Category Archives: writing

BOOK SIGNING CANCELED

BOOK SIGNING CANCELED

Due to the continuing Corona Crisis, not even a pandemic will stop my alliterations, the signing event for my first novel is now canceled.

With gatherings of 10 or more people highly discouraged the store, Mysterious Galaxy, has closed to foot and in-person traffic until at least April 1st. There are discussions of possibly rescheduling the event for later in the year but I am sure slots will be limited and I am not the only author impacted so a reschedule would be nice but I am not counting on it.

If you were planning to attend the event, or if independent bookstores are important to you, I suggest that you buy the book from Mysterious Galaxy anyway. They are taking orders and fulfilling them by mail. Bezos and Amazon will weather this storm with literally billions in cash but local businesses will not be so lucky.

Mysterious Galaxy is a critical factor in the existence of my novel Vulcan’s Forge. For ten years I have met there with my writing group and that has certainly leveled me up as a writer and their staff are always helpful, friendly, supportive, and knowledgeable. From Mysterious Galaxy and stores like them you get those personal recommendation that can lead you to a new favorite author, not something simply pushed by an algorithm.

Vulcan’s Forge is my first novel and I certainly hope it is not my last. Having your debut event canceled is tough but COVID-19 is tougher and we can weather this if we do the right things. So, I will be sad to not have that signing but I hope that instead people stay safe, healthy, and order the book online even if they can’t have my illegible scribbling defacing it.

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Debut in the Time of Corona

It is now less than two weeks until the publication of my first novel Vulcan’s Forge and the world is gripped in crisis. A novel corona, Covid-19, that emerged from China towards the end of 2019 is now rapidly spreading around the globe, shuttering entire cities, overwhelming hospitals, and killing people.

Far more important that my debut is fighting Covid-19. We have to keep our distances from each other, we have to disperse any large groups and gatherings, we have to flatten the curve because it is too late to halt the spread of the disease, Chinese and American mismanagement has assured us of that failure, but we can slow the growth enough, maybe, to keep from crashing ours and the world’s healthcare system.

The virus appeared in China in early December but reports were suppressed and people endangered by their government for speaking the truth. Reporting bad news is a bad thing to do in authoritarian systems, China refused concede that there was human to human transmission until later January, wasting vital time for the world to take the precautionary action required to stop the virus.

President Trump dismissed early warnings about the virus, berated staff for bringing it up, and lied to the public about the seriousness of the threat. We do not have an authoritarian system we do have a man-child for whom bad news is a forbidden subject.

Compounding the mismanagement by the presidential administration we have the bad decision making about testing and test kits. Test kits for identifying the virus were available for US agencies to mass produce and use but the decision was made to develop new test kits that would be able to detect a spectrum of corona viruses not only the specific virus causing the pandemic, Those new kits turned out to be faulty, and in limited supply, hamstringing our ability to know the facts on the ground as the disease established its beachhead in the United States.

We’re now facing serious troubles, but we can still do thing that matter. Soap and water is your best defense and the best thing you can do to protect those around you. Limiting social contact is essential.

I’ll admit to being depressed over my debut as a novelist during this crisis and to feeling guilty about being depressed. I’m no good at being noble but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of one little novel doesn’t’ amount to a hill of beans in the world. Yeah, I use movie quotes all the time in real life. Read my novel and you’ll understand.

 

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Two Weeks until Publication

In two weeks, Mach 26th 2020, my novel Vulcan’s Forge will be available at all booksellers in paperback and hardback editions from Flametree Press. Yesterday my US edition author copies arrived and I got my first look at the hardbacks.

They look great, but I could be biased.

This has been a moment a long time coming. The first time I attempted writing a novel was 1979 in my senior year of high school. Freeholder was a post-apocalyptic story about liberal pacifist survivalist. I did complete it so it counts as my first novel and no it is never going to see the light of day.

There have been other novels in between, though it wasn’t until fairly recently that I returned to the novel as a format. Some of those recent books I plan to re-write and there even one currently under consideration by a couple of publishers including my current home of Flametree.

In just over two weeks, March 28th 2020, I will be holding my author event and signing for Vulcan’s Forge, provided it is not canceled due to Corona Crisis, at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I’ll admit to be quite nervous about a public reading and signing but it is part of the gig.

