Steven J. Pemberton's Blog, page 22

Book trailer for Escape Velocity

This is the announcement I hoped I'd be making a few weeks ago about Escape Velocity...

Over the last few months, several people have been beavering away on a book trailer for the novel, which you can now watch here. Why did it take so long? Well, your average indie book trailer looks like an animated PowerPoint slide deck, and I wanted to do something a bit more ambitious...

If you have a fast connection, I recommend watching in high definition and fullscreen - use this link instead of the one above and click the little "four corners" icon on the right-hand end of the play bar.

The first draft of Dust & Water is finished

I reached the end of the first draft of Dust & Water (volume 3 of The Barefoot Healer series). Hurrah! It clocks in at 114,015 words, or about the same length as volumes 1 and 2.

There's still a lot of work to do. My critique group are grumbling about scenes where nothing seems to happen, and about how I'm handling the relationship with Adramal's new love interest. I'm debating whether to add some scenes from the perspective of Adramal's father, and I need to add events that foreshadow various surprises towards the end of the book. But this is why they're called first drafts.

Watch this space for further announcements...

An' now fer summat completely different...

While we were on holiday in Blackpool recently, Breda and I filmed several videos, including this one for fun - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yqa1W...

It's a recital of The Lion and Albert, a monologue written by Marriott Edgar for the comedian Stanley Holloway. Edgar wrote about thirty monologues in the 1930s, of which The Lion and Albert is probably the most famous.

I don't pretend to do it nearly as well as Holloway, but we had fun making it.

An announcement - but not the one I thought I'd be making

I'm pleased to announce that my science fiction novel Escape Velocity is now available for ereaders other than the Kindle. I uploaded it to Smashwords today, where you'll find it at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/214175. It should filter through to the retailers they distribute to in the next week or so.

What was the announcement I thought I'd be making? It concerns Escape Velocity, but I don't want to spoil the surprise...

Alan Turing - Life and Legacy

Along with many other anniversaries, 2012 is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing. The Science Museum in London has an exhibition about his life and work, which I went to see yesterday.

Most people who've heard of Turing will tell you that he cracked the German Enigma cipher during the Second World War. They might tell you something about the Turing Test, which tries to determine whether a computer program is as intelligent as a human. (To date, no program subjected to a Turing Test has been consistently able to fool a human for more than about five minutes.) But to my way of thinking, Turing deserves to be remembered more as the father of computing and computer science. This exhibition addresses both his practical and theoretical work.

The exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically: the first thing you come across is almost the last thing Turing worked on, the Pilot ACE computer. (Turing didn't actually build this, but it was based on his designs. It was - briefly - the fastest computer in the world, being clocked at a blistering 1 megahertz.)

There are the inevitable Enigma machines, and a couple of rotors from a bombe, a machine used by the British codebreakers to help determine the daily key settings for Enigma. The latter are apparently originals, not reconstructions, which is surprising, as nearly all of them were destroyed after the war.

I had rather hoped that there might be a page or two of the manuscript or galleys of Turing's landmark 1936 paper, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, but I didn't see any. There is a video of someone talking about it and why it's significant, which is probably more useful for anyone who doesn't have a degree in computer science.

The Entscheidungsproblem ("decision problem") is a question posed by the mathematician David Hilbert (who was German, ironically enough) which essentially asks, within the language of mathematics, can every statement be proven true or false? Turing's paper showed that this was not so, closing off an entire field of mathematical enquiry. But in doing this, he proposed a "universal machine," now known as a Turing machine, which could calculate the answer to any and every mathematical problem that could be solved. The machine I'm using to write this blog post, and the machine you're (probably) using to read it, are essentially Turing machines. The same paper presents a program for a Turing machine that allows it to emulate another Turing machine, thus anticipating the concept of a virtual machine by a good thirty years. (Yes - VMs have been around since the 1960s. They just weren't practical or desirable for most uses until recently.)

The exhibition concludes with three interactive displays that teach basic concepts in programming - decision, looping and... I don't know what the third one was, as it was broken when I visited. I didn't think these were as successful as the rest of the exhibition, as they bear little resemblance to a real computer or real programs, and it took me a few minutes to figure out how each one worked. Perhaps my computer science degree and my career in software development are making me overthink things. Most people will never need to write a real computer program, so it doesn't matter (much) if these displays aren't like the real thing.

Overall, I think the exhibition gives a good account of the man and his work, and would recommend it to anyone who's interested in the Second World War, codebreaking or computing. Admission is free (always a bonus!), and it runs until the end of July 2013.

New book - Escape Velocity

I have a new book on sale today, Escape Velocity. As the title might hint, it's a science fiction novel. Here's a taster of what it’s about -

Sam Grainger, rocket scientist, gets a phone call from his wife Jennie one evening. Which would be perfectly normal if she hadn't been dead for over a year.

