Dan Thompson's Blog, page 10

Eaten by Rabid Turnips

Given all the usual April Fools shenanigans I wasn’t even going to post anything today, but that plan went to the dogs when my home was invaded by the neighbor’s turnips.

No, it’s not a weed infestation spreading into my yard. He’s been experimenting with radiation, gene-splicers, and not a trivial amount of alien DNA. “It’s technically TSNA,” he’s always telling me… something to do with the extra oxygen in the base pairs along with substituting silicon in some of the carbon structures.

So, yeah, these things are a little weird. And big. Big enough to climb the 12-foot concrete garden fence with barbed wire across the top? No, but they had no trouble tunneling under the damn thing and then breaking through the back windows.

I ran upstairs, which as I should have known from countless horror films is never a good move, and the damn things cornered me in my office. I have to say, though, that was surprised me most was not that these mutant turnips had arms, legs, and claws. It’s that they had mouths and teeth – big, nasty, carnivorous teeth.

Did I mention the foaming at the mouth?

Apparently there were some wild dogs in the neighborhood a few weeks back. We were all a little worried about this because wild dogs can, of course, be a real danger out here in the country due to rabies. Well, they went digging in my neighbor’s turnip patch last week, and no one’s seen them since. Well, I’m pretty sure what happened to them, and that they did, in fact, have rabies. Because where else would these 10-foot tall mutant turnips have been infected?

That’s right, the turnips have rabies.

Fortunately, I was pretty much swallowed hole, so I don’t think I’m infected. I’m missing a shoe, though it’s possible it has already dissolved. There’s not much light here in the turnip’s stomach, you see. In fact, it’s just the light from my phone that lets me see at all.

So I figured, what the heck, why not do a blog entry while I’m stuck here? The GPS says we’re headed into town, probably towards the capitol building. From what I can see of the traffic alerts, the army seems to be cordoning off the city, but from the sounds of artillery, these things aren’t going down easy.

Which only confirms my childhood opinion… I hate turnips.

Review: So You Created a Wormhole, by Hornshaw & Hurwitch

This is satirical guide to time travel, and while the first parts of it were quite funny, the second half flopped down into repetition and lame humor.

The first parts included some theories on time travel, mixing farce with science and movies. It also gave us descriptions of the various kinds of time machines, the perils of the various flavors of paradox, and some ideas of what to do if you ever run into yourself or break your time machine.

The second half of the book, however, is a repetitive survival guide. It follows the same formula of what to bring, what to fear, and how to fix your time machine in time periods from the dinosaurs to the future. The first one or two time periods were OK, but after a while it started to get repetitive. Long before the end, I found myself skimming and looking briefly at the crazy diagrams.

So while it started strong, it almost seemed like they ran out of steam and used the Survival Guide section to pad it out another two hundred pages. So, it made for an OK gift, but I wouldn’t spend my own money on it if I had the choice.

Thank You, Mrs. Gorman

I spoke to my copyeditor over the weekend, and she’s about 80% of the way through Ship of My Fathers. So far, she said it had been a fairly clean draft, even with cross-checking it against the Chicago Manual of Style rules. For that I have my seventh grade English teacher to thank.

Mrs. Gorman’s class was something of a crucible, and while I won’t liken her to any torturer or stormtrooper of old, I will say this. She wasn’t merely the original Grammar Nazi. She made the mold for the original Grammar Nazi. I don’t exactly wake up in the middle of night in the cold sweat of terror, but I do have flashbacks. “And! But! For, Or, Nor, and sometimes Yet and So!” Not only do I remember the words, but the cadence still rings in my ears. I’ve heard from other students she’s had over the decades, and they remember it as well. The most chilling words I ever heard in her class? “We have six minutes left. Let’s drill.”

Now, all PTSD jabs aside, she taught us very well. If ever brainwashing was used for a good cause, this was it. At the beginning of the year, she told us that she would teach us all the grammar we would need to know until our sophomore year. I figured this was pretty ambitious, since that was three years away. Alas, no. She meant our sophomore year in college, seven years into our educational future. A boast, one would think, but in truth she was being modest. I can think of only one or two grammatical rules I have learned since her class, and they are on esoteric subjects like comma usage around dependent adverbial phrases.

And yes, Mrs. Gorman was a fan of the Oxford comma.

