Steven R. Boyett's Blog, page 5

Fata Morgana – Sample Chapters

Here’s the Prologue & Chapter 1 of Fata Morgana, my new novel with Ken Mitchroney coming out in June.

Reposting hugely appreciated!

Kindle (.azw3)
Kindle (.mobi)
Nook, iBooks, Kobo
PDF

 

 

 

 

Publisher’s Weekly just gave us our first “official” review, saying:

The prose is energetic, combining some of the gentler wit of Catch-22 with riffs on dystopian fiction clichés. Boyett and Mitchroney elevate the pulpy vibe with unusual and fully developed protagonists.

…which, um, okay.

Fata Morgana sample chapters & book giveaway coming soon!

Just a quick post to let you know that next week, sample chapters from Fata Morgana will be available for download in all major e-book reader formats and PDF.

Soon after that, Ken and I will be giving away Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) of the novel.  Stay tuned!

Happy President’s Day!

Plus ça Change….

“Twenty-three years after the coming of Timoleon [338 BC] a rich man’s revolution suppressed the Syracusan democracy, and put the government into the hands of six hundred oligarchic families. These divided into factions, and were in turn overthrown by a radical revolution in which four thousand persons were killed and six thousand of the well to do were sent into banishment. Agathocles won dictatorship by promising a cancellation of debts and a redistribution of the land. So, periodically, the concentration of wealth becomes extreme, and gets righted by taxation or by revolution.”
—Will Durant, THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION:

The Life of Greece (1939)

Resist

Photo Bombers

The Author Shot. Click for full-size glory  (photo by Jon Tucker).

Probably because he knows everyone and is interested in everything, Ken Mitchroney somehow arranged for us to have a photo session for our Fata Morgana author pic at March Field Air Museum on a B-17G bomber.

Danny Sandoval, Jon Tucker, & the World History of Camera Gear (photo by ken mitchroney).

Jon Tucker, a hugely talented cinematographer who has worked with Ken, offered to take the shots. He showed up with an SUV full of gear and a cart, an assistant named Danny Sandoval — oh, yeah, and a camera.

The rain in LA had been unprecedented the previous few days, but the day of the shoot was gorgeous: Robins-egg-blue sky, massive clouds, and buckets o’ sunshine. Our luck was crazy.

Ken wanted to try to re-create this shot from the movie Air Force:

Still from the movie Air Force.

I thought it would look great, but it immediately became clear that we couldn’t do it, because the cockpit windows didn’t go back far enough. Either they were different in the earlier B-17, or they’d been rigged in Air Force. There was no way two of us could lean out of one window. Time to improvise!

Ken & Jon line up shots (photo by Scott Kelley).

Ken worked with Jon on angles while my friend Scott Kelley shot “B-roll” of the activities. We took advantage of the opportunity to crawl all over that aircraft.

I’d thought that a shot looking through the windshield at Ken and I at the controls might be great. But the parked bomber angled up steeply, and Jon would have to be 15 feet up to get the shot. “No problem,” said March Field’s Greg Kuster. “We’ll get a scissor lift.”

Good lord.

Ken and I in a nutshell (photo by Jon Tucker)

While they were bringing over the lift, Jon took shots of us in the cockpit. I thought this setup was  ideal for an author shot, but we were completely backlit, and I scouldn’t imagine Jon would be able to get good lighting. Which maybe shows my limited understanding of exactly what a cinematographer can do, given the shots he ended up with.

Please keep your trays and seatbacks in the full upright position (photo by Jon Tucker).

When Jon got raised up in the scissor lift, it was immediately clear that the through-the-windshield shot was out: The windshield was dirty, wet from the rain, and glaring in the relentless SoCal sunshine. So we stuck ourselves out the pilot & copilot windows instead, and Jon just beamed and yelled Ohh, yeah. Ken and I couldn’t stop grinning like idiots.

Jon on the scissor lift (photo by Scott Kelley)

For my part, I’d been living in a B-17 in my head for the better part of four years working on this book. I’d done ridiculous amounts of research, watched videos, walked through the 909 and the Aluminum Overcast when they barnstormed Concord and Livermore. But it’s a completely different deal to have full, unsupervised access to a WWII bomber, to have no one else on board, to have no sense that you should hurry up and give someone else a look, and to go into places nobody but nobody gets to go. The cockpit, ferchrissake.

(photo by Scott Kelley)

When Ken and I looked at each other across the top of the bomber and started laughing our asses off, I think we knew that this was gonna be the shot. When we got the pix from Jon, there was no doubting it.

We went for black & white because of the feel of the novel. I dunno what Jon did, but he made the damn thing look as if it’d been taken in 1943. Needless to say, Ken and I are stoopidly happy with our Author Shot, and can’t wait to see it on the jacket of the hardcover when it’s published in June.

Massive thanks to Jon Tucker and Danny Sandoval; to Scott Kelley for tons of behind-the-scenes shots; and to Greg Kuster and Paul Hammond of the March Field Air Museum, for their amazing help and kindness, and for opening up the Starduster to us. I highly recommend a visit to the Museum in Riverside, CA (I haven’t even talked about their spectacular collection). Our day there was literally one for the books.

