then considered Catch-11 but ran into the same problem because of Ocean’s 11 (the 1960 Frank Sinatra movie, not the George Clooney remake). His editor settled on Catch-22 because 22 was a “funnier” number than 18.

Some books, however, get their titles changed because the author’s original choice was replaced by something better. Jane Austen’s First Impressions is better known as Pride and Prejudice, no one has read The Last Man In Europe by George Orwell, although they are familiar with 1984, and John Steinbeck eventually decided to go with Of Mice and Men instead of Something That Happened.

And then, there’s yours truly. While I am reasonably confident that I am an OK writer, it is becoming more and more clear to me that I am absolutely terrible at book titles. My original title for Braking Day was Starship 4. Almost the first thing my original agent said to me when I spoke to her on the phone was, “How do you feel about the title?” I took the hint.

One of the reasons I use initials to identify works in progress is that the working title I love so much is probably cringeworthy. I am very pleased with how my second novel, V______ R___, has turned out. But when my agent, the estimable Brady, and his assistant James came back to me the other day with some very minor edits, they also appended a list of 25 (twenty-five!) alternative titles.

Having read through them, I was left with the distinct impression that the two of them had cracked open a bottle of vodka, come up with a list of titles ranging from sensibly sober to bombed out drunk, and then rearranged said list to disguise the progression. Unfortunately for me, but not surprising in any way, at least half of them (including some of the bombed out drunk ones) were way better than V______ R___. Having consulted with my family (who treacherously side with my agent), V______ R___ has now become T__ S__ W__C___ I___ T__ C________, a terrible acronym but a great title. TSW for short (and still initialized because, who knows, it might change again!).

Despite what I’ve just said, I fervently believe that E________, the novel I’m working on at the moment, is a really good name for a book and will stand the test of time. However, as my fervent belief has never survived contact with reality, E________ will remain E________ only until further notice.

(E________, first draft: 13,600 words)

When the good folks at DAW sent me the copy-edited version of Braking Day, it contained detailed instructions on how to review, so that if the copyeditor’s suggested amendments conflicted with my preferences, I could change them in such a way that the final version actually reflects my wishes.  So focused was I on following DAW’s granular guidance on editing the copyedit, I almost missed the following.

“If you would like to have a dedication and/or acknowledgments page in this book, or any other front or back matter, please send those to me at the same time as the reviewed manuscript.”

Yikes!  I hadn’t even thought about this.  I am not the sort of person who even thinks to send out thank-you notes (though I am always tickled pink when I receive one), so expressing gratitude in written form is not one of my strengths.  Although the principal reason for this failure is congenital bone idleness, a lesser ground is this: most people will overlook a failure to offer written thanks.  They will not, however, forgive a written thank-you to a third party when they themselves have been left out.  Acknowledgments are a social minefield.  One false step and you are dead to someone.

Being a man of immense bravery, my immediate reaction was to duck the whole issue and not write one, like C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher in Alliance Rising, or maybe do something super-short and high level like Martha Wells in Network Effect (I worship at the altar of Murderbot!) but these are all established writers who can get away with that sort of thing.  Mine is a traditionally published debut novel.  And I am incredibly lucky to be in a position to write the previous sentence.  It really does feel like winning the lottery and it would be churlish in the extreme to not at least try to thank the many, many people who have helped make that happen.  So, if you get to the acknowledgment page, and I have forgotten to mention you, I am really, really, really sorry.  Braking Day went through eight rounds of edits.  I only had one shot at the acknowledgment.

I don’t want to be dead to you.

(E________, first draft: 13,600 words)

The U.S. version of Braking Day has come back from copyediting. Copyediting (and copy editors) have always been a mystery to me. I had this vague sense that it involved correcting typos but it’s so much more than that. For better or worse, copy editors are the enforcement arm of the style manuals.  The copy editor is the one who makes sure the manuscript’s syntax is smooth, that the writing adheres to the conventions of grammar, that wording is proper and precise and that punctuation is both appropriate and correctly placed. When it comes to fiction – and science fiction, in particular – this is not an easy job. How do you tell when we have roughed up the syntax for dramatic emphasis as opposed to just screwing it up? Is bad grammar in the dialog the way a character speaks or a failing in the author? Which version of a made up word is spelled correctly? Copy editors wrestle with this every single day.

On top of that – and I really did not appreciate this – the copy editor is the last line of defense against howlers in the text: “How can this character be opening a door when he’s still sitting down?” Thank you, Copy Editor, thank you!

The copy edit for Braking Day is a masterclass in that bible of American English, the Chicago Manual of Style. While, as predicted, the copy editor came after my idiosyncratic attachment to alright instead of all right, I learned just how much I still do not know about punctuation, word usage (a hold versus ahold, for instance), and (embarrassingly) basic grammar.

