Eric Thomson's Blog, page 25

Howling Stars (Decker’s War – Book 4)

I promised that the fourth Zack Decker adventure would come out in November and there’s just under two hours left in the month in my part of Canada, so here it is:

Howling Stars (Decker’s War Book 4)

The paperback version will follow in a few days.  Enjoy!

Musical Memories

Since quitting the bowels of the demented bureaucracy, I’ve kept a bit of background noise, both at home and in my truck, by sticking to a pleasant, advertizing-free radio station. It not only keeps me amused but makes me thankful, during the morning and afternoon traffic reports, for no longer having to endure the foibles and stupidities of people who shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel.

Because of the political garbage permeating virtually everything in the last few weeks, I’ve switched my radio allegiance to a station broadcasting classical music instead of opinions, editorials, and other idiocies. It’s as much a matter of taste as it is a question of health. I quit the bureaucracy to escape a life dominated by high blood pressure and bathing in politics would only keep me popping pills that much longer. In the process, by listening to the soothing sounds of masterpieces from a past that didn’t exude the unpleasantness of Anno Domini 2016 (although it had unpleasantness of its own), I rediscovered a pair of gems that aren’t as well-known as they should be.

The first, a little melody deserving so much more recognition is called “Vltava” by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana. It is better known by its Germanic name, “The Moldau.” The Vltava is the longest river in the Czech Republic and is commonly referred to as the Czech national river. I was first introduced to Smetana’s enchanting composition by my mother at a very young age and even now, almost five decades later, it still evokes unexpected emotions. One of the few memories I have of being a small child is asking my mother to play the Moldau. The last movement in particular still touches me in a way few musical pieces can.

The other piece, Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic poem “Pines of Rome,” is an understated musical gem that doesn’t get much airtime, so I was enchanted to hear it on the radio a few days ago. I can’t quite remember when or how I was first introduced to it, save that it hooked me immediately. I suppose having studied Roman history in large part through Edward Gibbon’s seminal work “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” gives it a greater significance in my eyes.

Listening to both compositions, I can easily visualize the influence Smetana and Respighi had on their modern musical descendants, in particular those creating soundtracks for the movies. They’re not the only ones, of course. Gustav Holst, for example, has inspired such great contemporary composers as John Williams of Star Wars fame, among many others, but if you listen carefully, you’ll find that the two underrated composers whose works I’ve rediscovered still resonate long after their deaths.

And no, my life hasn’t been all classical music or home renovations (though the workshop rebuild is finished!). My final revision of Howling Stars (Decker’s War Book 4) is almost complete, and publication is but a few day away.

The Magic of Hard Work

The basement annex rebuild is chugging along at high speed. The workshop walls have been repaneled with a nice pearl white beadboard that gives it a cheerful old-fashioned look, the baseboards are on, and today, I’ll start putting up the tongue and groove white pine ceiling planks. A couple of days work and I’ll be able to apply the finishing touches, i.e. the window and door casings, the crown molding, a lick of paint on the detail work and install new cabinets as well as a new door.

Once that’s done, all of the tools, supplies, etc. that are piled up in my ‘man cave’ will migrate back to a workshop that’s so much cleaner, brighter, safer and more inviting than it ever was. Once that’s done, I’ll tackle the laundry room, but probably not until January. At some point, I have to spend more time writing A Splash of Blood if I want it to see the light of day before the end of winter (the first draft is only a third done). Plus, I’ll be getting my editor’s comments back in a day or two, meaning whatever time I don’t spend renovating in the next two weeks will be spent finalizing Howling Stars (Decker’s War Book 4).  And no, I haven’t forgotten the fourth as of yet untitled Siobhan Dunmoore adventure. It’s stewing in the back of my subconscious.

Considering our house is over forty years old and ready for another renovation cycle, there’s enough work to keep me busy for a long time as I do one or two rooms a year. If nothing else, the physical work on top of my daily cardio routine at the gym is doing wonders for my health. I’m probably in the best shape I’ve been in years, and I’m losing the extra pounds! Our next scuba diving trip should see me able to spend even more time under water thanks to my much improved physical fitness.

UPDATE – My nail gun is officially my favourite power tool.  154 sqft of tongue and groove planking on the ceiling completed in five hours.  I get to start on the finishing touches tomorrow.