We learned grammar from the parts of speech all the way up to diagramming sentences. We had compound sentences, complex sentences, gerunds, compound clauses, infinitives, and so on. When copyediting my own work, I often find myself mentally diagramming complicated grammar to make sure my usage is correct. In programming languages, I found myself falling back on analogs of her sentence diagrams when parsing syntax. Even though my hearing made foreign languages very difficult, I was at least able to make sense of their grammar by comparing their structures to English.

I took her class thirty-two years ago, and I have to say that I still remember almost everything she taught me. I’m fuzzy about the distinction between among and amongst, and I think I capitalize a few things I shouldn’t, but other than that, I’m in pretty good shape.

I wrote her a proper thank you letter ten or fifteen years ago when she was still teaching. Now that I’m publishing books, I think about writing another, but she has since retired. Then again, I’ve also started taking some stylistic liberties, and I fear that if I were to send another letter, I would inadvertently commit the cardinal sin of her classroom. My letter would come back to me with bold red letters proclaiming my failure, “Run-on sentence! C-!”

But even so, thank you, Mrs. Gorman.

My Magical Watch

(I was asked to write a true Urban Fantasy story. This might border more on magical realism, but here it is…)

I confess that I don’t put much stock in ghost stories or psychic events, but on the other hand, I can’t tell someone that they did not actually experience what they remember experiencing. After all, I’m not the one who was there. With that in mind, let me tell you about a wristwatch of mine that seemed to know more about how to live life than I did.

It was an unassuming little thing, an analog wristwatch with a small digital inset. I’d had it for years, and the gold-plating on the wristband had faded to a dull yellow. I would have replaced it long before, except for the fact that it was thin and lightweight, and the trend for men’s wristwatches had moved towards bulky anchors. Those factors combined to make the watch literally irreplaceable. So I was that much more annoyed when it started acting funny.

You see, sometimes, it would simply stop. The hands would freeze in place, and the digital portion would go blank.

My first thought was that the battery was dead, but before I could take it down to Walmart to get a fresh battery installed, it started working again. So I reset the time and continued on my way. But then it would stop again, and after a day or so, it would restart. After a few months of this I began to notice a pattern.

It only stopped on the weekends.

Being something of a scientist, I began to sniff around for rational explanations. Texas is hot from April to October, and I was frequently outside in the yard working up a sweat on the weekends. Sometimes I was mowing the lawn with plenty of vibrations coming up through my hands from the mower. That had to be it, right? Or could it be the heat and humidity? That made sense. So I stopped wearing it while doing yardwork, but even then, it would still sometimes stop on the weekend.

Well, that wasn’t not so bad. The weekend is a time to relax. As my wife put it, I don’t really need to worry about time on the weekends. She suggested that perhaps my watch was trying to tell me not to worry about the time when I should be relaxing and enjoying life instead.

While I admitted that it was indeed a good time to be relaxing, I wasn’t ready to buy into any magical watch theories. I replaced the battery, but it still kept quitting on the occasional weekend. I took it to a jeweler to be repaired, and he suggested that the spring holding the battery in place was simply loose and needed to be tightened. That sounded like a good rational explanation, so I had him do that.

It didn’t make a difference. It quit on me the very next weekend, and what’s more, it started quitting on me when I went camping. I was doing two or three weekend campouts a year in Central Texas back then, and sure enough, within an hour of arriving at the campsite, the watch would quit on me. That was fine. It was a relaxing campout. I shouldn’t be worried about time anyway, so I left it in the car. Invariably, it would start working again on the drive home. Still, my rational mind was satisfied with the heat and humidity explanation.

Then it went missing.

I was on a business trip to SIGGraph. I was working at Autodesk at the time, and every other year I went to this conference that was half technical folks and half graphical artists. I could attend a presentation on vector compression and walk across the hall to see interactive, three-dimensional art. For someone like me who was equal parts math-geek and visual artist, it should have been more of a vacation than a business trip. But this time, early on the first day, I noticed that my watch was no longer on my wrist.

I had been checking email on my laptop earlier in the day, and I tend to take my watch off when I’m typing. To keep track of it, I would usually set it on the open laptop so that I would be forced to put it back on before closing up. Maybe I did something different that time. Maybe I set it on the table. Maybe I tried to put it in a pocket and missed. Or maybe the watch just made a jump for it.

I stopped by the show’s administrative office and registered it with their lost and found, but then I put it out of my mind and stopped worrying about the time. I stayed out late. I ate dinner with random people I had met at the conference. I ran into one of our executives and invited him to join me and some of my coworkers for lunch. I wandered the halls and found parts of the show I had never known existed. Sure, I missed a few presentations that I had circled in the program book, but I enjoyed that show more than any other SIGGraph before or since.

