Tag Archives: Projects

Stars Trilogy

Formatting and metadata


Getting an eBook ready, especially sorting out the ‘metadata’ isn’t easy if you don’t want to end up tearing your hair out. I’ve just spent all my ‘free’ or writing time for the last two weeks proofing, editing and ensuring the chapter headers and all that shizzle are in apple pie order. Reminder to self; buy more Tylenol. I’ve mercilessly hunted down the last errant apostrophe, ruthlessly swatted the last inadvertent spelling error, jumped up and down on the non-deliberate grammatical errors, and corrected the chapter headings. When you’ve been working on a hundred and fifty six thousand words, it’s easy to make mistakes. Three times this morning I’ve gone back over a hundred and forty heading entries to find stupid dingbatted errors, and I’m allowing myself two days pause before I run the spell checker twice more, and re-read the MSS specifically looking for those dumb ‘a, the’ errors I’m prone to after cut ‘n paste rewording of a passage that feels clumsy and clunky.

Target price is CAD$4.99. Which is pretty cheap, considering all the time and effort that’s gone into it. I think there’s an option for serious discounts for the first two weeks as well, which will be nice for some. Depending on their taste in Sci-fi.

The metadata is fine. The author and title names all match throughout the manuscript, and I’m sticking with some old cover art that I really don’t want to change. Especially as I’ve moved computers twice and lost track of the specific cover art font. There is a follow on already written (155,000 words at last edit), and I just need to get that ready before skipping over to see friends and family back in England, Ireland and the Netherlands. I’ll have my laptop with me, so will be logging onto the nearest free WiFi point every so often to check on the distribution. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the iBookstore shouldn’t be an issue, and I’ll be confirming availability via the Kobo marketplace. which should be relatively easy now that we have a little Kobo Glo.

End result is a tale in a style of Robert Heinlein meets Tom Clancy (I think). The characters love, hate, laugh and cry, get alienated, reconciled, killed and wounded and all that jazz. What’s truly amazing is the fact that I still actually like the story, even after all the prolonged birthing pains of repeated rewrite, edit and format.

What if

What philosophical questions do you answer when you write?


Angie is reading Thoreau’s novel ‘Walden‘ at the moment, and we’ve taken to discussing pertinent passages over breakfast and during work breaks. Although a lot of Thoreau’s sentences and paragraphs always leave me feeling like I need to take a damn good run up before launching into them. He packs a lot of idea into his words. That said, I tend to take such works with a very large proverbial pinch of salt. I’ve done the whole close to nature thing, and have come to appreciate the comfort and convenience technology affords.

Nevertheless; today’s thought train was kicked off by one such reading, and came laden with the question, what are stories for? Why do we write and tell them? Are they simply for entertainment, or can they serve a deeper, more significant purpose? Does addressing a hypothetical question give a story a more rewarding depth?

For my part, I write science fiction to examine ideas and premises like; say you genetically engineer a ‘perfect’ alpha male, where would he find his role in life? What destiny could he carve out, and how would it affect his relationships? Or perhaps; almost fatally injured in a terrorist incident, one of my not-so-heroes has part of his brain rebuilt using a new variant of stem cell technology. Where does he fit in? How does being able to read people’s thoughts alter your relationships with one time friends and family? Or, what if immortality was a near symptomless disease? What are the larger implications? What good is luxury if you lose your freedom? All of these questions are woven into the underlying themes of my current projects. Like I’ve said before, it’s interesting and even fun to get down and dirty with these concepts and wrestle some sense out of them. I think that’s why a lot of people who write fiction do so. Because the ‘Big what if’ game of writing fiction is so absorbing.

Stars Trilogy

Picking up the baton #WritersBlock


Three major projects on the go at present. Have picked up the MSS of ‘Darkness between the stars’ yet again. Just over 52,000 words when I last ground to a halt. There’s a missing coupling in the narrative train and up until yesterday I didn’t seem to be able to hitch it up properly without the connection looking overly contrived, or asking any reader to make massive intuitive leaps.

The problem is, in order to fit my self imposed timeline, a civilisation has to stop interstellar travel within a very short period, and I’m having trouble logically mapping this process out. The dots have to join up or the narrative doesn’t work. Four storylines have to run and converge to a single precise point fror the story to make sense. There’s something missing. A metaphorical link in my coupling, a critical pin in the linkage. Like any technician, I work on the premise that if I can work out what it does, and how it does it, I can create it. Simple.

In the meantime, pass the Tylenol.

What if

Playing with immortality


In between shifts and running errands, and delving into the darker aspects of book and eBook distribution, I’m currently playing the ‘what if’ game with a story concept. It’s just a short at the moment and I’m only a couple of thousand words in. Set in my ‘Association worlds’ timeline some three hundred years after Earth has abandoned her one time colonies. It may even sprout a timeline branch of its own. Depends on what I do with the characters. It could go one of three routes to the final line, but I know exactly how I want the story to end.

