For what it’s worth, the synopsis plus sample chapters got me a complete manuscript request, and ultimately a review before the editorial board. Though that may not be completely accurate. Getting that far had much more to do with connecting with an editor who genuinely seemed to like the novel…and as most writers know, making that connection is both the hardest and the most essential part. I believe the editor was more upset than I was when the rejection came down.

Anyway, I offer this purely for your edification. Do not confuse it with a tutorial.

WARNING: If you’re reading Agnosis serially (rather than downloading the full text)…though I can’t imagine why you would…the rest of this post contains spoilers.

Chapter 1

In which we meet John Dorian and Amara Cain, tech employees of the Masonic Archive Infocache, a personality/personal data digital archive. Dorian, the resident IT dork and erstwhile systems hacker, tracks and eliminates a data spider that has infiltrated the Infocache. Amara, perky office mate, shows off her spiffy grrl-power physical avatar.

Chapter 2

In which Dorian disassembles the data spider and realizes that it originated from within the Infocache’s network. Dorian begins to suspect that the spider has been at work for a very long time, stealing data from the Archive and bouncing it to points unkown. Worse, the spider may have originated with Michael Raville, creator of the Zap technology — instant site to site matter transfer — which had revolutionized human history. Dorian invites Amara to go for take out. And dinner at his place. (Wink, wink.)

Chapter 3

In which Dorian and Amara explore his apartment, view their city (Sonali Real), discuss technological developments and Michael Raville. Dorian manages not to sleep with Amara, mostly because he’s a huge dork. We also meet Dorian’s cat, who does.

Chapter 4

In which Dorian researches Michael Raville via the Strand — the post-Internet, fully emersive data universe — and gradually comes to the shocking realization that the spider was not bouncing data outside of the network, but seeding data into it. Dorian learns that the Archive hosts Michael Raville’s original personality inventory, realizes that the inventory has somewhat nefariously copied itself, and the copy has achieved consciousness. Dorian freaks out a bit about this before deciding to “geek” into the copied data stash and have a look at what the spider and/or the sentient copy of Michael Raville have been doing with themselves for the last forty years. Amara convinces him to let her come along.

Chapter 5

In which Dorian and Amara explore the virtual rendering of Michael Raville’s memory palace — the 3D world the digitized personality AI has been “living” in. Lots of random marvelling at Raville’s ingenuity. Eventually, they meet the sentient AI package himself.

Chapter 6

In which Raville acts like a charming asshole, flirts with Amara and explains that the universe is about to be destroyed unless Dorian and Amara intervene on his behalf. Dorian reacts skeptically. Raville reveals that Zap technology was not so much discovered as gifted to him by a semi-divine alien race called the Exousiai, whose ultimate goal was to free humanity from the shackles of biology and into a deathless eternity as pure thought and energy. Raville believes that the still-living version of himself (i.e., flesh and blood Michael Raville) has betrayed the vision of the Exousiai and is preparing to start a war from a scientific/military installation on Giari Tau at outermost fringes of human exploration in order to prevent them from liberating humanity. Dorian remains skeptical.

Chapter 7

In which Raville scoffs at Dorian’s skepticism and explains that the real-Raville’s war on the Exousiai can only end with the complete and utter destruction of humanity and therefore MUST BE STOPPED(!!!). Amara is convinced, and before Dorian can intervene, accepts a virtual code package (rendered as a ball of glowing light) from Raville into her personal data storage. Raville calls it the quae-ha-distra — both a simulated experience of first contact with the Exousiai and a synaptic bridge for accessing a hyper-secret data archive where the real-Raville has stored everything known about the Exousiai, including a direct link to the thought/energy of the Exousiai themselves. Inside, he tells them, is the secret to stopping the war. Amara collapses into a semi-coma of data overload. Raville tells Dorian that in order to save her from imminent brain death as the quae-ha-distra code runs amok in her neural matrix, he will have to assist in Raville’s plan. Dorian is undertandably annoyed, but forced to comply.

