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.

Cover Story

When I first published The Zhala Trilogy I had the notion that I wanted them to look austere and anachronistic. In particular I was attracted to the aesthetic sensibility of the designs Romek Marber did for Penguin paperbacks in the 1960s. To me they communicated a stylish austerity that complemented and, at the same time, partially concealed each book's subject matter. So with character art commissioned from Brent Skinner that's what I did. I made my Marber Grid template and created my covers being very much pleased with the end result. The font used on all of the cover text elements was another wilfuly bleak choice and, in a final iconoclastic, flourish I reversed the normal orientation of the spine aping the style of a Russian or French novel.

While the covers greatly appealed to me it had somehow slipped my mind that I'm not the person who's supposed to be buying these books. Something more professional and commercially compelling was required. New covers were commissioned from Sarah Waites who did an absolutely oustanding job of capturing the essence of the books. The colour sequence of the originals has been retained in modified form and the character on the cover of the final book switched to Zhala from her father.

The Map of the Monarchy

I hate fantasy books with a map in them. However, I have learned from experience, that it is an oft requested feature from the reader. So here is the map of the Monarchy.  This was painstakingly constructed during the editing of all three books to remove geographical and temporal inconsistencies.

The Zhala Trilogy

After three years of not inconsequential effort the trilogy is complete. I enjoyed almost every aspect of creating these books. One would have to as the immense amount of mainly unrenumerated work would otherwise be impossible.

The trilogy sketches a distant world in a distant future in which Zhala rules as king using the same combination of deceit, guile and caprice that she used to become the Monarchy's ruler. She is assisted and occasionally hindered by her father and the diverse group of friends that form her cabinet.

Book I : A DYING KING
Book II: SORROW'S CROWN
Book III: OUT OF DARKNESS

ADK Paperback

If you really like it you can have the rights
It can make a million for you overnight
If you must return it you can send it here
But I need a break
And I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

That was a great deal of work but I am very happy with the results. The cover format is based on the Marber Grid invented by Romek Marber for his work on Penguin paperbacks in the 1960s. The artwork is by Brent Skinner.

You can and should it buy it here. When you do please remember to leave a review as that helps me more than the purchase.

A DYING KING

Like the Beatles with LSD I've decided to strike out in new directions and experiment with KDP in the hope of a breakthrough. I'm not saying it's better than Revolver but it's certainly a work of comparable artistic and cultural merit.

Buy it on Amazon.

My Man Booker Was Lost in the Post

In which there is a brief and not particularly happy update on the state of my writing projects.

Without a City Wall a.k.a. City Wall

I started writing this in Belgium in the autumn of 2007. At this time I had not yet learned what the craft of a novelist truly entailed and progress was slow. For a first book it was very ambitious as it had a split narrative structure with two separate but distantly related narrative arcs in alternating chapters. It's a Science Fiction novel that explores themes of interstellar colonisation, environmental degradation and the ceaseless urge of humans to create conflict.

By the southern hemisphere winter of 2010 the book was half finished and I was living in Australia. I still, it seemed, failed to grasp the centrality of hard work to the business of being a novelist. Over the years that followed my run rate did not improve and I finally finished it at the start of 2015.

In September 2015 I had managed, through the gift of flippancy, to acquire an agent who told me some hard and invaluable truths about the book which led to a rewrite. This much improved book was submitted to various US and UK publishers in February 2016. None of them liked it enough to loosen their famously taut purse strings and do a deal.

Redeeming Blood

I decided to build on the complexity of City Wall by doing something even more complicated. I spent most of 2015 writing another split narrative novel that would serve as simultaneous sequel and prequel to City Wall. Look at me! Look how very smart I am! Of course, the inescapable axiom that eluded me was that the sequel to a novel with no commercial viability also has no commercial viability itself. The positive aspect to the Redeeming Blood experience was that I wrote it in approximately eleven months from January to November 2015. If nothing else, I had finally realised that these things happen more quickly if one works harder.

City Wall, it has been observed, is a book about women and its companion piece, Redeeming Blood, exhibits pleasing symmetry in that it is a book about men. It also takes a giddying whirl through the topics of trans-humanism, representative politics, terrorism and first contact. I like it and its characters a great deal but, sadly, its a commercial dead end.

Six Sides

After City Wall failed to attract to a publishing deal I had the idea that it could be combined and resequenced with Redeeming Blood to form one novel that eliminated the split narrative structure and presented as one longer but more coherent work called Six Sides. I resisted the temptation for the pretentious neologism 6sides. I am in the process of doing this and the result is pleasing to me if nobody else. I have no idea what the plan for this is. 

Weft

Weft is a novel that sprang from two ideas: the titular word and my conceit that the definitive SF espionage novel had never been written and that I was the person to write it. Happily, I managed to sustain the fecundity I had exhibited in the production of Redeeming Blood and completed it withing the calendar year of 2016.

