One Thousand And One Parsecs

New STAR WANDERERS story coming soon!

For those of you who have been following the Star Wanderers series, I’m happy to report that Deliverance (Part VIII) will be out soon! My test readers have more or less gotten back to me on it, and aside from tying up a couple loose threads, it looks like we’re good to go.

This one is a bit longer than the other ones, and has quite a bit more action and adventure. It basically shows the events of Homeworld from Mariya and Lucca’s points of view. In Homeworld, most of the action takes place off the page while Jeremiah and Noemi work together in virtual space to hack the pirates’ network. Well, Deliverance brings all that back, plus a whole bunch of other awesome stuff that I think you’re going to enjoy.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Star Wanderers story without some kind of love story. Homeworld of necessity glossed over the romance between Lucca and Mariya, but in Deliverance, that’s at the center of everything. He sweeps her off of her feet when he rescues her from the pirates, but when the escape attempt fails and they crash on the alien planet, she sweeps him off of his.

Here’s the teaser:

SHE NEVER TOOK A CHANCE AND HE NEVER HAD A PLAN UNTIL THEY MET IN THE OUTWORLD STARS.

Lucca Tajjashvili isn’t a typical star wanderer. The youngest son of a wealthy planetborn family, he took out his inheritance early in order to build his own starship and seek his fortune on the Outworld frontier. The starfaring life suits him well, and he has no plans to settle down.

All of that changes when he picks up a distress signal in the Far Outworlds. A small colony has been taken over by pirates, and Lucca is the only one in a position to help. Among the prisoners is a beautiful young woman whom Lucca decides to rescue. But when the pirates see through his skillful ruse, any escape plan he might have had soon falls completely apart.

Mariya isn’t the kind of girl who likes to take chances. But when she finds herself stranded on an alien world with her would-be rescuer, that’s exactly what she has to do. Lucky for her, Lucca is just the sort of guy who can teach her.

So yeah, I should be finalizing the story in the next day or two. My first readers really liked this one, so I’m going light on the revisions, basically just fixing a couple of small issues and tying up some loose threads that didn’t quite get enough resolution before the end. If I don’t finish it tomorrow, I’ll definitely get it done on Monday.

The teaser and book cover are already good to go, so the only thing left is to proofread and format the thing, which I can almost certainly get done before January, even with the holidays. Right now, I’m shooting for a publication date in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. That might be a little ambitious, but it’s definitely doable, especially if I can get the proofreading done in the next ten days.

As with all the other Star Wanderers stories, I’ll be giving this one away for free via Smashwords to all my newsletter subscribers. If you’d like to sign up, there’s a form in the sidebar over there. ———–> I only send out emails when I have a new release, so you don’t have to worry about getting spammed (unless, of course, you think I write too many books, in which case you’re probably not going to sign up anyway :P). Smashwords has every ebook format, so if you get it from there you should easily be able to sideload it onto any device.

The print version probably won’t be available until January, seeing as it’s taking me forever to get the print versions up for the rest of the series. But Outworlder is already available in print, albeit with the old cover. Who knows, though–maybe those will be worth something someday. At this point, it’s almost certain that I’ll change them, but I’ll do original covers for all the print books in the series, just for those who want a complete set.

… and that’s about it. Lots of work to do, but I’m definitely having fun doing it! This story is solid, so I can’t wait until I can put it in your hands. If all goes well, I should be able to do that before the end of the month.

Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!

Operation SB #1: The Infiltrator

Title: The Infiltrator
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 3,945
Time: 2 days

For my first story for Operation Short Blitz, I took a story idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for some time: that one of the best way for aliens to spy on us without being detected would be to send an infiltrator disguised as a homeless person.

I tried to do something with this idea before, but like many of my short story attempts, it turned into something longer. For that one, I tried to tell the story from the point of view of a normal twenty-something single guy living in an apartment close to where the alien infiltrator had his base. But then it started turning into a story about the guy, leaving the alien as the impact character, and the story became about something else. I eventually lost interest and trunked it.

