Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 152

Deucado

In the world of Rome's Revolution, Deucado, "the little world that could" serves as the home and centerpiece of much of the action in the Vuduri universe. Now, for the first time, you can see a full map of Deucado with all its features flattened:


The most important thing to notice are the huge holes punched into the surface of the planet by countless asteroid and meteor strikes over the millennia.

Lake Eprehem is annotated and this is where Ibbra City and New Ark City were founded. To the east, on the little isthmus between the Great Northern Bay and the Great Southern Bay lies Vuduri City. The western continent is called Asquarti. The eastern hemisphere is considered two separate continents connected by a larger isthmus. The northern continent is called Toraode and the southern continent is called Sul.

As mentioned in a previous post, there were a group of Vuduri who did not agree with the plan to allow the Overmind to take over. This group was called the Suduri and they eventually left Earth. They were the first humans to land on Deucado (ignoring the fact that the Deucadons had been there for over 400 years) and they settled in the lower continent of Sul. Aason Bierak led an expedition there and discovered evidence of their colony. However, the Suduri had long since fled to places unknown. I think you may find out where they went in the final novel of the series entitled The Last Journey but I have no idea when that will be.

Happy New Year!

Wait, what? It's only December 27th. What's going on here? Well, yesterday's post was my 366th article about Rome's Revolution which means I have posted a full year's worth (including a gratuitous leap day) of blog entries. Every day for the past year!

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I started on December 23, 2012 and posted every single day except for three times. I am going to bind this whole first year into an e-pub called Tales of the Vuduri: Year One and sell it for free on Amazon, B&N, iTunes and Smashwords. Bruce is working on the cover as we e-speak.

In the beginning, I sat down at my desk and wrote a fresh post every day from scratch. That was a lot of work. Then I got into the habit of writing seven entries at a time (usually on a Sunday) and then posting one each day until the following weekend. That was much easier. If I knew I was going to be out of town, I could set up the publication engine to post on a certain date and time automatically. This was great but I wasn't getting much traffic so I started posting the link to the blog articles on Facebook and Twitter. That seems to have gotten my daily visits up to around 30 - 40 a day. That's over 12,000 page views! Some of my more popular articles get 60 or 70 page views the first day.

I've been compiling the articles for the book. I'm about 1/3 done and I am up 35,000 words. If my projections are correction, that means I've written more than 100,000 words, bigger than two of my three Rome's Revolution novels!

My biggest hit ever was my first post entitled "How to speak Vuduri" which is sitting at 109 page views. My two most clever titles were "Tails of the Vuduri" and "Ah, Capella." I found that posting little pictures, sometimes relevant, sometimes amusing (like the one above) boosts page views as well.

Here's the amazing thing. While many of the articles are random, mostly I have been following the original long-form of Rome's Revolution for inspiration and I am only up to Chapter 8! So if I can keep it up, this thing might go on for years! Thanks for all your support and I hope you have enjoyed it so far.

Mike

You have to know the end before the beginning, Part 3

In yesterday's post, I discussed how the ending of The Ark Lords came about. Today, I finish up with how the ending for Rome's Evolution came about.

Rome's Evolution was never supposed to be a novel. It was going to be a novella entitled Rome: Tracker and it was just going to be about Rome acquiring telepathic capabilities and tracking down the would-be assassins. I knew how it ended. Rei and Rome were going to capture the last two fugitives. But suddenly, clear as day, I realized there were other loose ends (Sussen, anyone?) that I could bring in. So how would it end? Well, Rome would triumph, of course. But how? I loved the idea of split narrative. I did it in the middle Rome's Revolution with Rei and Rome taking their separate journeys. I also did it in The Ark Lords by interweaving the story of how Hanry Ta Jihn defeated the original Erklirte. But in Rome's Evolution, I wanted to take it to the next level. Literally. The battle between Rei and Rome and MASAL's Sipre was going to take place both on Earth and within the ethereal plane.

But I knew it was Bonnie Mullen, holding Jack Henry's M9 Beretta and shooting Sussen in the head would be the climax. I had my ending! The rest of the story wrote itself.

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So I go back to my original premise. You cannot write a book (or make a movie) before you know how it ends.

You have to know the end before the beginning, Part 2

In yesterday's post, I discussed developing the ending of Part 3 of Rome's Revolution. Sure there were loose ends. I knew I was going to have the VIRUS units detonate Kilauea and destroy MASAL. But what about the Stareaters? Meh. I'd deal with them later but then bang, it hit me, just like something out of Masters of the Universe, Rei, Rome, MINIMCOM and OMCOM would hold Aason over their head and instead of saying "By the power of Grayskull" they'd shout "we are here" like Horton Hears a Who. This was delicious!