(photo by Ken Mitchroney)

Another Great Day at Deyan Audio

Deyan Audio

Two weeks ago Ken Mitchroney and I drove out to Deyan Audio in Tarzana to meet with  MacLeod Andrews, who  narrates the upcoming Fata Morgana audiobook. I’d been to Deyan previously, for the Ariel and Elegy Beach audiobooks, which I blogged about here. Suffice to say the staff and facility are made of pure awesome.

MacLeod Andrews. Photo by Ken Mitchroney

MacLeod is a hugely talented, ridiculously handsome, up-and-coming actor who has narrated a ton of books and won several awards. Ken and I picked him instantly after hearing his audition; his reading was perfect.

The audiobook’s producer, Bryan Barney, was great about working with us to solve some problems in translation from print to audio. (For example, Chapters 4, 5, & 6 end and resume in midsentence to indicate an abrupt transition from one place to another, which wouldn’t work for an audiobook because [a] the narrator announces the new chapter, which would ruin the effect, and [b] the mp3 version would contain separate chapter files that would stop and start midsentence, likely making a listener think something had screwed up. The solution: combining those chapters into one. Ta-da.)

Sound baffles! Blinky lights! Sony cans! Pure audio porn!

I’m in the midst of sound-treating my office/studio with a view to record an audiobook of Mortality Bridge, so for me the recording rooms at Deyan are pure sound-engineer porn: Efficient, acoustically flat, with vocal booths bought from an audiologist and repurposed for recording (genius!). And Genelec monitors — ka-ching!

Ken and I joked around a lot, and sat in on the beginning of the session, but we cleared out soon afterward. We didn’t want to loom, and it was pretty obvious the production was in good hands.

I have to say, I’ve been pretty lucky. It’s not that common for writers to meet with the narrators of their books or show up for the recording session.

Even luckier, I’m getting a shot at composing the audiobook’s theme music. Maybe it’ll sound like chickens in a blender, but it’s an opportunity I can’t pass up. I’ll blog about that & post the audio file when it’s done, probably in a couple of months.

Tune in next time for the truly awesome production that was our Author Shot in a B-17 bomber!

Bookwork in L.A.

I turned in the proofread galleys for Fata Morgana to Blackstone this week. Other than reviewing the corrected proof and final cover jacket, there’s little production work left until June. Woo hoo!

Next week I’ll be in Los Angeles, which I’m excited about for three reasons:

1. March Field Air Museum has generously allowed Ken & I the use of their B-17G, Starduster, for our author shoot! How awesome is that? Big moby awesome. Definitely looking forward to this!

2.  They’re recording the Fata Morgana audiobook at Deyan Audio in Tarzana. Deyan  is where the Ariel and Elegy Beach audiobooks were recorded (I posted about My Day at Deyan Audio back then), and Bob and Deb Deyan became good friends. I was devastated when Bob died of ALS two years ago. He was an amazing, generous, and just plain fun guy, and my friendship with him was just getting off the ground when I moved from LA to the SF Bay area. He is hugely missed by a great many people.

Deb will be out of town while we’re there, dammit, but Ken & I will  get to meet the narrator, actor , along with the production team. The opportunity to do that is priceless.

3. I haven’t been to LA in nearly five years. That freaks me out a little. I lived there for 30 years, and loved the hell out of it, until I didn’t any more. I never would have imagined I’d go five years without a visit. I won’t have a lot of time to hit all my favorite spots, but I plan to try.

Christmas Comes Early!

Cheese! (No, not the book. I mean say “cheese.” Jeez.)

You spend years writing & revising a book. You go through all kinds of anxiety marketing it. You sell it, you work with the publisher on all kinds of aspects. Gradually the idea of it, the abstraction of words, becomes imagined as an object: The embodiment of words.

Yet however many times you go through that process, nothing prepares you for the moment you hold the thing itself. Some superstitious monkey part of your brain thinks, I have thought a thought inside my head and now it is a thing out in the world.

In my case, that thing — the Advance Readers Copy — had been delayed by snow for days, and when UPS rang the doorbell this morning I ran down the stairs like a kid tearing for the Christmas tree. (Which also explains why I look as if I just got up. I don’t know how to explain how I look the rest of the time.)

And as much as Ken and I have worked to make this book real, and as much input and collaboration as we have had with our publisher, Blackstone, to realize this idea, I still think it looks unbelievably better than how I thought it would look. And I thought it was gonna look pretty good!

Fata Morgana is Ken’s first novel — he’s over the moon right now!

And the hardcover pre-order is being discounted at $19.56 at Amazon. Get thee hence, I say!

Fata Morgana Cover!

Fata Morgana, my collaborative novel with Ken Mitchroney, will be out from Blackstone next June 13 in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. Ken and I worked closely with Kathryn English, Blackstone’s lead designer, on the book’s cover, and we’re really happy with it. Click the pic for full-sized awesomeness.

Fata Morgana is part WWII adventure, part science fiction, and part love story. Pub date is June 13, 2017, but you can pre-order it here. Bound galleys have gone out for blurbs, and we’re already getting back some terrific responses.

We’ll post the opening chapter in a few weeks, and we’ll be giving away signed Advance Reader Copies after that, so stay tuned!