For this one, I kept it simple, telling it straight from the point of view of the alien. I resisted the urge to put in extra subplots and instead focused on the core idea itself, making sure that everything in the story was directly connected to it. That definitely helped to keep it short and focused.

I think it turned out pretty well. It was hard not to self-edit as I wrote it, which was part of the reason it took two days to write instead of one. I started it on Saturday, tried to finish it but went for a two-hour midnight walk instead. Picked it up on Monday and finished it up then.

So now, after doing a quick proofread to fix typos and grammer, I’m going to put it on submission, sending it to Writers of the Future first and working my way down. I don’t expect it to place, but maybe it will get honorable mention, which would be cool. And who knows? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Operation Short Blitz

Primary Objective: To master the art and craft of short-form storytelling.

Secondary Objective: To achieve name recognition in the speculative fiction field through publication in the major short story magazines.

For some time, I’ve wanted to branch out and learn how to write well in short form. I’ve written several novels, and I feel I have a pretty good understanding of that form, but short stories have always eluded me. I want to turn that around and really gain a degree of proficiency with short fiction, so that it’s not a big blind spot for me and that I can really master that aspect of storytelling.

My purpose in doing this isn’t to make money, though I certainly hope to make something (I write for a living, after all). Rather, it’s to expand my storytelling capabilities and build a name for myself. Most working SF writers have a short story component to their careers, so I figure it’s time to work on my own.

Since prestige is more important than money, I’m going to focus on getting published in the major magazines, and won’t self-publish unless either the story fails to sell anywhere (at which point I may just trunk it) or the first publication rights have already been exercised. I do expect to self-publish my stories eventually, but not until I’ve gotten as much mileage out of them as I can.

Strategic Outline:

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) keeps a list of qualifying markets for membership, which is useful for picking out the best magazines to submit to. If I can get my stories published in these magazines, which pay the highest rates and have the widest circulation within the field, I figure that Operation Short Blitz can definitely be considered a success.

In addition to the SFWA qualifying markets, there are a number of semi-professional markets that would be good to submit to as well. I’ve heard that Ralan.com is a good site for finding those, as well as Duotrope (though the site now requires a subscription). I won’t submit to the semi-pros until I’ve exhausted the professional markets first, though.

Even if I seriously doubt that a story is good enough to get picked up by the best markets in the field, I’ll still start at the top and work my way down. I remember hearing that the editor of Analog (or was it Asimov’s?) once got really mad at a writer who told him that he didn’t have a story that was good enough for his magazine, since that writer was basically trying to do his job for him, and writing his own rejections instead of giving his stories a chance. That isn’t going to be me.

(Although, there are some markets like Tor.com that have ridiculously long response times. For those, I suppose it’s better to wait until I’ve really got a zinger of a story to send them, since I can only send one submission to a place at a time.)

I fully expect to get rejected by everybody, multiple times for multiple stories. That’s okay–it’s all part of the process. I’ll probably get a sidebar widget or something to track my progress, with total rejections as a prominent stat. Maybe when I hit 500 or 1,000 or something, I’ll do something special. It’s a milestone of progress, or at least of effort, so I definitely plan to own it as such.

Even though my goals aren’t financial, I probably won’t submit to markets that only pay in contributor copies (or don’t pay at all, for that matter). Those publications aren’t really going to help me make a name for myself, and if I wanted to write for exposure, I could just as easily publish my stories myself. There’s no sense in writing for exposure unless you’re the one who has the control.

Of course, I’m going to have to write a lot in order to have a lot to submit. My goal for now is to write at least two short stories per month, preferably one every week. I figure that’s a good balance to strike between this and my other writing projects. My novels and novellas still take priority, but I’ll make time for Operation Short Blitz as well. Besides, sometimes it helps to take a break and work on something that you can start and finish quickly.

For fun, I’ll post a quick summary of each story I write, with the word count, genre, how long it took me to write, and what my thoughts are on it. If you guys can keep me honest and make sure I don’t slack too much, that would be awesome. I won’t be posting them, though, or really any excerpts either, since I need to keep the first publication rights in order to sell them (almost no-one takes reprints, unfortunately).

