Category Archives: Books

The Chain that Broke My Novel

Late March 2020 saw the release of my traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge that played with Artificial Intelligence, the fetishization of 50’s Americana, the relationship between the

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individual and their larger culture, crime, Film Noir, and loads of movie references. It was a novel that I had written solely for myself and yest was purchased by the first editor I presented it to.

Late March 2020 is also the time the world shuttered, going into a prolonged lock-down as a pandemic, the likes of which had not been seen in a century, swept the globe, disrupting every aspect of life and killing far too many people. (Including a friend I had known for nearly 40 years.)

Needless to say, that was a very bad time to release a debut novel. As if a global pandemic was not enough to throw at my arrival as a novelist the fates had more hurdles to place. The publishing house was transition between physical distributors, snagging and disrupting sales to bookstores and they had just ended the contract with the studio that produced their audio versions, leaving Vulcan’s Forge without an audiobook not only as their format continued to grow but as that very format became more readily accepted during the pandemic.

Within eight weeks bookstore had worked out virtual launch events and people had begun to adjust to a new way of living during shut down, but the damage had been done and Vulcan’s Forgenever recovered from its debut.

Such is life. There are always factors in life far beyond your control or even influence. I don’t waste time crying over what has happened and cannot be changed. Life moves in one direction, forward, and that is the focus of your attention with the past providing lessons to improve your choice of paths into that future.

Now, I have not mentioned the most important link in the calamitous chain that broke my novel and the lesson I and others can learn from it.

Vulcan’s Forge sat on my agent’s desk for a year, unread and unrepresented.

When I discovered that my agent had lied to me and withheld critical information about his position at the agency, I contacted his boss and that is when he dropped me as a client. But for months I had been harboring doubts and considering dropping him. And that is the lesson, not all agents are good for you. In fact, they can hurt you in ways you cannot foresee. That is not to say you should never have an agent, but you must always remember that they work for you. If they are a poor employee, fire them and find another.

It can feel scary, nay terrifying, most of us search for years, enduring rejection after rejection searching for that representation but do not let that blind you to the truth. If they are not helping you then they are hurting you. There is no neutral position.

Vulcan’s Forge is history, though you can still order copies, but my future novels are not. I have a murder mystery/sf Novel under serious consideration at a major SF publisher, I am finishing up a military SF novel now and will then move onto crime and corruption on Mars. There is only one direction to life. Forward.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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My Writing Method

Some general nattering about how I approach writing.

As I have said in other posts, I am a plotter. I cannot start writing a story until I know how it ends. To me ending are where it all comes together and produces the satisfaction for the journey. For short stories I can begin just knowing where I start and where I end the few thousand word between the two I can discover. However, for novels I have to outline, sometimes just six or seven thousand words and sometimes nearly twenty-thousand words laying out character, world, story, and plot.

When I write I must write from start to finish. I cannot, as some other writers do, leap ahead, and write scenes near the end before I have gotten there in the manuscript. This may seem strange since as I have planned out the story and plot, I already know what the scenes do and why, but the truth of the matter is I can’t feel the scenes ahead of time.

Those hours and hours writing the sequences before a scene are an emotional journey not only for the fictional characters but for me as a writer. (And hopefully, for the readers as well.) I must experience the emotional journey to understand and feel the emotions in a scene I am writing. I may know that this is the scene where the scales fall from the hero’s eyes and they see the betrayal, but I can’t feel the devastation, the despair unless I have walked in their shoes and lived their trust. Other writers can leap into those souls more easily than I can. That is neither good nor bad. It is their process, and this is mine.

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Final Thoughts: Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes

My sweetie-Wife and I have finished watching the Netflix Norwegian series Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes, which presented a fresh and novel take on the Vampire story.

Set in the isolated rural community of Skarnes Norway the series follows the troubles of a family-owned funeral parlor facing bankruptcy due to the lack of business. The daughter Live is found dead in a field but reawakens on the autopsy table kicking off the supernatural/vampire plot, along with the mystery of who attacked and killed her.

Post Mortem avoids overt displays of the supernatural stripping vampirism of many of its flashier powers and abilities revealing a much more humanistic story that serves as an analog for addiction. The vampires of this setting do not required blood for sustenance and as such can endure avoiding the harsh consequences of not obtaining any with far less than would be needed as ‘food.’

