Summer Schedule

Fractals of Change is going on its summer schedule of two or three posts per week instead of the five I have been doing. Actually, summer is just an excuse to let me make time to get my book finished.

The first draft of the book – an historical murder mystery set in the last Internet bubble – is done. But there is a lot of hard work left.

I’m finding that editing a mystery is a lot like debugging. Some of the stuff you wrote in the beginning doesn’t work right with the stuff you wrote at the end. Moreover, the pesky subroutines (aka characters) insist on doing their own thing.  The personalities of fictional characters really do develop as you write about them and sometimes the characters can’t be credibly coerced into doing what would be convenient for the plot.

Editing a mystery is also like one of those poker games where players turn over their cards one at a time with a round of betting after each card turn. You try to arrange the exposure of facts in the novel so that most readers are still not sure of the outcome until the final page has been turned.

Then there’s a lot more stuff to make a book a product. These days it needs a website. Of course we (“we” is marketing maven Mary, my wife and partner) are working with the same people we turned to whenever we started a business for that: David Zahn at Signalz and the talented graphic artist Pat Bertha.

We’re thinking about whether podcasting is a distribution mechanism for an audio version of the book and whether an audio version for this book, which has lots of dialog, should have actors reading dialog rather than just a narrator.

And, of course, snippets of the book as well as news about the book could well find their way onto this blog.

BTW, I know the title; I’m just not telling yet.