The most eye opening thing about this exercise, however, concerns numbers. Everything I know about writing numbers can be summed up as follows: if it’s ten or less, spell it out in words, otherwise use numerals.

Hah!

For starters, CMoS (which sounds more like a computer language than a style-manual acronym) “advises” you to spell out numbers up to and including one hundred. No reason is advanced: it just does. And there’s more….

Don’t start a sentence with a numeral. Write it out. “Three hundred and eleven men and 302 women took to the streets.”

Spell out round numbers. “The pot was thought to be six thousand years old. Radiocarbon dating indicated a precise age of 5,998 years.”

If two numbers need to be placed next to each other, spell out the smaller number. “He ordered 15 twelve-foot boards.” “The platoon was arrayed in three 12-person rows.”

When writing discourse, numbers should usually be spelled out, with some exceptions (years, for instance – but why?). ” ‘We found a hundred and eleven bodies,’ he said, remembering. ‘That would have been back in 1985.'”

Working through all this has been a trip. I’ve learned a lot and will try to apply it to the E________ manuscript this winter. The kicker, though, is that every one of these rules has exceptions. It’s enough to drive one mad!

Or to take up copyediting.

(E________, first draft: 10,300 words)

Some ideas are so bad, so obviously stupid, so not in your best interests, that you can’t stop acting on them.

Years and years ago, when I was a junior barrister, I had a court case in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Stoke, by the way, is at the heart of the region known as The Potteries, for all the fine china that is produced there. (Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, was also born nearby.) Stoke was roughly an hour up the road from where I lived at the time so, prudent young man that I was, I left home an hour before I needed to get there.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, what barristers do and how they do it is a mystery to large chunks of the outside world. That said, the one thing almost everyone does understand about barristers is that they wear wigs and gowns when they appear in court. This, in fact, is not always true, but it was very true on this particular day. Turning up in court without a wig and gown in such situations feels pretty much the same as appearing naked in public. Judges, if they have a mind, will announce after you have spoken that they “can’t hear you,” and raising your voice won’t do the slightest bit of good. All you can do is slink shamefaced out of court and hope one of your colleagues of approximately the same size will take pity on you and let you borrow their duds. The price being, of course, that he or she gets first shot at spreading the tale of your abject humiliation around the barristerial community at large.

Needless to say, the one thing I did obsessively and repeatedly before getting in the car that morning was to check that I had packed my wig and gown. And there they were, packed (reasonably) neatly beside my law books and pink-ribboned “brief.”

As I rolled up the motorway with no margin for error I suddenly thought, “It would be horribly embarrassing if I forgot my wig and gown. Thank goodness I didn’t!” I’m sure I smiled a little at the absurdity of it and moved on to other things. Like my upcoming case.

But what if I had forgotten my wig and gown?

I didn’t.

Yeah, but what if you did?

The miles continued to roll by and soon the thought that I’d left my wig and gown behind became the only thing I could think about. I knew I’d packed my stuff properly. I knew if I stopped to check, I would be late for court. I knew I was being silly.

I pulled over anyway.

I arrived late.

This kind of irrational behavior is known as giving in to the “imp of the perverse,” after the 1850 story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe.

“[T]hrough its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.”

The other day, typing happily away at the early pages of E________, it suddenly occurred to me that what I was writing might be garbage. What if EK, the first of my two protagonists, comes across as a complete, total, unacceptable jackass? No one will like him, no one will read the book, it’s going to be a disaster. You should delete everything and start again.

I know this is a really stupid idea, the manifestation of some kind of insecurity or, possibly, a dodgy egg sandwich. But it would not go away. I literally had to turn off my computer and walk away from my desk to stop myself erasing several thousand words worth of work.

The next day I sat down, opened up my laptop and found that Poe’s evil imp was still sitting on my shoulder. At the end of the day, though, I managed to fight it off.

Two things saved me. First, I remembered a quote from that peerless mistress of SF, C.J. Cherryh: “It is perfectly okay to write garbage–as long as you edit brilliantly,” which transmogrified in my head to, “Write first. Worry later.” Then my second protagonist, AE, made her first appearance. As she is, in many ways, EK’s antithesis, writing her was like pouring antacid on the indigestion EK is causing me. I stopped worrying and got back to the sheer joy of throwing words onto the page. The imp of the perverse has been beaten!

For now.

(E________ first draft: 4,300 words.)

I do not have time to watch anywhere near as much TV as I would like. I have, however, made some for Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, a “cozy” comedy-mystery set in a New York apartment building. Apart from episode six (a hot mess saved only by the actors), it’s a funny, beautifully written show wrapped around a genuinely intriguing mystery. Episode eight dropped yesterday. I’m already jonesing for nine!

