Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 36

Famine to feast

Well, it took a while for my relief at finally getting my advance check to override my tension of the past few weeks, but it kicked in after I went to bed last night — suddenly, my whole body finally relaxed, more fully than it has in quite a while, and it felt wonderful.

So anyway, you’re not going to believe this next bit. Late this morning, I checked online and confirmed that my deposit to my checking account had gone through, so I wrote a check to myself to deposit in my much-depleted savings account at my other bank, which has a branch within walking distance and which is open for part of the day on Saturday. So I filled out the deposit slip and headed out to the bank. When I was maybe half a block or so from home, I thought, “Hey, I think I heard the mail come earlier. There’s almost no chance my Analog check has come so soon, but maybe I should go back and check the mail juuuust in case.” I debated with myself for a bit, and if I’d been maybe 30 paces further along, I wouldn’t have bothered, but as it was, I decided to go back and make sure.

And when I opened my mailbox, I started laughing, since there was my Analog check.

It’s like they say — you wait an hour for the bus, and then three come along at once. It would’ve saved me a lot of anxiety if one of these two checks had come just a couple of weeks sooner. Still, at least they’re here now — and I’m grateful for my neurotic extra-cautiousness for once, since it saved me a second trip to the bank.

Anyway, after tearing up the first deposit slip, filling out a new one, and depositing both checks in my savings account, I just found myself going for a long walk on the university campus and thinking about… nothing in particular. I just enjoyed the way it felt to have a relaxed body and a clear mind for a little while, before getting back to priorities like finishing my taxes and working on my novel. It was really nice.

The dawn

I’m relieved to report that my advance check did finally come today, and I just got back from depositing it in the bank and restocking my depleted groceries. I’m not exactly celebrating, since a significant amount of it needs to go to paying bills right away, and I’m not yet sure when the next installment will come. And I’ve just been worried for so long that it’s hard to shake it off and really feel at ease. Still, I’m back from the brink, just in the nick of time. And I’m very grateful to my fans who made donations and book purchases — I wouldn’t have made it to this point without your help. Those of you who ordered books should begin seeing them in the mail fairly soon.

Another bit of good news — I finished doing my taxes this morning (did them myself since I couldn’t afford to pay my usual tax preparer this year), and I’m pleasantly surprised to see that the new tax laws this year benefit me, even though I’d gathered that they only helped the ultra-rich and hurt most everyone else. I was afraid I’d owe a lot, but I owe significantly less than last year, at least federally (haven’t done Ohio yet). So that won’t take too big a chunk out of my advance.

So now (or once I finish my taxes) I can get back to focusing on writing, and see a movie or two. But right now I think I just want to rest.

Darkest before the dawn

First, I want to thank my fans for their generous donations and book purchases last month, which ensured I was able to pay my rent. Of course, the offer to Tuckerize anyone who donates or buys books worth $20 or more (i.e. name-drop them as a bit character in my next book) is still open, and smaller donations/purchases will get thanks in the acknowledgments. By the way, there are a few people who didn’t specify whether or how they want to be Tuckerized: Jeff van B., Ricarda D., Gavin S., and Darryl S. (Casey L., I did get your message last week.)

As for this month… Well, that’s tricky. I got my new contract on March 8, but the advance check is taking longer than usual to arrive. My editor reassured me on Monday that the check had been processed and cleared and was on its way… but it’s three days later, the mail just came, and it’s still not here. Knowing it’s on the way just makes it that much more frustrating every time I open that mailbox and it isn’t there. After all, taxes are due on Monday, so I can only pray the check arrives tomorrow or Saturday. (As for my sale of “Conventional Powers” to Analog, I only signed the contract 2 weeks ago, and in the past it’s generally taken about twice that long to see the check. I’m hoping this will be an exception to the usual pattern lately of things taking much longer than expected.)

