Post #143 October 29, 2018

“Updates and Upcoming Projects”

I just completed some statistics on my book downloads for mid-October.  Here are the cumulative downloads from Smashwords by category as of October 15, 2018:

Tales of the Quantum Corps: 5403

Farpool Stories: 2241

Quantum Troopers (formerly Nanotroopers): 7526

All else: 1710

Total cumulative downloads for the last 4+ years since I started using Smashwords: 16,880

Net downloads for all titles in 2018: 3919

In recent posts to The Word Shed, I have described some of my upcoming projects.  One which I have detailed extensively is my new series Time Jumpers.  I have now established the upload schedule for all 12 episodes, so here it is:

1. Time Jumpers is a series of 20,000-30,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of the jumpship Cygnus and its crew and their experiences as time jumpers with the Time Guard.
2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 25,000 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 approximately the schedule below:
    
   Episode #        Title                                                                 Approximate Upload Date

1.             ‘Marooned in Voidtime’                                 February 1, 2019        
2.             ‘Keaton’s World’                                            March 1, 2019
3.             ‘A Small Navigation Error’                             April 15, 2019
4.             ‘Cygnus Rift’                                                  May 3, 2019
5.             ‘The Time Guard’                                           May 31, 2019
6.             ‘First Light Corridor                                       June 28, 2019
7.             ‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’     August 2, 2019
8.             ‘Operation Galactic Hammer’                        August 30, 2019
9.             ‘Byrd’s Draconis’                                           September 27, 2019               
10.             ‘First Jump Squadron’                                    November 1, 2019
11.             ‘Planck Time’                                                  November 29, 2019
12.             ‘The Time Twister’                                          January 3, 2020
     
     
    Beyond the late fall of 2019, my next anticipated novel-length project is a science fiction work entitled Monument.  It’s an outgrowth and expansion of a previously published novella entitled ‘Designs,’ published several years ago in my short works collection Colliding Galaxies (available from Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers).  Monument is about an architect of the distant future and his attempts to build a lasting legacy with his greatest work.  Architects here on Earth build buildings.  The main character is Monument is an architect who builds worlds.  His name is Phillipe Dugay.
     
    Let me introduce him to you with a short excerpt from ‘Designs’….

 

He brought the palomino to a skidding halt on the stone of the Mansion’s courtyard and left it in the hands of a faceless cybermate.  The gallop across the plains of his estate had left him exhilarated and breathless.  Philippe  Dugay enjoyed the classes he taught at the Institute (my Institute, he told himself—they come from all over the System) and sometimes wondered how things would have turned out had he taken such training.  Pointless fantasy; his glory days were behind him and he knew it. 

Dugay wandered inside, through the rotunda of the house.  He’d modeled it on a Florentine palazzo, with apologies to Brunelleschi.  A marvelous copy, too, but he’d come to despise it.  He despised a lot these days; ten years’ time had dulled him to the beauty of the place.  If he had another chance—but what was the point?  Architects were born to create and for the last decade, he had managed to create only misery for himself.

A female cyberMate popped out of nowhere and handed him his usual stiff of gin.  He started to tipple, then stopped.  The Mate hadn’t droned off on another chore, like she was programmed to.  A raised eyebrow got him an answer.

“You have a visitor, Monsieur Dugay,” she said, in an overly lush, recorded Parisian lilt.

“Where, dear?”

“Your penthouse study.  That’s where you always go after your bath and rubdown.”

Was that a smirk he detected?  “I’ll pass on the lust and depravity for now.  Who is it?”

The cybermate replied coldly, “His name is Lorenzo Jenkins.”

Dugay was already half into the lift when the name stopped him.  “Lorenzo Jenkins?  The Jenkins?  Hmmm.”  He waved the mate off and took the lift up to his study.

It was Lorenzo all right, never a doubt about that.  Jenkins ran the asteroid metropolis of Big-Venice-in-the Belt, the most popular vegas in the entire System, with every diversion and sin an ore driver or scoop pilot could want.  The bald orb had already made himself comfortable, so Dugay dispensed with formalities.

“Enjoying yourself?”

“Wickedly,” Jenkins replied.  He cocked his head and squinted as Dugay found a seat behind his desk.  “Quite a cottage you’ve got here.  They don’t make terretas like this anymore.”

“Never did,” said Dugay.  “It’s an original.”

“Along with a few thousand others.  How’d you happen on the name terreta anyway?”

“’Small Earth.’  We light up the night with orbiting mirrors and they call those solettas or lunettas.  So—terretas.  A city in a bottle.  Clever, no?”

“Clever, yes.  Terretas made the Inner Ring possible.  Civilization in space without them?  Fah, who could imagine it?  No room for luxuries in a makeshift fuel tank, which is what my great-grandfather called home out there.  You opened space to the masses, Dugay.  Every time they turn out another terreta, it’s got your name on it.”

