Speaker 1: 0:00

every scene that was not working well, did not have a clear-cut decision, and so for me that was a big aha moment and, from my writing, made me realize that the scene needs to kind of focus around. This decision is going to be made, and how the character makes it is going to determine what happens next.

Speaker 2: 0:24

Welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. My name is Savannah Gilbo and I'm here to help you write a story that works. I want to prove to you that writing a novel doesn't have to be overwhelming, so each week, I'll bring you a brand new episode with simple, actionable and step-by-step strategies that you can implement in your writing right away. So, whether you're brand new to writing or more of a seasoned author looking to improve your craft, this podcast is for you. So pick up a pen and let's get started. In this episode, we're going behind the scenes of Cheryl Arco's writing, editing and publishing journey to get an inside scoop on how she published her debut science fiction novel at 72 years old. In this episode, you'll hear from Cheryl about what it was like to work with a developmental editor to revise her manuscript, including the two to three key things she focused on in revisions that took her story from good to great. You'll hear us talk about exactly how long each part of the process took from reworking her entire outline to revising her first draft, to line editing, copy editing and reworking her entire outline to revising her first draft, to line editing, copy editing and actually producing her book. And you'll hear all about why Cheryl decided to self-publish her debut novel at 72 years old, despite having interest from a few different literary agents and so much more. But before we get into all the details, let me quickly read you the back cover copy of Cheryl's book, so you have a little bit of context for our conversation.

Speaker 2: 1:47

Here's what it says Prejudice legacy redemption. Arise carries a secret that could shatter his world. The telepathic Allegrian has spent his life atoning for his dead father's role in humanity's disastrous first contact. Now, as a tech specialist for the Earth-led alliance, he serves in silence until sabotage threatens the lives of dozens of human children and the traitor is one of his own. Forced to work with a brilliant but hostile human engineer, arise must dismantle not only the deadly conspiracy but also the deep-seated mistrust between their peoples. With time running out, he faces an impossible choice Break the fragile allegrian human treaty and invite the death penalty to forge a forbidden mind link with a human, or let innocent lives be lost. Two worlds on the brink a single act of defiance. Can compassion rewrite a doomed future?

Speaker 2: 2:44

The Allegrian legacy begins here, a gripping sci-fi adventure rich in high-stakes dilemmas, deep character bonds and first-contact intrigue. All right, so let's dive into my conversation with Cheryl Arco to hear all about her writing, editing and publishing journey. Hi, cheryl, thank you so much for joining me today on the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you, I'm excited to be here too, and I gave you a quick introduction already, but I would love for you to tell my audience in your own words who you are, what you do, what kind of things you write and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 3:20

I've been writing since I was really since I was a child and my first writing was actually I would draw what looked like comic strips, so pictures telling a story and balloons with the dialogue and stuff, and so I've always been interested in stories and I've been interested in science fiction for as long as I can remember, influenced by two brothers, an older brother and a younger brother, and my parents encouraged learning about new things too.

Speaker 1: 3:49

So, that's always. It's been fun and other things that I am. I have a couple of different hats that I wear for my day job, which buys the writing classes and pays for the dog food. I'm a senior data scientist, which is the kind of the culmination of a many year career in IT. So I'm kind of, you know, always interested in science and technology and things like that. And then my other hobby is I am a dog trainer. I've been training now this, this dates me, but I've been training dogs for competition since 1965, which means, yes, I am not a spring chicken and do both competition with them in breed and obedience and other performance-type activities and just kind of enjoy them and their mischief around the house.

Speaker 2: 4:51

And how many do you have? Tell everyone how many you have.

Speaker 1: 4:54

Well, right now I have six Airedales ranging in age from two to nine.

Speaker 2: 5:00

So lucky.

Speaker 1: 5:01

Yes, they keep me out of trouble. So they keep me out of trouble and actually they fit into my writing in that when I'm working on ideas for the storyline, one of our favorite activities, especially in the summertime time, is that I go into what we call the big yard. I've got a smaller yard where you can corral kids up when you know you're going to have to be leaving the house soon and you don't want to be playing games about. Are you going to come in or not? And then there's the big yard, where it's a. It's a festoon area, it's a couple of acres and it's a good place for dogs to play doggy people with them. So are one of my favorite summertime activities is I put on some I have these really good headphones I listen to my one of my favorite playlists and I go out with the dogs in the big yard and I walk the fence line and I work on story plot lines and I just kind of play them through my head like playing through a movie.

Speaker 1: 5:56

So I play through the dialogue and how everybody is feeling in the scene and what's going on and I just kind of walk the fence line and the dogs are playing and sometimes it's really funny because they keep track of where I am and sometimes they just line up behind me and so I'm walking the fence line and I've got this single file line of dogs behind me following and I'm working on my story and they are evidently working on.

Speaker 1: 6:19

We must follow the leader, so we have a lot of fun that way. That's cute. Yeah, that's pretty much how I spend my time and I got serious about wanting to write a story that could be published. Oh, it was still a long time ago. It was probably in the 80s when I made a short story version of the story that ultimately became my novel.

