How I wrote a 65,000-word novel on my iPhone in two months

In 2023, I wrote a 65,000-word novel about a Dyson Sphere which was a finalist for a science fiction contest. I did it all on my smartphone. Then, the contest crumbled to pieces.

In early 2023, an unexpected contest sprouted on the Internet, managed by a company called Scifidea. It would select 20 stories that featured Dyson Spheres as their setting, ranging from a 30,000-word novella to a 100,000-word novel. Then, 10 winners would be picked to win US$ 20,000 each. The remaining 10 finalists would receive US$ 2,000 each. The winners would be offered a contract acquiring the intellectual property of the story, which would then be published and optioned for TV/movies at China. Further royalties would be offered, but the details escape me now and are irrelevant for this text.

You didn’t read it wrong. It promised to pay US$220,000 (yes, US dollars) in total, not counting the undisclosed amount promised to the top-notch team of judges and every other incurring costs from running the contest. The judges themselves were authors and professionals from the SFF field that I admire immensely, and that served to add a layer of authenticity to the contest—which, let's be honest, was kind of sketchy from the start simply because it's not usual to see that amount of money flowing in literaty contests, much less in an extremely specific one inside the realm of science fiction. The judges were: Phoenix Alexander, Neil Clarke, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Nancy Kress, Derek Künsken, Robert J. Sawyer, Michael Swanwick, and Liza Groen Trombi. If you’re in SFF publishing for a while, you know they’re big names.

Photo credit: Kevin M. Gill on VisualHunt

But let’s stop for a moment! You might be wondering what the heck is a Dyson Sphere.

A Dyson Sphere is a concept devised by physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson in 1960. Long story short, it’s a megastructure enclosing a star to capture most (or all) of its energy, emporewing a civilization living within this sphere to heights never before imagined. It’s a concept that makes sense physically, but which is probably an impossibility when it comes to engineering. You can find Dyson Spheres in novels like Orbitsville, by Bob Shaw (sadly, an unamusing book, in my opinion), in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s S06E04 “Relics”, and in other places.

But why did I decide to invest my time and participate?

There are several reasons for that, some of which I used to convince myself that it was worth the time. First, the money. It’s a lot. In Brazil, where I live, it’s a LOT, roughly a year’s wages of a doctor or a lawyer. Of course I wanted US$ 20,000. Secondly, a motivation to write something bigger than what I was used to, in the veins of a novella or novel, was a good thing. Thirdly, I always liked Dyson Spheres. I was never an expert, but years ago I read a lot about them and just liked the concept and its possibilities.

In early 2023, I was also on a dry spell for new short fiction. I’d written The Plasticity of Being and A Lifeline of Silk but that was it. I had tons of ideas but couldn’t find the energy or the time to write them. So, the contest served as motivation to write. I also reasoned with myself that not many people would be participating—the deadline was short (about 5 months), the wordcount was big (30K to 100K), the theme was extremely specific (Dyson spheres aren’t just that popular anymore—were they once?), and there was barely any promotion. Logically, chances would be higher.

So how the hell would I find the time for such a project if I wasn’t able to find it for some new short fiction?

It’s not that I don’t have the time with my day job and daily routine. But it’s short and hard to find undisturbed moments—which I deem essential when I’m writing (more on that below). What I had was a span of 40 minutes to 1 hour during weekday mornings between the gym (when I go) and the day job. I often use that time for reading in a mate place (a sort of cafe but focused on iced yerba mate), since I’m not at home and walk around with my Kindle in my backpack. That would have to do.

What I didn’t want to do was to carry my laptop with me all the time. It’s an extra weight and sometimes it’s not a good idea to carry a laptop around Rio all the time.

I was always severely against writing on a cell phone: it steals my attention; it’s small; it’s probably not good for my eyes; the software I like and use (Scrivener) had syncing issues with the cloud; the list can go on. But I had to try.

First, I had a ton of research to do. The contest was a hard SF contest, so it demanded a degree of scientific rigor. I’m an engineer and had a slight notion of how some things about a Dyson Sphere should work and how the physics should behave. But it was just feeble knowledge. I had to read and learn a lot.

It was on April 1st, 2023 (no fooling) that I decided to embark on this journey. I needed to plan a Dyson Sphere (my setting), think about a plot, create engaging characters, devise an outline, and write the damn stuff. And if I intended to use my smartphone for writing the story itself, I wouldn’t do it for planning and outlining—not for the most of it, at least—because it demands a lot of back and forth between websites, apps, and documents that is just not that feasible on a small screen.

After focusing almost all of my free time in the first two weeks on intensely planning how my world would be, hopping back and forth through dozens of forums, reddits, wikis, scientific papers, and doing more calculations that I’d like to, I came up with my Dyson Sphere: it was called Thekla. Furthermore, I had a rough outline that I intended to improve as I moved on and the basic features of three characters.

And then, the magic happened. Writing flowed like I never imagined it could on a smartphone, tucking it all into my daily routine.

The hardware: I used my iPhone 12 mini for the task, which made things slighly more challenging since its screen is smaller than the usual devices on the market. Haptic touch was essential for me, since it simulates the feel of keystrokes. Being earnest, I probably wouldn’t be able to proceed without it.

