Post #262 June 28 2021 “Plague is Done; Get Ready for Diaspora!” In the last few days, I have completely finished my latest book in The Farpool Stories. It’s called The Farpool: Plague. I plan to upload this new title on 2 July 2021. Look for it in the days to follow, at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers. The next title in The Farpool Stories is called The Farpool: Diaspora. Almost all prep work is done and I expect to begin writing the first draft on or about 9 August 2021. With luck, this title will be done and ready to upload by the end of 2021 or early into 2022. Following is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Chapter 1 Aboard Europa Clipper Jupiter Orbit Insertion January 5, 2210 (Earth U.T.) Three days and a handful of hours after arriving in Jupiter orbit through the Atlantic Farpool, Europa Clipper had put in at Gateway Station for some light maintenance work and re-provisioning. Alicia Wu and Evgeni Kotlas were sitting at a table in the ship’s crew’s mess, nursing a few beers. Kotlas fiddled with the gain on the main viewer to bring Jupiter into full resolution. “Looks like a fuzzy beach ball,” Wu said. “With hair—“ Kotlas pronounced himself satisfied with the view. “Yeah, a beach ball with enough radiation to fry your pretty little brain in about two seconds.” “You’re assuming I have a brain…I checked mine at the recruiting station when I signed up for Farpool school.” It was a salmon-hued world, mottled and banded with oranges, reds, browns and ambers, a cauldron of clouds, storms and majestic seething turbulence. Alternating strips of light and dark wrapped the planet in a calico shroud and several small red spots boiled away in the north tropical zone, companions to the Great Red Spot in the south, a centuries-old hurricane churning since the time of Cromwell and King Charles. “Ten seconds to separation,” Sonora called. The captain scanned her boards and instruments, pronounced herself satisfied with what she saw. Europa Clipper was docked at the forward nose port of Gateway Station, a giant sausage stuck on a plate, secured to a kebab skewer, as Alicia Wu had termed it. “Three…two…one…separating now—“ There was a gentle shudder and the sound of capture latches releasing. Sonora pulsed Clipper’s aft thrusters and the ship backed off at a stately pace, eventually settling into a co-orbiting position several thousand meters from the Station. Below them, Europa turned like a cracked golf ball, dimpled, rutted with deep ice canyons and odd brown streaks. As Clipper backed away, the huge banded disk of Jupiter itself poked over the Europan horizon, at a crazy angle. The moon was in a three-and-a-half-day orbit about the giant planet, averaging three quarters of a million kilometers above her cloud tops, bathed in hard radiation. Miriam Sonora was glad Clipper and Gateway both maintained active rad defensive shielding and emitters. Otherwise, they would have all been fried to cinders days ago. For several days after departing Gateway, Europa Clipper coursed through the Jovian skies in a steeply inclined orbit, skirting the shoals and reefs of her radiation belts, until at last they found the first of several holes in the sheath of charged particles. Captain Sonora passed the word to all hands that the ship was about to begin a series of maneuvers which would end up bringing them into orbit around Europa. Clipper dropped to a lower orbit through the first of these holes, like navigating a minefield in a wartime harbor. After a few days had passed, the ship settled into orbit half a million kilometers above the cloud tops. By now, the planet filled nearly a third of the sky and hundreds of frothing spicules and cells of gas swept by beneath them. The speed of its rotation flattened Jupiter at the poles and widened it to a bulge at the equator. Ferocious winds resulted and they smeared the columns of gas into all sorts of grotesque and beautiful shapes. Wu and the rest of the crew that came by the crew’s mess watched the scenery below for hours at a time. Wu found herself transfixed by the ever-shifting palette of colors and shapes. She could well imagine the planet’s visible face as a giant’s palette, where Nature worked as the artist to create an ever-changing panorama of colors, forms and brush strokes. In time, Clipper made her way into orbit about Europa. Clipper’s pilot, Reynaldo Diaz, joined some of the crew in the mess compartment, as the cracked billiard-ball of a world turned slowly below them. “Gives me the creeps,” Casey Winans said. She shuddered involuntarily and sucked at her drink. “All those cracks are seams in the ice plates,” Belket klu kel: Om’t marveled. “And to think that’s where we’re going, right into one of those seams.” “And below—“ added Sonora. She decided it was time to finish up their final briefings and get ready for the landing. “All right, boys and girls, all hands lay aft to the Service deck. I want to go over last-minute details before we head down.” The briefing lasted half an hour…. Okay, so that’s the excerpt. I hope you’ll like the final result and I hope the excerpt whets your appetite to learn more about the world of The Farpool Stories. My final title in this series, after Plague and Diaspora, will be called The Farpool: Destiny (likely available sometime in the middle of 2022). That will make a total of eight stories in the overall arc. That’s enough for me. The Word Shed will take a brief hiatus for a mid-summer vacation next week. There won’t be a post for July 5, due to the holiday. The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 12, 2021. See you then and have a great holiday. Phil B.

