Month: December 2021

E________, first draft: 27,700 words.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. As ever, an aversion to hard work lies at the root of this particular failure. List making! Public declarations! Execution! It’s all far too exhausting.

Plus, I can also rationalize my idleness by pointing out there’s a lot of evidence that resolutions don’t actually work. I suspect that if you’re the sort of person for whom resolutions make sense, you’ re also the sort of person who doesn’t actually need them. You would have done whatever it is you resolved to do anyway. And if you are going to do it, why wait to start in the new year? For sure, if I was going to resolve to go to the gym and get fit, I would start that in, say, March, when all those crispy new January resolutions have faded and wrinkled in the dreich days of late winter. There’d be less crowding in the changing rooms and shorter lines at the equipment.

But that’s not to say the long dark nights aren’t a good time for dreaming and reflection. When better? Particularly now that the rush of Christmas is over and the only thing to sustain us through the two coldest months of the year is the thought of what might lie beyond. Unless, of course, you’re a snow sports person. In which case the time for action is now!

Snow sports? Nein danke. As someone who only leaves the house at this time of year because of work or the relentless demands of the dog, dreams and reflections for 2022 are all I have. In my writing life, Braking Day is due out on April 5th, The Wrong Shape to Fly, my contribution to Baen’s Worlds Long Lost anthology will hopefully be published in the fall, and TSW, the novel formerly known as V______ R___, will be going out to market looking for a publisher in the next few weeks. My dream for 2022 is that Braking Day is a great success, The Wrong Shape to Fly leads to opportunities to write more short stories, and that someone agrees to take on TSW. Fingers crossed that the dream comes true!

But then, being the sort of person that I am, I cannot help but reflect on what will happen if the dream does come true. On top of my (not undemanding) day job, I will be committed to writing a SF follow up to Braking Day, a short story or two, editing TSW, and committing to a follow up to that. Dream realization means two novels a year, plus short stories, plus all the marketing and ancillary stuff that goes along with.

Not so long ago, I was whining about how I couldn’t do NaNoWriMo because it was too much work. Plodding along at 600 words a day over maybe a couple of hours was enough to get out a novel a year, I reckoned. The 2,000 daily words required for NaNoWriMo was, in my opinion, nothing less than a recipe for burn out and divorce.

And yet here I am, dreaming of an outcome that will more than double my present workload. Four hours a day, plus my actual, you know, job. Am I nuts?

Probably. But you know what? I don’t care. If a dream coming true leads to problems, those are the sorts of problems everyone should have.

Bring it on.

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.