Remembrance

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them

The Perils of the Inner Critic

One of the downsides of being a sci-fi author, or any kind of writer really, is how critical we become. We’re so used to being harsh with our own creations, questioning ourselves, our creative decisions, plot lines, finding and fixing plot holes, etc., during the creative process that we end up doing it with the work of others, and it’s not really something we can control. I now get as thoroughly irritated by reading poorly edited prose in mass-market novels as I used to get watching a war movie filled with historical inaccuracies (spending a fair chunk of your adult life in the Army will do that!). I get equally irritated by watching movies where things don’t make sense, where the plot holes are big enough to fly a Death Star through and the scriptwriting is terrible. It explains why I’ve rarely stepped into a cinema in the last few years. Paying high prices for the privilege of a two-hour assault on my visual and auditory senses (and sometimes olfactory if another patron bathed in scent instead of actually washing), just doesn’t appeal anymore. I now wait until movies make it to Netflix, or in some cases, buy the DVD once it’s been discounted.

Case in point: last night, my wife and I watched the latest Star Wars installment for the first time. I wasn’t particularly interested after reading the reviews, but she wanted to see what it was all about and since it was on Netflix, all I had to lose was two hours of my Saturday evening.

When Star Wars Episode IV first came out in 1977, it left the teenaged me with a sense of wonder and awe. The Empire Strikes Back did the same, and I remember Return of the Jedi with fondness, notwithstanding the Ewoks. The less said about the three prequel movies, the better, although I did enjoy the final scenes in Revenge of the Sith when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader, and of course, Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine was a treat to watch throughout. He was probably the best thing about the prequels.

What can I say about The Force Awakens? It had none of the charms of the originals, although it felt more authentic than the three prequels. I suppose feeling wonder and awe at my age is a sensation harder to come by, though I’m still charmed by the originals when I watch them. It was fun to see Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke and Leia again, the thirty plus years since we last saw them etched on their faces, just as the years are etched on mine. The visuals were well done, especially when it came to those that harkened back to the original movies. The Force Awakens is peppered with sly and not so sly references. But sadly, I found myself mocking a lot of the film.

Plot holes big enough to fly a Death Star through? Check. Nonsensical behavior by central characters (I’m talking to you, Kylo Ren)? Check. Characters who do things they shouldn’t be able to do? Check. No actual science in the fiction? Check. I know you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief, but the writers need to help me a little with that. In The Force Awakens, they pretty much failed. Granted, a dear old great-uncle of mine, now long gone, called Star Wars (the original) a modern fairytale, and he was right. Star Wars isn’t really science fiction, it’s fantasy in space. But even so, the latest installment failed to generate that sense of wonder and left both my wife and me shaking our heads at more than a few parts.

However, I have to wonder whether I’m judging the latest Star Wars harshly because it has, at least to my eyes, a multitude of massive flaws in the plot and characters, or because I’ve become overly critical as a byproduct of my turning to writing as my main occupation, or because the passage of time makes the originals seem that much better. Or perhaps it’s all three, or even for reasons I’ve yet to articulate.  And it saddens me to some extent.

The movie has been critically acclaimed, made oodles of money and I know plenty of people who absolutely loved it. In a sense, I envy them and wish I wasn’t the odd man out. Part of me desperately wanted to immerse itself in the story and revel in a return to that galaxy far, far away. But watching Kylo Ren’s childish temper tantrums – Darth Vader would have been appalled – watching Rey do things no teenaged scavenger should be able to do and especially watching a superweapon the size of a planet suck in an entire star to power it, not to mention Han Solo’s pointless death? Sorry. Those things just knocked me out of the story and killed it for me. I need a modicum of believability nowadays, some science in the fiction and some sense to the characters, their behavior, and their motivation.

Of course, the above is merely my opinion, and I always try to keep in mind Dirty Harry Callahan’s immortal words concerning opinions. I’ll watch the sequels once they hit Netflix in the next few years and hope they reignite my love for Star Wars.  I might even re-watch The Force Awakens at some point and see if it wasn’t just a matter of my feeling overly cynical last night.

In the meantime, the little ironies of life march on, seeing as how my editor is doing to Howling Stars what I did to The Force Awakens last night, and I’m trying to write a sci-fi cop story with three-dimensional characters and no plot holes, which is harder than you might think.

Delusions of Adequacy

As readers of this blog will know, I’ve had to tear down a portion of the basement (that which we call the annex) due to leakage earlier this year. The pros came by several weeks ago to make sure the leaks don’t happen again. Since then, I’ve been rebuilding. In recent weeks (months?), I’ve concentrated on removing all the fiberglass insulation and wood turned damp, mouldy, mouse-poop infested and generally in violation of the building code thanks to a failed reno 20 years ago.  It’s amazing how long rot will accumulate before it becomes visible.

