Post #128 June 25 2018

“Developing Time Jumpers”

As summer begins, I am in between books in my Farpool series and developing outlines for multiple episodes in my next series Time Jumpers, which debuts early next year.  Book number four in the Farpool Stories, entitled The Farpool: Convergence will be available at the end of June.  Book number five, The Farpool: Union, will be available by the end of 2018.

Which leads me to Time Jumpers.  Previously in The Word Shed, I have described this series this way:

1. Time Jumpers is a series of 15,000-20,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Jump Captain Monthan Dringoth and his experiences as a time jumper with the Time Guard.
2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.
3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.
4. There will be 12 episodes.  The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.
5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc. 
6. The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.  
7. Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com on a schedule still to be determined.
    
   Episode #        Title                                                    

1.             ‘Marooned in Voidtime’                                
2.             ‘Keaton’s World’
3.             ‘A Small Navigation Error’
4.             ‘Sturdivant Eleven’
5.             ‘The Time Guard’
6.             ‘First Light Corridor
7.             ‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’
8.             ‘Operation Galactic Hammer’
9.             ‘Byrd’s Draconis’
10.             ‘First Jump Squaadron’
11.             ‘The Planck Time’
12.             ‘The Time Twister’
     
    Currently, I am developing outlines for each episode.  I’m also developing background for the entire series.  Today, I want to lift the curtain a little and give you a peek at some of this background.  Time Jumpers has no upload schedule yet, but you can anticipate that Episode 1 will be available for download sometime in the first quarter of 2019.
     
    The first matter to deal with, since we are talking about traveling through time and engaging enemies who can do the same, is to describe what this feels and looks like.  Below, is a short description about how Time Jumpers do this.

Navigating Time Streams

There are two analogies for traveling through time streams aboard at Time Guard jumpship. 

One analogy is that time is a great, infinitely wide river.  A river wide enough has many currents, eddies, substreams and hazards embedded in it, like rocks, hydraulics, rapids, sandbars and shoals.  So does time.  Traveling through time embedded in a time stream aboard a jumpship is analogous to whitewater rafting on a rapidly flowing, twisting and turning water course.  Cross-currents are tricky.  There are eddies.  Undertows.  Flat water and white water. All kinds of hazards.

Traveling through time involves navigating similar flows.  In the age of Time Jumpers, jumpships can create their own wormholes with an onboard singularity core. 

Once in a primary time stream, propulsion and steering are maintained by a propulsor, while the singularity core uses its twist fields to keep the ship in the main stream.  Additional control surfaces are also used, much like a boat or a submarine.  There are flow vanes (flowvaters) and diving planes to shift the ship’s course into another time stream.  Much of the moment-to-moment control of the jumpship is handled automatically although the pilots can exercise control via a fly-by-wire system if they choose. 

Another analogy for time travel is the electromagnetic spectrum itself, which pervades the Universe.  The analogy here is less effective, although with EM frequencies and waves, there are some similarities to navigating in a time stream. 

Suffice it to say that navigating time is unlike any trip ever taken by humans before.

The primary time stream for humans is called T-001.  This time stream is considered the normal unchanged course of events that unfurls moment by moment everyday in our lives.  Additional time streams are for most purposes infinite and only the precision of our navigation and steering allows us to enter subsidiary time streams with any degree of control.  As navigation and steering become ever more precise, jumpships can ‘parse’ off ever-finer slices of time and travel those courses as well. 

Local time streams (time streams near in time and space to T-001) are numbered T-002, T-003, and so forth.  The higher the number, the greater the temporal distance from T-001.  As of the 29^th century and the time period of Time Jumpers, the Time Guard has ships and techniques which allow humans to travel into and out of time streams numbering upwards of T-8500 and below.  Time streams can take jumpships forward or backward in time, depending on how the time stream is navigated.  The mother stream (T-001) is agnostic as to the direction.  Time seemed for generations to have a directionality, but we now know that this was an artifact of our limited knowledge.  Time and space are the Universe and although all evidence points to an expanding Universe, expanding in all directions from a primordial Big Bang, the mother time stream T-001 is navigable in any direction, backward and forward.