Begin Rant

I’m going to digress for a moment and state I have never liked supernatural vampires that burn in sunlight and flee from crosses substituting cow’s blood for human as an alternate food. These revenants are not consuming blood for the fats, carbs, and proteins floating in the flow, it is a magical fluid that sustains them and plasma from bovines does not fit that bill.

Rant Over

The characters inhabiting Skarnes, the local police chief Judith, the annoying yuppie-like businessman, the eccentric attendants at the forensic morgue, and more are all entreatingly sketched and performed giving the series a vitality. As with all successful stories it is the characters, their problems, and their humanity, even as vampires, that pulls you in and keeps you watching.

The series answered all the major questions it posed, completed the plots it started, and left enough open that a second season would fit nicely, or it can be considered resolved and complete with just these six installments. I approve; I detest cliff-hangers.

Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes is worth your time.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel, Vulcan’s Forge, available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and is the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and his desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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A Writer’s Most Important Skill

Recently on Twitter someone asked what is the most important skill a writer needs to possess?

Now, in one respect that is a difficult question. Crafting compelling characters, devising interesting and engaging plots, mastering transporting dialog are all vital skills and having any one of these missing will seriously damage any book.

That said we all know published, both traditionally and independently, novels that not only had some of these flaws but still managed to find success and readers.

There is one skill that all writers need to master if their work is going to find readers and any measure of success.

You must finish the project.

The worst book you ever read, the one you hurled across the room in frustration at its lack quality was completed. That writer kept at it, worked through the hard parts, wrote when everything looks dark, and they could not see the way forward. they, persisted and reached the end.

A completed but bad manuscript can be fixed. Words can he cut out, can be added, can be rearranged. New chapters added or deleted, sequences can be reordered, new character created to fill out those thin sections.

None of that will save an unfinished story.

Worse yet abandoning a story when it’s not working, or when the plot has slipped through your fingers can become a habit. The stumbling block in the next story makes it easier to give up on that one too.

That is not to say you never abandon a project. I certainly have, but it is a fate that needs to be avoided whenever possible. Just as abandonment can be a habit so can complete and when finished it can be saved, it can be fixed. Steven King tried to abandon Carrie, but his wife refused to let him. Where would he or we be if he had?

Finish that book, that script, that short story. It may still stink but you will be better for reaching the end.

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What I Hate Most About Trad Publishing

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like traditional publishing, I have no real skills in marketing, layout, or cover design so it is a good thing to have paid professionals preforming those vital functions. My goal is and remains for the traditional publishing route. (And that’s no slight on those who take the hybrid or solely independent paths. In fact, it’s mad respect for managing all those skills.)

I have gotten all manner of rejections going to trad route, form cars, form emails, personalized rejections, and feedback on why didn’t work for the editors reviewing the manuscript. All of these I can take. Strangely I am rarely devastated by a rejection but move on to the next market. So, rejections cold and impersonal or detailed and inviting of further submissions I do not hate.

It is the lengthy time it takes that drives me bananas.

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary for my submission to a major SF publisher of my SF murder mystery novel. Six months since I was contacted by the acquisitions editor that it has been pulled for closer consideration. It’s waiting more than year that I find so hard to endure. (But I do for I have no real other options.)

My previous traditionally published novel, Vulcan’s Forge (A SF novel that evokes film noir) sat on my former agents desk a year unread but gloriously but sold to the first editor I sent it to. Had I not lost that year the novel would not have released the week the world went into lock down at the start of the pandemic.

Like Inigo ‘I hate waiting.’

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A Response to Jordan S Carroll’s Article Misunderstanding a Classic 60s SF Novel

 

On May 29th Jacobin.com published the ironically titled article To Understand Elon Musk, You Have to Understand This ’60s Sci-Fi Novel by Jordan S. Carroll in which the good professor misread or misrepresented the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert A. Heinlein as a guide to understanding Elon Musk.

I come here not to defend Heinlein’s novel, its philosophies, or its meaning but rather in protest the professor’s inaccuracies and omissions that create a strawman for his argument.

Here from the article is Carroll’s description of the novel core conflict.

It’s about a lunar colony that frees itself, via advanced and cleverly applied technology, from the resource-sucking parasitism of Earth and its welfare dependents.

