Just in case anyone wants a short but pithy description of five of my lead characters, I’ve added an extra page under the ‘Stars Trilogy’ tab under the title “Who is….?” I did some silhouette artwork, which looks okay. so if anyone happens to be passing………..
I like the way the drop down menu works off the ‘Stars Trilogy’ tab.
Revised and cheaper versions of both ‘Sky’ and ‘Falling’ should be available shortly.
Took a look at the price of one of my hardbacks on Lulu and decided that the First Editions are just too damn expensive. So I’ve been busy reformatting the text and tidying up some punctuation errors that somehow missed the proofing process. 155,000 words is a lot of reading, and although I still like what I’ve done, to be honest I’ve read the damned thing so many times that I don’t want to read it any more.
However, I’ve slimmed it down from 479 pages to 339, and will be reissuing all editions at a hopefully lower price. I know I’ve spent over five years on the story, and despite forward moves in science and technology it hasn’t dated, but to be honest I want to move on.
Recently I’ve been messing around with cover art. Thinking about creating something eyecatching which makes a strong visual statement, but isn’t too ‘busy’.
At the book fair last weekend, I was watching what other people were doing as far as cover design is concerned. I was also covertly observing the reactions of would be readers to the artwork on show. I caught a few vague nods of approval at the ‘Stars’ covers, despite it being an unpopular genre with the majority of browsers, and barely suppressed looks of veiled horror at the more ‘crowded’ cover work. Conclusion; the most popular covers seemed to be the simplest. Either text only, or a single strong and pertinent image that attracted the eye without distracting from the contents.
Still struggling with the murder scene for ‘a falling of angels’, and trying to rationalise some of my notes from 2005 and embed them into the Cerberus story arc.
Keeping chipping away at ‘Darkness’ at about 500 words per day, but the story needs expanding. There’s an element missing. Not sure what it is, but I think a revision of the counter plot needs to be done. I’ve killed off the original bad guys, but all I’ve got in their stead are a lot of faceless bureaucrats who are hard to nail down. Very unsatisfying.
Recently one of my acquaintances, who incidentally has never read any of my work, said this to me when I was showing off the cover artwork of ‘Falling through the stars’; “Science fiction, huh? Full of aliens come to eat our brains, yeah?”
“No.” I replied, a little nettled.
“All about how UFO’s built the pyramids?”
“No.” Up until then I’d considered him quite level headed. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“You say you got an interstellar war in this book?”
“Yes, one earth based regime against another.” I replied.
“So the aliens stop the war and make people live together in peace?”
“Look.” I said, mildly annoyed. “There are quite a few non-human life forms described in my work, but there are no alien space ships and no super intelligent aliens who visit Earth. Read it for yourself.” As if I’d resort to some cheap Deus ex machina narrative device.
“No thanks.” He replied. “I don’t like science fiction.”
At this point I made an excuse and left the coffee shop. I think he was just trying to rile me for fun. Needless to say, he’s currently off my greetings card list. At least until he actually bothers to read my work and apologise.
Okay, I’m going to nail my colours to the mast; I am a writer of science fiction who does not believe that hyper intelligent alien species visit our little home planet for the following reasons;
1. The odds are against it. While ‘life’ throughout the universe may not be as rare as we have previously thought; there being millions of worlds out in our galaxy alone that probably contain the basics needed to support life. The path of evolution required to produce intelligent, tool using life forms is overlong and fraught with pitfalls. See this Wiki page on the Fermi Paradox.
2. The ‘evidence’ for aliens is wafer thin. Blurry photographs, laughably inauthentic video / film footage. Reams of unverifiable ‘sightings’ found to be misidentification of planets, stars, satellites aircraft or cloud formations. (See items 5 & 6)
3. Lack of conspiracy. Governments are rubbish at covering up anything, never mind UFO’s. Remember that Government is made up of people. People are fallible, they make mistakes, they gossip and tell friends and family things they aren’t supposed to. They take short cuts when pressured. They get flustered when out of their comfort zone. Secretive or unusual behaviour is painfully obvious. In short; Governments leak like the proverbial rusty sieve. It’s why the Cold War went on as long as it did. If the Atomic secrets hadn’t been leaked, the USA, British and French would have been the only nuclear powers in the world and history would have been very different.