I stopped by the admin office each morning, but they never had the watch, nor did they ever call. I checked out of my hotel the last day, made one last sweep through the trade show floor, and finally started thinking about time again. I found myself looking at the clocks in the building, aware that I would have to leave soon to catch my flight home. Then, as my last stop before heading out to the taxi stands, I went to the admin office one last time. Sure enough, someone had turned in my watch mere moments before. It was still working, showing me the correct date and time. It seemed like it was taunting me for not believing in it.

I was a lot more forgiving of its idiosyncrasies after that. When it stopped on the weekend or on a camping trip, I merely set it aside for a few days and picked it up when it was time to start moving again. We had reached an understanding of sorts, and I was happy to let that go on for another year or so.

Then my dad got sick. It was cancer. He battled it out for two years, and I made a few trips out to visit him in the dry Arizona desert, sometimes even stopping off for a day going to or from my job in California. Sure enough, on every visit, my watch stopped working. I didn’t worry about the time. Instead I savored it. Those moments were both fleeting and priceless.

Eventually, my father lost his battle with cancer. I was back home when it happened. It was a Monday afternoon in August. I sat down that evening at my computer, laid my watch across the top of the keyboard, and wrote a blog post that eventually became his eulogy. The watch stopped fifteen minutes after I posted that entry.

The watch never started again. It’s been almost eight years, and it still sits frozen on my desk. I have bought other watches since then, but I never made another attempt to revive that one.

So that’s the true story of my magical watch. I remain a scientist at heart, but I can offer no rational explanation for the many coincidences I had with that watch. Instead, I am left only with the lesson it taught me. Don’t worry about the time. Treasure it.

Review: Cursor’s Fury, by Jim Butcher

This is the third book in Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series, and I get the feeling that this is where the story really gets rolling. We learn more about two of the principal political players in the realm, and we learn more about young Tavi’s back-story. We also get a taste for what’s going on in the larger world.

I think what I really liked about this one, however, was seeing Tavi in action. Yes, we got some of that in the first two books, but here is where I think we really see him come into his own. You see, Tavi has never developed his “fury” powers, which are basically a magical mastery of the various elements (fire, earth, water, air, metal, plants, etc.). In that, he’s kind of a powerless freak in an unkind world, but he’s also a very intelligent powerless freak. So here, we finally get to see him use his intelligence to not only overcome his lack of furycrafting, but to outwit and outmaneuver those with much greater abilities.

The book also has some major revelations about both the past and future of the realm. The First Lord is old and without an heir, and this book finally opened up the door on some new possibilities of what is going to happen when the old man finally dies. It left us with a teaser, bordering on a cliffhanger, that has made me eager to get to the next one.

Marriage in SF/F

I attended a wedding last week, and it got me thinking about the institution of marriage in science fiction and fantasy. I frequently run into stalwart captains and noble queens who are single by either choice or tragedy. I also see a number of couples, but I confess I don’t run into all that many marriages, and certainly even fewer weddings. Maybe that only means I’m reading about a bunch of loners, but it does not show up as often as I’d expect.

Still, it’s not entirely absent. There actually are a number of marriages, and while some are the humdrum union of old sweethearts, I’m more interested in the marriages that can only occur in a science fiction or fantasy setting, or at the very least, that won’t happen in our world today.

Given that last week’s wedding was an interracial marriage – my long-time friend is black, and his bride is white – I thought I would start with some similarly mixed marriages. Perhaps the most famous is that of Spock’s parents, his human mother Amanda and his Vulcan father Sarek. Another of my favorites from SF is the union of Babylon 5’s Captain Sheridan and the Minbari Ambassador Delenn. Rather than focusing on their progeny, we got to see the culture clash play out in their courtship. (One word to my fellow Babylon fans: Woohoo!)

On the fantasy side, Lord of the Rings had Aragorn marry Arwen with hints of half-elf children in their future. I’ve seen a few human-demon pairings as well as human-vampire pairings, but very few actual weddings. (Sorry, I’m not aware of anything called Twigh Lite.)

These all tend to be humanoid to humanoid pairings. I don’t know if that’s a lack of imagination, a lack of effects/makeup budget, or a simple limit on what parts match up with other parts.