With fresh insulation and vapour barrier up a few weeks ago on the surfaces facing the exterior, that portion of the basement became ready for a Canadian winter. In the last few days, I’ve been rebuilding the parts that didn’t face the immediate exterior, replacing really crappy 2×2 framing (put up by a moron with delusions of adequacy) with proper 2×4 studs and rewiring it in accordance to code, where before it was an incompetent handyman’s disaster.

Take this as a plea from someone who’s not on his first house and not on his first reno: if you don’t know the local building code requirements for such basics as framing, wiring and insulation, put down the tool belt. As Mike Holmes likes to say, make it right. If you don’t know how to make it right, just don’t. Please, don’t. Call in folks who have a clue. That way, you won’t have to fight off the bad karma guys like me are sending out to all inept DIY wannabes as we fix problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.

At least now, we’ll be getting workshop and laundry rooms that are not only up to code, but are also functional and good-looking. By the way, after my insulation efforts, those two rooms are the warmest in our 40+ year old house. I think that says something.  Once I’m done, I might just make the workshop my number one hang-out during the truly brutal January and February cold spells.

Howling Stars (Decker’s War Book 4) is currently under my editor’s red pen. I’ve not received an ETA on comments, but expect her to be done within the next two weeks. In the meantime, I’ve picked up the pen on A Splash of Blood once again, between bouts of framing, wiring and all the rest of the work needed to refinish the basement annex, but this time doing it right.  Between writing and building, life is good.  Using brain and hands in equal measure is a balance worth achieving.

Signs of the Season

Although the leaves aren’t completely off all trees yet — our red maple seems to be hanging on to its leaves with grim determination — there’s no doubt that we’re sliding headlong into winter. On Sunday, we enjoyed a long walk, to take advantage of the blue skies and sunshine, even though it was windy, and I remarked to my wife that the light already had a wintery quality, with early afternoon feeling like the supper hour was just around the corner.

Yesterday, I performed the annual ritual of cleaning out and reorganizing the garage so my wife could park her car in it on snow days, and we’ve started talking with growing enthusiasm about our next scuba diving trip, now that I’ve made the final payment to our travel agent. In past years, I would be facing the string of social events at work during the lead up to Christmas. They represented a sort of checklist of things that must be done before escaping into the holidays, but now, the only Christmas office parties will be in my own kitchen, with a dog who won’t insist on congratulatory speeches although a treat or two are expected.

Even though I’m a writer living in my own imagination most of the time, I’m not immune to the constant media bombardment of current event news. I often wonder how much they influence my story development, even though my protagonists won’t be born for another four or five hundred years. But then, as a lifelong student of history, I also know that humanity has a tendency to repeat mistakes over and over because human nature has changed little over millennia. Lust for wealth, power, sex, and fame are still today as they were when first discussed by the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Religious fanaticism has existed since the first humans disagreed on the nature of God or the gods. Corrupt, self-serving politicians are a given, even in the most advanced trust-based societies, let alone those still based on kinship or tribalism.

As a result, it’s difficult to write about future societies without seeming, in the eyes of some readers, to make reference to and comment on present day events. The odd reader might even deduce (for the most part erroneously) my own political leanings. However, since I do not believe in the perfectibility of humankind, I expect our descendants, even centuries in the future, to act in ways not all that different from today. It’s a theme I explored in Like Stars in Heaven (albeit heavily influenced by Arnold Toynbee, to whom I was exposed in my college history classes.) and it’s become a common thread in the Decker’s War series.

Anyways, enough philosophizing. I’m most of the way through the final revision of Howling Stars in preparation for the submission to my editor. Another day or two of sustained effort and I’ll be done.

Finished? Or Not?

It’s telling that after my first revision of Howling Stars (Decker’s War Book 4), I realized that my editor would inevitably take me to task for the ending – again. I seem to have a habit of ending my stories too abruptly, perhaps because at that point in the first draft, I’m anxious to be done. This time, I decided to take the initiative and rework the ending before sending her the manuscript so that I don’t get scolded for it.

Considering that I expanded the epilog from a few pages into three full chapters, I probably wasn’t finished with the first draft when I declared myself to be so. Mind you, I might be told that it’s now too long, but probably not. My editor likes to see most threads neatly tied off, leaving only those concerning the wider series arcs hanging. We’ll see. I’m just about done with the revision, which means the manuscript will be in my editor’s hands by the end of this week.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with the MacGuffin for the fourth Siobhan Dunmoore adventure and have tentatively started to build the story skeleton during my breaks from revising Howling Stars, so yes, there will be a fourth novel in the series in 2017.

