C. Litka's Blog, page 49

Lines in the Lawn

My, that went fast. The simple illustrations that I planned to do didn't take more than three or four hours to complete, and with proofreading done, blurbs written, and, a sample epub version looking as well as it is going to look, I uploaded Lines in the Lawn to Smashwords today, 8 June 2020. We'll see if it makes its way to Apple, Kobo & B&N in the coming days. I will probably wait to see if it passes muster for those stores before submitting it to Amazon.
This little story is sort of a joke. I hated (note the past tense) mowing my lawn. As a kid we moved the the 'burbs when I was eight, and so I knew how the great game of having the greenest, most weed-free, most uniform lawn in the neighborhood is played. (Cutthroat) And so, when we moved into our house on a new street in a small town, I wasn't about to play that game, even though I had nice neighbors who did play the great lawn game. They'd mow twice, if not three times a week, put on fertilizer and weed-killer themselves or having a lawn service.Weed-wack every edge. Blow the grass clippings off the sidewalk and driveway, before the wind did. On the other hand, my grass grew just fine without any help from me at all. I'd put some week-killer down ever so often to keep the "creeping charlie" in check, but it never hurt all my wild violets in the grass. Nor those bright yellow spring flowers, were my hose couldn't reach. And there was some tall grass around my trees. And I only mowed once a week, and only if it needed it. As I told my neighbors, there's always at least one snake in any suburban paradise, and when it came to lawns, I was theirs.
This story was sort of a my response to the great game. I actually mowed my lawn like Roy. It provided a little amusement in an otherwise dreary chore. Given how much I hated mowing the lawn, I rather hoped to die doing it. It would be so ironic. But last year we moved to a condo, so that not only do I not have to mow the lawn anymore, but I'll have to find another ironic way to die.
Below is the blurb for Lines in the Lawn: 

A SHORT STORY of some 4,000 words, with illustrations, written to be read by a grownup for a child

Young Roy Williams liked to look down from his bedroom window on to the front yard, with its neat, precise lines made by the wheels of a lawnmower his father used to mow. He couldn’t wait for the day when he too, could make lines in the lawn

But he had to wait, for what seemed like forever. He had to wait until he was old enough, and big enough to be able to push the lawnmower, and not cut off his foot with it. And when that day came, he discovered that he had to start mowing in the what his dad called “the minor leagues.” Which is to say, the small, flat backyard of the Williams’ home

After some setbacks, Roy makes it to the major league of mowing – the long, sloping front lawn. He discovers that mowing the hilly front yard of the house was hard work. He also discovers that his style of mowing – his lines – rather clashed with those of his father’s 

Ah, but is there more to Roy’s style than just artistic temperament

Lines in the Lawn was written to entertain the grownup as well as the child. As a consequence, there are words that the grownup will have to explain. Words like “diagonal,” and “pantomime.” However it is felt that this is a plus, since it encourages a conversation between the grownup and the child or children, enriching the experience for both.

Lines in the Lawn -- Coming soon!

Lines in the Lawn has been sitting in the "drawer," which is to say a file in my computer, for probably a dozen years awaiting its illustrations. It is a 4,000 word short story that I wrote for a grownup to read to a child. My original plan was to illustrate it with a dozen drawings, but well... I'm not an illustrator and I never quite got around to even trying to do the illustrations. While my original idea for the illustrated book would've worked for a print book, illustrations in ebooks, with their flexible type sizes and layouts, makes illustrations rather clunky. It would certainly loose its original formatting, unless I released it as a PDF. But as a PDF the print would be too small to read. So it sat for these dozen years. Until now.
Now I've, rewritten the story to my current standards, and as, as you can see, I've worked up a cover for it. I still have three or four simple simple interior illustrations to do, but I'm going to keep those very simple, stand alone illustrations that are a map of the yard showing the lines in the lawn left by the lawnmower as described in the story. They will probably take up one page each.
I'll have more to say about the story, in a future blog post, but suffice to say that I wrote the story with the idea of entertaining the reader as well as the child being read too. It's a bit of a mystery story...

Exploring My Library

I find that writing is a wonderful way to fill one’s time, and well, I have a lot of time to fill these days. I can’t blame that on the pandemic, as that hasn’t affected us in any significant way, i.e. my wife only allows me go grocery store once a week, and only to the supermarket a minute away, and at 5 in the morning. Being both the household cook, and a former grocery store clerk, I rather like grocery shopping. I miss the deals and imported food of Aldi and the vast selection of everything at Wodemans. Sad, but we all must soldier on, I guess.

