In my circle of friends and family, I am fortunate to know an electrical and a mechanical engineer, as well as an IT professional who owns his own small business. I say I am fortunate in this regard because I primarily write science fiction, and in my genre knowledge can lead to very dynamic and rich writing. The quality of a written work often depends in large part on the quality of the sources being referenced. This is the same whether writing a graduate thesis or a full length novel. The fact is the facts matter.

Setting aside surrealism and abstract thinking, when a skilled artist paints something, they do it with references, or material facts. They go visit the terrain they are painting, they have a subject in a chair or standing on a platform, the look at photographs to gain information. All of this happens before they even put down the first brush stroke. Comic book artists making doodles still use small models to draw the human form. Writing, whether academic or artistic, is the same. It can't exist without a foundation. It needs something to attach to, a baseline that your readership can operate in, and that can only come from research through various sources.

Let's talk about something nobody likes to touch on: money. Specifically, earning money from publishing your writing. As my first novel gets closer to release, I've had many opportunities to consider to myself what price point I will set when it's time to click the magic button and publish to the world. There have been many studies by various individuals and groups, and many people will advise that books priced at $4.99 sell far better than those priced higher or lower. There are many legitimate factors for this reason, and I'm not here to argue against any of them. Instead, I'm going to put forward a sales strategy that I have grappled with myself: do I give my book away for free?

Yes, everyone wants to be rewarded for their hard work, and they should be. Writing a manuscript, editing, designing a cover, editing some more--all these things take time and effort. Ultimately, however, you need people to be exposed to your book, or you're not going to move any copy. This is particularly true when facing the reality of ebook publishing. Accessibility means you can post your masterpiece. It also means that there are fifty people before you posting what they feel is their masterpiece. It's easy to get lost in the noise. And if they're all $4.99, and all have similar characteristics, who's to say which one will rise to the top? The fact of the matter is that when you are starting out, you have no base, no audience. It's your job to construct one, and it gets done one reader at a time, which means that, ultimately, what you are after is exposure, not profit. You want sales numbers to drive your visibility, and you want reviews to come in quickly, especially since online purchases are rely so heavily on them in this day and age.

But wait, you say, when can I make my millions from my masterpiece? Let me put this forward to you instead: how much money is your book making you right now, and would you still be writing regardless of profit? Some people will only write if they know they will make money, and that's fine, but I think that for many people, their self expression will lead to their continued involvement in writing. And these same people (being you and I and so many others) have made exactly zero dollars off of our work. So what do you have to lose in giving your work away? You're going to write again, you're going to have another book out, and by that point you will (hopefully) have a readership awaiting your new work, shaking their money at their monitor or smartphone, hoping to speed up the release. Sacrifice upfront will reap gains further on. Even better, many ebook publishers and distributors now offer the ability to make coupon codes, and this gives you even more flexibility in building your readership. Why, who's to say your first book shouldn't be priced at $4.99, but for everyone who reads your website or follows you on Twitter, you provide for them a coupon code that gets them the book for free? And it is this last strategy that I find most compelling in both flexibility and buzz. For that reason, I'm going to go ahead and say at this point, keep reading my blog, follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, and you will be offered a coupon code to get my debut novel, "Jupiter Symphony," for $0.00.

A.C. Harrison
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Pssst... are you here because you've been following this blog and want to know about the promise I kept to give away my book for free? Head to Smashwords and use coupon code NC74E, good through the 28th of September. Do me a favor, though? Leave a review when you're done; that would be great!

This blog posting was already on my list of articles to write, but events of the past weekend jumped it to the head of the queue. The photo you're looking at is the interior of a close friend's house, almost completely consumed by a fire. Everyone got out and nobody was injured; many of the family heirlooms also survived. What struck me about the event was how it nearly destroyed the legacy of the man who lived in this house. This friend is a professional writer, one who has done so for a lifetime and is successful in his trade. Most of his articles and books are stored in soft copy on two computers he keeps in the house, and they were both very nearly consumed by the flames. Hindsight is 20/20, and in this case my friend will now be backing up his work and placing more of his items in the cloud, but it doesn't take a life threatening event to prompt this change.