It is a much stronger and accessible than either of my first two efforts as I had learned a great deal from them. My eventual intention for Weft is to pursue a trade publishing deal as it has strong commercial appeal. Though this isn't going to happen any time soon.

A Dying King

This novel, which I wrote in manic burst of energy from January to July 2017, is my self-indulgent 50th birthday present to myself. I strongly dislike the formulaic strictures of the fantasy literature and wanted to write something that would challenge the conventions of the genre. It is the first work in a planned trilogy although I have no immediate plans to start on the second volume. I will not be seeking representation or a trade publishing deal for this book.

There you have it: 10 years, 4 books and 500,000 words summarised in one blog post.

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.

Losing My Shit

T. E. Lawrence once famously left the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station and, despite an offer of reward and beseeching newspaper advertisments, had to rewrite it from memory.

So how do I protect myself from this manner of catastrophic loss. In the digital age it is both easier and more complex but to mitigate the risks we first have to understand what they are.

The most obvious and likely scenario that could cause a writer to lose material would be a hardware failure on their computer. The best way to protect against this is an online storage service such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive. These services will automatically make an online copy of the work and if, stricken by a hardware failure, one could simply resynchronise a new device. Happily, this would also preserve your work for posterity should your house burn down with you in it.

What such a service would not protect against is some manner of encryption threat such as a ransomware attack as the local encryption would rapidly be replicated in the online copy. Anti virus will provide some but not total prophylaxis against such an attack. In order to preserve documents from a ransomware attacked there has to be a copy which air gapped, i.e. not physically connected, to the infected network.

One way to do this is by having another computer or device which is only sporadically powered on to connect and synchronise its copy of the documents. Obviously, having a seperate computer for this purpose isn't ideal for everyone so an external hard drive is only seldomly connected would also work but you'd have to manage the file copying operation for yourself.

There is also the remote chance that the documents themselves could become corrupt and unreadable across all your backups. This happens much less frequently than it did in the ancient pre-history of personal computing but I wouldn't say it's impossible that it can still happen; particularly with very large and heavily revised files like, say, a novel manuscript...

This is my practice:

• Every chapter gets its own file and sits in its own directory. This protects against file and directory corruption for a work in progress. The very most I could lose is one chapter.
• My entire body of work is synchronised online with Dropbox. This protects against hardware failure and house fires.
• Once a month I start up a virtual machine on my PC which connects to Dropbox and synchronises all the files. This protects against ransomware and other malware as the VM is usually powered off and therefore the files inside it are invisible. If malware that encrypts virtual hard disk files appear then I may switch this function to seperate physical hardware such as an Android tablet.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

In vivid contrast to romantic rejection, which customarily arrives in a single crushing blow like a massive brain haemorrhage, literary rejection is more akin to having one’s muscle mass slowly consumed by flesh eating bacteria. The rejections arrive, one at time, heralded by the primitive two dimensional envelope icon of the Gmail alert. The effect of each rejection, while of minor significance in themselves, gradually accrete over time until the writer’s sense of self worth is nothing but a husk that will crumble to dust at a touch.

 The full article is on the Red Sofa NaNoWriMo blog.

Three Full Time Jobs

That's what I've discovered writing to be. Obviously, theres no money in it so you are going to need a normal day job so that you can buy Gummy Bears and toilet paper. So that's the first job.

If you give the slightest fuck about the output then writing books is a job in itself. Not just the work of actually creating the book, but there is also the very considerable burden of proof-reading, consistency checking, research and general editing. That's the second job.

The third and final job is securing representation, writing proposals and marketing yourself and your work. It's immediately and transparently obvious to the most casual observer that publishers expect authors to arrive with an audience already attached and engaged. Why would they expend time and money marketing a book when the author can do it in between writing another book and bouts of Gummy Bear induced diarrhea?

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.

Starbound Interview with Lucinda Margaret K.

Transcript of an interview with the Gliese colonisation mission primary Pilot/Navigator from the United Nations Space Agency internal information channel Starbound on 1st August 2106.

Interviewer: Lucy, thank you very much for agreeing to join us on Starbound. We're very excited to have you here.

Lucy: Well, thank you very much. It's both an honour and a privilege.

Interviewer: Tell us a little about your background and family. Where were you born and how did you come to be an UNSA officer.

Lucy: I was born in Eurabian state of Northumbria in 2081. My father was a judge and a man of very fixed ideas regarding his childrens' scholastic prowess. All three of my brothers are borderline retarded and were therefore a profound disappointment to him in that regard. They all ended up in the army, obviously, but I went to boarding school were it transpired I had a modest talent for mathematics. Honestly, all three of them really are quite stupid. Can I say hello to them?