 

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Mind Exchange is Fantasy Not SF

The final indignity for the original series of Star Trek was the episode Turnabout Intruder where a bitter woman, Janice Lester, used trickery and an alien device to swap bodies with Captain James T. Kirk generating some of the series most over the top performances from William Shatner.

The body swap, a fantastical process where one person’s mind is placed into the body of another is tired trope and one that should always be understood as fantasy not science-fiction.

The core erroneous concept for this idea is that there is a separation between body and mind, that our ‘selves’ exist independent of our bodies and thus could be transplanted into a new form like a sapling being moved to a larger pot.

Our minds are emergent properties of our bodies. The subtle and complex interactions of physical experience, hormonal balances, and genetics give rise to the varied and unique personalities of the human race. There is not independent mind to move from one body to another. It is the body that generates the mind and with a different body, or a significantly altered one, the mind is different. Numerous brain injury and disease cases bear witness to this fact of life.

All of that said, I think I have found at least one, far out but barely plausible method of telling a body swap story. Now to see if I can make it work.

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The Joys of Revisiting a Manuscript

For reasons too extensive to go into here I am revisiting a novel length manuscript I last opened in November of 2014. This novel, at the suggestion of an agency, went through a major change in 2015 and that revised version has been the version sent to various people. Now I am taking the opportunity to go back to my original vision and use it for a different submission.

Originally, I went in for the prosaic task of turning all the underlined text into the house’s preferred format italics which required carefully reading every page of the novel to make sure I didn’t miss an instance. This led to the discovery that this earlier, longer version of the story is also before I changed the name of one of the major military ships that appear in the story, Okay, so now I am not only fixing underlines with italics but I’m watching for the old name so I can replace it with the new one.

Of course, my writing a changed over the last five and a half years, hopefully for the better, and I am finding the odd sentence where I need to massage it a little to get it to where I am today in terms of style and voice.

Then I discover an error that somehow slipped past all my earlier edits, my beta readers, and everyone else who has taken a gander at the manuscript. Reggie leave Geneva under the light of a full moon; the same night Seth in Spain is getting ready for what he hopes will be a romantic evening under a new moon. Glad I caught that one!

Still, my most common reaction to re-reading and working on this manuscript has been joy. This is the sort of book I love to read and while there are minor edits taking place, I am very happy with the prose and love revisiting my original vision.

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Quick Post

So, I missed posting on Monday and Tuesday because over the weekend I came down with some sort of sinus bug. No, it’s not Covid-19, but some rather short duration but fairly intense clogging of my sinuses that left me dizzy, congested, headachy, and generally non-functional.

Saturday I was fine, running my Space Opera RPG game but as the evening ended and I departed for home my head started to hurt. By the time I reached home, just 5 miles away, it was a fairly serious migraine, and Sunday I canceled on going to the zoo with my sweetie-wife leading to a convalesce that lasted through Monday and Tuesday.

So, my weekend and the first part of my week has not been very productive. I did manage to get some more editing completed on a manuscript I am about to send to my editor at Flame Tree and I watched a few films, re-watching 1993’s Searching for Bobby Fischer which I enjoy quite a bit.

 

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This Feels Wrong

This will be a quick post.

So, I am revising my military SF about an American serving in the European Union’s Star Forces set in a future in which America took a wrong turn in the early 21st century and became a second-rate power. Honest, I was cooking this idea back in the early 90s.

This is the manuscript that originally clocked in at 115 thousand words and on advice from an agency was trimmed to around 98 thousand.

As I review the original longer work, a version I had preferred, I find that I am really enjoying this book. It has been a few years since I have read it carefully, line by line, word by word, as once I send a project off to editors for consideration, I protect my sanity by moving on to the next project. So, this return to the origi9nal manuscript is a, pardon the pun, novel experience.

It feels wrong just how much I am enjoying this read. But this speaks to the truism I hold to in writing, write the book you want to read. There is your vision, there is voice, there is what makes it yours.

 

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Treacherous Seas

In less than a month my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge will be released upon an unsuspecting world. My editor at Flame Tree has expressed the hopes in the future that we shall be working together on many novels. I have found everyone at Flame Tree to be wonderful, supportive, and utterly professional and welcoming so the idea of working with them on more books is very enticing.

Some years ago, I completed a military SF novel that landed me with a literary agency. While the association with the agency didn’t work out and we went our separate ways, that novel has sparked at least some interest with a couple of publishing houses.

The trouble is timing.