Logistical Considerations:

In order to do this as efficiently as possible, I’ve put together a spreadsheet of all of the magazines I hope to submit to, ranking them in order of preference and listing all of the relevant information about them. This information includes:

Name of the publication.
Word count requirements.
Genre qualifications.
Payment rates.
Expected response time.
Name(s) of the editor(s).
Link to their guidelines.
Link to their submission system.
Whether they accept reprints.
Whether they accept multiple/simultaneous submissions.
Whether they’re a SFWA qualifying market.
The length of any exclusivity period in their contracts.

In addition to everything listed above, I’ll also keep a column for each story I’ve written, to indicate which markets I’ve sent them to and any result. I’ll keep things color coded for convenience: red = standard form rejection, yellow = personalized rejection, green = currently on submission, blue = published, white = haven’t submitted yet, and gray = doesn’t qualify for submission.

Basically, it looks something like this:

Whenever I write a new story, I’ll list it in a new column on the spreadsheet, gray out any markets that I don’t plan to send it to, and immediately send it out on submission, starting with the market at the top and working my way down. If it goes through all the markets and doesn’t get picked up by any of them, then I’ll either trunk it or self-publish, but not until I’ve gone through all the markets first.

I’ve got to admit, one of the big motivations for me is this spreadsheet. There’s something about having all of my stories organized and color coded in a place where I can see them all that makes me want to write more of them. What can I say? I’m a nerd.

Tactics:

For the duration of this operation, I’m going to adhere strictly to Heinlein’s rules, which are:

You must write.
You must finish what you write.
You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
You must put what you write on the market.
You must keep it on the market until it has been sold.

No matter how great the temptation, I will not revise a story after it’s finished. If it’s broken, I’ll just trunk it and write something else, or rewrite it from scratch. If I workshop it, I’ll do it the way Dean Wesley Smith advises, which is to workshop it after you’ve sent it out, in order to learn how you can improve on the next one.

The reasons for this are twofold. First, a lot of writers I whom respect (especially short story writers) swear by Heinlein’s rules, so I plan to try them out and see just how well they work for me. Second, I don’t want to become a master reviser or editor, I want to become a master writer. I wrote almost all of my college essays the night before they were due, and could easily pound out an A+ essay on a first draft by the end of my college career. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if short stories are similar.

Since I have a lot of other writing projects to deal with, I’ll probably limit myself to two or three days at most for each story. I average around 2,500 words a day when I’m on project, so if it takes me a week to write a 5,000 word short story, I’m probably doing something wrong.

Like I said above, my goal is to write at least two stories per month, preferably one per week. I usually take Sundays off, so I figure that Friday/Saturday would be a good time to work on a short story. It’s at the end of the week, so it won’t interrupt my normal work flow too much, and gives me a chance for a nice break. If I don’t finish it in one weekend, I can put it off until the next one. I’ll try that out and see how it goes.

Of course, the only way to get great at writing short stories is to read a lot of them too. I already subscribe to Escape Pod and the Clarkesworld podcast, and just signed up for Daily Science Fiction as well. If any of you guys have good recommendations for short stories or magazines, let me know–I’m definitely interested in reading as much great stuff as I can. And of course, I’ll still keep working at the slushpile for Leading Edge.

That just about does it, I think. This is definitely uncharted territory for me, so I expect I’ll be learning a lot of great stuff along the way. For now, though, this is how I plan to go about doing it. It will probably take a couple of years before Operation Short Blitz really comes to fruition, but I plan to stick with it until it does.

Wish me luck! And if you want to join me by doing something similar, let me know how it goes!

Revisions, X-COM, and working on my short game

So I finished putting together the revision notes for Heart of the Nebula on Monday, and started working on those today. It was interesting to compare the original rough draft (which was completely broken) with the incomplete revised version that I’d worked on about a year ago (which was also completely broken, but in different ways). Fortunately, even though both drafts are train wrecks, they’re not unsalvageable. In fact, I think there’s a pretty good story underneath it all.

