Sold three copies of The Early Fox. Probably. Two are almost certainly to people I don't know. That brought it up to the low 6,000 in "mystery series" on Kindle, which is sobering: not for my low sales, but for how many books are doing worse.
I still want to do the Bill Bixby arc but I don't know if it would sell or even why I want to do it. The series really is a better fit towards mystery-adventures set in exotic locations (if you think of Southwark as exotic!) that have a strong focus on history and archaeology.
That's the biggest problem I have going into A Fox's Sleep. But I have one that's bugging me more.
I want that classic small town with Bad Things going on under the surface. But that very archetype seems to require that these be something other than an ethically dubious restoration of an old building or some kind of white collar crime. In fact, I don't think it even works if there are drugs being smuggled or there's missing loot from an armored car robbery.
It seems to require that there be blood.
That is, that there is real hurt being done to people right there. Violence. And that's a bad mix with the contract with the reader that I've been operating under. Not quite Nancy Drew rules but close. The reader can feel safe my protagonist and narrator isn't going to get kidnapped and tortured, and when someone tries to kill her, they won't make it as simple, ruthless, and effective as a cartel hit.
And, in general, she doesn't play in those leagues or on that field. She's not a skilled fighter, she doesn't get caught up in the justice system. She's, basically, not adventuring anywhere that the bad guys aren't playing with kid gloves. She can get by with acting skills and luck.
These are degrees of shading, not hard rules -- but such is the contract with the reader. One can tell within a page or two of the cover if one is reading a Miss Marple or a Jack Reacher.
I think I can fix the contract with the reader by putting some blood in the very first chapter. A spoiler warning in prose form.
And... since starting this post, I got it. I have the bones now. The coal mine, the data mining, the corruption, a string of murders. Trouble with the law, the classic suspect-in-the-murder routine. And the Bell Witch, too.
I still don't know if it fits the series.
All Systems Blue is creeping along. No, I haven't finished the first chapter yet. I've given Sinclair her first line of dialog but it was wrong and that version is in the circular file now.
I'm slowly closing in on what kind of story it is and how I am telling it. Starting in social circumstances was the right move. Pushing it further is even better. I know, it sounds like a lot of work for an opening scene. But it isn't an opening scene. I might even cut this scene. What it is, is the test scene. The proof of concept for the whole book. The character, the world, the style and approach.
I did some rough math. Given the plot chunks I've got in mind and arranging them along the story arc and target word count, I could afford to burn 10K of prose before I even get to the Robinsonade. The examples I've been reading from various SF settings have leisurely beginnings (plot-wise, that is) with heavy world-building. There is nothing that flies against the usual standards in spending that many pages just playing with the ship she starts on as they go about business as usual.
However, I'm trying to be less dense on the info-dump, concentrating on plot-important information and delivering as much of it as I can contextually. It is hard especially in the opening paragraphs, as you want to ground the reader as quickly as possible so you can get them involved in the story. Thus a hell of a lot of going back and forth in my various drafts.
And that sort of contextual delivery (show not tell) has issues for some readers. Some people don't know how to read SF. They don't realize it is exactly the same as reading a mystery; you are taking the surface narrative and looking inside, forming your own theories about why the barber in Margrave doesn't seem to be concerned about the lack of customers, or why the bereft widow hiring the PI isn't wearing a wedding band.
Or why the clocks are striking thirteen, or why there is a salt water tap, or why the word used to describe an opening door was "irised."
Some readers really hate hitting an unfamiliar word or name and will stop dead until the author provides them with a dictionary or encyclopedia entry. So I'm having to think about those, too. Give them enough in baldly stated and defined "This is a starship and it is in space" so they at least have some sense of what is going on.
Between that, and the contractors banging on the walls, no wonder I've gotten a bunch of reading done instead.
