M. Jonathan Jones's Blog: Spilt ink, page 4
May 7, 2018
Thalassa - the Lost Prologue
The second edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves lacks the prologue of the first edition. The prologue was a last-minute addition, and although I like it, I was always in two minds about it. Prologues are often seen as old hat these days, and when competing for clicks, not starting a book with the main character can be a drawback. So I ditched it. It still exists on my website and I thought I'd post it here too.
Prologue
Something moved through the wide and empty waters of aqua incognita far to the north of the Federation Frontier, something big and grey and whale-shaped. But it was no whale. Its skin and bones were steel and iron, the blood in its veins was oil, fuel, hydraulic-fluid, and its eyes were made of glass – a submarine. A dead and dormant submarine. The steering-fins hung slack. The thrusters were silent. No lights showed through the observation-windows that studded its broad and gently rounded back. It was a ghost, drifting through the gloom.
The white-painted letters stencilled across the submarine’s flanks identified it as the Syracuse, a Militia patrol-sub out of MacGillycuddy’s Reef, the nearest and northernmost Tethyan Colony that was not yet part of the Federation. The white-painted letters were clean-edged and fresh.
Fresh and fake.
Straining ahead of the fake Syracuse was a small tow-tug. The tug looked like it was trying its hardest not to become the patrol-sub’s next meal, speeding ahead just out of reach. Strung out on control-cables behind the tug were two detachable thruster-pods, each pod locked onto a steering-fin of the impostor, one to port, one to starboard. Another tow-cable stretched back from the tug to the snub snout of the patrol-sub, all three of the cables taut, dragging the monster through the Deep.
A man sat inside the raised glass steering-cabin of the tow-tug, making final adjustments to his course and depth. There were no official charts of aqua incognita – that was the point of ‘unknown waters’, after all – but the man knew exactly where he was, and that was right where he wanted to be.
The man said nothing because there was nobody to say anything to. He turned off the engines and sat there, slowly drifting with the current. He watched the tethers to the patrol-sub slacken and billow behind him and gauged the speed and the strength of the streaming waters. The man listened as intently as if he was listening to his own heartbeat. All was quiet, just the gentle creak and groan of the hull as the unseen rivers in the ocean took hold of the tug and its lifeless companion.
The man knew what those currents could do; he had felt their strength pulling him down, had tasted the burning saltwater filling his lungs. Few ever came face-to-face with the Deepwater Dark and survived, and something of the sea had remained within him; the rhythm of its ebb and flow was in his bones. Perhaps such a sense of its power was unsurprising for someone who had never felt the wind on his face.
When he had seen and heard enough, the man moved to release the thruster-pods and reel them in on their control-cables. They hopped and hurried through the water, docking with the tug’s outstretched wings. Then he disengaged the third and final mooring-cable to the sub, and the streamlined shape that he had towed out into aqua incognita turned its nose away from him and faded into the murk.
The tug’s job was done and man wouldn’t be needing it any more. He set a course for the auto-pilot to follow and restarted the engines. Before the would-be Syracuse had completely vanished from sight, he unbuckled the safety-harness and stood up, filling the cramped space of the steering-cabin. He didn’t hurry. His movements were fluid and exact, not too fast and not too slow. There was a precise purpose to everything he did and how he did it – the precision of planning and years of training.
He pulled up the extendable helmet from the collar of his pressure-suit, adjusted the visor in front of his face, and locked it into position under his chin. Then he turned to find the access-ladder that led out of the steering-cabin, and with clockwork movements of his hands and feet he climbed down the ladder and into the hull, tock-tock-tock-tock.
The tow-tug was little more than a floating engine, but it did have a MANTA-bay, a narrow space that was almost as cramped as the steering-cabin for launching a one-man MANTA mini-sub. The man clambered into his MANTA where it stood upright in its launch-rack. Inside, stowed in the compartment for hand-luggage, was a canvas bag. The man glanced at the bag in passing but gave it no more attention than that; he had already made sure of its contents hours before.
The man strapped himself in and checked over the flight-systems. Once he had made sure that everything was operating normally, he armed the MANTA’s torpette-cannons – a sub never knew what might be waiting out in aqua incognita – and reached up to lower the glass canopy that enclosed his head and shoulders. It locked with a hiss.
An alarm sounded. The steel door to the launch-tube slid shut and sealed itself tight. Ten seconds later, the out-lock hatch in the hull of the tow-tug winked open like an eye, and the MANTA rose up into the waters of the uncharted ocean. With a twitch of its steering-fins and a burst from its thrusters, the MANTA turned and twisted so that the man inside it was lying face-forwards, and sped off in the direction that the currents had taken the would-be Syracuse.
A minute later, the blurred shape of the patrol-sub with its fake Militia markings came into view, right where the man had thought it would be: right where he had known it would be. He flew his MANTA above the curving upper-hull of the impostor, skimming along its length all the way down to the rear steering-fins to give everything one last look-over.
He left the patrol-sub behind him and flew in a slow, steady circle around it, keeping it just in view as he checked one final time that he was unobserved. He was – aqua incognita was as empty as ever, just the fish and the flotsam and the restless souls of the billions who had died with the Old Earth more than a thousand years before.
The man banked his MANTA once more, giving the directional-thrusters a nudge, and came back towards the fake patrol-sub from below. As he came in close he cut the engines to almost nothing, feeling again how the currents streamed past him. For a few seconds he drifted with them, just to be sure. Then he kicked back into the thrust-pedals and climbed towards the patrol-sub’s MANTA-bay. One of the lower launch-hatches was already open, waiting for him. With a half-twist and a turn, he lined up his fins, pointing vertically upwards, and with a final spurt from the thrusters, he vanished inside. The launch-hatch closed, and all was quiet again except for the long drawn-out murmuring of the sea.
The interior of the drifting patrol-sub was dim and dank and cold. Very cold. The man’s breath steamed out in front of him as he raised the canopy of the MANTA and unfastened his pressure-helmet. Emergency-lighting wrapped crisp shadows around everything, and the air was sharp with the smell of rust and damp.
The sub was not just dead and dormant, it was deserted.
The man took the canvas bag from where he had left it and slung the carry-strap across his body. He climbed out of the MANTA, leaving it ready in its rack. There was only one way out of the MANTA-bay and the man took it with quick strides, sending steely echoes ringing out into the shadows ahead of him. He stopped halfway to the next level and drew something out from the bag that hung at his hip: a cone of grey-brown clay. A very particularly shaped cone of grey-brown clay, which he attached in a very particular position on the bulkhead.
There were people on the Federation side of the Frontier, down in Capital Colony or Cuatro Corrientes, who could tell the difference between a hull-breach due to an impact at speed and a hull-breach due to a shaped charge of thermox explosive, but the man knew how to make life difficult for them. Not that he thought it would ever come to that, what with the real Syracuse having been a Militia sub from an un-Federated Colony. No-one south of the Frontier would give a damn what had happened to it, and the man needed the charges to make sure that things turned out exactly as he intended.
He spiked the clay of the thermox-charge with a detonator and set it for fifteen minutes.
Two minutes later he stopped again. Once again he positioned a charge on the bulkhead. Once again he spiked it with a detonator, but this time he set it for thirteen minutes.
Every two minutes along the route to the bridge, the man stopped, precise to the second. Every two minutes he set another charge, leaving a string of them behind him, all perfectly synchronised.
With five minutes remaining on the clocks, he entered the bridge.
