Behind the Scenes: Portland in Eight

A reader once complained to me about Ollie’s affection for Portland. At the time, they were reading the first draft of Eight, and felt that his reminisces about the city were distracting from the story. Ollie was in a new world, after all. The focus should’ve been there, right? 

Well, yes, but the new world also needed a counterweight—something to help contrast between Ollie’s experiences before and after his arrival—and that was the role Portland played. 

The honor certainly wasn’t going to go to Ollie’s first family. They were a mess, no matter how much he cared for his grandparents. The family was dysfunctional at best, and his experiences in Sherwood weren’t any better. The wooded areas around his family home were important to his development into the man he’d eventually become, but the actual town and its people, not so much. 

No, the story demanded that Ollie have a place he could call home and where he could find happiness, otherwise there’d be no sense of loss upon his arrival. His life in Sherwood sure wouldn’t cut it, which is how Portland came into the picture. It was where he met Helen and where he raised his kids. 

In the same way Sherwood conflated with Ollie’s first family, Portland conflated with his second. He could’ve potentially moved away from Oregon entirely to find his happiness elsewhere, but I didn’t want to complicate his background by introducing an exodus to some other setting. Besides, Portland’s weirdness lended itself to the darker, more mystical aspects of Ollie’s background. 

As an aside, after writing the scene in Eight about the Midnight Man, I was dogged for months by the desire to write a series of ‘Weird Portland’ short stories featuring Ollie’s family going around town solving mysteries like Scooby Doo and the gang. If only my writing time weren’t so limited, I might’ve done it. 

Anyway, if you’ve seen maps of Portland, you know the city has a number of bridges connecting its west and east sides. That was the role I envisioned the city playing in the book—a bridge between Ollie’s early life and his new life. A place where he could plant roots, so that they could more clearly be torn out when he arrived in the new world. 

It also didn’t hurt that I’d lived in Portland, and knew the city well enough to be able to describe it decently well. 

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I recently just came back from visiting, and it was clear that the last few years have been hard on Portland. I still saw a fair share of characters walking the streets, and kindness too, but also many more store fronts for lease than I’d ever seen before. For nostalgia’s sake, I stopped by an old place of employment, and the building was empty and for lease. 

While I was there, I also grabbed a bunch of shots of street and found art. It’s something I do whenever traveling. 

If you’d like to see more from Portland, as well other places I’ve visited, check out my Instagram page.

P.S. Sherwood is a real place, just like Portland, and the folks I’ve met from there have been great. Don’t forget that Eight is a work of fiction.

5 Things I Learned When Editing 2 Books in 12 Months

The scene: I’d written two serialized books that’d been posted to Royal Road, and I wanted to get them ready for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. Like, really ready, so I hired a professional editor. 

Cue the editor: Specifically, I reached out to JD Book Services for three rounds of edits on Eight (developmental, line, and copy) and two for the sequel (line and copy). 

What followed: a year of slogging through the editor’s comments, during which I frequently questioned my sanity for wanting to write, but from which I eventually emerged as a better writer. Plus, the books were much tighter and more coherent thanks to the time invested. 

Cutting to the chase, here’s what I learned: 

1. How to properly use a gods-be-damned semicolon. Before, I’d treated it as a super-powered comma, but that’s not a semicolon’s purpose; its job is to separate two independent clauses. If one of the clauses can’t stand alone, then it needs either a comma or an em dash. Unfortunately, I’d littered my novels with semicolons before I learned that lesson. 

2. That writing serially introduces certain artifacts, which can be exacerbated if there are long periods of time in between posts. For me, I post a chapter a week on Royal Road, which may not sound like a long time, but depending on the length of a book, months might pass before a thing mentioned in chapter X is referenced again in chapter Z. That necessitates reminders that sound a lot like the author repeating themselves constantly when read non-serially. 

3. To watch out for unintentional rhymes. They’re not a problem when reading, but can be distracting when the story is translated into an audiobook. 

4. Record keeping for stats and character progression has to be immaculate, so that if there are edits, you can keep it all straight and not introduce any errors when making adjustments. That went double for silverlight gains, the equivalent of experience points in my books. 

5. To let scenes breathe and to take the time necessary to flesh them out. This lesson was a hard one for me, and the editor pointed it out over and over in the text how I had a tendency to drop a big thought and then move on. It was like I wanted to prove I was a clever writer, but didn’t have the discipline to demonstrate I was a hard-working one too. 

To put it more bluntly: any stray ideas or observations that weren’t worth taking the time to fully integrate, those were distractions from the story’s flow and had to be cut. And, as the edits proceeded and the story grew stronger as a result, I learned that this way of building up scenes also enhanced the feeling of authenticity arising from them. They were so much better than before, and it became clear that if there was a choice needed between the two, authenticity beat cleverness every time.  

So, those are five things I learned when editing two books in twelve months. There’s more beyond them, but I’ve gone long enough. I hope you find these observations interesting or helpful in your own work. 

Please note: No editors were harmed in the making of this post, which was probably a mistake. It means that I am solely to blame for any errors, grammatical or otherwise.