Plot: the last ten percent is the hardest.

I've just reached the point in writing my eighth novel, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' where it starts to get really hard.

The last ten percent is the hardest in terms of logic and persuasion. It is vital to weave together the threads of the narrative, and take all the characters that were developed separately in early chapters and bring them together in a climactic solution to the problems set them by the narrative. All of these people have been brought to this point, at this particular place and time, under this particular set of circumstances. No matter how ribald and absurd, it must have sufficent logic to satisfy the reader. They have to be able to follow along.

This is where control comes in, and how we end up with a wedding or something.

Oh, yeah, baby. This is defintely the climax of the book!

I slow right down. I daydream a lot. And yet at the same time, my mental gatekeeping is a lot better than it was two or three years ago. I don't write anything I don't have to. While the attitude may be different if an author was shooting for a 100,000 word manuscript, what I am doing now, is finishing the plot.

I want to get to the end of the plot.

I'm shooting for 60,000 words, which is all it takes to call it a 'novel.'

If someone asked you for an estimate for 32,000 square feet of drywall board, would you offer them an estimate for 45,000 square feet and a microwave oven? If someone wanted a 2,500 square-foot roof done, would you ask your crew to put a few shingles on the house next door while they were at it?

("Not I," said the cat.)

What I need to do is to hit the end of my plot at about 60,000 words. At this point, 59,990 would be okay too, as the next step is re-writing, and that's when a lot of detail will be added in. This novel has no need to go over 70,000 words.

This is a comedy. It's not 'War and Peace.'

This is where we earn the big bucks, because from this point on, is where most manuscripts fail. This is where most beginning authors fail--they get 90 % of a book done. Then they start to worry about what other people think if they don't get it exactly right. This is why the wedding is so important--the book wouldn't get done otherwise.

Somehow we have to get the people to the wedding, and the only way we can do it is to write them there...getting people to where they must be on time is like planning a wedding, or anything else involving time, motion, and space, from multiple points of view.

That's why I don't want to write too much. It makes my job a lot simpler. My head only has so much capacity.

It's not nececesary to write about a wedding with three hundred guests. Too much happened, there are too many stories and too many perspectives. This particular story, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' has maybe twenty characters, and I only introduce a crowd, 'people walking down a street,' or 'people at a wedding,' if I really need it.

Excerpt: 'On the Nature of the Gods,' a steampunk weird western.

The following is a scene from what is clearly a very silly book indeed.


After a confab with the equine members of the party, the two men and Hope went back into the hotel. There were a few bleary-eyed patrons in the wide expanse of barroom, but the piano player was slumped across the keys in an alcohol-induced comatose condition. The bartender was nowhere to be seen and Hope wondered if he was asleep on the floor behind the bar. Either that or out in the privy abusing himself, she thought. Gripping the handrail tightly as they made their way up the narrow stairs, she longed for sleep, the last refuge of the truly unhappy.

Her room was first on the right, and she pointedly slammed the door upon entry.

She flung her clothes off, not caring where they landed, and slumped into her lumpy bed, a straw tick of about two and half inches thick, very itchy as all the ones out here were stuffed with bad hay and pinon nuts.

While there was still the distant rumble of talk from below, for the most part silence reigned, and she was just so grateful, no matter how bad the bed. It lasted all of thirty seconds.

A drumming came from the ceiling above. A few seconds later, it came again. After all they had been through! Her first wonder was if someone was trying to get her attention, perhaps in some kind of emergency. Maybe they had fallen and couldn’t get up or something like that.

There was another drumming, a thudding of something hard, and resonant, but of course the floor was just planks. She knew the sounding board of a piano was spruce, right? It made sense.

She knew she would never sleep with all that ruckus going on.

Grinding her teeth, for they had been days passing the Unpainted Desert, a raw, untamed wilderness of gypsum and silica sand, and that damned racket came again. It was all white, hence the name.

“Oh, God, am I tired,” she said aloud in sheer resentment.

Hopefully the idiot could take a hint.

She made a similar observation, only louder this time.

Was it a reporter? Or was it some pimply-faced wannabe pulp fiction author, pounding away at his tripe-writer? Poor fellow! She had some empathy for all of the losers in the galaxy, but she had been averaging three and half hours of sleep per night for about the last ten days or so. The thought that a genetically-modified hammerhead diamondback rattler would sneak under the blankets and then try to crawl up into her puss-puss had kept her tossing and turning all night.

Hopefully, they were a little more scarce here in town, rinky-dink as it was. For some reason it just creeped her out.

Thuds, thuds, thuds…more thuds.

Hope reached under her pillow, and pulled out a 7.63 millimetre German-made Mauser pistol, a long and awkward thing, but deadly enough at close range, and shouted up at the ceiling. She had a spare clip or two under there as well. It was the Turkish export version, given to her as a gift by a love-crazed firearms aficionado. She’d had it anodized a pretty royal blue at a little shop in Greenwich Village. The guy lived at home with his mother and after a while the thing clearly wasn’t going anywhere…

“Let a lady get some sleep down here,” she called in the most commanding voice that a shy, half-naked young mere slip of a woman lying in a bed could generate.