Physics tells us that mass affects the flow of time. Because of this, Time Guard jumpships have to navigate around large masses to stay in the primary time stream, or accept that their transit speed and time will vary according to how close they pass near to large masses, like stars, black holes, etc.  Often navigation charts and courses are plotted to steer clear of known mass concentrations, just as a kayaker in whitewater would steer clear of hydraulics or rocks in a stream.  Other routes are plotted to take advantage of known time stream effects and make quicker runs to common destinations. 

Time Guard has an operational practice of navigating to and through certain well-traveled time streams for the sake of efficiency, speed and safety.  The critical time streams are listed below:

T-001 – the mother time stream

T-009 -  a shortcut path to a time when the first human settlements were established on Keaton’s World, home of the Uman Alliance

T-087 – shortcut time stream to the days of the founding assembly that established the Uman Alliance.  Easily reached from T-009 via a voidtime corridor.

T-455 – best time stream path to temporal anomaly and wormhole known as Newton’s Jaw.  The Jaw is a confluence of wormholes, generated originally by a local black hole (now artificially maintained by Time Guard) that permit efficient and speedy travel to more distant time streams, such as T-7668 (also known as First Light, a time when the Universe was young, just after the Big Bang and photons became possible amidst the hydrogen soup and quark-gluon plasma that was the early Universe).  Also known as the Great Decoupling or the Dark Age.

T-9998 – a special time stream that has never been successfully traversed.  This stream takes a traveler (it is theorized) to the earliest formative time of the Universe, a time known as the Planck Epoch and later, the time of Superinflation.  Time Guard protects this time stream with special security forces and the Uman Alliance has passed strict regulations and laws forbidding unauthorized entry and transit into and through this time stream.  As would happen later with T-001 in the time of the Coethi conflict, T-9998 is effectively quarantined from use by Time Guard.  Research probes occasionally are sent in but none have ever returned data, signals or ever been recovered.  Like ancient seafarers’ maps, this is the region of “Here Be Demons.” 

It is possible to enter the mother time stream and not travel into any other time stream, but rather simply stay caught up in the flow of T-001.

In the late 28^th century, a new temporal phenomenon was discovered called voidtime.  Certain extreme singularity core conditions allow a jumpship to enter T-001 and yet flow as if it were literally “outside of time”.  Voidtime is a place where time does not flow, nothing ages or deteriorates, a sort of featureless ether that is nonetheless traversable using pulsing features of a jumpship’s singularity core.  Some physicists have theorized that voidtime is like a black hole turned inside out, a place and time where normal laws don’t apply.  In historical terms, voidtime could be considered to be like an ancient sailing ship becalmed in the doldrums, unable to go anywhere, but able only to drift with the prevailing currents.  Now, with singularity pulsing as a technique, it is possible to traverse voidtime, though speeds and navigation accuracy are less than occur in a normal time stream. 

There are sound tactical reasons for Time Guard to explore and try to utilize voidtime, for a ship in this medium is effectively outside of time and undetectable.  Time Guard continues to explore and chart voidtime as a way of gaining military advantages over enemies such as the Coethi, who also have perfected temporal travel as a technology.

 

Okay, so that’s a little peek behind the curtains.  I’ll provide more as the year progresses and we get closer to the beginning of Time Jumpers as a series, just as a way of whetting your appetite, to learn more about what I believe will be a very intriguing series.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 2, 2018.  In this post, I'll talk about the upside and downside of outlining before you start a story.

 

See you then.

 

Phil B.

 

 

Post #127  June 18, 2018

“How Many Pages Should I Write Today?”

Every writer faces the same question when he or she sits down at the computer in the morning: how many pages, how many words, should I write today?

This is basically a matter of scheduling.  For writers of novels and non-fiction books, it goes without saying that there’s no way you can do the entire work in a day or a week, probably not even in a month. You have to divide it up into chunks, mainly because you’ve got other things to do with your life along with writing. 

Case in point:  I'll soon be working on a science fiction novel called The Farpool: Union.  I anticipate that when the initial draft is done, it will come in at somewhere around 250 pages, when formatted for Smashwords.com.  Each page runs on average about 500 words, so we’re talking about 125,000 words in total.  Now, how to divide that up....