4. ‘Aliens’ have not made themselves known. Truly. All a real alien would have to do is land their starship on one of the many spaces perfectly designed for that purpose, like an airport. Besides, why cross hundreds or thousands of light years or more simply to hide in the bushes? Especially from a species supposedly fifty times less intelligent and technologically inferior.
5. We would have seen and recorded them. The skies are watched. Avidly so. Satellites, meteors and comets are tracked not only by multiple government agencies in multiple countries, but also by an army of amateur astronomers. People who can tell the difference between a planet and a star, a satellite and a meteor. For every sighting of a ‘UFO’ there are multiple sightings of the same phenomena from a different angle which identify said UFO as something terribly mundane and indisputably natural or human made. There are millions of people who can actually tell the difference between aircraft contrails lit by the setting sun and atmospheric tracks left by ‘giant meteors’. Or even UFO’s and pigeons.
6. I’ve seen so-called UFO’s. Then had a damned good laugh at myself for being foolish. My first sighting was at six years old. I was on holiday with my family in Devon, England, at the time. One evening we heard a report of a UFO on the car radio. We’d pulled over for a pub supper, and I was sitting outside in the pub gardens when we saw it; a dark red globe high up in the sky with something dangling below. “Is that a balloon?” I said, staring up at it. “It’s a balloon!” A few other people confirmed. After we’d eaten we heard on the radio that yes, the ‘UFO’ was a Weather recording balloon. During the 1960’s, and until the technology was superseded, such sightings were quite common. Since then I’ve seen lenticular clouds, light reflected off high altitude aircraft, and foil party balloons filled with helium high up amongst the clouds. No alien spacecraft though.
7. There have been no ‘Alien abductions’. Every single one can be more easily explained by sleep disorders, isolation, hallucination, and chemical imbalance. For example; look up ‘Sleep paralysis’ which is a condition known to produce hallucinations of ‘abduction’. That’s even without graphic hallucinations related to extreme celibacy (Incubi and Succubi)
8. Timescale; While there is a possibility that super intelligent species may evolve on other worlds, who is to say, considering that there are star systems many times older than our little home in the Orion spur of the Milky Way, that any alien or artefact has to exist within our time frame. We have only been doing powered flight for just over a century, and only fifty five years since the first satellites went into orbit. That’s a very tiny time frame, and it’s worth mentioning that the Universe operates on a timescale so vast that even Earth based geological time may be considered the barest blink of an eye. So any putative alien civilisation might well be separated from us by millions, even billions of years as well as light years.
9. Yeah, but area 51, right? All the UFO’s land there. No. Sorry. Groom lake, Nevada, USA or the ‘Box’ as it is sometimes known, is a secret experimental testing facility, and ‘sightings’ have been made, but; and this is a big ‘but’; what part of ‘secret and experimental’ don’t these ‘Alien’ conspiracy theorists get? Of course they will see unidentifiable objects as new military airframes are trotted out for testing. Some of these have been disk shaped, and what’s more have actually flown. Prototype disk shaped aircraft go back to the 1910’s (McCormick-Romme ‘Umbrella’ plane and others). Other sightings might have been down to dirigible prototypes. Northrop-Grumman and Boeing have a couple of interesting designs. Perhaps a ‘sighting’ might even be one of the big circular radar arrays seen on Sentry AWACs.
10. These ‘invisible aliens’ are also remarkably silent. SETI, active since 1951 with access to radio telescopes and a huge network of volunteer observers, has yet to turn up any proof of super intelligent alien life. Not an electronic peep. Which is strange, because everything that moves off a reaction. To adopt a Newtonian metaphor, even events at the quantum level alter the behaviour of more familiar phenomena. Everything creates a knock on reaction. Electron charges are altered, electron flows initiated, molecules moved, heat, sound or movement generated. Nothing happens in isolation and everything has an equal and opposite reaction. So if super intelligent aliens have visited we should have heard something by now. Inverse square law or not.
The only logical conclusion to draw from the above is that there never have been any alien visitors, benign or otherwise. No little grey skinned bipeds with big eyes or similar. No distant or even close encounters of whatever kind.
This being the case, for the moment I will be restricting myself to human house guests, not ‘My favourite Martian’.
Well, for better or worse both video’s will be up very shortly on the ‘Video’ tab. I’ve disabled comments over at YouTube because I want anyone who wants to say anything come here and do so. It also saves me messing around with yet another login just to argue when I should be writing.