Chapter 8

In which Dorian, back in the real world, cracks Amara’s private datascape and uses a special bit of code provided by Raville to disconnect her from the rampaging quae-ha-distra code that is remapping and reshaping her internal storage network. Amara awakens without damage. Dorian decides to take Amara home with him again because of her ordeal. Not (NOT) to sleep with her. Someone blows up Dorian’s apartment, but he and Amara (and the cat) narrowly escape. Based on this evidence, Dorian suspects that the real-Raville is somewhat pissed off about Amara having invaded the hyper-secret data archive via the quae-ha-distra.

Chapter 9

In which Dorian and Amara seek refuge with Dorian’s old military connections, Tyrus and Lily Danek. Tyrus, Lily and Dorian rub their heads together about Raville/real-Raville conundrum and about future plans now that the real-Raville seems to be trying to kill them. Amara produces the quae-ha-distra…in real space. The others are understadably baffled by the conversion from code to physical artifact. Later, Dorian shares some details of his traumatic personal history with Tyrus and Lily. It’s a bonding moment.

Chapter 10

In which Dorian, Amara and the Daneks ruminate on the meaning of the quae-ha-distra and what to do with Raville’s plans. Dorian advocates that they run and hide. Amara wants to help prevent the war and explore the future liberation the Exousiai seem to promise. Lily and Tyrus correctly point out that they won’t know what to do until they have more information…which is only available inside the hyper-secret storage space that Raville has opened up to them by giving Amara the quae-ha-distra. Dorian dithers because of the danger inherent in connecting to the Strand network (i.e., that they can be identified and tracked by real-Raville’s agents).

Chapter 11

In which Dorian exercises a gigantic wad of geek gimcrackery to hide Amara from detection on the Strand and to map the contents of the quae-ha-distra‘s dtascape. Amara bounces from the Strand to his personal data storage, and ultimately into the space opened by the quae-ha-distra to find the information Raville has promised will prevent war with the Exousiai. Dorian successfully evades their pursuers. Because yes, he is that good.

Chapter 12

In which Dorian guides Amara as she explores the new datascape and realizes belatedly that he isn’t nearly as good as he thought he was. Raville has tricked him. The code he used to crack Amara’s datascape (back in Chapter Eight) has been acting as a sort of quae-ha-distra in Dorian’s own datascape. Alone in the hostile data environment, Amara becomes lost, and Dorian has no alternative but to bounce into the quae-ha-distra datascape after her…where he discovers a perfectly rendered copy of Sonali Real. Dorian and Amara argue about whether this was Raville’s planning, or if their experience was being influenced by the god-like Exousiai.

Chapter 13

In which Dorian and Amara frolic in the virtual Sonali and eventually end up back at the Infocache, where they bounce to another datascape and experience the limitless freedom of the Exousiai. (Big bonding moment.) Amara is awed by her apparent first hand contact with the Exousian consciousness. Later, they find a render of an ancient temple where inside, they encounter a search index avatar in the form of Raville’s deceased wife. Amara is disillusioned by the apparent influence of the Exousiai being only code wizardry. Dorian tracks down the datacore Raville sent them to find.

Chapter 14

In which Dorian and Amara share a rendered vision of the raw quae-ha-distra dataverse as a semi-sentient blob of inky life. Dorian absorbs the data into his storage by eating it. This chapter is thick with metaphor and symbolism. THICK WITH METAPHOR, I TELL YOU!!!

Chapter 15

In which Dorian and Amara process what they’ve learned and compare notes. Amara has obtained a Zap address for the Giari Tau scientific installation on the edge of human space from which the real-Raville intends to launch the war against the Exousiai. Dorian figures out from the data he consumed how to manipulate the networked connections between the quae-ha-distra, the Strand and the Infocache (which should be theoretically impossible) and summons up Raville’s original datascape inside the Infocache. Raville is pleased and gushes about everything going according to plan. Amara is miffed because the entire quae-ha-distra experience was mediated code-illusion rather than actual contact with the Exousiai. Raville drops the bombshell that the whole purpose of revealing himself to them was because of Amara — because of his belief that Amara is an Exousiai forerunner enrolded in flesh and sent to finish the task of awakening humanity to their ultimate destiny. Only an awakened Amara, in full possession of her god-like powers could stop the war before it began. Dorian greets this information with typical curmudgeonly skepticism. But Amara believes.