One of the three main characters in Only Murders is played by Steve Martin. His character, Charles Haden-Savage, is a past-his-prime actor who was the eponymous star of a 90s police show called Brazzos. A show so successful that his catchphrase, “This sends the investigation into a whole new direction!” is still remembered 30 years later.

Of course, one of the reasons I can’t watch as much TV as I would like is that I have now started on the first draft of E________. As readers of this blog will know, I have already outlined the novel, so “all” I have to do is write it! E________, unlike Braking Day, has two protagonists, the first of which, EK, has now appeared on the page.

And has completely messed with me.

When I drafted the outline, I had a very clear idea of what EK was going to be like. When he arrived, however, he was a great deal cruder and significantly more intelligent than I originally envisaged. Put another way, he is a completely different character, which means that his reactions to the situations in which he finds himself is not what I thought they would be, which means the scenes don’t go the way I thought they would, which means, of course, that the outline is not going to win prizes as a roadmap.

But that’s OK. Roadmaps are boring. Outlines should be more like nautical charts, preferably old ones, with coastlines marked “terra incognita,” or “here be dragons.” When you drive, you have to go where the road makes you go. But when you sail you have to wander. There’s no other way to do it. There are currents and contrary winds, storms and unnerving calms. You can never keep a straight course: to go north you tack north west, then north east, then north west again as wind and current dictate. You can sail past islands you never intended to visit, see the mountains of an undiscovered continent loom suddenly on the horizon, fill up on water at the mouth of an unknown river.

But if the map is true, you will still get where you’re going. EK has taken E________ “into a whole new direction.” But it’s a thrilling one, and if we have to sail a different tack to accommodate it, so be it. When we finally drop anchor at our destination, the chart we used to get there will be filled with exciting new details: “terra cognita” and “no, really, I mean it: there were actual dragons.”

Let out the mainsail. Time to see what’s out there!

So, earlier this week, I finished the final (for now) V______ R___ edits. The estimable Brady reckons that unless I’ve scattered typos all over the place, the manuscript will soon be ready to try its luck in the market. Typos are always a possibility with yours truly, so I will keep my fingers crossed!

Keyboard incompetence aside, I have now gone through all but one of the daunting list of to-dos that were jeering at me back in August. I am now free to start work on E________! As finishing the outline of E________ was item number one on said to-do list, all I have to do is sit down, crack open my laptop, and start typing. This, coincidentally, puts me pretty much in sync with National Novel Writing Month, which starts (as it does every year) in November. The basic idea of NaNoWriMo, as people insist on calling it, is deceptively, seductively simple: drop everything extraneous in your life and commit to banging out 50,000 words of that novel you were always going to write but have never got around to. Don’t worry about the quality, just get it on the page. You can always edit later.

NaNoWriMo is, by all accounts, an excellent way to get budding authors onto their backsides and typing. After all, once you’ve hammered out your 50,000 words, are you really going to stop? It’s reported that The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, and Cinder, by Marissa Meyer, among others, owe quite a lot to the turbo boost that NaNoWriMo gave their manuscripts.

NaNoWriMo has a ton of resources attached to it. There are inspirational websites and opportunities for writers to get together to bond over their various projects. Here in Pittsburgh, where I am sitting out Covid pending my indefinitely delayed transfer to Edinburgh, the Carnegie Library is having write-ins, with free coffee and stuff, pretty much every Saturday in November. And here I am, perfectly positioned to take part. For a novel like E________, assuming I start writing it next week, NaNoWriMo could rocket me to the 70% line.

But. To hit 50,000 words in 30 days, you have to aim for 2,000 words a day. I know that comes out at 60,000, but you need a safety buffer against life as we know it. As a general rule, though I’m not fanatical about it, I aim to write two-and-a-bit double-spaced pages a day (the “bit” part of that formulation allows me to pretend I’ve written three pages). Two-and-a-bit pages generally comes in at something over 600 words. For me, that’s usually one to two hours of typing. If you assume a SF novel is around 100,000 words, that’s roughly six months to a first draft, allowing plenty of time for editing, pitching, etc. if you are aiming for a book a year.

To do NaNoWriMo “properly” I would have to find about four hours every day for 30 days. Nothing to a full-time writer but, for me, it would be brutal. I’m pretty sure if I tried it I’d become burned out and divorced: not necessarily in that order. I think I’ll just plod along in the slow lane while my NaNoWriMo colleagues blast past me, flames bursting from their exhausts.

I might wander into the library, though. I may not want to take part, but it will be fun to watch.

Here it is!

Many thanks (again!) to Kekai Kotaki and DAW Books for pulling this together! The cover was released on io9.com, who were kind enough to say nice things about it. The first time I was aware of io9 was when they wrote a review of Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (who is actually two people!). As that book was followed by numerous sequels and eventually became The Expanse on SyFy and then Amazon, I’m going to take it as a good omen!

All we need now (fingers crossed!) is a kick-ass quote for the top of the page….