Where’s SONS OF THE STARFARERS: BOOK IV?

So it’s been several months since I released Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III), and I’ve already gotten some flak from people waiting impatiently for Book IV: Friends in Command. Some of you may be wondering about that yourself, considering how I wrote and released the first three books within a couple of months of each other.

Well, here’s what’s going on. I wrote Friends in Command a couple of months ago and sent it out to my test readers, hoping that they would enjoy it. Many of them did, but they pointed out some problems that required a major rewrite. Essentially, I had put the entire novel in one character’s point of view, but there were plot points that happened outside of her point of view that made that not work.

So I went back and did a major revision, throwing in Aaron as the secondary POV character. And the plot points turned much smoother. But when I sent it out to a second round of test readers, they told me that it felt too much like a bridge story—that something was still missing. It wasn’t that the book was broken, or that the story didn’t come together properly. The story was good, but the book wasn’t as satisfying as I wanted it to be.

Now, Friends in Command is part four in a nine-part series, so in a lot of ways it really is a bridge. But I want this story to be more than that—to be strong enough to stand on its own, and not just set things up for the later books. Kind of like how Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes back sets things up for Jedi, but is an amazing movie in its own right (arguably the best one in the whole franchise). So with the new feedback, I identified some character elements that I needed to develop, and went back to work.

So far in the series, each book has centered around a different character. The first book, Brothers in Exile, focused on Isaac, the older and more responsible brother. The second book, Comrades in Hope, focused on Aaron, the younger brother who is eager for a chance to prove himself. Strangers in Flight revolved around Reva, the girl that they rescued in the first book, and Friends in Command revolves around Mara, the close friend and confidante that Aaron makes in book two.

The main thing is that I’m doing all I can to make this book as great as possible. I could have pushed it out a couple of months ago just for the sake of putting it out quickly, but I didn’t want to do that until I knew I’d written a quality book. So don’t be worried that I’ve dropped the ball, or that I’ve abandoned the series—I definitely have not! I’m just hard at work making sure it’s done right.

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the next Sons of the Starfarers book, the good news is that I think I’m just about ready to release it. I’m finishing up with the third round revisions today, and I feel really good about it. I’m still going to send it out for one last test reading pass, just to make sure, and if everything’s good I’ll send it out to my editor before the end of the month. My cover designer is already working on the cover, and my editor says he should have a slot open very soon.

So if all goes well, I’ll put Friends in Command up for pre-order in the first or second week of April. The pre-order price will be $.99, with a tentative release date of May 1st. If things don’t go well, I may have to do another revision pass, but I’ll still do my best to release the book by June.

Six months without a new release is far, far too long. Fortunately, I have some other books coming down the pipeline, such as Heart of the Nebula, a full-length novel and direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home. With luck, that one will be out before the end of the year. And I’m about halfway through with The Sword Keeper, another awesome novel that I think you guys are really going to enjoy.

Lots of stuff going on! I’d better get back to work, but don’t worry—the books are coming!

Blogging vs. journal writing

So as you may have noticed, I generally blog a lot less nowadays than I did just a couple of years ago. That doesn’t mean I don’t blog at all, or that I don’t value keeping a blog, but it’s just not something I do as frequently as I used to. I’ve been wondering why that is—about what changed to make me blog less frequently. And I think I’ve found the answer.

Last year, one of my new year’s resolutions was to keep a detailed weekly personal journal. All of my other 2014 resolutions eventually fell by the wayside, but that was the one that I actually accomplished. In fact, towards the end of the year, I switched from keeping a weekly journal to keeping an almost daily journal. By December, I had written 169,000 words—more than four hundred pages—about the personal events in my life for the year 2014 alone.

I’ve been a journal writer ever since elementary school, but when I started this blog back in 2007, I kind of took a break from that. My reasoning at the time was that my blog was my journal, and while I recognized that there were some parts of my life that I wanted to keep private, I figured that those just weren’t worth writing about.

After living and studying in Jordan for a summer, I realized that there was value in keeping a private journal in addition to my blog, and I started up another one. But I kept it fairly infrequently, sometimes with months going by between journal entries. In 2012 when I went to Georgia, I had a lot more things happening in my life to write about (and a lot less access to the internet), so I kept it much more regularly. But then I came back to the States, and life fell back into a monotonous routine.