Chapter 16

In which Dorian and Amara discover upon leaving the datascape behind that three days have passed, and in their “absence”, Tyrus and Lily’s house has been invaded by the infamous anarcho-techno-terrorist Ray Morrical and his band of Misfit Toys. Morrical is an old acquaintance of Dorian’s, and became aware of the troubles in Sonali Real through his network of data spies. The Misfit Toys have been protecting Dorian and Amara while they were abroad in the dataverse. Morrical has also been in contact with the virtual Raville and has been convinced that the real-Raville is up to no good, though he knows nothing of the Exousiai. Dorian and Amara choose to keep this information (and her emerging godhood) to themselves. Dorian, Amara and the Misfit Toys join forces to invade the scientific installation using the newly acquired Zap address.

Chapter 17

In which the whole crew travels aboard Morrical’s spacecraft, the Proletariat Horde, to put distance between themselves and Raville’s assassins in and around Sonali Real. They reason that the Zap depots on Dorian’s planet are likely to be under surveillance, and Morrical pulls some strings on a distant world to arrange safe entry to a depot from which they can Zap to the scientific installation on Giari Tau undetected (in theory). Dorian spends the transit time trying to hack the nastier bits of the datacore he has stolen from Raville. Amara begins to exhibit some alarming supernatural powers. Dorian reveals that he has some fuzzy and squishy feelings for Amara and that he’s less concerned about stopping the war than he is about just keeping Amara safe. He also worries that as she changes, when confronted with the Exousiai, she’ll leave.

In attacking the security on Raville’s datacore, Dorian discovers that the virtual-Raville has copied himself and hitched a ride in Dorian’s personal datascape. They have a deep conversation about Dorian’s role in helping Amara awaken. Dorian resists because he’s frightened of her alien-ness. Raville tells him he’s an idiot.

Dorian and Amara are summoned to the bridge because they’ve been tabbed by the real-Raville’s organization as cyberterrorists. Morrical threatens to withdraw his assistance and turn them over to the authorities unless he is given the complete truth. Amara reveals her true Exousian essence in rather spectacular fashion.

Chapter 18

In which Dorian continues to hack the datacore and finally succeeds, despite the fact that Amara informs him that knowing Raville’s secrets is no longer necessary. He chooses not to believe her. The Misfit Toys join the ranks of True Believers(tm) in Amara’s imminent godhood.

Chapter 19

In which Dorian, Amara and the Misfit Toys arrive at the Giari Tau depot, only to find that their arrival was detected, and they’ve been held in digital stasis for six months. They manage to fend off the initial assault and lock themselves in the station’s storage warehouse. Dorian has difficulty remembering what vital bits of information he gleaned from Raville’s datacore just before zapping to Giari Tau. Morrical arrays his crew to defend the warehouse against the installation’s security teams.

Chapter 20

In which the security forces stage their incursion, and brief/disastrous firefights ensue. Amara intervenes with her increasing powers and causes the Misfit Toys to vanish into thin air, which amazes the security folk more than a little. She and Dorian are taken into custody preparatory to an encounter with the living Michael Raville.

Chapter 21

In which Dorian and Amara are escorted to holding quarters and learn that the military starships Indianapolis and Juggernaut have arrived at Giari Tau to lead the assault on the Exousian entry point into human space. Amara impresses young Lieutenant Sainz, head of the security detail. Dorian sleeps and dreams the contents of Raville’s datacore, uncovering details that make him increasingly suspicious of the intentions of the Exousiai. Ultimately, Dorian and Amara are placed under the watchful eye of Ford Garrison, Michael Raville’s Chief of Staff. Dorian manages to irritate him extensively.