I’ll be doing 5 pages a day.  That doesn’t sound like much. But it leaves me with time for other tasks and projects.  Writing 5 pages a day takes me about 2+ hours, depending.  But it’s 25 pages a week.  Divide 250 pages by 25 pages and you get 10 weeks, about two and a half months.  At the rate I have chosen, I can do a draft of The Farpool: Union in three months.  Plus I can work on other things and have a life.

Could I write more?  Of course I could.  But you should choose a rate that is comfortable and sustainable over a long period, since it’s unlikely you can finish a novel-length project in a few weeks.  There are some writers who bat out a draft in a single marathon session of a month but I’m not one of them.  I take longer and take my time and try to do the thing right from the beginning. 

One the most important aspects of this writing process for me, when engaged in a lengthy work, is “staying in the story”, mentally.  I find that a daily regimen like I described above is a great way to do that.  Even away from my desk, I find my feverish brain cogitating on the next scene, the next sentence.  Sometimes ideas for snatches of dialogue or plot variations will come to me when I’m working out, mowing the lawn, eating dinner, watching TV.  I want that. 

Every writer approaches this differently. 

I’m also a detailed outliner and planner, when it comes to writing a novel, or writing anything.  I’ve covered some of this in earlier blog posts, but I work from the beginning to build a fairly detailed outline, with character sketches and setting and background details readily at hand for the actual writing.  Sometimes my outlines and sketches are detailed enough to be lifted and pasted into the novel text as is, or with little change.  That makes life easier, as long as it advances the story.  The story is everything.  I’m even planning on including an Appendix of some of this material at the end of The Farpool: Union, for readers who just can’t get enough detail on my imaginary world and its people.

That’s a little peek behind the curtains at the logistics or the mechanics of daily writing life.  I plan to do more of this sort of thing again. 

My next post, on June 25, will cover more details about my upcoming series Time Jumpers, which debuts at Smashwords in early 2019.

See you next week.

Phil B

 

Post #126 June 11, 2018

“You Can and Should Judge a Book by its Cover.”

Last year, I upgraded my series Tales of the Quantum Corps with all new covers.  Smashwords (my ebook distributor) recommends doing this on a regular basis as a way to pump up your downloads.  To date, I’ve seen some spikes, not huge, but there has been some increased activity in downloads since I started uploading new covers.

There is an old saying: don’t judge a book by its cover.  Baloney.  We all judge books by their covers.  We have to and we should.  A good book cover captures not only the reader’s attention and interest, but when done well, captures the essence of the story itself.  A really good cover pops and can’t be ignored.  How readers respond to covers varies with each reader but there are some good practices that should be followed in designing a book cover.

Before I get into these practices, I’ll show you how the cover of one of my books has evolved.  The book is Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor, book one in my series Tales of the Quantum Corps.  Here’s the original cover…

    

It’s got the basics: the title and my name.  The image is some kind of virus particle…on a black background.  Looks ominous, befitting the story in many ways.  I liked it because it’s simple, it was easy to create, and it sort of implies something we don’t see all the time…a virus particle magnified a few hundred thousand times.  The story involves a nanoscale robot called ANAD, which is able to function at the same size scale as a virus…in fact, in the book I imply that ANAD is derived from and functions as a programmable virus.  So the image fits the story.

I recently upgraded the cover to the following…

The new cover is richer visually, more stimulating.  We’re still at the level of atoms and molecules (remember the story hasn’t changed) but now it looks like some kind of vortex or whirlpool has trapped all the atoms.  There’s still the title and author’s name, but now I’ve added the fact that it’s part of the Tales of the Quantum Corps, implying the existence of other stories. 

Only time will tell if the new cover stimulates even more downloads.  Or whether it’s really an improvement at all.  With that, let’s look at some good practices in book (especially ebook) cover design.