Speaker 2: 6:43

And.

Speaker 1: 6:44

I sent it to some you know, some of the science fiction magazines like Analog and such, and of course, was rejected, but I had, you know, gotten far enough that I had the bug that I wanted the story to be read by somebody other than me. Yeah, and that kind of led into. In the 90s, I got hooked up with a writing group led by Les Edgerton, who passed away a couple of years ago. He was a great mentor and instructor, though, and that was a great group, and so from there the story grew to become a novel, but then I knew that I needed more. So now I had essentially a first draft of a novel, but I knew that there was a big gap between that and something that could be published, and so that's when I went looking for more help with that and led into my running into Savannah, and there we went from there.

Speaker 2: 7:36

And so we're going to walk through all of Cheryl's timeline today, because I know that listeners find it so interesting and I know you would agree too, cheryl. It's so interesting to hear, when someone started, how long something took and lessons learned along the way. So we're going to go through all of that. But, like you said, we met around 2022 in July and we did a manuscript evaluation together. So that was what you're saying you knew you needed something more. You didn't really know what to do next, so we did that. And do you remember around that time, like, what were the big takeaways from that process?

Speaker 1: 8:26

finished draft. You know a draft that needed work, but there were parts that something wasn't quite right with and I didn't know what it was. And that question got answered by applying structure to it. And then we identified what was missing and what we needed to do. But that meant going back and kind of reverse engineering some of it to find what those elements were and put them in. And I know there's always a discussion back and forth about does an outline take away your creativity versus being valuable, but everybody finds what works for them. But I think you do need to have a concept of the way the structure of stories work, because if you don't, you end up with what I had, which was knowing something was missing, something wasn't working and not knowing where to go from there. And so getting a system to make an outline that worked for me, with the right level of detail for me and the way that my mind works, really helped answer those questions and put in the missing pieces.

Speaker 2: 9:20

Yeah, and I definitely want to talk about you and details, because you are such a detail person, which is one of the things I love about you, but it's also one of the things that held you up for a while is researching the right words and some of the little details, like that. So we'll definitely talk about that. But yeah, you're right, one of the things we talked about was let's kind of tighten up this structure, let's use structure as a way to make your story the best it can be, and then the other thing we had to do was really dig into your antagonist, because you knew who they were. You had this whole version of them in your head, but it wasn't quite on the page. Do you remember that?

Speaker 1: 9:55

yes, absolutely, and when we were working that out together, when we met, one of the fascinating things was we would focus on let's tell this scene from the antagonist's point of view and you know I was always my story is like a third person, close with the protagonist and when we focused on the antagonist, we discovered things that were going on that just hadn't been obvious before and that made the story pulled together better, made the story richer and helped and by developing the antagonist more, it just, you know, added a whole layer of depth to the story that had not been there before, yeah, and so what we did for everyone that's listening there were a lot of things that were really already working in Cheryl's draft.

Speaker 2: 10:42

So her themes were really strong. She had a really cool world, a really cool plot, a really compelling protagonist that we knew readers were going to love. But it was the antagonist and the structure that we really needed to work through. So sometimes what we would do is we would look at the outline from her protagonist perspective and we would say, okay, these actions make sense. And then we might get stuck or we might say, well, what would he do next and why would he do that? And then we had to flip our perspective around and say, well, let's think about where the antagonist is, because maybe they're already doing something that's going to cause trouble. So that's what she means by. Like she didn't write in the antagonist's point of view, but we got in his point of view to understand the bigger movements of the story. Anything to add there, Cheryl?

Speaker 1: 11:26

No, that is exactly right and it really, again, like we said, that those were things that had been in the back of my mind so I kind of knew them, but they weren't on the page and when we got in, you know, into understanding the antagonist better and expressing that in action, because we, like you said, we don't actually change to the antagonist point of view and telling the story, but the events that happen and what the antagonist does reflect what he's thinking and that just really enriched the whole story yeah, and it's interesting too, because I went back and actually read the manuscript evaluation letter that I had sent you and one of the things was, I said I'm not sure what the protagonist's main question is.

Speaker 2: 12:10

Is it because in Cheryl's story I've already read the summary of the book. In the summary you can glean that there's a problem with children going sick and also this problem with a saboteur, and they are definitely connected. But something we had to do in each scene was think about what is the primary storyline, and we just had to promote one over the other. And the reason I'm saying this, cheryl, is because I don't think you were on this call the other day, but another writer was asking me. I got feedback from my editor and she said the through line of my story is missing, but the structure was working. And she's like how could that be possible?

Speaker 2: 12:43

And I thought of you because that's exactly what we had to do, and sometimes it wasn't. It's not like we had to overhaul your story, we just had to make things more clear. Would you agree? Yes, definitely, yeah. And so I want to say that because I know there are writers out there who they might get feedback that says the same thing and they might think it's the end of the world. And it's like, no, no feedback that says the same thing.