It is indeed a writer’s life for me.

 

A Time to Give Thanks

I pulled Howling Stars (Decker’s War Book 4) out of the fermentation chamber yesterday, after deciding that I had completed the first act of A Splash of Blood and could safely put it aside while I revised the latest Zack Decker adventure. It’ll take me a week or two to slice, dice, chop and sand it down to the point where I can safely present the manuscript to my editor for criticism and suggestions.

Yesterday was also the second anniversary of my first novel’s publication, when I unleashed Zack Decker on an unsuspecting military sci-fi fandom in Death Comes But Once. With two more adventures published and a fourth coming out before the end of the year, I’m a pretty happy author. Not only that, in less than two weeks, I’ll be celebrating No Honor in Death’s second anniversary of publication, having added two more adventures to Siobhan Dunmoore’s saga since then. Even now, both series are finding new readers every day, which is both gratifying and humbling.

It’s now been six months since I retired from my day job in the bowels of the demented bureaucracy and I still think I’m the luckiest guy in the world, especially when I read all the newspaper articles about the follies, foibles and failures occurring in my former sphere of professional activity. I dodged a few bullets by getting out last spring and have no regrets, though it’s still a bit strange, when I go out and about every day, to be rubbing elbows with fellow retirees who are somewhat older than me. On the other hand, being able to live according to my whims and finally pursue my dreams at a relatively young age is priceless.

The only downside is my constant struggle with procrastination. In fact, some days I feel like the king of the Procrasti Nation, but it still beats the piles of administrative trivia I struggled with for years, often under the pressure of unrealistic, if not downright idiotic deadlines, dulling my imagination and sapping my will to live. Therefore, on this Thanksgiving weekend, I can, for the first time in years, be truly thankful for everything and that is a most precious feeling. It is especially so as I think back to the dark place I inhabited twelve months ago when I made the decision to prematurely end what had been a successful career in IT and become my own boss as a full-time author so I could find some joy in life again. Mission accomplished. Now, the universe is the limit.

To my Canadian readers, I hope you have fun with family and friends on this weekend. Happy Thanksgiving.

Fall Follies

Although I don’t relish the idea of the upcoming Canadian winter, I have to admit there’s something enchanting about the changing quality of the light while we slowly head from the fall equinox to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Coupled with the eruption of colour as trees prepare to shed their summer cloak and descend into the annual cycle of hibernation, autumn can sometimes be the most pleasing of times. Or, as a gray weekend proved, the least agreeable.

As I write this, I see a whole army of squirrels on the neighbouring lawns, foraging to stock up food supplies. Are they sensing a harsh winter or a mild one? Time will tell. The weatherman on the radio just said we’d see our first bout of frost this coming Monday morning, which is about normal. I’ve finally put away the shorts until our next foray to warmer climes for a bit of scuba diving and am back in my usual writer’s garb of jeans and a button-down collar shirt. Though I’ll miss summer’s warmth soon enough, the cooler nights have done wonders for my ability to sleep better.

The first draft of the fourth Decker’s War adventure is still fermenting quietly in the darkness of an enclosed hard drive or two. Once it’s ready for the revision, I’ll know. In the meantime, I’ve not been idle. I’m scoping out story lines for the fourth Siobhan Dunmoore adventure, now that she has been given command of a new ship, with an old friend as first officer. And – drum roll – I’ve gotten well into (i.e. past 20%) the first draft of the first novel in a new series set in the Decker’s War universe, one I’ve wanted to write for a while.

The protagonist is a character who’s been lurking in my imagination for a long time, almost as long as Dunmoore. I’ve decided to call the series Quis Custodiet, taken from the Latin Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes translated as “Who will watch the watchmen.” You can read more about it here. I’ll probably have the first draft done before this coming Christmas, with publication in late winter 2017. While the series will keep the Decker’s War space opera flavour, it won’t be military sci-fi. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as police procedural or hardboiled detective sci-fi, but if there isn’t yet, I’ll create it. So far I’m having fun with the story. It’s told in the first person, and hopefully comes across as reminiscent of the style of some of my favorite mid-twentieth century pulp detective fiction authors, although the murder victim is an alien and the story doesn’t take place on the mean streets of 1950s Los Angeles or New York, but on the mean decks of an orbital station dozens of light years from Earth.

Happy autumn to everyone in the northern hemisphere, and a good spring to my readers on the other side of the equator!