Then we get into different kinds of marriage. Heinlein was all over this with both line marriages in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and group marriages in Friday. Some of these were meant to preserve property, while others were simply a raised finger to the institution of monogamous marriage.

I’ve also run into time-delimited marriages from several different authors. C.J. Cherryh’s Ateva, particularly their nobility, marry for reasons of political alliance, and those marriages come and go with shifting loyalties. Kube-McDowell’s Quiet Pools showed me contractual marriage with and without options for child-rearing.

Sharon Shinn’s world of Samaria had angels living amongst humans, but angels were forbidden to marry angels. Instead, angels always married humans, but even then, it was often a more open marriage, particularly for the male angels. You see, an angel-human pairing could produce either human or angel children, but since successful angel births were rare, male angels were spreading their seed far and wide. I’ll let you read the books for the messy details of when the god Jovah would choose the Archangel’s spouse – not always a match made in heaven.

I’ve also run into SF societies that completely divorce, so to speak, marriage from reproduction. The merchants of C.J. Cherry’s Merchanter’s Union did not really marry. The woman would have sex with men from other ships, because their own ship was filled with family. Children were not raised by mother and father. Rather, they were raised by mother and aunts and uncles. The demons in my upcoming Hell Bent have similar family lives for very different reasons.

A world I imagined had a society made more intellectual than emotional by computer implants, and marriages were based on intellectual harmony with no regard to physical or sexual chemistry. Choosing a sexual partner was done via genetic analysis, and potential partners approached the selection with about as much emotion as we would choose a lab partner for class. Child-rearing was quite different, of course, but the implants allowed early intellectual maturity, long before the body reached adulthood.

Now, if that hasn’t completely detonated the nuclear family, I’ve heard of even stranger arrangements, where the aliens in question were sentient symbiots, so simple pairings were by definition group marriages. Taking it further, there are some fictional races that live in between individual sentience and shared hive minds, so the notion of marriage for love vs. arranged marriage is dropped into the conceptual blender and thoroughly pureed.

These days, marriage is a political hot potato here in the US with the ongoing debate over gay marriage, but I would like to think that in the future we’ll at least be able to talk about marriage without invoking Nazis or the end of civilization. After all, it’s all about finding the symbiotic hive mind of our dreams, right?

So how about the rest of you? What’s the wildest concept of marriage you’ve run into in SF or fantasy?

Review: WWW Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer

I don’t remember how I first came across this one, but the basic idea is that the Internet becomes self-aware. It was an idea I have toyed with from time to time but never figured out how to turn it into a story. Sawyer did.

It’s mostly told through the POV of a blind teenage girl who gets an experimental implant to grant her sight, but there are also some other characters scattered around the globe playing their own parts. While the girl’s operation is at first deemed a failure, time changes that. I don’t want to say too much about that, because it’s a spoiler worth preserving, though I will say I was initially annoyed by what she sees via her implant. Still, I recognized it was required by the plot, but I was glad to see it go.

We also see some of the story told from the POV of the emerging sentience of the internet. While generally told in small snippets, I found that part very interesting. Over the book, it goes from a barely aware sentience to a fully self-aware, communicative mind. That in itself was an interesting journey.

So, overall I enjoyed it, with only minor points of nit-picking. It’s clearly the first in a trilogy, so I look forward to seeing where the rest of this goes.

Beta Readers

In my self-publishing process, I don’t hire story editors or developmental editors. I do hire a copyeditor, but that’s for after the story is already fine-tuned. Instead of these earlier editors, I use beta readers.

As I explained in an earlier post, I do my own alpha reading and fix up what I can, but then I reach a point where I need an outside perspective. That’s when I turn to my beta readers. They don’t provide everything that a professional story editor – particularly one in a publishing house – would provide, but in some ways, they provide more.

But first, who do I pick as my beta readers?

The common wisdom going around is that these should not be your friends and family. The logic behind that is that these people won’t understand what is required to make a story work, and besides, they don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they won’t speak up about your book’s problems. While I think that can be true, I don’t think it’s always true. Certainly not all of my friends and family are qualified, but a few of them are quite qualified. And some of those qualified few are also emotionally invested in my success. They actually read the damn thing, make notes, and give me good feedback.

What makes them qualified? Well, ideally, I’d love to three or four uncles who have spent a lifetime as professional editors in my genre of publishing, but that hasn’t happened. I think the key though, is that my beta readers need to be well-read in the genres that I’m writing in. If all they read is chick-lit, they won’t be able to give me good feedback on my space opera. And when I say well-read, I don’t mean half a dozen books. I mean hundreds of books.