Like the pitter-patter of mules getting at ‘er on a hot tin roof, the danged pounding and stomping came again, with the soft moonlight through the windows illuminating her high cheekbones and wide, sensitive mouth. But her eyes were hard and her lips set tight and firm, like concrete.

Hope emptied the magazine, spraying it back and forth, up and down, carefully peppering the ceiling surface above her with little round black holes. Quickly changing clips, she completed the cross-wise sweep. A cloud of pale smoke hung in the air, her ears rang with the concussion, and a thin haze of dust fell slowly down from above. The thuds and jumps seemed different now, more uneven…something crashed into the far wall up there, and then hit the floor with a resounding thud.

Her door smashed open, hitting the wall with a hurried crash and Rufe stood there with a wild look in his eyes.

“No! No, Hope, no!”

“What?” she asked. “I’m tired Rufe, not now, okay?”

“That’s Michael Flatus up there,” he hissed, tip-toeing up to her bedside and gently prying the gleaming blue weapon from her reluctant hand, although it was empty now anyway.

“Who? What?” she gasped.

“Yes!” he assured her. “Michael Flatus, the Broadway star, and a headliner in Danse of the Mucky Old Creeks.”

“That one was off Broadway, so far off Broadway you could say it was in the Bowery,” she noted doubtfully.

“I don’t care if it was Staten Island! He’s frickin’ famous,” Rufe stuttered.

It was quiet up there now. Blood dripped out of some holes over by the corner of the room.

Jaw hanging, eyeballs bulging, Rufe turned and stared at the ever-widening pool of blood in the corner.

“Now, if you don’t mind, sir, I would like to get some sleep,” said Hope, and with firm resolve, she turned over on her side, pulled the blankets up under her chin and closed her eyes.

“But…but…” he stammered.

“They’ll never hang a good-looking woman, Rufe,” she said without opening her eyes.

He thought about it for a moment. This was the woman he loved, and would, forever-more.

There was the sound of cautious footsteps, and then her door closed. She popped her eyes open, craned her neck, and made sure Rufe had really left the room. She leaned over, and checked under the bed. Then a very tired Hope Ng put her head down for good that night. She was snoring in ladylike fashion all of three minutes later, with visions of dumping magazine after magazine of 7.63 ball ammunition into carnival shooting galleries chock-full of sugar-plum fairies dancing in her head. She’d never actually fired the thing before. It was a really nice gun, when you got right down to it, even in that daze-like state between wakefulness and downright dreaming.

'On the Nature of the Gods' is available on iTunes in the iBookstore.

POD Cover and notes.

Above: A simple book cover using stock CreateSpace options.


So far, I have the interior file pretty much ready to go, but there are still questions and issues regarding this project.

First of all, the best I can do so far is to have page numbers centred at the bottom of each page. I would have preferred right and left, mirrored.

Secondly, because the headers and footers appear to be linked in Microsoft Word, I only have the title at the top of each page, rather than the title on one page and the author name on the other. That doesn't look too professional. When I try fix that, one set of page numbers disappears, either odd or even.

Third, this is going to cost me $25.00 for each title I upload, and after fifteen years on disability, living at about 2/3 of the poverty line, (or $7,000 under, whichever is more clear to the reader,) I don't know how fast I can go on this.

That being said, I might be able to do one a month.

I haven't calculated the retail price of the product yet, but if I set it to earn $2.00 clear profit per sale, I have to sell thirteen books to cover the cost.

Finally, if CreateSpace is anything like the parent company Amazon, they have 'thresholds' authors have to meet before they will cut a cheque, and as a Canadian, it is virtually impossible to open a U.S. bank account without going to the U.S. and doing it in person. And, since I don't have a birth certificate, nor a passport, this brings up other costs, including time spent and administrative delays on the part of the government. It's $25.00 for the birth certificate and $80.00 for the passport. Also, getting a birth certificate involves a 'garantor.' Just who in the hell is going to do that for me is a bit of a mystery at this point, as you can't use relatives and they are asking for 'persons of standing' in the community, i.e. a member of parliament, a judge, a cop, whatever--just the sort of people I hate to ask for anything. The reader's experience may vary.

So I don't know what to think about that, but I'm obviously not going to do this if there is no chance in hell of ever making any money at it--and for reasons unknown Amazon and probably CreateSpace don't deal with PayPal. The threshold for EFT on Amazon is $10.00 accrued in one month, and it's $100.00 for a paper cheque to be issued.

That sounds simple enough, but what is implied there is not. If I'm not mistaken, as I often am, 90 % of the authors on Amazon will never meet that $100.00 threshold, but then U.S. authors can just use their local bank and get Electronic Funds Transfers. If I'm the first guy to figure that one out we'll call it a 'scoop' but I'll bet the company knows that very well. What's really interesting is that they don't use the in-house AmazonPay either. I could speculate as to why this should be so, but I won't. Not yet. It might have something to do with the razor-thin margins and the fact that they are trying to take over the world...right? That's hard to do on a budget. The way I see it, if they take over the world, fine, do a good job of it--and make sure I get my piece of the action.

Tens of thousands of authors around the world will probably never figure that one out, but I like to ask a 'bleep' of a lot of questions, and I guess we'll just leave it at that.