Aliens Invade Earth and No One Notices Because They're Too Busy Scrolling on Their Fucking Phones to Look Up

Just finished off the next test for my class. Oh. My. God. So fucking frustrating. I signed up for an Anatomy and Physiology class online as an attempt to get a degree in Radiology. And I wish I'd done some more research on schools before I signed up for one. The class I got has live testing that is mandatory for the course and they actually film you while you do the test. I guess to ensure that you aren't cheating? It's really insulting and it intrudes greatly on my life. They even make you hold up your ID to the camera to prove that its really you taking the test and I guess not a perfect body double of you that magically knows all the answers. It's damn weird.

Well, I finished my first chapter in my LitRPG project. I'm calling it Low Life. I think it's coming out pretty cool so far. I sent off the first chapter to a buddy of mine who is kind enough to read it and give me feedback without trying to steal from me. Somebody on discord tried to steal from me once. He said he'd read it on his day off. Lol. I don't think he realizes how short it is. But regardless, work continues on chapter 2.

As I mentioned before, this is not my first novel. I've written a few that have never seen the light of day, but I am writing this one a bit differently. I've always been a strong user of outlines when I write. I mean, huge detailed outlines. Outlines that are basically the book in handwritten form. But I am also terribly guilty of over writing. In the few times I've gotten my work out there, that has been the most common reaction.

Just. Too. Much.

For the new project, I'm writing without an outline and trying to keep my words more limited and essential to moving the plot forward. But it's been hard going. 

With no one willing to read my work in the past, it took me a long time to see this problem of over writing. I had to read a book where the author was guilty of the same thing. I'm not knocking this book at all, but...well. Okay, this was it.

 

 

The cover leaves a lot to be desired, but given the font and so on, looks like they were trying to piggy back on the success of Becky Chambers. But I digress.

 

The Stars Now Unclaimed is actually a pretty good book. There are a number of neat ideas at work. Space. Planets. Aliens. All good stuff, right? Except that the author's writing style is just so god damn fluffy, you can't get to any of it without hacking through his prose with a machete. I got about five chapters in (FIVE CHAPTERS!) and literally nothing had happened. I got to the point where I was reading as fast as I could just to get through all the words. Let me find an example of what turned me off. Again, I'm not criticizing this book or the writing. Just the style.

 

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams

 

"The city itself—and that’s what it was, not just a colony, or a military base, but a city, populated by people from all over the galaxy, people trying to make that galaxy better, even if they could only do so from hiding—was built across a mountainside, overlooking a crater filled with a pellucid sea of indigo-to-red crystal, the formations frozen in sweeping waves when the destruction that had swept through the system had locked the moon’s orbit in place."

 

Too. Many. God. Damned. Words.

 

And dude obviously had his thesaurus at the ready. Never read the word "pellucid" before and I'm not going to bother looking it up. Earlier in the book he used the word "perambulate" in place of "walk". Let's just take that first sentence. The city. Not a colony. Not a military base. Not a shopping mall. Not a library. Not an underground railroad. Not a village. Not an autonomous collective. WHAT ELSE WASN'T IT, BRO?! 

You get the point. Again, there are some cool ideas in here, it just feels like the actual details that move the plot forward are drowned out by all these unnecessary words. My advice for revision: The city was built into a hillside. Boom. Done. Print it

True story: I actually got this book for free from a local used bookstore and I still ended up wanting my money back.

The point I was trying to make here, and why I can't start ranting and raving about how bad this book was, is that I have been doing the same thing for years. My last completed novel was a whopping 160,000 words. And probably could have been edited down to 80,000 words if I'd had the time or the energy. What happens is that writing is fun. And I don't know about Drew Williams, maybe he was trying to stretch his narrative, but in my case, I just got so damned excited about doing it that I couldn't shut up and get on with it.

I finally learned my lesson, though. Or at least, I'm trying to. Now when I write something, if I end up with "the thing was doing this and this while doing this". I cut it down to "the thing did this". It's gotten a lot harder to write longer stories, to be sure. But hopefully they're better?