“Along with Shepard and Kangyo’s.  So how’s business?”

Jenkins smiled as Dugay polished off the drink and poured them both another.  “Booming.  You ought to pay a visit.  I hear you never leave this place anymore?”

Dugay handed him a goblet.  You had to be wary of Jenkins.  The man was wired like a machine and spent hours plugged into Big Venice through implanted tabs.  The tales had it that he was so sensitive to the subtle electrical fields of that city that he could pick up the micro-currents of another man’s nervous system and decipher his impulses before they ever reached his brain.

“I live in the past,” he admitted.  “I’ve done enough for one man.  Besides, there’s the Institute.  The kids’ll take terraforming farther than ever.”  He hoped that sounded sincere enough.

“They’ll have to go some to beat your act.  Giving the moon an atmosphere was quite a stunt.” 

“It was no stunt,” said Dugay.  “Within a year after I’d crossed Tranquility in a sailboat, Selenopolis had doubled in population and the Amber Shores resort was almost finished.  I turned the Moon into real estate.”

Jenkins tried to smother a smile at the success of his own tactic.  “And Venus.  Mars.  Delambre too.  All the terretas.  Any one of them would make you a name to reckon with in this pantheon of greats, right up there with Wren, Sullivan, Wright, Le Corbusier.”

“All right, so I like to be flattered.”

Jenkins turned serious for a moment.  “I can do more than that, Philippe.  I need you and I’m offering the biggest commission you’ve ever heard of.”

“A commission?  Now?”  Dugay forced a laugh that wasn’t as contemptuous as he intended.  “I’ve been out of circulation for ten years.  Techniques have changed.  Styles are different.”

“You run an academy for the terraforming arts.  And who says genius is ever obsolete?  Your name and reputation are powerful magic anywhere in the System.  Just listen for a minute.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I’m a Belt man, pure and simple.  My business is ninety per cent scoopers and ore drivers and their families.  With the Inner Ring and the Belt states competing against each other, it won’t be long before all the asteroids are picked clean.  We’re running into limits but there’s still a lot of momentum behind our expansion.  That kind of squeeze makes things expensive, so we have to look outward.”

“The gas giants.”

“Exactly.  The biggest terraforming project there is.  I’ve got the backing of a lot of investors from Canto del Aria to Rock City.  We’re going after the big worlds.  And we want you in charge.”

“What have you got in mind?”

Jenkins didn’t blink.  “Dismantling Jupiter.”

“And?”

“And constructing another ring of terretas, just beyond the Belt.  An Outer Ring, financed by this consortium I’ve put together.  With ready-made worlds of your design, the Belt would attract hordes of new settlers.”

 

Okay, so that’s the excerpt from ‘Designs.’  In my main effort for the year 2020, entitled Monument, we’ll see more of Phillipe Dugay and learn why he wants to undertake this legacy project that would re-arrange the entire solar system.  Suffice it to say, he will face substantial opposition.  So how far is Dugay willing to go to cement his architectural legacy? 

Tune in around mid-2020.

The next post to The Word Shed will come on November 5, 2018.

 

See you then.

 

Phil B.

 

Post #142  October 22, 2018

“Developing Time Jumpers (Part 2)”

As fall begins, I am well into my latest Farpool novel, The Farpool: Union, which 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 released.
    
   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.             ‘Jumpship Majoris’
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 again and give you a peek at some of this background.  Time Jumpers has an upload schedule which I can’t reveal yet, but you can anticipate that Episode 1 will be available for download sometime in the first quarter of 2019, likely February.
     
    One matter to deal with, since we are talking about traveling through time and space in the 28^th century and beyond, is to describe how the Time Guard and its parent political organization, the Uman Alliance, is organized. Below is a short description about this.

The Uman Alliance (UA)