The software: I wanted to use Scrivener, but since I was having syncing issues with it, I decided not to go with it. Then, I started with Notion, which was extremely useful for planning and writing the first chapter. But the lack of some basic features often present in word processors made me abandon it in favor of Google Docs.

The flow: I wrote approximately 1,000-1,200 words every weekday, with some days going as far as 2,300. When I got it going, I started fetching my smartphone during other moments to write or revise—during lunch, waiting in lines, at Uber… Even when I wasn’t in the mood, I fetched my phone and reread parts of the text, correcting and changing anything I felt was necessary. But what really worked were the “reserved”, undisturbed slots on weekday mornings. On weekends, I mostly revised or planned what to write next.

The placeholders: As you probably know, English is not my first language. As such, sometimes words and expressions escape my mind through a black hole. Besides, writing a hard SF story demands a lot of research, rechecking, and sometimes some damned calculations. I didn’t dawdle on them, though, or the flow would be broken. Whenever I got stuck, I just added a placeholder with a comment.

A silly, fake example: “And she crouched to open the computer. Inside it, she saw [research].” And then I’d add a comment like: “Research parts of a computer”. Later, I'd research it in my computer and edit the story.

Long story short, here are the things that made it work for me:

1. a slot of time with no interruptions every weekday;

2. having my draft at my pocket at all times;

3. haptic touch;

4. leaving all the research and editing for when I got to the computer;

5. “Vomit drafting”, as some people call it: writing the story without worrying about typos, inconsistencies, or even leaving out entire paragraphs—it can all be solved later. The important thing is flushing out the story from your head to the paper—or to the screen.

On early June 2023, I had finished the first draft. It was titled The Spiraling Sun and ended up being a hard SF adventure filled with sense of wonder and themes centered around migration and leaving one’s family and roots behind.

This is the tagline I used when I submitted the story:

After receiving the news of her sister’s mysterious death, Galyal decides to go to Thekla, the cluster of ecosystems enwrapping the sun. Traveling across worlds with dinosaurs, rolling atmospheres, and flying metropolises, she’ll unravel a conspiracy that might destroy trillions of humans and all the accomplishments of Thekla.

Thekla itself is a named derived from a never-ending construction in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and gives purpose for its builders. But that’s not what matters here. What matters is that I was very satisfied with the result and with what I accomplished with this piece.

Early on 2024, I received the news that I was among the 20 finalists in the contest. A total of 203 participants entered it, which was far beyond what I’d expected given the limited timeframe and the significant wordcount. But that meant that about 10% of the participants would get something out of the contest.

But then things were already crumbling. Scifidea was a branch of a Chinese IP acquistion firm, and they suddenly cut off all investment for reasons not totally disclosed. The thing is: from the start, things were complicated. Their communication was poor, the contract they would offer had some inconsistences, and their business model was totally askew when compared with what’s tradionally done in English/US publishing—they’d publish the stories on their website and a reader could acquire shares in those books, increasing their value over time, making it all work just like a stock market. There were also talks about cryptocurrency, weird offers of a supposed ticket to Mars, poorly done translations, and fake comments in the commentary boxes of the books previously published on their website. A more thorough analysis can be found here.

On February 2024, Scifidea announced bankruptcy and informed they wouldn’t be paying the prizes or publishing any of the winning/finalist stories. For me, it didn’t come as a surprise. The contest was legit. It wasn’t a scam and they’d previously ran it successfully on China. They probably just lacked someone to guide them through a different landscape while suffering pressure from above. The fact that they probably thought SF readers/writers would be massively interested in Dyson Spheres was already strange enough. It’s a niche even among die-hard SF fans. They wanted it to be the first of a series of hard SF contests, and perhaps they intended to launch a trend. But it takes far more than that to set a trend in motion.

It’s fair to note that besides the judges, who are excellent professionals in the field, there were other people involved in the project that were really struggling to make it happen. Editor Lynn Sun was very professional all throughout and even did more than she was paid for. And Tang Feng (who is an important name in Chinese SF) and who was—as far as I understand—the head of Scifidea, vowed to make ammends with the winners and propose a deal to fairly compensate them. I don’t know the details about that agreement, and I think it’s private between the winners and Tang Feng, but I certainly hope that authors can take something out of it, given their hard work writing a challenging hard SF novel in just a few months. Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief at Clarkesworld and one of the judges, also engaged with the participants in a Discord server and explained a lot of things about what was going on—though even he was partly kept in the dark.

As for myself, I’m happy with what I achieved. I wrote an entire novel using my smartphone while “on the go” and saw that it was possible. I’m not sure with what I’ll do with this story going on—perhaps it belongs in a trunk—but I don’t regret anything about it.

Tidbits

• I was a finalist for the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novelette with my story A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair.

• My story about journalism, family, hunger, and plastic-eating humans, The Plasticity of Being, is up at Reactor/Tor.com.

• But if your vibe is a deep relationship of union and transformation between captain and spaceship, then you get The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds at Diabolical Plots.

• If instead you prefer 10 solarpunk/climate fiction short stories to brighten up your day (or make you rebel against the status quo) , you might be interested in my collection, Different Kinds of Defiance.

• But if dark SF is your thing, then join Dana as she struggles to tell a story in Complete Log of Week 893819 – Dana’s Story at Apex Magazine.