Speaker 1: 13:09

And they might think it's the end of the world and it's like, no, no, there's a lot that's working we just need to make the stuff that's in your head more apparent on the page, which is exactly what we did for Cheryl. Yes, yes, and. And that whole idea of interiority kind of fits in with that, because that was the other big thing that was lacking in my story. I knew what the protagonist was thinking and why he was doing things, but what I was relating in the story was more described from his point of view, but still just telling you know, he did this and he said that and so did this and that and whatever, but a lot of the reasons why he was making those decisions was not verbalized anyplace, and when we added a lot more of that, that made a lot of that more clear.

Speaker 2: 13:49

Right, and what was interesting is you had known all of that in your head, and so I like to bridge the gap between the type of feedback a writer might get, which, if you're listening, you might get feedback that says I don't understand your protagonist motivations, or maybe the backstory is unclear or whatever, or how they change is unclear throughout the story, and so I said some of that to Cheryl and she was like well, I know exactly how he changes, I know all of his backstory and I know why he's doing everything. So it was really just about making it more apparent, which I think is a really important distinction to make, because some, like I said, some people will take feedback like that and say my whole story is broken, I should just quit.

Speaker 1: 14:27

Yeah, yeah, and we'll never, never quit, never quit.

Speaker 2: 14:31

Okay. So that was like August, september 2022. We started working together one-on-one and we went through about like 12 months of just like you know reworking. I know the beginning, especially because we had to tighten some things up and plant a lot of stuff that comes into play later, and most of what you had we kept. We just made it, we just tweaked it. So for that whole like 12 month period, we did that, we reverse, outlined your entire book. So we said, okay, here's what we have. Where are the scenes that work? Where are the ones that don't work? How can we plant clues throughout the whole thing? How do we make sure that each section's the proper pace and length, and things like that? Do you remember going through all that for about a year, cheryl?

Speaker 1: 15:13

Yeah, I do, and I think that one of the reasons that that took a whole year is that for me there is always a constant struggle to keep the big picture in view, because I get bobbed down in details, word choices and such for a scene that maybe wasn't even going to make it all the way to the final draft. So I had to kind of keep learning to watch the big picture even while you are, you know, putting words on the page. It was a slow lesson for me to learn, but I think I finally got it, because when I stopped looking up every single synonym for this word and that word and whatever, and just focused on tell this part of the story and have what the character is thinking, have what they're doing, what everybody is doing, and then later go back and make it be all the right words to have it just in the right place and that, doing it in two passes like that rather than trying to do it all in one single pass, it was just much faster to do it in two passes like that.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Yeah. And so what I think from my perspective, what I saw you doing which I know a lot of other writers do is, let's say, we were working on chapters one through five or scenes one through five, whatever. You would revise them and then you would want to send them back to me to get the final checkmark and I kept having to say, like we're not final until we get to the end, and come back around and you would tell me too on our calls. The other day I spent 30 minutes with my thesaurus and I'm so mad at myself. So it's those two things happening.

Speaker 2: 16:50

And then, once we got into the zoomed out version of we have to look at the rest of your outline to make sure that we know where we're writing to. And you had some interesting and fun personal deadlines in between there that we can talk about in a second of like I need to write 50 pages by tomorrow. But once you kind of zoomed out and we looked at the whole story, you were like, okay, I see that it's kind of more of a work in progress and I need to just get to the end and then I can worry about my thesaurus and have fun with that. Remember that, yes, Yep, definitely so, during this year too, during 2023, and during one of those times where you were rushing to get a bunch of pages done. Do you remember what that was for?

Speaker 1: 17:31

Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I have like a love-hate relationship with deadlines. You know I hate the pressure, but on the other hand it appears that when there is that pressure I can do it. What had come up is that in my writing group with Les Edgerton, he was encouraging members to submit their stories to the Killer Nashville Writers Convention or Conference for some of the prizes that they had, and so it's like, oh, the deadline was actually just a couple days away and I thought, okay, okay, I'll just look and see what it wanted. And for unpublished manuscripts, what it wanted was the first 50 pages of the manuscript and I thought, well, I can do that. And then I looked at it and it's like me and I haven't gone back and like polished this up yet, and it was like I have 24 hours to do this in. And so I did and I it had, you know the, the, the new things with. You know the, the additional interiority and more development of the antagonist right away. You know all the stuff that we've been talking about in it. And so I polished that up and I got it in and it actually did end up being a finalist for the.

Speaker 1: 18:40

That's the Claymore Award at Killer Nashville for Best Science Fiction Fantasy and I was astounded. And then I thought and wow, I actually was able to do that and I to do those 50 pages like that. I don't think I could have done that if it had been a couple of years earlier. I think it was because I knew what needed to be in there, because we had talked about it, and so it was just much easier to plow through and get that work done because I had a clear picture in my mind of what I was trying to do with it.