Now I’ve been working on this story on and off for a couple of months, and every time I pick up the file end up hurdling cliché’s like some literary obstacle course. The ‘what if’ for today Mr Phelps, is what if someone discovered how to switch off all the mechanisms which cause cell mutation and ageing? What if they discovered a self perpetuating delivery system for this vector? What if they were bright enough to A) Develop the mechanism, and B) Foresee the possible consequences?

Without giving anything further away, a lot of science fiction authors have been here before, but I genuinely feel I’ve developed a new twist on the theme. Dark as Belgian chocolate, and almost as rich and bitter sweet.

Cerberus

Work in progress; excerpts posted


In the Cerberus Conspiracy pages, I’ve decided to post the first two chapters from my work in progress ‘A falling of Angels’. I’m fairly happy with the chapters as they stand and the word pictures they paint. Paul Calvin, Ben Wallace, Fat Mary and Jed Carter feel right as characters living in a crumbling society, riding the razors edge between anarchy and stability. Link is here.

As matters stand I’m still only about a third of the way through the story, with a lot of ground to cover. Gang wars, the role of a shadowy corporate in societal breakdown, more on the Freemen, blackmail, and pleasure seekers made into techno zombies. Plenty of juicy filling and not too much in the way of bread for padding. So far so good. Well, I like it even if no one else does.

I’ve also added the first chapter from the ‘Shifting States’ MSS on a sub page of the Cerberus Conspiracy tab, which has been work in progress for just under ten years.

Cerberus

Progress happens in the oddest places #WritersBlock


Day off from the day job yesterday, and for a change took my laptop with me on our tour around town to the Museum, Angie’s Pilates class and the best coffee shop in town. Putting the earbuds in and playing some of my favourite tunes meant I could pound the keypad to my hearts content undisturbed, managing to almost crack the 2000 word mark in the latest Cerberus story “A falling of Angels”.

The current storyline has my mind reading hero hunting down a child molester in the middle of a massive refugee camp on the site of Bristols old Avonmouth docks. He is also looking for a lead to a cold blooded murder and the source of a menace which could bring mayhem to the streets. It’s coming along nicely.

One of the themes I constantly find myself returning to within the Cerberus series is exploring the nature of human consciousness, and putting forward the postulation that our minds have a Quantum level effect upon our surroundings. Not physically, but at the level of phantasms, shadows on the background of space / time. Back in 1972 there was an early TV play written by Nigel Neale called ‘The Stone tape‘ which was generated on the premise of strong emotional events imprinting themselves upon physical objects, like stone. My take on the theme is this; in the process of existence we imprint our minds / memories / desires upon the very fabric of the universe, which is where my notion of the supernatural comes from. Strong baseline emotional events, fear, love etc leave the longest lasting impressions, like the victims of nuclear explosions leaving shadows on walls and ground. Even certain strong personality types leave a mark. Some are merely images, others like GIFs, some like computer games. All depend upon how driven the individual was who left the marks.

Is this concept true or false? Some say that because stories of the psychic world are purely subjective, the answer has to be a firm and unequivocal no. For myself I have no idea, but that doesn’t stop me exploring the concepts and mud wrestling with them. If nothing else it’s provided me with much good material.

Cerberus

Writing well, but very slowly #WritersBlock


Work proceeds on the next of the Cerberus series of stories; ‘A Falling of Angels’. It’s also going very slowly. The story is at an interesting point; in the middle of a refugee camp down at the old Avonmouth docks in Bristol, England. I’ve successfully introduced the ‘Freemen’, a cult of surprisingly orderly anarchist-like monk characters very loosely based on the ‘Freemen on the land’ ideology. As far as the story goes, they work beautifully. Quality is high. The trouble is, writing is such an effort at the moment. Finding the time to relax into the tale is proving difficult.

Paid work is currently more full than part time. Angie, having taken over my office, is now sitting in front of me in the kitchen working leaving me no place to settle and buckle down to some good old fashioned keyboard pounding. The baking is therapeutic, but when you’re deep in the throes of narrative, the last thing you want is someone (no matter how much you love them) asking questions about what your tax position is, or a hundred different non writing related queries.

Writing is nothing unless it can be done, and if it is not being done then all the mental effort behind it gets wasted. I need to concentrate in order to work, but I’m finding it difficult to do so,and I don’t want to make an issue of my objections and thus provoke domestic discord. Which would bring all writing activity to a dead stop for months.

What is a man to do? No wonder it drives so many to drink.