Anyway, I find that time really flies when I’m writing. Hours go by unnoticed. However, I am not writing fiction at present. I am, however, running the beginning of what I hope will be my next story through my head -- for a few minutes at a time all through my waking hours. But writing it, if I get an actual story out of it, is still months away. However, since I have the time and I enjoy writing, I’m focusing my typing efforts on this blog. Now, I don’t think I’m very good at this type of writing, but on the theory that practice makes perfect … I’ve decided to launch yet another series of posts, this time featuring the books in my library. Contain your excitement.

My library is pictured above. It used to be spread out along two walls, but having moved last year, I had to condense everything into just one wall, floor to ceiling, with many of my old paperback SF stuffed along the edge and along the top of the actual shelves. A little awkward, but I don’t think I’ll be re-reading most of those old SF books anytime in this life. They’re still with me, not as books to be read, but as loyal, lifelong companions. Some of them have been my faithful companions for the better part of 60 years. They’ll see me dead. Hopefully they won’t end up in a land fill when that time comes.

My plan for this series of occasional posts is to pick an author, show the books of that author that I have in my collection, and talk about them and what they mean, or did mean, to me. The first author I am planning to feature is Andre Norton. The reason I wanted start with her is that I’ve been follow the Norton re-reads on TOR.com and I am amazed at all the books of hers that were published in my white-hot decade of reading SF (1962-1972) that I have never heard of. So why did I stop buying Andre Norton’s books? I still have fond memories of her books, though I know… Well, we’ll save those speculations for the first blog post in this series, coming soon. Stay turned.

Origin Stories -- The Bright Black Sea (Part Three)

A cover featuring the arrival of Cin in the nick of time on Despar

In this my third and last, I promise you, post on how The Bright Black Star came to be written, I want to talk about the things I did and why. And the things I learned along the way.

Rather than starting the story like a scalded cat right out of the gate, (as it seems to be how many writers do it today) I decided to spend some time setting up the premise, the story’s setting, its economics, and then introduce the ship, the Lost Star, its acting captain, and crew. Because I don’t have a visual mind, I see my creations only vaguely, out of the corner of my eye. So, to give them some sort of concrete existence, I imagine all the little, everyday details of life in the universe I create, to build a scene and a setting, piece by piece. There is a lot of that in my writing. For instance, if I wanted dogs aboard the ship, they would need to have magnets surgically implanted into their paws so that they move about when the ship was in free fall, which was much of the time. On the other hand, cats, with their claws, might not need them. And so it goes, lots of little details, that might be considered non-essential, but contribute to my understanding of my world.

I also wanted to create a well rounded world of the “spaceers” central to the story. I tried to imagine how they lived both aboard ship and downside. Side stories, like the moon buggy racing, were borrowed from stories about old sailing ships in anchorage waiting for their cargo. Unlike today, here turnaround times are kept to an absolute minimum, in the old days, idle crews would stage contests – boat races, cricket matches, etc to pass the idle time. I also tried to make interplanetary trade economically realistic. Ships like the “Firefly” that carry a couple of pallets of cargo from planet to planet make no economic sense. And since the days of break cargo are long since gone even today, it would make no sense to move cargo between the planets in anything but prepacked containers. I even thought about how credit might work between mostly economically independent planets. The central story could’ve been told without these sidelights – and I am sure some readers would argue that it should’ve been – but I disagree. I want my readers to look back and have the feeling that they actually visited the Nine Star Nebula. I want them to believe that the Nine Star Nebula is real.

Battle scene art with the Lost Star and a jump fighter

And yet, because I don’t have a visual mind, I had only the vaguest impressions of what my characters look like – at best. I did do some sketches of them, but in the end, I decided that less was best. Rather than piece together some sort of manikin of a character, I just gave each a vague characteristic or two – perhaps a body shape, or a hair color, and build my characters on what they said and did. I am quite content to let the readers to fill in these blanks themselves. If someone is pretty or handsome, I’ll leave it to the reader to picture in their mind what they think pretty or handsome looks like. I was careful not to give any character a skin color. That too, is entirely up to the readers. And because the story is set so far in the future, and so far away in space, I did not give any character any sort of ethnic homeland on earth. In these stories, those homelands have long since been consigned to ancient history.

I felt going into the story, that the idea that they would have some sort of different adventure on every planet they call on, wasn’t all that realistic. Realistically, the spaceer’s life should’ve been pretty tedious – one orbit like another, cargoes loaded and discharged, around and around they go – even the spaceer dives would be almost the same. Of course, there could be small adventures when downside, but I felt that eventually I’d have pushed my imagination to the breaking point, by having to come up with some new danger or adventure for every planet and every story. To smooth over, as it were, this sticking point, I suggested early on in the story that there was some mystery connected to the ship and its former owners, the “Four Shipmates,” as they called themselves. I figured that that mystery, whatever it was – and I had no idea what it was – could serve to drive the story when an adventure a planet got stale. It could be used to explain at least some of the adventures as the story progressed. As it turned out, I turned to it almost right away, and it became the central theme of the whole book. That was not planned, it just evolved that way. And to tell the truth, the mystery, also evolved as the story went along. It was never clear what the mystery was when I was writing the first three or four, or five episodes. I had several possible candidates in mind, and only settled on the final one, as I went along.