Usually when I write a big novel like this, the first draft works pretty well up until about the middle, then either it falls apart or the scenes start getting out of order, or both. In the first revision pass, I take out all the stuff that isn’t working, but struggle to come up with new stuff to replace it. Usually, I’m just recycling the old stuff, and the result ends up a bit out of place and watered down. On the third pass, I say “screw it” and come up with a bunch of new stuff, which helps me to see where the story is actually going and arrange the scenes in the correct order. It’s not always as straightforward as that, but that’s the pattern.

In fact, I’ve learned a lot of interesting things from this revision, which I’ll probably save for another blog post when my thoughts on this are a lot clearer. The big takeaway is that I need to clearly separate the tasks that should be done in my creative mind (like writing new words and coming up with story) and the ones that should be done in my critical mind (like mapping out what to cut and what to keep or recycle). But more on that later.

About a week ago, I got X-COM: Enemy Unknown on a Steam sale and I’ve been playing it like crazy. It’s a really awesome game! I love the complex tactical thinking and how it really puts you there on the ground with your troops. And then, an enemy pops out of nowhere, flanks you, gets a critical hit, and the next thing you know your favorite soldier who you’ve been meticulously leveling up over the last thirty missions is DEAD! NOOOOO!!!

So yeah, that’s been eating up a lot of time–probably too much of it, to be honest. But I’m still working on various writing projects, including a plan to improve my short game. I put together a spreadsheet of all the major short story markets in the speculative fiction field, and ranked them in order of preference. My plan is to write a short story every week (or at least twice a month) and put it on submission, going right down the line until I’ve exhausted all the appropriate markets. No revisions, no holding stuff back because I think it’s not good enough–just writing and submitting until I’ve mastered that side of the art.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but I’ve been holding back because … well, I don’t know why I’ve been holding back. Maybe I’ve just had it in my head that I’m not any good at short stories? Well, maybe right now I’m not, but I’m sure that it’s something I can learn. It’s a side of creative writing that I haven’t really explored yet, which means that there’s a lot of opportunity to learn and grow. And if/when I do start getting picked up by the major magazines, that’s going to do a lot to advance my career.

Don’t worry, I still plan to keep working on novels and novellas. This short story thing is something I’ll probably do when I need a quick break, to start something that I can finish in a day when I’m stuck in the middle of a gargantuan project. I’ll probably limit my short story writing to Saturdays, so it doesn’t interrupt things too much, and try to write them in one or two sittings if I can.

So that’s what I’ve been up to in the past week. In other news, it has gotten RIDICULOUSLY COLD out here in Utah, and I love it. Cold weather means hot chocolate, borscht, and oatmeal! It also means I need to get myself a bomber jacket–the kind with the awesome pockets on the arm. It’s been years since I had one of those, and they are good quality jackets.

In any case, that’s enough for now. I’ll do what I can to keep this blog updated as I move on with revisions and other stuff. In the meantime, stay warm!

SW-I OUTWORLDER is #1 on Amazon’s Space Opera subcategory!

Check it out! 😀

With the new cover, Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I) has been bouncing around the #3 / #4 slots, with the top slot taken by books with holiday weekend promos. But now that it’s Tuesday, it’s right up there at the #1 spot! This is without any kind of extra promotion on my part.

Outworlder has been kicking around on this list ever since it went free in October of last year. With the old cover, it hovered somewhere between #10 and #15. I’m not sure if this is the new cover, the holiday weekend, something else, or some combination of the three, but I’m happy to be riding the wave!

#1 on Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera translates to #41 on Kindle Ebooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction, which is not bad. This is for free books, not paid books. I haven’t cracked any of those subcategories yet, though the other Star Wanderers books are selling at a pretty decent rate.

This is for the Amazon.com store. Here’s how it currently ranks at the other stores:

Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom): #13
Amazon.ca (Canada): #18
Amazon.fr (France): #2
Amazon.in (India): #14
Amazon.com.au (Australia): #6

I may have a problem with checking my sales numbers too much. 😛

Not a new book, just a new cover!