A quick glance through the forwards-facing observation-windows showed the ocean as deep and as blue as ever, but something darker was showing up behind the blue – the jagged outline of a submerged reef. The man from the MANTA could fly anything under the waves, but even with navigation-computers and optimised control-by-wire, a patrol-sub like the fake Syracuse needed a crew of at least three to guide it safely through the Deep. Luckily, guiding the sub safely anywhere was the last of the man’s intentions. He did, however, need to have the engines running when it hit the reef. There were some things that couldn’t be faked, and the random way a drive-shaft would plough through the hull at five thousand revolutions a minute was one of them.
The man powered up the hydrogen-splitters and started the engines. A shudder ran through the deck beneath his feet. He adjusted the thrust and the steering, making a few last-minute corrections to the drifting course that the impostor-sub had taken; almost literally last-minute corrections. Then he was gone.
Back down the access-ladders and gangways he went, retracing the route to the MANTA-bay past all the charges he had set on his way in.
With two minutes thirty on the clock, he was striding through the galley and into the crew’s quarters.
At two minutes, he was on the gunnery-deck.
At one minute thirty, he had entered the MANTA-bay. His MANTA stood where he had left it, canopy wide.
Tick, tick, tick.
One minute ten. The man strapped himself into the MANTA and slammed the canopy. The launch-sequence started. Lights flashed. The countdown began. The launch-tube closed around him and started to flood.
With barely fifty seconds left on the timers, the MANTA dropped from its launch-tube out into the ocean. The man kicked the thrusters to full speed and went as fast as he could away from the immovable obstacle of the submerged reef.
For forty-five seconds he headed into the Deep. Then he turned back on himself, aiming the MANTA’s strengthened and streamlined shape into the shockwave that would be coming any second…
Impact. Explosion.
Barely any delay between the two.
From where he was, the man in the MANTA could hardly see the mock-up Syracuse ramming itself into the reef. Then, in perfect synchrony, half a dozen lines of fire flickered, marking out the sub’s outline. The hydrogen-tanks ruptured first, then the oxygen-tanks. With a stuttering flash and a judder of exploding air, the patrol-sub blew itself inside out.
The man steeled himself as the pressure-wave slammed into his MANTA, a thud-crack-crunch, muffled but incredibly powerful, water turned almost solid. The shockwave flung him around, but the man had been ready for it, and it passed him by unscathed. Following close behind, distorted by the distance, the aftermath of the explosion: a tortured mix of screeching girders, buckling pressure-plates, and falling rock.
Where the fires still burned, the pieces of the wreck hung clear against the reef for a few seconds, as if they were surprised by the blast and what had happened to them. Then, slowly and gracefully and surprisingly gently, they settled into the silt on the submerged slopes.
The sub that was not the Syracuse was gone; all that remained of it was just so much twisted ironwork.
The man had seen enough. He had done his bit – the water and the fish and a few months in the silt would do the rest. When it was found, the wreck would look just like any other sub that had got lost and wandered into a rock in the wrong place. No questions asked, no answers sought. Case closed.
The MANTA flipped around on its axis and the man took it towards the Frontier at full speed, leaving the uncharted depths of aqua incognita to guard one more secret.
Prologue
Something moved through the wide and empty waters of aqua incognita far to the north of the Federation Frontier, something big and grey and whale-shaped. But it was no whale. Its skin and bones were steel and iron, the blood in its veins was oil, fuel, hydraulic-fluid, and its eyes were made of glass – a submarine. A dead and dormant submarine. The steering-fins hung slack. The thrusters were silent. No lights showed through the observation-windows that studded its broad and gently rounded back. It was a ghost, drifting through the gloom.
The white-painted letters stencilled across the submarine’s flanks identified it as the Syracuse, a Militia patrol-sub out of MacGillycuddy’s Reef, the nearest and northernmost Tethyan Colony that was not yet part of the Federation. The white-painted letters were clean-edged and fresh.
Fresh and fake.
Straining ahead of the fake Syracuse was a small tow-tug. The tug looked like it was trying its hardest not to become the patrol-sub’s next meal, speeding ahead just out of reach. Strung out on control-cables behind the tug were two detachable thruster-pods, each pod locked onto a steering-fin of the impostor, one to port, one to starboard. Another tow-cable stretched back from the tug to the snub snout of the patrol-sub, all three of the cables taut, dragging the monster through the Deep.
A man sat inside the raised glass steering-cabin of the tow-tug, making final adjustments to his course and depth. There were no official charts of aqua incognita – that was the point of ‘unknown waters’, after all – but the man knew exactly where he was, and that was right where he wanted to be.
The man said nothing because there was nobody to say anything to. He turned off the engines and sat there, slowly drifting with the current. He watched the tethers to the patrol-sub slacken and billow behind him and gauged the speed and the strength of the streaming waters. The man listened as intently as if he was listening to his own heartbeat. All was quiet, just the gentle creak and groan of the hull as the unseen rivers in the ocean took hold of the tug and its lifeless companion.
The man knew what those currents could do; he had felt their strength pulling him down, had tasted the burning saltwater filling his lungs. Few ever came face-to-face with the Deepwater Dark and survived, and something of the sea had remained within him; the rhythm of its ebb and flow was in his bones. Perhaps such a sense of its power was unsurprising for someone who had never felt the wind on his face.
When he had seen and heard enough, the man moved to release the thruster-pods and reel them in on their control-cables. They hopped and hurried through the water, docking with the tug’s outstretched wings. Then he disengaged the third and final mooring-cable to the sub, and the streamlined shape that he had towed out into aqua incognita turned its nose away from him and faded into the murk.
The tug’s job was done and man wouldn’t be needing it any more. He set a course for the auto-pilot to follow and restarted the engines. Before the would-be Syracuse had completely vanished from sight, he unbuckled the safety-harness and stood up, filling the cramped space of the steering-cabin. He didn’t hurry. His movements were fluid and exact, not too fast and not too slow. There was a precise purpose to everything he did and how he did it – the precision of planning and years of training.
He pulled up the extendable helmet from the collar of his pressure-suit, adjusted the visor in front of his face, and locked it into position under his chin. Then he turned to find the access-ladder that led out of the steering-cabin, and with clockwork movements of his hands and feet he climbed down the ladder and into the hull, tock-tock-tock-tock.
The tow-tug was little more than a floating engine, but it did have a MANTA-bay, a narrow space that was almost as cramped as the steering-cabin for launching a one-man MANTA mini-sub. The man clambered into his MANTA where it stood upright in its launch-rack. Inside, stowed in the compartment for hand-luggage, was a canvas bag. The man glanced at the bag in passing but gave it no more attention than that; he had already made sure of its contents hours before.
The man strapped himself in and checked over the flight-systems. Once he had made sure that everything was operating normally, he armed the MANTA’s torpette-cannons – a sub never knew what might be waiting out in aqua incognita – and reached up to lower the glass canopy that enclosed his head and shoulders. It locked with a hiss.
An alarm sounded. The steel door to the launch-tube slid shut and sealed itself tight. Ten seconds later, the out-lock hatch in the hull of the tow-tug winked open like an eye, and the MANTA rose up into the waters of the uncharted ocean. With a twitch of its steering-fins and a burst from its thrusters, the MANTA turned and twisted so that the man inside it was lying face-forwards, and sped off in the direction that the currents had taken the would-be Syracuse.
A minute later, the blurred shape of the patrol-sub with its fake Militia markings came into view, right where the man had thought it would be: right where he had known it would be. He flew his MANTA above the curving upper-hull of the impostor, skimming along its length all the way down to the rear steering-fins to give everything one last look-over.
He left the patrol-sub behind him and flew in a slow, steady circle around it, keeping it just in view as he checked one final time that he was unobserved. He was – aqua incognita was as empty as ever, just the fish and the flotsam and the restless souls of the billions who had died with the Old Earth more than a thousand years before.
