Ricardo Pinto's Blog, page 4
August 15, 2018
the Stone Dance Second Edition
Once upon a time I said in an interview that there was only a single word that I wanted to change in the whole of the nearly seven hundred thousand words of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. That I could say anything so ludicrous and pretentious says a lot about who I was then. How things change: for the Second Edition I have reduced the text by a quarter, and I hacked my way through the excess verbiage with pleasure. The Second Edition is a much cleaner, leaner and more vital affair. Beyond and above this I took the opportunity to sort out all kinds of problems that I knew were there, and many more that I discovered along the way. In places, where I had compromised, I have restored my original, instinctual vision. Prime among these is that Fern has become Blue—indeed, the desire to rewrite him niggled at me for years, and it was Blue—that he be put right—who helped draw me back to the Stone Dance.
I have broken the Stone Dance into seven rather than three parts. There are practical reasons for this, but the artistic reasons are the clincher. I have had to write new material, most specifically the four new ‘hinge chapters’: if the First Edition was a triptych, the Second is a heptaptych.
As for the practicalities, the re-editing is done, and the text is being proof-read. I am working on new covers that are my own designs. The Second Edition will be available in paperback and as ebooks and will be released sooner rather than later; the individual volumes probably within a few months, or even weeks of each other. Please join my mailing list if you wish to be kept informed of progress.
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August 5, 2018
Matryoshka published
I haven’t written here for a while, and I’ve not had a book published for even longer. That doesn’t mean that I have not been working and writing, it’s really just that I’ve been down various rabbit holes and am only now emerging. To mark my return I am pleased to announce that my science fiction novella, Matryoshka is to be published by NewCon Press on the 21st August 2018.
Matryoshka is a strange beast. It is the first proper book that I wrote after the 700K words of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. As you may imagine, after 10 years struggling over such a colossal work, I was aiming for something shorter and breezier. As it turned out, I overshot by quite some margin, and Matryoshka didn’t even end up long enough to be a novel. Not that I see that as a problem: it seems to me exactly as long as it needs to be. Besides, I have come to the conclusion that it’s about time that there was a renaissance in short form fiction—though that may also be me coming to terms with my inability to write very fast—that if I am to have any chance of getting out a fraction of the ideas that I would like to before I pop my clogs, immense trilogies are not the way to go.
For such a relatively short work, Matryoshka is the result of a serious effort of world building. And though it may appear on the surface to be a fantasy story, it is built on some pretty hard(ish) science. Do give it a try and let me know how you get on with it.
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October 31, 2013
War in Heaven is released today…
April 9, 2013
beauty is in the eye of the beholder…
March 25, 2013
the once in a 100 million year experiment…
March 19, 2013
English spelling: unity over ease of learning…
March 12, 2013
a new covenant with nature…
March 5, 2013
cute puppy distractions…
February 26, 2013
allowing ideas time to form…
February 12, 2013
the trouble with skeuomorphs…
