Monthly Archives: March 2020

A Few Collected Thoughts About the Current Crisis

My week of intense book promotion has ended and so today I’m going to toss out just a few thoughts about our current pandemic crisis.

 

There’s no point beyond racist blaming to insist on calling it by some derivation of its geographic origin. It has an official name that’s not hard to use, Covid19. To quote my own novel,

Do not hide your intention behind a facade of ‘accuracy.’

There is reason to mistrust some of the data from China but that doesn’t absolve any of the bungling and lies by our own government and politicians.

Inaction at the start of this crisis, when experts were calling for swift and important steps to be taken and the scope was becoming clear, is the reason we’re deep in trouble. This was never going to be easy. It’s a novel virus and we’re all susceptible but months ago procedures could have been put in place, testing capacity increased, and vital equipment produced ahead of the crisis. None of that was done because it clashed with what our leaders wanted to hear and once you can no longer utilize hard truths you’ve already lost.

 

This is why it is always vital to vote.

We are stuck with a narcissistic immature vengeful man-baby as our president because a handful of people didn’t get their preferred candidate. Hell, I was deeply unhappy with our selection in 2016 but it was painfully clear who could operate better in a crisis. Everyone who voted for Trump or cheered his victory shares in this disaster but also to blame are those who were ‘unenthused’ to vote against him. Voting is a responsibility, a civic duty, not a lark subject to whims and moods.

 

This will go on for awhile. It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be painful, if we try to take an easy route out it will end up being more painful and more deaths. Save lives, stay home.

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The Blog Tour’s Final Stop

The final stop on the blog tour for Vulcan’s Forge happened yesterday March 29th with Jessica Belmont. She apologized for being a day late but hell, in these hectic, crazy, and frankly frightening times a date getting slipped is fully understandable. The pull quote from here review that I am using is:

Tension, intrigue, and action galore, Vulcan’s Forge was a compelling read

It has been very gratifying watching the response come in from the blog tour. The book has gathered responses from enjoyable to enthusiastic with none of the reviewers giving it bad marks or savaging the piece. That will come. It will eventually gain dreaded 1-star reviews at Amazon, Goodreads, and other places but that is how things should be. Nothing is a good fit for everyone.

This has been a long road to publication and it’s been surprising that it was my odd little SF-Noir that was the first novel to cross the finish line. This is an example of how you should not self-reject. I wrote this book for myself, first. It was what I wanted from a science-fiction noir but I wasn’t certain that others clamored for the same thing. I didn’t write this to the market and I think because of that it found its success.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the blog tour, to those who pre-ordered and have ordered the novel in these dark times you’ve given me a ray of warming sunlight.

 

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Publication Day Plus 1

The Blog Tour for Vulcan’s Forge continues at Scintilla. My pull quote from this review is:

Robert Mitchell Evans manages to create a world that is both a caricature and frighteningly believable. 

As they stream in it has been interesting to read the reviews of the novel. I know there is a great deal of advices suggesting that authors should not read reviews. After all reviews are for readers, to help them find the next book to add to their ‘to be read’ pile and not for feedback to the authors and there is a truth in that. Find reviewer whose taste matches closely with your own and use their information to help you find the next thing you’ll fall in love with. For author negative reviews can be emotionally crippling, or so I am told. Perhaps it is because I am coming to professional publication later in life but I find I can hold negative reviews and feedback at a personal distance. So far no one has hated the book but they will change it simply is the nature of the beast.

However, I am enjoying reading the reviews. It is fascinating to see all the various lens and interpretations that get applied to the text. In my writing group I am fond of saying that no honest critique can be wrong. It is how that person, on that day, reacted to that piece of work. Sometimes people see what is there more clearly than the author and other times what they see says much more about themselves and their worldview that it does about the words on the page. None of that is inherently right or wrong it is how people function. I can know my intention in writing a piece, or in a bit of world building but I too have lens and filters through which I interpret the world and that impacts on my world building in ways that may be invisible to me. So, some of these reviews might even open interpretation that I agree with but never considered because the very premises were obscured from me.

I hope that when the inevitable terrible review rolls in I will react the way I suspect I will. I have always been that sort of person for whom a professional rejection carries little emotional weight. The rejection slip doesn’t trigger imposter syndrome or send me spiraling into self-doubt and depression. My reaction to rejection slips has always been, ‘okay, not for them’ and sending the piece on to the next editor. We shall see if I feel the same way once the first 1-star reviews start appearing on Amazon.

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Publication Day Is Here!

Today is the day. You can now buy Vulcan’s Forge online and at your local booksellers, that is if you live in an area where the shops are open. California has been under a stay at home order since last week but my local favorite bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy, is staking order online and yours might be as well.