The man banked his MANTA once more, giving the directional-thrusters a nudge, and came back towards the fake patrol-sub from below. As he came in close he cut the engines to almost nothing, feeling again how the currents streamed past him. For a few seconds he drifted with them, just to be sure. Then he kicked back into the thrust-pedals and climbed towards the patrol-sub’s MANTA-bay. One of the lower launch-hatches was already open, waiting for him. With a half-twist and a turn, he lined up his fins, pointing vertically upwards, and with a final spurt from the thrusters, he vanished inside. The launch-hatch closed, and all was quiet again except for the long drawn-out murmuring of the sea.
The interior of the drifting patrol-sub was dim and dank and cold. Very cold. The man’s breath steamed out in front of him as he raised the canopy of the MANTA and unfastened his pressure-helmet. Emergency-lighting wrapped crisp shadows around everything, and the air was sharp with the smell of rust and damp.
The sub was not just dead and dormant, it was deserted.
The man took the canvas bag from where he had left it and slung the carry-strap across his body. He climbed out of the MANTA, leaving it ready in its rack. There was only one way out of the MANTA-bay and the man took it with quick strides, sending steely echoes ringing out into the shadows ahead of him. He stopped halfway to the next level and drew something out from the bag that hung at his hip: a cone of grey-brown clay. A very particularly shaped cone of grey-brown clay, which he attached in a very particular position on the bulkhead.
There were people on the Federation side of the Frontier, down in Capital Colony or Cuatro Corrientes, who could tell the difference between a hull-breach due to an impact at speed and a hull-breach due to a shaped charge of thermox explosive, but the man knew how to make life difficult for them. Not that he thought it would ever come to that, what with the real Syracuse having been a Militia sub from an un-Federated Colony. No-one south of the Frontier would give a damn what had happened to it, and the man needed the charges to make sure that things turned out exactly as he intended.
He spiked the clay of the thermox-charge with a detonator and set it for fifteen minutes.
Two minutes later he stopped again. Once again he positioned a charge on the bulkhead. Once again he spiked it with a detonator, but this time he set it for thirteen minutes.
Every two minutes along the route to the bridge, the man stopped, precise to the second. Every two minutes he set another charge, leaving a string of them behind him, all perfectly synchronised.
With five minutes remaining on the clocks, he entered the bridge.
A quick glance through the forwards-facing observation-windows showed the ocean as deep and as blue as ever, but something darker was showing up behind the blue – the jagged outline of a submerged reef. The man from the MANTA could fly anything under the waves, but even with navigation-computers and optimised control-by-wire, a patrol-sub like the fake Syracuse needed a crew of at least three to guide it safely through the Deep. Luckily, guiding the sub safely anywhere was the last of the man’s intentions. He did, however, need to have the engines running when it hit the reef. There were some things that couldn’t be faked, and the random way a drive-shaft would plough through the hull at five thousand revolutions a minute was one of them.
The man powered up the hydrogen-splitters and started the engines. A shudder ran through the deck beneath his feet. He adjusted the thrust and the steering, making a few last-minute corrections to the drifting course that the impostor-sub had taken; almost literally last-minute corrections. Then he was gone.
Back down the access-ladders and gangways he went, retracing the route to the MANTA-bay past all the charges he had set on his way in.
With two minutes thirty on the clock, he was striding through the galley and into the crew’s quarters.
At two minutes, he was on the gunnery-deck.
At one minute thirty, he had entered the MANTA-bay. His MANTA stood where he had left it, canopy wide.
Tick, tick, tick.
One minute ten. The man strapped himself into the MANTA and slammed the canopy. The launch-sequence started. Lights flashed. The countdown began. The launch-tube closed around him and started to flood.
With barely fifty seconds left on the timers, the MANTA dropped from its launch-tube out into the ocean. The man kicked the thrusters to full speed and went as fast as he could away from the immovable obstacle of the submerged reef.
For forty-five seconds he headed into the Deep. Then he turned back on himself, aiming the MANTA’s strengthened and streamlined shape into the shockwave that would be coming any second…
Impact. Explosion.
Barely any delay between the two.
From where he was, the man in the MANTA could hardly see the mock-up Syracuse ramming itself into the reef. Then, in perfect synchrony, half a dozen lines of fire flickered, marking out the sub’s outline. The hydrogen-tanks ruptured first, then the oxygen-tanks. With a stuttering flash and a judder of exploding air, the patrol-sub blew itself inside out.
The man steeled himself as the pressure-wave slammed into his MANTA, a thud-crack-crunch, muffled but incredibly powerful, water turned almost solid. The shockwave flung him around, but the man had been ready for it, and it passed him by unscathed. Following close behind, distorted by the distance, the aftermath of the explosion: a tortured mix of screeching girders, buckling pressure-plates, and falling rock.
Where the fires still burned, the pieces of the wreck hung clear against the reef for a few seconds, as if they were surprised by the blast and what had happened to them. Then, slowly and gracefully and surprisingly gently, they settled into the silt on the submerged slopes.
The sub that was not the Syracuse was gone; all that remained of it was just so much twisted ironwork.
The man had seen enough. He had done his bit – the water and the fish and a few months in the silt would do the rest. When it was found, the wreck would look just like any other sub that had got lost and wandered into a rock in the wrong place. No questions asked, no answers sought. Case closed.
The MANTA flipped around on its axis and the man took it towards the Frontier at full speed, leaving the uncharted depths of aqua incognita to guard one more secret.
March 13, 2018
Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling - my top 6
Aerogramme Writers' Studio has a list of writing tips compiled by Emma Coats who once worked at Pixar. Most of them seem very useful to me. The full list can be found here. Here in no particular order are my favourite six (my lucky number, allegedly):
1) "You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different."
2) "Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time."
3) "Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite."
4) "Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone."
5) "No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later."
6) "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating."
And only one I'd really quibble with:
"Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself."
I'd say to hell with novelty. It's a work in progress. Start somewhere - anywhere - and work on it. It will take on its own direction in time. New possibilities will be revealed as you go. Follow your nose.
1) "You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different."
2) "Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time."
3) "Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite."
4) "Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone."
5) "No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later."
6) "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating."
And only one I'd really quibble with:
"Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself."
I'd say to hell with novelty. It's a work in progress. Start somewhere - anywhere - and work on it. It will take on its own direction in time. New possibilities will be revealed as you go. Follow your nose.
February 19, 2018
Thalassa - the world beneath the waves NEW first chapter
This is part of the revised first chapter to the second edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves. Latest: I'll be running a Kindle Giveaway from March 2nd to March 17th 2018.
Moanna was running out of time.
She pressed her face against the glass of the window, and the endless, everlasting weight of the ocean pressed back. The light was dying. Pale shimmers still filtered down from the poisonous hell at the surface, stirring the sea as they came, but they were no longer unchallenged; the Dark was creeping up from the depths.
How had it got so late?
Moanna left the window at a jog. Past the ladder up into the steering-module, past the family shrine and the staring statue of the Blue Lady, through the hatch into her bedroom. Except calling it a bedroom was at least half a lie: one pace one way, one pace the other, that’s all the actual room there was. Come to think of it, there was no proper bed, either.
Sliding open the glass of her sleep-vault so that she could dress without banging a knee or an elbow, Moanna pulled on her pressure-suit. As she turned to leave she caught the flash of blue eyes in the mirror.
Ultramarine eyes.
She would be fine. She had been out in the ocean at dusk a hundred times before. Darker. Deeper. It wasn’t herself that she was worried about.