 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a moon colony forced by the centralized Lunar Authority to ship food to Earth where it goes to feed starving people in places like India. The lunar citizens, or Loonies, revolt against the state monopoly and establish a society characterized by free markets and minimal government.

 

Absent from this recounting and the entire article is the quite essential element that in the novel the moon is a penal colony. It is a prison removed from courts, laws, and governance. Exile to the moon is a one-way life sentence and even the guards and the despotic warden are, due to physiological changes wrought by prolonged life in 1/6 gravity, unable to return to Earth. People born on the moon are not technically prisoners but have no rights save whatever is granted by the warden’s generosity and can never live upon the Earth. It is a despotic, authoritarian dictatorship without any form of oversight. By omitting this element of the narrative Carroll is free to portray the people, for they are not citizens anywhere, of the moon as greedy libertarians indifferent to their fellow man.

The novel takes solutionism to the extreme when Mannie enlists the help of a sentient supercomputer named Mike to lead the overthrow of Earth’s colonial government on Luna

 

Here Professor Carroll has reversed the cause and effect of the novel’s progression. Mannie is not a revolutionary who enlisted the secret sentient computer into the revolution but rather it was the curious computer, Mike, that sent the apolitical Mannie into the revolutionary meeting because he had no way to listen in on the meeting. It is only after Mannie is won over by the revolutionaries and reveals to the pair that recruited him that the lunar colony’s central computer is aware that they decide to utilize this unique resource. Mike leads nothing, he is a tool and in many ways a child treating the revolt as a game.

When it comes to the revolution itself Carroll is no more careful in his representation that he was in depicting the conditions on the moon.

Mannie the computer technician, designs their clandestine cell system like a “computer diagram” or “neural network,” mapping out how information will flow between revolutionists. They determine the best way of organizing a cadre not through democratic deliberation or practical experience but through cybernetic principles.

 

Either Professor Carrol is ignorant or has chosen to ignore the history of Clandestine Cell Structure that has been used in resistance and revolutionary movements decades before the novel’s publications. In his haste to prove that everything from the novel that has apparently influenced Musk is tied to modern tech bro culture is has ignored or misrepresented actual history.

And here is another distortion of the novel’s events.

Even when it comes time to establish a constitution for the Luna Free State, the conspirators use clever procedural tricks to do an end run around everyone in the congress who is not a member of their clique. Smart individuals always win out over mass democracy in Heinlein’s fiction — and that’s a good thing.

 

First off, they did not ‘do an end run around’ the congress they established the congress with their command cell member occupying all the key positions. They attempted to create the impression of a representative government while retaining full control and that’s what happened — for a while.

The Lunar Congress, unaware that they were supposed to be rubber stamps and nothing more, formed a new government and with a stroke undid all of the revolutionaries careful plotting. Because this was not a revolution that shot the most capable revolutionaries after the victory, as so many in history has done, an actual representative government replaced the despotic tyranny of the penal colony. Not quite what Professor Carroll told people in his article.

And that brings me to the final and most critical blindness in the article and in people who hail the novel as a tale of a successful libertarian revolution.

In the novel the revolution failed.

Yes, the penal colony was freed, and a representative government replaced a dictatorship, but that government very quickly transitioned away from anything approaching pure libertarianism into a more conventional form. The novel opens with the Mannie bemoaning the coming of new taxes, and then once the flashback to the revolution is over, it ends with him contemplating immigration to some less populated area. The Libertarians lost the government. The moon did not become an outpost of pure unfettered capitalism and unregulated markets. It became Earth. If Musk thinks the novel points to an unregulated future, he has misread it as badly as Carroll.

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Birthday Beg

Saturday is my birthday, and I will be spending it with friends playing the tabletop RPG Space Opera.

While others are quite charitable on Facebook using their birthdays to raise funds for causes this year, I am going to be self-centered and greedy and tell you what I want more than anything for my birthday.

Reviews

My novel, Vulcan’s Forge, has gathered a mere 11 reviews over two years and I desperately need more to appease the god algorithm.

If you have read the book, which can kind of be described as WandaVision meets Raised by Wolves (Humans raised by A.I.s obsessed with mid-twentieth century Americana) w a heavy dash of film noir, then please go to Amazon and leave a review. Even if you hated it, be honest, I am not asking nor wanting anyone to leave false flattering reviews, just reviews.

