Beyond the Farthest Star – Comments

Over the past week or so I’ve spent a lot of time revising the manuscript for Stryker #4, Beyond the Farthest Star. I had written up through chapter 30, and then I just got stuck. It turned out that going back and revising the book was the right thing to do – I now know how to finish the story.

Re-reading the book also revealed that it was not the disaster I had feared. It’s a much better story than I had remembered. I had been reluctant to finish the book because I was concerned that it was a real mess. It’s actually not that bad – there are a lot of good parts in it. I think the book is worth finishing.

In some ways I think I’ve been too hard on the Stryker books. The first book I ever wrote was Final Destination. It was actually an adaptation of a computer game that I’d written. The book had glaring problems, but it did have an interesting story. It was my first try at writing, and as they say, you have to start somewhere.

After writing Final Destination I began work on the first Stryker book, On the Edge of Eternity. That book, though, is just the first part in a five-part series – so one could make the case that the entire Stryker series is just my second novel.

I think one can see a huge leap in quality between Final Destination and the Stryker series. Pretty much everything is better – the story is better, the plot is more intricate, the scope of the story is far greater, the characters are better, etc. Yes, it’s not perfect, but it’s really a giant leap forward – and as they say, you learn by doing.

There’s an excellent chance that whatever I write after I finish the Stryker series will be quite a bit better. Writing the Stryker books has taught me a great deal about writing. The next time I do this I’m going to take a very different approach – one that I hope will be much more successful.

I’ve considered trying to apply these lessons to the Stryker books, but to be honest, if I had known these things five years ago I would never have written them in the first place. I’m just going to finish the Stryker books as they are and then go on to something new.

For example:

* Don’t write books where the hero is a teenage girl. I don’t konw the first thing about teenage girls. That was a terrible, terrible mistake.

* I’m pretty good at writing narration, but very poor at dialog. Whatever I do next should focus more on my strenghts, and less on my weaknesses.

* Don’t write a 500,000-word epic that takes place across 5000 years of history. Try to write something smaller and more narrowly-focused. Big stories are hard to read and almost impossible to write – and a real pain to finish. A 50,000 word book is far more doable than one ten times that long.

* If you want to explore spiritual themes in a book, a great way to do that is through conflict. If there’s no spiritual conflict then you’re just not going to get very far. I did this well in The Key; in the Stryker books it has been a huge struggle.

* Don’t write science fiction books. Nobody likes to read them, and they get outdated very quickly by the pace of technological discoveries. Fantasy is a much better field to explore.

* Avoid starting a series of books. Writing a series, instead of a single novel, is a huge mental drain. Finishing a series takes years and years of time, during which you’re stuck working on the same story.

Anyway, work has begun on Stryker #4 once more. At some point I’ll post the rest of the chapters, and then a link to download the entire manuscript. I’ve gone back and made significant changes to the end of the book, so I’ll be reposting a few sections.

Thanks!