Out of her room, really running now, she took the turn to the MANTA-bay. As she passed the statue of the Blue Lady, she gave it a touch. A touch for luck. Not that she believed in the Blue Lady, with her pointed crown and the flaming torch she held high. Most Pioneers prayed to her for protection out in the open ocean, but not Moanna. Not really. Just a silly superstition.
Then down the long central corridor of the H-Pod, through one open hatch after another all the way down to the MANTA-bay. The lights flickered on, and the two MANTAs in their storage-racks stood to attention. Fifteen feet tall, they resembled statues themselves, statues of metal, glass, and plastic, half-human, half-fish, honouring some other ancient Pioneer god of the Deeps.
One of the MANTAs was Moanna’s. The other MANTA had been her brother Jason’s.
Jason Morgan was dead, lost somewhere out in aqua incognita. He had been dead for nearly a year – a long time set against Moanna’s age of fifteen. It still felt sometimes like he would come home. Moanna wondered when that feeling would fade, and whether she really wanted it to.
Nobody quite knew what to do with Jason’s MANTA; it was a reminder of a past stopped short, of a gap in the future. It was another thing to pat as Moanna went by.
She ran past the two empty racks – Moanna’s parents had taken their MANTAs with them to the sea-grass prairies for the harvest – and then she was at the access ladder.
The reflected glare of the lights slid up and over the open bullet-nosed canopy and across her MANTA’s smooth, hydrodynamic body. Moanna checked it over. All the steering-fins looked fine, no weeds or line snagged around them, and the ballast-vents were all clear. Then she unplugged the umbilical-cables and climbed up the ladder. At the top, she ducked under the curving canopy and stepped inside the body. Her legs slotted down until the instrument-displays in the sill came up to her waist – no need anymore for the pedal extensions that she had used as a child.
Moanna strapped herself into the flight-harness and powered up the MANTA’s systems. One by one, they winked online. She tugged the extendable helmet of her pressure-suit out from the high collar behind her head, and with the quick, fluid movement of daily practice, she slid the clear plastic visor down over her face and fastened it at her throat. Then she was good to go.
The hydraulics whined as she pulled down the transparent canopy, slamming it hard and locking it. There was a hiss as the cockpit pressurised. All lights were green. It was time to fly.
Moanna hit the launch button.
“Launch-sequence activated,” a recording of her mom’s voice burbled through the loudspeaker. “I hope you remembered to go to the bathroom.”
Moanna checked the straps of the flight-harness one last time. Behind her MANTA, the in-lock hatch to the launch tube slid open.
“And did you wash your hands?” the recording asked.
Motors growled, and still sitting in its rack, the MANTA rumbled backwards into the vertical launch tube. The hatch closed, sealing Moanna inside.
“Launch in ten seconds,” her mom’s voice said, and the lights in the launch tube started to flash.
Then Moanna heard them all, a chorus of Morgan voices, shouting the countdown together as the water rushed in; her younger, gap-toothed self, her mom and dad, and a barely teenaged Jason, his voice wobbling between high and low. She remembered the day they had made that recording; Jason counting out of order so they had to keep re-doing it, her own fits of giggles, and the horror of hearing what her own voice sounded like.
Blue-green and bubbling, the water climbed rapidly up the strengthened glass of the canopy. Lots of people hated being in a flooding launch tube, but Moanna liked the rising note the water made as it filled the empty space. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, every time.
“Five!” She turned on the MANTA’s flight-lights, and the launch tube blazed white all around her.
“Four!” The Morgans’ recorded voices were muffled mid-word as water flooded the chamber completely.
“Three!” There was a thud and a click and the out-lock hatch above her rotated open.
“Two!” Moanna released the docking-clamps that were pinning her MANTA to the rack.
“One!” A last swirl of silvery bubbles spiralled up past the MANTA, and she hit the thrusters, racing them up the launch tube and out into the ocean.
Up and up the MANTA went, fifteen, twenty, thirty feet above the untidy shape of the Morgans’ H-Pod. Moanna flexed the steering-fins and put the MANTA into a lazy spin. She shifted into. horizontal. flight as she passed back over the out-lock hatch and watched it close automatically beneath her.
Hanging suspended in the flight-harness, she glanced right and left through the bullet-shaped canopy. Deep purple-blue surrounded her, with the silver-white beams of the MANTA’s flight-lights stabbing out ahead. As she circled, she looked along the path they illuminated.
Half a day’s flight to the west were the Morgans’ sea-grass meadows out in the wilds where her parents had been for a week already, and just beyond the meadows, the deep, dark water of the Mississippi Trench. Beyond that, if the old legends were true, the seas eventually ended and the rocky mountains of the Great Plague Deserts pushed their poisonous heads up above the surface. Not far in the opposite direction, behind Moanna, were the Colony’s coral mines, and then hundreds of miles further to the east, more legends: the rising slopes of the Appalachian Islands. North: nothing as far as any Tethyan knew, just aqua incognita, unknown water. Right where the Morgans’ H-Pod sat on its flat coralcrete perch was just about as far beyond the Frontier as any Tethyan had ever dared to settle.
Through the shifting bands of the salt-water currents on Moanna’s left, away to the south, the Colony of MacGillycuddy’s Reef came into view. It was speckled with shimmering lights, sprawling across the rocks and ridges like a massive metal starfish. It had grown so fast in the last few years, unrecognisable from the small hitch-up it had been for most of Moanna’s life, and more changes were coming. If the plans of the politicians in Capital Colony worked out, the Reef would soon become the newest and northernmost member of the ever-expanding Tethys Federation.
Moanna turned towards it.
Strands of twinkling dots moved between the manufacturing and trading sectors as cargo-subs and shuttles approached or left the docks. There was the odd MANTA too, and maintenance-teams flitted like little parasitic fish across the Colony’s jumble of interconnecting pressure-hulls, fixing leaks. Far away in the murk, so distant that its shape was not really visible, was the High Hub, the tower at the centre of those radiating limbs, where people as wealthy and as well-connected as Jenn and Douglas Anderson lived.
Except where was Douglas Anderson now?
Nothing. No lights broke away from the glittering constellation of the Colony and headed in Moanna’s direction.
Dammit! Had Douglas gone on ahead already, looking for her? Maybe. Or was he trying to impress her, waiting to surprise her? That thought almost made Moanna smile. But the Dark was deepening all around her: no place for a dry-walker Colonist to play the daredevil.
“Are you going out to check your lobster traps?” Jenn Anderson had asked her earlier that day, thirty-hours away at the end of a crackling teletalk-line in Capital Colony.
Moanna gave herself a mental kick for being so unguarded. She should have realised what it had meant, that question, so innocent-sounding.
Jenn hated the Andersons’ family visits to Capital Colony, Moanna knew that. Anyone else would have been excited at the thought of a trip down there, to the old, established deepwater Colonies on the edge of the Florida Deeps. But not Jenn. She called Moanna every day, seeking sanctuary from the boredom of endless shopping visits and official engagements, and that day had been no exception.
So Moanna had thought it was a fair question, asking about something that reminded Jenn of her life at home on the ‘wrong’ side of the Frontier.
And then Mrs Anderson had got involved. Moanna knew she had to be worried to consider sending Douglas. Her son had returned from Capital Colony with his father the day before, and as fond as Mrs Anderson was of Moanna, she normally tried to limit any time that Douglas might spend in her company. Just in case.
