Hey everyone! Just wanted to give you a heads up that my latest release, A Hill on Which to Die, is now up on Amazon for a promotional launch price of $.99. Here it is!
Cover reveal for new fantasy release!
A while back, I wrote a short fantasy novelette about a group of orcs setting out to found a new clan. Well, I’ve decided to self-publish it! If all goes well, it should be up on Amazon by this weekend. Here’s the blurb:
IS THIS THE HILL ON WHICH YOU WANT TO DIE?
That is the question on Garak-Nur’s mind every time he draws his trusted sword Blacknife. A battle-hardened mountain orc and warrior chief of his clan, he knows when to turn from an unwinnable fight—and when to face death head-on, sword in hand.
Garak-Nur is ready to meet his fate, but the rest of his clan is not. A Witch King has risen to power in the north, impressing all the mountain orcs into his massive army. To preserve their freedoms, Garak must lead a band of warriors and she-orcs into the wilderness to start a new clan.
But the challenges they must face are great, and the lands they must cross are teeming with danger. Dwarves, dragons, and rival orcish war parties all stand in their way of finding a new home. Even if they do manage to start a new burrow, their fledgling clan may still not survive the winter.
One day, Garak-Nur will climb his last hill and meet the fate that awaits him. But for the sake of all those who look up to him, that day must not come a moment too soon.
WARNING: Contains mature content including rape and sexual violence.
And here’s the cover!
This book is a fairly wide departure from my science fiction stuff. I have no idea how well it’s going to be received, or whether there will be enough interest for more books and stories in this universe. If there is interest, I do have more stories that I can write. First, though, I want to see how well this one does. If you enjoy it, please leave a review to let me know, so I can decide whether to write more stories in this universe!
For those of you waiting on my ongoing science fiction series, don’t worry—I haven’t given up on those. Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV) will probably be out sometime in February, and Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) will be out sometime in the spring. These stories are running a lot longer than I’d planned for them too, so for those of you who want something longer than a typical novella, you’re going to get it.
That just about does it for now. If all goes well, A Hill on Which to Die should be up on Amazon in the next 48-72 hours. Keep an eye out for it!
Thoughts on the new Star Wars trailer
I have a lot of thoughts on the new Star Wars trailer. But first, a little background.
Growing up in the 90s, I was a huge Star Wars fan. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Star Wars was my life. I played X-Wing every day, I watched at least one of the original trilogy movies every week, I read every Star Wars book in the library that I could get my hands on, and I daydreamed and made up Star Wars stories all the time. I was living in the golden age of science fiction (about age 9-12), and that meant Star Wars.
Then Episode I came out. Like all the other fans, I was super, super excited about it. Like all of the other fans, it was a huge disappointment. Several things ruined that movie for me, but the biggest were Jar-Jar Binks and midichloriens. The most magical aspect of the Star Wars universe, the Force, was singlehandedly ruined by the whole midichlorien thing, and as for Jar-Jar … I don’t even want to go there.
There were a lot of other little things too: like the pod racing sequence, where the sand people were thrown in for a gag, and that part where Obi Wan and Qui Gon Jinn drove a submarine through the center of the planet. My suspension of disbelief was stretched to the breaking point, and this awesome thing that I loved now felt like a little kid story. But the biggest things that broke the movie for me were Jar-Jar and the midochloriens.
But that was Episode I, and Episode II was bound to be better. After all, how could you screw up the Clone Wars? Unfortunately, I was about to find out.
To be fair, Episode II wasn’t nearly the disaster that Episode I was. Not that that’s saying much, but still, it wasn’t horrible–it was just bad. The romance was cringe-worthy, the pace was glacial, and the action sequences had too much flash and not enough substance.
Jar-Jar was gone (thank the stars!), but C-3PO and R2D2 were little better, and the fact that they were in the story at all caused a major sprain to my suspension of disbelief. The lightsaber duel with Yoda and that other guy felt like it was thrown in for a gag, and Anakin … yeah. By the time the big stadium battle happened at the end, all I could do was yawn. The battle of Hoth had a lot less flash to it, and yet was infinitely more engrossing.
By this point, I’d started to phase Star Wars out of my life. I still occasionally watched the original trilogy movies, and played stuff like X-Wing: Alliance from time to time, but I wasn’t nearly as invested in the franchise as before. I’d moved on to stuff like Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, and spent more time playing stuff like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Star Wars did not hold the same magic as it had before.
