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November 15, 2005

Umbra Breaks 50K!

This has been a long, long time coming: today the UMBRA manuscript ticked over the magic 50,000-word mark. This, at least in theory, means I'm about halfway through the book. And, at the current rate of about 1000 words per session--an achievable quantity on a regular basis--means I could be done in about 50 more work days. How many actual days that works out to, I could not say. But I could be done sometime early next year after about six months work.

If you've been reading my earlier posts about the book's progress, you know I've been plagued by all kinds of doubts and misgivings about it and about myself. All along I've held to this lofty ideal: if I can just crack 50K, I might have something. Way, way back when I was just a dumb teenager learning how to write novels on my own, and working on an Imperial 202 portable typewriter, amid daunting piles of finished pages, 50K was a goal so remote, so practically crazy ("why, no man on Earth could possibly climb a mountain 50,000 words high! It's surely suicide even to try!"), that it also had a kind of mad allure. I worked out my average words per page, divided the magic number by this words/page figure, and knew that when I hit Page 250 in a double-spaced manuscript, it would be time to break out the bubbly--no, wait, I was only a kid. Okay, it was time to break out the red cordial. It was a big deal.

I'm hoping the magic still holds, and the next 50K goes a bit easier than this first 50K. So far, it looks promising. I've just set off a major plot bomb, and the frustrated protagonist is finding himself in deeper and deeper trouble. In the next chapter or two more plot bombs will be going off, which should bring things to a nice head. So I'm not short of story to write. Sometimes it's more about, "geez, how do I cover all this material in a rational manner?" than about, "Ack! What happens next?"

* * *

Last week, Publicity Whiz Janice got in touch to ask if I could produce a short (under 500 words) synopsis or blurb for HYDROGEN STEEL right away. Hmm. So I went away, tried to write a synopsis that covered the whole story in under 500 words--and got to 450 words and found I was still dealing with stuff from chapter three. So I junked the "tell the whole story" stuff, and wrote a snappy blurb instead. The story has some humourous bits, so the blurb reflects that. Here it is...

HYDROGEN STEEL—short synopsis

When retired top homicide inspector Zette McGee, late of Winter City, Ganymede, gets called out of her mysterious retirement to help Kell Fallow, a desperate former android accused unjustly of murdering his wife and children, she knows she has to help him, for Zette has a secret she is desperate to keep, and Fallow knows all about it.

With the help of her best friend, the elderly but very suave former secret agent Gideon Smith, and his ridiculously impressive personal starship, the Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Zette sets out (a) to help the accused man, but also (b) to keep Gideon from finding out her own awful secret, even as everything they learn in the investigation keeps pointing to it.

But when Kell Fallow is killed by a bomb he didn't know was buried in his guts, and when a homebrew android identical to Zette destroys her home on the luxurious Serendipity habitat, Gideon and Zette go on the run, only to run afoul of sabotage, spies, nasty infections, bad guys galore, and ordinary machines come to relentless, murderous life.

The case will take Zette and Gideon on a terrifying journey into the darkest reaches of human space, in pursuit of an ancient truth--and will bring her into deadly contact with that truth's keeper, the awesomely powerful firemind, Hydrogen Steel, an artificial consciousness evolved far beyond its original design, and which is utterly determined to keep that same truth from getting out, at any cost.

Hydrogen Steel is a tense and thrilling mystery within a mystery, a tale of secrets and truth, and a journey to the limits of existence--and a bit beyond!

Posted by adrian at November 15, 2005 05:50 PM

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Posted by: pastamasta at November 26, 2005 12:29 AM

Posted by: David S. at November 17, 2005 05:45 AM

Posted by: Charlie at November 15, 2005 11:18 PM

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