I have been giving a lot of thought to the title of my "untitled middle-grade" adventure. I did not worry about it before; I always assumed the title would jump out at me as I wrote. Adventures for children, even older children, need to have a title that clearly tells them "Read me, I am exactly the kind of book you want."

The original story was going to center on a male protagonist named Bill, but when it became an adventure for younger readers I felt I could write about a boy-girl team more effectively. A coworker suggested the name "Piper" for the girl, and I had already kind of settled on "Tom" for the boy.

The Adventures of Tom and Piper: Ghost Ship

Tom and Piper Adventures: Book One, The Ghost Ship

Tom and Piper in the Adventure of the Ghost Ship

Ghost Ship: A Tom and Piper Adventure

Ghost Ship: A Tom and Piper Novel

Ghost Ship: A Tom and Piper Book

The Ghost Ship: A New Tom and Piper Adventure

Keywords are an important aspect of naming a series (less so a standalone novel), and "adventure" is more descriptive than something like "novel" or "book", so I wrote off the titles that did not include "adventure".

I put Tom's name first in the title for a few reasons, but mainly because I am male and feel like it will be easier for me to write from that viewpoint (I am an aspiring author with no experience writing from a female POV as I write this). I have not done the research yet, but I feel like young boys are going to be a bigger market for these adventures and I fear that "the adventures of Piper and Tom" might not sound as interesting to them. I never liked Nancy Drew novels when I was a child, but I loved Hardy Boyse, for example. 

A Tom and Piper Adventure

The Tom and Piper Adventures

The Adventures of Tom and Piper

The question is, will readers a year from now like any of these?

I placed my second order with the artist, and once again he did not disappoint.

The illustration turned out much more cheerful than I expected, and it did not really match how I imagined the scene, but I was blown away nonetheless. To my eye, this is the kind of art that sells books to children and young teens.

I am left with a dilemma, though.

My book was really targeted at adults and young adults. By leaving out swearing, sex, and unnecessary violence, I thought I could appeal to a wider audience. I started reading adult science-fiction and fantasy at the age of twelve, and children that age are bright enough to understand adult fiction. Unfortunately, the artwork is more suitable to pre-teen adventure novels than grim young adult post-apocalyptic fiction. Yes, it was not going to be too grim, but how can I possibly have artwork like this in a book targeted at jaded young adults?

I love the art direction, so I think I am going to scrap the outline I have and start over as a dedicated adventure series for middle-grade readers. I have no idea what this means for my market as I was researching adult science-fiction categories on amazon, but I think it will work for my debut series. I still plan on launching the first book with book two on pre-order and having book three ready to go before book two launches.

My original plan was to launch book one in December, but the extra six months should result in a much better book.

Amazon allows a three-month pre-order, so it will be safe to put it up in May. I will be concentrating on amazon for this series, so the books will not be available on other platforms for the first six months to a year.

 I have selected an artist to work with!

The winning entry is pictured here, and I was very happy with how it turned out. The centipede is larger and more menacing than I planned, clearly showing the danger. This artist uses an anime-like style to his work, which suits my taste and should make the illustrations appeal to a wider audien

I will not post the losing entries because one of them was terrible. Well, terrible is probably unfair, but it appeared to be targeted at a pre-school audience. The other losing entry is quite good, so I will probably work with the artist on some different books in the future.

The winning illustration is one of many I will need for the current book. I have not broken the story into chapters yet, but I imagine there will be at least fifteen. I will also need chapter images for the second book because I plan on having book two available for pre-order when book one goes on sale.

I should discuss the finances a bit, since my original budget of $1000 per book was grossly optimistic. Roughly speaking, I need to budget $400 per book for interior art. Editing will cost around $1000 per book, perhaps $1500 if I order a full developmental edit. Professional covers are going to cost about $400 per book, and formatting (for print and kindle) another $100 per book. This means that I will need about $2000 to publish each book, not counting any overages, promotions, or ad spend. I plan to dedicate a few posts to detailing the financials in more detail.

Anyway, I ordered another illustration from the winning artist, and plan spread the orders out to one per week so that the artist is not overworked between now and December.

I have spent a few days looking at sample illustrations on a few online marketplaces where artists can be hired. I am planning on ordering chapter illustrations, so the artist I work with will need to be able to draw a basic scene from that chapter, then do it again for twelve to twenty more chapters. And perhaps as many as eight or ten books in the series. I may need a single artist to commit to creating two hundred illustrations, so hiring the right artist is critically important.

Why a single artist? If I write a series of novels, I want the illustrations to be consistent throughout them. This probably means a single artist, but I could hire a team and still have consistency in tone, in how characters look, and in how the theme is approached. I also do not want to micro-manage the artist because I believe they need creative freedom to do their best work. And let me be honest, I am no artist, and I will not know how to illustrate better than any artist I hire.

Artist Contest

I hired three illustrators to create a scene from my first novel. The cost, a little over $100, is an investment that I am happy to spend to sample their work. 

I gave each the same somewhat vague criteria (a child, dressed in rags, is attacked by a giant centipede), and I am now waiting to see what they come up with. If none of them "win," I will contact three more artists and do this again. If one of them stands out, I will start ordering illustrations based on my scene list. If more than one of the artists stand out, I will use them on different series or perhaps to create promotional artwork.

So far, all three asked me questions about the background (they are in a basement of an abandoned building), props (they can be holding a burning torch, they do not wear shoes), and about the centipede (no violence, the image needs to show the scene before the centipede attacks). And now, we wait for results.

I have to admit that I am very excited to take this step, particularly since I am personally very busy this month and am not able to make any progress on the actual writing.

First, some news and updates.

I will not have much time for blogging or working on my novels until early August so that this site will be inactive for most of July. I do have some plans for this time; however, and thought I would share them with you.