Chapter 22

In which Dorian dreams the contents of the datacore again and a dream Michael Raville reinterprets what he has learned to this point in light of later knowledge to explain his opposition to the plans of the Exousiai. Specifically, that the future of the Exousiai is a future of oneness, of complete cultural unity. Raville has discovered that he would rather be free. Complete unity is too high a price to pay for eternal life. The Exousiai absorb the species that are awakened. Michael Raville, the human man, is not completely human at all. He is like Amara — an Exousiai wrapped in human form — sent to unveil the transforming technology of Zap, which would psychologically prepare humanity to cast off the bonds of flesh. This is a truth he learned only after the copy of himself from the Infocache had been created.

Dorian shares this information with Amara, but she rejects his interpretation. She refuses to believe that the Exousiai have anything but pure motives.

Chapter 23

In which Ray Morrical, now bearing the sentient copy of Michael Raville, and the Misfit Toys infiltrate the starship Indianapolis in order to locate and destroy the weapon the real-Raville has prepared against the Exousiai. The Misfit Toys locate the weapon (which appears to be a massive disappointment) and take control of the flight deck where it is housed. And Ray Morrical discovers at the critical moment where he must decide what to do with it that Michael Raville has cut him off from the datascape and vanished into the ship’s network system.

Chapter 24

In which Dorian and Amara meet face to face with Michael Raville and his advisors. Raville reveals more of the Exousian truth, essentially that the Exousiai absorb new species in an attempt to fend off cultural entropy. Factions within the “overmind” have developed which argue for devolution from a state of oneness in order to allow for more autonomy rather than absorption as the key to the Exousian future. Raville believes that the plan of the Exousiai must be thwarted for their own good, as well as for humanity’s survival. The down side is that only integration with Amara’s special qualities will allow the viral bomb that will break the oneness of the Exousiai to be absorbed, and there’s a significant risk that the Exousian entity will be destroyed. To save humanity, Amara has to be re-absorbed into the Exousian entity.

Amara agrees to sacrifice herself.

Simultaneously, Raville learns about the Misfit Toys’ assault on the Indianapolis, their possession of the weapon that will transfer Amara to Exousian space, and the even greater threat that the digital copy of Michael Raville has taken control of the ship’s control system. Raville has, in fact, used those controls to cripple the Juggernaut, and is in the process of turning the weapons’ systems against the Giari Tau station. Appropriate chaos ensues.

Chapter 25

In which Dorian and Amara are reunited with the Misfit Toys aboard the Indianapolis, with the real-Raville in tow. The code-Raville has locked himself in the starship’s datacore, and forces are scrambled to get Dorian and the real-Raville down to the datacore where they can manually override the code-Raville’s attack before he can destroy the station and the Ultimate Weapon(tm). Working together, Dorian and Raville countermand the threat and regain control of the Indianapolis.

The code-Raville somehow manages to escape.

Chapter 26

In which Dorian and Amara spend the night together, pondering her imminent demise as she returns to the Exousiai. Dorian grieves. Amara informs him of her secret plan. Simply: that Dorian will come with her into the Exousian entity, enfolded in her essence, as part of the bomb. Inside her data structure, he would retain sentience. He could, in essence, hack an entire universe so that the Exousian entity would not be destroyed, but gently weaned away from unity by the gentle introduction of autonomous elements. Both species could be saved.

Dorian agrees.

Chapter 27

In which Dorian and Amara are packaged into a special Zap chamber that will enfold their digital essences and transfer them to the warhead of the Ultimate Weapon(tm). They make their goodbyes to the Misfit Toys.

Chapter 28

In which Dorian and Amara, held in an eternal embrace, allow themselves to be euthanized into a life of pure digital consciousness that will save the entire universe. It isn’t as sad as it sounds.

