For the first time in a long time I am willingly submitting myself to the scrutiny of others and exposing my ego to damage. Today marks the day when I make my official first attempt at writing, and not the usual engineering or technical papers that I tend to be involved in. A BOOK, a novel, a long story, whatever you want to call it, I'm attempting to write one. I have kept it a little secret for the past few months because I wasn't sure if what I had was worth anything or if it would just fizzle out. Apparently it has not fizzled, I have been working in the spare time that I have, an hour or two here and there, and have come up with a plot line, seven to ten primary characters, the sketched outline for the first six or seven chapters and the primary ideas for approximately seventeen chapters. The idea came to me, as ideas do to many people, in the shower. I had been thinking about the show Heroes which was short lived and jumped the shark almost after he first season was over in addition to pondering the feasibility of a type of generator I had heard about a while ago and came up with a cool idea: What if there were bio implantable generators? Weird right? then everything started to fall out, the main character, what would happen to her, how it would happen, all the good stuff that make a story.
For the next couple of days every chance I got I kept writing, not on the actual chapters, but background. Character names, story flow, actual ballistics and medical condition research, genetics research, in a short time I had a binder and notebook with hand written notes, typed pages and diagrams. Its been a lot of fun so far.
Recently I had my wife Dr. Maureen read the prologue. The verdict? Amateurish, she didn't really like the stories of that type, not extremely well written. I was crushed. The person I had counted on to give me words of encouragement had eviscerated me instead. [WHAT THE WHAT? I did no such thing. -Ed.] At first I was a little shocked but then she told me she was comparing me to actual written work, stuff that had been published. She also said that she had read stuff like this on the shelves. Keeping in mind that I'm not an author by nature and I was a bit more encouraged. I set about re-writing the prologue and I feel its better now, in fact ready for (queue drum roll) EDITING
I knew I'd reach the point where self editing was not enough so I decided that I would need to find a person who did this for a living. I checked on line and there are plenty of places that will do it but they want you to buy some sort of editing/publishing deal usually and they mostly deal with paper publications. So I went looking for alternatives and found some. Which leads me to today. I have just sent the Prologue and three chapters out for editing. I have yet to decide how I want to release it, there are so many options. I guess it depends on whether the thing stinks like last weeks fish or not. I think, however, I will release the Prologue for all to read and comment on when as soon as it's ready.
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