I’ve resisted writing this post, wanting to wait until I could report good news. After all, it doesn’t feel right to make another needy post about my money woes (and implicitly or explicitly invite donations) when I might be better off 24 hours from now. But I think I need to just talk about it just for therapeutic reasons — to stop bottling up my feelings and share them with someone. I’m really, really stressed out and anxious right now. Even with assurances that I’m about to be pulled back from the brink, having to keep teetering on it day after day is frightening and emotionally exhausting. I’m in the middle of lunch right now but I’m finding it hard to work up an appetite (which is unusual for me, since I’m usually more prone to stress-eating). I’ve been doing my best to relax — deep breathing, listening to music, reading, going on walks in the good weather we’re fortunately having this week — as well as trying to focus on my writing to keep me occupied, but managing my emotions has never been easy for me. And I’m afraid I don’t have much of a social life locally, in part because I have so little money to spend on going out — though, admittedly, in part because I’ve inherited the tendency of Bennett men to be highly introverted. The last social event I attended was the memorial service for WGUC-FM’s Frank Johnson a couple of weeks ago. Which was a good opportunity to spend time with some local friends I usually just interact with through Facebook, but still a sad situation. (More so since I learned that WGUC is about to move out of the building it’s been based in since I was 12. I haven’t been there very often in the past few decades, but it still feels like a cozy, familiar place and it’ll be a shame to lose it. Although I won’t miss the ancient, malfunction-prone entry gate in the city-owned parking garage underneath it.)

I’ll be so relieved when the check comes and I can indulge in a little recreation. The mail these days usually comes before noon, so I keep hoping that maybe I’ll find the check in the mailbox and be able to go right out to the bank and then get to the theater in time to see Captain Marvel. I keep fearing, what if the check is so delayed that I miss the movie in theaters? I can’t see Avengers: Endgame without seeing CM first! And if the timing doesn’t work out for the movie, then at least I could go to the grocery store and splurge a bit, as opposed to the austerity measures I’ve been following in recent weeks. (I’ve had a lot of ramen noodles lately. You can make a pretty good soup out of a ramen packet by adding diced chicken and mixed vegetables, although you have to add extra water too.)

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the check will be in the mail tomorrow. But I’ve been thinking that 6 days a week for the past 2 or 3 weeks, only to be disappointed once again. So it’s hard to have faith in that. I keep trying to remind myself that this is going to be a good year for me career-wise, with new books and stories coming out and more prospective sales and opportunities on the horizon. But the wait for things to get better has taken so very long, and it’s coming right up to the wire now. I really hope this is the last time I have to make a post like this.

Thanks for listening, folks. It helps knowing you’re out there.

The Troubleshooters return — in TWO new stories!

I have some excellent news, which I hinted at back in December but took longer than expected to fall into place. I’m finally able to announce that I have sold not just one, but two new works of short fiction featuring the Troubleshooters of Only Superhuman and fleshing out new facets of their world.

[image error]The first is my previously announced short story in eSpec Books’ upcoming anthology Footprints in the Stars, the next (second, I think) installment in their Beyond the Cradle anthology series. The theme of this particular anthology is “Stories of the discovery of evidence of ancient aliens and how humanity reacts to those discoveries.” At first blush, that may not sound like the sort of book where you’d expect to find a superhero story, but as it happens, I already had a Troubleshooter idea that fit the premise perfectly. It’s called “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” and it’s the first Troubleshooter story that doesn’t star Emerald Blair/Green Blaze. Indeed, it’s a prequel set a couple of years before her birth and even before the founding of the Troubleshooter Corps, an early adventure of the Corps’s founder Yukio Villareal in his heroic prime. “What’s that,” you say? “Evidence of aliens was discovered decades before Only Superhuman? How does that work?” But don’t worry — this is an idea I originally came up with before OS was published, so it’s consistent. Indeed, I did mention in passing in OS that life in other star systems was already known to exist, and the historical appendix in Among the Wild Cybers confirms that as well.