So a couple of weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from Derek Murphy over at CreativIndie Covers. He’s a cover designer who periodically does cover makeovers for indie writers, as a way to bring in business and build his own reputation. He wanted to do an experiment to see if he could double my sales in a month by making over the cover for Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I).

Well, I’ll be the first to admit that the original cover isn’t all that great. The book was a bit of an experiment, to see if writing in a more serial format would be more effective than writing and releasing full-length novels. I’d spent a fair amount of money to get Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars up, and sales were too low at that time to justify another huge publishing project. In order to cut costs, I did the covers myself, using public domain images from NASA and Hubble. They aren’t super great, but they do say “space!” which is better than a gray box with a question mark.

If anything, I’m surprised that the series has done as well as it has with the current covers. Each book in the series sells in the double or triple digits monthly, and Outworlder has been in the top 20 on Amazon’s Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera and Kindle eBooks > Romance > Science Fiction subcategories for over a year. The consistency with which these books have been selling has really surprised me, so anything to push these books to the next level and put them in front of new readers will hopefully yield some awesome results.

So Derek and I went back and forth for a while, and this is what we came up with:

Pretty sweet, huh? 😀

I am extremely excited about this cover, and I’d love to see what he can do with the other ones. First, though, we’re going to put this one up for the month of December to see if it has a noticeable impact on overall sales. I’ve got data from last December as well as the last few months to compare it to, so we’ll see how it does. And if there is an appreciable increase, I’ll probably go ahead and have him redo all the other covers as well.

Since this is still just an experiment, though, the covers for the print editions will remain the same as the old ones. I don’t anticipate keeping them forever, though, especially if this experiment works out. Even so, I’m still going to release them as I’d planned, so if you want the print versions, you can get them.

And who knows? If these books take off, or I become a well-known author in the future, the original print versions of the Star Wanderers books may be worth something someday. Maybe. Who knows?

So far, it appears to be working. The new cover went live on Amazon last night, and Outworlder has dropped about 700 rankings to #1,705. That’s without any sort of advertising or promotion, except for the also-bots of course. Last year around this time I participated in a fairly big group promo, so I’ll try to get this book listed in a couple of places to make up for that. Or maybe we can extend the experiment through January, in the interest of ~~keeping a really cool cover~~ getting more accurate data? We’ll see.

Man, it’s so much fun to be a self-published indie writer! 😀

Back to novels again

So yesterday I finished the rough draft of Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile. It needs work, but at least I’ve got something to work with. Of course, before I can do that, I need to take a break and work on something else.

For my next project, I’m going to do a massive revision of a novel I wrote almost three years ago. Heart of the Nebula is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and features James McCoy as the main character. He’s older and (somewhat) wiser, with a lot more responsibility resting on his shoulders as an officer in the Civil Defense Corps of the Colony. With the Hameji occupation driving them into famine and poverty, the stakes are a lot higher than the first book, and the dangers and intrigue a lot more complex. Not only are there pirates and criminals to deal with, but the Patrician is playing his own game, and James soon gets caught up in it.

Currently, this book is a real mess. I’ve attempted numerous revisions of it before, but finished none of them. The first part of the book is probably pretty close to where it needs to be, but then there are a bunch of broken subplots, characters who were excised from certain sections and left in others, scenes and chapters out of order, and relationships that develop either way too fast or hardly at all.

Before I dive in, I’m reading through the whole draft and making notes on a scene by scene basis. I’ve got a map set up for where all the scenes need to go, and I’m putting together a checklist of all the changes I have to make. I did the same thing when I wrote Bringing Stella Home and Genesis Earth (come to think of it, Desert Stars as well). Hopefully, this will help the revision to go quickly and to fix all the broken elements without watering down or polishing out the good stuff.