Interviewer: Er, that's great... And how did your UNSA career start?

Lucy: When I was 14, so that would have been 2095, my school recommended that I attempt the UNSA selection board. I did the preliminary aptitude and psychometric tests then I travelled to the UNSA Academy in Baikonur for the simulations and socialisation evaluations.

Interviewer: And you were accepted?

Lucy: Not immediately. I was rejected on the basis that I didn't respond in a positive manner to authority and would not take direction or follow process. So I thought that was that. However, a few months later they were having trouble getting candidates who could hack the requirements of the Pilot/Navigator track so they went to the bottom of the rejects pile and there I was.

Interviewer: How long did you spend at Baikonur?

Lucy: About five years, then I moved to flight training at the facility on Deimos. About four years ago I was assigned to the first Gliese flight as Pilot/Navigator.

Interviewer: What will the duties of the Pilot/Navigator be on the flight?

Lucy: I will do the orbital maneuvering of the colonisation ship, the Integral, at departure and arrival. I'll manage the reorientation of the ship from the accelerative to decelerative phases and execute the atmospheric entry and landing of the cargo containers. Finally, I'll fly the landers to the surface.

Interviewer: That all sounds very challenging. You must have moments of doubt and fear?

Lucy: No, I don't. This is a dangerous business and if I ever entertained doubts or fears I would have been killed ten times over by now.

Interviewer: Thank you very much, Lucy, for a fascinating discussion.

Lucy: Thank you.

Interviewer: Make sure you join us next time for an interview with Doctor Rafferty, the Integral's Flight Surgeon.

Lucy: You don't want to do that. She swears like a fucking docker.

Two Toes

Two Toes had got his the name the day the bunyip came out of the lake. It had heaved its ugly, steaming bulk from the dark brown waters and waddled over to Two Toes' favorite gum tree to rub its scaly hide against the trunk dislodging great skeins of bark. This was, in Two Toes' considered opinion, a diabolical infraction of the way of the world. 

He swooped, screaming, out of the gumtree, which was shaking violently under with the ministrations of the bunyip. Two Toes wasn't the biggest, strongest, quickest or cleverest galah in the forest but he was the bravest and most determined. Bravery and determination count for a lot in a fight with a bunyip. So Two Toes and the bunyip went at it in the sun dappled mud under the gum tree by the lake. They fought in a storm of feathers and drops of green bunyip blood. After a few extremely violent minutes the bunyip slunk back into the water lacking an eye. Two Toes had lost a toe from his right foot to the bunyip's snapping, serrated teeth reducing that foot's number of toes to the eponymous two. They both knew that the matter had been settled in favour of Two Toes and the bunyip never returned to the tree.

Two Toes was sat in the tree that was now indisputably his on the day the ghosts and their metal beasts came into the forest. His cousin White Wing, who was the dirtiest and foulest beaked galah in the forest, came flapping in to the tree.

“They’re ripping it all to shit, mate!” White Wing screamed while pointing one of his grimy wings to the cloud of dust and debris that was enveloping the forest on the Western shore of the lake.

“Who is?” Asked Two Toes.

“Ghosts and metal beasts!” White Wing’s shrieks reached an even more feverish tenor and he hopped from foot to foot on the branch in agitation.

“I’m going to take a look.” Two Toes exploded into the warm morning air with a crack of his wings. He’d heard tales of the ghosts and metal beasts from the sly and inquisitive magpies of the forest. They had been eating the forest up the coast for many years and it seemed they had finally made it to the forest around Two Toes’ lake.

He flew toward the dark brown cloud and roaring noises of the metal beasts. Settling on a branch next to the new clearing he watched the metal beasts spewing acrid black smoke as they ripped up and ate the trees. The ghosts who were smaller than the beasts scurried among and tended to them. Two Toes could not discern which was master and which was slave.

He was surprised when he was joined on his perch overlooking the devastation by a large and battle scarred magpie. Broken Beak was the leader of the magpies who held the forest on the western side of the lake as their undisputed fiefdom. Two Toes had some bitter and violent territorial disputes with Broken Break but they had now reached an accommodation based on guarded and mutual respect.

“I know what’s happening.” Broken Beak spoke in the usual magpie manner that left the audience in no doubt as to who held all the secrets in the forest. “The ghosts and the metal beasts are going to build a giant nest. I even know what it’s going to be called.”

“What?” Two Toes asked.

Broken Beak rubbed his chipped beak on one of his wings groom his feathers before he replied.

“Joondalup.”

An Interview With K.C. Shaw

Kate Shaw is a fantasy author who was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in East Tennessee, where she lives today. For her day job, she is a test proctor at a state community college. You can find details of her literary work here.

