Writer Senses

I was surprised to learn that I received an honorable mention for my third quarter, 2018 entry of the prodigious WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. Image source. Honestly, I submitted on a whim because it had been about six years since I'd tried. Although I did not win, I consider this a win because it means professional, working writers and editors think highly of my work. One day I will win one of these things.

Collect and celebrate the small victories. We reach our goals one hill at a time. I'm happy to report that I received an honorable mention in 2018's Writing Contest for the category of *Prose: First Chapter (Novel).* This contest is judged by professional authors from outside Utah, so that's something. If you don't follow my FB author page, Daniel Rodrigues-Martin , I'd love your support. I'm also on Twitter , but only because I have to. The honorably-mentioned chapter, "The Fates of Stars and People," comes from the beginning of my third book in the Ark Saga , Goddess from the Machine , and is included below. THE FATES OF STARS AND PEOPLE (c) 2014-19 by Daniel Rodrigues-Martin. All rights reserved. It was poetry to die like this, rain falling in sheets from the mouth of an angry sky, all the cosmos peering through the cloud cover at the man’s last moments. Did the stars ponder the fates of humanity as humanity pondered the fates o...

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com. Languages in the Ark Saga are not any Earth Prime language. My philosophy of writing the characters’ idiom – how they speak and write as natives – was rooted in the principle that my narrative style is a direct translation of their fictional language (vocabulary, syntax, and grammar) into idiomatic American English. Years into writing the books, I formalized unique alphabets for two of the languages represented in the fictional world of the Ark Saga. For the language the main characters speak, I realized that, given my philosophy of language within the story, any time a unique letter was named, there was not a complete correspondence between the English alphabet and the fictional alphabet. What this meant was that any time a character wanted to talk about the language they speak, they didn’t call it “English.” When any character had to directly name a letter or directly spell a word, they had to name the letter(s) in their language, not English...

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com. On June 16, 2018, the League of Utah Writers (LUW) held its Summer Writers Symposium at the University of Utah. The symposium covered a broad spectrum of topics from the value of poetry to the agenting vs. independent publishing debate. I had two main takeaways from the event. #1 Success at Self-Publishing Means Sustained Hard Work (…And Probably Isn’t for Me) Indie romance author Cami Checketts led a session titled: “Self-Publishing: Is It Right for You?” She provided some practical advice about different marketing sites ( Bookbub ) and the importance of sharing success and building a friendly community of co-writers and “cheerleaders.” Before taking the self-publishing path, Ms. Checketts had a literary agent and was traditionally published, but found consistent success challenging and traditional pathways restrictive. She was also not a fan of the publisher’s sizable cut . The main takeaway of Checketts’s talk for me was that self-publis...

After gaining some killer advice at the Chicago Writing Workshop 2016 , I cut up the first Ark novel, An Autumn Veil , into the first two  Ark novels: A Flood of Silence (previously: A Steel Horizon )   and An Autumn Veil . Book 3, A Labyrinth of Smoke , is still in the works, and book 2 has been undergoing restructuring now that it's standing on its own two feet. I've also been working on book 2.5: Goddess from the Machine . Though properly a spin-off of the larger Ark saga, GftM features a plot and characters with touch points to AFoS and AAV, especially its protagonist and one other major character. It provides a fleshed-out background story for ALoS. Beta readers have already expressed appreciation of the characters and plot. GftM is different than anything I've written. Originally a character study of an important, tangential character from AAV, the histories of the characters of the original short quickly overtook the narrative, ultimately demanding a more matu...

In accordance with my first formal rejection for the ARK books , which, FYI, makes me a real author, I'm taking seriously the advice to not pitch a work exceeding 125,000 words in length. (One veteran speculative fiction agent said bluntly in panel at the Chicago Writing Workshop back in May, "I've never sold a sci-fi/fantasy book longer than 140,000 words.") FYI: I attended the crap out of that conference. The So-So News: I didn't feel like I was finished with An Autumn Veil after the first act, which is why I kept writing and revising for six years. But if I wanna sell, I've gotta play ball. Other So-So News: This means I have to break An Autumn Veil into two books, one 97k, words in length, the other 107k words in length. Book two will be called An Autumn Veil . Book one will now be called A Steel Horizon . Also, prologues are no longer "in vogue," and the same veteran agent who's never sold a book over 140k words recommended cuttin...

Do you like Avatar: The Last Airbender ? Do you like great villains? Do you like Princess Azula of the Fire Nation? You can read about why Azula is one of the best villains in any story in the 21st century thus far in my newest article on Geekdomhouse.com, available here . Comment, share, and link! D