Off The Pink

at 10:20 PM

The good news is that I got Valentine's Night polished up, printed out, and sent off to Eleanor today. This is the second spec manuscript I've written in as many years, in addition to finishing off Prophets for DAW. Here's hoping it does as well as Lilly's Song. This means, now that I got the rewrites done on three novels, I get to start on the next book in the Apotheosis Trilogy sometime before the end of the month. This means the counters will finally start moving again.

Now, the reason I'm not starting the new book right now leads me to the bad news. . .

You see, my mother-in-law has dementia and has moved into assisted living. This is a good thing, as she is, to put it kindly, obstinate and difficult to deal with. As in there was no way we would ever get her to agree to move, we had to check her into the ER after she wandered off and have her shipped directly from the hospital to the assisted living facility the following Monday. She's royally pissed at my wife, when she's coherent, but she now gets three meals a day, social interaction, and the occasional shower.

The bad news is her house. I get to spend this weekend cleaning out a house that hasn't been vacuumed, dusted, tidied or otherwise cleaned out in nearly a decade. Parts of it are near collapse. There's mold, bugs, rats and things I don't even want to think about. I'm afraid I'm about to run out of dumpster. I'm exhausted, and I've barely started on what promises to be a very long weekend.

The way I get through crap like this? I promise myself that it will make it into a story someday.

at 9:54 PM

I turned in the editorial revisions for Prophets today, which means that I am officially done with it. It got a bit longer which is why all the counters moved around. Next task, is a second round of editorial edits on Lilly's Song, which are relatively minor and should only take a couple of days. Then I need to do a revision of Valentine's Night before I give it to Eleanor to shop around.

Then I'll be writing new stuff. . .

at 12:10 PM

No I didn't forget about them, it's just this little old thing called revision. See, when I finish a novel and turn it into an editor, it isn't really finished. Since you all saw those counters grind to a halt I've been stuck revising Lilly's Song for Bantam, and I'm currenly revising Prophets for DAW. I will also be spending the rest of this month revising Valentine's Night before I finally hand it off to Eleanor. Then I'll be doing new stuff, working on the second Apotheosis book.

at 5:38 PM

Well, since I finished up the Wolfbreed rewrite, I haven't done much writing. I guess I just needed to rest the old story muscle for a bit. Also, the next thing I'm working on is Heretic, the second book in the Apotheosis Trilogy. This means going straight from a rewrite of a medieval historical dark fantasy-cum-romance into a full-blown post-singular space opera. If I didn't take a bit of a break, I'd probably pull something from the cognitive whiplash. I plan to get going on that next week, but in the meantime I've been playing with the Title Scorer on Lulu.com.

As any reader of this blog knows, I've been racking my brain for a title for Wolfbreed #1 now that we've decided that will be a series title. I have been playing with titles (most of which suck) and now I have at lest some objective measure of how "good" they are.

Here's some examples with prospective titles I've been kicking around:

Should any Nightmares Come scores 59.3% (phrase comes from the book, but Bantam nixed it as too horrory)

What the Darkness Brings scores 63.7% (from the same place, a lullaby I wrote for the book, probably still too horrory)

Lilly's Song scores 76.9% (Lilly is the heroine's name, and again it refers to the lullaby.)

Black Cross, Crimson Heart scores 69% (A pattern that I'm playing several variants of, "Black Cross" being a reference to the Teutonic Order.)

at 7:37 AM

Now that I finished the unscheduled spec novel (the first draft anyway) I am now in the throes of doing an editorial rewrite on Wolfbreed #1 (did I mention I need titles?) which will probably take me through mid-April (tax day, wheee). After that's done the plan is now to attack the second book of Apotheosis, and then Wolfbreed #2 (Did I mention, yeah, I think I did.) and then finish off Apotheosis.

Since what I laid out there is about 18 months work, and a lot can happen in a year and a half, this probably only has a marginal relation to reality. But the upshot is, I'm in re-write land, so we won't have any counters moving for a month or so.

at 8:16 PM

A couple of woo-hoos:

First off, Anne at Bantam has given the ok to the outline I submitted for Wolfbreed #2 (titles, I need titles.) which means that I can go ahead with it as soon as I get the next DAW book out of the way. Second off, we are retiring the Valentine's Night counter, since I've just wrapped up the first draft.

This is shaping up to be my most productive year writing since 1992, when I started doing this professionally. About exactly a year ago, I started writing Wolfbreed #1. I've since finished the novel, landed one helluva agent, found a new publisher, finished the first volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy for DAW, and now I've wrapped up the first draft of a third novel outside of any contractual commitments.