Kate and Jekyll

Tell us about the town in which you grew up.

I grew up in a tiny rural town in East Tennessee, which is in the southeastern part of the United States near the Smoky Mountains. Even today the town only has about 1,500 residents. It's half an hour's drive from anywhere really interesting--like a movie theater or even a supermarket--so I was eager to get out of there as a kid. I moved to the giant (by comparison) city of Knoxville, Tennessee after I graduated from college. Then about five years ago, after a lot of moves to different cities and states, I missed my quiet hometown. I moved back and actually bought a house.

When I was growing up, all the kids in town told spooky stories about Sawmill Road. We were all convinced it was haunted by the ghost of a bank robber who had wrecked his motorcycle and died during a getaway. A few years ago I was talking to my aunt--who also grew up in the same town--and mentioned the story. She laughed and said, "Your dad made that up when we were kids. I can't believe people are still telling it." I included the setting in one of my earliest published short stories, "Sawmill Road," published in Every Day Fiction in 2007, and used the ghost story itself in another story published in an anthology of Halloween fiction. Thanks, Dad. 

Sawmill Road

What character written by another author do you admire the most?

I greatly admire the character of Gen in Meghan Whalen Turner's book The Thief. It's told from first person and Gen is not an unreliable narrator, but the author still manages to keep secrets from the reader about him. I've read the book at least a dozen times, both because I love it and because I wanted to figure out how she manages to unfold those secrets as the book progresses.

As for admiring a character on a personal level, that would definitely be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz books. I grew up reading the series--my mom read them to me and my brother when we were little, and I read them to myself as I got older. In the books (as opposed to the movie), Dorothy takes everything in stride and is always positive. When presented with a weird situation she examines her options practically. I see a lot of her in my own personality. I still love the books.

When did you start writing your first novel and when did you finish it?

I wrote my first book in eighth grade, although since it fit in a single spiral notebook it was more of a long short story. I don't remember much about it but I'm sure it was awful. I wrote a no doubt equally awful (and short) book when I was about twenty, and a much longer but definitely a terrible book in my late twenties. I didn't start getting serious about writing until I was in my mid-thirties. The first books I wrote then were still pretty bad, but I've gotten better and better with every one I write.

I'm a fairly fast writer and typically complete a draft within a few months.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I'm between projects, but I think I know what I'm doing next. Remember that terrible book I wrote in my late twenties? It was an epic fantasy with a horse as the main character, and for some reason it popped back into my brain recently. The basic story idea was good and would make a great YA fantasy. I'm still in the early phase of worldbuilding and making decisions on where I want the plot to go, but this time I think I can do it justice.

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.

On Submission

The manuscript of Without a City Wall has been polished until it glistens like the hoard of Croesus and the proposal has been honed to a vorpal edge. So, this is it, we push it out into the cruel but hopefully not indifferent world to find its fortune with ten different publishers.

Now we wait. And wait. And wait. You get the idea.

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.

Books I'd Like to Read But Don't Want to Write

• A first contact SF novel written from the point-of-view of the aliens. I have a lurking suspicion that this already exists. Tell me if you know.
• A alternate history of Europe from 300 B.C. to the present which explores the question of what would have happened had Alexander III of Macedon turned west to defeat the Romans instead of heading east to give the Persians a shellacking.
• A Neuromancer sequel in which the AI from Alpha Centauri makes contact and connects into the matrix wherein Case has to battle it to the death.
• A fantasy trilogy in which... Hang on, scratch that, I don't want to read any fantasy.

Hunger

"There are no miracles or mysteries in cycling. It's just a question of how much you can suffer."

So wrote Irish cyclist Sean Kelly in his highly recommended autobiography Hunger. I am starting to come to a similar view on the subject of writing SciFi novels. You can sit around, looking at a blank screen and a flashing cursor, waiting to be touched by the ethereal finger of Arthur Charles Clarke to gain inspiration or you can get on with it and write something. Every day.

I finished my second novel, Redeeming Blood, this week and from the first word to the last it took me just over eight months. As my first book took me over five years this is a very welcome improvement in productivity. What was the difference in the two experiences? Well, by the time I started the second book I had detected a modicum of appetite for my first book in the industry. So I started to believe that this is something I could really do and I wanted to do more of it. In short, I got hungry and worked relentlessly hard at the second book.

In my not entirely unbiased opinion I believe the second book is a stronger piece of work in some ways than the first. It has more coherence and better structure from not having such a protracted gestation.

In other news, my third book will be called Weft and will not be related to WaCW or RB but will take place in the same imagined future. I have a storyboard and some notes for it but I am going to take a break after the death march of simultaneously rewriting WaCW and finishing RB. So the first word of Weft will not be written until 1st July 2016 and will not be complete until spring 2017.