The Lunar Revolution is faltering, events are spinning out of control, and Bill Shelley is inches away from achieving victory. Meanwhile, far away in the south, the footsteps of a little girl running for her life bring with them a secret that could start the war before anyone is ready.

From the surface of Mars to the forests of Vermont, the players are at the table, their antes are in, and the next round of cards is about to hit the felt. The winners will determine the face of the solar system…if they can survive the game.

Read the first four chapters here.

Or, buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.

But first, the reasons why the two popular methods don’t work for me.

Pulling Down My Pants

“Pantsers” are folks that write by the seat of their pants. They trust their subconscious and just fly on from word one, muddling through as they go–and often, they’re brilliant. Many of my favorite short story writers (including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Dean Wesley Smith) write like this, and they are quite often bloody brilliant.

I’ve done this with short stories–sometimes, I’ve done it really well. But for every short story I’ve finished with this method, I have five that started, sputtered, and stopped. Some I’ve gone back and done in a way more suited to my workflow–others I’ve abandoned and think of fondly, like childhood friends I’m unlikely ever to see again.

Why do they sputter? Frankly, it’s because I often write from a milieu, and only infrequently is a milieu sufficient to sustain a whole story. My process often relies on the collision of two dissimilar ideas in my own head, and without those two ideas, the story won’t spin.

With novels, it’s the same problem, only worse. Unless the story itself is a discovery process with a very constrained point of view, there isn’t a lot I can get a foothold on. Even then, I only get so far before I have to resort to other methods.

Which brings us to outlining.

Sketchy Thinking

The beauty of an outline is that you never have to worry about where you’re going. You decide in advance what happens, and why, and when–sometimes in rough detail, sometimes in minutia. Many of my favorite novelists (including Gail Carriger, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Frank Herbert) work this way, to spectacular result, and the method has innate appeal. The question of “what’s next” that can get writers blocked on a project, and pre-laying the track means you don’t have to worry about going off it and losing the plot.

But it comes with a cost: spontaneity. My particular neuroses innately rebel against tight pre-plotting. Once I’ve written an entire story in my mind once, it’s a slog to write it again, and that slog sometimes shows in the finished product (which is why there are a few novels and stories that will never see the light of day–they are, according to my betas, stale-born, and I don’t have the heart to go back and redraft them from scratch).

However, for someone of my disposition there is a third way to write.

I call it “playing jazz.”

Why Jazz?

Using music as an analog, a pantser would be like a musician who has so internalized structure that they can pick up an instrument and do a solo jam that is neither dull nor directionless. An outliner would be a concert pianist who rote memorizes perfectly a pre-composed piece, and then adds texture and flourish by the way she performs the notes and accents the silences.

Jazz is an artform between. Like writing, music depends upon deviating from a well-understood structure. In both music and writing, structure is king–without it, you don’t have anything that resembles a story, or music. But with jazz, the structure is malleable within certain limits, and the bulk of the piece within those limits is made up of improvisation to such an extent that no two performances of the same piece will ever be the same. Sometimes, they may not even sound like the same song.

To play Jazz with words, you need the baseline structure–a few story beats you must hit for everything to work well. Then, in the vast spaces in between, you connect the dots by playing in between them–exploring the complications, finding the indirect ways between points A and B and C. In a long, plot heavy novel like The Antithesis Progression, the individual storylines will all have those points, and there will be planned points of intersection between them, but the jazz happens in the execution. In books with a more straightforward structure, like The Clarke Lantham Mysteries or Down From Ten, there is more improvisation–but in either case, the method lays in playing to the strengths of both outlining and discovery writing, while sidestepping the aspects of both processes that my particular twisted psychology finds unendurable.