Also, they should know what they like and why they like it. It’s not enough that they really enjoyed Old Man’s War by Scalzi. They should be able to talk about what parts really thrilled them, what parts were only okay, and why they reacted that way. When the end of my book doesn’t work for them, they can have some idea why, whether it be plausibility, character motivation, or emotional satisfaction. This kind of feedback is easier to get if the beta reader is also a writer, because writers think about these things a lot, but it’s not a requirement. I’ve also gotten this kind of quality feedback from people who never write fiction.

And finally, they need to show a track history of giving me honest feedback, especially when that feedback is bad. I may not know this until I first try them as a beta reader. They may come back and simply tell me it’s wonderful. That’s nice and all, but it didn’t get me any further down the path. If they come back and tell me it was great until page 212 when the navy showed up and solved everyone’s problems, then I’ve gotten some great feedback about my ending. These are the kind of people who will say, “Yes, those jeans actually do make you look fat.”

Some good feedback I have gotten from my beta readers have been things like:

You’re telegraphing the main conflict in chapter one. I would have enjoyed it more if it had developed over time.
Hank is a real dick at the beginning, and you never explain why.
I really liked Walter until 2/3 of the way through, and then he just went nuts for no clear reason.
Bob reacts to everything by being angry, and that got a little annoying. Is that all he can do?
The scenes with Susan were kind of boring to me. I didn’t stop reading, but I wanted to skip ahead.

These were great because they were specific, they reflected how they reacted as readers, and they were not suggesting radical changes like, “I think Frank should be a vampire.” They were giving me a measurement on whether or not I invoked the kind of emotional response in readers that I was attempting. Did I make you cry, or did you blow a great big raspberry at the page?

Of course, beta readers are not a complete replacement for a story editor or a development editor. They won’t tell me that New Adult is a big thing right now, and this story could be redone with the protagonist five years older or five years younger to fit that market. They won’t tell me that the paranormal horror market is oversaturated and showing signs of shrinking. And I doubt they’ll tell me that my mystery-horror crossover will be hard to market.

On the other hand, beta readers provide a diversity of feedback that no single editor will be able to match. If one beta reader complains about one of my favorite parts, I have to wonder if I’m on the right track or if I have to “kill my darlings” as the saying goes. But if the other readers all liked that particular point, I can safely set aside that single piece of feedback with the notion that I can’t please everyone all the time. On the other hand, if most of them complain about the same thing, I have to accept that the problem is real and haul that particular darling of mine off to the guillotine. With a single editor, I’d always struggle with whether or not to stick to my guns on things like that.

Would I like to have a developmental editor and a story editor as well? Possibly, but for now I’m making do with my beta readers. However, I will say that I’m looking for additional beta readers. Right now, I have a trio of ladies as my beta readers, and while I don’t want to throw down the gauntlet of gender inequality, I’d like another man’s perspective from time to time.

How about you folks… do you use beta readers? Have you ever been a beta reader?

Review: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

I always felt badly that I had never read this classic book, that I was somehow not really an SF fan because of it. Eventually, guilt or shame brought it to the top of my in-pile, and I dove in. Now part of me wishes I had simply left it there.

The premise is that humanity of early 21st century is at war with a far-flung alien race. We’re not quite sure how it started, but it looks like they shot first. The only FTL is via some kind of wormhole, but there is plenty of slower-than-light travel to and from, and much of that travel is at relativistic speeds.

So, rather than leaving it as a pure space-navy war, we decide we need some boots on the ground. So who do we recruit as our cannon-fodder? Only the best and brightest will do. So we skim off the cream of our intellectual crop and send them off to battle. If only their commanding officers were as smart.

Which is leads me to the main complaint about this book. The people in charge were always extremely short-sighted and downright stupid. I recognize that to some extent this is a screed against the U.S. political/military leadership from the U.S.-Vietnam war, but it got really annoying as to just how stupid they were making these folks.

How stupid? Well, they planned their training with the expectation that half of the trainees would be killed or permanently maimed during the training. They also sent them on missions over the years (in fact, centuries) where the expectation was an average of 66% casualties per mission. But it’s not like we were stuck in the jungles, trying not to kill too many civilians. Nope, we were fighting over deserted rocks. What part of orbital bombardment did they miss?