Then came Episode III, the final nail in the coffin for me. I can sum it all up in one word: “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
Episode III was marginally better than Episode II, but that was only because of Order 66, where all the Jedi died and the Republic transformed into the Empire. Order 66 was pretty cool. But the rest of the movie? I mean, right from the first battle, I knew that it was going to suck. When a ship in orbit tilts to one side, it does NOT cause everything to fall in that direction! Lucas might as well have shown people falling off of the south pole. From that point on, my suspension of disbelief was shattered beyond any hope of recovery.
But the worst part was Anakin’s transformation. Here’s a guy who is supposed to turn from this whiny, annoying brat into the most iconic sci-fi villain of all time … and I just wasn’t buying it. With each progressive step, he just didn’t seem any different than before. Instead of the character driving the story, it felt like the plot was shoehorning the character into a role, and all he could do was passively accept it. The slaughter of the young Jedi knights at the temple, the oath of fealty to Chancellor Palpatine–none of it felt authentic at all. And even after he put on the mask, he was still the whiny, annoying brat from before. Darth Vader, the linchpin of the entire franchise, was ruined.
At that point, I completely checked out. That’s right–the kid whose whole life was tied up with Star Wars now wanted nothing to do with it. I still went back to some of the old, pre-Episode I stuff from time to time, just for nostalgia’s sake, but I had no desire to keep up with any of the new stuff that was coming out. Books, games, TV shows–I was done.
Then Disney bought Star Wars, and rumors started to fly. My expectations at first were pretty low, but George Lucas had done so much to screw it up already that I figured Disney couldn’t do any worse. Then I realized that Disney does a lot more than princesses and fairy tales these days, and my indifference turned to curiosity. When J.J. Abrams was slated to direct it, curiosity turned to the faintest glimmer of hope.
Which brings us to this:
I have to be honest, I’m actually kind of excited. After all that the prequels did to ruin Star Wars for me, that’s saying quite a lot.
First of all, the black stormtrooper. I’ve heard a lot of griping about the fact that he’s black (or more accurately, that he isn’t one of the clones from Episode II), but come on guys–do you really expect the first generation stormtroopers to stay on active duty for fifty-plus years? Of course the Empire is going to replace the clone warriors with newer soldiers (hopefully, ones that can actually shoot).
Personally, I think it’s kind of awesome that he’s black. More than that, though, I think it’s awesome that he has a face. Imperial stormtroopers have always been quintessential mooks, and that’s always bugged me. Just once, I’d like to see the good guys face off against a bunch of stormtroopers who can actually shoot straight–it would add a whole new level of tension and danger. To feature one as an actual character is promising indeed
One of the things I loved the most about Star Wars was the grungy, dirty, second-hand feel of most of the technology. In the original trilogy, you really get the sense that you’re in a used future, especially on the planet Tatooine. From what I can see in the trailer, it looks like they’re bringing that back. Deserts + derelict spaceship wreckages + super fast hovercars that look like they’re about to break down = OMG YES.
But the part of the trailer that really won me over was this part right here:
Specifically, how realistic the X-Wings look. The way they kick up those clouds of water as they buzz the surface of that lake–you can’t deny, that’s pretty freaking awesome. My biggest running issue with the prequels was how they constantly abused my suspension of disbelief, so the fact that these X-Wings actually look real is perhaps the most promising part of the trailer for me.
Yes, the bad guy’s lightsaber with the dinky little lightsaber spurs looks … well, dinky. No argument there. But the last part, with the Millennium Falcon doing the crazy barrel roll as the music hits you with all of its glory–HOLY CRAP YES!!!!!
There’s not a whole lot of substance in this trailer. It’s only a tease–but wow, what a tease! I’d hate to get my hopes up only to have them dashed as badly as Episode I dashed them, but I’ve got to be honest: I’m actually kind of stoked for this movie now.
Episodes I, II, and III alienated a lot of the older fanbase, but it did appeal to the younger generation that came to the Star Wars universe without any preconceptions or expectations. Before I saw the trailer, I thought that Episode VII would simply continue that trend. Now, I actually think it may turn things around–bring back the old-school fans while showing the younger generation that Star Wars can be so much more.
The next big dream
When I graduated from college, my goal for my writing career was this: to make a living telling stories that I love. It seemed, at the time, like an impossible dream–something so far out of my reach that I couldn’t possibly achieve it without years and years of constantly frustrated effort.