It’s All About Process

My first million-and-a-quarter words qualify me as a neophyte in the writing world, but they have taught me why it takes so long for writers to find their voice. Learning a process will allow you to grapple with story structure in a way that will help you tell stories that connect with your audience. There is no right way. There is only the way that you find that works for you. If you, like my conversation partner last night, are feeling confused by the prescriptions offered by writers further along than you, take heart! It’s normal for all of us to think “my way worked for me, so it should work for everyone.”

But however well-intentioned that advice, the fact remains: only you are capable of working out what process works best for you. And whether you’re writing books and screenplays with highly developed structures (like episodic television, or category romance) or that are more free-form (like slipstream), the process you go through to get there will vary according to your psychology. Take my description of “playing jazz” as another possible option–but don’t take it as gospel. Your mileage may vary.

Some of you will get a sneak peak. You see, this is a big book. It ate up more pages, and more time, than I expected by an order of magnitude, and I’m eager to see it find a good home on the shelves and in the e-readers of all of you, including those of you who have drifted away in the meantime, intending to come back when the series continued.

To let people know Antithesis is back, we’re going to need publicity. Publicity means you! Some of you out there enjoy blogging, posting opinion pieces and reviews, etc., and you are the ones I need. Starting today, the first hundred of you that email me (either the normal way through the feedback at jdsawyer.net address, or through the web form you can find here) with the subject line “Free Will Ebook” will receive a free, pre-copyedits ebook version of Free Will (and a corrected version once the proofs are done).

In return for receiving this advance review copy, you promise to blog the book when you’ve finished reading it and, once the book is released to the general public in the next week or two, to post a copy or extract of your blog review in two of the following: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Goodreads, Kobo, Sony ebook store, Kobo, iBookstore. Those of you who feel enthusiastic enough about the book to post the review in all those places will be entered into a drawing. The four prizes in that drawing will be:

Spread the word!
Also, watch this space. There will be more announcements in the coming days about casting calls, a new Death Threats contest, and other goodies.

In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

The definitive update, in audio for all you grabbing this with podcatchers. Lots of news

All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.

New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.

What does this mean for you?

Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.

It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).

Time to crack the champagne!

Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where book 1 could end naturally–and on a very nice cliffhanger–so I could move on to the new book 2 (which was originally the planned second half of book 1). I’d just sit down and write book 2 as soon as the time afforded.

Yeah.

If you’ve been following my progress with this book, you already know how that bright idea turned out. I’ve gotten four other books written in the meantime, and I’m quick on the way to finishing a further two, and still Free Will mocks me with its recalcitrance. And it’s not because I haven’t kicked ass on writing it either: Predestination rang in at 122,000 words after some serious cutting post-podcast and only had to cope with four major storylines. That’s a healthy sized book–it’s fantasy-novel length. Free Will is…well…bigger.

Much bigger. Two and a half reams of paper big. It isn’t done yet, and it’s north of 160,000 words with fifteen storylines (eight of them major). That’s too long, even though the second half of the book is wall-to-wall action and the first half moves along as a very fast clip. Too long as it is, and I’ve still got a lot further to go–easily another 50,000 words if I play the story to the original end point.

After printing the whole thing out today and separating out the storylines I had a read-through of each, and I discovered something:

I’ve done it again. My original planned Book 1 of Antithesis isn’t just two books. It’s three. Well, two and a half. And I’ve already written sixty pages of book three by accident.

What does this mean for you who’s been waiting eagerly?

Well, it means I’ll actually finish Free Will this century. Probably this month. And I’m close enough to the end to head back into production on the audio this week, which I’m doing. It also means that Free Will will be a reasonable length–it might even sneak in under the equivalent of 650 pages when all is done. It means you’ll get a book that ends on a sequence of scenes that is the biggest, brashest you’ve seen yet…

And it means that the first two acts of book 3 are going to be incredibly explosive.

This series keeps surprising me with how much story is wrapped up in it. I can’t wait to share that surprise with you.