[image error]The second new story is a novelette titled “Conventional Powers,” which will be my 12th work of fiction to appear in Analog Science Fiction and Fact but my first Troubleshooter story therein (and the fifth Analog story to be set in that overall universe). This one is a Green Blaze story, and I’m happy to say it’s not a prequel. It took me 7 years, but I finally get to move Emry’s adventures forward beyond Only Superhuman, albeit in a standalone story that should be accessible to new readers, though readers familiar with the novel will see continuity between them. It’s a fairly light, offbeat story that examines the question: What would a superhero convention be like in a world with actual professional superheroes? Writing “Conventional Powers” was a fun opportunity to flesh out new facets of the Asteroid Belt’s transhuman culture and the broader workings of the Troubleshooter Corps.

Added to Only Superhuman and “Aspiring to Be Angels,” these stories will double the size of my Troubleshooter bibliography (in number though not in word count), and I can now say that every completed Troubleshooter story I’ve written and marketed has been successfully sold — though that will only be true until I complete the next one or two. But it gives me the encouragement to go ahead with those.

It’s too early to know when either of these stories will be published, or which one will come out first. I will, of course, announce that information once I have it.

Checking in, belatedly

Hi, folks. I just realized I’ve been neglecting the blog again. I’ve been working on an original fiction project the past couple of weeks, something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time now and finally had a window to get started on, and it’s been taking up a lot of my attention. I don’t want to go into specifics yet, but it’s a return to a familiar setting in a new way.

Anyway, to those of you who’ve made donations and book orders in response to my last post, thank you very much. You’ve been extremely generous once again, and your contributions have helped me pay a slightly overdue health insurance bill and stay afloat for the month. Luckily, I’ve had a new book contract come in recently and will hopefully be seeing a substantial advance check any day now, but just in case it’s a bit late, your generosity has ensured I’ll be able to cover my rent for next month.

Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever sold so many books in one sale, though that’s largely thanks to one person who ordered one of everything. I’ve run out of a lot of my stock — I still have 19 copies of Only Superhuman, but only one left of Among the Wild Cybers, and in Star Trek I’ve only got a few copies left of Rise of the Federation Books 2-5, five copies of Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows, and one each of Mere Anarchy and The Sky’s the Limit. See the previous post for the updated list and ordering instructions if anyone’s still interested.

As for shipping, don’t worry, I’ll begin mailing out the books once I get my advance check, which hopefully will be within the week. And I’m keeping a list of the Tuckerization requests, of course. Surprisingly, only one of you has asked to be killed off horribly in the book. Well, maybe you know that’s more up David Mack’s alley than mine.

—

Let’s see, what else has been going on with me? Nothing great, I’m afraid. I’ve been dealing with a persistent throat irritation of some sort that feels at its worst like something’s stuck in my throat or choking me, which is pretty nasty. (My breathing is unaffected, though.) The doctor thought it was from sinus irritation and prescribed something that didn’t help. I eventually figured out that the best thing to relieve it was deep breathing and focusing on relaxing the throat and neck area, so I suspect it’s mainly an anxiety symptom — probably an initially mild irritation that I made worse by repeatedly clenching my throat in response to it and by being mentally preoccupied with the discomfort. (Even writing about it right now is making my throat uncomfortable. I’m so suggestible.) Relaxation exercises have been the one pretty reliable way to ease the symptoms. But it still hasn’t entirely gone away, and I’m still not sure what might trigger a recurrence; some of the things I’ve thought were causative factors turned out not to be correlated with it at all. (I thought coffee, orange juice, and acidic foods might be doing it, but fortunately they don’t seem to have been.) I think it’s become closer to the exception than the norm, at least, and it’s usually milder and shorter-lived when it does happen.

I also learned last week that someone I knew had passed away suddenly — Frank Johnson, who hosted the same WGUC-FM afternoon radio show that my father hosted for most of his career, and whom I was casually friendly with through occasional social gatherings in recent years. I didn’t know him that well, but he was a nice guy and I felt sort of a connection through my father (we were both inheritors of his in a way) and through WGUC. And I didn’t even know he was battling cancer; apparently he was very private about it. So this came as unexpected news. My condolences to his family and close friends.