Speaker 2: 19:13

That being said, too, it wasn't the final version that ended up in your book. It was pretty close, but there was still polishing and like line editing and copy editing to do. So it's pretty amazing what you won. You were a finalist in this competition or contest, whatever you want to call it with pages that weren't totally perfect or totally done Right. I mean that's amazing.

Speaker 1: 19:36

Yeah, and I think it's because we had talked through the structure of the story so much that it really held together.

Speaker 2: 19:43

The story was louder than the unpolished words or the right words. Right, the story mattered more than anything else and we had that nailed. So, yeah, yeah, very cool, and it's so funny in hindsight just thinking, thinking of. On one hand, that feels so long ago. On the other hand, it feels like it was yesterday when you were up late at night rushing to get your 50 pages done. But totally worth it, and I think this was part of the turning point. To correct me if I'm wrong, that was you realized. Okay, maybe I can get through this faster and I don't need to spend so much time on word choice or polishing my prose, would you?

Speaker 1: 20:17

say that's right. Need to spend so much time on word choice or polishing my prose. Would you say that's right? Absolutely, If I hadn't been before. It made me a believer regarding the structure and the elements that we talk about. When you and I, in Story Lab and Notes to Novel and so forth, when we talk about what goes into a scene, it's like yeah, it works.

Speaker 2: 20:39

And so there's kind of two things. If I'm a listener, I might be thinking, wow, on one hand, you're saying it took about 12 months to go back through and do these revisions and you're saying that you were stuck in the weeds on word choice. So as a listener, I'm going to say, ok, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to take advice from Cheryl. But, on the other hand, the 12 months where we did some really deep work on your story and when it came time to write, you were able to then fly through the next version of it Granted, yes, you did have a full draft and things to work with. But do you want to talk a little bit about, like, remember, when we made your version of, cheryl wanted a spreadsheet? Because, of course, of course she did. She's the details slash data person, right, cheryl? Yeah, right, yeah. So she wanted a spreadsheet with each of her scenes. And do you want to just talk about what that was like and some aha moments you had during that phase?

Speaker 1: 21:28

Yeah, yeah, so I modeled. I had like a page for each scene and I modeled them after the structure with the five elements Okay, let's see if I get this right the inciting incident and the complications and the turning point, the climax, and then the big day, which is the big decision, and then the resolution, what happens afterwards. And so when I took all the C's that we had and I plugged them into that formula, if you want to call it that, there was something that turned up that was quite fascinating. Every scene that was not working well did not have a clear-cut decision, and so for me, that was evidently that was a big aha moment and, from my writing, made me realize that the scene needs to kind of focus around.

Speaker 1: 22:17

This decision is going to be made, and how the character makes it is going to determine, you know, what happens next. And so when we went through and either tweaked the scene to make sure that there was a real clear decision or, in a couple cases I think, we combined scenes and in a couple of cases we realized that there was something missing and we created a whole new scene, because we couldn't get from scene A to scene B without something else happening and another decision had to be made. That was important, and so we added a scene for that. And then it's like then the whole plot just kind of clicked together once we did that. Then it's like then the whole plot just kind of clicked together once we did that.

Speaker 2: 22:58

Yeah, and what's really cool is, if we kind of think back to what we said earlier about you had to put in interiority to show your character Arise's arc, and then we had to figure out the antagonist and how he works into the structure.

Speaker 2: 23:17

That is really what you're talking about on a scene level too, because the crisis shows that choice in a scene and for listeners we'll link to an episode in the show notes about this scene structure if you want to learn more. But the crisis moment really shows how the events are affecting the character and what they're going to do, based on motivations, worldview, value, all kinds of things like that. And then those scenes, a lot of times when there was something missing between point A and point B, that's where we would say, well, what is the antagonist up to? And every time it was like something just clicked into place a little more and then by the end you had this like a reverse outline that showed all of your scenes and we could say they work enough for us to feel confident to go through and now just tweak your pages, rewrite your pages, whatever we needed to do.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Yeah, yeah, and that rewriting went a lot faster with having those outline notes to for each scene to look back to.

Speaker 1: 24:03

Yeah, so you had that version, which was like definitely the strongest version up until that point in six months or less faster, and especially, the more I let go of trying to do what you might call the wordsmithing, where you're trying to polish up the words, the more I let go of that for this stage, the faster it went.

Speaker 1: 24:31

We even had some fun with it because we'd even put, like you know, modern day language in there saying, well, this guy, you know, did that and he said, darn, I wish that hadn't happened, whatever, and I even, you know, let myself, you know, write it that way at first because that had the feeling in it. It's like the character is frustrated, or the character is is afraid, or the character, you know, whatever the character is just express that kind of colloquially and then to go back and put it into the right tone and words that I want to use. Then it was kind of fun because it's like, well, I already know all the feelings and all the you know and what's going to be said and what's going to happen and what each character is going to do. Now I just need to smith it in a way that fits the tone of what I want to tell the story.