And now, Episode 5 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by Jack Hosley, host of Wander Radio.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Steven H. Wilson as Percy Scott
Nobilis Reed as The Nurse
Nathan Lowell as Senator William Shelley
Kitty Nic’Iaian as White House Intern
Benjamin Roberts as Shane the Aide

And now, Episode 4 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by Steve Riekiberg, host of Geek Cred.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Nathan Lowell as Senator William Shelley
Miss Kalendar as Ali Hartman
Kitty Nic’Iaian as Fugitive and The Answering Service
Andrea Fender as The Moon Girl
Michael Lemonjello as The Fish Man
Mark Smith as The Jet Pack Man

And now, Episode 3 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by Blake Charlton – find his book Spellwright, forthcoming from TOR at his home page.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):

Miss Kalendar as Ali Hartman
Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal
Kitty Nic’Iaian as Fugitive and The Answering Service
Kim The Comic Book Goddess as Val

And now, Episode 2 of Free Will and Other Compulsions. Story So Far by J.R. Murdock – find his books at Podiobooks.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Andrea Fender as The Moon Girl
Michael Lemonjello as Search Party Leader
Mark Smith as The Third Search Party Member
Miss Kalendar as Ali Hartman
Derek Moore as Jim Hartman
Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal
George Chlentzos as Douglas Reeves
Kim The Comic Book Goddess as Val

To tide you guys over this week, and for those of you who might not have heard it, here’s the show where Philippa Ballantine, Chris Lester, and I podjacked Podioracket. Much silliness ensued — enjoy!

And now, Episode 1 of Free Will and Other Compulsions.

Cast this week (in order of appearance):
Stephanie Sawyer as Cassy Orinthal
Kim The Comic Book Goddess as Val
Mark Smith as Nineveh Docking Control

Featuring the voices of Georg Chlentzos and Miss Kalendar

Want to see the artwork? Click here (NSFW)

Download Subscribe

Hello everyone —

Due to circumstances beyond my control, Down From Ten is not going to be posting until next week, when we should have two episodes up. In lieu of that, I’m bringing you the much-anticipated preview for Book 2 of the Antithesis Progression: Free Will and other Compulsions

First, the appearances. You can find me on recent episodes of Podioracket, The Dead Robots Society, and doing voice work as the German Army in Philippa Ballantine’s Weather Child. You can also hear my fantasy story Buried Alive In The Blues, for which I also did some of the voice work, on the excellent (if racy) anthology series Erotica A La Carte.

For those of you who enjoy my Open Source madness will be pleased to hear that there are new LinuxJournal articles – one is a review of the Indamixx portable recording studio, and the other, which hasn’t yet published, is a review of OpenGear’s new KVM management console. I’m currently stalking a couple more regular writing gigs, so if the internet gods smile upon me, you may be seeing quite a lot more out of me in this vein in the coming months.

Podcast monkeys, you may have noticed the new buttons on the right side of the page – each podcast feed now has an iTunes one-click subscription link, as well as the normal RSS buttons. There’s also now an Uberfeed, which will give you everything I podcast (except Apologia, which you can get here).

You also may have noticed that I’m now podcasting my new novel Down From Ten. This is a comedic country house mystery with elements of romance, horror, and science fiction around the edges – it’s a change of gears from The Antithesis Progression. It’s also listed on iTunes now, so if you’re listening and enjoying it, please leave a review and tell your friends.

I’m also the subject of, and participant in dialog to, a blog series about the doctrinal foundations of Christianity by Scott Roche on the Spiritual Tramp blog. If you like my arguments on Apologia, you’ll definitely find this one entertaining.

I’ve also recorded MORE Reprobates Hour episodes, which, along with all the other special features I have on my hard drive, I’ll hopefully start spooling out here again this month.

As far as writing projects go, Free Will is picking up steam and is now officially on schedule for a November release. I’m also working on a couple more secret projects, which hopefully I’ll have news about soon here.

Finally, I hope to have some good news on sales in the next couple weeks, so watch this space!