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.