Sam's convinced the call is a hoax, but before he can investigate, a much larger mystery presents itself - parts of the world have started to vanish, and Sam is asked to join a team to investigate.

Once he's reunited with Jennie, Sam learns that the world isn't what he thought it was - and neither are he and she. Worse, some very ruthless people are determined to make sure the secret doesn't go any further.

Racing to stay one step ahead of their enemies, Sam and Jennie learn that the key to mending the holes in the world may be the spaceship they worked on before Jennie died. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t have to steal it...

You can buy Escape Velocity (or borrow it, if you’re an Amazon Prime member) from the following URLs:

Amazon US UK Germany France Italy Spain



I've enrolled it in the KDP Select programme, which means that (for now, at least) it's available as an ebook only on Amazon. I've expressed concern that Select is not good for readers or writers, but a couple of things persuaded me to try it with this book. Firstly, most of my sales come from Amazon anyway, so I'm not cutting myself off from a large number of existing readers here. Secondly, Escape Velocity is currently a standalone title, so I'm not cutting off a large number of potential future readers either. The story's ending leaves the door wide open for a sequel, but I currently have no plans to write one. Even if I did, I have at least two other books to write before I could start it.

That leads neatly into what I know you're thinking - what about Adramal and Lelsarin and Alesin? Where is Dust & Water (book 3 of The Barefoot Healer)? Well, although I called Escape Velocity a new book, I actually wrote it before I started Death & Magic (the first Barefoot Healer book). I thought it was good enough to be published, but the legacy publishing industry (obviously) disagreed. So I put it away for a few years, while I wrote Death & Magic, and then Plague & Poison. As I was beavering away at Dust & Water, I came across various blog posts by authors much more famous than I, to the effect that the best marketing for your writing is... more of your writing. That is, the more books you have on the market, the better, as it creates more opportunities for readers to discover you.

So I decided to release Escape Velocity. I thought it just needed a little proofreading, a cover, a blurb, a conversion to Kindle format, and then in a week I could get back to Dust & Water.

That was three and a half weeks ago.

I decided to delete a large chunk of the first chapter that wasn't working, and had to make sure the information in it got slipped in elsewhere. I also decided to rewrite a scene about two-thirds of the way through, where Jennie does something that proves very useful later on, but which didn't make much sense for her to do at the time. That meant careful reading of the final third of the book to make sure all the back-references were consistent. I also had to reconcile two different versions of the book. When I was trying to get an agent for it, I created a new copy with all my notes stripped out, but then continued tinkering and, for some reason, wasn't consistent about which version I edited. Just as well OpenOffice can compare two documents and tell you where they differ... The cover was trickier than I thought too, but maybe that's a tale for another blog post.

Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, I'll resume work on the first draft of Dust & Water. This is currently at 30,000 words. If I stay true to form, that means I'm about a quarter of the way through. Wish me luck, and in the meantime, enjoy Sam and Jennie's company...

I *can* tell a story in less than 100,000 words...

I just uploaded a short story called, confusingly enough, The Last Story. You can read it here. It's a spoof of film noir detective stories, in which an author gets more than he bargained for when a reader offers him an idea for his next story.

It started life as a film script, and you can watch the finished film here.

It's a shade under 1,000 words. By some definitions, this qualifies it as flash fiction, something I thought I'd never write.

Those of you who are eagerly awaiting the next instalment of Adramal's adventures needn't worry - I'm not reinventing myself as a humorist or writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. It's just something I had lying around and thought would be fun to share.

On the origin of the name "Pemberton"

The introduction of the book Pemberton Pedigrees has the following to say about the origin of the surname...

The family of Pemberton undoubtedly derive their name from Pemberton in Lancashire. This is described[1] as “a populous and extensive township, containing the manufacturing village of Lamberland Green. The Manor before and after the Conquest was one of the berewicks, or members, of the Manor of Newton-in-Makerfield, and is now claimed by the Leighs of Lynne, Haydock, etc, in right of their ancestors. The old ‘Pemberton Hall’ is now scarcely remembered.” Since 1904 Pemberton has been taken into the civil parish of Wigan. The Normans took their names from places, just as the Saxons gave their names to places, and so one of the Norman families came to be known about the twelfth century as “de Pemberton,” “de Penberton,” or “de Penbreton.” As the place-name is antecedent to the family name it seems natural to accept the most obvious derivation - “Pember’s tun,”[2] or village, but other suggestions have been made. One is that it stands for Pen-berton, i.e., the “berton” or walled-in-farm, on the “pen” or hill-top[3].