And Mrs Anderson was worried. Even after five years, she wasn’t used to Frontier life in MacGillycuddy’s Reef. Down in Capital Colony there were miles and miles of fencing and wide areas of carefully managed banks dotted with habitation-condos. Most settlements were linked together by dry-walk connections or tunnel-trains, so that even a trip in a shuttle-sub was regarded as a hazardous inconvenience. Dry-walkers called MANTAs ‘iron coffins’, and for that reason, Mrs Anderson and her husband had never been anywhere near one. Jenn and Douglas had learnt to fly – all part of growing up past the Frontier – but compared to Moanna, they were little more than novices. Just experienced enough to get into trouble…
Now Douglas was out past the Perimeter, sent to baby-sit someone who had spent her entire life out in the Wet! Moanna was annoyed by the arrogance of it – the stupid, well-meaning, dry-walker arrogance.
She couldn’t wait any longer. She flipped her MANTA around in the water, kicked the thrusters to full power, and headed for the Perimeter. She soon passed it – the sentry-pods and the strung-out lines of fluttering weeds that marked the fences, all of it left over from the last Wire War. Further south, on the Federation side of the Frontier, such defences had long since been salvaged. Up on the edge of aqua incognita, where sharks and pirates and who knew what else lurked in the unknown waters, the fences had been kept for safety’s sake.
As she angled her fins away from the Perimeter, Moanna armed the anti-shark spines on her MANTA and looked around warily. But aqua incognita was as empty as ever – just the fish and the flotsam and the restless souls of the billions who had died with the Old Earth more than a thousand years before.
The land rose beneath her, drowned summits that must once have been low hills far from the sea, and the waves at the surface painted broken ribbons across the coral banks.
Moanna glanced up. The surface was so different from the tranquil waters of the Deeps – turbulent and wrathful, a sign of the Hell that people said was beyond them. She stared at the kaleidoscope patterns of greens and blues that furled and furrowed overhead. Only a hundred feet away, but a thousand years of fear and superstition lay between her and the surface.
No-one from the Tethys Colonies had visited the surface for more than a thousand years, and most Tethyans didn’t believe it existed at all. Water all the way up, they said, until you got to Hell itself where the Sun burnt down with its shining rays, peeling the skin from your body, scorching out your eyes, and boiling away the seas to fill what was left with poisonous gasses. Papa Noah had led their ancestors under the waves away from all that. No-one but them, a few thousand at most, had survived the fires and the floods and the toxic winds that had come afterwards from the Great Plague Deserts in the west. The Old Earth had died and a new world had been born: Thalassa, the world beneath the waves. It was Moanna’s world, and she knew it intimately.
As she rounded a saddleback seamount and flew out above the plateau, the waters widened, opening to her sight. Still nothing. No MANTA. Where could Douglas be? There was nowhere to hide out there. Nowhere except…
The knot of fear in Moanna’s stomach tightened, and she headed off at full thrust towards the dusky twilight of the lower slopes.
Moanna was running out of time.
She pressed her face against the glass of the window, and the endless, everlasting weight of the ocean pressed back. The light was dying. Pale shimmers still filtered down from the poisonous hell at the surface, stirring the sea as they came, but they were no longer unchallenged; the Dark was creeping up from the depths.
How had it got so late?
Moanna left the window at a jog. Past the ladder up into the steering-module, past the family shrine and the staring statue of the Blue Lady, through the hatch into her bedroom. Except calling it a bedroom was at least half a lie: one pace one way, one pace the other, that’s all the actual room there was. Come to think of it, there was no proper bed, either.
Sliding open the glass of her sleep-vault so that she could dress without banging a knee or an elbow, Moanna pulled on her pressure-suit. As she turned to leave she caught the flash of blue eyes in the mirror.
Ultramarine eyes.
She would be fine. She had been out in the ocean at dusk a hundred times before. Darker. Deeper. It wasn’t herself that she was worried about.
Out of her room, really running now, she took the turn to the MANTA-bay. As she passed the statue of the Blue Lady, she gave it a touch. A touch for luck. Not that she believed in the Blue Lady, with her pointed crown and the flaming torch she held high. Most Pioneers prayed to her for protection out in the open ocean, but not Moanna. Not really. Just a silly superstition.
Then down the long central corridor of the H-Pod, through one open hatch after another all the way down to the MANTA-bay. The lights flickered on, and the two MANTAs in their storage-racks stood to attention. Fifteen feet tall, they resembled statues themselves, statues of metal, glass, and plastic, half-human, half-fish, honouring some other ancient Pioneer god of the Deeps.
One of the MANTAs was Moanna’s. The other MANTA had been her brother Jason’s.
Jason Morgan was dead, lost somewhere out in aqua incognita. He had been dead for nearly a year – a long time set against Moanna’s age of fifteen. It still felt sometimes like he would come home. Moanna wondered when that feeling would fade, and whether she really wanted it to.
Nobody quite knew what to do with Jason’s MANTA; it was a reminder of a past stopped short, of a gap in the future. It was another thing to pat as Moanna went by.
She ran past the two empty racks – Moanna’s parents had taken their MANTAs with them to the sea-grass prairies for the harvest – and then she was at the access ladder.
The reflected glare of the lights slid up and over the open bullet-nosed canopy and across her MANTA’s smooth, hydrodynamic body. Moanna checked it over. All the steering-fins looked fine, no weeds or line snagged around them, and the ballast-vents were all clear. Then she unplugged the umbilical-cables and climbed up the ladder. At the top, she ducked under the curving canopy and stepped inside the body. Her legs slotted down until the instrument-displays in the sill came up to her waist – no need anymore for the pedal extensions that she had used as a child.
Moanna strapped herself into the flight-harness and powered up the MANTA’s systems. One by one, they winked online. She tugged the extendable helmet of her pressure-suit out from the high collar behind her head, and with the quick, fluid movement of daily practice, she slid the clear plastic visor down over her face and fastened it at her throat. Then she was good to go.
The hydraulics whined as she pulled down the transparent canopy, slamming it hard and locking it. There was a hiss as the cockpit pressurised. All lights were green. It was time to fly.
Moanna hit the launch button.
“Launch-sequence activated,” a recording of her mom’s voice burbled through the loudspeaker. “I hope you remembered to go to the bathroom.”
Moanna checked the straps of the flight-harness one last time. Behind her MANTA, the in-lock hatch to the launch tube slid open.
“And did you wash your hands?” the recording asked.
Motors growled, and still sitting in its rack, the MANTA rumbled backwards into the vertical launch tube. The hatch closed, sealing Moanna inside.
“Launch in ten seconds,” her mom’s voice said, and the lights in the launch tube started to flash.
Then Moanna heard them all, a chorus of Morgan voices, shouting the countdown together as the water rushed in; her younger, gap-toothed self, her mom and dad, and a barely teenaged Jason, his voice wobbling between high and low. She remembered the day they had made that recording; Jason counting out of order so they had to keep re-doing it, her own fits of giggles, and the horror of hearing what her own voice sounded like.
Blue-green and bubbling, the water climbed rapidly up the strengthened glass of the canopy. Lots of people hated being in a flooding launch tube, but Moanna liked the rising note the water made as it filled the empty space. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, every time.
“Five!” She turned on the MANTA’s flight-lights, and the launch tube blazed white all around her.
“Four!” The Morgans’ recorded voices were muffled mid-word as water flooded the chamber completely.
“Three!” There was a thud and a click and the out-lock hatch above her rotated open.
“Two!” Moanna released the docking-clamps that were pinning her MANTA to the rack.
“One!” A last swirl of silvery bubbles spiralled up past the MANTA, and she hit the thrusters, racing them up the launch tube and out into the ocean.