Language

Ten steps to a more businesslike approach to writing #WritersBlock


Have been thinking about this a lot recently, and have come up with a simple ten step businesslike approach to writing;

1. Plan the narrative, set and use timelines
2. Write to the plan unless there’s a bloody sound reason
3. Set a schedule, hours, dates, times, which are given solely to producing ‘product’
4. Set hours, dates, times for getting the message ‘out there’
5. Set up a web linking strategy. Follow it.
6. Create useful resources for readers
7. Create interesting forums with anti-troll and spam defences. Be ruthless.
8. Stick with what you’re writing, don’t get distracted.
9. Don’t listen to too much advice
10. Proof read, spell check daily.

This is more for myself than for anyone else, as I tend to let myself get distracted and do anything but get on with it because I get stuck. I intend to set myself a target of 10,000 words per week minimum, with a set maximum of 3,000 words per day. If I’m going to try and make a success of something, the least I can do is do it in a disciplined, focused manner.

Cerberus

Old text in new stories #WritersBlock


I’ve been digging through all the odd ideas I’ve jotted down for the Cerberus volume ‘A falling of Angels’ and rediscovered this fragment, ostensibly written on an ageing ThinkPad 600E in 2009. At least that’s what the file creation date originally told me. With the feeling it began life even earlier, I took a deeper look at the content creation details in file properties which gave me an even earlier date. 2006. Good grief.

“You want?” The piercing punctuated pusher was high on her own merchandise, pinpoint pupils and twitchy as a cat on fire.
“Yeah! You got?” In the noise of the crowded bar they both had to shout to hear each other. By gestures she got him to follow her out into the cooler night. He started to sweat as the cool air hit his skin under his leather coat and stab resistant shirt. She beckoned him into a doorways shadow, away from the watchful eyes of CCTV.
“Switch.” He tried to act cool. How was this supposed to go?
“Oo, gonna cost yo’ baby. Cool nineyfivehunnerd.” Her tone was mocking. All of fifteen years of age. He felt suddenly very old.
“What do I get?”
“Y’all see when yo’ git it.” A flash of an urchin grin as she stuck out her new model cred tab. “C’mon hunky, gimme.” She eagerly ran a studded tongue over black tinted lips, iridescent violet hair sparkling in reflected streetlight.
“’kay.” A blue spark of laser light flickered and the deal was done.


It has rhythm, cadence, tension, and although it’s a bit pulp fictionish, the text has a good feel. Now all I have to do is bolt it into the current story structure.

Technology

Old stock and a series of freebies #SelfPublishing


Got talking to a work buddy yesterday afternoon about publicity, Facebook and Twitter. He suggested giving a freebie eBook away as a kind of loss leader. Just to “Get the conversation going” as he put it. As I’m working evening shifts all this week, I’m using my day times revising some of my back catalogue of short stories ready for free release via Smashwords. Smashwords seem to have the widest distribution for various eBook formats, rather taking the pain out of providing separate editions for one group of platforms.

I think a good chunky read can be boilerplated together from a mix of sci-fi and supernatural stuff that doesn’t really fit in with my currently themed body of work. On the other hand, it’s amazing what you find when you start digging on your hard drive. Found a couple of short, thousand word pieces that fit in beautifully with the narrative for ‘A falling of Angels’, the next in the Cerberus series. Another few story fragments that can be hammered into fully fledged, and quite satisfying prose with a minimum of effort. There are a few that rage, a few that weep, and a couple with built in quirky smiles, like ‘Polish Ted’. Many of them set in an England I am all too familiar with. Although a few years ago I did rewrite a version of ‘Polish Ted’ for a US setting under the title ‘Cold Warrior’, and as a story it still worked beautifully. I might even bolt that one in as a ‘contrast and compare’ exercise. Just run the stories one after the other. See what the feedback is like. It’s as easy a way to put a 100,000 word collection together in a relatively short period of time.

Plenty of entertainment. For free. Give me a month or less.

Observations

More thoughts on constructing Timelines #WritersBlock

1 Comment

Have been working on events timelines as a tool to make sure I don’t lose the thread of a story. This helps when constructing multiple character story lines to knit together at or around the denouement. Coupled with research on carbonaceous chondrite, and a few other associated topics made interesting by recent events, this has ground the writing process to an almost complete halt, or should I say hiatus.

The timelines are helping though. They are the anchors of stories and a ready reference for the Cerberus series, and the final volume of the Stars series, which had somewhat lost its narrative thread in the last nine months. Now with the assistance of formalising my timelines, I have a far clearer idea of where individual story threads have to go in order to reach the desired conclusion.

In addition I’ve been trying to get out a little more, in between work – eat – sleep – write, but the only sci-fi meetups seem to be over in Vancouver, which means two lost working days if I decide to go, ferry timetables and public transport being what they are. Living on Vancouver Island is fine, I love the space, but occasionally find it a little isolating.

