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Posted by on Apr 24, 2012 in GAHA: Babes of the Abyss, Sci Fi Noir | 2 comments

Sci Fi Noir

You would think that completing my fifth novel, Gaha: Babes of the Abyss would be an occasion for celebration but I don’t feel like celebrating at all. Each book I complete becomes harder to sell. At this point the number of agents reading unsolicited manuscripts is small and even the indie presses don’t want to see manuscripts. Publishing and the whole apparatus of editors, agents and bookstores is in total collapse. But, for some reason, I keep at it. Completing a book is its own reward, especially, as in my case, if you have a handful of readers.

It was a joyous moment when I discovered I had written the final lines. That was one of the strangest moments of my writing life. I knew how I wanted the novel to end, but it was bending away from that ending. Faced with about 30 pages to go, I felt the whole thing slipping away from me. And it was making me panic. Unable to think my way through to a plausible, satisfying ending, I finally gave up and told myself to let it come. Let the characters go where they are going. Without a lot of hope I wrote the chapter I was working on, knowing that when it was done I would have at most 20 pages to wind things up. I sat down and plodded along as I had for 3 years, putting down the words. The scene worked out very well, and as I brought it to a conclusion I wrote a sentence and felt, after that sentence, a total silence. There was no next chapter. I had said all I had to say about things. Without planning it, without even knowing it, I had written the last line of the book. It was irrefutable. The End. I sat there a little stunned. Was it really over? Yes it was. It required revision. I had to tweak some parts. But the last sentence was there.

Gaha took 3 years to write, but there were interruptions, many interruptions. I worked for an hour to an hour and a half 4 or 5 nights a week. I wrote two or three pages on a good day, and revised constantly as I went along. It is the first novel I have written entirely on a computer, and entirely at home, after dinner. And it is more disciplined than the others. I set out to write a book about 100,000 words long and wrote one that is 102,000 words. I hewed closely to my protagonist/narrator’s voice and character. I stuck to the plot and kept at it to make sense. And I resisted the impulse to explain Bob’s world in ways he wouldn’t naturally explain it as the narrator of his story.

The story itself comes from The World’s Worst Women (Of the 20th Century), a true crime book I discovered in the stacks at the library I work in. It was 1993. I knew right away I wanted to steal the story of the First Acid Bath Murders (see here for the second acid bath murderer).  It was not until years later that I knew I wanted to set it 500 years in the future. And it was not until years after that that I realized that the sci fi trilogy I planned on writing would start with the murderous adventures of Bob Martin and the van Doderer sisters, Irmela and Elma.

This book is sci fi noir. It is a dark, bitter tale of lust, exploitation, fraud, murder, and civil war. When I tell friends who have lived in LA that I destroy the city of Los Angeles, reduce it to rubble, they smile and cheer. Literally.

I am going to start posting chapters shortly, one a week, hoping to find readers. Then there will be e-book and print-on-demand editions for sale.

 

2 Comments

  1. mazel tov!

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