Jonathan's Scrivenings

Progress has been slow this past month, but there has been progress. Mostly what I have been doing is expanding my outline from what was sometimes just a sentence or two, fleshing each out to sometimes as much as several hundred words. Book one (The Pyongyang Incursion) has its outline completely done, although I am sure there will be further revisions to it as I work on the other two book outlines. Currently the outline stands at over 2400 words across twenty different outline points, and I am overall pretty pleased with how it's shaping up, the overall story arc is much tighter and I was able to trim some fat off some points and add other points to keep the story moving along at a good pace. Book two (The Vladivostok Penetration) has most of the summary written but only three outline points, while book three (The Berlin Infiltration) has one lonely little outline point and no summary written. The summaries for the overall series background has been expanded a little bit more,

So far this week I haven't gotten too much done, I've mostly been outlining. Book 1 was fully outlined in basic one sentence form, so I have been going back through the outline and tightening it up, by removing things that impede the narrative flow, and expanding the areas that help it progress.  I want to make sure that I don't have anything outlined that is just "filler" or something clearly thrown in just to pad the word count a bit, I hate it when authors do that. The goal is to get each one sentence outline expanded to a full paragraph. Then I'll do a scene breakdown, then and only then will I write the story. My hope is that this will not only keep the books feeling cohesive, but will also help me use my writing time more effectively. The outline for The Pyongyang Incursion  is twenty-one points currently, and I have expanded nine of them to a full paragraph in the last week. I also have the first three outline points done on the sequel, The Vladi

I haven't been doing much writing in the last couple years, I have mostly been working on other side projects. One of the problems with being somewhat absent minded and prone to chase rabbit trails ;) I have been pleased to see a handful of people downloading Rise to Revolt from Kobo and I even got a couple more star ratings for it, its sitting at 4 out of 5 stars with three total ratings. Kobo tells me that it has been downloaded about 20 times, although I seem to remember seeing something about that number possibly being inaccurate due to Kobo having a bug of some sort a while ago that interfered with counting free downloads. Is 20 free downloads and three ratings anything to get excited about? Well for me, it certainly feels good to know that 20 people tried to read my first book, and none of them hated it enough to send me nasty emails or leave a bad review. For a complete unknown's first work, one that was deliberately published on a very small platform that reaches a

Below is the rough draft of the first chapter of my current foray into the genre of urban fantasy. I am trying a few new things with this, both in the genre and in my writing process. As far as genre goes, I am writing the story as if magic is really a scientific process that is poorly understood. Cause and effect are understood, but the "why" isn't.  "Spells" are really just 'mathematical' equations that allow the magus to channel the "aether" in a specific way that gets a specific result. Basically, the magus "solves' the equation to get the desired result. I also wanted to avoid the trope of mysticism and such that most urban fantasy has. This is the normal world, just with a few new twists. As far as my writing process goes, I am experimenting with just using a basic outline and a few character and world notes to pull it together. Rise to Revolt has tens of thousands of world building notes, I wanted to see how my writing proc

I am not an author. What I am is an aspiring  author, someone who has hopes of having a career as an author, where people pay me money in exchange for my stories. Right now, what I have is a completed novel that has so far earned me .45 cents and some outlines of stories in various stages of completion. And you know what? That is completely fine, Rome was neither built nor burned in a day. What I am trying to chart on this blog is the path that I follow on my way to whatever success I eventually wind up with, and to be an encouragement to anyone else out here who is trying to get off the ground, same as I am. Currently, I am an S List novelist, based on Larry Correia's Offical Alphabetical List of Author Success , which he defined as: S List – The Struggling Authors who’ve written something, but haven’t had any luck selling it yet. Authors with the most incredibly frustrating job in the universe. The Future of Writing. That's actually very encouraging because it gives