Speaker 2: 25:13

And there were even for listeners, who do this because I want to make the listeners who are, I want to say, guilty of this too. I am too. So no judgment, but Cheryl was also the type of writer that would be like, well, these two sentences start with similar words, or I use the same word twice in a paragraph, and so she'd be trying to do that as she's crafting like the big picture of the scene, which, of course, would trip anybody up. So if you're listening and you do that as well, maybe Cheryl can be your inspiration to you know, just get through the meat of writing and use the colloquial language or the simple language and then wordsmith it later.

Speaker 1: 26:38

Yes, that was one of my huge takeaways from the whole process and, yeah and so that actually made it fun, because otherwise it was looking more like it was a daunting task, and when I approached it in those kind of like two different layers, it's like each layer was fun because it was funny. It was fun writing it as if it was like, you know, just me and my brothers talking with ourselves and then, you know, putting it into the language that I wanted to use for the story. That was fun too, because the hard work was already done. I already knew what are the feelings being expressed, what are the actions that are happening and what kinds of things need to be said, you know, by each character. That was already laid out, so then it was just purely a matter of putting it in the type of words that I wanted to use.

Speaker 2: 27:29

Yep, and all that wordsmithing, like you said. I remember you had fun with it and per my timeline that took about four months, so you were able to get through that piece even quicker. Once, like you said, you were confident the story worked and your scenes had check marks next to them, and then it was kind of time to tighten and focus and so a lot of it was the wordsmithing, like you said, but at that point we also had a climax that we had to work through. Do you remember that?

Speaker 1: 27:54

Yes, and that was from even from the very beginning. One thing that we knew is that the climax for the story what I had, was too drawn out, it got a bit repetitive and we knew it needed to be tightened up. But looking at all of these pages, the book ended up being 107,000 pages. So, and that may sound terrible, 107,000 words, right, cheryl? Or words, yeah, that must be really long. Yeah, we need a truck to cart it around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, one hundred and seven thousand words, which I was originally shooting for ninety thousand words, because that was kind of the recommended amount for a debut novel.

Speaker 1: 28:35

But science fiction and fantasy and I am not writing fantasy, though the science in my story is it gets a little bit into kind of more paranormal type stuff rather than just pure hard science. But at any rate, those types of stories actually are typically a bit longer than some of the other genres, and so that word count was okay. But the climax of the story, the way it was originally written, was not okay because it kind of kept repeating the same things without adding something new to the story, and so we tightened that up. So every time something new happened it added to what was going on in that climax and brought something new in. And what's that?

Speaker 2: 29:19

Yeah, oh, what's interesting too is we could identify that from your reverse outline and we said maybe this will work out or maybe it'll be a little bit too drawn out feeling. And then you wrote it because we were like we don't know, we just need to see. So you rewrote it and then we said, okay, yeah, it kind of parts are working, parts are a little too drawn out. So during these kind of last phases of polishing the manuscript, we were really hard on the climactic scenes and just tightened everything as much as we could, and you know we're both happy with the result.

Speaker 2: 29:48

So, um, yeah, I just think it's so interesting to think about. It's almost like you have this big mess, almost, and then you just sharpen, sharpen, sharpen until it gets to the point where you're happy with it yeah, yeah, and we spent a lot of time on on on the climax.

Speaker 1: 30:04

So what? Like we did on the beginning, which I think makes sense because those you know, that brings the reader in at the beginning and the start and at the end you've got to satisfy the reader. It's all got to make sense and the reader has got to feel good about how it's all coming out, and so we paid a lot of attention to that.

Speaker 2: 30:26

And would you say that the climax was easier to work through after all the work we had done on your antagonist?

Speaker 1: 30:32

Oh, definitely, because of course the climax was a big confrontation between the protagonist and antagonist and having all that additional information not just in the back of my head, but we had been verbalizing it through the story all along it really made the climax come together a lot more clearly and in a real satisfying way.

Speaker 2: 30:58

Yeah, and in a way I remember watching you kind of go through the phases of the climax and there was never really a version where it was like, well, what is his motivation? Because we knew what the antagonist wanted. The whole time we'd expressed it, and so at a certain point it got to just kind of the stage direction and how is all this going to come out and actually play out? And then it was like polishing, because I see a lot of writers who they'll get to the end and they're like I don't know why my antagonist is confronting them right now.

Speaker 1: 31:27

And I think that was just evidence that we had set up everything in the draft properly so that when you got to that point it just kind of flowed Right, right, yeah it was, yeah, the the parts that we lingered on the most was more of a what was a little bit more of a back into the detail level in that, just making sure things happened in the right order because we knew what things were. But but it's it's like when do we want this to happen? When do we want the reader to know that? And so it was more kind of like going through that stuff. But it wasn't a question about why things were happening, it was just making sure that they were in the best order and in a way that would you know, keep the reader's attention as they were moving through it.

Speaker 2: 32:07

Yeah, and we had the fun experience of dealing with weapons that you've made up and technology, and getting those in the right place at the right time and making sure that nothing was usable that wasn't being used. You know, because that's the thing science, fantasy or science fiction and fantasy writers deal with.