A never published cover featuring a scene from the bridge. I decided not to use it because it wasn't very good, and I didn't want to imply how my characters looked, since I wanted to leave that to the readers.

This is the way a lot of the story worked. I’d toss things in just for some “color” since, as I said, I focused on little details to build the set and setting. And then, these little color items, like the ghost, Glen Colin, or the Travel Book of Faylyen, or the grandmother from the drifts, or the darq gem ring, somehow became very important and useful, if not essential, later in the story. It was almost spooky how many things that I just tossed in for color, turned out to be essential to the story. It is really the magic of writing.

As I said earlier, I intended to write a variety of different types of stories. I think I succeeded, somewhat. We have an eerie story, a “war” story, a pirate story, some lighthearted times within the stories, some romance, adventure, and sense of wonder, discoveries. But the thing is, I only wanted to write small stories. Stories about people. I believe that one can write thrilling stories where the stakes are only the life of the hero or his friends. You shouldn’t need greater stakes. It seems, however, that I’m in a minority on this issue, with both writers and readers. Almost every SFF book I read about has some great conflict central to the story, even if the story focuses on one character. I suppose I shouldn’t make such a sweeping statement, but that’s the impression I’m left with. Anyway, that is what I tried to do. I guess in the end, they did find something big and important – but only to the characters.

An alternative title and cover

About halfway through writing the story, I came up with the story’s ending – but not just the ending, but with the story I really wanted to tell after the ending, which dragged me into writing its sequel, The Lost Star’s Sea. The locale I created for the ending became ever more expansive as I went along. What was once imagined to be an abandoned space ship with some sort of secret onboard – perhaps a treasure in darq jewels or something – became a floating island in a sea of air, and a revolution. And that sea of air became the Archipelago which continued to grow ever more expansive, so that by the time I got my characters shipwrecked for the story that I thought would be great fun to write, getting them out again became an almost impossible problem. Indeed, I have yet to do so, but that’s the next installment's story.

I think I will take a break from this series of post for a week or two. Coming up next, I will explore my library and talk about some of the books in it, and their importance to me.

Previous cover art

Origin Stories – The Bright Black Sea (Part Two)

An early book cover with one of my working titles, a play on "Ports of Call." I wasn't certain that it would be clear that planets weren't called "Call" though I liked the title.

In my previous post I discussed what inspired me to write The Bright Black Sea. In this post I’m going to discuss the nuts and bolts of how it came to be.

I began thinking about the stories that would become The Bright Black Sea soon after Amazon’s lending library, Kindle Unlimited was introduced. At that time authors were being paid whenever their book was borrowed. It was a flat rate payment per book, so that short books paid the same as long ones. Authors quickly took advantage of this, and started publishing short stories and novels as serial stories, to get paid many times more that a single novel length book would bring in. It was in this economic atmosphere that I conceived the idea of writing a series of connected space ship adventures. My model was Guy Gilpatric’s series of short stories featuring Mr. Glencannon. the chief engineer of the tramp steamer Inchchiffe Castle. Using a tramp freighter space ship sailing between the planets would not only allow me to set my stories on a variety of planets but to write a variety of stories, from comedy to spooky stories, intrigue, romance, and adventure. I intended each story to follow one after the other, so that I could weave some sort of over-arching plot into the series, if needed. And, indeed, this is the formula that I have followed, though I never released it as a serial story. For quite a few reasons.

A never published cover

First was that Amazon changed the way the Kindle Unlimited program paid their authors. It is now the number of pages “read” that determines payment amounts, rather than just if the book is borrowed. Serials, or installment novels no longer offered any economic advantage.

Secondly, I was very leery of having to produce a story on any sort of schedule, much less a monthly one. I feared running out of ideas. Which, as it turned out, is a real issue with me. I suppose that I could crank out some sort of a story on demand – but it would be work, not fun, and probably not very good. And as I have said already, I don’t like to work. So the idea of having a monthly episode seemed too daunting a prospect to pursue.

Thirdly, I don’t write short stories. And, for the most part, I don’t read them. Even in my heyday of reading science fiction, I read mostly novels. I never subscribed to any of the SF magazines. And the episodes that I ended up writing reflect this anti-short story bias. All were novella length pieces of between 20,000 to 40,000 words. It would have been pretty impossible for me to keep up a monthly pace at that length, unless I had a hundred stories to write already in my head. Which I didn’t.