The original concept for this article was in regards to saving time, but I want to also encompass redundancy, for obvious reasons. When I write, I do so in a shared medium (such as Google docs). For those of you who do not know, writing is not my day job, nor is it my night job. In fact, I don't get paid to write, but I do because I love it. Maybe some day it will become lucrative enough that I can write full time, but for now I am only getting my feet wet and enjoying the process of developing new stories. Because I have to do my 40 hours a week at a corporation, I found a best practice in hosting my manuscript online, which allowed me to work on my book even if I only had ten minutes of time. Now, obviously writing on a phone can be clunky and annoying, and later on my manuscript became too large for my phone to load (100,000+ words). But, I couldn't have reached that state if I had not jumped on opportunities when they presented themselves. What it boils down to is this: if you have the goal of writing, ask yourself what you have done today to work towards that goal. One of the ways you can do so, one of the ways in which you can be the best writer possible, is to make sure you can access your work wherever and whenever you want to.

On top of my manuscript, I kept several other files online where I would make small notes, explore plot ideas, and jot down things that struck me as being relevant to my work. Again, no matter where I was, I could either input to this list or retrieve information to integrate into my novel. Accessibility is key. You may not always be motivated to write (although I recommend you still do), but when the moment strikes, why not have your text with you?

After the events of the weekend, clearly the other factor is preserving your work. A fire is a terrible thing, and obviously quite deadly, but something as simple as a spilled glass of tea could put the kibosh on whatever it is you were working on. There are sometimes issues of security to deal with, but in general you are better off having your work stored somewhere offsite. This could even be a friend's computer at another residence, so long as you regularly back up the files. In this way, you won't have to pray that the hard drive on your laptop makes it one more weekend, so help me God. Your work is unique and important. Treat it as such. Put it in a digital museum, away from disaster. Make it so that when inspiration strikes, your novel is at your fingertips and you are writing before that flash of inspiration flickers and fades away. It's 2013. Write as such.

I think this one goes without saying, but I do want to touch on the topic and really drive home the importance of editing. When it comes to writing, next to getting started, the single hardest thing is editing a work. Certainly a writer should read and reread his own work to ensure that there are no errors, but what I'm discussing goes far beyond just grammar and spelling checks. A novel is a representation of the writer, it is how he or she interacts with the world. Just as in the business world, there are people who come in to work dressed professionally, and there are those that show up wearing whatever they crashed in on Sunday night. In the realm of writing, there are those that take time to be exacting in their work, and there are those that simply slap text on a page and call it good. Now, the latter in many cases can have excellent ideas and fantastic dialogue, but which one do you think gets read end to end? Hint: it's not the guy who's been in the same job for ten years.

Now, I'm not recommending you hire a professional editor, and I'm not saying I agree with the practice of "beta readers," by which a book is sent to ten, twenty, or even fifty people to be read and reviewed before publishing. Professional editors can cost a pretty penny, and (to me) beta reading is similar to the practice carried out in the movie industry of using test audiences, which have on more than one occasion ruined a perfectly good film. What I am saying is that you need to get your work in front of people who will be honest and offer constructive feedback that improves your narrative, pushing you further than you would normally be able to go.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague, during which I made an offhand comment about writing and made suggestions on how I ultimately figured out what novel I was going to write, even if I didn't necessarily know where it was going to go.

This individual knows I've been writing creatively, and that I finished my first manuscript, to which he stated that he "could never do that." Hogwash. I gave him the "write what you know" shtick as a rebuttal. Crucially, I detailed to him how I had exactly started, only afterwards realizing that I had never really before taken the time to analyze my own writing process.

Obviously everyone functions differently, but for the people who want to write a manuscript and don't know where to begin, I humbly offer the method that carried me through.