Digital Publishing 101 has a web site that offers some well-thought out tips and techniques for cover design.  In particular, the authors speak of 3 critical elements of book covers:

Background

Image

Type

 

Background:

Your cover should have a background color, texture or image rather than being plain white. Plain colors can be a bit dull so consider using a graduated color background or a background image. A good quality image will add a professional look provided it doesn’t conflict with other elements and provides strong contrast for the typographical elements.

 

Image:

Some book covers can work well without an image if the other elements work together. But a strong image can lift your cover design, give it a focus and convey something important about the book’s subject or style. As with background images, make sure this image is of high quality and consider using a stock photo library if you don’t have anything suitable. The image must work with both the background and, importantly, the type. If you need to use an amateur image, you can often improve it with smart cropping or special effects such as fading but don’t overdo these: Like the use of too many fancy fonts, it can end up looking, well, amateurish.

 

Type:

Typography is a real art and sets the best book designers apart from the rest. On covers, effective typography is perhaps the single biggest success factor. It must suit the book’s genre and, most importantly, be clear and readable at the smallest scale.

The top half of the cover is prime real estate so, as a general rule, use it for your main type area. You’re unlikely to be able to fit in much more than the title and author, with perhaps a short subtitle or series cover line visible in the larger images. Non-fiction titles might be better to drop the author to free up space for a subtitle unless the author is well-known.

Covers are the one place you can forget about working with the narrow range of e-reader- and web-friendly type styles because the cover type will only appear in an image. The sorts of fonts that work for covers are quite different from the fonts that work best for body type. For instance, readable body type is fairly open while strong headline types are tighter with less white space and, often, more height. You should only use one or two fonts on a cover and they need good size and contrast against the background and images.

There are lots of great sites for fonts on the internet. One which specializes in good quality free fonts is Font Squirrel (www.fontsquirrel.com).

 

Spend some time on your book covers.  Or engage the services of a professional.  Smashwords highly recommends using the services of a pro.  I’ve elected to do my own covers for the main reason that I know the story better than anyone.  But probably, I’d benefit from a professional approach as well.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 18. 

 

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #125 June 4, 2018

 

“Here Comes Convergence!”

 

Some time around the end of June, I’ll be uploading the newest episode in The Farpool Stories.  It’s called The Farpool: Convergence.  To get everybody ready for what’s coming, below is another excerpt from the story….

 

Chapter 2

 

Trieste Operations and Mission Control

Gateway Station

Earth-Moon L2 Point

September 4, 2120

0350 hours EUT

 

On Europa, there is only ice…to the naked eye.  Ice cliffs and ice valleys.  Ice ravines and ice canyons.  Ice bergs, buttes, badlands.  Ice continents.  Above the ice is the vacuum of space.  Below the ice is a vast ocean, black as night.  Normally, the two don’t mix.

In the late summer of 2120, as people on Earth reckon time, a small channel of sluggish, slightly warmer ice surged upward through the badlands of Conamara Chaos, embedded in a column known to geologists as a diapir, and burst through the surface crust.  A geyser erupted into space, not in itself an unusual occurrence on Europa.  However, this geyser extended over several square kilometers, flinging tons of ice and steam into the heavens. 

This geyser caught the attention of observers on Earth and at Korolev Crater’s Farside Observatory, on the Moon. 

After the Jovian Hammer mission some years before, an orbiting detection network had been put into place around Europa.  Known as Europa-Eye, it was designed to provide intelligence on the ceaseless heaving and churning of the Europan ice surface.  The network contained numerous instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers. 

Not long after Europa Eye had been put in place, a new visitor came to the badlands of this mysterious moon of Jupiter, a small robotic explorer called Trieste.  The little ship landed and immediately began boring through the ice, eventually carving out a narrow tunnel though which it could descend into the black ocean below.  Five days after it had set down among the ice mountains of Conamara Chaos, the ship came to the bottom of the kilometers-thick ice layer and scooted off to explore the ocean.

On the first day of September, Europa-Eye detected evidence of some kind of vast movement under the ice.  Increased thermals, spikes in electromagnetic activity, even acoustic signals well above baseline were detected and processed through SpaceGuard Center at Farside. 