The thing that changed in 2014 was the realization that I wasn’t just keeping a journal for myself, but that I was keeping it for my children, grandchildren, and others who would come after. When I was a teenager, journal writing was an act of self-discovery, and for that reason it was much more private. As an adult, though, I already have a pretty firm sense of who I am, so the self-discovery is much less important. Keeping a personal historical record, though, both for myself and for my family, is much more important to me.

Even though I’m not just keeping a journal for myself anymore, there is still a lot of sensitive information in there that really shouldn’t be available for public consumption at the present time. That’s especially true now that my blog is less of a personal project than it was when I started it. Now that I’m a professional writer, I’m a lot more careful about what I post here. I still try to be honest and genuine, but I’m probably not going to blog about, say, my romantic relationships or personal spiritual experiences.

It’s weird, though, because the roles are now reversed. Back in 2007, I felt free to blog about anything but didn’t know what to write about in my journal. Now, I know exactly what sorts of things to write about in my journal (I’ve already up to 42,000 words for this year) but have no idea what to write for my blog. And that’s the main reason why I haven’t been posting quite as much.

So for those of you who do keep up with this blog, what sorts of things do you want to hear about? I’m happy to post weekly updates on my writing, though I’m worried it might get tedious after a while (contrary to popular belief, writing is one of the most boring professions on the planet). Do you want to hear more of my thoughts on current and political events? More reflections on life as an indie author? More insights about the worlds and characters in my books? More tvtropes?

This blog is not going anywhere, so don’t worry about that. But it’s going to change as I figure out exactly what I want to use it for.

$.99 sale and giveaway for THE JEREMIAH CHRONICLES!

Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you know that Star Wanderers: The Jeremiah Chronicles (Omnibus I-IV) is on sale for $.99 for the first week of March! In addition, I’m doing a Goodreads giveaway with two copies of the paperback. Check it out!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Star Wanderers

by Joe Vasicek

Giveaway ends March 08, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

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It’s done!

Yesterday I finally finished the second draft of Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV)! I know I’d said I was working on other projects, but those were intermittent—this was the main one I was focusing on. I still need to run it by my first readers, but I’m pretty sure this is the version that I’ll publish. If all goes well, you can expect to see this go up on pre-order before the end of March.

While working on the revisions for Friends in Command, I more or less plotted out the rest of the Sons of the Starfarers series in my head. There are going to be nine books total, most of them around 40,000 to 50,000 words (or 150 to 200 pages). It will probably take me between two and four months to write each of them, including sending them off to first readers and implementing their feedback. If my first readers come back with problems, though, it might take more like five or six months.

While I’m definitely committed to finishing up this series, I’m probably not going to work exclusively on Sons of the Starfarers. As much as I would like to wrap up this series and get it all out there, there are a lot of other projects calling out to me—projects that I’ve been putting off for far too long. Here are just a few of them:

STAR WANDERERS: CHILDREN OF THE STARRY SEA

Yes, I have another story in the Star Wanderers series to tell. This one is a full-length novel, though, and it takes place about sixteen years after the events of The Jeremiah Chronicles. It’ll be fun to bring back all the old characters, but this story is mostly about their children (hence the title). This WIP is still in the early outlining stages, but I have lots of ideas with where to take it. I’ll probably write it sometime over the summer, unless there’s enough demand for me to write it sooner.

THE SWORD KEEPER

This is my epic fantasy novel that I’ve been writing on and off for the past two and a half years. I put it on the back burner last summer after I got blocked, but just last month I figured out what I needed to change to get the story flowing again. I could probably finish this one in a month if I focused on it. Hopefully, this is the year that I’ll finally get this one finished and publish it.

QUEEN OF THE FALCONSTAR

This is the passion project that distracted me while I was working on Friends in Command. I wrote about three chapters, put it on the back burner, and then daydreamed the whole rest of the book. Needless to say, I’m eager to get back to this one. I think it has a lot of potential—Star Wanderers was an unplanned passion project just like this one.