Busy as I seem to be, my goal of finishing volume 2 for both Wolfbreed and the Apotheosis Trilogy in the next 12 months doesn't seem particularly daunting. Yea me.

at 8:59 PM

Like I mentioned with Wolfbreed #1 some time ago, there's a point in every novel I've written where I feel like, "OMG what kind of garbage am I writing here?" It always happens in the last third of the book. I hit a wall where I feel everything I've written is total shit and I have to slog my way through the next few scenes no matter how excited I am about the project. However, I must still be growing as a writer, because I've just made two discoveries about this phenomenon.

First, this did not happen with Prophets, and I think it must be related to the fact that it is the first book in a trilogy, and really is only the first third of a narrative and not a stand-alone book.

Second, and more important, in today's "slog," I discovered a way to short-circuit the process. I skipped back into the first third of Valentine's Night and added a new scene retroconning a plot point I realized I needed for the ending. Turns out that, while it wasn't my intent, adding the scene (where my vampire RN heroine gets to set her own compound fracture in a wrecked police car) managed to re-ignite the enthusiasm that made me launch the project in the first place. Now I'm back to being excited about attacking it this weekend. Got to remember this for the next novel, it'd save me some angst.

On an unrelated note, I got notes back from Anne for Wolfbreed #1 (still need titles), and with them I have the first word on when it will see print. As of right now, we're looking at Summer 2009. Mark your calender.

at 12:21 PM

Or a third of a trilogy. Final verbiage until editorial revisions kick in: 95,859. Since rewrites for me always go long, Prophets will probably be 100K words when it hits the shelves. I've retired the counter, and adjusted the word count for the trilogy as a whole so that Prophets is actually 1/3 of the total.

Yea me!

I now have a long weekend ahead filled with a buttload of SF movies and office furniture assembly.

at 8:57 PM

By about 5000 words so far, but another 1000 to 2000 words and Prophets will be done. I was going to try and wrap it up tonight, but ended up dealing with insurance people (will people stop it with the rear ending of me and my wife, please!) and buying a new office set for my wife, who definitely needs her life organized (guess what I'll be doing with my day off Monday?) and I just now finished dinner, and I'm dog tired. So, what's another day? Sigh.

Good thing is, cliffhanger ending or not, I think I did find a nice natural break to end book #1. Sure I killed a major character, left another one floating stranded in space, and everything's sort of going to hell, but it feels like a good place to stop.

at 1:10 PM

It's a new year and I've revised my project counters. I have ditched the counter for The Unicorns of Hunting Valley because it seems very unlikely I'll be able to justify getting back to it any time in the near future. (As in, any time in 2008.)

I've added a counter for book 2 in the Apotheosis Trilogy, which, barring catastrophe, should be done some time this upcoming year.

I've also added a counter for the book two in the Wolfbreed series.

Note, some title changes here. I've talked with Anne Groell at Bantam and it looks as if "Wolfbreed" will be the title for the series-- which makes sense given how I intend to follow the book up going forward.

So the first book, which up to now I've been calling "Wolfbreed" will actually be printed under the title "Wolfbreed:[something else I need to think up]." I'll post here when I have a clue what the final title will be.

And, if you're curious, book two is set in 14th century Poland.

at 8:05 AM

I didn't write a chapter 12 for Prophets.
No, I didn't leave anything out, I just went straight from 11 to 13.
No, I don't know how it happened.
Yes, this is a sort of pointless comment.

at 6:31 PM

But I still managed about 2500 words a day, which is pretty respectable output when I'm not under the whip of my muse. When you subtract the two days where I had an output of approximately nil (one celebrating X-mas with my Mom, the other X-mas with the in-laws), I actually made my 3500 word/day goal. The counter stands at 91%, and I think that my initial word count estimate may in fact be pretty damn close for once. I didn't finish the draft, but we're clearly at the point where when I get to the right point I can turn it in.

Notice though, I didn't say "end." unlike Hostile Takeover, Apotheosis doesn't quite lend itself to three independent chunks the way that trilogy did. This one is going to be a bit of a cliffhanger.

at 9:56 PM

Well, Christmas is upon us and for me it means something in addition to the birth of Christ, feeding ham to the in-laws, and sacrificing a tree on the altar of capitalism: This year it's the start of my semi-annual writing vacation. (No, not a vacation from writing.) Like a lot of novelists out there, probably the vast majority, I have a day job. So, I have to work the writing in around the job, usually in the early morning.

However, one of the perks I do get is four weeks of paid vacation a year. So, I use half of it for actual family vacations (like my trip to Germany this year) and the other half I use for intense work on whatever project is on the front burner. Sort of a micro NaNoWriMo where I'm aiming a lot higher than 1600+ words a day. A one person writer's retreat that, this year, is going to run from Christmas to Jan 1st. I'm hoping I'll be able to sprint to the finish with Prophets and have it done for the new year. (Which, if my estimate of the word count for the novel's right, will require something under 3400 words a day for a week.)