There was no consensus on what the signals meant, just a growing suspicion that something seemed to be stirring beneath the ice.  Analysts at SpaceGuard Center, vidconferencing with their colleagues at the UNISPACE Watch Command Center in Paris, concurred that something was happening on the surface of Europa, something different, something unexpected. 

Visual analysis from Europa-Eye was inconclusive.  Trieste was directed to proceed cautiously toward the source of the disturbance. But it was plain to see from the imagery streaming back from Jupiter’s huge satellite, that a newly formed geyser had just erupted on the surface.  After some discussion, UNISPACE analysts finally decided to log the event as an icequake, a shifting of ice plates and ice continents, that had opened up a channel to pressurized water beneath.  That water, rising through the newly formed channel from the Europan ocean, was now sublimating into space, in a series of spectacular geysers.  The phenomenon seemed to be mainly centered along a series of ice grooves, known as linea, starting in the Conamara Chaos and ending at the southern end of Radamanthys Linea, longitude 192 degrees, latitude 12 degrees north.

Or so they thought.  The report issued to CINCSPACE made the conclusion that the geyser field was nothing more than an unusual series of ice plates shifting about, despite growing evidence of massive movements in the ocean below.  Europa-Eye would continue to observe and record the event, providing thesis material for astronomers and geologists and glaciologists for years to come.  Farside and UNISPACE would continue to monitor the activity that had roiled the surface of Europa.  Trieste would give them answers once she came within instrument range of the disturbance. 

But the report was firm in its principal conclusion:  natural forces were responsible for a series of new ice geysers erupting on the surface of Europa.  It was more violent and spectacular than before, but nothing the investigators hadn’t seen before on countless other worlds, even on Europa itself.

What Europa-Eye could not see, however, was what was actually embedded in the main geyser, hidden from view, obscured by the violence of tons of ice sublimating into space every second.   A massive swarm of nanoscale robotic devices, most no larger than a few atoms, was no longer submerged in Europa’s ocean of night.  Instead, the swarm had bored through more than thirty kilometers of ice and arisen to the surface of the satellite.  Now residing in a steep ice ravine, surrounded by towering ice cliffs, hidden by geysering spouts of water, the vast swarm boiled away like a festering sore, slamming atoms to maintain itself and expand in the maelstrom of erupting ice and water.

As it settled onto the icy surface, the swarm had begun to bud off trillions of replicant bots from its main structure.  The swarm was shedding parts of itself.

These bots sloughed off and drifted upward, some riding on droplets of water, particles of ice sublimating into the vacuum.  Most of the bots managed to achieve escape velocity through infinitesimal nano-scale thrusters, using the available water as propellant.  Orienting themselves toward the Sun, the swelling swarm of nanobots soon entered a steep, elliptical heliocentric orbit, an orbit which would intersect the orbit of Earth in less than six months.

Disguised by the geysers, the swarm escaped Europa and the Jupiter system completely.  It now drifted sunward…and Earthward.

 

Mission controllers Leo Benford and Marcie Jameson were on duty at Trieste Mission Control when the signal came in from the little robotic explorer cruising in the sub-ice ocean of Europa that something odd had been detected on sonar.  It seemed to be a large formation of nanobotic elements, floating several hundred meters below the ice and below a region called Rhadamanthus Linea.  Acoustic signals, electromagnetic signals, everything pointed to bots, uncountable trillions of bots, slamming atoms like a frantic brick mason, dead ahead of the little submersible.  Trieste was commanded to investigate and the nature of this phenomena soon became apparent: something intelligent had left this swarm there and further investigation now seemed critical.

Jameson blinked hard at her displays.  “What the hell--?”  Her fingers played over the keys on her console, bringing up more windows, more displays, more data. 

“What is it?” asked Benford, studying radar imagery of the Europan surface from Europa-Eye. 

“Something just happened to the Trieste feed.  One moment I’m getting telemetry on all systems, radar, radio, infrared, everything.  Then…zip.  Nothing.  Nada.”

“Comm failure?  Have you got a carrier…any signal at all?”

“Zilch.  Trieste has gone quiet.”

The idea that the little submersible might have gone belly up on their watch at Ops gave rise to a sour taste in Benford’s mouth.  “Run all diagnostics.  And make sure everything is backed up.  I don’t want anybody saying we screwed up.”