When I set about to write Agnosis, I’d just finished reading a book called The Rule of Four, a murder mystery/thriller set on the campus of Princeton University. To be honest, I liked the idea of paying homage to one’s alma mater in fictional form, especially (and only, really) when it’s well done. When I say well done, what I mean is that the location is integral to the story rather than appearing completely arbitrary. When it isn’t well done, it comes across as the sweaty ramblings of a Creative Writing undergrad with more passion than life experience. Hopefully, I’ve avoided that.

Of course, I didn’t swipe the whole campus as my model for Michael Raville’s memory palace, just the Indiana Memorial Union. (The Union’s official website is here. It has lots of pimping for their convention, meeting and hotel space, as you’d expect. Personally, I prefer the bloomingpedia entry, but that’s just me.)

Floor Plan with the South Lounge highlighted

You’ve got to understand here: the IMU is an absolutely massive building. It’s said to be the largest student union in the world (whatever the fuck that means). I just know it’s huge and gorgeous and almost always chock full o’ students in various stages of studying/cramming/sleeping. I have plenty of my own memories of hanging out in the South Lounge — where, perhaps not oddly, the encounter with Michael Raville takes place — to escape the ice, snow and cold of Indiana winters. Though my memories of that time are growing hazy, I was fortunate enough (um, by virtue of the fact that my office is just a few hundred yards from the Union) to be able to refresh my acquaintance at will while I was writing the chapters in question.

And yes, that was me wandering around the halls of the Union taking notes, scribbling descriptions and inventing snatches of dialogue as I wandered around. That was also me sitting in the chairs Dorian and Amara occupied in front of the fireplace while I got the cinematics right…or in some cases, taken liberties with the physical space to fit my cinematic vision. (What?! You’ve taken liberties?! Psst. You know they filmed most of The X-Files in and around Vancouver, right? — Ed.)

I tried to find some images of the South Lounge, but no joy. It really is a wonderfully cozy place to sleep on a cold day.

External view with glimpse of entry portico

The image above is specifically to show you the portico where Dorian and Amara enter the building. For reasons that have forever escaped me, this is one of my favorite entry points to the IMU. Not far out of the frame to the right is the back edge of the School of Journalism’s Ernie Pyle Hall…one of the many buildings on campus that I’ve never actually set foot in.

D.

Update: I actually found a couple of photos of the South Lounge. Here’s one facing the fireplace, and one of the wall of windows (to the right of the fireplace from this perspective). That album has a bunch of great photos of the Union and other parts of campus. I’d point out more, but I assume you can figure out how to use Flickr.

Fast forward to yesterday, mirabile dictu!, and I’m cleaning out my Junk e-mail folder to find a response from said SFF publisher apologizing for the delay and requesting a chapter-by-chapter synopsis plus a larger partial. The twisty bit in all of this for me is that when I’m writing a manuscript, fairly early on in the process, it invariably occurs to me that I should start scratching down short descriptions of what a chapter is about so that I’ll have it later when my memory has grown fuzzy and/or an editor inevitably requests a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.

I never heed this occurring thought, mind you. But I do have it.

So, as I said, I spent most of the day yesterday synopsizing with the end result that I now have a fairly clear idea of what this novel is actually about. What surprised me most, and at the risk of tooting my own horn, is that the whole process took about four times longer than it should have because I kept getting caught up in reading my own story to find out what was going to happen next. I also spent a good portion of my time alternating between sentiments of “Dude! That really kicks ass! You are awesome!” and “What the fuck were you thinking? You write like teh shit.”

In other words (as most writers will recognize): situation normal.

Which, given my history with this book, is a good thing. A very cathartic thing. A whomping sigh of relief thing.

Anyway, so part of the fun with the synopsizing was working to music. I don’t write fiction to music generally. It’s too easily distracting, but I really dig writing code and/or documentation with a soundtrack. I was looking for something a bit different yesterday, and happened upon the Glam Rock preset on Slacker. We’re talking a whole day with Poison, Warrant, Guns n’ Roses, White Lion, Skid Row, etc.