Fourthly, as I have already mentioned when writing about A Summer in Amber, I became aware that I did not write tight, fast, thriller type of stories, or as Sargent Friday might say, ‘Just the story ma’am.” My pace is wordy and leisurely, which is not the type of writing that would lend itself to writing old fashioned Saturday matinee adventure serials. To write a story that would keep readers on pins and needles until the next episode, not only would I need to write differently than I do, but I would have to write in a way that I didn’t care to. Episodic serials usually involve ending with cliffhangers. Which is to say, one writes the first ¾ of the story in one episode, but only the finished the last ¼ in the next episode, along with the first ¾’s of that nest episode… to be concluded in the next, as so on. In short, I would have to forego telling the whole story in the hopes of hooking readers by making them wait for the conclusion in the next episode. As a story teller, I didn’t care to do that. It seemed to be to be unfair to the reader. And as I said before, I don’t write stories that lend themselves to that technique anyway. Nor do I want to.

The Nine Star Nebula in color

So in short, the incentive to write serials went away, and the episodes I could see myself writing would be too long and too complete to insure that people would keep coming back for the next one. And I wasn’t confident that I could keep to any reasonable publishing schedule for a serial story.

Yo get around these qualms, my first plan was to release the first three episodes, Captain of the Lost Star, The Mountain King, and Lontria, as one book. Story wise, the end of Lontria was a good story break point, as we were leaving the familiar Azminn solar system astern, and together the three episodes ran well over 100,000 words, making it a good sized novel. My thinking was that by making the first three episodes available to be read without any time gap between them, I could hook the readers into reading the first three episodes, and then they’d be so invested in the characters and story that they would read those that would follow, even without cliffhanger endings.

However, it was such a great theory, that it could be applied to every other episode I would write. Why not wait and release the following three episodes as a novel as well, since it too, had a good break point – which is not surprising since I was, by now, more or less plotting the episodes to make them novel sized installments. Indeed by that time I was writing these episodes, I had abandoned the release by episode idea and was all in on releasing novels, or just a novel.

Now, given how they were written, I could’ve easily released The Bright Black Sea as a trilogy, with three 100K+ word novels – basically how I wrote them. If my goal was to at least try to make money, this would’ve been the best route to take. It is the strategy that almost everyone recommends that a writer should do – especially if you have all three books written and ready to go. However, since I was always intending to release my books for free, maximizing profits wasn’t something that needed to be considered. It wouldn’t matter if I released one book or three books. Except to my ego.

The thing is, not everyone who opens a book is going to like it. That’s a given. And that means that the second book in any series is going to sell less than the first book, as all the people who didn’t like the first one aren’t going to buy the second. The second book may still attract readers on the fence, but by the third book, the readers are either engaged in the story, or they’re out. Quite candidly, I didn’t wish to see that inevitable decline. I don’t need that sort of heartbreak. So, by selling the complete set of episodes in one volume, I would see only the numbers of people who tried it, not the number of readers who liked it enough to read it all the way to its end. Of course, in the end, I did write a sequel to it, so I do see that number, but well, The Lost Star’s Sea came out two years after The Bright Black Sea and is a different sort of book, despite having continuing characters, so it’s a little bit different. And well, maybe I can take disappointment better now. Not that I am disappointed. Like my characters discover, one should be careful what one wishes for. Wishes sometimes come true. I’m happy with my writing, and I don’t think becoming a best seller author would suit me very well. With that comes responsibilities. I try to avoid those as well. So, I’m planning to be famous only after I’m dead.

To the left is the mock up of a cover for what would have been volume 2 of a 3 volume paper release that I considered doing given the size of the complete book. In the end, I abandoned the idea. The titles would have been The Captain of the Lost Star, The Ghosts of the Lost Star, and The Secrets of the Lost Star.

Hmm… It seems that this post has run on long enough, but since I still have more to say, there will be a third episode of Origin Stories – The Bright Black Sea, in which I’ll talk about actually writing the story. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to avoid, and how it evolved as it went along.