The first video is a very uncomfortable me doing a little reading off a cheat sheet, trying to explain in under four minutes what a three volume trilogy of 450,000 words is about. The second is another four minute vid of me talking about some of the ideas I got to play around with. Not quite so uncomfortable, but not as smoothly as I’d hoped.
If the Stars trilogy were a sandwich, it would be a club sandwich with a whole steer and half a hectare of vegetables, smothered in fifty gallons of mustard and mayonnaise, and not too much bread. Not to everyone’s taste, but if we all liked the same thing, what a dull world it would be.
I’m currently having a Henry Higgins “By George he’s got it” moment. My stammer is mostly absent, and I’m finally confident enough to sight read my own work to camera. The proof of the pudding came yesterday, when I settled down in front of my laptop camera and read the first eleven pages of ‘Sky full of stars’, hardly muffing a word. Well, apart from six occurrences that I noticed. Not bad for twenty-nine minutes without a break. I’m quite pleased.
Until I’ve sorted out some kind of video hosting, I think my best path is to post on Youtube and embed on this site on a specific page like on a Youtube channel. While I’m sure there will be some less than kind comments from the casually immature, I’m hoping that there will be more supportive responses. A couple of friends tell me that the best way to deal with negative people online is simply to delete their unpleasantness.
The current state of play with our local Weather is that we might get lucky with clearing skies to view a possible Aurora Borealis on Saturday night. SOHO has experienced considerable interference from heavy S1 level particle bombardment as reported on Spaceweather.com. I shall also be watching the CSSDP Real time Auroral data to see if anything in happening elsewhere.
In my ‘Stars’ trilogy, I’ve been looking at the issues, strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats with regards to Reactionless Electromagnetic Drives, of which my fictional ‘Omega’ drive is one such.
Today I was reading about Project Icarus, and the type of Drive envisaged to send what Niven would call a ‘Slowboat’ to other worlds. Essentially a pulsed Fusion reaction (See this Animation).
The same principle was envisaged in the Project Orion of the late 50’s and early 60’s which was killed off by various Nuclear test ban treaties. Essentially the Orion and Icarus Drives use the principle of a controlled nuclear detonation to provide a pulsed thrust to the vehicle they propel.
To my mind these solutions are on a par with Ramjet technology. Sure they could be made to work, but using one for interstellar travel would surely be like trying to use wood burning steam engines to drive Formula 1 racing cars. Or even Sir George Cayley’s Gunpowder engine, which probably worked, temporarily. Although the Mythbusters test showed how difficult the concept is to implement.
There is a body of opinion which says reactionless electromagnetic drives are ‘impossible’. See this paragraph from a Wikipedia article below.
“In spite of their physical impossibility, such devices are a staple of science fiction, particularly for space propulsion, and as with perpetual motion machines have been proposed as working technologies.”
I’d disagree strongly with Electromagnetic Drives being akin to ‘Perpetual Motion’ devices. Mainly because it’s a bad analogy. An EM drive by its very nature would utilise huge amounts of energy, but not reaction mass. Which in itself would not violate the rules covering the conservation of energy or momentum. With my fictional Omega drive, these rules are scrupulously observed. There is definitely no such thing as a ‘free lunch’ when it comes to interstellar travel.
When it comes to reactionless electromagnetic drives, at least in my fictional universe; I make a paradigm shift in starship construction and design. Working on the premise that such a vehicle would have to travel inside a magnetic warp to obtain the acceleration described, my fictional engine is an integral part of the hull. Several theoretical advantages to this approach present themselves; firstly economy of hull shape and use of the well documented skin effect. Secondly a tightly contained electromagnetic ‘shield’ to deflect harmful radiation / small objects as a benefit of the hull coils creating a magnetic circuit. Thirdly to create a pulsed electromagnetic field of sufficient density which might allow the fictional ‘Sub space transition’ I write about.
Low velocity impulse would be provided by a VASIMIR type engine, but the serious ‘grunt work’ of traveling between star systems would be provided by an electromagnetic drive such as the ‘Omega’. Again, this is an almost practical proposition. All it requires is enough energy.
Whilst there are some who might dismiss my musings on this subject as being ‘moronic’ or ‘impossible’, at least I’ve bothered to try the ideas out and take them for a test drive. What’s foolish about that?