Well, guess what? For the past six months or so, I’ve more or less been doing it. I live below the poverty line in a basement with two other guys, and I have to donate plasma to cover the difference in my expenses each month, but writing is my main gig and I’m making enough to pay all my bills with it. Barely.
There’s more to life than making a living, though, even doing something that you love. My current month-to-month lifestyle isn’t particularly well suited for anything except, well, living month-to-month. So I need to make some changes, and to do that, I first need to dream a little bigger:
A really good dream should be–or at least seem to be–a little bit impossible. That way, you don’t have to worry about achieving it too soon. At the same time, it shouldn’t be too impossible. If you can’t see myself ever achieving it, then what’s the point?
For example, one of my bucket list goals is to look down on this planet from space. With the awesome advances in spaceflight that companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are making right now, I can totally see that happening in my lifetime. But setting foot on an alien world? Nah, I don’t think that’s in the cards for me.
(Then again, if we figure out how to live forever, maybe it could actually happen. Even just adding another 50 or 100 years to my life would probably let me live to see a permanent base on the Moon or Mars. So maybe impossible is actually better–I don’t know.)
A friend of mine is building a business that he hopes will one day make him a cool seven figures. His mom makes six figures, but her name is also on six mortgages, so she’s pretty much tied to her job. One of his big dreams is to pay off all those mortgages for her so that she can retire.
When that happens, he’s going to celebrate by getting a bunch of friends together on a road trip to Texas. We’ll take a big refrigerated meat truck down there and go wild boar hunting until it’s packed full of pork. Then we’ll come back to Utah and have the mother of all barbecues. 😀
That’s the kind of dream I need to shoot for: something specific and personal that sounds kind of crazy but is still just barely within reach. In other words, it should be something that’ll make a good story when I finally achieve it. Or maybe I won’t achieve it–maybe the dream itself be so awesome that just the act of striving for it will make all the difference. As David Gemmell once wrote:
May all your dreams come true save one, for what is life without a dream?
It’s going to take more than one blog post to figure this whole dream thing out, so I’ll just leave that here for now. It’s definitely going to be on my mind for the next little while. If you have any impossible dreams of your own, please do share!
Trope Tuesday: Colony Ship
It’s been a while since I did the weekly Trope Tuesday posts, but those were a lot of fun and they still get a lot of traffic, so I’m going to bring them back with a couple of changes. Instead of focusing on the trope itself, essentially rewriting the description on the tvtropes page, I’m going to pick apart what I like about it and focus instead on the trope’s appeal. I’m also going to pick tropes that are in my own books, so that I can talk about how I’m using them.
To kick things off, this week’s trope is the Colony Ship. A staple of space opera, this trope is exactly what it says on the tin: a giant starship, often a worldship or a starship luxurious, taking a band of colonists to settle the final frontier. Essentially, this trope takes the wagon train to the stars concept to its logical conclusion, since what is a wagon train but a band of hopeful colonists? And since this is space, there’s no limit to where you can take it!
I love this trope because it’s so hopeful. Even in dark post-apocalyptic stories like A Canticle for Leibowitz, the possibility of taking humanity to the stars shines like a beacon of hope, an interstellar ark that can fling a light into the future. No matter how badly we screw up Earth, we can still atone for our sins by starting over with a clean slate out among the stars.
One of the other things that makes this trope appealing is that it’s not that far removed from reality. On that other wiki, there’s an article on Generation Ships with a link to this very interesting academic paper on the feasibility of building giant worldships. Just as Science Fiction conceptualized satellites, robots, and cloning before they were actually built, this may very well be the case with interstellar colony ships as well. I doubt that NASA or SpaceX are currently working on any prototypes, but we’re definitely on a path that will lead us there, if we have the courage and tenacity to follow it through.
If faster-than-light travel is in play, then the people who set off on the colony ship are usually the same people who build the colony. If FTL is not in play, though, things get really interesting. Sanderson’s second law of magic states that the limitations of a magic system are inherently more interesting than the powers, and since sufficiently advanced space travel is itself a kind of magic (see Clarke’s third law), then it makes sense that sublight colony ships are more interesting than FTL ones.
Sublight colony ships come in two basic types: generation ships and sleeper starships. In a generation ship, the colony ship itself becomes something of a miniature world, often like a city in a bottle (with all of the juicy story implications that come with it). In a sleeper starship, the colonists freeze themselves in stasis, opening the possibility for stuff like lightspeed leapfrog.