Post #261 June 21 2021 “The Plague is Coming!” In the last week, I finished the first draft of my sf novel The Farpool: Plague. It comes in at 225 pages and about 123,000 words. What’s next? The real work begins. I keep a file called Next Steps for every project I do. It tells me what I have done and what still needs to be done. Below, I’ve reproduced this file for the current project…. 1. Complete any needed expansion of Story Outline, and Sequence of Events. DONE 2. Re-read all titles in The Farpool Stories for continuity with new stories DONE 3. Complete List of Major Players DONE 4. Background and personality sketches on major characters DONE 5. Details on medical/biological effects of the Purple and medbot interventions DONE 6. Write Chapter and Scene Details (2195 CE) DONE 7. Started first draft: 5 April 2021 8. Finished first draft: 10 June 2021 9. Review and edit final 10. Spellcheck 11. Book descriptions 12. Tag lines 13. Word 97 version 14. Set all text to Normal and enforce my styles 15. Verify cover format USE JPEG! 16. Projected upload date: 2 July 2021 From this, you can see I’m proposing to have this work finished and ready to upload to Smashwords by 2 July. This list is to remind me of all the things, after writing, that need to be done to finish a project. I’m currently on #9. So, there is still a lot of work to be done. And the job is somewhat more difficult in that this book is #6 in the series The Farpool Stories and there are 2 more to come. Just preserving continuity with earlier works is a big job in itself. Once the book file and cover file are in good shape, the job turns to marketing efforts. Smashwords offers a lot of recommendations on how to market ebooks. I’ll cover a few here that I like to follow. First, consider including an excerpt from the next novel at the end of this one. This is a form of pre-selling, or maybe whetting a potential reader’s appetite. Of course, this also means you have to have written enough of the upcoming work to make an excerpt. That has not been done yet…one more thing to do. Another marketing idea from Smashwords is to do your upload at a strategic time, ideally just before a major holiday, or even just on a Thursday or a Friday. The idea behind this is that it is during these periods that prospective readers will have more time to browse and come across your work. In my experience, this works pretty well. A third recommendation is to do what I’m doing right here…pre-notifying all my blog readers that something is coming. Also, you should do some of this on your web site and also on Facebook if you have an account, which I don’t yet. All of these ideas are good ways to get the word out that you’ve got something new coming and there’s even more new stuff after this. Pretty much anything that gets your name into the minds of readers is a good thing (like a review in Goodreads). As mentioned, The Farpool: Plague is title #6 in my series The Farpool Stories. As of mid-April 2021, this series had garnered 6587 downloads. That means I potentially have a ready-made audience who might be interested in any new works in this series. Anything I can do to let them know of new titles coming is a good thing. So, here’s the moral of the story: Just finishing the first draft of a book is only the beginning. What follows is at least as important to your success as doing the storytelling in the first place. Don’t skimp on it. The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 28, 2021 See you then. Phil B.

Post #260 June 14 2021 “Researching a Novel…or Just the Facts, Ma’am” Nobody writes a novel without doing some kind of research. It can be detailed and extensive or barebones, but if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better get your facts straight. Currently I’m into researching, planning and outlining for my next sf novel The Farpool: Diaspora. I’ve got electronic and real folders for character bios and backgrounds, book covers, Earth circa 22nd century, Human-Coethi conflict and Jupiter/Europa details, plus a variety of additional files and notes. At this moment, I’m developing background and bios for major characters (but not all of them). The great question for any storyteller or novelist is how much research is enough? How much detail is enough? There is a term—verisimilitude—that writers sometimes use. It means ‘resemblance to the truth.’ No storyteller tells a story with all possible details. He’d be writing or reciting an encyclopedia instead of a story. The storyteller chooses details selectively to enhance the story and give it a flavor of being real. You should include just enough detail to transport your reader into your imaginary world and ground him there, believing that all this could in fact have happened. Which means that you do enough research to provide enough detail to achieve verisimilitude. In practical terms, that means you have to do a bit more research than you ultimately might use. As an author, writing about how a character feels or might react to a situation, I want to be able to pick and choose details to explain, illustrate or dramatize the situation in such a way as to put the reader right there in the character’s shoes. Little details can matter, especially if a reader has some experience with the subject matter. When I wrote The Farpool, I used the term valsalva maneuver to describe something that scuba divers do to clear their ears and sinuses when experiencing pressure changes. The concept was relevant to the story and I had to use it accurately to maintain verisimilitude. I had to research it to know what I was talking about. And I’m sure some of my readers are well familiar with this technique and would have bitten their lips in anguish or firebombed my house if I had used the term incorrectly. I should add that I’ve never scuba dived a day in my life. Ernest Hemingway once said all writers should have a built-in bullshit detector. Why? Because all readers have a built-in bullshit detector. What about science fiction stories, where the writer is taking us to worlds and times and alien cultures that have never existed anywhere outside the writer’s imagination? Here again, the details have to read true, sound true and feel true. And they have to be internally consistent. Often, the littlest detail—what someone ate for dinner last night, how they dressed for descending into that cave, what it felt like when they landed on the icy surface of Europa—if done right, can connect with the reader in just the right way and they’ll find themselves saying: “Yeah…I can believe it would happen like that!” Author Tom Young, writer of many well-regarded military thrillers, writes in Writer’s Digest some tips to follow when researching a story: 1. Write what you know (personal experience has a value all its own) 2. You can do research on the cheap (that’s why we have Wikipedia and libraries) 3. You can find anything on YouTube 4. You can find things anywhere. Keep pen and notepad nearby during all waking hours. 5. Use all your senses 6. You can leave things out. I particularly like Young’s advice about number 6 above. To quote: “If you do thorough research, you’ll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader “overhear” the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.” In other words, a little bit of detail can go a long way if it’s chosen properly and used correctly. But it’s still necessary. You still have to do the research to dig out that little nugget and save it for the right moment in the story. Researching is ultimately about being prepared, ready to write the story with the flair and power that will grab the reader and pull them into your imaginary world and strand them there for the duration. The best stories, the most memorable stories, have memorable characters and memorable settings and details. Anyone remember the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey? The next post to The Word Shed will come on June 21, 2021. See you then. Phil B.