Probably the most important thing about revision notes is that they help me to separate my critical mind from my creative mind. When I’m looking at the book in my critical mind, I want to throw out the stuff that isn’t perfect and make lots of changes to the story. However, that can be a lot more destructive than constructive, since it’s the creative mind that really makes the good stuff. By writing a set of notes before diving into revisions, I can keep my critical mind from making too many changes to the actual story, and identify the problems so that when I go back to make the changes, I can switch the critical mind off and keep the creative mind on. And often, instead of making the changes I told myself to make (or rather, the changes my critical mind told me to make), my creative mind comes up with something else that puts the story on a much better path.

That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see how it goes. The revision notes are going pretty quickly now, and even though things are going to get more complicated deeper into the book, I don’t think it will take me more than three or four days to finish them (unless I get called in to a job somewhere). Once that’s done, I’ll dive right into the book, probably tossing half of it and rewriting from scratch.

Thing is, it’s been a long time since I’ve worked on a novel this way. All last year, I’ve been writing novellas, and while some of them have required overhauls, it’s never been too complicated. With novels, though, it can be a mess. I’m sure I can do it, but I’m not sure how long it will take me. Hopefully no longer than a month, but I’m not going to stress it. The important thing is to do it right, and to really immerse myself back into this world.

So that’s what I’m working on now. I hope these updates on my writing projects aren’t too boring. They’re really helpful in writing the Author’s Notes at the end of each book, because I can go back to my blog, drill down the categories by book title, and see what I was working on at various different times when other stuff was happening in my life. For a book like Heart of the Nebula, that’s going to be important, because it’s been almost three years in the making. For most of that time, it was just sitting on the back burner (or, more accurately, the fridge), but it’s out again now and I’m focusing on it again. We’ll see how it goes.

Ghost King by David Gemmell

Ghost King Another review of a David Gemmell book? Yes, because I’m just that much of a fanboy.

With the Drenai series finished, I decided to sink my teeth into the Stones of Power series. This series confuses me, because I’ve read The Jerusalem Man, which was retroactively put in as book three, but that’s a post-apocalyptic tale of the gunslinger Jon Shannow, but the series actually starts in Arthurian England. As soon as I got a couple chapters into the first book, though, I began to see the connection.

Ghost King is an alternate history tale of King Arthur (Uther, in the book), and how he rises to become the Blood King of Britannia. His grandfather, Culain, takes him into the mountains after the Brigantes assassinate his father, and there trains him to become a leader and a warrior.

Culain, of course, is one of the immortal Atlantians, just like his friend Maedhlyn (Merlin). After the fall of Atlantis, they have wandered the Earth as gods, using the powers of the Sipstrassi stones to accomplish wonders. Worshipped in turn by the Greeks, the Romans, the Hittites, and the Babylonians, Culain has tired of immortality and now wants to live out a mortal life. But his jilted lover, the Ghost Queen, wants revenge on him for leaving her. She was the one who killed Uther’s grandmother and mother, and who now wants to kill him and rule all of Brittania. But her son Gilgamesh has corrupted her, so that in a parallel universe she must kill twenty pregnant woman every month just to replenish the magic of her Sipstrassi …

Okay, I might as well give up trying to explain the plot, because it only gets crazier. Somewhere in this parallel dimension, a lost Roman legion has been wandering for hundreds of years, consigned to the void by Culain. Also, Gain Avur (Guenevere) is in there too, as well as the Lance Lord (Lancelot), though he doesn’t come in until the epilogue. There are also demons and vampyres, all sorts of battles, and lots of other crazy stuff. It’s pretty freaking dang awesome.

I really enjoyed Uther’s transformation from the weak, bookish boy to the warrior king, as well as the budding of his relationship with Gain Avur (what can I say, I’m a sucker for romance). My favorite character, though, was Prasamaccus, a crippled Brigante peasant who becomes one of Uther’s close advisors. He’s basically a regular guy who gets sucked up into the whole adventure, but he’s level-headed and practical enough that he manages pretty well. He’s also just a good person, which was quite refreshing in a world full of death and drama.