Two other editors are looking at the book, one because we met a conference and they read a few sample pages and the other because I had submitted the manuscript through the imprint’s slush pile. (Slush pile is the name for the great stack of manuscript that are sent to a publisher un-agented.) Both publishers have had the book for over a year now. In that interim I sold, edited, and next both will have published Vulcan’s Forge with Flame tree.

I have decided that I am going to go ahead and send my military SF book over to Flame Tree. I will let the other editors know what the score is but I can’t even be sure that my emails are being read. These are turbulent seas to navigate and the sort where having an agent would be extremely helpful but I have no agent and must sail these waters myself.

I am taking some time to revise the manuscript before sending it over the Flame Tree. When I submitted to that agency I was signed with it was 115,000 words long, not overly long for an SF novel, but the reader and co—owner of the agency had required that I cut it down before he recommended it to his agents and so I brought it down to 98,000 words. I did this by trimming the opening battle but I was never truly happy with that. The massive battle that opens the book is meant to have the scale, weight, and importance of something along the lines of WWII’s battle of Midway and the lighter version I felt didn’t quite get that across. So, I am going back to the 115,000 words manuscript, making minor adjustments and that will by the new version.

Wish me luck.

 

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My Long Weekend

This past weekend was a very satisfying one for me. Thursday, I traveled to Disneyland and hung out with a friend I have not seen for a few years. The original plan was to be with two pals but financial issue at the last moment grounded one of my friends. We hung about in Galaxy’s Edge, though we did not get a boarding Pass that would have allowed us onto the newest attracting, explored other areas of the park, and had a smashing good time getting caught up on each other’s lives. After about 7 hours of walking my knees sent their vehement protests and we called it day so I could drive home to San Diego.

Friday through Saturday I spent at the 34th annual Southern California Writers Conference. This is the third time I have attended the particular conference and it is small intimate gathering of writers and agents to share the craft. There were many good seminars and workshops during the daylight hours and in the evening I participated in read and critique sessions giving my meager opinion on some fantastic writing. I got valuable feedback on a work in progress of mine and all in all had a great time with friends and expanded my skill set.

The Conference continued into Sunday, but I skipped out on the last day not because it had suddenly turned dull but because I wanted to spend my Sunday in my traditional manner, with my sweetie-wife. We did not go to the zoo, perhaps just as well as I feel I may have pushed my knees a bit far, had a lovely lunch at one of our favorite spots, and generally enjoyed each other’s company.

Here’s hoping your weekend was similarly enjoyable.

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Naming My Characters

Coming up with names for characters in my short stories and novel has always been a challenge. There’s the desire to avoid names with feel too ‘common’ and lack their own sense of character, the Bobs and so forth, but going too far afield into actual names that are exceptionally rare feels false. This is a    hurdle I have to overcome with every piece of fiction, no matter how long or how brief and can be magnified if the character in question is an alien because before I can name the character I have to devise a naming system for his culture because after all individual name plus family name isn’t even universal among humans.

For my novel being published next month I managed to make this difficult task even harder.

The set-up in the novel is that when the Earth is threatened with destruction by a rouge brown dwarf passing through the inner solar system humanity launches hundreds if not thousands of automated arks loaded with self-replicating machines, artificial wombs, and banks of sperm and egg to establish new human colonies. Some of these arks were programmed with very specific goals of persevering certain cultures, nationalities, and religion and so forth, some were designed to have a greater degree of freedom in the care of the generations of humans that were to follow.

For the colony of Nocturnia where the novel takes place the demographic percentages of the later 21st century America were used to create the racial make-up of the colony and the names were taken from the U.S. Census but in drafting the outline and creating the character I faced a decision that swung me back and forth for quite some time.

Should the character names be tied to their character’s ethnicity?

These characters had never in any sense at all be a product of the cultures that their names derived from for all intents and purposes they were faux-Americans. With their ark’s designers fixated on an idealized American culture that never truly existed would that have programmed the artificial intelligences to force names to match ethnic background or simply have left the assignment of names to the A.I. own randomness?

I liked the idea that the names were randomly assigned but I was concerned that the readers might be lost of confused. I wanted to avoid leaning too heavily on reminding the reader just what each character’s ethnic heritage was and if I kept the names tied to their heritage I could side-step the challenge. But once I hit on the idea of the randomness of the names I really really liked it.

In the end I went the character names that do not map to their racial appearance. Now with the book coming out next month and should reviews and feedback come back my direction I will learn if I met the challenge or faceplanted.

 

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