Origin Stories -- The Bright Black Sea (Part One)

First cover with its first title. This would end up being the first 1/3rd of The Bright Black Sea

I can pin part of the blame for instigating The Bright Black Sea on a website/magazine called Raygun Revival. It was on the web from about 2006 to 2012 and featured short stories and serials recalling old fashioned space operas. I can’t say I actually read many, if any of the stories – I really can’t read books on a computer (the scrolling gets to me) but the idea of writing the type of story that they might welcome was certainly one of the threads that lead to The Bright Black Sea. I did start to write a short story – on my ipad – with the idea of submitting it to them, but I didn’t finish it, and it got lost… But while nothing concrete came from my interest in Raygun Revival, it planted the seed to write an old fashioned space opera. A cover prototype, never used.
Of course, I must go much further back in time than Raygun Revival to find the true origins of my space opera. I wrote it as a homage to all of the space operas of my youth, from E E Smith, Andre Norton, Heinlein, A Bertram Chandler, and many others who told stories centered around space ships. The space ship is, to me, the defining feature of space operas – it carries you to adventure.
However, the seeds of The Bright Black Sea were planted even earlier. I think I can go all the way back to the old Flash Gordon serials that I watched on the small screen of a b&w TV in the 1950’s. And from that on to the first SF books I read: the Tom Corbet, Space Cadet series, along with the Tom Swift Jr. books. My decision to set my story based on old fashioned rocket ships was both a challenge to myself and a nod Flash Gordon, Tom Corbet, Digg Allen, as well as Arthur C Clarke’s The Sands of Mars, the first “adult” SF paperback I read. No faster than light drive. No artificial gravity. It was “rockets away, lad!” And magnets in the soles of your shoes!


And it was a challenge. Those old rocket ship stories still had a solar system to explore when they were written, with the steaming jungles of Venus, the ancient ruins of Mars, the mines of the asteroid belt, and all the rest. Setting a rocket ship story in today’s solar system, while certainly possible, did not interest me. I wanted the romance of the jungles of Venus and the dead cities of Mars. So I had to invent a place where I could invent anything I cared to, without sacrificing the authenticity that using rocket ships brought to the tale. I would, of course, have to fudge science somewhat to get everything working – everything from inventing materials that would protect my spaceers from the deadly radiation of space, to making plasma/fusion propulsion easily do-able, to genetically engineering humans to be able to live in free fall, low gravity, or high gravity without health issues. I also wanted a wide canvas to paint my stories against, and, with travel between stars that were light years apart impossible with my rocket ships, I had to invent a place were I could cram as many planets and even stars into a relatively small space of space.
But they couldn’t be too close, either. If there is one thing that makes me close a book, it is when authors chose to set their stories in the “galaxy” and then make every planets a subway stop apart. The universe is really, really big. The galaxy is really big. And yet I often come across stories where stars are just several hours away from each other. And then, as often as not, they’re one feature planets – a desert planet, an ocean planet, a city planet…That being the case, why not set the story on a planet, or even a continent, and have cities or locales so that the heroes can drive, fly, or even take a train to? But before this turns into one of those observations directed at the clouds, I’ll just conclude by saying that I wanted my locales to be a realistic distance away from each other, but close enough that I could write a variety of stories about routine travel between them. So I gave each star a whole host of habitable planets, and packed the stars very, very close together by making them the debris of a failed supernova. In this way, I made travel between planets a matter of days or weeks with months between the solar systems. I created the Nine Star Nebula. The Lost Star in orbit.
And that brings me around to yet another thread that lead to The Bright Black Sea,which is sea stories. I can remember at least looking at the Howard Pease’s “Tod Moran” series of juvenile sea stories on the library shelves while I was selecting Heinlein’s juvenile books. I don’t think I actually checked one out back then, though I did pick a few up when I came across them at book sales later in my life. Still, that seems to suggests that I was interested in sea stories from an early age as well. I certainly started reading them in late teens and 20’s. There were Basil Lubbock’s books about the China clippers, W Clark Russel’s Victorian era sea stories, C. S Forester, and later, Patrick O’Brian’s (and many other’s) stories of the Napoleonic era.There was Erskine Childer's The Riddle of the Sands as well as the tramp steamer stories of C J Cutcliffe Hyne, Guy Gilpatric, and others. I was never brave enough to go to sea myself, so I went to sea from my armchair. So, with my love of sea stories, I made my rocket ships, ships with crews, not airplanes with a pilot and perhaps passengers, or subway cars that whisk one from stop to stop.And I imagined that the distance between planets was an ocean to sail across in days or weeks, not something to fly over in a couple of a few hours.
The ancestor painting of the present cover 
But seeing that I've a lot more to talk about, I think I'll bring this post to a close. In the next installment in this series I will discuss the how The Bright Black Sea came to take its present shape, what  my original plan for it was, and how and why I abandoned that plan.
Stay tuned.