KING WASHINGTON

This is a new project that I haven’t blogged about yet. I’m collaborating on it with a friend (the story was actually his idea), and we’ve spent the last two or three weeks plotting out the entire series. All that is done now, so all we have to do is figure out our collaboration style and write the thing. We’re doing it in season/episode format, with five seasons of 12 episodes each. The episodes are each going to run about 20k to 30k words, so once we have our workflow down we should be able to pump out an episode every four to six weeks.

Lots and lots of stuff to work on—that’s partially why I haven’t been blogging much in the last few weeks. I hope to change that soon, though. And even if I’m not quite so active online as I have been, don’t worry—I’m still writing!

My LTUE 2015 Schedule!

It’s that time of year again—time for Life, the Universe, and Everything, Utah Valley’s best and longest running sci-fi convention! I will definitely be there, so if you’re able to make it this year, be sure to hunt me down and say hi! And if you can’t make it, I’ll be tweeting about it using the #LTUE hashtag, so you can follow along that way as well.

I’m on four panels this year, one of which I’m apparently moderating. Here’s my schedule:

THURSDAY

10:00 AM: Raising the Language Barrier

6:00 PM: Publishing in the Future

SATURDAY

12:00 PM: What I Wish I Knew When I Started—Common Mistakes Made by New Writers

1:00 PM: Self-Publishing Pros and Cons

I’ll also be helping out with registration, so you might see me there as well. At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be at the mass signing: there was some confusion about the sign-ups for that, and I get the sense that things are still very disorganized. But if you want to buy a book from me, I’ll have a few on hand either in the green room or in my car.

See you there!

The love languages of Star Wanderers

So I’ve been reading this really interesting book recently called The Five Love Languages. Maybe you’ve heard of it. The basic idea is that all expressions of human love and affection fall into five basic categories or languages, and that we’re all better at speaking or understanding one language than we are at the others. There’s actually an online test where you can figure out what your primary language is (mine is physical touch), and learn how to better speak the others.

As I was reading this book, I couldn’t help but think about the characters from my books, especially the Star Wanderers books. Just for fun, I decided to figure out what their primary love languages are. Just as a warning, there will be unmarked spoilers below.

Jeremiah

Jeremiah’s primary love language is definitely physical touch, and that’s probably why I was able to write him so well. For him (and for me), physical intimacy implies an emotional commitment, which is why at first he turns Noemi down (he doesn’t want to make a promise that he can’t keep). When they finally do get together, the language barrier isn’t so much of an issue for him because he gets all the love and affection he needs through physical touch.

Noemi

Noemi’s love language is quality time. For her, physical touch is more just a means to an end, which is why she’s okay with offering herself physically to Jeremiah before she really knows him. But at the various points in the series where it looks like he might leave her for a while, she freaks out a bit, even when she knows it’s only temporary. Because the Ariadne is so small, and she and Jeremiah are basically forced to live on top of each other, she’s able to bond very quickly with him because of all the time they spend together.

Mariya

Without a doubt, Mariya’s love language is acts of service. It’s not until Jeremiah saves her family by getting them a berth on the Hope of Oriana that she really starts to fall for him. She tries to express her love by offering to help translate between Jeremiah and Noemi, which has the added benefit of making them both dependent on her to some degree. When Lucca rescues her from the pirates, she starts to fall for him instead, which culminates after he helps her to save everyone else.

Lucca

I’m not sure what Lucca’s love language is exactly. I want to say it’s acts of service, because he also doesn’t really fall for Mariya until she saves him. At that point, she goes from being the pretty trophy he won in the contest with the pirates into an actual human being that he can love and respect. He also has a bit of quality time going on, since he really comes to love her after the time that they spend together.

Jakob

At first, I thought that Jakob’s love language would also be acts of service, because of how he slaves away to support his family and feels rebuffed when they don’t appreciate it. But then I remembered that his pride makes it hard for him to accept acts of service from others. After thinking about it some more, I think his primary love language is words of affirmation. Salome’s constant nagging really grates on him, and her harsh words nearly drive him to the brink of suicide. He’s too proud to admit that he needs to be told that he’s loved, but he really does.