Up and up the MANTA went, fifteen, twenty, thirty feet above the untidy shape of the Morgans’ H-Pod. Moanna flexed the steering-fins and put the MANTA into a lazy spin. She shifted into. horizontal. flight as she passed back over the out-lock hatch and watched it close automatically beneath her.
Hanging suspended in the flight-harness, she glanced right and left through the bullet-shaped canopy. Deep purple-blue surrounded her, with the silver-white beams of the MANTA’s flight-lights stabbing out ahead. As she circled, she looked along the path they illuminated.
Half a day’s flight to the west were the Morgans’ sea-grass meadows out in the wilds where her parents had been for a week already, and just beyond the meadows, the deep, dark water of the Mississippi Trench. Beyond that, if the old legends were true, the seas eventually ended and the rocky mountains of the Great Plague Deserts pushed their poisonous heads up above the surface. Not far in the opposite direction, behind Moanna, were the Colony’s coral mines, and then hundreds of miles further to the east, more legends: the rising slopes of the Appalachian Islands. North: nothing as far as any Tethyan knew, just aqua incognita, unknown water. Right where the Morgans’ H-Pod sat on its flat coralcrete perch was just about as far beyond the Frontier as any Tethyan had ever dared to settle.
Through the shifting bands of the salt-water currents on Moanna’s left, away to the south, the Colony of MacGillycuddy’s Reef came into view. It was speckled with shimmering lights, sprawling across the rocks and ridges like a massive metal starfish. It had grown so fast in the last few years, unrecognisable from the small hitch-up it had been for most of Moanna’s life, and more changes were coming. If the plans of the politicians in Capital Colony worked out, the Reef would soon become the newest and northernmost member of the ever-expanding Tethys Federation.
Moanna turned towards it.
Strands of twinkling dots moved between the manufacturing and trading sectors as cargo-subs and shuttles approached or left the docks. There was the odd MANTA too, and maintenance-teams flitted like little parasitic fish across the Colony’s jumble of interconnecting pressure-hulls, fixing leaks. Far away in the murk, so distant that its shape was not really visible, was the High Hub, the tower at the centre of those radiating limbs, where people as wealthy and as well-connected as Jenn and Douglas Anderson lived.
Except where was Douglas Anderson now?
Nothing. No lights broke away from the glittering constellation of the Colony and headed in Moanna’s direction.
Dammit! Had Douglas gone on ahead already, looking for her? Maybe. Or was he trying to impress her, waiting to surprise her? That thought almost made Moanna smile. But the Dark was deepening all around her: no place for a dry-walker Colonist to play the daredevil.
“Are you going out to check your lobster traps?” Jenn Anderson had asked her earlier that day, thirty-hours away at the end of a crackling teletalk-line in Capital Colony.
Moanna gave herself a mental kick for being so unguarded. She should have realised what it had meant, that question, so innocent-sounding.
Jenn hated the Andersons’ family visits to Capital Colony, Moanna knew that. Anyone else would have been excited at the thought of a trip down there, to the old, established deepwater Colonies on the edge of the Florida Deeps. But not Jenn. She called Moanna every day, seeking sanctuary from the boredom of endless shopping visits and official engagements, and that day had been no exception.
So Moanna had thought it was a fair question, asking about something that reminded Jenn of her life at home on the ‘wrong’ side of the Frontier.
And then Mrs Anderson had got involved. Moanna knew she had to be worried to consider sending Douglas. Her son had returned from Capital Colony with his father the day before, and as fond as Mrs Anderson was of Moanna, she normally tried to limit any time that Douglas might spend in her company. Just in case.
And Mrs Anderson was worried. Even after five years, she wasn’t used to Frontier life in MacGillycuddy’s Reef. Down in Capital Colony there were miles and miles of fencing and wide areas of carefully managed banks dotted with habitation-condos. Most settlements were linked together by dry-walk connections or tunnel-trains, so that even a trip in a shuttle-sub was regarded as a hazardous inconvenience. Dry-walkers called MANTAs ‘iron coffins’, and for that reason, Mrs Anderson and her husband had never been anywhere near one. Jenn and Douglas had learnt to fly – all part of growing up past the Frontier – but compared to Moanna, they were little more than novices. Just experienced enough to get into trouble…
Now Douglas was out past the Perimeter, sent to baby-sit someone who had spent her entire life out in the Wet! Moanna was annoyed by the arrogance of it – the stupid, well-meaning, dry-walker arrogance.
She couldn’t wait any longer. She flipped her MANTA around in the water, kicked the thrusters to full power, and headed for the Perimeter. She soon passed it – the sentry-pods and the strung-out lines of fluttering weeds that marked the fences, all of it left over from the last Wire War. Further south, on the Federation side of the Frontier, such defences had long since been salvaged. Up on the edge of aqua incognita, where sharks and pirates and who knew what else lurked in the unknown waters, the fences had been kept for safety’s sake.
As she angled her fins away from the Perimeter, Moanna armed the anti-shark spines on her MANTA and looked around warily. But aqua incognita was as empty as ever – just the fish and the flotsam and the restless souls of the billions who had died with the Old Earth more than a thousand years before.
The land rose beneath her, drowned summits that must once have been low hills far from the sea, and the waves at the surface painted broken ribbons across the coral banks.
Moanna glanced up. The surface was so different from the tranquil waters of the Deeps – turbulent and wrathful, a sign of the Hell that people said was beyond them. She stared at the kaleidoscope patterns of greens and blues that furled and furrowed overhead. Only a hundred feet away, but a thousand years of fear and superstition lay between her and the surface.
No-one from the Tethys Colonies had visited the surface for more than a thousand years, and most Tethyans didn’t believe it existed at all. Water all the way up, they said, until you got to Hell itself where the Sun burnt down with its shining rays, peeling the skin from your body, scorching out your eyes, and boiling away the seas to fill what was left with poisonous gasses. Papa Noah had led their ancestors under the waves away from all that. No-one but them, a few thousand at most, had survived the fires and the floods and the toxic winds that had come afterwards from the Great Plague Deserts in the west. The Old Earth had died and a new world had been born: Thalassa, the world beneath the waves. It was Moanna’s world, and she knew it intimately.
As she rounded a saddleback seamount and flew out above the plateau, the waters widened, opening to her sight. Still nothing. No MANTA. Where could Douglas be? There was nowhere to hide out there. Nowhere except…
The knot of fear in Moanna’s stomach tightened, and she headed off at full thrust towards the dusky twilight of the lower slopes.
February 6, 2018
Good openings - the eye of the beholder
Two blog posts in one day? The writing must be going well... But I didn't want to *just* use the blog as an exercise in book promotion (despite temptation/appearances to the contrary).
I'm currently dipping into Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress. I've read a few bits and here and there, as well as trying to take a more structured approach to what Kress has to say. I'm not big on self-help books, mainly because I like to discover things for myself and I think if I'd read this as a 'how to write' guide I would have felt quite daunted. Better to write first and read about your mistakes afterwards, in my view. I also think that too close attention to any 'rules of the game' can result in formulaic writing. Nevertheless, the book accords very well with my experience of writing so far and it's handy to tie things together and learn a few new things along the way.
One thing that has made me wonder a bit is Kress's approach to beginnings. She has some great advice, but she uses these two examples of beginnings to explore do's and don't's (I should also point out that the emphasis is on introducing a character):
Example 1 (p. 10):
"I am sitting over coffee and cigarets [sic] at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.
It is late of a slow Wednesday when Herb seats the fat man at my station.
This fat man is the fattest person I have ever seen, though he is neat-appearing and well-dressed enough. Everything about him is big. But is is the fingers I remember best. When I stop at the table next to his to see to the old couple, I first notice the fingers."
