It’s Not That Easy…. but it IS Easy…

With STAR VECTOR set to debut October 2nd with the release of Part I: Enter: The Star Medics, I’ve come to a point where everything is almost finished yet there is still so much to do before the ultimate release on December 18, 2026! Announcing it here first before I edit the website, STAR VECTOR as a project is nowhere near complete. However…

• PART I: Enter: The Star Medics comes out October 2, 2026
• PART II: The Martian Saga releases with the following on December 18, 2026
• STAR VECTOR The Complete Paperback *
• STAR VECTOR Special Edition Hardcover “”

…and I still have A LOT to do before the December release!

That’s on top of continuing to read over and edit the current evaluation copy of the novel – a brick. Also, getting feeler copies out to reviewers who have the time and patience for the entire novel and getting awareness on it so that people will actually buy the book…

There’s so much hustle work that still needs to happen!

What I’ve ultimately learned was this…

Doing this on my own is NOT easy!

The Lessons Learned

When I wrote my first novel and released it, I was so excited that I ordered myself several author copies to gloat. Of course, no one bought the thing and it was stuck on KDP Select (free copies to Kindle Unlimited subscribers) for years. To give you an idea, KDP Select from jump is like going direct to VHS (streaming for the young folks out there who have no idea what VHS is). You get paid per page read and royalties are like twenty US cents per read page. I even paid for, for YEARS, advertising on Amazon, thinking it would do the ground work for me.

I bellyached to a good friend of mine, popular video game writer and New York Times Best Selling Author David L. Craddock. He said to me, and let me see if I can quote him accurately (sorry if I misquote a little, Dave):

“People think they can just write something and it’ll magically sell! You have to do all of the pushing and hard work yourself. You can’t just write it and magically expect success to be built in. You’ve gotta bust your @$$; it’s very hard work and it pisses me off when people think it’s so easy to do! It’s a job!”

My first novel failed so hard, if it were a constructed building, it would’ve collapsed from rot! To be honest, I don’t think I would’ve been proud to push it. The novel in question, which I will not mention, suffered from the following…

• Too Explicit – Even though the content was “watered down,” it still read like a porno plot
• Subject was Too Squeamish – the main character was 16 and his love interest was 22 which would’ve actually made possession of the novel illegal in most countries
• Zero Marketing – I reached out to reviewers after the fact and a grand total of zero got back to me. I pushed nothing and thought Amazon Advertising would do the footwork for me. NOPE!
• Rife with Errors – The “final draft” and “production manuscript” looked perfect on paper. When I got the physical novel in my hands, boy was I nearly sick to my stomach at the sheer number of errors I’d found!

All in all, the novel was trash! It was so bad that I decided to rerelease it from zero – rewrite it completely, changing elements and making a solid series out of it.

That’s when I decided to just stop right where I was and go in a different direction.

The Birth of STAR MEDIC

This can also serve anyone who wants to take a crack at writing a novel of their own.

I started with a bible. NOT the Holy Bible, but a series of documents and notes that would form the basis for the story. I sketched out characters (major and minor), built the world in which I was going to play in, and finally outlined the story. The bible contains also many notes on things that I thought would be cool to have in this world. It’s still a huge sandbox, but having all of these things organized kept me from any real feature creep and going off in an unnecessary tangent.

The outline and character docs are the most important, in my opinion. It all serves as a general roadmap on how you’re going to take your story and keep continuity all at the same time.

While this is literally called a “bible,” it is by no means gospel. Your actual prose can add to or drop away from the outline, and that’s perfectly fine.

As all of this began to take shape, I called the project, STAR MEDIC. I ran a check for the title through AI and general search results and it came up with nothing. So, believing the title was good, I ran with it and it stuck.

The Writing Process Itself… Not What I Thought

I ran all of my ideas and prose checks through AI. ChatGPT to be exact. I found that, if I prompted it to give me feedback rather than ideas, it stuck to the request rather well. However, without “analyze only please” clause to the prompt, AI tended to hijack the story, eliminate characters, and correct character dialog. For example, if I had my main character say, “Hi y’all!” AI would say, “That is grammatical error. To make it more accessible, I’d change that to, ‘Hi everyone!’ It sounds more natural and is proper English grammar.” It would ignore character design and style.

Regardless of that, as you start to read your draft, you start to question your life choices. I had several sequences in the novel where you’d get full backstories on the four main characters. It was good world building and while the narrative was good, there were two unique qualifiers that would’ve needed to justify keeping these full-on lore dumps in the narration.

1. By the time we get here, do we care enough about the character to need to read this?
2. Are these backstories earned?

For me, in this context, the answer was a clear NO to both. The backstories were in the outline, but they didn’t need to be full-on dumping of information just to pad the length of the book. So, I dumped them.

They didn’t go away entirely as I just integrated them into narrative nuggets. You’ll still learn the motivation and driving events behind these characters – just not in dedicated chapters that aren’t fully necessary.

Needless to say, I ended up with 5 total drafts before I was ready for the production manuscript.

Ready…. or Not?!

When it was all said and done, I had produced a lot of supplemental material through AI. After putting it all together, we created a website and launched it. I had the production manuscript ready and everything was all set.

I did one more pass at a title check to make sure everything was on the up and up.

…turns out, STAR MEDIC is a series of science fiction novels whose main character is eerily similar to mine! Having the same title between two works, yet totally different elements, is not uncommon. However, our main characters are too similar for me to continue to use the title.

The title had to go through multiple transformations, and it did. I finally landed on STAR VECTOR which holds multiple meanings that are accurate for this novel.

Thus, STAR VECTOR was born!

Challenges Yet to Come

While I await the approval for PART I from KDP so I can update the website, there is still so much work yet to be done.

I am still finding errors and editing the grand novel. I’m able to finalize PART I and schedule it for release because it’s the final, final, final, final version and it’s ready.

The story is so big that it needed to be cut in half.

Plus, I need to still reach out to reviewers to get eyes on it. If they can influence enough people to buy the book in any form, I’ll be happy and honored to continue the series. Even if not, I’ll continue to write. But, it all has to get done before the middle of October.

It’s not going to be easy. But, it’s not going to be a wasted effort, either. It has to be done – it IS work.

The Version Differences…. Even if we Didn’t Ask for it

Okay, so if you’re wondering what the differences are and why should you consider buying different versions of the same book, let me explain.

Here are the features of each version.

• Part I and II Paperbacks – Lower price ($15 USD each) and all story – no special features whatsoever
• eBook – Complete version ($8 USD) with e-paper-friendly versions of the special features
• Complete Paperback – The entire brick with full page spreads of special features scattered throughout (price TBD)
• Deluxe Hardcover – Will feature FULL COLOR special features, and more! (price TBD)

I would encourage you to buy the Deluxe Hardcover as it is the ultimate way to experience STAR VECTOR. However, you lose nothing should you buy Parts I and II separately. The story still is the story. You get the special features if you get the complete editions.

In conclusion, I’ve learned a lot through this endeavor. I wish I could’ve started early, like my friend David Craddock and I STRONGLY recommend his titles. Specifically, The Dumpster Club – a young adult novel that’s really, really good!

This may or may not have been encouraging to you to start writing your own. But if you do, if you don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on professional editors, copywriters, doctors, agents, publishers, etc., you can do it all for almost free – you just have to do the footwork, yourself. That takes a lot of effort but it could be the difference between being just a blip on Kindle Unlimited and being a New York Times Best Selling Author. I’m not reaching for THAT, but I do hope that STAR VECTOR is entertaining enough for you to recommend to your friends, family, colleagues, and/or followers.