Salome

Salome’s love language is almost certainly receiving gifts. When Jakob’s work at the Oriana Station dockyards take him away from her, she feels unloved because he isn’t giving her the gift of his presence. More importantly, when he sent both of their sons away on the Medea, she felt as if he had taken two of the most important things in her life away from her—the exact opposite of giving gifts. The fact that they’re so poor certainly doesn’t help things.

Just for fun, let’s do a few characters from Sons of the Starfarers as well!

Isaac

Isaac’s love language is probably physical touch. He feels like he has to be within an arm’s reach of Aaron at all times, which is one of the reasons that Aaron resents him. He’s also hyper-aware of Reva’s no nudity taboo, and is very careful not to touch her when she isn’t wearing any clothes. When she puts a hand on his shoulder, he has a minor breakdown, and when she gives him the henna tattoo, that’s also a big deal mainly because of how it involves physical touch.

Aaron

I’m pretty sure that Aaron’s love language is words of affirmation, though I haven’t fully thought it through yet. He misbehaves and acts irresponsible because of how Isaac constantly nags him, and when he’s surrounded by friends who give him verbal encouragement, he starts to shape up rather quickly.

Reva

I’m not sure what Reva’s love language is. It isn’t physical touch, and it isn’t words of affirmation—her father wasn’t very good with words, but she still knew that he loved her. It isn’t receiving gifts either, since she doesn’t think much of the clothes that Isaac buys for her. So just by process of elimination, her love language is probably either quality time or gifts of service. Of those two, I’m more inclined to say that quality time is the more important one, which should become obvious in Book V: Captives in Obscurity.

Mara

Mara’s love language is almost certainly words of affirmation. In the first chapter of Book IV: Friends in Command, she has a nightmare that should make that abundantly clear. She’s also closed herself off in a lot of ways, to the point where she’s no longer comfortable with giving or receiving any sort of affection. That’s why she can be so harsh when she’s criticizing Aaron—though, to be fair, she always strives to make her criticism constructive.

So there you have it! Six characters from Star Wanderers and four characters from Sons of the Starfarers, with all of their love languages worked out. For the characters I’m not so sure about, I should probably take the online test for them just to see how it ends up. That would be a fun project, but for now, I think my time would be better spent writing the next Sons of the Starfarers book.

Take care, and let me know what you think!

Thoughts on the danger of falling in love with your characters

As a writer, I spend so much time in the heads of my viewpoint characters that I can’t help but like them. So it sometimes comes as a surprise when readers get frustrated and want to slap my characters around.

To be fair, sometimes I do that on purpose. For example, in Stars of Blood and Glory, Princess Hikaru does some incredibly stupid and naive things that end up getting everyone else in a lot of trouble. There’s a reason for it, though: she’s been sheltered in the palace all her life and knows nothing of the outside universe. Over the course of the story, she comes to realize just how naive and sheltered she’s been, and has something of a transformation.

Jeremiah from Star Wanderers is another character that readers sometimes get frustrated with. He’s very passive and lacks a strong backbone, at least at the beginning of the series. I did try to make sure that each story in his viewpoint was driven by his choices, rather than the things that happen to him. But he isn’t your typical alpha male starship pilot—far from it.

With Jeremiah, I tried to lean towards writing an “everyman” rather than a “superman.” In a lot of ways, he was also a case study in human nature for me, since I’m not a passive person and in real life tend to get frustrated with passive people. When I dove into Jeremiah’s head, though, I found it almost impossible not to like him, even with all his flaws.

Another good example from Star Wanderers is Mariya. Some of my readers absolutely hate her. Given her role in the story, it’s not hard to see why: she basically tries to steal away the love interest from the main female protagonist of the series.

In her head, though, she’s not stealing—she’s sharing. Everything she does makes sense for her perspective, and when she realizes how much she’s hurt everyone, she feels genuine remorse and regret. As a character, she fascinated me so much that that was one of the main reasons I decided to write a book solely from her point of view.

To be fair, one of the other reasons readers get frustrated with her is because she’s an angsty teenager. Her life is either amazingly awesome or on the verge of falling apart (the latter being much more common). I can’t fault readers at all for getting frustrated with that—all I can do is hope that the payoff is greater than the pain.