There’s also a good news/bad news situation where I’ve nominally sold a story I’ve been trying to sell for a while, yet there’s a surprising delay in seeing the actual contract. Although that’s less worrisome than it was because that much bigger contract has come through, so there’s no longer a rush. Still, I hope that gets resolved soon so I can talk about it. I have a couple of other major original projects that are close to landing as well, but they’re also unexpectedly delayed. Everything in publishing seems to be moving so slowly these last few years, at least for me.

Well, I’ll feel better once that check comes in and my financial worries diminish (at least for now). Then I’ll finally be able to see Captain Marvel and maybe one or two other movies, get out into the world more again. Plus it’s spring now, so the weather will be improving and I can get more outdoor exercise. Although I won’t have too much time for that, since I’ll be very busy writing that new book.

Another autographed book sale and plea for donations (now with a bonus!)

Hi, folks. Once again I’m in a financial pickle similar to the one from last year — I have a couple of new contracts on the way that should sustain me financially for most of 2019, but they’re taking longer than expected, and I’m practically broke at the moment, so I don’t know if I’ll have enough money to pay my bills for the month ahead. So I’m going to try another autographed book sale to raise funds. As always, you can buy the books by clicking on the PayPal “Donate” button on the right-hand side of this page.

Even if you don’t buy a book, I hope you’ll be willing to make a donation to help me over this hump. You guys were very generous to me with donations when I needed them last year, so this time I want to offer a bit of a reward in return (and, yes, an incentive). As with last time, everyone who makes a donation will be given a shout-out in the acknowledgments of the next novel I write, unless you ask to remain anonymous. (Last year’s donors are acknowledged in The Captain’s Oath, due out in May.) But anyone who donates $20 or more (or spends that much on books, not counting postage) will, if they so desire, be Tuckerized (i.e. have a minor character named after them, or possibly a spacecraft, institution, or the like) in the next novel I write! Don’t worry, I’ll do my best to avoid having your namesake character meet a horrible fate or be a horrible person — unless that’s what you ask for.

Science news: a “new,” safe, clean nuclear tech that’s actually decades old!

It’s been a while since I did a science-themed post around here, partly because of generally neglecting my blog but partly because I’ve fallen out of the habit of reading science magazines online — something that I fear has been affecting my professional writing as well, since I’ve been having trouble thinking up new story ideas in recent years, and maybe the lack of inspiration from science articles is part of the problem. But recently, when the Firefox browser discontinued its inbuilt support for RSS feeds, I found a separate add-on that worked even better, in that it notified me of new posts and made it easier to keep current. So I decided to take advantage of that to subscribe to some science sites’ feeds so I could stay more current with the news.

Anyway, Discover Magazine just posted the following article, which is quite interesting:

Nuclear Technology Abandoned Decades Ago Might Give Us Safer, Smaller Reactors

It’s a long article rather than the short colums the feed usually gives me, so I’m not sure if it’ll stay permanently available or go behind a paywall at some point. So I’ll summarize here.

It turns out that, in the early days of nuclear research, scientists had examined various options for generating power from atomic fission, including a system called a molten salt reactor. Per the article:

Every other reactor design in history had used fuel that’s solid, not liquid. This thing was basically a pot of hot nuclear soup. The recipe called for taking a mix of salts — compounds whose molecules are held together electrostatically, the way sodium and chloride ions are in table salt — and heating them up until they melted. This gave you a clear, hot liquid that was about the consistency of water. Then you stirred in a salt such as uranium tetrafluoride, which produced a lovely green tint, and let the uranium undergo nuclear fission right there in the melt — a reaction that would not only keep the salts nice and hot, but could power a city or two besides.