Speaker 1: 32:22

A lot is right stuff that they make up yeah, yeah, yeah, because because actually there was one weapon we totally got rid of because there was just no reason for it, and once we had gotten through, it's like we don't need that particular weapon. We can torture our protagonist enough without that weapon. So, yeah, and that was good. And one other thing that was kind of fun regarding the science part of it, because the whole story idea evolved over so many years. Actually, for me, I had to keep changing the science part of it because it's like the real world kept catching up to where I was and I was right about some things and not about other things, and so I had to keep changing the nature of the original problem that my protagonist is trying to solve, which is the, if you want to call it, the surface problem, the technical problem. I had to keep changing that based on what was going on in the real world. So that was fun too.

Speaker 2: 33:16

Yeah, that's pretty funny and I think you're a good example of the advice that says write what you know, because you took your work background and your interest in science and technology and put that into your sci-fi stories. That's pretty fun. Yeah, yes.

Speaker 1: 33:29

Well, not only that, but my protagonist is an IT person and it's like, okay, how do you make an IT person? It's like, okay, how do you make an IT person interesting?

Speaker 2: 33:38

Yeah Well you know right? Yeah, let's make him an alien.

Speaker 1: 33:43

Let's give him an inner wound, let's beat him up a lot.

Speaker 2: 33:49

That's something Cheryl's really good at. That a lot of writers struggle with is beating up their protagonist. She's very good at that, yes, okay. So then we went to line editing, and then you went to copy editing and then, somewhere around there, you decided to self publish your book. So two questions Was there anything that stood out during the line editing and copy editing phase, and then why did you decide to self publish?

Speaker 1: 34:11

Right. Well, there was one big thing happened during the line editing. The editing folks that that I worked with were just absolutely excellent, but in the line editing the editor questioned something in the climax that we had thought was we had it, that we had things pretty tight, and we actually rewrote the climax yet one more time and the line editor gave me a second line edit on that. It was basically more tightening up. It was like we had removed so much repetition and it was looking compared to how it was, it was looking really good to us. But the line editor questioned some things and it's like, yeah, those are good questions, and so we went back and worked on that some more.

Speaker 1: 34:56

So I would say you know, don't shortchange that editing process when you're getting near the end. Even though you've done a lot of work and you've worked with the good editor to get to where you're at, there are still things that you may have missed. You know that a brand new reader is going to see that. You just can't see when you've been in it for so long yourself.

Speaker 2: 35:18

And at that point I mean we were over a year and a half into it, you a lot longer, but you know I tell writers all the time, even if, like in this case, I was Cheryl's developmental editor and book coach, and there's things that I'm not going to see clearly after a year and a half, of course. So it's always a good idea to switch up your editors if you want, or at least go through the line editing and the copy editing after your developmental edit and beta readers just to get eyes on your story that you don't have throughout the process.

Speaker 1: 35:47

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And then the final choice, for how am I going to publish it? I had always been aiming it towards the traditional route. So I had done some querying when I had the first draft done and it was not very successful. But you know, I was new at querying and I had this brand new, somewhat unpolished manuscript but at least I got to know a bit with that process, got to know a bit about that process, but at least I got to know a bit about that process.

Speaker 1: 36:22

And then, when it got to the point where we actually had the additional editing done and we have a pretty polished manuscript, I decided for really two reasons to pursue the self-publishing. And one has to do with the timeline, because I'm 72, 72 so I'm not remember I was draining dogs for competition and they can survive. So you know, not spring chicken here. And when I, you know I was taking a lot of, you know, webinars and stuff on. You know the nuts and bolts of the publishing process and and pretty much the standard advice was to expect that once a publisher now not the agent, mind you, but once a publisher has bought your manuscript, it's going to be 18 to 24 months before you see that actually in print, right? And the thing is is that clock doesn't start ticking until you actually have the publisher. Before that you need to get an agent to be willing to take you on.

Speaker 1: 37:24

And I'd actually gotten to the point where I had two agents who had requested the full manuscript, which was a lot of progress from where I had started. But the thing is they still would have to sell out to a publisher and every step along the way they're going to ask for changes. That that's going to be standard. And so I looked at even if we had the publisher buying it.

Speaker 1: 37:47

Now we're looking at 18 to 24 months and I thought that for me, I thought that is just too long for me, and so I wanted to take control of the timeline. And then the other element was that at each step the agent and their editors will look over the manuscript and the publisher's editors will look over the manuscript and, reasonably, would ask for some changes. That's pretty normal. And I thought about it and I thought I've got some pretty strong themes in this story, enough that I actually had an official sensitivity reader go through it to make sure I didn't cross boundaries too much, and I decided it's not that the manuscript had not been edited. It's been edited, you know, inside and outside, and I just did not want to make any more changes to it, especially something that might affect the theme, and so those and when you say strong themes, you mean that in two different ways, right?

Speaker 2: 38:51

So you mean there are some things that you feel very passionate about, like not judging others and being open to things that are different than you or your experiences, and then also, we know there are life and death stakes and children that are not like violently at risk or anything, but there's a what do we call it like a disease that's affecting yeah, there's.