1. UA is an outgrowth of the old United Nations of Earth.
2. Story arc for Time Jumpers takes place in late 2700s and early 2800s.  (28^th and 29^th centuries). 
3. The term ‘Uman’ is an outgrowth of the word Human and encompasses both natural human beings and post or transhumans, like cyborgs and androids and other AI entities. The UA hosts no real ‘alien’ races, as none have been discovered as of 2814 AD. All UA member states are human settlements, in one form or another.
4. By this time, human beings and human-machine entities (cyborgs and androids) have created several dozen settlements among the nearer stars. 
5. A few of these settlements are Keaton’s World (star-sun Sturdivant 2180); Gibbons’ Grotto (same sun); Telitor (star-sun Delta Recursa); Poona-Peeona (star-sun Lalande 21185); Hapsh’m (star-sun Epsilon Eridani); Byrd’s Draconis (star-sun Ross 154); and Landfall 4 (star-sun Gliese 876).  There are sixteen human settlements in near-sun space, within about 25 lightyears of the home system. 
6. In the year 2775, fourteen of these settlements formed the Uman Alliance, after a constitutional convention on Keaton’s World.  The founding date was Midtober 5, 2775 (T-001).  The Articles of Alliance are the founding documents.  They read like an updated UN Charter.  Two settlements (Gavrilon and Nanjiang, both of star-sun 40 Omicron 2) both elected to remain outside UA but cooperate closely with the Alliance.
7. UA is organizationally a close analog of the UN.  There is a General Assembly, a Secretariat and a Secretary-General, a Security Council, an Economic Council, a Court of Justice, UA Health Organization and various associated agencies and units. 
8. The Security Council has a War Department known more formally as UNIFORCE (also UmanForce or UA Force).  Time Guard is part of the UA FORCE organization. 
9. Other parts of UA Force include UA Quantum Corps and UA Frontier Corps.  Time Guard has a mandate to deal with threats and adversaries that can manipulate time streams and that threaten Uman time streams. 
10. The putative capital of UA is Paris, France.  There is an alternate capital complex on Keaton’s World and this settlement is often considered to be the real home of the UA, as its founding convention was hammered out and signed there in 2775 AD.
11. As Time Jumpers begins, the Secretary-General (S-G of UA) is Dr. Anika Steen-Dellarosa.  Her primary office is Paris, with a satellite office at Keaton’s World. By convention, the SG is an enhanced transhuman. 
     
    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 October 29, 2018.
     
    See you then.
     
    Phil B.

 

 

Post #141 October 15 2018

“Should You Join a Writers’ Group?”

About six months ago, I joined a writers’ workshop.  Several friends of mine had been after me to do this.  In years past, I have been to several writers’ workshops and have developed a generally skeptical view toward the value of such things.  But maybe I’ve changed.  Maybe I’m more mature as a writer and more open to new ideas.  Maybe I understand my strengths and weaknesses as a writer better.  Whatever the reason, this workshop seems to be clicking for me.

Should you join a writers’ group or participate in a workshop?  Of course, the answers will be as varied as writers are.  Before making your decision, consider these three aspects of the decision.

1. Craft skills.  No writer is perfect.  And no writer knows everything or can‘t improve his or her skills at plotting, developing character or detailing setting.  Well-done workshops can focus on the basics, which busy writers sometimes tend to forget.  What carries a narrative?  How do you build suspense?  What makes a character memorable and engaging?  How much detail do you need to make a place come alive? (the answer: not as much as you think).  A well-done writers’ group or workshop will allow you to experiment with new ideas, critique others and have your work critiqued, develop a comfort zone with being around people who love words and want to develop their abilities to tell stories and mutually support each other’s efforts to do so.  No writer is so great or unique that they can’t become better by absorbing a little enlightened criticism, whether from an editor, an agent or a writers’ group.
2. Networking.  Writing is for the most part a solitary occupation.  And to be successful, who you know matters.  That’s just a reality of the writing business.  The writers’ group I am involved with is led by a lady named Kit, who is a published author in illustrated children’s books.  She has a wealth of insights about the ins and outs of publishers, agents, deadlines, working with rewrites, etc.  Others in the group know people who may be helpful to you in various aspects of your project.  One may know a good illustrator.  Another may know of an agent or a publisher who is looking for just what you’re writing.  By joining a writers’ group, or workshop, as opposed to a book discussion club, you increase your chances of meeting the right person to help you in your work.  Plus it’s just plain more rewarding to be among people dedicated to the craft and business of writing and telling stories. 
3. Validation of effort. Everybody needs feedback and an ‘attaboy’ once in a while, regardless of your efforts and your field.  Validation means you get some kind of psychic reward for what you are doing.  Dogs need this when they’re learning what their masters want.  It’s human nature to want approbation and approval of our efforts.  It helps us learn and grow.  Writers are no different.  A good writers’ group allows you a safe place to ask what seem like stupid questions (but really aren’t) and get answers to things that have been bothering you about the craft and how to accomplish something you haven’t been able to do.  In a sometimes lonely occupation, knowing you’re on the right track, knowing that others struggle with the same concerns, knowing that there are people out there who really do want you to succeed at what can sometimes be a merciless art, is vital to keeping you focused on the long game and energized to finish what you’ve started and enjoy the supreme feeling of really accomplishing something worthwhile, something that others (readers) will appreciate and perhaps even pay money for.
    
   That’s why joining a good writers’ workshop can be a rewarding experience.  Just do your homework, ask around and choose wisely.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed will come on October 22, 2018.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.