Finished with Soulbond

I have finished editing Soulbond from beginning to end again as part of the Ecto Chronicles. This was my main goal. I'm going to start reading through the next book, Hard Reset to see what I find but generally I was happier with the sequels to begin with because they've gotten more polish than the first one. I probably won't end up doing the same deep editing that Soulbond got. And truth be told, I'm really excited for the re release of the Ecto Chronicles so I can only delay gratification for so long!

The Ecto Chronicles:The Final Draft

For quite a long time I've thought that I should go back and rewrite Soulbond. It was my first book after all and like most authors' first books, the writing doesn't hold up as well as their latter body of work. I tried to go back to it a couple of times but never ended up making anything more than a few superficial changes. I knew things needed to be changed but I didn't know what or how. Now that I'm planning to take the individual Ecto novels off of the shelf, I really want The Ecto Chronicles to have the polish it needs so that I can be done with it and don't have to look back and cringe, thinking I should have cut this changed that.

Suffice it to say that I have resolved to go through it all one last time to create a definitive manuscript. I've already started doing this and am happy to say that I'm actually making a significant amount of changes which I interpret as my plot development and writing style having developed enough that I can see a day and night contrast between my first book and the way I write now. I'm confident that by the time I'm done re-editing the Ecto books, I'll have something highly polished that I don't have to fret over any longer. 

Updates

My life has been grueling the past few months. I have written almost nothing because I had no spare time at all.

Three things:

1. I am probably going to do some consolidating by taking down the four smaller Ecto ebooks from internet publishers in favor of just promoting the big omnibus The Ecto Chronicles.

2. I'm finally going to give this site it's long needed face lift. In fact I've already started.

3. I'm currently about 15% into writing a new science fiction novel set in present day earth. More details to come. 

Book Updates

All of my ebooks on both Amazon and Barnes & Nobel have now been updated with nice across-the-board formatting and functioning front matter (table of contents links.) They are now $1.99 each. Also, Soulbond has been taken down from Goodreads as a free to read ebook. 

Soulbond is Free!

Yes that's right, the first book of the Ecto Series is free to read and download from my author profile on Goodreads. (That's provided you make an account there.) Now there is absolutely no excuse for you to not read it.

New Soulbond Cover

 

I've decided to redo, (or at least retool a little bit,) the first three book covers because I often don't spend a lot of time on developing concepts for them as I'm too excited to get my book on the web. So now that all the books are out, I can sort of pay some attention to them. I liked the synapse visual that I did for the site background so I wanted to do something similar for the new Soulbond cover. I've already retrofitted the ebook on B&N and Amazon.

Original Soulbond Cover

This is the original cover for the first book of the series, Soulbond. I was excited for the book to go live but it needed a cover, so I put one together at work during slow times. Then I sent out the book. I quickly decided that I didn't care for the cover so much and designed the red and black cover you see now that has set the series' permanent color scheme. Still, there are a handful of copies that were actually sold with the electric brain cover, so it still exist somewhere...

Writing Soulbond (Pt. 3)

I don't make outlines for what I'm writing. I don't even do notes most of the time. I just write directly from what I have in my head in chronological order from start to finish. Then I go back over each sentence a hundred times and fuss over them neurotically. I think this Oscar Wilde quote describes my approach about right.

"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."

I'm also a lousy typist. I'm slower than most because I have to look at the keyboard while I methodically punch out the words.


I don't read very much either. Again, it's because I'm slow. When I was younger, I absolutely hated reading. In school when the class was assigned a book to read, I'd either meander through the pages at a snail's pace or just give up and pretend to read.

As an adult I tried to get more into reading. Gradually I did get a little faster but it still takes me half a year to finish a novel. Not entirely because I'm slow but because I also can't focus on books for very long. When I started looking for books to read, I didn't even know what I'd like. I'd walk through the book store and pick up anything with an interesting cover. Maybe I'd like sci-fi. I picked up Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear. Don't do this. Don't start with Greg Bear.


