This Is Hardcore

I was recently invited to participate in the beta program for KDP hardcover publishing. Having been blessed with special favour from "Jeff" I felt it behooved me to explore the opportunity so I decided to make a hardback version of my book Weft available.

Feel free to order your own copy of Weft here.

The process of creating a hardback cover in KDP will be very similar to those that have endured the mental torture of the paperback process. A paperback cover file will not suffice and a new .pdf document with larger dimensions must be created. Scaling up the paperback file will not work as the alignment of the spine text may no longer be correct. There is a new and different Excel template available from Amazon to assis with this.

A further complication is that author copies are not available for order and it only appears to be possible to fulfil hardback orders for delivery in the United States. However the overall product looks very good and I am happy with the result.

Special thanks to Sarah Waites at Illustrated Page Book Design for helping with this project.

Personnel Dossier: Khamitova, J.

Name: Yemilia "Jema" Alexandrovna Khamitova-Romanovskaya
DoB: 6th June 2156, New Novosibersk
Augments: Hwangso HXC-1000 visuals, Stage II retroviral cosmetic rejuvenation

Education: Graduate of the Alliance Naval Academy class of 2176, received the Sword of Honour for graduating at the top of her class.

Instructor's Comment: JK was not the smartest or the strongest but she was, by some distance, the most determined. She never, ever relents in anything she does.

Military Service:  Commissioned as an Ensign in the Special Activities Division of the Naval Infantry. Military occupational specialties: Close Quarters Combat (Armed), Close Quarters Combat (Unarmed), Firearms, Explosives, Trauma Medicine. Awarded Combat Service Ribbon for the counter-insurgency action at [REDACTED] and the Naval Cross for her actions during the boarding of the [REDACTED].

Commanding Officer's Comment: One of the bravest and most action focussed junior officers that I have ever served with in the Sads. She was the first person through the hull breach on the [REDACTED] when we boarded it and the last person to leave it as it was breaking up.

General Intelligence Directorate Activties: Transferred to the GID in 2179 on the specific request of the Executive Director's Chief of Staff. Now performs assignments of the highest sensitivity and importance under the direct control of the EDCoS. No ratings within the normal GID evaluatory framework are possible as all activities are executed outside the control of the Operations Section.

Explorer to Prisoner in One Step

It's my observation that starting a new book can be a heady and liberating experince. The blanks pages stretch like an unexplored country on a map. Except, it's better than that as I can form the terrain according to my taste and will.

That's how I felt when I started work on Weft. My previous book, Redeeming Blood, was a tightly confined work as it was a sequel to Without a City Wall. I still very much enjoyed writing Redeeming Blood but its narrative and chronology was tightly constrained by what had gone before.

Weft, by constrast, was a completely different experience in its initial stages. As it shared no characters or events with my previous two books I was utterly unshackled and could do whatever pleased me.  What did surprise me was just how soon that book would start to form its own boundaries that had to be respected if the narrative arc were to be consistent and logical.

By the end of chapter 4, which would be about 20% of the way through the book if all goes to plan, my latitude to maneuver was already limited by the patterns of behaviour I had already established for my major characters.

So the moral of the story is: enjoy the liberty that the start of a new book affords because it doesn't last.

Infant Mortality

I started my third novel, Weft, in late January 2016 and, by early March I was 29,000 words in. I'd set myself some lofty goals for this book. Specifically, I want to write something longer, slower paced and more character driven than my previous two works. I believe that I was on my way to achieving these goals and, what I have to come to think of as, Weft 1.0 would have been a fine book.

So why have I stopped? There was a lot to like about Weft 1.0; I like the protagonist, the settings and the revealed use of technology. Granted, it had a few structural problems. Two of the main characters were dead by the end of chapter 2 and chapter 3 just seemed to be an extended love letter to the Middle East.

The process of writing it has exposed to me the book I should  have been writing. It's now apparent to me the that settings and power dynamics were exactly the reverse of what they should have been for the book to reach its full potential. 29,000 words is obviously not nothing. It's probably several hundred hours work that I do not discard lightly. However, I'd rather do that than expend several thousand hours more work into a book that would have been, perhaps even only slightly, less than it could have been.

There will be more planning, more character and location sketches then I'll be ready to start on Weft 2.0. I don't know exactly when but it will be the second half of this year.

Waiting for Weft

Toward the end of 2015 I pushed myself very hard on two simultaneous writing endeavours. I was doing a rewrite on Without a City Wall after it had been edited. At the same time I was in the home stretch on Redeeming Blood and writing 500 to 1,000 words per day on that. The combination of these two efforts was physically and emotionally draining so when I finished I decided I was going to take six months before starting my next book.

I had some ideas of the themes and the narrative trajectory of the next book. I also wanted to challenge myself by writing a longer book and get away from the dual narrative timeline I had used in both WaCW and RB. So I thought I would spend six months planning and outling the new book, which will be called Weft, and start writing in earnest in July 2016.

Apparently, that's not how my process works; I can't plan if I'm not producing. I developed a very rough structure, a few characters and a high level narrative arc but that was as far as I got. I just had to start. So, here we are: February 2016 and Weft is 2% complete! If I can continue to produce at my targetted run rate Weft will be complete on Halloween. It's a huge challenge but I've been here twice before and can do it again.