I'm not joking when I say write what you love, but there's more to it than that. I'm not a very structured person, but I find a loose and flexible framework allows me to head towards a goal, while permitting me still play around and not feel so constrained that I abandon the project. In the case of my first novel, I knew the genre I wanted to write in (science fiction), as well as the sub-genre (cyberpunk). Then I simply made a list of all the things I wanted to have in my cyberpunk story. Not a list of plot devices or characters, but things that I, in my childish brain, thought would be cool to have. I'll even embarrass myself and put the list at the bottom of this article (it evolved as I added to it in my writing). It didn't matter if I used some, all, or none of these items, only that they were there and they started giving me a foundation to work in. I could refer back to it when stuck and find an element that needed touching on, allowing me to move forward.

The second step was to take these elements and put them in an environment, which was actually constructed from the same list. In this case, it was a post-apocalyptic America, which had suffered a terrorist attack and was now economically ruined and politically unbalanced. Now there were pieces in motion, and as a writer I had a playground to work in.

The third step, now that I had a foundation, was to think up a character and put him in the environment. I was not even certain this was the main character (he turned out to be), but that didn't matter. I needed to explore my own universe. So I gave him a job, that of water scavenger, and a quirk, the goggles he wears, through which he views the post-apocalyptic universe.

The last step was much easier: I wrote. I explored the character, gave him a vector. Once given a vector, I found my character running into challenges, and that's when new characters would form, because interaction had become necessary, and the vacuum of the early universe began to fade as it became populated with lives, giving me a story. Of course, there were times when I would get stuck or change my mind, but the important part was to have that momentum. I feel people get too hung up on character creation, on minutia, on trivial details that ultimately do not do anything to tell a story. Yes, it's fantastic your character has a fully charted family lineage, and his residence is completely mapped out and detailed, and his physical characteristics are meticulously drawn. But what does he do? He has no purpose, no interaction, no vector. And that, for me, is where I found my story.

One last note, as I give everything away to my clamoring audience. In my writing I also had to reflect on myself to determine what kind of worker I was. I'll detail more later about how I overcame my inherent laziness, but more than that, I knew that this project would befall the fate of so many others unless I owned up to the fact that I edit my own works to death. I read, and reread, and re-reread, but I don't write. I lose my momentum, my vectors. So, in bold letters, in size 24 font, smack dab at the top of my novel was a note to myself: DO NOT READ, JUST WRITE. It worked.


The List:

What do you feel passionate about that can be expressed in the cyberpunk genre?
Border crime and illegals, as well as possible solutions. (this will be in commentary on the past)
Class warfare.
Federal worthlessness.
Gun control.
Climate change (global warming and possible ice age; might even have drought be a background plot point, followed by the relief of an ice age coming at the end, symbolically)

Things you want to include:
- predictions for evolution of the internet
- prevalence of portable devices
- power armor
- music?
- cybernetics
- genetics
- economics
- What year? 2120?
- lack of fossil fuels?
- megacorps
- flechette rounds, gyrojet
- some conspiracy, government or corporate, that has to be discovered and stopped
- incredulousness as to how things were (are now IRL)
- complacency led to our downfall; it has to come from within; rotten core
- border drug trade even larger with collapse of law enforcement > could lead to increased border militarization; drugs now supplied by the government?
- water trade > almost like drug dealing > involve character at start?
- terrorist/conspiracy government nuclear emp attack -- called “The Long Night;” millions die; marshal law
- Rogue general/colonel running own operation? Trying to reform US as he thinks is appropriate. Hard right commentary
- Does Ash die? What other characters are there? Is Ash even the main character?
- Does someone find, read, write a manifesto? Too didactic?
- Feds trying to locate command center for orbital weapons platform? Location information lost in Long Night? Could use for variety of purposes, including wiping out nomads, fringe groups, protests, etc.
- Ash as immigrant persona when coming into the city; looked down on negatively