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The second-person narrator, Balram Halwai, is a boy who wipes tables in a bakery in a poor village in India – a bakery his grandfather once owned but which was seized by a rich person. His father now pedals a … Continue reading
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The revision of “Robin,” the second android novel, is done. It’s a big improvement over the first draft, but it’s obvious there will be another re-write. As is my style, the story is too complex and I struggle to write … Continue reading
An astronaut is injured in a dust storm on Mars. His crewmates give him up for dead and head home. Miraculously, he survives (some extreme hand-waving is needed to explain that). He makes it to the inflated canvas habitat left … Continue reading
I’m still struggling to focus my latest android story on my lead character, Robin, one of two androids. I’ve put her on stage more frequently and tried to keep the spotlight on her. I changed an important dramatic crisis by … Continue reading
This sci-fi adventure gets points for creativity. A small crew from earth investigates an alien ship somewhere out in the Oort cloud. The stimulating questions include, how would you communicate with aliens, and, what are the aliens like? Usually in … Continue reading
I finished the synthetic outline of my latest android novel. That’s an outline made after-the-fact, by writing a brief synopsis of each of the 33 chapters. In reviewing it, I discovered redundancies, excesses, omissions, and nonsequiturs. Redundantly, I had refuted … Continue reading
Six characters write diaries and letters, along with the transcript of a conversation, all presented in rotation. There are no dramatic scenes in real time, and no plot. Everything is remembered and told from afar through a haze of maudlin emotion. … Continue reading
I’ve broken my own rule about letting a new manuscript marinate for a couple of months. My recently completed android novel was calling out to me from the darkness of its disk drive. It lacks a traditional story structure and I thought … Continue reading
This “Bible” is very informative, detailed, well-organized and accessible; more comprehensive and with a wider range of examples than Syd Field’s classic, Screenplay. On the other hand, it’s nearly 500 pages of 8.5” x 11” text, so it’s formidable. Despite … Continue reading
The characters in my latest android story did not want to quit. It took longer than I anticipated to tie up loose ends and bring the thematic material to a conclusion. I ended at 77,500 words, about what I’d had … Continue reading