I swear to God, I thought I was in heaven. It was high school all over again. Made me want to break out my leather jacket and cut some holes in my jeans. That, of course, led me to YouTube, where I watched a bunch of the old Headbanger’s Ball videos and realized definitively that Jani Lane is still one ugly motherfucker and even at my age and state in life, I’d probably still sell my immortal soul to date the girl from the “Cherry Pie” video.

(If you don’t know the “Cherry Pie” video, you’re officially no longer allowed to read my blog. Please leave.)

And all of this, of course, reminds me of the classic “Cherry Pie” origin story that Jani Lane used to tell. The apocryphal version goes like this: Warrant’s first album (Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich) sold like 700 trillion copies, so the record execs were hoping for similar success with the band’s 2nd album, Cherry Pie (the album, not the song). The band goes into the studio, cranks out an album that they really like, only to be told by the record company that it desperately needs a hard rockin’ anthem. Lane, pissed off to no end because he feels like the band has made the album it wants to make and this is just mindless, sell-out record company tampering, scratches out the lyrics to “Cherry Pie” in like 15 minutes and fills it with as many thoughtless, sex-metaphor cliches as he can muster. The band spends all of a day throwing together a tune and an arrangement and plunks it on the album.

“Cherry Pie” eventually cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard Charts and became the most popular song — some might say the signature song — in the band’s history.

That’s it for me today. I’m going back to listening to my Best of Poison CD and reliving my rock hard youth.

D.

An SF writer’s biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn’t know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version.

Doctorow was one of the first writers to recognize that selling dead trees was sucker’s game for most novelists. In an economy of shrinking midlists and smaller sales for blockbuster fiction titles, the chances of a writer breaking out in Rowling style are increasingly small. If there’s anything the internet has taught us, it’s that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of talented writers out there willing to produce quality content for free in their spare time. There are fewer cultural touchstone artists in a social network driven by niche interests, where a deep discussion of any topic that tickles your individual fancy is just a few mouse clicks away.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about that has absolutely nothing to do with writing or fiction. When I was a kid, I was convinced that the greatest invention in the history of mankind was the random number generation button on my Texas Instruments calculator. I survived junior high and high school by figuring out that I could analyze baseball statistics over a few seasons and come up with a fairly reliable distribution of offensive and pitching categories that, when run through a sequence of procedures whose outcome were determined by random numbers, could simulate a baseball game. Over the years, my model became increasingly complex. By the final iteration, I was using real stats to individualize real life players within my overall gaming system. I filled dozens of notebooks with season after season of random number generated stats. And yes, most of those seasons ended with the Red Sox winning the World Series, just in case you were tempted to get the idea that I developed my system without bias.

In 1989, I got my first home computer. I don’t remember anything about it other than the fact that it had two 3.5″ drives, no hard drive and ran DOS. One of the first pieces of software I acquired was a baseball simulation of the 1983 season called Major League Manager (released by the now defunct Spinnaker Software). The game was a green ASCII text representation of a baseball diamond overlayed with the names of players. The outcome of an at-bat was scrolled into a text box on the right hand side of the screen.

I have no idea if the generated statistics were anything close to accurate. What I do remember was simulating season after season, one pitch at a time, and collecting more statistics than I could ever possibly sort through. I dutifully printed these out at the end of each season. I’ve still got them somewhere. How obsessed was I with these fake baseball statistics? I would set my alarm clock to go off every hour during the night because you couldn’t schedule games in advance. Once you set the lineups, the game would run itself, but team matchups had to be kicked off manually. It took about forty minutes to simulate a game. My alarm would go off and I’d roll out of bed long enough to start the next game running, then go back to sleep.

And yes, for some odd reason, the Red Sox won most of those World Series, too. I have no idea why.

