Happy Sunday!
, it has been quite a while since I sent my last update, and really, I guess it's because I didn't want to flood your inbox for no reason until I had something solid to give.
Today is that day.
Part One: New Book Cover, Quick Overview, and Beta Readers!
I want you, yes, you. I want you to become my beta reader for the huge rewrite of my first story, Afterworld: The Haunted Realm Beyond Our Stars. If you've been with me since the beginning, you know I've worked on this book, tinkered here and there with it, cut a lot of fluff and junk, and so much more. But this time I gave it life. I took my first story, which I was afraid to kill, if you will, and broke it down, expanded scenes, and rewrote others.
Leon D. Michaels opens his eyes to the roar of chaotic wind. Free-falling through a starless sky, he quickly realizes two terrifying truths: this isn't a dream, and he is dead.
But the afterlife is no paradise. Plunging into a freezing ocean beneath two strange moons, Leon enters Afterworld—a brutal dimension where unfathomable horrors have knocked humanity to the bottom of the food chain. Here, human souls are little more than livestock, traded as currency for consumption and gain.
Arriving at a volcanic slave camp is only Leon's first taste of hell. His real challenge comes when a desperate resistance drags him into a shadow war against cosmic overlords, where Earth’s forgotten legends, armed with advanced weapons and powered by the knowledge of the afterlife, fight back. To survive in a realm where Dark Gods linger and morality is a luxury, Leon must forge himself into a weapon. Humanity might be on the menu, but he refuses to be prey.
Cover Art by Dzmitry Zasimovich.
If you're sold and want to start reading to provide me some much-needed feedback so I can do that final polish before sending it off to my editor, you can stop now and click the link above. The rewrite sits around 94,000 words and is currently 62,000/94000 ready to read (I'm adding more chapters daily after my final beta-ready tinkers.); however, if you want to get a little more background on the process and Afterworld's transition, continue onward!
Part Two: The Failures of a Fresh Author
What triggered the rewrite was a culmination of a few different things. Earlier this year, I was working with Nick Russ, an outstanding and talented musician, an overall cool dude, and the audiobook narrator for the series. During the process and going in and moving around the audio to match with the other voice actors' voices for the full cast production, I started to hate it. Not the story itself, and certainly not the actors, who have all done a phenomenal job. No, I'm talking about the writing. Certain parts were alright, but then other parts were just barely holding the pages together.
My first edition of Afterworld had around 92,000 words. I published it in April 2020. Out of all my books, this one has always given me the most difficulty. Even in the first stages of printing, I had somehow accidentally set it so that the page numbers appeared in the spine. There are only a few of those copies out there in the world, rare collector's pieces, ha.
Eventually, I think it was after I completed the first edition of The Ripper that I went back and edited this story. The problem is that while the prose somewhat improved, and some of the fluff was cut, the story continued to shrink. My most recent fifth edition (no longer available for sale in any format outside second-hand shops) landed at around 69,000 words (including the back matter, etc.) The problem should have been obvious. The book was bare-bones. I couldn't have just cut it and everything be hunky-dory; I had to do more.
First edition cover art by James G. Robertson.
Part Three: The Rewrite and What Changed.
Beyond my musings about the audiobook, there was something else that happened: a certain book had opened its pages to me, and opened my mind in a way I can't quite explain.
Salem's Lot. I'm still doing a thorough read-through of King's works, and the current book I'm going through is The Shining, but there was something special about Salem's Lot that changed my writing for the better. After the first edition of Afterworld, I had looked into improving my writing and came across a simple idea: show, don't tell. This sparked the idea in my mind that: Oh, all I need to do is show what the characters are doing. Aha, I've got it. "Leon saw a giant ant crawling on the bed." That's all I was missing. I'm showing! No, my sweet past self, no.
What I was doing, and what you should know if you intend to write fiction stories, is that this is actually called filtering. I was filtering the experience of what the reader should already know. If we are locked into a character's POV, we don't need to say x saw something. We can instead write it like: 'A giant ant crept across the sheet, one of its antennae crooked and dragging. Its guts streaked the white linen. It'd be dead before it crossed over the edge of the bed.'
That's just a short example, but I think that gives you an idea of showing is really creating an experience—a perspective. It shouldn't be "Show vs Tell" it should be "Experiencing vs Filtering". A good story, certainly in this half of the century, should be about providing an immersive experience for the reader. I'm thankful for King, for though I've read many of his other works, it wasn't until Salem's Lot (and thinking about my own writing of Afterworld) that I learned this important lesson.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! Hopefully, my next newsletter won't be so far out, but my goal for the year is to finish the rewrite for Afterworld and tackle the final rewrite for Merlin's Crucible. I've always taken my writing seriously, putting hundreds and thousands of hours into the process. But now, I think I've got the knowledge to succeed.
As always, stay posted, and I hope to get your beta reader request using the button above or this link:
https://storyoriginapp.com/betacopies/01a0bfdf-3490-72ac-a0af-2c6e4f52fc7e
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