so… about that novel

what can i say?  life got in the way, and it wasn’t meant for me to write a full length novel in the month of November.  However, thanks to NaNoWriMo, I’ve got a great start with some great ideas and a few chapters to build off of.  I will see this to completion, even if it’s a few months away.  At this point, I’m thinking I might even take a few days of vacation spattered here and there to work on it.

In doing things like this, I like to know what all the possibilities are.  If I’m going to write this thing; poor my time, energy and ideas into a manuscript… then I want to make sure that there’s at least a chance that someone will discover it and enjoy it.  I’ve done some minimal research and found that, at the very least, there is one place I will be able to publish it:

Amazon Digital Shorts

More likely, however, I would put it for publishing through Amazon’s digital services, which would allow a different pricing structure.  Either way, this will allow the manuscript to be read on a Kindle… which… would be very fitting (if you’ve read the first chapter).  I would like to firmly state that the manuscript did begin before the Kindle was released/publically known about.

So on my quest for information regarding my publishing options, I got a chance this past week to meet with David Webb of B&H Publishing House.  I was quite pleased to get to know him; he seemed to be a genuinely nice guy who is as passionate about books as my wife is.  It didn’t hurt that he had artwork from an Alex Ross calendar or a Worf mug in his office, either.  What I liked about Webb is that he told it to me straight: there isn’t much room for sci-fi in the CBA market.

Seeing as I’m getting my MBA, I was actually quite interested in his perspectives on the market, as well as the future plans for the B&H fiction line, in general.  I found it amazing how much the market is geared toward women… as most faith-based products are nowadays.  Why aren’t men buying faith-based entertainment?

We talked briefly about the struggles I would have with writing a Christian-based sci-fi novel, but he also offered some like a group of authors who recently went on tour promoting their sci-fi and fantasy work.  Webb was very encouraging when we got to the end of the conversation, as we both agreed that sci-fi was a great place to explore faith.  Being followers of Christ allows us one constant – that God is and always will be God.  So even if I place my story 100,000 years in the future… God is still God.  And that allows me a world of creativity.

So I now have two assignments:

1. Finish the novel
2. Write the pitch

The pitch is going to be interesting… but I think I might tackle most of it first.  There are some things they are looking for that I hadn’t really thought out yet.  And, the pitch does include the full synopsis.  It might be good to decide how my story ends… even though I prefer to discover it along the way.

So… about that novel.  I’m still working on it.  Maybe you’ll get to buy it someday.