Example 2 (p. 11):
"The fall day was hot. Ted Henderson drove to the school and parked the car. He wore a dark blue suit, black shoes, and the maroon tie Kathy had given him for Christmas. He climbed the steps and opened the door. Inside, it was cooler. The school office told him Mrs. Kelly would join him soon. Ted sat down to wait.
When Mrs. Kelly arrived, she led him into a conference room. They sat down.
'I'd like to discuss my daughter Jane's grades,' Ted said. 'Her report card wasn't very good.' "
Which of these openers is deemed by Kress to be "unsuccessful"? Answer below.
Kress concludes that example 1 is more successful at introducing a character. It gives the character a real 'voice'. In Kress' words: "readers will sense that there is a character here, a genuine person." (p. 11). In contrast, example 2, Kress contends, simply raises a ton of questions about who Ted is and his motivations for seeing Mrs. Kelly. I don't dispute that, though I think anyone writing in the first person automatically gains more character - Kress doesn't make this point in her critique - and so the comparison is a bit unfair. Beyond that, which opener would prompt me to read more? For me, it would be example 2, simply because there are so many questions about Ted Henderson and his motives. Example one - from a story by Raymond Carver - is less interesting to my taste, and I even find the use of such obvious devices as the meandering and mundane 'this-is-not-important-but-it-is' tone a bit cliched and annoying.
What I really learnt from this example: write for yourself - you know what works for you, and if you don't like it, nobody else will.
I'm looking forward to the rest if the book: it's making me think, even if I don't always agree, and that's always a good thing.
I'm currently dipping into Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress. I've read a few bits and here and there, as well as trying to take a more structured approach to what Kress has to say. I'm not big on self-help books, mainly because I like to discover things for myself and I think if I'd read this as a 'how to write' guide I would have felt quite daunted. Better to write first and read about your mistakes afterwards, in my view. I also think that too close attention to any 'rules of the game' can result in formulaic writing. Nevertheless, the book accords very well with my experience of writing so far and it's handy to tie things together and learn a few new things along the way.
One thing that has made me wonder a bit is Kress's approach to beginnings. She has some great advice, but she uses these two examples of beginnings to explore do's and don't's (I should also point out that the emphasis is on introducing a character):
Example 1 (p. 10):
"I am sitting over coffee and cigarets [sic] at my friend Rita's and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.
It is late of a slow Wednesday when Herb seats the fat man at my station.
This fat man is the fattest person I have ever seen, though he is neat-appearing and well-dressed enough. Everything about him is big. But is is the fingers I remember best. When I stop at the table next to his to see to the old couple, I first notice the fingers."
Example 2 (p. 11):
"The fall day was hot. Ted Henderson drove to the school and parked the car. He wore a dark blue suit, black shoes, and the maroon tie Kathy had given him for Christmas. He climbed the steps and opened the door. Inside, it was cooler. The school office told him Mrs. Kelly would join him soon. Ted sat down to wait.
When Mrs. Kelly arrived, she led him into a conference room. They sat down.
'I'd like to discuss my daughter Jane's grades,' Ted said. 'Her report card wasn't very good.' "
Which of these openers is deemed by Kress to be "unsuccessful"? Answer below.
Kress concludes that example 1 is more successful at introducing a character. It gives the character a real 'voice'. In Kress' words: "readers will sense that there is a character here, a genuine person." (p. 11). In contrast, example 2, Kress contends, simply raises a ton of questions about who Ted is and his motivations for seeing Mrs. Kelly. I don't dispute that, though I think anyone writing in the first person automatically gains more character - Kress doesn't make this point in her critique - and so the comparison is a bit unfair. Beyond that, which opener would prompt me to read more? For me, it would be example 2, simply because there are so many questions about Ted Henderson and his motives. Example one - from a story by Raymond Carver - is less interesting to my taste, and I even find the use of such obvious devices as the meandering and mundane 'this-is-not-important-but-it-is' tone a bit cliched and annoying.
What I really learnt from this example: write for yourself - you know what works for you, and if you don't like it, nobody else will.
I'm looking forward to the rest if the book: it's making me think, even if I don't always agree, and that's always a good thing.
Hunted across the dead red deserts
To celebrate the second edition of Race the Red Horizon, I'm offering free ebook copies to anyone interested. If you'd like one, please email me at "my-name-as-written-below"@hotmail.com, and specify whether you'd like epub or mobi. I'll send one out as as soon as possible. Thanks.
mjonathanjones
Not a preview exactly, but a taster of the setting taken from my webpage.
"Dawn comes to the dead red deserts, chasing away the lethal cold of night. You wake up in your sleeping-tube and stretch your muscles beneath your skin-suit. As much as you can, anyway – it’s a bit cramped in there. You check the readings in your goggle-display, take a sip of water from the drip-tube inside your facemask, and maybe even unfasten it (briefly!) to have a bite of breakfast. Mmmhmm. High-calorie ration-bars! Deeee-licious!
You wriggle out of the sleeping-tube through the flap at one end, pull your wing-pack after you, and strap it on. Brrrr! Still chilly out, but like a good Pteronaut you check the sky. Faultless and blue, just like every other day. Ever.
That first breath through your facemask clears the stale air from your breathing capillaries. Toxic air – utterly deadly if you fancied a sniff of it unmasked – is drawn in through the gill-cells that rib your chest, and the carbex filters inside suck out the poison. Automatically, you check the readings in the goggle-display: all green. Your filters are fresh and will give you enough air to last the journey. All being well.
Your roost is high up on a ridge. A red ridge, among red rocks, because red is the palette of everything in the cold dead deserts, everything but that pristine blue bowl above you. You scan the landscape. It’s stark, bleak and brutal, and utterly empty. Or so it would look to a non-Pteronaut. But you don’t see the starkness; you don’t even see the grim beauty of it. You’re looking for thermals.
A few dust-devils stagger drunkenly around, up and about early like you are. The air is heating and starting to circle. Invisible thermals are building. In a while, their currents will call you. First, you need some water. There is plenty of ice locked deep down in the permafrost – the problem is getting to it. Your goggle-eyes sweep the buttes and mesas and the canyons around you. You spot a little hollow of darkness, a fracture in the rocks, where the ice might be close to the surface. It’s a quick flick of your wings away, and you’ll check it first thing. If there’s no ice there, you’ll need to dig. Never much fun when all you have is a knife.
You reach down and collapse the sleeping-tube. It puffs and pants and shrinks to the size of your palm. The sleeping-tube is the difference between life and death, because the night-dark is too cold to survive in the open, so you stow it carefully in the pouch beneath your wing-pack.
Now it might just be time to fly. You reach up for the handgrips at your shoulders and unlock the wings. They sweep out on either side, unfolding, clicking into place. The wings hum and sigh as the early morning breeze plays over the struts. You test them, feeling the way they bite into the wind.
With a kick, you step off the ridge and take to the sky – you are a Pteronaut again…"
mjonathanjones
Not a preview exactly, but a taster of the setting taken from my webpage.
"Dawn comes to the dead red deserts, chasing away the lethal cold of night. You wake up in your sleeping-tube and stretch your muscles beneath your skin-suit. As much as you can, anyway – it’s a bit cramped in there. You check the readings in your goggle-display, take a sip of water from the drip-tube inside your facemask, and maybe even unfasten it (briefly!) to have a bite of breakfast. Mmmhmm. High-calorie ration-bars! Deeee-licious!
You wriggle out of the sleeping-tube through the flap at one end, pull your wing-pack after you, and strap it on. Brrrr! Still chilly out, but like a good Pteronaut you check the sky. Faultless and blue, just like every other day. Ever.