1. I am starting to research book cover artists and will continue to look at the options through July. I do not have a title and will need a completed first draft to write the sales copy for a cover, so this is just research. 
2. I am starting to search for an artist for the interior of my first fiction novel.  Illustrations are rare in adult fiction, but hey can add to the work if done correctly. I have a lot to learn in this regard, and it was not something I considered until just recently. 
3. I am reconsidering the target audience for my, as yet, untitled adventure series. I think adult fiction is a better market, but I want to write this series for older children (something in the 10-14 age range). I was always planning to write without swearing, sex scenes, or overly graphic violence, but the structure of the story would have to change. I'll think about this over July and make my decision.
4. I am planning to write a blog post per week, outline a novel a month, and post a daily writing exercise for the next year!

I can create a rough outline in a day, so one detailed outline per month should be attainable. The daily writing exercises will be more difficult, but I am dedicated to doing them for the following reasons:

• It is important for an aspiring author to get into the habit of writing every day if they want to finish anything.
• Writing something that is not connected to the current project can help break writer's block and motivate the writer.
• Short random stories can be fun to write (this is how I started writing in elementary school).
• Writers get better with practice so doing any creative writing will help.
• Writers tend to be perfectionists, which can cause paralysis when the rough draft is terrible (and the rough draft is always terrible). Writing intentionally bad story fragments can help the writer get past their inner editor while working on drafts.
• The writer can always look back at old daily stories to look for inspiration for plot points, characters, dialogue, locations, etc. Just because these are terrible and unedited does not mean they are necessarily useless to the writer.
• Finally, writing and sharing these may help motivate another aspiring author to start some sort of daily writing exercises. 

I hope to start the daily writing exercises by early August, so in about a month, and plan on limiting them to a range of 500 to 1000 words. I will write them in sprints, as quickly as possible and without any plan or development before I start, or editing after. I will edit them to correct obvious spelling errors before I post them to this site, but otherwise, they will be very rough story fragments, outlines, descriptions, partial scenes, etc.

I wanted to follow up on the topic of index cards this week. I spent years struggling to write effectively, and it usually started well and died after a few pages. Why did this happen? I felt like I had an amazing story in my head, but when it came time to put it on paper it was broken and terrible. I decided to try outlining my novels, but I invariably ended up getting stuck because the process was the same series of "what comes next?" that I struggled with when writing without an outline. I already tried to explain this in the previous post, but it is such an important concept I wanted to reiterate. Using index cards, I write down all of the "events" I want my story to have. It may be incomplete, some of the "events" may be chapters instead of scenes, some of them may be grouped to make one strong scene... but I get them written down and then I can start moving them around. The moving part is key because reordering two events can suggest new scenes or events between and around them.

I guess what I am saying in a very round-about way is we think we have these perfect stories in our heads, but they are more impressions of stories. We might have an interesting character or location or crisis, but that is more inspiration than content. Writing out the parts we know will help us to see gaps in the story, and having those pieces easy to move around helps us to write the best story. That's my experience so far, but I am writing my first novel, so your experience may be different.

The writing process is something that everyone has to figure out for themselves. For me, as a computer professional by day, it turns out that handwritten index cards are the best way to flesh out a scene list or outline. Part of this may be age, but I spend so much time with computers that outlining manually with cards allows me be more creative. There is something "real" about physically writing on cards/

I thought I would describe my experience working with index cards, as I am starting my first novel and am excited to see how using index cards speeds my process.

I wrote out a scene list a few days ago, with four early scenes as follows:

• A visitor brings rumors of people mysteriously disappearing in other communities.
• The protagonist is on top of a tower in the evening and sees the lights of distant villages go out.
• The protagonist's father and community defenders travel west to investigate.
• One member of the expedition returns with horrible news, but no knowledge of what happened to the others.

The idea is that a problem is introduced and then quickly escalates to the point where the protagonist has to act. With a word processor, I have to think about what I want to do, how I want the story to flow, but with index cards, I can jumble things around quickly and repeatedly to see if something I did NOT think of stands out. I have reordered scenes numerous times and found some interesting combinations. The current order of the four scenes is:

• A visitor brings rumors of people mysteriously disappearing in other communities.
• The protagonist's father and community defenders travel west to investigate.
• The protagonist is on top of a tower in the evening and sees the lights of distant villages go out.
• One member of the expedition returns with some horrible news, but no knowledge of what happened to the others.

I love the extra tension that the scenes create in this order.  Part of the creative process is changing order, and these scenes might end up as flashbacks later in the book or dropped entirely, but that is a subject for a different post.

I have wanted to write for most of my life, starting with handwritten stories I shared with my elementary school friends. I joined NaNoWriMo in 2010 and successfully wrote 50k words once in 2013. While this was a great experience and led me to the decision to write seriously, it showed me how difficult writing could be given our busy lives. To that end, I have given myself some deadlines, which I will discuss in later posts.

What I want to discuss today is planning. When I made my NaNoWriMo attempts, I wrote without outlines and quickly ran into issues where I was unsure were to take the story. I was doomed before I started. Now, I do not want to say that everyone needs to outline, but for me, I need to have a plan, or my story meanders into dead ends that require rewrites to fix.

I am currently pre-outlining a bunch of books; in fact, I am pre-outlining everything I can think of. Space Opera, Zombie Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse Horror, High Fantasy. I want to get all of it written down in synopsis form. I will then pick a few appear fun to develop, and I will go ahead and outline them in full. Outlining will be discussed in later posts, but basically, I will write a sentence for each of the main scenes, then I will work on filling the story between them. At some point, I will have enough story, character, and world to write the full outline. The full outline will be my guide for writing quickly and efficiently, but it will not be used to limit the story if I think of new events or characters while writing the first draft.