In my current WIP, Heart of the Nebula, I’ve combined both of these subtropes to create a hybrid generation sleeper ship. The ships are designed for sublight travel through a region of space where FTL is impossible, but there are too many colonists to fit in all the cryotanks. Subsequently, those who don’t go to sleep have to turn their tiny little ship into a self-enclosed home. When the sleepers wake up, they find that they’ve become living relics to the great-great grandchildren of their friends and relatives.
The main character in Heart of the Nebula is James McCoy, who you might remember from Bringing Stella Home. Just before he goes into cryo, he rescues his people from a terrible enemy, so that when he wakes up he’s a living legend. People have been watching movies about his exploits and doing grade school reports on him for generations. But the thing that made him a legend also put a lot of lives at risk, so that he’s also an extremely divisive figure. To make things worse, most of his friends didn’t go into cryo, so they’re all gone by now. But their great-great grandkids are still around …
As you can see, Colony Ships can be a lot of fun to play with. I’m definitely having fun with it now, and I plan to return to this trope often in the future!
DESERT STARS Goodreads giveaway!
Hey guys, I’m giving away a copy of my book Desert Stars! You can sign up for it in the link below. It’s one copy and I’ll be giving it away on Saturday, so sign up soon if you want it!
This is for the last first edition copy on my bookshelf. I’ve got a new edition with a slightly different cover coming out soon, so I wanted to get rid of the old ones in order to make way for the new.
So sign up!
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Back from unannounced hiatus
Wow, it’s been forever since I last blogged. One of my real-life friends even asked me why I never post anything anymore. That’s when you know you’ve fallen off the face of the Earth.
In truth, there’s not a whole lot to report. I’m plugging away on Heart of the Nebula, making good progress. My goal is to finalize this draft before the new year. After that, it’s off to the first readers, who should be pretty happy to see another Gaia Nova novel. It’s been far too long since I’ve written one of those.
As for Friends in Command (Sons of the Starfarers: Book IV), the first draft has some problems that can only be fixed by throwing in another viewpoint character. For that reason, I probably won’t be publishing it until February or March. I could drop everything and try to push it out by the end of January, but I want to make sure that I’m putting out the best possible book that I can. Besides, there are other pots on the back burner that I need to stir.
Speaking of pots and back burners, while I was at my sister’s for Thanksgiving, we got to talking about all the cooking and gardening that I’ve been doing recently, and she suggested in jest that I start a homemaking blog. Well. I have to admit, it sounds like fun. I’m going to write it under a pseudonym, so I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s going to be about the intersection between homemaking, emergency preparedness, and self-reliance.
Of course, I’ve got a lot of other work to do before I can afford to spend much time on a hobby blog. So at this point, I’m just trying to keep my head above water. With the holidays coming on, there’s a lot of publishing stuff that I need to get done, on top of all the writing. But don’t worry, I’ll still find time to post a thought or two on this blog. And I plan to run a few more Goodreads giveaways in the future, so keep an eye out for that!
Excited for a new old project
So a couple of weeks ago, I picked up the manuscript for a novel I’d written years ago, looking to see how much work it would take to salvage it. It’s a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, with James McCoy (again) as the main character. Long-time readers of this blog may remember it as Heart of the Nebula.
I wrote the first draft in 2010-2011 (started it almost exactly four years ago, in fact), and right from the start I could tell there were a lot of problems with it. I tried to throw in a romantic subplot that backfired horribly, and several of the major plot points weren’t thought out very well. I pushed through and finished it, though, and in spite of a few extra arms growing out of weird places, there was a lot of stuff in there that I liked.
(Come to think of it, I think this was my NaNoWriMo attempt back in 2010. That would explain why I pushed myself to finish the thing, even though I knew it had problems. I dropped it before the end of November and didn’t pick it up again until March, but since the only other books I had going on at the time were Desert Stars and Bringing Stella Home, I forced myself to finish it just so I had another one. This was back when I was under the impression that every book needs at least five or six revisions to be any good, and that most of the work in writing is actually revising. I no longer labor under those myths).
Over the next few years, I went back to it from time to time to dust it off and run it through a revision pass. Unlike my other novels, though, this one was so broken to begin with that revising wasn’t enough. I changed a lot in the 2.0 revision, cutting out most of the worst problems but not really replacing them with anything better. In the 3.0 revision, I mixed things around a bit but didn’t substantially change the story. Then I went through a bunch of incomplete revision attempts, tweaking scenes and rewriting sentences, but not really changing the story as a whole.
