Five Things I Learned Writing Aquarius
Rising
by Brian Burt
For years, Brian Burt stuck to the instant gratification of
writing short speculative fiction. He couldn't really decide what kind he liked
the best, so he wrote a smattering of science fiction, fantasy, and dark
fantasy shading towards horror. During this period of aimless literary wandering,
he encountered one obstacle again and again: his short stories always seemed
just a bit longer than the maximum
word length accepted by most target markets.
Realizing that if brevity is the soul of wit, he's fairly
witless, he decided to ignore his instinctive terror of long-term commitment
and try his hand at a full-length novel. In fact, he even had the gall to
contemplate a three-novel trilogy. And so, the Aquarius Rising novels were born, tracing the adventures of a race
of human-dolphin hybrids who have built their reef communities on the bones of
drowned coastal human cities in the wake of catastrophic global warming.
Here
are five lessons Brian learned while laboring in the fictional universe of the
Aquarians.
1. RESEARCH IS FUN BUT NEEDS TO END
As a landlocked Midwesterner who has only lived near an ocean
shoreline on a couple of brief occasions, I knew I needed to do my homework in
preparation for writing a novel (or three novels) where most of the action
takes place beneath the waves. Before starting Aquarius Rising 1: In the Tears of God, I compiled a massive amount
of notes, read tons of nonfiction tomes on the sea and marine creatures, lurked
on online forums aimed primarily at marine scientists, watched so many ocean
exploration documentaries that my eyes started to bleed, and generally obsessed
over all of the things I didn't know
about life in the sea. I enjoy learning new things; that's half the fun of
writing science fiction. But, no matter how much time and effort I expended, I
wasn't going to become a bona fide expert on marine biology or oceanography.
That's when I had to take a deep, healing breath and remind
myself why I love speculative
fiction: we get to build and explore new worlds that live only in our twisted
imaginations. Sure, it's important to get the basic facts right whenever
possible, but we're not writing textbooks, we're writing tales that stretch the
boundaries of what we think we know.
Good speculative fiction imparts its own brand of truth.
2. PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE... AND
WRITERS ARE VIRTUOUS
Well, at least we get plenty of practice in mastering the art of
patience after submitting a novel to a prospective agent, editor, or publisher.
I learned quickly that most markets don't accept simultaneous submissions,
don't much care for unsolicited (unagented) manuscripts, and can take something
on the order of geologic time scales to respond to your query letter or sample
chapters, much less the entire manuscript if that's requested. It can literally
take a year or more to get a reply before you're free to try your luck
somewhere else. Ouch.
On the positive side, this provides plenty of opportunity to
work on other writing projects to keep a tenuous grip on your sanity while
you're waiting, with an odd mixture of hope and despair, to hear back from that
latest publishing house. In the end, when you get the acceptance letter, you
lie to yourself and say "that wasn't so bad!"
3. WRITING IS HARD, BUT MARKETING
IS HARDER
I was pretty proud of myself for finishing that first novel,
finding a publisher, and seeing the book released on Amazon and other online bookstores.
I then learned a harsh reality of the modern marketplace: there are a million
new books published every year. Self-publishing and eBooks are wonderful,
empowering technologies for writers, but they have a down side. Even when you
wade through the slush pile of submissions and slog your way to publication,
you've just released your literary creation into yet another slush pile — the
explosion of digital content. It's incredibly difficult to raise your novel's
signal above the deafening background noise of all those other choices that
assault your potential readers' senses. My publisher repeatedly emphasizes to his
entire stable of authors that "marketing and promotion are as much your
job as writing the book in the first place." In today's ultra-competitive
market, publishers don't have the budget to handle promotion for every title.
Honestly, this is an area with which I still struggle mightily;
it's not my strength. I'm learning the hard way. Traditional paid advertising
for fiction books rarely pays off. Building your "online platform"
via social media channels like FaceBook, Twitter, and Goodreads takes considerable
time, energy, and effort. Thousands of other gifted writers are working their
tails (and tales ;-) off to attract attention to their own works.
It can be daunting for any new novelist and can feel like an
uphill battle... or maybe an assault on Everest. Sometimes I yearn for simpler
times, when I submitted a short story to an eZine and the magazine editors /
publishers took care of marketing their story collections, leaving us writers
to focus all our energy on writing. But that's not how the real world of book
publishing works. Finding the right balance between writing new stories and
marketing existing ones is both art and science... so it should be right up a
science fiction author's alley, right?
