Welcome to the blog for my novel - ENEMY CALLING

Welcome to my blog! I'm currently in the process of finishing the first draft of my first novel. And when I say 'in progress', I really mean I'm too slow - I've been working on this draft since November of 2005.

First, a little about me. I'm an aspiring writer. There you have it. Everything you need to know about me - for now.

The idea of writing a novel was something I had been kicking around for years. I guess you could say that I've always known that I wanted to write sci-fi, but I never found the time, nor had the self-determination to actually get past the first few paragraphs. In 2004 I heard about the National Novel Writing Month website, and thought I'd give it a shot. After all, I thought I knew who my main character would be, and I figured that it would be easy. Unfortunately, I hadn't figured on being pulled away from the keyboard incessantly (all in relation to my 'job' at the time). I reached exactly 213 words before I finally realized that I was just too damn far behind to actually have a chance at making the deadline (50000 words in the month of November). Hence, I waited.

And waited. And October 2005 rolled around. Guess what? I no longer worked for the same company, my schedule was much easier, and I felt more determined to write something. I was a year older, and hopefully wiser, but I still hadn't written much fiction, save the few pieces I was required to do for my last comp class in college. It seemed a daunting task as I approached the November 1st start date.

Midnight hit after I took Grace (my daughter) trick-or-treating, and I began writing immediately. Here's where I explain how and what I'm doing. I had an idea for a story, and I knew it wouldn't fit in 50000 words. But the whole point of doing the NaNoWriMo is to force yourself to work under a deadline, which is EXACTLY what I needed (especially if you know who I am typically). I thrive under deadlines and in crunch time situations for work, so this would (hopefully) enable me to finally make some progress on my first novel (or novella, depending on the final word count). So I began writing gibberish. Not random typing on the keyboard, but pure, unadulterated, unfiltered, unedited crap. I started with what I thought would be the final chapter in the story (which it isn't), and went from there. I figured that every time I had attempted to write before, I always started with the first words of the story, and I always ended up stuck a short time later. My 'brilliant' idea was to start with the ending, and backfill the story from there (only later did I learn that several successful writers actual work their novels this way...hmmm). I began writing like a madman those first few hours in the early hours of November 1. And as the clock approached 4:00am, I did a word count in MS Word, and saw my gaudy word totals from my first 3.5 hours of typing - 1664. Needless to say, my immediate reaction was "oh crap!", followed by a hasty math calc to find out if I was trending towards making the 50K mark. Guess what? I needed to average around 1725 per day to get the minimum numbers for the NaNoWriMo criteria, and I was already behind on Day 1. Luckily for me, I still had the remainder of Nov 1 to finish writing. I decided after that initial panic not to even worry about word counts anymore. (I did reach the 50k goal by the way, with about 2k to spare.)

So that brings us to the "what's it about" part. Here's where I'm going to cheat a bit. I have the draft of the backpage cover material for my book, which is what anyone on Amazon.com will see as well:

Rumors out of the atheist Fe-Ruq system allege that the Son of God has appeared on one of their military planets. The Shalothans, followers of Christ and a constant threat to the Fe-Ruqians, plan a covert mission to return Christ to their home world. Meanwhile, the United Space Navy, long an intermediary in galactic conflicts, receives intelligence regarding the planned rescue attempt, and launches itÂ’s own interdiction mission in hopes of preventing a conflict that could escalate into another galactic war. ItÂ’s a race against time to reach the Son of God.

There you go. The summary of the story, short and sweet.

I'm currently in final editing mode, and will be submitting the finalized work to the publisher this month. The expected date of release for the book will be in November or early December of 2006. And what a perfect idea for that hard-to-shop-for person on your list!

My next post I'll put up finalized prologue to the story.

Have a great weekend...

Erik