Then last year, I read through all the sundry drafts that I’d written of this story and put together a massive set of revision notes for the 4.0 draft. This time, I tore into the heart of the story itself, reworking plot points and adding new subplots to replace the ones that didn’t work. I went through the whole thing by chapter and scene, making a list of bullet points for all the changes that needed to be made. I also made notes for scenes that I needed to write entirely from scratch, and other notes for scenes that I needed to recycle from previous versions.
It was a massive undertaking, and I got about halfway through it before putting it on hold for other projects. That was nine months ago. Between then and now, enough time passed for me to more or less forget most of my ideas for it.
So earlier this month, I had an opening in my schedule and decided to take a look at this one again. Instead of picking it up where I’d left of, I decided to start from the beginning. Immediately, I was struck by how much better the story was. This wasn’t the three-armed baby I’d stuffed into the closet back in 2011–this was a really compelling story, with an intriguing hook and great potential to go places. The further I got in it, the better it became.
There were a couple of scenes early on that just didn’t work. I could tell that I’d reworked them to death, so I threw them out and wrote completely new ones. This time, they actually worked! By completely getting rid of the problem scenes, amputating those mutated limbs at the base, I was able to free the story from the mess in which it had spawned. For some of these scenes, revision is not enough–they need to be tossed and rewritten from scratch.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve really gotten excited about this project. Not only do I think it’s salvageable, I think I can make a really awesome story from it. I just got to the middle of it today, past the part where I’d stopped back in February. For the next few chapters, I think I’m going to throw out the revision notes entirely and just see where the story goes. I’ll probably write toward the stuff I know I want to keep, but throw out everything else.
So yeah, you can expect to see Heart of the Nebula come out sometime next year, probably in the spring. I still want to run it past my first readers, but I don’t think it’s going to need any major revisions after this one (at least, not any that should take more than a week). Keep an eye out for it!
The Writer by Dosshaus on deviantART
Two new cover reveals!
In between writing and revising, I’ve managed to redo the covers for Desert Stars and Stars of Blood and Glory. Check them out!
I’m really excited to get the new editions out, especially the print editions! Expect to see those soon, like maybe in a week or two.
If you’ve already bought the books, don’t worry; the stories are still exactly the same. The new editions will just have the new covers and some updated metadata. I’m not sure if Amazon automatically updates them if you’ve already bought them, but if it’s an issue, just shoot me an email and we’ll work it out.
Man, designing covers is fun! 😀 I should do it more often!
Still alive, still writing
One of my friends asked why I don’t post on my blog anymore, and I realized that I haven’t posted anything here in forever. It’s not that I’m not doing anything worth blogging about, it’s just that it keeps slipping my mind to post something. So hopefully that will change.
On the writing side of things, I’ve decided not to give myself any specific direction for the rest of the month other than to write at least 2k words per day (or revise at least 10k words). After my last WIP took a month longer to finish than I’d expected, I’ve come to realize that I might be able to be more productive if I changed up which projects I’m working on. So for the next couple of weeks, I’m giving myself permission to work on anything, just to see what excites me the most right now.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my writing friends recently. We’ve had some very interesting discussions, such as whether the 2nd amendment should apply to nukes and which modern cities are most likely to be abandoned in the next 200 years (Detroit doesn’t count, since it’s pretty much already there). It’s fun to get together and burn things, especially when you have a cast iron skillet and bacon. Good times–maybe I’ll post a couple pictures from the next bonfire.
I just finished all the new covers for Desert Stars, Stars of Blood and Glory, and Sholpan, so you can expect to see a few cover reveals soon! I’m keeping the artwork, but updating the typography to look more, well, professional.
Also, I just got an email from the Writers of the Future contest that they should have the finalists for the 4th quarter decided in about a week, and my story is still in the running! I’m super super nervous about this, because I think the story may actually be good enough to have a decent chance. You never can tell about these things, though–writers are horrible judges of quality when it comes to their own work. In any case, either way, I’ll probably self-publish that story once I hear back.
Winter is here, and I haven’t stocked up on LDS cannery hot chocolate yet. The shame! If the apocalypse happens between now and April, I’ll be broke (I am convinced that the LDS church offers hot chocolate as a food storage item so that we’ll have some form of currency in the event of the apocalypse).
In any case, I’d better get back to writing. Take care!