And then there was the whole Malthusian situation back on Earth. I know there was a lot of concern about the rapid rise of population back in the 1970’s, but even growing up with that, I was never all that worried. The concern, as originally laid out by Thomas Malthus in the late 1700’s, was that our population would outstrip our food production, and that the only ways to combat this were draconian birth control of the less desirable or poorer populations or outright war and starvation to bring the population back down to a manageable level.

Some of offshoots of this back on Earth during the Forever War were an economy based entirely on calories. Then there were some civil wars and lawlessness that brought the population down. And then we had enforced and universal homosexuality. Maybe it’s because I now live in a world where most demographers realize we are not headed towards a Malthusian catastrophe, but frankly, I found most of this to be ridiculous.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to lay these criticisms on Haldeman’s 1970’s book, but its repetitive message that our leaders are stupid and we are all doomed was very tiring. I prefer more optimistic futurists because instead of complaining about all the insurmountable problems facing us, they tend to propose the solutions that actually solve those problems.

And my final complaint about the book was that the resolution of the war was very much deus ex machina. After centuries, humanity transformed into another form that was able to communicate with the warmongering aliens. No, we can’t explain to you how the communication works, but now that it does, everything is just fine. The war was a silly misunderstanding, and now everyone can live happily ever after. We thank you for your centuries of pointless sacrifice.

About the only thing I did find worthwhile in the book was the realities of relativistic travel, of skipping forward into the future. Friends and family age and die. Technology and society march on in unexpected directions. The realities of life, death, and injury change from one trip to the next. That, at least, was interesting.

But by and large, I did not enjoy the book.

Ships of My Fathers is off to the Copyeditor

Last week, I handed my next novel off to the copyeditor. If all goes according to schedule, she’ll have it wrapped up by the end of March, and I’ll be able to release it around the start of May.

Ships of My Fathers is the first of a five-book series set in the same universe as Beneath the Sky, though it’s neither sequel nor prequel. In truth, it happens in parallel to Beneath the Sky and touches on one or two minor characters from that book, most notably Father Chessman and the Yoshido pirate syndicate. Chessman is not the central character, by far, but in search of a good-sounding tagline, this might very well end up being known as the Father Chessman Saga. I’ll say more about it as the release approaches, but until now I suppose it’s been nothing more than a title to everyone but my beta readers.

Handing it off to my copyeditor is a strange milestone for me because it marks the beginning of the hurry-up-and-wait stage. I still consider copyediting to be part of my polish process, but until I get those edits back, there’s very little for me to do. That sudden inactivity comes on the heels of a major push to reach that point, so in some ways I’m still hearing my writing-brakes squeal.

When I started the year, I set a schedule that called for an “editing” deadline in late January, but when February 1st rolled around, I was nowhere close to being done. Knowing that much of the rest of the schedule would be out of my hands (copyedits, bake time at printers and retailers, shipping time for galley proofs, etc.), I realized that if I missed my end-of-February deadline, there was no hope of catching up. So I doubled my efforts and did three different editing passes in February:

I finished the story edits, incorporating the beta feedback. The book grew about 5000 words along the way.
I did a word-crafting pass, beefing up my word choices, slaying weak adverbs, adding more colorful metaphors, and just getting rid of really annoying filler words like “just” and “really”.
Then I did my own copyedit pass and found some truly awful errors that had amazingly slipped past every one of my own reads as well as those of my beta readers.

In the end, I missed my deadline by two days, passing it off near midnight on March 1st rather than my original February 27th goal. It now stands at about 85,000 words, and I think I’ve read it beginning to end at least four times. At this point, I’m strangely ambivalent about it. In some ways I’m sick of it, but in other ways, I’m reveling in it. This one bit towards the end still makes me tear up, even after that many readings. So, either I’m incredibly narcissistic, or the book is pretty good… though I suppose both could be true.

So now I’m edging into the publishing process, even as the polishing process is wrapping up. I’ll be doing a rough cut of the print formatting so that I can get an approximate page count. This is necessary to calculate the spine width, and I need that to correctly size the wraparound cover. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do with it, image and text-wise, but I’m still toying around with fonts and such. I also need to think forward to the next four books and their likely covers, so that the series will have a more unified look.

And I’m also starting to think about other projects. I’m going to revise the cover of Beneath the Sky and get back to the edits on Hell Bent. Hopefully I’ll be handing that over to my beta readers about the same time I get my copyedits back on Ships of My Fathers. And then I need to start thinking about drafting a new novel from scratch, quite possibly the sequel to Hell Bent, tentatively titled Stone Killer.