So I'm a writer that can't type and hardly reads. Suffice it to say that I don't know from books. I know from movies and video games. That is where my influences come from. I can pinpoint two specific works that inspired the creation of Soulbond. The first is Armitage III Polymatrix which is essentially an animated Bladerunner. I saw it when I was about 13 and something about it resonated very deep within me. Maybe it's Kiefer Sutherland's voice. The first version of the movie I had was a VHS tape I recorded off of the Sci-fi Channel, (now "Syfy." Seriously, what the hell is that?) I was so amazed by this move that I watched the tape over and over, multiple times in a day. I've seen a ton of animated sci-fi movies since but nothing else hits the spot like Armitage.


The second thing that inspired me was... I'm hesitant to say, Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat is a fighting game that is different from other fighting games. There's more blood and gore. And you can definitively kill you opponent. It's about superhumans and demigods trying to kill each other with spectacular superpowers. That's what I want. If you look at Soulbond and its sequels you'll find that the encounters are very much like they would be in a fighting game. It's often one on one in an interesting location that may even include some form of deadly hazard. Of course this aspect could just as easily have come from Indiana Jones, which has been spliced into my DNA since I was about six. 

As I've already said, the fight scenes and the action were the first things I conceived. After that I had to ask myself the obvious question: why are these people trying to kill each other?

Writing Soulbond (Pt. 2)

(Highlight the invisible text to read spoiler trivia.)

One of my most favorite music videos is the video for Elektrobank by The Chemical Brothers. It's one action scene played out and synchronized to one song. It's not just action to music though. There is a story surrounding the video, a context. This girl in the video has put in a lot of training to get to this point. There's obviously a heated rivalry between her and one of the other top competitors. The girl's mom shows up late to her routine. The viewer never sees the development or the cause behind any of these plot points. It's like we're missing the rest of the story. It's like we're watching the climactic scene taken directly out of a feelgood sports movie. This is the closest emulation of what the original Soulbond movie idea was, that I know of. The fight scenes I spoke of. They would look just like this.

I've already explained that I've come to terms with not being able to do a movie. But as a holdover from the original idea, the chapter titles are all appropriately picked song titles; sort of a book soundtrack. 

The song ‘Replica’ by Fear Factory is the title of the chapter where Andy fights a replica in a factory.

Coming up with a good character name is one of the most difficult things for me to accomplish. If left to my own devices with no help, I tend to come up with bland names like Andy or Travis. In the past I've pulled names from the phone book and famous baseball players. When I started Soulbond I immediately needed help again. I decided I'd go with a theme and I ended up sticking with it the whole way through. All female characters' first names are lifted from video games, specifically horror video games. Why? Because. The only exceptions are Trish and Misty whos' names come from outside the horror genre.

The character Laura Marks is inspired by two pain in the ass instructors I had in art school. One instructor in particular was so impossible that I was convinced that there was no way that you could show her anything you did and leave a generally good impression. She could critique the Garden of Eden. She'd give it a C+.

In the first draft of the book there were no nanobots, murder/AID side story or cannibalism. The character Trish only existed in mention.

The four codename tarot cards drawn in the debriefing all accurately predict their respective characters' immediate futures.

A dullahan is a type of ghost forced to carry its severed head. It is also the last name of the Quantech CEO who was shot in the head.

One of the biometrics specialists at the AID is named Michael as a self reference from several bad short stories I wrote in high school. They were all completely different in genre but somehow shared a recurring character of the same name. (I told you how hard it is for me to come up with good names.)

There are several movie quotes and references throughout the book, many of which come through Andy. The quote written in gold in Andy’s tomb is from Bladerunner.

In the movie Equilibrium, Christian Bale shoots his partner in the head through a book of Yeats poetry. This is referenced in the first chapter of the book.

VEO, though never explained in the book, stands for Violent Ether Outflux.