Literary luminaries at Nanaimo District Museum and fifteen minutes delivering what should have been a ten minute set piece to an audience. Five minutes about the Stars Trilogy, plus a five minute reading. One or two people picked up my books and checked out the promotional signs I’d made. “It’s well written.” One browsing reader commented. Sadly they did not buy. At 11:45, my turn came to speak.
One of my (many) shortcomings is public speaking. I make all the classic mistakes. I ramble and digress. I don’t keep to the script. I’m too busy reading my notes to give the audience my time and eye contact. I forget key information. In short, I’m happier behind a keyboard than in front of potential customers. No matter how polite and complimentary they are towards the end.
Having taken professional acting training I should be a whole lot better, but I’m not. I’ve picked up a stammer from somewhere. Now where in the tenth circle of hell did that come from? I’m sure I never used to stutter. Maybe it’s because I’m presenting my own work.
Again; this is odd. Acting, and especially comic improvisation used to be one of my strong points. Loved every second. Smooth as greased glass without a verbal tic in sight. Throw me a line or a gesture and I was away like a dog after a stick. Well, maybe not my dog, Amos. He sees me throw a stick for him to chase and he lies down with his tongue hanging out and gives me a funny look, as if to say “But you threw it away. Now you want me to get it? Jeez, Boss!”
One of the things I liked about the event was getting to talk to some of the other authors. I was the only sci-fi writer there, my neighbour Historical fiction writer Kenn Joubert and his wife Fern were on the next table but one, and spent a good deal of time speaking to Mary Ann Moore, a poet and writer from Gabriola Island.
Not many potential buyers, but it was good to see Jordan, Aimee and Amy of the Museum staff. I’m very fond of all the crew there. Although now I’m doing more shifts at my day job, I don’t get to volunteer as much as I used to. I miss that about Tuesdays, but most of the big display changes are done, and Jordan and Rick take care of most of those. On the run up to Christmas, I often felt I wasn’t really contributing any more.
Perhaps if the writing paid a bit better, I’d probably volunteer more. I’d also like to go to one or two of the Science Fiction conventions to hawk my wares. Just for the opportunity to rub shoulders with some more experienced authors like Niven and Bova. One can dream.
Finally got the picture taken of me, grinning like a maniac at my first ever book signing. Still not comfortable with seeing myself smiling, or the shine off my head. However, life moves on, and despite not doing much writing over Christmas, things have been moving gradually in the right direction.
Helping out with taking down our local Museums ‘La Belle Epoque’ display and gossiping with display guru Rick Slingerland about various things, when Amy, the museums Programs Director wanders into the display area we were taking down, sees me lying on on my back undoing bolts with an electric screwdriver in hand and asks to talk to me “When you’re vertical.”
“Sure.” Said I, finished what I was doing, and being a gentleman stood up to talk to her.
the upshot of our conversation was that I’ve been invited to do a presentation as one of the local ‘Literary Luminaries’, in which local writers get to do short presentations about their work on the 26th February. Although at the time of writing my name isn’t on the blog or any visible online publicity yet, but then I wasn’t asked until shortly before 11. Even in these days of instant connectivity, Facebook and Twitter, someone has to write the news down first.
Feeling mildly pleased with myself. Must get a couple of posters and some promotional stuff made. Fortunately I picked up some extra work over Christmas which will pay for such small expenses. I’m almost looking forward to it; which is unusual for me and public appearances.
Despite the title of this post, I actually like Brussels as a city, and have fond memories of visiting friends who used to live there (Hi Ralph & Sheena).
In the late 21st Century of the ‘Stars’ trilogy, I’ve used the city for a more sinister purpose. Brussels becomes the headquarters of the Gaian European Republic, a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of oligarchs. A superficially theocratic republic where dissidents are routinely murdered for parts of their brains which form the processing cores for the Gaians war machines. Where people’s remains are cultured and rendered to form ‘Go-Quarn’, a Tofu like substance given to citizens as part of a ‘healthy vegetarian diet’. They were great fun to write. Even more fun to destroy.
This is the great thing about writing science fiction on the grand scale. You can have a great deal of fun simply blowing things (Places, Cities, even whole planets) up. Although in the imaginary future of the ‘Stars’ trilogy, the Gaians see democracy as a primary threat, and spend a great deal of time trying to wipe out said dangerous creed. So it could be argued that the Gaians got what was coming to them.
Having nailed my colours to the mast with regards to my fictional version of Nuclear Fusion, I’d like to continue digging my literary grave with a few thoughts on faster than light travel and Starship construction.