Speaker 1: 39:11

There's a disease, and actually I believe that there are two children.

Speaker 1: 39:15

They don't die the page, but they do die in the process of the story and that's, you know, it's not for every reader, but for me it was an expression of the stakes and also gave me the opportunity to show one of my themes, which is the compassion that the main character has and the empathy that he has for those that are different from him. That, even though there is this antagonism between the alien race and the human race and that was an important theme to me and having very serious consequences was the way that I expressed that and and I I wanted that to stay in the story.

Speaker 2: 39:58

So yeah, so that makes sense. With the timeline and just with the edits you've done and how you got it to a place where you were really proud of it, you were like, I think I'm good to just self-publish. Yep, yeah, so that makes sense. And this month, well, while we're recording it, your book is up on the internet. It's ready to purchase or ready to pre-order, and then when this episode airs, it will have been out for just a few weeks. So I mean, that's pretty amazing.

Speaker 1: 40:24

It is amazing for me to think of. It's still kind of hard to believe, and it's funny because it's like there was so, so much time put into working the draft from its roughest form to the final form and yet, you know, all of a sudden it seems like everything's just happening so fast now.

Speaker 2: 40:44

And you're still in production mode, so I'm sure part of it doesn't even feel real and it probably won't until things slow down a little.

Speaker 1: 40:51

Yeah, yeah, and for anybody that's working in that phase, what I have found is that it can look overwhelming if you look at all the things that you need to do. And so I have learned to say today I'm going to do X, y and Z and I can put on blinders and not even worry about the've been focusing on signing up to get trade reviews, and so it's like I'm not worrying about the other things because there's nothing I need to do about those things in the next few days. So putting on those blinders really helps, because otherwise you can just kind of start hyperventilating and definitely it looks overwhelming otherwise, and it helps that you're so organized.

Speaker 2: 41:34

You gathered all the data and you know the deadlines of when you need things, and so you're working off a very easy to execute checklist at this point, which is great. That does help, yeah, yeah. But well, I want to ask you, cheryl, if you think about the version of you back in 2022, or even before that, when you had joined your other writing group, because you wanted to take this more seriously. Now that you've gone through this and you know what what are like, what would you tell yourself to do differently, or what are you looking forward to doing with your next book?

Speaker 1: 42:05

well, and I am actually. I have 200 pages of the sequel to this written and I thought surely you've already violated one of the things you said.

Speaker 1: 42:14

So so, before I do, I had actually had that written when we were first starting when, I first started working on book one, but what I'm doing is making sure that I've got a solid outline for the story before I go any farther. A lot of what I already have written is going to be usable, but it needs to fit into a good, solid structure, and so I've actually, this last week I've started putting that structure for book two together, and boy is that fun stuff finished up for book one, so that I can just really concentrate here on book two, because I am so anxious to put into play what we just talked about. You know, make sure that I've got you know the, you know the, the, the overall structure at the act level and then the scene level laid out, and I can see most of it in my head already and can hardly. We're almost to the weather where I can be outside in the backyard with the dogs.

Speaker 2: 43:20

Yeah for more brainstorming.

Speaker 1: 43:22

Yes, working through details, but I'm actually so excited about book two I can just taste it, and so, if anything, what all of this experience has done is just made me more eager to do it all again with the next book and and apply the things that I that I've learned that that need to be done. So the antagonist will definitely have a lot more development and and I will be thinking from the antagonist point of view about things I think I've got a good handle on interiority now and then it's just so much fun doing that.

Speaker 1: 43:56

Write it colloquially first and then go through and smooth it afterwards.

Speaker 1: 44:00

It's like that is just so much fun so I actually, when I first decided I wanted it to be, you know, more serious published novel, I was a bit of trepidation looking towards that, but it's like I wanted to do it. Now it's like it's all looking like fun and so I just, I just can't wait to, you know, be totally embroiled in the next story. And this whole story sequence is going to be a trilogy. So I've got notes for book three already, and when I get notes I just just write them down, keep track of them. So yeah, so that they will come together into a structure when we're ready for that.

Speaker 2: 44:38

Yeah, and I bet too in hindsight, there's things like you probably heard advice on the Internet like don't write and edit at the same time, and you probably said, ok, I get that, but whether I put it into practice is another story. I bet there's things you look back on that you're like I just wish I would have listened to that advice.

Speaker 1: 44:53

Yeah, and that's true. And then, on the other hand, I think for each of us there's probably a point in time when we're ready to hear a particular piece of advice and for me it happened over these past couple of years but it's like once I finally started doing it, it's like, oh man, this is not only is this easier, but it's fun. And it's like, okay, this is definitely the way to do it. And yeah, I probably should have done it earlier, but it's like I wasn't ready to receive that advice earlier, or something.