It has been a long and twisty road to this day. It started years ago when I decided that I wanted to write a science-fiction noir that didn’t rely on the private eye or police detective plots. And there I stalled for quite a while grinding the gears of my mental transmission searching for the plot and characters of the story.

One thing that consumed more time in my gear grinder than other elements was the search for a McGuffin. Hitchcock coined the term McGuffin referring to the thing that everyone wants in a plot to drive the action of the story, think the bejeweled statue in The Maltese Falcon or the NOC list from the first Mission Impossible movie. Borrowing the wider universe from an unpublished novel of mine I finally worked out the McGuffin and then the characters and story fell into place.

With that I sat down and write Vulcan’s Forge as a 15,000-word novella that did not work.

All the core elements of the story were there but far too compressed lacking the sense of building disaster that I think is one of the central elements to noir fiction. The story had to be a full novel.

So, then I planned on writing a short 60,000-word novel that I expected to self-publish as SF books of that length haven’t really been in fashion since the 60s. However, I overshot that mark and landed at 80,000 words a much more traditional, if a bit on the short side, for novels today.

Once the manuscript was finished, survived it beta-read, I sent it to my then agent where it languished unread until our partnership dissolved and he no longer represented me.

One my own I searched publishers for someone who might be interested in this odd mix of science-fiction and noir and discovered the wonderful people at Flametree. I submitted it, they made an offer, we negotiated, and now the book is out in the world.

Flametree has been wonderful to work with. From the editorial through the promotional processes I have had nothing but good experiences with these people.

Looking back on the trials and tribulations this novel faced to reach publication all I can say is ‘Never Give Up, Never Surrender.’

 

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1 Day Until Release and The Crush of a Deadline

Tomorrow Vulcan’s Forge will be released upon an unsuspecting public. Today’s blog tour stop was Miss Known’s blog and book review site. Let us all give thanks to book bloggers getting the word out there and help authors connect with readers. The pull quote I am taking away from this review is:

“There was so much happening, it made me forget that this was a sci-fi book.”

In addition to traditionally publishing novels one of my goals has been to win The Writers of the Future contest. WotF is a quarterly contest with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners each quarter, then at the conclusion of the contest year the 12 winners are brought together for a week of instruction lead by one of my favorite authors, Tim Powers. The contest does not disclose how many submissions it gets but it is known to be in the thousand each quarter and to date my best placement has been as a finalist, one of the top eight from which the winning three are selected.

Eligibility is restricted to writers who have not been professionally published and that means I lose my eligibility to enter the contest tomorrow with the publication of Vulcan’s Forge.

I have a story in progress the question is; Can I finish it before midnight tonight?

It will be an effort but I am going to try.

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2 Days Until Release and Satanic Panic

My science-fiction noir mash-up of a novel Vulcan’s Forge will be published the day after tomorrow. I will be taking Thursday off from work to spend time online interacting and promoting the book.

Sunday Night after a year of waiting my sweetie-wife and I finally got to see the horror comedy Satanic Panic on the streaming services Shudder.

I first heard about Satanic Panic last year when it played the opening night at 2019’s Horrible Imaginings Film Festival but due that night being a holiday and my low seniority at my day job I was unable to get the day of and drive to Orange county. I made the rest of the festival, saw great films, made new friends, but I also regretted I could not see the opening night feature. Last week the movie came to Shudder and it was our weekend movie.

Satanic Panic, directed by Chelsea Stardust and written by Grady Hendrix is about Sam, a young woman who has taken a job as a pizza delivery person working for sub-minimum wages and tips. Taking a delivery to the wealthy side of town instead of a generous tip Sam finds herself captive to a satanic cult with plans for a human sacrifice. With over the top gore and broad characters Satanic Panic is a satire in the manner that The Hunt failed to be with a point of view and something to say about class divides in America.

Not for the squeamish and while avoiding the Lucio Fulci perchance for things going into people’s eyes, though not by much, Satanic Panic is not for everyone but those who enjoy practical gore effects with social commentary this film should find its mark.

 

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3 Days Until Release and The Blog Tour Begins

This Thursday Vulcan’s Forge will be available from all your usual and favorite booksellers and as of today the link for the e-book went live.

The publisher, Flametree Press, organizes a week of book bloggers reviews the book around each book’s publications date and today my blog tour kicked off with a review at The Bookwormery.

Here’s my pull quote from the review but read the entire thing yourself.

“Wow…..the world building in Vulcan’s Forge is just so well done, the feeling of almost claustrophobic tension is felt throughout. “

In other news my sweetie-wife and I are handling the shelter in place order imposed on California rather well. We get along fabulously, part of why we’re married and all that, and we each have plenty of activities to keep us engaged. Her employer has instituted a work from home policy while I continue to go into the office at my day job, but the office staff is reduced there as many are being sent to work from home as well. A few others and I have volunteered to maintain the critical office roles for as long as possible. I am fortunate to have a job that is critical to helping people get medical care so not only do I still have work and pay but I am also helping people directly during this crisis.