Wish me luck.

at 2:03 PM

Well I've hit the first landmark in the Apotheosis Trilogy I've felt worth posting about. I have reached the quarter mark on the trilogy as a whole. Word-count subject to change, as I've assumed that book #1 is going to be a little longer than the next two. Speaking of book one, I'm a little past the 2/3 mark, and I'm hoping to get the first draft wrapped up sometime in early January.

BTW- here's a good rule of thumb. The more fragmented your POV, the more characters and settings, the more tightly you need to adhere to an explicitly linear time-line. If you have events separated by several light-years that converge and diverge as the players move about-- you better draw up a literal time-line(s). I have an Excel spreadsheet with columns for various characters so I can track when stuff happened.

at 5:21 PM

Well, I am just about halfway done with the first draft of Apotheosis: Prophets. I have reached a point where I am willing to hazard a prediction. You know most books, in addition to the (usually badly written) back cover copy, there's almost always some edited snippet of the actual text inside the front cover. I strongly suspect that I've just written the scene that DAW's going to use for that snippet in Prophets.

Minor spoiler warning, as this is a big reveal midway into the book. But that doesn't change my opinion that they're going to use this bit as a teaser:

There wasn’t even a sound to mark the jump, just an abrupt shift in the star-field shown in the holo.

Another twenty light years, Nickolai thought. Here we are.

“We’re still nominal on all systems,” Parvi said. “Drives are cold.”

Wahid didn’t say anything. After a long pause, Mosasa said, “Navigation?”

“Hold on a minute.” Wahid shook his head, and for all the trouble Nickolai had in interpreting human expressions, even he could tell something was seriously wrong.

“What’s the problem?” Parvi asked. “Are we off-course?”

Nickolai knew that the Eclipse was fueled for multiple jumps at this distance, but even so, the thought of taching twenty light years in the wrong direction tightened something in his gut.

Could what I did have affected the engines? Nickolai began to realize that there was no particular motive for Mr. Antonio to keep him alive. Mr. Antonio wasn’t like Nickolai. He was a man, and had no honor to keep, even to himself.

“No. We’re right where we’re supposed to be.” Wahid said slowly. It almost sounded as if he didn’t believe it himself. “All the landmarks check out. . .”

“What’s wrong then?” Parvi asked.

“Look at the damn holo!” Wahid said, thrusting a hand at the display as if he wanted to bat it out of his face.

“What?” Parvi looked at the holo of stars between them, and her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “No. . .”

“Kugara?” Mosasa snapped.

“I’m ahead of you. Mass scans out to the full range of the sensors. No sign of anything bigger than an asteroid for 100 AU. We got background radiation consistent with interstellar media—”

One of the scientists, the female with yellow hair, spoke up. “What happened? Is there some sort of problem?”

“Bet your ass there’s a problem.” Wahid spun around on his chair and faced the spectators, pointing a finger at the holo display. “We’re missing a whole star.”

“What?”

“Xi Virginis is gone, Dr. Dörner.”

at 11:24 AM

Working on Apotheosis (going well, thank you for asking) I've found myself digging in my old notes for Hostile Takeover. And I found a little sketch I made of the character Flower, when I was figuring out what the Volerans looked like.

Now I'm not a very good artist (I was a lot better before I decided to concentrate on writing some 20 years ago) but I thought it was a neat example of how sometimes a cover artist can actually tap into what the author was thinking. (Opposed to my prior post on book covers.)

Here's my little sketch:

And here's a detail of the cover of Profiteer, (one of my favorite book covers after the one for Dwarves) showing the same character:

The cool thing, Jim Burns never saw the sketch I made, he was going off of my description in the book. That was pretty cool.

I just wish he hadn't made Tetsami (a short Asian woman) look like a pissed of Sigourney Weaver.

at 9:02 PM

There seems to be two main "movements" in science fiction (and I'm talking about science fiction, not the broader speculative fiction/fantasy etc.) at this point in time. Both were mentioned in the editorial in the October '07 issue of Asimov's. The first is the manifesto-wielding vanguard of Mundane SF that I've mentioned in an earlier post. The second movement has been called "New Space Opera," which has no manifesto I know of, or a website for that matter.

The name "New Space Opera" seems to have come into currency with a 2003 edition of Locus (a role that an upcoming issue of Interzone seems to be planning to play for Mundane SF) and has not had a terribly clear definition, but my favorite one is by Paul McAuley from that same Locus issue.

