Badass Sci Fi is in Business!

I know, I know.  It seems like I’ve been talking about getting published forever.  I looked in my archives and discovered I finished the first draft of Opposable (sans Halteres) in 2009.  I first started receiving ideas about Halteres proper back in 2003.  These works contain ideas gathered through my entire life.

Well, I never gave up.  After experiencing many false starts, failed drafts, and a file cabinet full of rejection letters for both Opposable and Halteres, I refocused and recommitted.

I thought I took the road less traveled.  I thought I’d crap out a few hundred pages, and gain some Ernest Cline style fame on the spot.  Nope.  Naiveté led me to believe I could succeed taking the road less traveled, but reality showed me only by enduring the rigors experienced a million times before, can you progress.  I needed to take the road more traveled, and face its obstacles, in order to blaze my own path.  It’s not the road that defines a person, but what they accomplish while on it.

Starting with GEOCON last June (Thanks again RJT!), I plotted a course to breathe new life into Opposable.  Immediately following, I embarked on the Badass Sci Fi Road Trip (check out the posts in the archives).  I followed the path I wrote about in Opposable for the first time, and that made all the difference.

After transcribing 280+ pages of dictation, and blogging religiously, I got burned out.  By the time I regained motivation, the school year started.  I went back to my substitute teaching gig, and worked on the Opposable V3 while I could.

NaNoWriMo in November marked my next hurdle.  I added 59K words in revisions and new material, and completed Opposable V3 in early December.

Then I made a big mistake.  Compiling a list of 50 overused or passive words or phrases (Including apostrophes!), I began grammatical edits.  That took me a month and a half.  Why was that a mistake?  It tightened the manuscript immeasurably,  Well, next time I’ll do it following the completion of each chapter, not after the third draft of a 150k word novel.

After that, I did one last round of edits where I added any notes or ideas gathered since the last draft.  No small task.  One of the novel’s most hilarious characters entered the picture at this stage.  At the beginning of February, I completed the fourth draft of Opposable.  One-Hundred and Fifty-Five thousand words of Badass Sci Fi.

About how my fourth draft reads.

Since then, efforts to ensure Opposable publish-ready ensued.  I made Badass Sci Fi a publishing company, hired a professional editor, and researched a maddeningly convoluted web of self-publishing best practices.

Now I float in discovery limbo, waiting for the next hurdle,

and I work on my website.

But goals have been set.  You can see the countdown clock on my homepage.  Yes, the question mark gives me an out, but even soft goals are better than no goals.  GEOCON 2018 gave me a great jumping off point.  At GEOCON 2019, I’m gonna be a vendor.

Until next time, don’t bother me.  I’m running a company.

Ten points if you can guess the movie and character