Then came the internet, and I learned that there were other games out there. Games like Diamond Mind Baseball, Shaun Sullivan’s Puresim and Out of the Park Baseball. The latter two being not just season simulations, but career simulations. Not just one season’s worth of stat modeling, but games in which players aged, improved, declined, won awards, got injured, got traded, got pissed off at management and demanded to be shipped to Cleveland. Games in which I could simulate the entire history of baseball or simulate a century into the future.

(So that, yes, the Red Sox could win even more World Series championships. I call it “Setting History Straight”.)

Not long after I discovered this new generation of computer game simulators, I found that I wanted to be able to talk about them to other people who liked sports simulations. I also found out that there were simulations for sports other than baseball.

That’s how I stumbled across Front Office Football Central in early 2000. I was looking for a community to talk sports text simulations with. I was looking for tips and tricks to find better ways to set my offensive and defensive schemes for a game called (oddly enough) Front Office Football.

Here were these guys — Quiksand, Morgado, SkyDog, Subby, TRO, CubsFan — from all over the country (and in some cases, all over the world) writing bulletin board posts thousands of words long in an attempt to study the model of football presented by FOF and figure out the best way to beat it. They spent hundreds of hours designing offenses to replicate the Coryell air assault or defenses that would mimic the success of the Chicago Bears’ 46 Zone.

And I ate that shit up. I printed it out. I experimented with their results and tried to tweak their work to fit my preferred playing style.

And somewhere along the line, I started looking forward to reading Quiksand talking about politics or SkyDog talking about his wife. CubsFan opining about Next Year and why it would never really come. Morgado enlightening everybody on how salary caps should work, and what an ideal financial model for a professional sports league would look like.

In other words, I became avid readers of those writers, because within their niche, what they had to say was valid, well written, well argued and deeply considered.

Most of you reading this have never heard of any of these people. But they are stars in the smallish universe of sports text simulations. When they speak about sports sims or other topics about which they’ve proven their gravitas within the context of the FOFC community, people take note.

In the Doctorow article above, he wrote:

But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a personal relationship with their readers — something science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm — the ability to conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. … The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship. Conversation, not content, is king.

This is the model for artistic success that most resonates with me in the age of the Internet. Not a universe populated with light-bending singularites rubbing against one another in a trackless void, but a constellation of smaller stars brilliant within their own vibrant galaxies. Smaller platforms, independent labels, and terabyte after terabyte of conversation about content. And more than that, artists themselves improving and growing as they’re exposed to more and increasingly diverse influences — many lesser luminaries rather than a finite canon of supernovae — than they would have been otherwise.

Not brighter stars, but a brighter universe of innumerable stars.

Writer and programmer Simon Haynes, author of the Hal Spacejock series, has a nice collection of utilities for writers and readers available for free (FREE) at his Spacejock Software website.

The ones I find most useful:

Sonar – a utility for logging and tracking manuscript submissions.

yWriter4 – a very handy manuscript organization/development tool.  Lets you do lots of cool things with slabs of text that would be a pain in MS Word or a standard text editor. The best part?  It’s a whopping 3 MB executable.  I shit you not.

(N.B. – I use UltraEdit for almost all of my writing.  UE is really just a glorified text editor with a massive ton of built-in utilities for programming.  Not really designed for word processing, but because I use it for my real job (i.e., programming), when I fire it up, it puts me in that work frame of mind.  I still like to play with yWriter4.)

yRead – Text to speech software.  This little program will synthesize a text or html file and read it back to you.  There’s nothing more amusing than a computer reading your fiction to you.  I’m not kidding.

It’s all fun, it’s all free and it might just increase your productivity.

D.

I honestly don’t know how to feel about this story.

Let me give you some background:  I usually write a novel a year.  I don’t write every day.  I’m what you might consider a “project oriented” writer.  I spend several months reading on topics that interest me.  Then I’ll start scratching out ideas, first chapters, character sketches and random paragraphs.  Most of that is shit that gets tossed in the trash.  On average, it takes me about two dozen starts before I figure out how I really want to start telling a story.  Rarely is the story that I actually end up writing the story that I thought I was writing when I started.  Once the writing starts, I can knock out a first draft of a 125,000 word novel in about three months.  Something like A Vessel for Offering, which tips the scale at 250k, takes 7 or 8 months.

