My First Author Conference – Day 3 

It’s so true.

I was so drained by my lack of sleep from Day 1 & 2 that the husband said I snored very loudly last night and I woke up with a stiff shoulder – likely because I didn’t move much when I slept.

But I managed to sleep seven hours. That’s the most I’ve slept in a long while. So today already started right.

After I dumped my kids to school, I came back, made myself a cup of coffee (I’m a tea drinker, but I’m not looking to relax here) and jumped straight into my first video.

The Military Sci-fi Panel

Why? I don’t write military sci-fi and I have no intention to. I write space opera romance. Think Star Wars, Dune, with the focus on building romance between the two main characters.

But.

My writing seem to keep gravitating towards stuff that’s got to do with military and war. I struggled so much with the names of the ranks and rank-hierarchy that I resorted to making up my own names. If I could call the weapons used in my sci-fi “Pew-pew”, and “Jibaboom” (I’m pretty sure you can differentiate their firepower based on these names), I would.

It’s not just my Chikara Revolution series. I realised my Legends of Xi Shan series is about a high-ranking soldier who defected too. ARGH.

So yes, I thought I’d better listen to the panel and learn some stuff.

I’m very glad I did. The main takeaways for me are:

1. Determine what you’re writing. Military sci-fi or militaristic sci-fi? It will determine what kind of details you should include your story.
2. Don’t get too carried away with acronyms and jargon. It disrupts the flow.
3. If you didn’t serve in the military, get someone who does/did to look through your work so that you don’t make a fool out of yourself. Readers who enjoy this genre are very knowledgeable in this area, regardless of whether or not they had served in the military.
4. This is the most important point. Do not downplay the psychological damages of war on a soldier. PTSD is very real.

So far, I’m on the right track. Phew. But with these in mind, I’ll be even more careful about what I write as I expand those stories. It also inspired more

Next, I watched The Pitch – where authors try to sell their story ideas to publishers in hope they’d get picked up.

I watched this because I need help writing blurbs. I should watch the blurbology talk but I sort of already got the gist of Meek’s blurb talks because I hired him to write the blurbs for Chikara 1 & 2. Then using his style, I wrote the blurb for Chikara 3. It’s different from the one I put in Amazon because a more experienced author rewrote my blurbs for me and I was enlightened.

Anyway, it’s my ADHD that caused me to have a different blurb on this site from my Amazon site. For your benefit, you can read and compare Meek’s blurb and my fav author’s blurb. I only just realized I haven’t updated the blurb on this site after I wrote this. Heh.

I digress. Again. (ADHD)

I learned a lot watching The Pitch. I don’t know how to put what I’ve learned into words here but I understood what the publishers are looking out for and I could mentally pick out what went wrong with my blurbs, how I could refine my books so that they have a clearer selling point and all. When I put out the books I owe my readers, I will expand *all* my books to be about 100 – 120k words before I write a new one.

After that, I watched Story Creation – The Theme.

I felt more riled up after watching this. I will be reworking my books. Lol. Not because they are terrible, mind you. But I think I can make them better.

For now, I’m going to try to apply what I’ve learned into Serpent Uncovered.

I’ve also watched Part 3 to this class. There are supposed to be Part 2 and Part 4 to this but I don’t know where they are. Will try searching for them later.

I highly recommend this for newbie authors like me.

That’s all for today. I’ll watch more tomorrow. Oh, and I remembered today, it’s not just the humans who are disrespecting my personal time.

By the way, if you’ve watched the Story Creation class and read my books before, you’ll know I seem to be heading in the Michael Bay direction. I need to review my stuff and see how I can refine them to be Michael Crichton direction.