Current thinking seems to favour the ‘space warp’ / wormhole method of sidestepping ‘normal’ space times limitations as documented in the writings and theories of Albert Einstein and others.
Now as far as travel through such portals is concerned, my own thinking is in total concurrence. The only way of transcending the speed of light is via some other dimension or set of dimensions, like the theoretical realms of sub space or hyperspace. Where my view diverges from many of the concepts on offer is in the areas of field dynamics and thus starship design, and here I would like to offer the following thoughts, structured as postulates.
Postulate 1; Such a ‘Starship Drive’ would require power in the Gigawatt, Terawatt, and possibly even the Petawatt range, from a Nuclear Fusion reaction.
Postulate 2; Such a starship could only travel through the realms of sub or hyperspace in a heavily magnetically shielded ‘warp’. Unshielded media, signals or ordinary matter, even if they could enter such a realm, such as by a ‘Stargate’ type device would immediately become disorganised and lose cohesion. Perhaps explosively so. This would rule out any form of Teleportation of unprotected matter.
Postulate 3; Star ship design would have to be governed by the field dynamics of an electromagnetic field. Using this paradigm, the most efficient shape for a starship would be perfectly globular or cylindrical to provide a medium to establish a tight magnetic circuit close to the hull. At least field densities sufficient to allow a transition to a different set of space time dimensions.
In my fictional universe, Starship design favours blank cylinders with no windows, only camera and radar displays to show the outside. Also sub space, at least to our eyes, would be effectively invisible, as our eyes and senses are limited to the wavelengths of the visible electromagnetic spectrum, which might not be valid in a sub or hyperspace type transition. We would have no means of directly viewing such a set of dimensions, except being able to view the inside of a magnetic field boundary, which I describe as a uniform silky black.
My reasoning is thus; whilst all the external bits and pieces bolted on look very pretty, Starships of the “Enterprise” or irregular hull shapes would likely require too much energy, and the field shape would contain too many irregularities for the magnetic field to properly protect and enable translation between transitional space time and normal space time. A smooth and regular field shape is more desirable and easier to maintain than one that is all odd angles.
This issue is addressed in The ‘Sky full of Stars’, where a flaw in field dynamics design results in ‘Quantum foam‘ damage to the hull of the ‘Vancouver’ (A transport starship), nearly results in disaster for Paul Stovek and Lan Yue.
Quantum foam being microscopic vortices of subspace that momentarily exist in the wake of a subspace field collapse during transition to ‘normal’ space. The end result is transforming solid material into a porous sponge like lattice of hull material. In the case of the narrative, a titanium alloy. Such is my fictional interpretation of current thinking, anyway.
I’ve been re-reading ‘The Sky Full of Stars‘ again, trying to poke holes (well, more holes than necessary) in the narrative, and thought I might blog a few explanatory notes behind my vision of the technology. Today’s subject is Nuclear Fusion as a means for providing the energy for a Starship Drive. This is nothing new. Fusion as a literary device has a long and venerable history. Nuclear Fusion, and the wealth of energy it could theoretically deliver is a goal (currently) beyond the dreams of Physicists.
Real world Nuclear Fusion ‘in the wild’ occurs when a sufficient mass of hydrogen atoms are sufficiently compressed to create the fireball that becomes a star. ‘Star nurseries‘, where this process has been observed are a well known astronomical phenomenon. It is also observable in H-Bombs, which are a relatively crude means of getting hydrogen to fuse in sufficient quantities for a multi-megaton yield explosive device.
With Fusion, the first trick seems to be to get plasma at sufficient heat, pressure and density into a single point to initiate a self sustaining reaction. The second is getting usable power out of such a reactor without melting the entire installation. Such is the potential violence from the theoretical energy release.
Creating a controlled superheated plasma has been achieved many times before, including actual incidences of fusion, but only sporadically. Part of the problem seems to be in the plasma streams themselves, which tend to ‘arc’ to earth quite readily like lightning bolts. Stopping the plasma behaving in this fashion is heavy on power input, because even with heavy duty superconductors, the amount of electricity needed for the required electromagnetic containment field outstrips any output many times over. Focussing a super powerful laser at a single pellet of hydrogen isotope has also been tried.
The only current means of achieving even partially controlled Nuclear Fusion require huge amounts of energy to spark off a reaction. This is the current reality of nuclear fusion technology. Unless some new fusion milestone has been passed recently, and skipped merrily under my radar.