Weird or not, molten salt technology was viable; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had successfully operated a demonstration reactor back in the 1960s. And more to the point…, the liquid nature of the fuel meant that they could potentially build molten salt reactors that were cheap enough for poor countries to buy; compact enough to deliver on a flatbed truck; green enough to burn our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste instead of generating more — and safe enough to put in cities and factories. That’s because Fukushima-style meltdowns would be physically impossible in a mix that’s molten already. Better still, these reactors would be proliferation resistant, because their hot, liquid contents would be very hard for rogue states or terrorists to hijack for making nuclear weapons.

Molten salt reactors might just turn nuclear power into the greenest energy source on the planet.

It sounds paradoxical — they’re safe from meltdowns because they’re already molten? But the thing is, they’re designed to contain material at that temperature to begin with, and since it’s already liquid, any temperature runaway would just make it expand until the reaction shut down. Plus the coolant wouldn’t need to be under pressure so there’d be no risk of a steam explosion, and there’s a failsafe built in that would drain the molten salts into an underground tank so they wouldn’t be released into the environment. The one real problem, it seems, was finding a sufficiently corrosion-resistant material to make the tanks and pipes from.

Better yet, the liquid nature of the nuclear fuel means that it could be continuously filtered, purified, and cycled back into use like the liver cleansing the bloodstream, so eventually all the nuclear material would be used up and there’d be no nuclear waste — or rather, what little waste there was would have a short enough half-life to be safe after about 300 years rather than a quarter of a million. What’s more, it could use some of our existing nuclear waste as fuel and help reduce that problem too.

So why was this superior technology abandoned decades ago in favor of the riskier water-cooled, solid-fuel nuclear plants? Largely just industrial and political inertia, it seems. The solid-fuel design was already in use on nuclear subs when the effort to build civilian nuclear power plants got underway, and the molten salt design was still experimental. So by the time molten salt technology was experimentally proven viable, the industry was already fully committed to solid-fuel reactors, with a big infrastructure built up to support them and deal with their fuel. And there were big plans to recycle their fuel in breeder reactors and create more and more plutonium to power future reactors, which seemed like a great idea until it turned out you could build bombs from the spent fuel, which meant the recycling plan was shut down and we were stuck with a bunch of nuclear waste we didn’t know what to do with, and that problem plus Three Mile Island and Chernobyl soured people on any nuclear-fission research, even something like molten salt reactors that would be far safer and cleaner and have none of the drawbacks that made people so afraid of fission power. But now, people (at least those who aren’t in denial) are more afraid of climate change and are looking for green energy sources, and this might be one of the best.

Then again, MSRs are not a perfect technology. I looked around and found another site talking about the tech:

Molten Salt Reactors

This article is more cynical about the downsides of the tech than the Discover article, asserting that it could be used to create weapons after all, and that there are a number of unknowns yet to be addressed.

And here’s the World Nuclear Association’s assessment, which mentions that MSR research is already pretty big in China, something the Discover article doesn’t mention:

Molten Salt Reactors – World Nuclear Association

Although it doesn’t seem to agree with the previous article about the weapons risk, barely mentioning the issue in its discussion, and suggesting that the early research into the technology was specifically focused on finding a form of nuclear power that would minimize the proliferation risk. So evidently there are differing points of view on this, which is why it’s always a good idea to look beyond a single source.

—

This is informative stuff for a science fiction writer like me. For decades, SF writers have assumed that the future of clean nuclear power would be fusion rather than fission. I’ve long been a believer in the aneutronic form of fusion that would react deuterium with helium-3 (which is abundant on the Moon due to being deposited by the solar wind) and react without neutron radiation. But it turns out there’s been a viable, safe, fairly compact fission technology that’s been known about this whole time and largely ignored — already pretty much proven viable, while fusion has remained just out of reach (they’ve been predicting it was 30-40 years away for the past 50-60 years now). I mean, sure, a reactor based on what’s essentially a pit of radioactive lava sounds scary, but no more so than a starship engine based on constantly annihilating matter and antimatter.