“The last data we had was what we’ve had for several hours—that amorphous blob that was putting out thermals and EMs like there’s no tomorrow.”

Benford rubbed two-day old stubble and loosened his restraining belt a little more.  He swore silently; already the belt was too tight as it was and he was on the last notch.  Too many pancakes, he muttered.  Zero-g was all fine and good as long as you didn’t have to button your pants.  “Bot swarm…is that still your theory?”

Jameson shrugged, shoved back a few auburn bangs from her eyes.  “Signatures match…pretty well.  Maybe it could be argued.  Maybe it’s some kind of instrument glitch…wouldn’t be the first time.”

Benford would have scratched his hair, if he had any.  “Before we go to UNISPACE with this, I want to make sure CAESAR’s covered every angle.  I don’t want some supervisor at Farside or Paris taking a big chunk of my ass over hare-brained notions of alien bugs under the ice at Europa.  What about Europa-Eye?”

“Still chirping on all bands.  She just went through Level 1 diagnostics two days ago.  Everything looks good but I’ll pull up the spectra, see what kind of matches we get.”  The astronomer massaged her keyboard, calling up spectrographic profiles on every blip the satellite had seen the last month.  “Eye’s showing the same anomaly…  Europa’s been quiet for months…SpaceGuard’s not showing anything.  Now, all of a sudden, BLAM!  Energy spikes all over the place.  We should have seen something before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, radar spikes, something.  But nothing until this.”

Benford mulled that over.  “Two sources of data, each showing the same thing.  They can’t ignore that.  Are you recording everything?”

“Every last bit…backed up per usual.  It’s all on disk, Leo.”

Benford finally released himself from his belt and drifted off, letting faint air currents sweep him around the Ops compartment to a nearby window.  Outside, the crescent moon hung like a sliver of a dish from the mess hall, with a blue green sliver of Earth on the opposite side of the porthole.  All the cylinders, trusses, girders and modules of Gateway Station loomed below the window edge in the foreground.  Something moving caught his eye: it was only Cavanaugh outside, fixing something on the ‘front porch’, nadir side of the Hab module.

Benford realized looking at his reflection in the optical glass just how haggard he looked.  Too many extra shifts, trying to cover for others.  He was starting to look like a street bum.  “Okay, what else have we got for explanations besides alien bots?”

Jameson twisted around in her seat, watched Benford watching himself in the window.  “The traditional answer is icequakes.  Then there’s tidal flexing from Jupiter.  Some kind of weird ice breakup over the Chaos, little ice cubes tinkling down into the depths.  Meteor strike, though Europa Eye should have seen that kind of impact.”

“None of these theories match the signatures as well as alien bots?”

“Sorry.  Data is data.”

Benford shrugged.  “Doesn’t mean a thing, Marcie.  You did the normal correlations, didn’t you?”

“Several times.  The results came up the same every time.”

 “It’s statistically insignificant.  Run Statcheck…you’ll see what I mean.”

 Jameson hesitated before running the statistical routine.  “You really want to do this, Leo?  What if Statcheck shows significance?  How do we explain that?”

Benford ran a hand through his thinning hair.  “We’ll make the numbers work out.  This data’s got to be bunk…you know it and I know it.  What do you want me to do: put out an alert: ‘Hey, guys, the Old Ones have arrived at Europa and the buggers are eating up the whole planet.’  I don’t think so.  I value my career too much.  No, let’s get all the data we can and set up a vidcon.  There’s some kind of weird anomaly going on up there, one with a perfectly reasonable explanation.  We just have to find it.”

Marcie Jamison started saving all of SpaceGuard’s data to a file called Europa Anomaly.

Leo Benford returned to his seat, buckled in and started composing an alertgram to UNISPACE’s Watch Center.

Maybe I’ll poke another notch in this belt, just to be safe, for when the real crap starts flying around here.

 

That’s the excerpt.  I hope that this intrigues everybody enough to download The Farpool: Convergence and check it out.  Look for it at the end of June 2018.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 11.

See you then.

 

Phil B.