Origin Stories -- A Summer in Amber

Evening, Maig Glen
I suspect that I had begun working the first “episode” or two of that would become The Bright Black Sea prior to starting A Summer in Amber, but since A Summer in Amber ended up being published first, I’ll discuss it first.
Perhaps I should begin by saying that I blame it all on Edgar Rice Boroughs. Boroughs was experiencing a great revival back in the mid-1960’s when I started reading science fiction, and I was a big fan of his stories as a teen. Still, I never realized just how much of an influence he had on my tastes in stories until I started writing my own. All his stories had an element of romance in them. There was always a princess to fall in love with and rescue, usually many times. I realized, only after I started writing my stories, that I always wanted that element in them as well. They didn’t seem complete without one, nor would they be as fun to daydream about. I am, however, very careful to make certain that my princess are usually the ones doing the rescuing. They’re more fun that way.
The Maryfield RoadNow on to A Summer in Amber. The first files I find for the story, then titled The Rhymer’s Gate, date back to March 2013. This fits with my time line, since I know that watching the first two seasons of Downton Abbey on Netflix sparked my desire to write this story. I enjoyed the atmosphere it created, both visually and with the music, and the romance. I was, however, certain that I could write a better one using the same theme – a commoner’s intrusion into the world of the upper classes – while avoiding that show’s soap opera entanglements. i.e. no dead bodies need be hauled around the house.
My first thought was to write it as a period piece, like Downton Abbey. But I rather quickly rejected that idea. First, because it would require a great deal of research to get all the little details of everyday life in England in 1910 right, since I know that historical fiction readers are very picky about getting those things right. This would mean researching all sorts of things, from train schedules and times, to how telephones worked, as well as the manners and speech of the English of all classes of the time. And a thousand other things. It could, and no doubt has, been done. But it would involve a lot of work. I don’t really like work. And, well, in the end, I would mean that much of the backdrop of my story would reflect the research, work, and writings of other people, which made me uneasy.
Glen RoadI can offer two examples of this phenomena from my experience. Many years ago I started reading a fantasy book that featured a sailing ship. As I read the description of this ship, I experienced a sense of deja vu. It seemed that I was reading an almost word for word description of the tea clipper Cutty Sark. Tea and tea clippers where an interest of mine in my youth, and so I happened to be quite familiar with such ships – in words, anyway – and the passage struck me as something I’d read before. Maybe it wasn’t. I never bothered searching for the description in the Cutty Sark book that it reminded me of, but it just seemed so eerily familiar.
And then there is Connie Willis’s Blackout. I was also an avid reader of life in England in 1940, and the blitz. So that when I was reading her story, I got the distinct feeling that she had read, and incorporated into her story, incidents related in the sources I had also read. I know that she had spent a year researching the books, so this is not surprising. And while this is just a sense of deja vu rather than any suggestion of plagiarism, the fact that I could see, as it were, the bones of her story from my own reading in the history of the period, made me leery of doing something like that myself. I feared that if I wrote the story as a period piece, the work and writings of others would inevitably creep into my story. I didn’t want that. I wanted it all my own.
Bridge over the Maig RiverThe other reason I decided not to write it as a period piece is that history is an iron master. If I set it in the same time period, all the young men would be going off to war in a couple of years, and the world would change in ways that are well known. So, unless I wanted to make a historical fantasy out of it, the future of my characters would be dictated not by me, but by history. I didn’t care to cede control of my characters and story to history. And if I was going to write a fantasy, I might as well make it all my own.
However, since I wanted that old-time feel to my story, I decided to set the story in a post apocalyptic future. One that would allow me to bring in all the old-timey stuff I wanted. Not only I could then mix  old stuff together with some modern stuff as needed, but I could give the book a vaguely haunting, nostalgic air to it, like Downton Abbey had.This would also give me complete freedom to make up whatever I wanted, without a tremendous amount of research, which is to say, it saved me from having to work. It would be my world, and I’d call the shots. I figured that a story like this could fit – more or less – into the steampunk genre that was fairly popular at the time, and might still be. Sort of.
Road to the HighlandsThe second major ingredient of A Summer in Amber was Scotland. The locale was inspired by the work of John Buchan and the stories he set in the Scotland of the first several decades of the twentieth century. Stories like The 39 Steps, John Macnab, and Huntingtower, plus the Scottish stories of Compton Mackenzie like Monarch of the Glen, Keep the Home Guard Turning, Whisky Galore and Hunting the Fairies. All these stories and their vivid description of the Scottish countryside brought that land to life in my imagination, and I wanted to revisit them in my story. I had traveled about Scotland on an extended holiday after I graduated from college, so I could bring a bit of personal experience to the stories as well. I should also credit the 1959 movie The 39 Steps with Kenneth More and Taina Elg. It is one of my favorite movies. It offers a rather romantic version of Scotland of the 1950’s. No low, grey skies to be found in its Scotland. The bicycle weekend in the story was inspired by a scene in the movie.
So I had a theme inspired by Downton Abbey, and a setting inspired by the books of Buchan and Mackenzie. What I needed was a story to get my narrator to Scotland and on to the estate, if not into the house of the wealthy upper class laird.
Evening in the GlenI set out to write a mystery/thriller centered around a legendary invention. I explored many ways the story could play out. At one time the secret was a theory that would lead to a great scientific revolution which was devised by one Hugh Gallagher who stayed at the estate – owned by the department head of the college that he taught at – during the Storm Years. There, with the aid of his wife, Selina, he had perfected this theory, or so legend had it. It was lost, and would be found… Another version, closer to the final version, had a lot more industrial spying, intrigue, and action in it. Rival firms were actively attempting to steal the secret that Sandy Say was deciphering, including waylaying him, stealing the papers, along with chases through the countryside. But… after working on it for a year and more, I realized that I wasn’t that type of writer. I couldn’t get that type of story to work. And so, in the end, I just decided to write a simple “What I did during summer vacation” romance. I made the “The Rhymer’s Gate” more central and dramatic in this version, replacing the thriller elements of the original concept, and things worked out. At least for me.
The story is actually based in a real place, though I changed all the names, slightly. If you find it, you can see, on Google street view, what the countryside looks like now. Though, of course, after the Storm Years, it looks somewhat different in the story – more overgrown and abandoned.
My goal as a creator is to bring something new into the world. And yet, as you can see, the seeds for whatever is new to the world in A Summer in Amber, were in the world already – brought there by creators before me.
The aurora over the highlandNOTE: The illustrations for this post are samples of the chapter heading art I had created for an early version of the book. Art in ebooks is somewhat problematical (for me) and I decided that black and white versions for the print book wouldn't be worth the effort.