Speaker 2: 45:25

Yeah, well, I hope that, whoever is, I feel like there are people listening that are going to say I feel like I'm Cheryl two years ago and they're going to just take this as inspiration to maybe just lessen the editing a little as they write or to try outlining, if they haven't before. And on that note, cheryl, I wanted to ask you because I know that you're a data person, a systems person, you like to be organized and you're very analytical and stuff like that. But what would you say to people who are hearing all of this and they're like, well, if I do an outline, I feel like I'm not going to be creative? Did you feel that at all?

Speaker 1: 45:57

not the way that we did it. It's, you know, I you know, before we started, uh, using the, the outline structure that you gave us in story lab and in notes to novel, I thought, oh, it could be, it could be that that's gonna is, you know, gonna make me stuck with this particular. Once it's written down as an outline, it's like I'm stuck with it and I can't change it, and all the creativity thought of it. But the thing is, is that? No, the outline actually lives and breathes with you as you're going, especially when we were reworking the climax and we we broke it into four scenes and then we mish-moshed them together and so the outline kept changing. And that was another reason to keep the outline at a high level, because otherwise, if you're changing all those details over and over again, that's pretty tedious.

Speaker 2: 46:43

And.

Speaker 1: 46:44

I think that's one of the things that might keep a person from wanting to do an outline. But by keeping the outline to the high level of just the five elements that needed to be in there, then it became a matter of ordering them and just making sure that we didn't leave anything out, that each scene led into the next scene with its five elements, and by doing that so the outline was actually, in a way, it was being drafted just like the actual writing was being drafted. Only it was by keeping it at that outline level. It could be done quickly. You know when it was, oh man, we need this to happen before that happens, or this isn't going to flow together. Well, it was easy to change that in the outline because we didn't have to go back and rewrite all those paragraphs and all that dialogue and all that action. So in that respect, the outline really is just a very useful tool and, yeah, I won't leave home without it again.

Speaker 2: 47:46

Yeah, I think that's important. What you said, too, is you're almost treating it like a draft. You're writing like a zero draft through your outline and you're not going to in the weeds. And then once you're confident enough in that it doesn't have to be perfect, but once you're confident enough then you have so much room still to write a scene and there's so much creativity that can go into that as well. And then if things change, of course, like you said, we update the outline and we're good to go. So, yeah, I think that's going to be helpful for other people who are. They might hear you and think, oh, it's easy for you because of your background and you're so analytical.

Speaker 1: 48:22

But I do think that this kind of process can help plotters and pantsers and everyone in between. And one other thing on the you know being a detailed oriented person, in some respects that helps, you know, because I like to organize things right, but in other respects that made it harder to let go of putting in all that detail. And so, whatever your approach is, some of your natural approach is going to help what you're doing, and some of it are things that you're going to have to work with, and it doesn't matter which approach it is, because you need each element of those approaches. You need to be able to see the big picture and then you need to be able to see the detail, and so one's going to be easier for you than the other, but they can both be very doable if you just put the blinders on and you say I'm doing this, I'm doing this.

Speaker 1: 49:08

Now, here's my blinders on, I'm just going to do this. And now? Okay, now I'm going to do that.

Speaker 2: 49:16

I think that's a good point too. I think we talk a lot about in the on the internet, about how plotters need to outline to save themselves trouble, and it's almost like we spotlight the things that the bad things that happen when you're a I'm sorry, a pantser, and then we don't talk enough about the bad things that could happen if you're a plotter, because, like you said, a lot of plotters will hold on to things too tightly and get too in the weeds. So I, of course, I think it's all about balance. It's my Libra nature to think about balance. But anyway, cheryl, this was so fun to reminisce and go down memory lane. I know it's been years at this point, but anything else like that you want to, I mean, tell either your past self or aspiring writers who want to get to where you are now.

Speaker 1: 50:11

Just to keep writing and not let yourself, if you feel like you're getting stuck, just go and do something, anything, even if it's just rewrite over word for word something with physical exercise that if you just start doing something then it kind of locks everything or unlocks everything so that you can go forward with things. So, just keep writing.

Speaker 2: 50:27

Yeah, I love that. And, Cheryl, where can people find you around the Internet?

Speaker 1: 50:30

I have a website at wwwcheryl-arcocom and that's always a good place to start. It has a way to contact me and tell us a little bit about the book and have some cool pictures on it, and it's a good place to start.

Speaker 2: 50:49

Thank you so much, cheryl, and I'm excited to see how everything goes with this book. Oh, great, Thank you. So that's it for today's episode. As always, thank you so much for tuning in and for showing your support. If you want to check out any of the links I mentioned in this episode, you can find them in the show notes listed in the description of each episode inside your podcast player or at savannahgilbocom forward slash podcast. If you're an Apple user, I'd really appreciate it if you took a few seconds to leave a rating and a review. Your ratings and reviews tell Apple that this is a podcast that's worth listening to and, in turn, your reviews will help this podcast get in front of more fiction writers just like you. And while you're there, go ahead and hit that follow button, because there's going to be another brand new episode next week, full of actionable tips, tools and strategies to help you become a better writer. So I'll see you next week and until then, happy writing.