At one point, after rescuing Uther, he’s a guest in Uther’s chief general’s villa. The general gives him a servant girl for the night, since in this world most men think nothing of bedding a slave. Prasamaccus is a peasant, though, and he’s kind of shy. The girl was actually captured in a raid in Germany, where she was raped, and this is her first time bedding someone since those traumati not the monster she’s afraid that he’ll be–they actually share a really tender moment of intimacy that heals much of her trauma and introduces him to the love of his life.c events. She’s absolutely terrified, but so is Prasamaccus–he’s a cripple, and assumes that women just don’t want him. He spends the night with the girl but doesn’t force her to sleep with him, and when she realizes how gentle he is–that she holds the power, and that he’s not the monster she’s afraid that he’ll be–they actually share a really tender moment of intimacy that heals much of her trauma and introduces him to the love of his life.

It’s poignant, story-rich moments like that that make me such a David Gemmell fanboy. Usually they happen in the midst of war, between battle-hardened friends who are forced by circumstance to do something heroic, but they also happen in the quiet moments between characters who carry other scars. That whole thing in the previous paragraph only happened in three pages or so, but it was still so incredibly powerful and moving. Every moment of a David Gemmell book is like that, sometimes from the very first paragraph. It’s awesome.

As far as David Gemmell books go, I’d put this one in about the middle of the pack. It’s not quite as powerful as Legend or Wolf in Shadow, but it doesn’t meander as much as White Wolf or have such an anti-climactic ending as Ironhand’s Daughter (which was probably split by the publisher–more on that when I review The Hawk Eternal). The characters aren’t quite as memorable as Druss, Skilgannon, or Waylander, but they are pretty awesome nonetheless. I’d rate this book a 3 compared to Gemmell’s other books, but a 4.5 out of fantasy overall. Definitely worth a read.

I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo

I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo because … yeah, I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo.

I’ve been doing a lot to get the print versions of the Star Wanderers novellas up, but beyond that, not a whole lot of writing. Still one scene to go in Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile (that’s the working title, anyway), but I keep putting it off because … I dunno. So many other things going on, maybe? Sometimes it’s the easy stuff you put off the longest, sometimes, the hardest stuff. But I already said I wasn’t going to talk about nanowrimo …

In any case, I set Thanksgiving as the deadline to get all the print versions out for Star Wanderers, and it looks like I’ll be able to hit it. Outworlder, Fidelity, Sacrifice, and Homeworld are already up, and should propagate to Amazon in the next couple of days. Dreamweaver is in the proofing process, and I should be able to typeset Benefactor and Reproach in the next couple of days. It’s a relaxing thing to do while listening to podcasts, and the books are short enough that I can get all the work done in just a few hours.

In December, I hope to release a new Star Wanderers book: Deliverance, which covers the events of Homeworld from Mariya and Lucca’s points of view. This was a fun one to write, so I’m looking forward to getting it out there for you guys to read. It’s with my first readers now, who should get back to me by the first week of December or so. The draft is already pretty clean, so unless they bring up some major issues, I should be able to get it out fairly quickly.

And after that, I think I’m going to take a break from the Star Wanderers universe for a while to work on some novels. It’s been fun doing the shorter stuff, and I’ll definitely return to the novella form in the future, but there are a bunch of unfinished projects screaming at me to work on them. First among them is probably Heart of the Nebula, which I haven’t even touched in almost a year. It needs a huge overhaul–I’ll probably scrap a good half or so from the middle, probably more. But the ideas behind the story are solid, and I would really like to get another Gaia Nova novel out soon.

But the one that’s calling the most to me is probably Lifewalker. That’s the post-apocalyptic one with the guy wandering down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn toward a Las Vegas populated by cannibals. There’s actually a lot more to it than that, but that’s the 10 second pitch I’ve been giving people. The voice on that one was so different from anything else I’ve done, I had to take a break from it after I got to a good stopping place. But recently, it’s been calling out to me to finish it. I’ll probably move on to that one if I don’t go to Heart of the Nebula first.