My last visit to a Vancouver writers event with neighbour Kenn didn’t go anywhere much, as it was more of a ‘literary’ event. Several people I spoke to weren’t much interested in Science Fiction; indeed I seemed to hear a lot of “I don’t like Star Trek.” or “I don’t like Star Wars.” from what I’ll call the ‘anti’ faction of literati. Which seemed to act for them as a blanket dismissal for the genre. Okay, but that’s rather like saying you don’t like Fantasy, but have never read Terry Pratchett, Jim Butcher, or Christopher Stasheff; or because you find the Bronte’s and Jane Austen shirt wettingly dull (“Oh Mr D’Arcy – I am undone”), but never read Defoe, Hardy, or any of the other great 18th & 19th Century novelists. Maybe because someone doesn’t like the idea of ploughing through Plato’s ‘Republic’ they end up ignoring the whole corpus of early Greek literature, never mind entertaining Roman poets / satirists like Juvenal. Which has made me less than enthusiastic about spending time on such events.

On the subject of long distance travel, plans this year are still a little fragmented, but Angie and I are definitely going to visit England and possibly Southern Ireland. There is family to see, discussions to be held, decisions to be made. June looks like the most likely month.

After that, who knows? I have no Timeline for that, although a trip to the Okanagan to pick up some cases of decent wine is definitely in the early planning stages. Canadian wines are definitely worth a look. After much tasting on a trip last year, we found a rather nice non-vintage Pinot Blanc, and found several vineyards producing quite quaffable Gamay and Pinot Noir based reds. This might come as a surprise to the rest of the world, but not all Canada is the ‘Great white north’.

Observations

The importance of constructing timelines #WritersBlock


It’s often been said that the difference between fact and fiction, a line that can get increasingly blurred the more you read various accounts of events, is that fiction has to make sense. It has to have structure, logical consistency, whereas reality so often doesn’t. As I’m building up a body of futuristic work, it’s dawning on me that I need more than my usual conical collation of scribbled notes as a reference. I need a formal timeline to refer to, to ensure that logical sequences are adhered to.

To this end, I’ve been building up a series of linked spreadsheets as a reference database. These contain a series of seminal events for each of the Cerberus and Stars series. The premise being if you know where a story is going to, it makes the writing easier. Forming a reference to go back to for each novel in a series. In effect creating my own fictional galaxy. Mainly as a tool for me to refer to, like the compilation of space combat tactics I’ve been putting together, called the ‘Windsor Doctrine’. It’s only a few pages long at present, and I’ve had no time to do any artwork, but there’s potential there as a companion volume.

As I’ve been turning out ‘product’ over the past ten years or so, it occurs to me that the more modern reader needs much more than just a simple narrative. There is a faction that want detail, the more visual element. Not just the book, but the movie, the Manga comic, Anime, and more western animated series, not to mention action figurines. In the fullness of time, my rough timelines may just become that, forming part of a larger, themed body of work. However, for the moment they will remain a tool to circumvent any writers block.

Cerberus

Head of the Beast proof copy arrived today #SelfPublishing


Took a walk down to the post boxes today and found, joy of joys, that the proof paperback copy of Head of the Beast had arrived. 152 pages. 25 chapters. 70,000 words. In real terms looking terribly small, and feeling very light considering its length. My baby. Fruit of my over active imaginings. Head of the beast proof copy
It’s an odd sensation, holding the results of all that hard work and finding the result so small. Overall? I’m very pleased with the starkness of the look, although I might think about textured or matte covers in future as they don’t get quite so easily marred by every sweaty fingerprint. Perfect? No. Reading through, I can see ‘improvements’ to be made, but that’s just me. There has to be a point at which your baby bird has to leave the nest and try to fly.

I’ll proof it over the next few days and see how I feel about approving the distribution then.

Observations

A reply to popping the Kobo question #SelfPublishing #BookMarketing


While I was Hors de combat recently, those nice people at Kobo sent me an answer to my query regarding Kobo eReaders as a distribution platform for the Cerberus eBook series. The best word for their response has to be ‘comprehensive’. I’m still working my way through the ramifications.

Essentially, since I own all the rights to the work, I can create special editions so long as they are marked with a separate ISBN via Kobo, or whoever’s existing publication platform. This seems to indicate I’ll have to go through Kobo’s own self publishing programme, as I can’t afford the prices they’re asking for commercial ePub conversion and Metadata services. Not sure about Amazon and the Kindle, although this may prove to be a similar situation. Last time I checked, I was led to the conclusion that the Kindle agreement required exclusivity to a given title, although at the moment I’m not sure.

This merits further investigation, and since my brain is only slowly returning to full function, I will be taking my time about it.

On the plus side, I’ve found a local proof reader for a reasonable price.