Writing Soulbond (Pt. 1)

This story was gestating in my brain for at least four years before I ever thought about touching a keyboard. It wasn't really a story before that, just a bunch of scenes. Whenever I listen to music, especially something that strikes an emotional chord with me, I see little movies or music videos in my head. For instance, every time I hear the song Hot Rod Lincoln, I think about a fast car but not just any fast car.

If I was directing a short film/music video for the song I'd have it open up on a middle school science fair. Some nerdy-looking kid has an audience assembled behind him of peers, teachers and parents. His demonstration is taking place outside. In front of him is essentially a greatly modified RC car which is many times faster than ordinary RC cars. He kneels down to carefully place a rat in the driver's seat. You see he has successfully trained this rat to drive a small car through an obstacle course. The kid places a pair of tiny driving goggles on the rat and shuts the cockpit. Before he can collect himself and start the demo, the rat floors it. All eyes are on the car as it shoots straight through the first turn, out of the school parking lot and out of sight. The kid doesn't even try to run after it because he's in shock and the car is going much too fast anyway. He begins to cast nervous glances to the audience. Well, this is awkward. I knew I shouldn't have put the nitro in.

Cut back to the rat who's jamming down the sidewalk, nearly knocking confused pedestrians into the street. A barking dog on a leash lunges at the car but the rat swerves out of the way and into a grocery store where it causes more havoc in the produce section. The majority of the video would be this rat-driven car instigating chaos wherever it goes. It gets hang time off of someone's home made bike jump and destroys important paperwork in a government office building- no no, THE DMV!

The car rockets past two Latinos in a lowrider who are stopped at a red light. The one driving lifts up his shades and then the two just look at each other, both confused about the RC car doing 50 on surface streets and amazed by the fact that it just narrowly avoided being crushed by two vehicles in a busy intersection. The rat makes it to an onramp and onto the freeway where it really puts the pedal down. The car is now going underneath speeding vehicles and weaving wildly in and out of traffic. A highway patrol cop looks up from writing a citation to see the car zip by. He radios ahead to the next cop down the road. Soon after, the rat looks in its mirror, (yes there are mirrors,) to see flashing lights.

The rat speeds up but by this time the tiny tires, not made such speed, have become hot and burst into flames. The RC car swerves to the shoulder and slows to a stop. A highway patrol car pulls up behind and a state trooper steps out to investigate the car. He's astounded to discover that it was being driven by a rat wearing tiny goggles as the animal emerges from the cockpit to waddle around on the ground. The trooper turns back to the car as he pokes one of the smoking melted tires. He flips the vehicle over to look underneath and sees a name and address scribbled there in permanent marker.

Cut to the kid from the science fair who is now at home basking in shame and lament for an award that he would have won easily if everything had gone to plan. The doorbell rings and his mom opens the door. The trooper is standing there with a melted RC car in one hand and a shoebox containing the goggle-wearing rat in the other.

That's just one example but most of the time when it happens, I see a fight scene. Originally when I envisioned Soulbond, it was an action movie with heavily choreographed fight scenes set to music. Like if Dragon Ball Z was more like Disney's Fantasia. Not that they really fight in Dragon Ball Z because they're usually too busy talking, having flashbacks or powering up but you get my point.

I knew I could never make a movie so I just resigned it to a fantasy which I could drag out and play with on long train rides in and out of the city. Then one day for whatever reason i realized something that now seems so obvious. Microsoft Wordpad! Writing! It's an artistic outlet accessible to everyone. I could still create it in some form... just with no music. Though apprehensive at first about my own abilities and undertaking an entire book which I had never done before, I knew that writing was still my most effective medium of expression. The problem with creative inspiration is that once it crosses a certain threshold of development, it doesn't go away. It doesn't even take a break. It consumes you. It makes it impossible to sleep. Really what prompted me to start writing the story was so I could finally stop thinking about it.