Then there’s Edenfall, The Sword Bearer, a couple of other untitled ones, that Sword & Planet story I said I’d write … holy crap, so many unfinished books. I feel like I’m a bad writer whenever I don’t finish everything I start, but that just seems to be part of my process. Hopefully none of my readers are too impatient to get any particular book–although, come to think of it, that kind of pressure might be just what I need.

Either way, I really need to get back to writing. But I already said I wasn’t going to talk about nanowrimo (I wonder if this blog post counts?)

😛 Later.

Trope Tuesday: Eagle Squadron

You’ve got your standard mercenaries: hired guns who fight for money. Then you’ve got your fighting for a homeland types: mercenaries (usually) who used to have a cause to fight for, but now all they’ve got is each other, and maybe the hope that someday they’ll find a new homeland to replace the one they’ve lost. Invert that, and you’ve got an eagle squadron: a ragtag bunch of volunteers who leave their homeland to fight for someone else’s cause, usually a sympathetic rebel faction or band of underdog freedom fighters.

It isn’t really fair to group these guys with mercenaries, since they aren’t fighting for money or fortune. Far from it. They believe so totally in the cause they’re fighting for that they’re willing to give up their lives for it, even though they could easily go home and live out their lives peaceably. At least, that’s how it is on the idealist side of the sliding scale. On the more cynical side, eagle squadron is really just a Legion of Lost Souls full of thugs and criminals who are hoping to clear their names. Or, even further down the scale, perhaps they just love killing.

Even on the idealist side, there’s always the possibility that your terrorists are our freedom fighters. After all, where did Al Qaeda come from? The Mujahideen, volunteers from all over the Muslim world who joined with the Afghan freedom fighters against the Soviet invasion of the 80s. When they won, it galvanized their Islamist cause and inspired them to take the fight to their homelands, many of which were ruled by dictators. Since the United States props up many of these dictatorships, it was only a matter of time before they turned on us as well.

The name from this trope comes from three volunteer squadrons of US fighter pilots in World War II, who joined the RAF in the fight against the Nazis back when the United States was still neutral. Since the Nazis have pretty much become the standard of all that is evil in the eyes of our modern society, the eagle squadrons are now heroes by default. War is of course more complicated than that, though there is still room for heroism even in a world of moral ambiguity.

When the eagle squadron makes the ultimate sacrifice, you can count on them being remembered as heroes for all time. That’s basically what happened with the Alamo: a bunch of frontier Americans sympathetic to the cause of Texan Independence went to join the fight against Santa Anna and made a bloody last stand when the war went out of their favor. Of course, since history tends to be written by the victors, it’s arguable that this only happens if the survivors go on to win the war. After all, plenty of expatriates volunteered to fight for the Nazis, but we don’t remember them in quite the same way.

Wow, this post turned out to be way more cynical than I’d intended. The basic drive behind this trope is the yearning for an ideal, a cause to fight for. We root for the eagle squadron because we want to believe that all it takes to defeat evil is for good men from across the world to take up arms against it. If Eagle Squadron is led by the Incorruptible, then that might actually be the case, though it’s difficult to make that kind of a story anything other than black and white, one-dimensional, and utterly inauthentic.

I haven’t played with this trope too much yet, though I’ve been meaning to write a prequel book in the Gaia Nova series that tells the origin story for Danica and her band of Tajji mercenaries. Her father was an admiral in the Tajji rebellion, and when the star system fell to the Imperials, they killed her entire family. She escaped, though, and was taken in by an eagle squadron commander that fought alongside her father against the Imperial oppression. After getting back on her feet, she leaves the Eagle Squadron to start her own military band, intent on getting revenge for the loss of her homeworld. I’m not sure yet how the eagle squadron will play into that, but I see the commander as trying to dissuade her from this path.

In any case, it’s definitely a trope I want to play with. I had a lot of fun with fighting for a homeland in Stars of Blood and Glory, so this would be a way to revisit some of the dynamics that made that story interesting. You can definitely expect to see more of this from me in the future.