There are neither empires nor rigid technocracies dominated by a single Big Idea in the new space opera; like cyberpunk, it's eclectic and pluralistic, and infused with the very twenty-first century sensibility that the center cannot hold, that technology-driven change is continuous and advancing on a thousand fronts, that some kind of posthuman singularity is approaching fast or may already have happened. Most of all, its stories contain a vertiginous sense of deep time; in the new space opera, the Galaxy is not an empty stage on which humans freely strut their stuff, but is instead a kind of junk yard littered with the ruins and abandoned wonders of earlier, more powerful races.
Apotheosis Trilogy

at 12:34 PM

I finally feel as if the Hostile Takeover sequel is moving forward reasonably well. This should make Sheila at DAW happy, she's been waiting for it for an inordinately long time. Wolfbreed aside, I had stalled on the project because I hadn't decided who the main characters were. I had characters all over the place, too separated to make a coherent narrative. What really stalled me was the fact that I didn't realize that this was the problem. . . not until I had set the whole thing aside for a while. Coming back with fresh eyes, all the issues I had were cleared up by taking a couple of chapters and just placing them later on in the book-- in one case, the next book.

at 12:08 PM

No one is perfect. Sometimes mistakes make it into print. Sometimes huge steaming mistakes get in without anyone noticing until you need to write a sequel and go, "oops how did that happen?"

You can probably guess, there's a goof in Hostile Takeover. What is it? Well here's a hint in a couple of quotes:

Quote #1:
The atlas listed Kathiwar, an airless ball of rock out on the extreme fringes of the Indi Protectorate. Kathiwar orbited Beta Pictoris, and had a population of less than a million. It was inhabited only to put a way station between the Confederacy and Tau Puppis, the one contact with the Volera Empire. . .
Quote #2:Volera was discovered during the Indi Protectorate's massive colonial expansion. Sixty-two years ago, one of the hundreds of Indi scouts had discovered a highly attractive planet circling Tau Puppis, a star not only on the fringes of the Indi Protectorate, but on the fringes of the Confederacy.these two stars are 120 ly apart from each other.CelestiaHostile Takeover
A star-map sprang to life between him and Father Mallory. A large lumpy dumbbell-shaped cluster of stars shone bright yellow, marking the familiar confines of human space.

One end of the dumbbell was deformed, pushing away from the galactic center and away from a dusting of red stars clustered on the other side of human space from Beta Pictoris. The red stars were outposts of the Voleran Empire, governed by the only other space-faring race humanity had encountered in nearly five hundred years of interstellar expansion.

Humanity had discovered the Voleran Empire at a time when political power between the arms of the Confederacy was measured in the number of planets the arms controlled, how old they were, and how populous they were. The structure of the Confed government gave a strong political imputus to colonize new worlds, even when the economics didn’t quite make sense. At that time, the arm of the Confederacy that grew from the original colony on Epsilon Indi was the most aggressive in spreading outward, placing colonies on planets solely as launch-pads to reach further out. The relatively tiny outpost of Kathiwar was built on an airless rock orbiting Beta Pictoris to serve as one of those way stations, scanning the stars around and sending probes, and eventually, colony ships.

Shortly after Kathiwar was established, its observation platforms found a planet orbiting Tau Puppis. The discovery, Tau Puppis IV, seemed an obvious Dolbrian remnant, as no reasonably habitable planet should have evolved around that star. Its history might have ended there, as it was close to five times the maximum distance the Indi ships could reasonably supply a new colony, over 120 light-years away.

But when someone discovered that Tau Puppis was emitting faint EM radiation of demonstrably intelligent origin, the planet was moved to the front of Indi’s priority list. First contact with an alien race was important enough, and in the front of the mind of every Indi decision maker was the fact that the accidental contact between the Centauri arm and the delphinine natives of Paralia had resulted in the development of the first tach drives and Centauri dominance in the new Confederacy. So Indi routed money, people and Paralian-designed tach-ships down a corridor from Beta Pictoris toward Tau Puppis.

The aliens from Tau Puppis met them more than halfway.

There was a lot of diplomatic dancing, as it became very clear that the bird-like aliens were the rulers of an interstellar empire as large or larger than man’s, an Empire that claimed much of the hundred-twenty light years of space between Beta Pictoris and Tau Puppis, a volume as great as the whole of the Confederacy at the time. At some point Tau Puppis IV was named Volera, a name that carried over to the aliens as a whole even when it was clear that Tau Puppis was only a small outpost of the Voleran Empire.

at 7:53 AM

Everyone gets annoyed when someone flubs the continuity in an ongoing series. Fans will shout, "But that's not what you all said back in Issue/Episode/Movie #X!" From the outside, it looks simple enough to keep track of established facts of your universe.

Well, I have sympathy for all those poor bastards working in long running universes (Star Trek anyone) because it's damn hard keeping my own continuity straight in my Hostile Takeover universe, and it's only three books, and I wrote the whole thing. Just as far as setting goes; the first trilogy had about eighty planets established, 32 that were mentioned directly in the text. I've had to put together a little database just to keep track of them. Not to mention all the historical details. . .

It ain't easy.

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