Website: 8th anniversary

I turned sixty-nine today. The website turned eight. The last two years have been much more eventful for me than for the website, and even more so for this blog, which has continued to survive my benign neglect.

I continued writing over these two years. Six months ago, my son-in-law completed building a cabin in Scofield, Utah. I get to write there occasionally. It’s marvelous. Unfortunately, I have not written enough to complete either of the novels I started. The first, Orpheus Insufficient, is grounded science fiction, the story of a three-year-long voyage to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, in the years 2204 to 2207. Unfortunately, Orpheus, still unfinished, is over 130,000 words. So I am thinking I might rewrite it to add 80,000 or so more words and turn it into a trilogy rich in subplots.

The second novel is US 89. I started writing it for a contest, but needed to do more research than there was time for. It tells the story of a newspaper columnist in 2076 who is writing a piece a week about each of America’s fifty-two states. She ends up in Arizona, and it is suggested to her that she drive up US Highway 89, which goes from Arizona all the way to Canada. I wrote the Arizona chapters with little trouble, but everything past Utah stopped me in my tracks. The needed research may require me to actually drive the length of US 89. You would think that, being retired, that would be a simple thing for me, but my wife and I are surprisingly busy.

I have also been editing and rewriting scenes in The Time Well, the first in my time travel saga which could end up being eight to ten books. I have to rewrite because the science just wasn’t grounded enough. If we’re talking time travel, of course, it can’t be completely realistic. But my premise was too far out there. There’s going to be hand waving involved, but I wanted to stretch credulity only enough that suspension of disbelief would still come easily.

I continue to work on the sixth Time Well book, which has bloated to 399,000 words. It needs to be edited down and will still require three volumes. I am wondering how to make them work as stand-alone books, but it may just be impossible.

My second novel, Neyuki, is getting closer to being publishable. I have a cover artist, and a friend is typesetting it for me. I think that will all be done by the end of the month. It has taken me far too long to get this out. I kept thinking maybe I would go with a traditional publishing house. In the end, though, I have decided to self-publish. Marketing will be the hard part, and prepping the novel’s debut will take long enough that it won’t show up before July or August.

I have gotten much more involved with the local writing scene, working with two chapters of the League of Utah Writers. I have also joined Apex Writers, a writing community with international scope. Finally, I am still on the committee that puts on one of Utah’s largest writing symposia, Life, the Universe, and Everything, each year in February..

Fans

Brandon Sanderson created quite a stir with his recent announcement of extra novels he wrote during the pandemic. He had the extra time because he wasn’t doing his normal speaking engagements and fan meetings. He was able to produce five novels beyond his normal output. So he and his team put together a Kickstarter drive to publish four of them and raised over twenty million dollars in the first three days. Now he’s nearing thirty-five million dollars (with time left to go).

Thirty-five million.

Wow.

I also wrote obsessively during the pandemic. I wrote a time travel novel in March through July of 2020, followed by a pandemic romance in November of that year. I also wrote a sequel to my time travel novel in July and August of 2021, then three more books in the same series from November 2021 through February 2022. Six novels in two years. I have no plans to use Kickstarter to raise money for their editing and publication. You must have fans for that.

Got few fans.

Bummer.

So, since 2021 was the year I finally published something (Under Shōko’s Bed), 2022 is going to be the year I finally get some fans. They’ve got some good stories coming.

Finding comparable titles

If your novel can get a publisher’s attention, they will likely expect a list of comparable titles. I have been searching on my own and asking others who have read Under Shōko’s Bed for suggestions. I have yet to find any that are directly comparable in many respects, although there are some that are like Under Shōko’s Bed in one way or another. It is good for the novel to be unique. It may be harder to sell, though, when it cannot be pigeonholed, making its readership and profitability less predictable.

Spoiler alert! If you read the next paragraph, you may learn too much about the novel to most fully enjoy reading it.

Under Shōko’s Bed is a story of love and loss, and has strong elements of psychological pain. David suffers from depression and Shōko from post-traumatic stress disorder, and their healing influence on each other is a key part of their cross-cultural love story. Another important element of their recovery is Shōko leading David back to his true vocation, painting, something they shared when they loved each other many years before, but which David drifted away from in his life with his wife, Kelly. Unbeknownst to David and Shōko, however, they are part of a love triangle, as Kelly has not abandoned him as he thinks, but has only gone home to America. David, who has been too sick to leave the refuge of Shōko’s bedroom, has told no one where he is, and soon the police begin searching for him, and Kelly, now lost in worry, returns to Japan. It all comes to a head when Shōko’s parents suddenly discover David. He now has to make the impossible choice between the love he thought he had lost and the love he has just rekindled. Shōko must decide whether to fight for the man she loves or do her duty and step aside. Kelly too is faced with the awful choice of how to deal with David’s newfound love.

Under Shōko’s Bed is cross-cultural contemporary psychological literary fiction with mature characters set in Japan. Is that a category on Amazon?

The feedback I have gotten so far on Under Shōko’s Bed has led me to The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman as one of the most comparable titles, since it has much the same sense of impending heartache. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, a tranquil Japanese love story in a confined setting, is another. Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Nicolas Sparks’s The Notebook, stories of rekindling lost love, are two more. When We Collided by Emery Lord has broadly similar psychological themes, although it is about teens. I also feel some kinship with authors such as Barry Lancet, Micheal Pronko, and David Peace who have lived for an extended period in Japan and used Japan as a setting for novels (although they write in completely different genres from Under Shōko’s Bed).

Still, I have found no novel comparable to Under Shōko’s Bed in more than one or two aspects. My search continues.