That first breath through your facemask clears the stale air from your breathing capillaries. Toxic air – utterly deadly if you fancied a sniff of it unmasked – is drawn in through the gill-cells that rib your chest, and the carbex filters inside suck out the poison. Automatically, you check the readings in the goggle-display: all green. Your filters are fresh and will give you enough air to last the journey. All being well.
Your roost is high up on a ridge. A red ridge, among red rocks, because red is the palette of everything in the cold dead deserts, everything but that pristine blue bowl above you. You scan the landscape. It’s stark, bleak and brutal, and utterly empty. Or so it would look to a non-Pteronaut. But you don’t see the starkness; you don’t even see the grim beauty of it. You’re looking for thermals.
A few dust-devils stagger drunkenly around, up and about early like you are. The air is heating and starting to circle. Invisible thermals are building. In a while, their currents will call you. First, you need some water. There is plenty of ice locked deep down in the permafrost – the problem is getting to it. Your goggle-eyes sweep the buttes and mesas and the canyons around you. You spot a little hollow of darkness, a fracture in the rocks, where the ice might be close to the surface. It’s a quick flick of your wings away, and you’ll check it first thing. If there’s no ice there, you’ll need to dig. Never much fun when all you have is a knife.
You reach down and collapse the sleeping-tube. It puffs and pants and shrinks to the size of your palm. The sleeping-tube is the difference between life and death, because the night-dark is too cold to survive in the open, so you stow it carefully in the pouch beneath your wing-pack.
Now it might just be time to fly. You reach up for the handgrips at your shoulders and unlock the wings. They sweep out on either side, unfolding, clicking into place. The wings hum and sigh as the early morning breeze plays over the struts. You test them, feeling the way they bite into the wind.
With a kick, you step off the ridge and take to the sky – you are a Pteronaut again…"
January 19, 2018
Brandyke Reboot
This week I wrote 3000 words of Thalassa: Fire & Flood, book 3 of the Tethys Trilogy and the sequel to Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, which is a small start, but it's at least a start.
I have also spruced up the website for Brandyke Books and finished designing the cover for the second edition of Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. Take a peek.
I have also spruced up the website for Brandyke Books and finished designing the cover for the second edition of Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. Take a peek.
January 8, 2018
New year, new projects
Happy New Year. So here we are, 2018. No flying cars yet or jetpacks (or underwater cities), but at least it's not Blade Runner territory, either. Not yet...
I ended 2017 with the publication of book #2 of the Tethys Trilogy, Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves. It took me a while to get there. There were plot-knots to solve of course, and matters technical (how to navigate various changes of perspective), and also just the day-to-day problems of writing part-time. But it's done and I'm pleased with it - or I would never have let it loose. I also sneaked out a second revised edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves, and 2017 also featured the surprise publication of The Outlaws of Kratzenfels. This time last year, I had no idea I would write it; the whole thing was a bit of a blur between February and May. So, that was 2017: what's next?
Foremost, but I suspect not first, the third (and final?) book in the Tethys Trilogy (Thalassa: Fire and Flood) needs work. I have no idea when it will be ready. It exists mostly as fragments, notes, half-written scenes, and vague hints of things. This is how it works for me, and I need to let the plot stew to come up with something worthy of Moanna and co. (and you the readers, of course). It will be a while, probably 2019. But who knows? It took me a wholly unexpected - and somewhat breathless - 169 hours to write Kratzenfels, after all.
There is more to come from Kratzenfels and the wider world of Elbora too, I hope, though again I think 2018 is unlikely to see anything. And among the numerous other half-chewed-at projects, from both before and after Thalassa, there is one that I'm itching to get at. It's another post-apocalyptic tale, set in a mostly (but not completely) retro-tech world, very much in the vein of one of my favourites: Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. I can't see much of the plot yet - I'm blinded by excitement at the setting - but I know it's out there somewhere. I just need to stumble around enough and I'll trip over it.
2018 may well turn out to be the Year of the Stumble, with more thinking and plotting and less actual writing (or at least, publishing), but as one wise old muppet once said: always in motion is the future. See you there, and don't forget your jetpack.
I ended 2017 with the publication of book #2 of the Tethys Trilogy, Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves. It took me a while to get there. There were plot-knots to solve of course, and matters technical (how to navigate various changes of perspective), and also just the day-to-day problems of writing part-time. But it's done and I'm pleased with it - or I would never have let it loose. I also sneaked out a second revised edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves, and 2017 also featured the surprise publication of The Outlaws of Kratzenfels. This time last year, I had no idea I would write it; the whole thing was a bit of a blur between February and May. So, that was 2017: what's next?
Foremost, but I suspect not first, the third (and final?) book in the Tethys Trilogy (Thalassa: Fire and Flood) needs work. I have no idea when it will be ready. It exists mostly as fragments, notes, half-written scenes, and vague hints of things. This is how it works for me, and I need to let the plot stew to come up with something worthy of Moanna and co. (and you the readers, of course). It will be a while, probably 2019. But who knows? It took me a wholly unexpected - and somewhat breathless - 169 hours to write Kratzenfels, after all.
There is more to come from Kratzenfels and the wider world of Elbora too, I hope, though again I think 2018 is unlikely to see anything. And among the numerous other half-chewed-at projects, from both before and after Thalassa, there is one that I'm itching to get at. It's another post-apocalyptic tale, set in a mostly (but not completely) retro-tech world, very much in the vein of one of my favourites: Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. I can't see much of the plot yet - I'm blinded by excitement at the setting - but I know it's out there somewhere. I just need to stumble around enough and I'll trip over it.
2018 may well turn out to be the Year of the Stumble, with more thinking and plotting and less actual writing (or at least, publishing), but as one wise old muppet once said: always in motion is the future. See you there, and don't forget your jetpack.
January 5, 2018
Kindle FREE copies - The Tethys Trilogy Books 1 & 2
Just a very quick post to say that Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves and Thalassa: Aqua Incognita are available FREE for Kindle 4th-6th January (yep, I'm late. Apologies...).
Links are here:
Amazon .co.uk
Amazon.com
Amazon.de
Navigate from one of those if you need another 'tributary' (or whatever Amazon off-shoots are called).
Enjoy!
Links are here:
Amazon .co.uk
Amazon.com
Amazon.de
Navigate from one of those if you need another 'tributary' (or whatever Amazon off-shoots are called).
Enjoy!
December 22, 2017
Double whammy
Thalassa: Aqua Incognita is finished, the files are uploaded, and the ebook is on Amazon right now (here for .com; the paperback is still being processed), so I'm basking in that feeling you get at the end of exams or handing in a dissertation. It's been a tough nut to crack for various reasons, and I've tried to stick to the idea of 'the same but different': the plot moves on, of course, but we get to see some familiar faces doing what they do best, as well as learning more about them and their role in things. There are also some new characters, new places, and what I hope is a twist and a cliffhanger (trenchhanger?) at the end. You have been warned...
Also out is a second edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves, with a new cover, no prologue, and a substantial rewrite of the first two chapters. That's out in paperback too (not on database yet: look here). There are no major plot changes, and I'll describe/explain/justify my decisions in a separate post.
Both books are FREE on Kindle 23rd-24th December - I'll arrange another freebie in the New Year. Yuletide greetings to one and all.
Also out is a second edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves, with a new cover, no prologue, and a substantial rewrite of the first two chapters. That's out in paperback too (not on database yet: look here). There are no major plot changes, and I'll describe/explain/justify my decisions in a separate post.
Both books are FREE on Kindle 23rd-24th December - I'll arrange another freebie in the New Year. Yuletide greetings to one and all.