It’s also a good reminder that technology doesn’t always develop in a straight line — that viable advances can be sidelined for a generation or more because industries choose to concentrate all their attention elsewhere, or because the political will to explore them is lacking. Of course, there’s no shortage of SF stories about scientists (often of the mad persuasion) trying to prove to Those Fools at the Institute that a discredited fringe idea is viable after all, but it might also be worth exploring what comes after that, when the fringe idea finally starts to get acceptance — or when it was never really discredited to begin with, just overshadowed and forgotten until the hero of the story tried digging into old research and turned up an overlooked gem.

—

By the way, it’s amusing to read that the molten uranium-salt mixture has “a lovely green tint,” given that the public has long associated radioactivity with a green glow. That myth arose as a result of the glow-in-the-dark radium clock and watch faces that were common back in the days before it was understood how dangerous radioactivity was. The green glow wasn’t from the radium itself, whose emissions (like those of all radioactive isotopes) are invisible; rather, the radioactivity excited luminescence in the phosphor dyes the radium was mixed with. But since such items were common in the early 20th century, people assumed that anything radioactive would glow green, which is part of why the Incredible Hulk is that color (although it’s largely because his original gray hue was hard to reproduce consistently with cheap 1960s printing methods), along with various vintage monsters like those in The Green Slime and Doctor Who‘s “The Green Death,” and why the nuclear rod prominently featured in the titles of The Simpsons glows green. It’s also probably why kryptonite is green. So anyway, given that I’ve grown used to thinking of “green radiation” as a total myth, it’s ironic that the molten salt fuel in this case actually is green in color (though presumably not glowing except thermally) — not to mention that it’s a “green” power source in the environmental sense!

Two million words!

It’s time to do another one of my overview posts of the word count of my published works, since it’s been nearly three years since the last one and I’ve gained a significant number of original published works in the interim. Plus, as you can tell from the title, I’ve just achieved another milestone! With the recent release of my second Star Trek Adventures game campaign The Gravity of the Crime, I have now surpassed 2 million words of paid, published fiction!

The list below includes all my paid fiction that has been published as of February 2019, plus two upcoming releases that have already been copyedited so that I have final word counts, namely Crimes of the Hub and Star Trek: The Original Series — The Captain’s Oath. It excludes the sold stories “The Melody Lingers” (Galaxy’s Edge magazine) and “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” (the Footprints in the Stars anthology) because they haven’t been copyedited yet, but they should be around 4400 and 5000 words, respectively. There’s another story for which I’m currently waiting for a contract and copyedits, so I may update this list once that or the others come together. I’ve left out the unpaid essays I’ve contributed to various sites, since it’s hard to keep track of them all, and I do so much unsolicited blathering online as it is.

ORIGINAL FICTION

Default/”Only Superhuman” universe:

Novels:

Only Superhuman: 118,000 words

Stories:

“Aggravated Vehicular Genocide” (revised): 12,100
“Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele”: 9400
“The Weight of Silence”: 7600
 “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing”: 8900
 “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad”: 8200
“Twilight’s Captives”: 10500
“Aspiring to Be Angels”: 7900

Total story count: 64,600 words

Additional material:

Among the Wild Cybers Historical Overview, Glossary, and Afterword: 6500

Total default universe: 189,100 words

Hub universe:

“The Hub of the Matter”: 9300
 “Home is Where the Hub Is”: 9800
 “Make Hub, Not War”: 9800
 Hub Space: Tales from the Greater Galaxy: 33,300 (preceding stories + 4400 words new material)
“Hubpoint of No Return”: 12,400
“…And He Built a Crooked Hub”: 12,500
“Hubstitute Creatures”: 14,200
Crimes of the Hub: 45,600 (preceding stories + 6500 words new material)

Total: 78,900 words

Other:

