Tomorrow night is my feedback dinner for the Beta Readers of ‘Cawdor.” Sadly, not all the beta readers could make the dinner. Work schedules and other commitments rarely allow me to have 100% turn out, still we should have 5 or so people there and that will be enough for me to have a sense of where common fault and virtues may lie in the piece.

We shall see.

Something I seemed to revisit in my writing is the subject of loyalty. Many, though not all, of my stories have conflict of loyalty as the a primary source of character tension.

I know that I have always been bored by stories where the issue is merely: how do I win? For a story to be compelling there must be something personal at stake and there must be a personal decision the character must make that can never be unmade. What struck me this week is how often for my own characters it is a question of loyalty.

When I started writing Cawdor I had originally thought I would explore the avarice of ambition as the overriding theme, but when I crawled down into the trenches and fought and grappled with the plot, it became something different. Most of the characters are faced with tests of loyalty.

What I liked best in the way it turned out is that there was no simple answer to the puzzle of loyalty. It is not always good to be loyal and it is not always wrong to betray. That’s because as in so many things there is a hierarchy  to loyalty and the test is understanding that incline of competing demands for loyalty.

For example, Von Stauffenberg had taken an oath to be loyal unto death to Adolf Hitler. For a man of his social class this is not something one tosses away lightly, but he did betray that oath with treason and an attempted assassination. We do not look upon his betrayal as a bad thing, we honor it and make movies about it. Here disloyalty is prized, because the greater cause of virtue demands it.

That of course is an easy case. We vilify Benedict Arnold  because of his betrayal and the reason for his betrayal is more complicated. It might be because he felt slighted and insulted, which would hardly be sufficient to justify his treason. On the other hand it may be he was motivated by pure and consuming love and that is harder for us to emotionally reject as a cause.

In Cawdor I have characters that I think act rightly by betraying their oaths and their people and I have character who I think acts right by not doing so. I have never been fully aware just how much loyalty means to my writing. Even in my horror shorts loyalty often expresses itself.

I wonder why?

The revision edits on my horror short story Proof Of Principle have been completed and the story has been re-submitted to a pro-market. I got a very encouraging rejection from this market suggesting that that the prose could be tightened and it would take 500-1000 words out of the story.

I spent two weeks reading it aloud and editing based on that and in the end removed 750 words. My sweetie-wife today did a proofreading pass, caught a couple of errors which I corrected before submission.

Now the waiting. This could be my first nation pro-market sale….

So I got a fairly decent rejection slip a couple of weeks ago on a ghost story I had written, (Proof of Principle.) The editor suggested that I had some clumsy structure in my sentences and that by removing words here and there, and an occasional sentence entirely, I would improve the piece.

Getting this sort of feedback is really mind–blowing. It means I am getting fairly close to writing something good enough to sell to a pro-level market. The editor also suggest I try reading the work aloud to guide my edits.

Luckily for me I have just purchased a digital voice recorder. (A Sanyo Fp-600) I plan to use it to record the feedback dinner discussion for Cawdor and convention panels. (I can be a horrid note taker.) So in an attempt to edit this story I am reading it into the digital voice recorder. Any time I stumble over a phrase, I stop and go back to record that section. If I stumble twice, that gets rewritten. Also I am finding things that simply slipped past my eye, but not my ear. I am very excited about the prospects for my editing.

So here are my first, and pitiful, attempts to find a way to pitch my newest novel.

As a military officer, Major Gloria Manning has never directly seen combat. The war between her people and the Grand Unified Compact has been a war of limited engagements fought by highly principled and religiously adhered rules. On Cawdor all that changed. The Rules of War have been cast aside and Gloria is discovering that not all enemies wear different uniforms. A terrible secret lies on Cawdor and Gloria finds herself surrounded by chaos and treachery. Unless she can unlock Cawdor’s secret all of humanity may be plunged into genocidal warfare.

Majors Evelyn Sistari and Gloria Manning have every reason to distrust each other. They are enemies is a decade spanning war. Their cultures, though both human, are so different as to make them alien to one another. Now, trapped on the dying planet Cawdor, treason, murder, and madness threaten not only the two officers, but the wider war. Cawdor will test their loyalty and their sanity.

For Major Gloria Manning duty on Cawdor should have been a dull affair without opportunity for advancement. Then the Grand Unified Compact invaded. Suddenly she found herself a paroled officer, bound to the orders of the invaders. Torn between following the lawful rules of war, or fighting the increasing irrational invaders, Gloria must discover the truth hidden on Cawdor. A truth so terrible that even her people could be offered up as a sacrifice to protect it.

Major Gloria Manning never found it difficult to be loyal. She served in a professional and motivated military that scrupulously followed the rules of war. Her culture was the first truly rational culture in human history, dedicated to the flowering of humanity across the galaxy. The planet Cawdor destroyed her idyllic life. Trapped with an enemy force twice the size of her own, Gloria is forced to work with an irrational and unpredictable enemy to survive. When treason and assassination become to rule of the day, Gloria learns that not all enemies are easily known.

When her units surrendered to the enemy, Major Gloria Manning thought her career over. Trapped on a dying world, Cawdor, the star-gates inoperative, she expected nothing more than either imprisonment or death. That was before an assassination thew the allied forces into chaos. Embroiled in a plots of mutiny, madness and murder Gloria discovers that Cawdor harbors a secret that threatens all of humanity. Can she discover who her true allies and enemies are before time runs out?

Major Gloria Manning always supported the war. She never doubted that the Celestial Renaissance Cooperative was the salvation of a fragmented humanity scattered across the galaxy. Now after a surprise attack has left her forces trapped on the dying planet Cawdor Gloria begins to doubt. Tangled in a web of lies, mutiny, and murder she must discover the truth. One that reveals that the enemy is not always who you thought.

I have finished ‘Cawdor’ and I was looking forward to a nice long period of relaxation.

My damn brain doesn’t seem to be in on the plan. It started todaay worrying at the idea of a SteamPunk Horror novel.

This isn’t me! I don’t read steampunk! (except for the afore mentioned Ms Garriger.) It was just a vague idea, but then period and setting started falling into place. Quite unlike  anumber of steampunk novels this one is not set in the Europe or even in any of Victoria’s domains.

World building and a plot has started to form and I don’t want it!!!

grrrrrr