Anybody reading the book now would think that it was all so clever to have all the pieces fit together so nicely. And I suppose it was. It certainly taught me you had to know the end before the beginning.

Once I posted Rome's Revolution, my very first Amazon reviewer told me that Captain Keller and the rest of the Grays were acting too crazy. This bothered me. I needed them to act crazy and try to start a war so I could get some peace on Deucado prior to the attack on MASAL. It seemed worthy of another book. I have already written about how The Ark Lords came about. But ending that book was a problem. Even after Rome discovered the Darwin Project, even if she and Rei could end it, what were they going to do with all the lunatics?

I couldn't put them in prison so I had to send them away but where? That's where Helome came in. I had tossed the presence of a Vuduri colony at Rogal Canduro (Alpha Centauri) about in Rome's Revolution but never had any plans to invoke it. Then boom, it came to me (again, probably in the shower) and suddenly the not-sex scene between Rei and Virga was not only funny but necessary to have my ending. Once I knew how it was going to end, the book wrote itself.

Tomorrow, the ending for Rome's Evolution.

You have to know the end before the beginning, Part 1

You cannot start out writing a novel like Rome's Revolution without knowing how it ends. Can you imagine an author writing a whodunit without knowing who the killer is beforehand?

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You can't tell me that you haven't gone to a movie which seems great right up until the climax and then the ending is so disappointing that you decide you don't even like the movie. That's because the person who wrote it had this great idea but didn't know how to end it.

When I originally wrote VIRUS 5, I always knew how it was going to end. It was that OMCOM survived, the VIRUS units digested the Stareater but there were mutations leading to the Bridadiras and Cecetiras. I had no idea that this would lead to a sequel but leaving loose ends seemed like the best strategy. Even when VIRUS 5 evolved into the long-form version of Rome's Revolution, I left the ending intact.

When I was sitting on my deck, wondering what happened to Rei and Rome when they got to Deucado, it seemed like an interesting story but I had no intention of starting to write a book without knowing the ending. The idea that when they arrived they were attacked and Rome meeting up with her father seemed cool but there had to be a reason behind it all.

So the story remained untold. One day, out of the blue (or more likely in the shower), I came up with the climactic scene where Rome meets MASAL. I could just hear her whispering "But you are dead" and MASAL's booming voice replying "Hardly." That was it! I had my ending. The entire middle section of what is now Rome's Revolution flew by and I knew I was going to write the third part.

Tomorrow, more endings.

What Sally Saw

As part of the backstory of Rome's Revolution, I've mentioned Sally Reynolds numerous times. Sally was Rei's ex-girlfriend and he thought she was the love of his life. She spent the evening with Rei on his last day on Earth in Intermezzo 1 of Rome's Evolution. In another post I described what went into the calculation of that date which was January 24, 2067 AD.

The good news for you is that an upgrade came out for an app called SkyGuide that runs on the iPad. One of the improvements is that it allows you to see the sky on any given date and time. So I went ahead to January 24, 2067 and used the app to show the sky as Sally viewed it on that fateful night. I used the iPad to take a snapshot of the sky on that date. Tabit is circled and labeled Π³ Ori in the image:

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Here is the exact passage from Rome's Evolution, Intermezzo 1:

     Rei focused on where Sally was pointing. On this night, the constellation Orion the Hunter was just to the southwest of the Moon. Light pollution from the city drowned out many of the stars that would have been seen in an earlier age. But Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, the three stars in a row marking Orion’s belt, were still very recognizable.
     “The star you’re pointing to is the grip on Orion’s shield,” Rei said, trying to be analytical. “I don’t remember its name… Tabit maybe? But we’re not going anywhere near there.”

Well Rei was right about the name of the star but dead wrong about not going there. The true love of his life, the beautiful Vuduri woman named Rome, was waiting for him there.

The University of Deucado

Yet more fallout from the debut of the book trailer for The Ark Lords. Now people are asking me about the strange design of the campus surrounding Rome's Library of Life.

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Well, the actual description of why it was laid out this way was detailed in The Ark Lords fairly well. The blacktop area in the lower part of the shot is MINIMCOM's personal landing area. He also made it large enough to hold other spacecraft and flyers. The other three areas are just the excavations which will eventually hold the commissary, a dormitory and a lecture hall which would also serve as the planet's first movie theater.