 “No Dominion”: 7900
“Abductive Reasoning”: 4100

Total: 12,000 words

Total original fiction count:  280,000 words

MARVEL FICTION

X-Men: Watchers on the Walls: 83,500
Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder: 71,000

Total Marvel novel count: 154,500 words

STAR TREK FICTION

Novels:

Ex Machina: 110,000
Orion’s Hounds: 105,000
The Buried Age: 132,000
Places of Exile: 55,000
Greater Than the Sum: 78,500
Over a Torrent Sea: 89,000
 Watching the Clock: 125,000
Forgotten History: 85,500
A Choice of Futures: 81,000
Tower of Babel: 84,000
Uncertain Logic: 109,000
Live by the Code: 106,000
The Face of the Unknown: 95,000
Patterns of Interference: 85,500
The Captain’s Oath: 106,000

Total ST novel count: 1,446,500 words

Novellas:

Aftermath: 26,000
Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again: 28,900
Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within: 25,400
The Collectors: 35,400
Time Lock: 26,500
Shield of the Gods: 28,700

Total: 170,900

Novelettes:

“…Lov’d I Not Honor More “: 12,000
“Brief Candle”: 9800
“As Others See Us”: 9100
“Friends With the Sparrows”: 10,300
“Empathy”: 11,000

Total: 52,200

Total ST short fiction count: 223,100 words

Star Trek Adventures RPG campaigns:

“Call Back Yesterday”: 8200
“The Gravity of the Crime”: 10,500

Total ST RPG count: 18,700

Total ST fiction count: 1,688,300 words

STAR TREK MAGAZINE ARTICLES

 “Points of Contention”: 1040
 “Catsuits are Irrelevant”: 1250
“Top 10 Villains #8: Shinzon”: 820
“Almost a Completely New Enterprise”: 800
“The Remaking of Star Trek“: 1350
“Vulcan Special: T’Pau”: 910
“The Ultimate Guide: Voyager Season 3″: 1170 (not counting episode guide)
“Star Trek 45s #11: Concerning Flight”: 1000

Total article count: about 8350 words

All told:

 Novels: 1,719,000 words
Short fiction: 385,100 words
RPG campaigns: 18,700 words
Nonfiction: 8350 words

Total fiction: 2,122,800 words

Total overall: 2,131,150 words

 

(And just a reminder — if you enjoy any of my books, please post reviews of them on Amazon or other sites where books are sold. The more reviews they have, the more notice they can attract.)

More STAR TREK ADVENTURES coming this year (and one just released)!

I just noticed this item on the TrekCore news site:

http://trekcore.com/blog/2019/02/star-trek-adventures-continues-to-expand-in-2019/

It’s an announcement of several new Star Trek Adventures publications slated for 2019 release, including a couple of new sourcebooks, but at the bottom, it mentions the August release of Strange New Worlds: Mission Compendium Vol. 2:

[image error]

In August, Star Trek Adventures will begin to explore Strange New Worlds with its second mission compendium of the same name. The book will contain 10 original missions to play through, exploring the strangest and most challenging away missions on dangerous planets and weird environments.

Strange New Worlds follows These Are the Voyages in providing fans with adventure material for the game from both Star Trek fiction writers such as Christopher L. Bennett (The Captain’s Oath, Greater Than the Sum) and roleplay gaming luminaries like Jason Bulmahn (Pathfinder).

My contribution to this volume is the fifth adventure scenario I wrote, but it’ll be my first to be released in print instead of PDF form. At this point, only one of my PDF campaigns has been released, but hopefully more will come out in the 6 months before Strange New Worlds: Mission Compendium Vol. 2 comes out.

Hmm. Twenty years ago, I tried to break into Star Trek writing by submitting a few stories to another thing called Strange New Worlds, the annual contest anthology that Pocket ran for 10 years to discover new authors. As it happens, the first one I submitted to was the second volume of SNW. I never got into that SNW (although some of my Trek Lit colleagues got their starts there, including Dayton Ward and William Leisner), but now I finally get into another Trek collection of the same title, more or less.

