The (Fake) Reviews Are In! First Look at "Conservation"

"Terrible.  He should not quit his day job." -- George St. John, National Post Books

"My brain is crying.  Someone stop this man." -- Carol Barnes, New York Book Review

"I had to stop reading when I gouged my eyes out." -- Phil Larkin, Chicago Tribune literary critic

Nothing brings you back to a sense of your own inadequacy than reading the first draft of a story you wrote. I had this experience very recently with a Harvey Cook short story called Conservation.  I am beginning to experiment with FeedBooks.com and Conservation will be one of the first pieces to go up.  I pasted all the contents into their interface, generated the ebook, added the cover and gave a copy to one of my buddies to read.

Then I started reading it myself.  

The story is about Dr. Harvey Cook, a former government xeno-biologist, who attempts to steal back his own research on an invading extra-terrestrial plant life from a private corporation to prevent it from being used as a basis for bio-weapons.  As first drafts (or as I like to call them "shit drafts") go, it was pretty terrible.  There's a huge gap in the action about a third of the way in, the style is bad, the characters don't seem to know what they're doing.  A reflection on me, of course.  I hope Adam reads it with a sense of charity.

To give you a sense of the problems I saw, here's an example from the third movement of the story.  Harvey Cook and his young research assistant arrive by stealth at their old lab, break in and make it all the way to their work stations only to realize that all their computers have been removed.  They sneak back out and get away without being detected.  All of this after Cook had been warned by Anna Royse, the story's antagonist, at the very beginning that XenoCon had learned about their plans.

So you see what I'm facing.  It doesn't make sense for Cook to attempt the infiltration after Royse tells him that they know what he's up to.  It's like a cop telling a bank robber, "We know what you're up to." and the robber breaking into the bank anyway, having second thoughts and then leaving--all without the cops who would be lying in wait for him--not arresting him.  Dumb.

What can I say about this travesty?  In my defense, I wrote the tale in haste at a weekend writing retreat that my other buddy slash writing partner and I held about a month ago and my writing style lends itself to slower, careful plodding.  At any rate, I'm sure Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! wasn't a gem in its rough form either.

I am taking a break from my other project, The Dead Shark, so I can focus on improving Conservation.  I started rewriting the entire third movement yesterday and so far I like what I've come up with.

All is not doom and gloom, though.  I've started learning how to use Gimp to create ebook covers.  Here's the cover I made for Conservation. I think, for a novice, I did a pretty good job.

...now if only I could whip the story into shape. :)