Bob Blanton's Blog: Writing Delphi in Space, page 3

Wow, Book 10?

As you can tell, I'm not much of a blogger.  I need a teenager to interview me each day and do the blogs

Blame it on Covid-19Some of you may have noticed that boo...

Blame it on Covid-19

Some of you may have noticed that book six wasn't available through KU.  Oops, I missed checking that box when I did the prerelease.  It is now available in KU.   One of my fans, noticed it early this morning and let me know.

Cabin fever, that why:)

bob

First Audio Book is out

Finally.  What a long process to publish one.  But it's here,  Starship Sakira, Audio Version.

Uphill

I'm 1500 words into book 9.  It looks daunting,  70,000+ is the goal.

Funny how before the stay at home order, I preferred to stay home and write, now I've got cabin fever.

Book 6 comes out in three days, book 7 is in the final edit round, and book 8 got by the beta reader without major change.  I should be raring to go on book 9.  At least I have the plot:).

Maybe I need to social distance myself from the news.

Everyone, stay safe.

Oops, that is a long way

When reading and even when writing Science Fiction, we sometimes forget just how far apart things are.The fringe of our solar system is beyond Neptune, whose orbit is thirty AUs, thirty times farther from the sun than Earth.  Jupiter is only five times farther.   When writing book five, Delphi Alliance, I carefully calculated the distances and times.  In Delphi Federation, I used those numbers, but I glossed over the extra distance from forty-fifty AUs to sixty.  And in book seven, I used the numbers from Delphi Alliance.  Oops.  My wife mentioned to me that the travel times seemed short.   After assuring her that I had run the numbers multiple times, I thought, hey, why not.  I ran them again, and Oh shit, I was off by weeks.  I panicked.  Necessity being the mother of invention, I spent the day and night trying to come up with a way out of my problem without having to rewrite books seven and eight.  Then when I was working on the timeline, I set up the calculations for travel to the fringe and realized I was off by 10X, I’d entered 10E3 for x10^3 instead of E3.  Excel formula.  So, the problem wasn’t so huge.  But I was still off.  My solution was to raise the accelerations, but I didn’t want to create a magical inertial dampener.  I had looked at the problem of high Gs for the human body and came up with this solution.  Given that the main issue was pumping blood to the brain, I set the acceleration direction perpendicular to the seated passengers and pilots, so it appeared that they were laying down, then I had the acceleration cut out for ½ second every 2 seconds.  That allows for an unrestrained heartrate of thirty per minute, which matches the heartrate of highly fit athletes.  So I raised my max acceleration to 15Gs, problem solved, I hope:)

Delphi Station makes ebookDaily

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TaDa Book 7 Mapped

While lying in bed this morning, waiting on the heat, I was in that drowsy state between sleep and awake.  During this state the general outline for book seven crystalized.  YEAH!!!

Now I have to go back and fix the roadblock I inadvertently put into book six, fortunately, I haven't sent it to my beta readers yet.  And I'll have to check book five as well.  I'm pretty sure it won't need changes; if it does, my copy editor (Wife) might beat me severely about the head and shoulders:).

I always want a solid outline of the next book before I release the current one, preferably the next two.  It is amazing how you can inadvertently write yourself into a corner.  Read my post staying out of corners.

But you are now assured that books 5 and 6 are on their way, and book 7 is starting to take shape.

Last Line??

I just typed the last line of the sixth book Delphi Federation.  Now I need to let it sit for a few days.  Then I'll reread it and fix up a few things, then I send it to my beta readers to be shredded :(  Hopefully, I won't have to start over.  I'm sure they'll love it.  Won't they?

Now to the joy of working with my Editor to finalize book five, Delphi Alliance.  I keep hearing things like "WHAT!" so I'm afraid there's a lot of work to do to get it ready for release before the end of January.

Maybe she'll let me spend some time plotting book seven.  One can hope.

OOPS

Today I had to fix three typos and two formatting errors in Delphi Station.  One of my readers ratted me out to the Amazon police.  And I want to thank them so much.  It is amazing how many errors get through the copy editor, proofreader, and tools like Grammarly.  It is embarrassing, but I'm happy to be able to fix them so my future readers don't get confused.

Jonny, I've got a $100 Amazon gift certificate for you if you want to claim it.

Feel free to email any mistakes you find to me at delphi.in.space@gmail.com.

Thanks

Bob

Pushing through roadblocks

I find that when I'm working on a section that I know I'm going to have to come back and tighten up, it's hard to stay focused.  I guess I'm spoiled by the parts that I seem to just be able to write from memory, all those daydreams.  When I have to buckle down and write, knowing a major rewrite is in order, I look for other things to do.  Even editing is more attractive.

Back to plowing through that chapter.  My beta readers are going to hate me.