My 2023 as an sci-fi author

The last words in Red Twin for 2023 are written, and 2024 lies ahead of me. And what a year it has been! Challenges, setbacks, and progress. This has truly been the year I started to see myself as a writer and charted a path forward. Thank you for being part of the journey ❤️.

I can look back to a year ago, when I wrote the above post. At that time, I was about halfway through the script and had just gotten into a daily routine as a writer. Now I have a draft of 120,000 (that you will never see) and am halfway through a first revision of the sci-fi adventure Red Twin 🚀💪.

But a lot has happened along the way. For example, I have registered a business as an indie author and launched this website – thomaskung.se! Here I have collected everything you could want to know about the Colony, such as map, technology, places. In addition, I have started blogging about being a science fiction writer, editing and other things that have happened along the way. A journal of what I have done and learned, simply.

Perhaps the most rewarding part has been the process with my test readers. I have written, revised, and shared the chapters on the betabooks app, where Johan and Siri have devoured them and dissected every word.

It has been so incredibly valuable. They have pointed out my penchant for exclamation points and sparse descriptions so that I can become the writer I want to be. And they are the reason why the book will be a good experience in the end. Big thanks to you and all the other friends who read half-edited drafts (here comes one)!

But I’ve also gone “back to school.” After finishing the first draft, the first thing I did was read “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel” by Jessica Brody. What a bummer! I definitely should have read it before writing 120,000 words of nonsense.

But it felt like a revolution when I understood the dramaturgy as Brody described it. How the hero has to fight (and fail) for the goal to feel worth reaching. How it’s about the inner journey (B-story).

So the revision was more like starting from scratch. Ugh…

But after these insights, things have really gone smoothly and now I am close to the middle – “midpoint” – of the story in revision round 1 and am proud of what I have accomplished.

The lesson is not over yet, though, and I’m now reading the two other books in the picture – “Emotion Thesarus” and “Self-editing for fiction writers”, both of which expand my toolbox and help me stay the course in the revision swamp 📝. Let’s not forget King’s “About writing”, with its simple and obvious advice.

I will fight hard to achieve my goal in 2024, to launch “Red Twin” and establish myself as a Swedish science-fiction author. After that, the marketing plan will take over and I can establish my platform as an author and eventually an editor. Educating has always been rewarding for me.

Så där är vi idag. En hemsida, en debutant-bok under revidering och en plan för författar-karriären. Men inget är värt någonting utan dig, som följer med mig steg för steg. Tack till er alla som orkar lyssna på mitt tjat om Kolonin och den här boken som blir färdig “någon gång”. Den kommer bli klar och du var där när det hände!

Thomas Kung är författaren till Röd Tvilling, ett science-fiction-äventyr om en tjej som letar efter sin farbror i en främmande värld som heter Kolonin. Anmäl dig till nyhetsbrevet för att få erbjudanden och exklusivt innehåll.