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4 Days until Release & Game Review: Thanos Rising

The novel Vulcan’s Forge will be unleased upon a world clamming for reading material in just 4 more days.

 

My sweetie-wife and I enjoy a good board game and last week I finally got a copy of a game that I had only played at conventions, Thanos Rising: Infinity Wara media tie-in game associated with Avengers: Infinity War.

Thanos Rising a cooperative game for 2 to 4 players who take on the roles of various teams of heroes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe in their bid to prevent the mad Titan Thanos from acquiring all six Infinity Stones and destroying half of all life in the universe.

Each turn a player rolls dice and assigns them towards heroes to recruit onto their team or to villains to damage and eventually eliminate. The players win if they eliminate 7 villains from Thanos’ forces while Thanos has three paths to victory.

  • acquire all six Infinity Stones.
  • eliminate an entire hero (player’s) team
  • eliminate 10 or more heroes

Media tie-in games have a terrible reputation as games that are poorly thought out, designed, and generally as cheap cash grabs riding the tails of something else’s greater popularity but that is not the case with Thanos Rising.this game is well balanced and challenging to play. My group of experiences board gamers is currently running a success rate of about 50% playing the game without enhancing its difficulty at all. All in all, this is a fun game and one that is well worth acquiring.

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5 Days Until Release & The Hunt

Only 5 more days until Vulcan’s Forge is published and a gentle reminder that pre-orders count more than post publication orders for ranking and sales numbers.

Movie Review: The Hunt

Last night a friend and I split the cost to rent The Hunt a film more cursed with it release than my own novel’s trouble path to publication. Originally scheduled for release last year The Hunt is a graphic violent satire of the current political climate forged with the classic story The Deadliest Game. The overt and over-the-top political bent of the characters created a controversy last year and the title was pulled from distribution. Now the release has been thrown into chaos by the COVID-19 pandemic and the studio moved it to on-line rentals to recoup at least some of the production cost.

Betty Gilpin plays Crystal, one of nearly a dozen conservative characters who are kidnapped and awaken in a forest lethally hunted by cultural elites for sport. With a modest budget of 14 million dollars and released by horror studio Blumhouse The Hunt is over all an unsatisfying picture. None of the characters are fully developed and the yet are also not broad enough for over the top satire. The film takes too long to connect with its main character and I found that distancing and prevented me from becoming emotionally engaged in her struggle. Perhaps the greatest failing of The Hunt is as satire. Satire requires a point, an argument, it needs to stand for something and to say something. While it is far from necessary for the film to ‘pick a side’ in the liberal/conservative cultural war it satirizes it is necessary that the film say something, make some sort of point. The classic film Doctor Strangelove is satire with broad characters and does not pick a side in the US vs USSR cold War but does make a point about the madness of mutually assured destruction and living on a knife’s edge. The Hunt makes no statement, exhibits no point of view, but simple moves caricature of characters through cartoony chaos. While my friend enjoyed the movie, I find it is not one I can recommend.

 

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6 Days Until Release

It is now 6 days, less than a week, until Flametree Press publishes my first novel, Vulcan’s Forge.

First novel is such a strange term. Certainly, from the point of view of reviews and the public this is number one but from the point of view of the author it is far from my first, merely the first to survive until publication.

The very first novel I ever write was way way back in 1979 during my senior year of high school. Freeeholder was a post-apocalyptic adventure novel centered on a culture of liberal pacifist survivalists.

After my tour in the U.S. Navy there was a significant period of time when I did no writing whatsoever and even following that years long dry period what I attempted to write were screenplays.

It really wasn’t until the late 90s that I returned to prose writing and then it was short stories as I was quite fearful of the commitment required for a novel. During the 2000s I started writing novels again when a particular idea seized my and would not let go until had committed it to prose.

Several novels were then written over the years, some are destined to be re-written and some are going to be forever abandoned but all were learning experiences that extended my abilities as a writer.

Vulcan’s Forge started prior to 2015 when I first wrote it as a novella but that was far too brief for the world building required for this SF noir. The novel version was written and completed in 2017. At the time I had an agent and I turned the manuscript in to him and it sat on his desk unread for year until our association was dissolved.

2019 I submitted it to Flametree Press and they bought the book. My time with them has been fantastic. I couldn’t ask for better partners in traditional publishing.

The COVID-19 pandemic is terrible. I live in California and we are today 20 March 2020, under a stay at home order, though I work in an essential area of health care and will still be going to my day job. My signing and launch event were canceled, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of one little debut author, but books are still being delivered and you can still order it from your local bookstores, so all is not bleak.

‘First’ novels are rarely the first ones written but just as with ‘overnight’ successes perception doesn’t match reality.

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