Looking back on all this, I think that one of the potential traps of being a writer is falling in love with your characters more than your readers ever will. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t love your characters, but that you shouldn’t let that love make you blind to how your readers are going to respond to them.

It’s kind of like the central paradox in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game: in order to know an enemy well enough to defeat them, you have to know them well enough to love them as well. But just when you can’t help but love them, you have to destroy them. It can be the same way with your characters: even when you know them well enough to love them in spite of their flaws and weaknesses, you still have to give the readers their moment of schadenfreude.

Of course, a lot of it ultimately comes down to skill. If you truly excel at bringing readers into the character’s head, then perhaps you can get them to love that character as much as you do. But it also depends on the reader. If the reader isn’t particularly interested in falling in love with a character (or in falling in love with that character), then your writing skill probably isn’t going to change that.

It’s interesting to think about, and something I’ll definitely keep in mind as I continue to write. In the meantime, if you have your own thoughts on the subject, please leave a comment—I’d very much like to hear it!

Thoughts on American Sniper

Yesterday, I saw American Sniper. In a word, it was fantastic. Super intense—so much that the friend I went to see it with had to walk out in the middle—but well, well worth it.

The movie is about Chris Kyle, a US sniper in Iraq who had an incredible number of kills. He’s credited with being the most lethal sniper in US history. And yet, at the end of the movie, he states quite openly that he can answer a clear conscience for every shot he took—including the one in the trailer, which was his first combat kill.

Pause for a minute to think about that. What must it be like to have your first ever kill be a child? There you are with your finger on the trigger, wondering if you have it in you to take another human life, and instead of an obvious combatant, you’re presented with a grenade-carrying child. On top of that, add on the fact that you’re a family man. Could you do it?

And that was just the first combat encounter of the film. Things got progressively more intense with each combat tour, with some truly evil people and some truly hard decisions.

At the same time, though, the film didn’t try to dehumanize the enemy. Again and again, Chris goes head-to-head with an enemy sniper named Mustafa who is just as good as he is. Just as we see Chris with his wife and child, we see that Mustafa has a family as well. But there are evil people in the movie—truly evil people, such as the Butcher, whose preferred instrument of death is a power drill—and we see them too. Because guess what? Those people were real, and the atrocities they committed were real as well.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to kill one person, let alone more than two hundred. And yet at the end of the film, I sincerely believe Chris Kyle when he says that he can answer a clear conscience for every shot that he took. That is what made the movie so fascinating. The man was a true hero—I don’t see how you can possibly come to any other conclusion than that.

Still, I couldn’t help but think about the wider context of the war in which Chris Kyle was fighting. Men like the Butcher exist in every society, including our own. If a foreign government had set up a brutal dictator over our country, plunged us into a ten year proxy war in which millions of our people were killed, imposed a punishing sanctions regime on us for another ten years, and finished it off by invading us, would the United States be any different? Because that’s exactly what happened in Iraq. Every enemy that we have in the Middle East is an enemy of our own creation, and the harder we try to fight them, the more enemies we create.

I don’t say this to diminish Chris Kyle at all. I admire the man tremendously, and I can only hope that I would rise to the level of his stature if given the same responsibility to protect American lives. And to be fair, American Sniper didn’t try to defend the Iraq War at all. In fact, it wasn’t even about the Iraq War—it was about a soldier who struggled to do the right thing in combat and not be consumed by the war itself. In that aspect, I think that this film was outstanding. It’s probably the most empathetic war movie that I’ve ever seen, and I would gladly watch it again.

I have tremendous respect for the men and women of the US military, and this movie reminded me why. At the same time, I have very little respect for the politicians who sacrifice the lives of these brave men and women for their political ambitions. My personal views on the subject are best reflected in this 2012 campaign ad for Ron Paul which sums up the history quite succinctly. I don’t agree with Ron Paul on every issue, but on this one, I think he’s spot on:

But yeah, American Sniper was an amazing movie—well worth seeing. It’s rated R mostly for language, so even if you don’t usually see R rated movies, don’t let the rating alone scare you away.

Pay what you want

For a long time, I’ve said that if I didn’t have to make a living at this writing thing, I would love to give all my books away for free. Well, for the month of January at least, I’ve decided to do just that.