Another[4] would derive it from Pen Celtic for “head” or “hill,” beorh or bre, which also mean “hill,” and tun or “town,” i.e., “the town at the head of the hill.” - This, however, involves an awkward pleonasm. The last suggestion[5] is “Pin-bearu-tun” or “the pinegrove farmstead.”

[1] E. O. Baines’ History of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancashire, and Victoria History of Lancashire.
[2] Pendburh is an A.S. fem. name (Harrison)
[3] The late Mr. Henry Pemberton, of Philadelphia, U.S.A.
[4] Wyld and Hurst. “Place Names of Lancashire.”
[5] Henry Harrison. “Place Names of Liverpool District,” and “Surnames of the U.K.”

The village of Pemberton has long been absorbed into the surrounding urban areas, and (administratively, at least) is now part of Greater Manchester. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemberto...

See this previous blog post for more about Pemberton Pedigrees: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...

Some New Year's resolutions

These are some of the things I want to accomplish this year. I've found that it's easier to keep New Year's resolutions if you can express them as a specific goal, and if you have some objective way of deciding whether you've reached the goal or how much progress you've made towards it. It also helps if you can break down a big goal into smaller things that you can do every day or every week.

The main one is to finish writing Dust & Water, volume III in the Barefoot Healer series, and have it on sale by the end of the year. I want to have the first draft done by 30th June, so I've set myself a target of writing 5,000 words a week. This is a big increase on my old target of 3,500 words a week, and I'm a bit nervous about keeping to it, but we'll see how it goes...

I also want to finish a short story. Over the Christmas break, I wrote about 7,000 words of the story about dragons. (It doesn't have a title yet - I'm hopeless at them.) It's not finished yet, but I've discovered that my dragons like purple and they measure heights by singing.

I aim to read 15 books this year, and I'm using the Goodreads reading challenge to keep myself honest. When I get going, I'm quite a fast reader, and I could probably read 15 books in about 3 weeks if I had nothing else to do in my spare time... but writing 5,000 words a week isn't going to leave me much spare time.

And a few non-writing ones...

Visit Dublin with Breda. In all the times I've been to Ireland, I've never been to its capital. (Though I did pass through the airport once, on the way to somewhere else.)

I'd like to become better at photography. Theoretically, I know what all the controls on my camera do, but I usually can't answer questions like, "If I change this setting, how will that affect the picture?" or "How do I fix this problem with this picture?"

Migrate my main desktop computer to the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux (or somebody's 64-bit Linux, anyway). Currently it's 32-bit 10.04 (Lucid), and it's rather annoying that I can only access about half the RAM I've paid for.

Give blood at least once. I got back to it last year after a long absence, and the next two sessions were both on weekends when I was out of town. D'oh...

That's enough to be going on with. Come back in twelve months to see how I fared :-)

Going back to someone's roots

My parents are tracing their family trees, and when I visited them recently, I helped my father photograph an old book called Pemberton Pedigrees, held by the Lancashire Archives in Preston. The plan is to make the information in the book available on Pemberton Family World Wide, a project to gather and share any genealogical information about anyone called Pemberton. (There are thousands of such projects to research individual surnames, known as one-name studies.) They already have a microfilm copy of the book, which they’ve started to scan, but parts of it were badly-photographed and are almost unreadable. With a bit of luck, our contribution will fill in the gaps.

The charts were compiled by Major-General Robert Charles Boileau Pemberton. The book was an impressive piece of work for a time when there was no internet (and therefore no online genealogical databases) and few telephones. He gathered much of the information by visiting the families concerned. He died in 1914 before he could publish, and one of his sons, Reverend Robert Pemberton, published the first 40 charts in 1923. He intended to publish more, along with biographical information, but never did. If anyone knows the whereabouts of the remaining material, the researchers would be delighted to hear from them.

The book consists mainly of fold-out charts, which would be rather awkward to photocopy, so we decided to use my camera. We were allowed to use a tripod, as long as it was entirely on the table. We got a good set of photos, but by the end of the session, my knees were killing me from leaning against the table to see the camera’s screen. (Click here for a photo of me at work.)

My camera tends to be noisy in low light, so I set the film speed as slow as it would go (ISO 80) and set the shutter speed to a fifth of a second. This let the camera use a small aperture, increasing depth of field. (You wouldn’t have thought that a plane perpendicular to the lens could be partly in focus and partly out, but on the test shots, I noticed some blurring at the edges of the image. You could still read what it said, but I’d prefer the whole thing to be in focus if possible.)

Click here to see one of the charts. (This is one of the smaller ones, which I was able to fit into one photo. Most needed two or three images.)

My dad was pleased with the results, and is about to post a CD of the photos to Pemberton Family World Wide. Watch this space to see what they do with them.