Unfolding The Story Like A Snowflake
I feel that it is time to upgrade you about my progress since my last post. I figured that blogging isn't the most important part to do at the moment and instead focussed on the actual story. I read alot of books about how to write a novel and I must say that the most helpful was The Snowflake Method.
If you never heard of the method let me describe it in a few words for you. First you start of with the description of the book in one interesting sounding sentence. For a reference here is my sentence:
A science fiction novel about a young woman living in a Utopia governed by artificial intelligence, who is dispatched together with an old friend to colonize a remote planet, where she finds out, that everything she believes in, is a lie.
This doesn't need to be perfec tin the beginning, but it should set the mood about what the book is about, who the heroes are, where it plays and what will happen. From there you start splitting this sentence up and explain the whole story in five short sentences. As soon as you have the five sentences you expand them to five paragraphs and when you have filve paragraphs you expand them to a four-page synopsis. The you add character summaries, maybe a timeline and then you are able to write down the book.
As my story consists of many characters, it is was a lot of work to write down all their stories. But it is worth it. Even if you might never read all of their complete stories for me as the author it is very helpful to have these backstories, so characters decisions will make sense. But during this process I learned that a lot of ideas or decisions I had in the begining, wouldn't work in the complete story. So I had to rework all of the documents over and over in the last months. Now I feel that I have a great construct of the story. I need to reorganize it one last time and then be able to finally find a writer to help me formulate the first draft.
In the meantime I continued to work with my concept artist team and had most of the characters created as concept drafts similar to the ones shown in earlier posts. I also had the please to have some environment concept art be done, which I was really amazed by. I will leave a low resoution of this concept for you here:
I started to setup The Richard Brammer Company in Estonia. I needed to apply and receive my E-Residency for Estonia and am about to sign a contract with LeapIN to help me with the book keeping and taxes. I chose Estonia, as I travel a lot and Estonia has the E-Residency program, where you can run a company without actually being in the country. This is a big advantage to any company in Europe. I would love to set up The Richard Brammer Company in the USA, but this is a step I will have to do some time in the future.
Until then I will concenrate on getting the first draft been written as soon as possible. If you want to know when the book is available, join my newsletter or follow me on Twitter.