In my fictional world, I have a vision of a controllable nuclear fusion reaction as a hybrid between the ‘Wiffleball’ or Polywell (WB-6, 7, 8 After the theoretical work of Robert Bussard, later Richard Nebel) and the more ‘conventional’ Tokamak based designs (ITER etc). A critical point of fusing hydrogen atoms (Forgetting the technicalities surrounding Isotopes of Hydrogen for the moment) is developed by focussing a number of plasma streams into a ‘pinch point’ at which the conditions for a fusion reaction become possible.
One of the phenomena that may make this vision possible is the ability of plasma to ‘self organise’ into helices if a sufficient charge of electric current is passed through the plasma itself (See this result from the RFP Experiment, Padova Italy in 2009). Thus reducing the propensity of the heated plasma to arc to the nearest earth. What I propose is arranging several lower power Tokamak type toroids on edge so they form a kind of ring doughnut shape with a pinch point in the centre, where all the plasma streams converge in a narrow central core; charging the plasma so it forms helices, then synchronising the helical plasma streams to create one or a series of hot spots where sustainable heat, pressure and plasma density for continuous and controllable nuclear fusion may be created.
Getting any power out, of course might prove a little tricky. Although a charged particle stream from a Fusion reaction should be enough to induce electrical current via a series of coil windings or discharge points, as well as some form of rapid heat transfer mechanism to create steam to drive an electricity generating turbine. Preventing those melting might prove an issue, but those are mere technicalities.
At the moment my conjecture is purely a literary device, rather like the use of the hypothetical realm of ‘subspace’ for faster than light travel, or ‘space warp’. Yet like so many literary devices, perhaps my version might give a real world physicist a second thought, which in turn might go some way to provide a workable solution for the dream of almost limitless energy. With Fusion, there is always the constant feeling that we are on the cusp of something great and powerful. Yet like so many other other inventions, like heavier than air powered flight and the mass mobility of the automobile, there are one or two missing pieces in the jigsaw before we have the whole picture.
Have elected to rewrite Cerberus as a series of shorter works, as opposed to the original trilogy. Paul Calvin is too good a character to limit in that particular fashion. Telempathic Cop turned rebel solving mysteries? Shades of Sherlock Holmes, but not quite so full of himself. 50 – 60,000 words apiece, which should allow a higher output if there’s demand.
The follow on to the Stars trilogy I’m going to call ‘Earth’s Night’. No idea why. I just like the sound of it, that’s all. Similar format to the Stars trilogy, set two hundred years on. There’s a whole slew of ideas already in note form. All I have to do is finish ‘Darkness’ on schedule and move on.
Am currently polishing off a 20,000 word novella I’m calling ‘The Odd Machine’. It’s a first person narrative about a suburban man who loses his wife, is unfairly branded a paedophile, and how he struggles to keep his children as a family when his wife leaves him for reasons unknown, at least to him.
The Odd Machine refers to his inheritance of a bronze and quartz object once reputed to have been the heart of a ‘Death Ray’, and how it seems to be the catalyst for all his woes.
While the story itself takes the form of a single narrative spread over several years, the issues it addresses are quite current. The context tells of a farming family broken by bureaucracy. How a new generation has reinvented itself and faces, amongst others, the challenge of false arrest and public libel. While the subtext asks the question; “Who do we belong to?”
The cover art for the Kindle edition is already uploaded to Amazon, and the Novella itself will form the core of a collection of shorter fiction, to be published in hard copy format sometime in 2012. Have rewritten ‘Polish Ted’ as ‘Cold Warrior’ which will form part of the same collection, along with a bunch of other supernatural stories. Providing of course I can make time to finish the third volume of my Science Fiction ‘Stars’ trilogy, which is due in September 2012. Only 120,000 words and the collapse of interstellar civilisation to go. Then I’ve got the follow-on trilogy or possible series to write. As for the Cerberus series, well, there are a lot of episodes, but no coherent plot or story arc. That needs to be addressed.
I did consider Smashwords as a means of getting my shorter eBooks to market, but having to wait for the US IRS to give me an exemption number seemed a little too involved. I’ve only ever visited the USA once, so why on Gods green Earth do I need to get an IRS exemption? I pay my taxes here in Canada for goodness sake. So Smashwords will have to remain a closed market. At least as far as I’m concerned.
Martyn K Jones 