maps – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Teaser: Starmap from Bringing Stella Home

First off, let me get some business out of the way. I did another post for the Genesis Earth blog tour, this time on my friend Cavan’s blog. The subject: how and why I decided to become an indie published writer.

Also, if you live in Europe, it may interest you to know that Genesis Earth is now available on XinXii, a European ebook retailer website. The price is 2.99 USD and I believe that is VAT inclusive, which should make it much less expensive than Amazon and other American sites.

Finally, an update on my upcoming novel Bringing Stella Home. I’ve commissioned the cover art from Līva Šmaukstele, an artist from Latvia. We just got the sketches finalized this week, and I am very excited to see the final copy! My copy editor, Josh Leavitt, is finishing up with the edits in a couple of weeks, so if all goes well with the art Bringing Stella Home should be up before the end of the month.

And now, the teaser: I spent a couple of hours this afternoon putting together the starmap for Bringing Stella Home. This will appear in the front, just before chapter one. Check it out:

Pretty cool, eh? I might touch it up a little before publication, perhaps lighten the background a tad. I did it in B&W so that it would work better for the Kindle. Many thanks to Logan Kearsley for help with the stellar classes; it really pays to have geeky friends who know so much.

And yes, the Good Hope Nebula will be in the cover art. Yes, it’s going to be awesome. Expect another teaser to come out soon.

😀

Drawing up the starmaps

I’m a big fan of indirect sequels, where each book tells a standalone story but incorporates many of the same characters as other works and is set in the same world. Sharon Creech did this with Walk Two Moons and Absolutely Normal Chaos: the main character from ANC was a minor character in WTM.

The thing is, I write space opera, which means that each novel spans at least two or three different star systems. After four or five novels, it can get really hard to remember where all the stars are in relation to each other. So, taking my own advice from an earlier post, I drew up a starmap for my universe.

For a pattern, I used these maps of the region of space local to Sol. I’ve since forgotten where I got them; I think wikipedia, or maybe the atomic rockets site:

Since they’re only 2-dimensional, they have some obvious shortcomings, but for my purposes they work just fine. The thing I like the most about these maps is that they show rough distributions of interstellar gas and dust. In my Gaia Nova universe, areas of high density (such as the interiors of nebulae) are off limits to the FTL technology, so finding a way to show that was absolutely critical.

And so, after playing around with MS Paint and The Gimp, this is what I came up with:

It’s definitely a work in progress (seeing as I’ve only got about a dozen stars up so far), but I’ve got to be honest–I geeked out hardcore when I was finished with this thing. Whether you’re writing fantasy or science fiction adventure (which I’d argue is a branch of fantasy), there’s just something about having a map…

The best thing is that it’s REALLY easy to update. If I want, I can throw up half a dozen new stars in fifteen minutes–or rearrange the current arrangement of stars with the simple click of a mouse. That’s good, because I don’t want to spend all my time drawing up maps–the map is just a tool to help me write the stories.

And oh man, I’ve got a lot of stories to tell! 🙂

Genesis Earth 5.0 is finished!

That’s right; the fifth draft of Genesis Earth is complete. It was a quick, easy edit, but there were quite a few problems with the last draft, mostly having to do with the physics and timing/distances.

Anyway, here are the stats:

ms pages: 335
words: 71,500
file size: 164 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 2 Nov 2010
end date: 20 Nov 2010

And the wordle:

I used to describe this novel as a “hard sf romance,” but after this last revision I can see that it’s not hard sf at all–though the science (or pseudo-science) plays an important role, the story really is driven by the characters.

Thanks to some of my recent first readers, I also realize now that Genesis Earth is solidly YA. Based on their recommendations, I lowered the age of the protagonists to sixteen and seventeen, and made some adjustments to the query letter.

I’m not sure what this means for agent hunting, since it seems that many YA agents do YA exclusively, and while this novel is definitely YA, my other ones are much more adult (at least in terms of content and character).

Anyway, the song that was playing when I finished this draft was The Mummer’s Dance by Loreena McKennit, one of the songs from the soundtrack that Charlie put together a couple years ago. I think it’s very appropriate, especially for the last scene with the Icarian natives before the epilogue:

Finally, I thought you guys might want to see the “map” of the Icarian star system that I drew out on the whiteboard on my bedroom wall. Man, you have no idea how much I’ve been geeking out to this in the past few days. It’s a map…of a star system!