EDIT: Thanks to Bernd in the comments, I now know that my second PDF game, The Gravity of the Crime, was released just two weeks ago:

https://www.modiphius.net/collections/star-trek-adventures/products/star-trek-adventures-the-gravity-of-the-crime-pdf

[image error]Will you violate the Prime Directive?

Welcome commander…  Your orders are go undercover on the pre-contact planet of Kalmur to investigate the accidental death of a Federation observer.

When a Kalmuri experiment into artificial gravity goes wildly wrong, an experimental device explodes crushing everyone within the test lab, including a Starfleet scientist, Lieutenant Li, who had infiltrated the project as an observer.

Sent to investigate this apparently accidental death, your team is confronted by a Kalmuri detective, Lanox, who is convinced the deaths are the result of sabotage.

Can you solve this classic locked-room murder mystery without violating Starfleet’s Prime Directive?

Set during the TNG era, this adventure also contains advice for adaptation to other eras including The Original Series.

Announcing CRIMES OF THE HUB, my second Hub book!

It’s time for my first new project announcement for 2019, for certain values of “new.” Fans who’ve followed my posts and notes about last year’s trilogy of Hub stories in Analog are aware that I wrote the three novelettes with an overall story arc, with an eye toward subsequently collecting them in a second e-book/print volume to follow up Hub Space: Tales from the Greater Galaxy. It took a couple of years to find a publisher for the first collection and get it put together, but since that relationship with Crossroad Press was already established, I’m able to get the second collection out much sooner after publication.

Crimes of the Hub will collect “Hubpoint of No Return,” “…And He Built a Crooked Hub,” and “Hubstitute Creatures” into one volume. As with the Hub Space collection, Crimes of the Hub adds new material within and between the stories to flesh things out and tie the stories together a bit more, and to offer something new for those who’ve read the original stories in Analog. In Hub Space, I inserted in-universe articles as interludes so that the stories would stand apart more, but this time, since the stories were written as a single arc, I decided to add bridging scenes to make them flow straight into one another, essentially merging them into a fix-up novel. And it is long enough (about 45,000 words, more than a third longer than Hub Space) to qualify as a novel, albeit a short one. Although the original stories are longer than the first three as well, so the percentage of new material is about the same for both books, roughly 13%. It comes out to a whole new chapter bridging the first two stories but only one scene bridging the latter pair (since there’s less of a time jump there), as well as some added or expanded passages within the stories. I also trimmed or rephrased some bits of redundant exposition and moved a few lines around here and there to make it work better as a continuous narrative. But it still tells the same stories with the same dialogue and events, just with more detail and interstitial material added, and with some overlooked typos corrected.

My decision to turn this into more of a short novel than a pure collection is why I decided to call it just Crimes of the Hub instead of Hub Space 2: Crimes of the Hub as I originally planned. Or Crimes of the Hub: More Tales from the Greater Galaxy. Or something like that. I admit I seriously considered calling it Hub Space 2: Galactic Boogaloo.

Since small-press publishing moves fast, it probably won’t be very long before CotH goes on sale. I’ll post ordering info and the cover art as soon as they become available. It will initially be an e-book exclusive, but a print-on-demand edition should be available in time. It takes the publisher a little more time to get the print editions done, but this time the two editions should come out much closer together than the 3-year gap for Hub Space (since print editions weren’t yet available when the book first came out and I was slow to discover they were an option).

So anyway, this will bring my count of original books to four: Only Superhuman, Among the Wild Cybers, and the two Hub volumes. That’s twice what it was nine months ago. I hope it won’t be long before I have even more to announce.

As for the Hub universe, I haven’t yet made any firm plans for a third set of stories, since I’ve been focusing on other stuff. But the better Crimes of the Hub sells, the more motivated I’ll be to work on a continuation, nudge-nudge.