Smashwords has a special pricing option that allows readers to set the price for your ebooks that they’re willing to pay. There is no minimum price, so you can set the price to $0 and download it for free. You can also come back and pay for the book after you’ve read it. Smashwords breaks down where the money goes, so you can see how much of it goes to the author. Smashwords pays authors better than any other site I’ve worked with, and also gives you the widest variety of ebook formats to choose from.

I started this experiment two weeks ago and didn’t say much about it, just because I wanted to see what would happen first. The response so far has been quite surprising. A lot of people have downloaded the books for free, but the people who are opting to pay have more than made up the difference. If things continue like this, I may just keep all my Smashwords books at Reader Sets the Price indefinitely.

So if you’ve got an account at Smashwords and you’d like to pick up some of my books, feel free to check them out! You can pay whatever you want for them, or download them for free and tip me later.

More than money, though, what I really need for my Smashwords books are reviews. It’s an unfortunate fact that people who download ebooks for free are more likely to leave negative reviews (and then download the rest of the books in the series they supposedly hate, leaving negative reviews on each one). If you have a Smashwords account and you’ve enjoyed any of my books, I would really appreciate it if you’d take a couple minutes to go over there and leave an honest review. I would actually appreciate reviews more than payment, so if you want to pick up one of my books that you haven’t read yet, leave a review on one that you have and we’ll call it even.

That just about does it. When January is over, I’ll write another blog post where I’ll detail my results.

Thanks for reading!

Squirrel!

So a couple of months ago, I set aside the first draft for Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV) in order to let the story percolate a little in my mind. I do this from time to time, especially between deep revisions, in order to step back approach the story with a fresh mind. I’ve found that doing so tends to improve the quality of the story immensely.

I was fully intending to get back to Friends in Command this month (and still intend to do so eventually), but just as I was finishing up the 4.0 draft for Heart of the Nebula, I had this crazy awesome story idea pop into my head and I couldn’t not write it. It actually came to me right before I got to the last chapter, which led to this exasperated tweet:

Why do I always get my best ideas for new stories a chapter or two before I’m finished with my WIP? #amwriting

— Joe Vasicek (@onelowerlight) December 30, 2014

So anyways, the working title for the squirrel! project is Queen of the Falconstar. It’s a sci-fi action & adventure standalone (for now, heh) that takes place in the same universe as Sons of the Starfarers, but a few hundred years into the future. The Outworld frontier has been more or less tamed, and the Hameji are beginning to establish themselves on the outer reaches of human space. It’s a brutal and dangerous universe outside of the major stellar empires—which of course is where this story takes place.

It’s the main character, Zlata, that I’m really excited about. She’s crafty, pragmatic, resourceful, and slightly pessimistic, a little like Mara from Sons of the Starfarers but without all the trauma and daddy issues. She’s ruthless when she needs to be, but can be quite altruistic whenever it’s practical. Above all else, she’s a realist, accepting things as they are and preparing herself to deal with them accordingly.

The story starts when pirates capture her home station and carry her and her best friend off as slaves. It turns out, though, that these aren’t ordinary pirates—they’re Hameji tribesmen from the Outer Reaches. The captain, Lord Khasan Valdamar, is a young Hameji commander trying to establish himself and build a war fleet to his name. He doesn’t have much to work with, though, and in the brutal world of intertribal Hameji politics, a single miscalculation could lead to the annihilation of his small clan.

Through a daring combination of intrigue and romance, Zlata convinces him to take both her and her friend as wives, thus raising their status and securing their future. But this sets off a tribal war, which she soon discovers is far more of an adventure than she ever bargained for.

That’s the basic story idea that I’m working with, at least. Like I said, I’m way excited about it! I don’t have any idea how long it’s going to be or what it’s going to turn into, but this is basically how Star Wanderers got started and that turned out rather well.

So I’ll probably dive into this rabbit hole for the next month or so to see what’s down there. But don’t worry, I fully intend to write Friends in Command as well. At the very latest, that one should be out sometime in the summer, though it will probably be ready much sooner. And when Queen of the Falconstar is finished, I think you’re really going to like this one as well!