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Halfway There

After the brief suspension of daily writing while I looked after my sweetie-wife and then the week and a half it took to return to full speed clocking in around a thousand words per day at lunch, I have passed the halfway point of my current novel in progress.

This novel certainly has had a long meandering and strange journey. The central core concept, a telepath that planting ideas in your head but your inner monologue remains in your ‘voice’, so you are unaware that it is not your thought, dates to the late 1980s. Since then, the whole setting has been crafted, short stories, both of this idea and others in the same setting, have been written, and more than one novel has been written.

Yesterday the word count passed 53,000 words and with the momentum back I hope to have the first draft completed in about two months. Luckily for me my first drafts in terms of character, plot, and events, are fairly close to my final drafts. (An advantage to detailed outlining.) And subsequent drafts are principally about editing and proofing.

I will be thrilled to finish this novel and get it out the door. (Though sadden because one editor who had seen a novel of mine in the same setting and liked the character has now retired.) I am thrilled because I can’t wait to research and write my next novel a d dark noir sf set on Mars.

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Finally Getting Back my Rhythm

 

The last month has been quite hectic. Early in March my Sweetie-Wife underwent a total hip replacement for one of her hips and I took two weeks of paid family leave to look after my sweetie as she recovered.

She has recovered and the medical procedure went swimmingly, so all is good there.

Before the surgery I was writing north of 1000 words a day on my next Military SF adventure novel but braked to a complete stop as I transitioned to care giver for the recovery period.

When I did return to work, I found it difficult to regain my writing’s momentum. This is a fact of my writing process. A project that gets paused or halted becomes very difficult to restart. It is why I cannot write more than one project at a time. One with always end up the preferred one and the project ‘paused’ simply dies.

Last week I was averaging 800-900 words a day but yesterday I passed the 1000 words at lunch mark. The momentum is back and now I just have to keep the thing rolling.

It’s a particular challenge right now because a second surgery will be taking place and my mind has been racing on a new novel idea that has me very excited but requires a ton of research.

 

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Series Review: HALO

 

Adapted from the 2001 Xbox game HALO: COMBAT EVOLOVED Paramount + debuted yesterday the pilot episode of their Sci-Fi series HALO.

While I have played the game and its sequel I have never dived deeply into the lore or worldbuilding for HALO and as such my interpretation of the series is not a comparison but as a new viewer.

Set in the distant future of the mid 26th century, HALO is concerned with both a conflict between the Interstellar human government, breakaway rebel/insurrectionists colonies the war between the humans an alien coalition known as the Covenant. The story centers on a cybernetic warrior Spartan 117 ‘Master Chief,’ part of an elite unit of cybernetic fighters.

When the Covenant attack the separatist world of Madrigal, the Spartan intervene and discover in addition to a sole survivor of the massacre that the aliens were seeking some device on the colony. Factions with the human government splinter and contest each other for the best methods in dealing with both the Covenant and the Separatists with Master Chief, acting on an element of his reawakened humanity, finding a measure of independence from his programing.

HALO boasts impressive production design and special effects with many of the game elements both faithfully reproduced visually and credibly for today’s discerning audiences. The storyline is not a direct adaptation of the game’s plot and I believe I read somewhere that the show runners have no intent to adapt the already existing lore and story from the games.

The pilot episode seems to be unable to make up its mind what it wants in terms of tone. The action sequences are fairly well staged and fast paced but with the tangled political plotlines leaving the viewer without any clear faction to support the action is undercut. In the pilot it is unclear if any of the factions deserve the viewers sympathy or emotional investment.

Pablo Schreiber performed quite well as Master Chief but with and without his helmet. However, I found Natascha McElhone’s performance as Dr Halsey, creator of the Spartan Program, stiff and unconvincing. Several times we have her looking directly down the camera lens and I was at a loss to understand just what emotion or thought she was attempting to convey. This may be a directorial issue as I had no such troubles when she was in the American version of Solaris.

The episode’s dialog is best described as serviceable. While the exposition is not as heavy handed slapped into your face as JMS’s on Babylon 5 there were repeated instances where the characters spoke more for the audience benefit than from any inner need.

Overall, there is enough there to hold my interest and bring me back for another episode, but the series has failed to truly hook and me and leave me with anything more than a mile interest. Hopefully that will change with more and better episodes.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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