Agnosis took a great deal longer than that, despite the fact that I was writing every day.

It took longer because every day was an exercise in defeating my own personal terror.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Shortly after completing A Vessel for Offering in 2002, I started experiencing some weird physical symptoms.  I started passing out for no traceable reason.  Parts of my body would go numb for hours at a time.  I frequently had these absolutely face-exploding headaches.  I spent a week in the hospital at one point while my doctor conducted a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of tests to find out what was wrong with me.  Nothing surfaced.

On December 7, 2002, I collapsed into delirium.  What I remember was my entire body going numb.  Since I was used to this at that point, I didn’t think much of it.  I sat down in my living room and popped out my laptop, intending to distract myself with some light video games.  It took me fifteen minutes to figure out how to turn the machine on.  I stared at the Windows desktop for another half an hour trying to figure out what I was trying to do.  Finally, I realized that something was seriously wrong with me, and decided (as men will) that the best course of action was to go take a nap until the weirdness passed.

I woke up two weeks later in the intensive care unit.  I’d been in a coma all that time.  Turns out that I had been battling a growing infection in my spinal column and ultimately in my brain, a condition called encephalitic meningitis.  It had all but killed me.  Literally. At least once, the doctors taking care of me had pulled my wife aside and told her that I likely wouldn’t survive, and if I did, I was probably going to be severely brain damaged.

I spent a bit more than a month in the hospital.  For much of that time, I couldn’t write my own name.  I couldn’t follow a storyline on the television.  I couldn’t read the books people brought me.

What saved me was a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law.  He brought me one of those kid pencil puzzle books, the ones with mazes and logical puzzles aimed at the under-10 set.  It was all my brain could handle, and slowly, painfully, it taught me how to think again.

The ironic bit in all of this, of course, is that I’d spent a great deal of time researching encephalitic meningitis in 2001 as background for my novel From the Hands of Hostile Gods.  You’d think I’d have recognized the symptoms, but it honestly never crossed my mind.

I didn’t write any fiction from January 2003 to October of 2004.  Not a word.  I didn’t even try.

Why?  Because I was terrified.  Terrified that I’d lost the ability to write.

Agnosis is my attempt to regain what was lost.  How to tell a story.  How to write.  How to live inside my own mind and my own narrative without losing myself into a false construction of reality.

I was terrified of losing myself in the world of the coma again.  But more than that, I was afraid that at the end, I’d have to face up to the reality that I just couldn’t do it anymore.  That I’d lost the ability to write stories.

I don’t remember a great deal about this novel.  I’m vague on how the plot works.  I don’t remember a good many of the characters.  I haven’t read it since I finished editing it in January 2005.

To be completely straight with you, I don’t think I ever will.  It is what it is, whatever it turns out to be.  It is the end of my innocence.

I hope you enjoy it.

A book length manuscript gets a 3rd polish about two weeks after the entire rough draft is done to clean up what I’ve identified as bad, unclear, choppy writing. This is when I also fix things like spelling, grammar and formatting errors.

I do a 4th draft for continuity and more language polish.

Those are written in stone. Some sections of a work may be scrapped and re-written a dozen times or more depending on how unhappy I am with them. I’ve been known to spend thirty-six straight hours on six or seven pages that I just can’t get right and can’t let go. This is not something I would recommend to anyone, because I usually just end up throwing those efforts away after they’ve been completely wrecked and/or had the life squeezed out of them.

Anyway, for the morbidly curious, I thought I’d show you what a typical manuscript looks like between drafts two and three (i.e., the first “real” edit, as I think of it). The pages linked below are images from a novel called Agnosis, which is the next in queue to be blogged here.

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Good writing is good editing.

D.