Several years later, in Rome's Evolution, we get the sense that the university is expanding rapidly. Rome references a science building and a geology lab and we have to assume they were built farther to the left, expanding the campus. At some point, there will be students so they will need classroom space. We know this because Rome makes specific reference to teaching English to the Ibbrassati and Vuduri to the Essessoni. When you think about it, there are so many people flocking to the planet that in ten or fifteen years, there will be an entire generation of non-mind-connected young people who will have to learn skills, trades, science and so on.

Rei was right in recognizing that Rome's library was only the first of many buildings that would grow to become Deucado's first university. There is a little scene in the trailer that captures that ideal as well:

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The Library of Life

This is really cool. Now that the book trailer for The Ark Lords has come out, I'm getting flooded with questions with why this and why that. When you read books, you form a picture in your mind of the people and places described there. When the movie comes out or in this case a book trailer, suddenly everybody's preconceived notions are challenged because the images in their head are made real. To address this, yesterday's post dealt with why bricks?

Today's post concerns the shape of The Library in general.

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Why was it a T-shape? What went into the wings? What was it like inside, in general?

Well, the entry way leads in to the two-story tall main study area. This is the place where people can access the original data that Rome collected. As described in Rome's Evolution, the left wing contains a combination museum and shrine. Stored there were the invisibility cloaks donated by the Deucadons and Hanry Ta Jihn's M9 Beretta. It also housed the original data sources which included the Essessoni data slabs, the Deucadon's memory stick, a set of Vuduri data-cubes and Trabunel's notebook detailing the travails of the Ibbrassati.

As you go back along the main building, you have study rooms, research labs, a playroom and finally in the way-back, you have Rome's personal research library. Of course, as you can tell from the book trailer, Rome's library, called "The Human History Library" at the time, was bombed and rebuilt. It's kind of interesting that the original design did not have certain features. After Rome used the library and it got bombed, she had a say in how it was rebuilt. Mostly she kept it the same but changed it in subtle ways. To see exactly how she used it, check out Rome's Evolution.

Bricks

It was only two days ago that the book trailer for The Ark Lords was posted but already the questions have come flooding in. Statistically, the most questions have come in regarding the physical appearance of Rome's Library of Life (originally called The Human History Library). Here are two pictures of the library from the trailer:

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So the big question is: This is the 35th century! How come it doesn't look more futuristic? How come it looks like it was made from bricks? The answer is it isn't. The Vuduri would typically build such an edifice out of aerogel. Rei went along with their plan. He simply had the aerogel stained with brick color. He did this for the very same reason that the library looks like something from old Earth. He knew Rome would want it this way. The library was supposed to be for all the people of Deucado, in fact, for all of mankind so she would not have wanted designed in any particular style. She would have wanted it to appeal to the Essessoni, the Deucadons, the Ibbrassati and the mandasurte and even the Vuduri. So Rei had it designed and built generically.

That's the reason. It was on purpose.

MASAL, Part 2

MASAL, the Master Logical Entity (Masdre Andoteta Logice in Vuduri) ended up being the ultimate bad guy in Rome's Revolution. In yesterday's post, we covered a little bit about his origin.

Unfortunately for the Vuduri, somewhere along the line, MASAL developed a self-awareness and decided that it would be better if the humans were more compliant to its wishes. It convinced the humans that it could enhance the species by designing, building and distributing the 24th chromosome. Experiments were performed, a delivery mechanism was developed and when MASAL declared it safe, the 24th chromosome was distributed among the populace. Unfortunately, while there were some short term benefits, longer term, the 24th chromosome had a more sinister effect, eventually transforming humans into living robots called the Onsiras.

Even so, the changeover did not happen quickly enough to satisfy MASAL so he initiated a break with the Overmind and started the Robot War, solely to reduce the number of humans. The robots became his principal agents of destruction, preserving those humans more likely to give birth to Onsiras and targeting those farther away. Because of this, after MASAL was defeated, the Vuduri banned robots from their culture forever.

Of course, as we find out in Rome's Revolution, MASAL did not really die. He went into hiding beneath the dormant volcano Kilauea and drew from its thermal heat enough power to maintain his systems for over a century. It took Rei and Rome, using the weaponized VIRUS units, to set off Kilauea and vaporize MASAL.

Of course in the movies, the bad guy always dies three times. MASAL was no different. He died the first time beneath the Flatirons where Boulder, CO currently stands. He died the second time consumed by the hell-fury unleashed beneath Kilauea. For his third and final time, MASAL, his spirit embodied in MASAL's Sipre (his shadow), was conquered on the banks of the Los Angeles River by none other than Bonnie Mullen in the climax of Rome's Evolution.