H. B. Ransom

First novel · In progress

The world doesn't exist yet.

H. B. Ransom writes dystopian science fiction — stories about ordinary people working out the rules of a system that was built to outlast them.

There is no book to buy, and pretending otherwise would be a poor way to start. What there is instead: a manuscript in progress, an honest count of where it stands, and a progress report every three months or so. If you'd like word when there's something to read, follow along.

Manuscript log

  1. Premise
  2. Bible
  3. Outline
  4. First draft
  5. Revision
Working title
withheld
Structure
—
Scenes drafted
—
Open story questions
9
Last updated
—

Words on the page

Drafted
0
Target length
—

—

The book

What's being written

A dystopian science fiction novel — a standalone, set a few decades from now, in a country where an artificial intelligence quietly runs almost everything and the people living under it are, by every measure they have been given, comfortable.

That's about as much as I want to say for now. Not out of coyness: it isn't finished, and the parts I'd be tempted to describe are exactly the parts most likely to change. I'd rather under-promise here and let the book speak when there's a book.

What I'm willing to commit to is the shape of it. First person, past tense, aiming at 90,000–110,000 words. It's a book about comfort and what it costs, written on the conviction that a story like this only works if the trade is honest in both directions — no villains, no speeches, nobody defeating anything with a clever plan. If the easy life in these pages reads as a cage from page one, I've written it wrong. If the harder one reads as idyllic, I've written that wrong too.

Closer to the shelf below than to anything with a chosen one on it. If you liked what The Will of the Many does with a system of power learned from underneath, or what The Giver does with a place that seems fine, it's being written toward that.

Influences

The shelf this book is being written toward

The fastest way to tell a reader what a book is, before the book exists, is to tell them what it's standing next to. These are the ones that set the target.

Progress

Updates

Where the book actually stands, updated roughly once every three months. Drafts, word counts, timelines, and honest revisions to both. No plot, and no promises I can't keep — if an estimate here slips, the next update will say so plainly rather than quietly moving the target.

The outline is finished — seventeen scenes across three acts — and the background material it rests on (world, cast, the rules I'm not allowed to break) is locked down enough that I'm treating it as settled. Nine questions on it remain genuinely open, but none of them block drafting, so I've stopped circling and started writing. First scene is down. That puts the manuscript at a whole 586 words, which I mention mostly so that the number on this page has always been the real one.

The bulk of the last month went into a structural pass rather than new pages, and it was worth it: the middle act had a problem I'd have discovered forty thousand words later at considerably greater expense. Fixing it at the outline stage cost me a week and no actual prose. I'd rather report a small word count and a sound structure than the reverse, though I'm aware that's the sort of thing everyone says while they aren't writing.

Target length is 90,000–110,000 words, first person, standalone. No title yet — I have a working one I'm about eighty percent happy with, and there's no reason to lock it in this early.

For the next update, in November: the aim is to have Act I drafted. I've no track record to estimate from yet, so treat that as a goal rather than a forecast — and if it slips, I'll say by how much.

Work on a first novel is underway, and this page exists to track it. Putting one up before there's a book to put on it feels slightly premature — but the alternative is finishing a manuscript with nobody to tell about it, which seems worse.

Where things stand: the world and the cast have been worked out in some detail, and I've been reading properly on structure rather than assuming I already knew it. That reading has already changed the shape of the outline more than once, which I'm choosing to take as evidence it was worth doing.

Not much else to report at this stage. The next update should have a finished outline and, with luck, the beginnings of a first draft.

Elsewhere

Follow along

Same handle everywhere — @hbransomwrites. The quarterly updates on this page are the record; the rest is where the work gets talked about as it happens.

Subscribing on Substack is the one that guarantees you hear about the book.