Origin Stories - Some Day Days

An early cover, with my preferred spelling of the title

This is the first of my origin stories, in which I explore what inspired me to write each of my stories.
I should begin by mentioning that I don’t do market research. I haven’t read the 100 best selling books in my genre(s) to get a feel for what those readers expect. I haven’t studied their blurbs, nor have I modeled my covers after the best selling books in my genre. I also haven’t sold tens of thousands of books or make much money either, so take my method for what it’s worth.
All of my stories were inspired by self-imposed challenges, memories, or books I’ve read and enjoyed. I’ll talk about each of them in the order that they were written.
Some Day Days  Original working title: Yours, (someday, maybe)My preferred title spelling would be "Someday Days", but "someday" is not universally considered a word, especially in Britain where the story takes place, hence some days.
Kiss of the White Witch, is the opening “piece” in my “fix-up” novel, Some Day Days, A Romance in an Undetermined Number of Pieces.It was the first story that I wrote that I eventually took all the way to publishing it. I have files dating back to 2009, with the working title of Tea and the White Witch. I wrote Kiss of the White Witch as a short story – or as short as I can write a story. It originally ran a bit under 10K works, so that it is really a novelette, though once it became part of the a much longer story, I fleshed it out even more. My attitude is that if a reader is in a hurry to get through my books, they probably should just move along.
It come to be written as a result of two challenges. The first was some sort of challenge to write a flash fiction story about a piece of technology and how it impacted the future. I don’t recall where I came across this challenge. In any event, the piece of technology I chose was something that was in its infancy (and still is) – a device that takes a video of what a person is seeing. Think of Google Glasses or those Snapchat sunglasses which have cameras that record a few minutes or seconds at a time. I took that ideas to the point were one’s entire day could be recorded on such a device. I called them “dynamic diaries”, or dyaries for short. And in the story, I briefly explored what implications such a device might have, if widely adopted, and used a romantic plot to do so.
My second challenge was self-imposed. I wanted to write the story using as much dialog as possible. I wanted the characters to tell their stories in their conversation. At the time I had read some stories written by a friend of my wife, which I felt could be told more engagingly and more interestingly by the people within the story. Most of us live our lives in first person singular, and to me that seems the natural way to tell a story. Life at ground level.
Another cover idea.