4. IF YOU WRITE A NOVEL, YOU'RE AN
AUTHOR
After my first novel was released, and friends and colleagues
congratulated me on "making it" as a writer, I developed a pretty
severe case of impostor syndrome. I knew
I wasn't burning up any bestseller lists; I wasn't a household name. Every
compliment, however well-intentioned, made me feel like an utter fraud.
Then I read some comments from fellow writers that finally
(after many repetitions) sank in. If you write, you're a writer. If you publish,
you're an author. Maybe not a bestselling author, or an independently wealthy
author... but you're an author. Say it loud, say it proud — nobody can take that away from you!
5. TAKE CHANCES AND PLAY THE LONG
SHOTS
As a rookie novelist, I felt a bit overwhelmed when requesting
book reviews or considering entry in contests. It was my first attempt.
Honestly, how many of us look back on our first attempt at anything and feel like we nailed it? When another author at Double
Dragon (my publisher) mentioned EPIC (the Electronic Publishing Industry
Coalition) and their annual eBook competition, my first thought was "probably
a waste of time."
But I reconsidered. If nothing else, it would be a learning
experience. The odds were long... but so were the odds of getting published in
the first place. I submitted Aquarius
Rising 1: In the Tears of God, put the contest out of my mind, and got back
to work on Aquarius Rising 2: Blood Tide.
A number of months later, I received a notification that my
novel was a finalist in the Science Fiction category. Sweet! I was excited but
figured that would be the end of it. Then, a few months after that, I received
a congratulatory message that I had won the category.
The odds are long in fiction publishing today. There's immense
competition, literally hundreds of thousands of choices. But somebody gets the
publishing deal; somebody wins the award. Why not you?
Author Bio:
Brian Burt writes both short and novel-length speculative
fiction. He's published more than twenty science fiction and fantasy stories in
various magazines and anthologies. His short story "The Last Indian
War" won the Writers of the Future Gold Award and was anthologized in Writers of the Future Volume VIII. His
debut novel, Aquarius Rising 1: In the Tears of God, won EPIC's 2014 eBook Award for Science Fiction. Aquarius Rising 2: Blood Tide
was recently released by Double Dragon Publishing, and Aquarius Rising 3:
The Price of Eden is undergoing final revisions. Brian works as a
cybersecurity engineer and lives with his wife, three sons, a corn snake, a
panda-colored cat, and an aging white German shepherd in idyllic Plainwell,
Michigan. The dog, in particular, remains unimpressed with his literary efforts
unless they come with bacon. You can
sample Brian's writing at http://www.briantburt.com
or follow him on FaceBook, Twitter, or Goodreads.
Book Blurb: In the Tears of God
On an Earth ravaged by climate change, and a disastrous attempt
to reverse it, human-dolphin hybrids called Aquarians have built thriving reef
colonies among the drowned cities of the coast.
Now their world is under siege from an enemy above the waves whose
invisible weapon leaves no survivors. Ocypode of Tillamook is an Atavism:
half-human and half-Aquarian, marooned in the genetic limbo between
species. Only he knows why the colonies
north and south of Tillamook Reef have been destroyed, literally turned to
stone. Ocypode knows that Tillamook will
be targeted next, but sharing the reason might prove as deadly to Aquarius as
the Medusa plague itself.
Amazon Buy Link
(Creative Switchboard Operator note: I am reading this book: Aquarius Rising Book One, and it is superb writing and story-telling. And, no, Brian didn't pay me a million dollars to say this. Well, not yet anyway. LOL)
Megalops is an Aquarian from one of the many reef-cities that
thrive beneath the waves on an Earth transformed by climate change. Humans
clinging to the barren lands blame Aquarius for their plight and unleashed the
Medusa Plague that entombed Megalops's wife and daughter in stone. Tormented by that loss, Megalops swears to
avenge his murdered family by unleashing a Vendetta Virus as cruel and lethal
as Medusa. Ocypode the Atavism and his allies battle desperate odds to prevent
Megalops from igniting global conflict.
War demands sacrifice. If Mother
Earth and Mother Ocean wage war against each other, will anyone survive?
Amazon Buy Link