As it turned out, I fell in love with the lives of my characters, and so I continued to daydream about them and their friends, piece, by piece, scene by scene, over the course of many months. I began to set down more of their story, though my imagination raced far ahead of the written words.
However, by the time I got serious about publishing the story, several years later, many of those scenes had faded in my memory and had acquired that “been there, done that,” feel to them… And well, I didn’t have the energy to write the whole saga as I had imagined it, and doubted that there was a vast market for a Gone With The Wind sized romance novel. I had, however, written down the beginnings of Hugh and Selina’s romance and still had in mind enough of their story that I could write  Some Day Days as the first story arc in their saga. And having spent a great deal of time on those stories, and, as I said, grown very fond of those characters, I decided that they deserved the light of day and so I published what I had written, even if it wasn't the complete story I had to tell. 
I always considered Some Day Days as an experimental piece. In my early drafts I tried writing it as if it was a jazz piece played by Thelonious Monk, though, in the end, I did end up smoothing out my writing over the course of many revisions. I have always considered it a romance. However, I gather that these days, a true romance must have an “and they lived happily ever after” ending, which the story does have – only a couple of hundred thousand unwritten words later on. Oh, well. I did sneak that happily ever after ending into A Summer in Amber, which is set in the same time line, decades later.
And that is the origin story of Some Day Days. It began as an exploration of what recording our daily lives might mean, turned into an experimental romance, and ended up, just part one of a sprawling, unwritten, and now mostly forgotten story.
It is my least popular book, but I am actually rather proud of it. (Though, like all my work, I dread re-reading it, yet again, to be certain of that.) Popularity is not the yardstick I use to measure the success and failures in any of my creative endeavors. Thank goodness. I’d be a pretty sad fellow if it was.
First print version (with original title spelling)
The cover scene is inspired by a narrow street in Oxford, England, perhaps Rose Lane, or Brewer Street, or some similar little street.

Them Algoristhm Blues

It seems that algorithms of Amazon are up to their old tricks again -- they've dropped price matching for both Sailing to Redoubt and The Prisoner of Cimlye this time around. They are now listed at $.99 each. You can get Kindle compatible mobi versions of both books on Smashwords.com for free. I was patient the last time they decided to try to sell Sailing to Redoubt for list price, but this time I won't be. I'll give them a week or so, and unless I sell more books than I anticipate, its new list price will be: $8.50.

My policy is to offer new releases with a list price of $.99 for a year, after which I list them at my "my books are as good as traditionally published books" price. It's a game of chicken.

Daydreaming

I’ve no intention of using this blog as a diary. However, every now and again I have, and will continue to use this space to talk about my process, or the non-process of my writing. This is one of those posts.
In the past year I have talked about my struggles to maintain a novel a year pace. I spent the better part of 2019 auditioning different story ideas in my head. Three or four of them made it all the way to the writing phase, with anywhere from 4,000 to 14,000 words written before I abandoned them. What I found hard was not the setting, nor the characters. Plots proved somewhat problematical, but at least at the beginning they seemed do-able, and I probably could have worked them out, if I had cared enough about the story. The core problem was simply maintaining any enthusiasm for the various stories. At some point in the process, I looked ahead at the story I had in mind, and realized that in some way I’d been there done that, or read something too similar, and because of that, it bored me.
I suppose, if I was making a living in this racket, and under a contract, I could’ve gotten down to work and written them all the way to the end. But since I’m doing this for fun – if it wasn’t fun, I wasn’t doing it. And I’m writing stories I like, and if I don’t like it, why would I spend months working on it?

In the end, I circled back around to one of my first ideas, a sequel to Sailing to Redoubt. That book’s sales don’t, at this point, justify a sequel, in my opinion, and that was a big knock against that idea. Plus, try as I might, I couldn’t think of enough original ideas to make a long novel out of it, since I didn’t want to do storms, pirates, and lost cities again, and didn’t have any better ideas. But then, in desperation, I decide to scale back the story to just tell the story I knew that I wanted to to tell, without trying to invent some elaborate adventure to fill the story out. Suddenly the project looked do-able. To hell with the word count. That plan worked out well. I knew what I needed to write, and I knew that I needed to write the story sooner or later, since it completed Sailing to Redoubt, even though it could not be made fit into that story, realistically.With the story in mind, it took only 61 day from start to publishing The Prisoner of Cimlye. Now, while 54,000 words is a short novel for me, it is a pretty bog standard novel in the fast lane of indie-publishing. And when I look further back, to the science fiction novels of my youth, they were often only 35,000 – 55,000 words long.
 So, in the end, I produced my 2020 novel, with eight months to spare. Theoretically I now have 20 months to produce another one to a keep on a novel a year schedule.
My original intention was, and may still be, to write another short, “episode” length novel sometime this year. I have a vague story in mind. Well, it's more of a setting than a story, but, as before, I currently lack the necessary enthusiasm turn it into an actual story.
So, faced once more, with my old roadblock, I’ve been thinking that perhaps my problem is that I’d trying to dream up stories: i.e. books with plots that my readers would enjoy. Instead, maybe I should be simply daydreaming. Daydreaming up a set of characters that I want to hang with. Daydreaming about a place I would like to explore. And daydreaming scenes that may evolve, eventually into a story. In short, stop trying to write a book in my head. And instead, live an imaginary life that I could, maybe, tell a story about, someday.
We’ll see.