Doug Dandridge's Blog, page 21

Last Day

I remember watching the movie Logan’s Run back in the 70s. Also read the book and saw the not so good TV series. In Logan’s Run people were only allowed to live to 30 (in the book it was even younger). Then they faced Last Day, the day they were killed in a ritual, from which the people were told their souls would ascend and then reenter the body of a newborn.

Today was my Last Day at the State of Florida, though I didn’t have to attend a ritual that killed me. No, I walked out the door with my belongings, walked to my car, and drove away from what was a very difficult period of my life. Department of Children and Families Abuse Hotline was not an easy master. We did some good, but I also believe we hassled some people who really didn’t need us in their lives. Add to that low pay, no raises for five years, and directives that seemed to have been written by a thousand monkeys on typewriters, and made as much sense, and I am very happy to have walked out of that place of employment alive. Along the way I learned a lot, about people, about bureaucracy, about the evil that people do to their own. And about the craft of writing. I left some good people there, friends that I had seen every week for the last seven plus years.

Like the people in Logan’s Run, I entered Last Day expecting a rebirth. In my case it came true, and I leave this day as my own boss. I am now a full time author, able to make use of my time as I wish. If I want to be a successful author I will use that time wisely, to produce as much as I can, while I can. This weekend I will be completing the purchase of a motorcycle, and will be back on two wheels after a two year hiatus. That is part of this lifestyle as well, to get some enjoyment from each day that is not work related. I will also be setting up a work computer at home that should keep me near the cutting edge for the next couple of years.

I see big things for this blog in the near future as well. I have let it fall off a bit as other tasks took up my time. In the future I would like to have four entries a week. One will be about movies I have seen, and not just new releases, but also old classics. Another will be a blog on books, mostly in the realm of the fantastic, though maybe also something to do with history or science. The third entry will be about tropes, or science fallacies, or anything else that strikes my fancy, enrages me, amuses me, whatever. The last will be a shameless promotion of my own writing. It really is funny how I hated that kind of promotion when I started the self publishing thing in December of 2011. Writer friends of mine think it had a huge part to play in successfully selling lots of ebooks, and I can’t say that they’re wrong. Now I enjoy promoting, to a point. As long as it doesn’t interfere with all the other tasks required to put out a good science fiction or fantasy book.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my writing career. Follow me on this blog and see how I do.

Filed under: Comics, Conferences, Dragons, eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, Genetics, History, Kindle, Magic, Military, Movie Critics, Movies, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Past, Plotting, Proofreading, science Fiction, self publishing, steampunk, Sword and Sorcery, Titles, Tropes, Typos, Websites, Writing Tagged: blogs, jobs

Exodus, Refuge and little bit extra.

On Monday I put the first draft Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3 to bed. I normally put a first draft to bed for a year, but things have changed. I have been getting requests through posts to this blog, emails, and reviews on Amazon for book 3. It weighs in at 198,000 words, and will probably finish at 210,000 or more. For reference, Books 1 & 2 were both in the 110K range. I had hoped to do a much better job on book 3, and it will be as good as I can make it, but there will probably be some errors in there, even with other eyes looking at it. Probably no more than the other books though. I think the seven thousand fans who have bought both books 1 and 2 will enjoy this one, and the spinoff tale I am planning for the Fall. Also, I did some things a little different with this novel, writing each character’s story separately, then piecing them together at the end into one tale. I kind of liked that approach, and may do it in the future with other books. I am planning on pulling Exodus out again on April 1st, and will work long days on it to get it ready for publication.

In the meantime I am jumping on some other projects, including Refuge: Book 3 (Doppelganger is not really considered part of the storyline, yet. That novel was written seven years ago when I was still trying to attract a traditional publisher.) Refuge has done well, not as well as Exodus, and I think will do better with some more marketing. I love Exodus, but Refuge feels like an old friend, as I have been developing the world and the story for 15 years. What may put some people off is that it is a genre bender, combining high fantasy and military technofiction. With book 3 it will be leaning more toward fantasy, as the modern weapons are no longer of any use on Refuge. I have eight thousand words done so far on what I hope will be a 150,000 word novel. I am aiming to finish the first 50K words before the major Exodus rewrites start, and then I can take it from there when Exodus is out.

Refuge is my daytime project, and another book I finished the first draft of last year is my nighttime project. Working title is The Last Invasion of Sol, and I call it my Anti-Independence Day. Now I liked a lot of things about Independence Day, and hated just as many. In Invasion I have an alien race who has invaded another human colony and killed all the inhabitants before moving on Earth. Their ships are more advanced than humanity’s, though only capable of slower than light travel (the same tech the human race uses) and the human race knows they are coming. We can prepare for war. Still a daunting task and a close thing.

For the Summer I am planning to write the third novel of The Deep Dark Well Trilogy, titled Deeper and Darker, as well as a novel in the Exodus Universe about the criminal investigation of the deaths of members of Parliament in the Capital, as told in Exodus 1 and 2. That should keep me busy for the year I think. There are other first drafts on the hard drive. Some will come out next year as stand alones, though one, Theocracy, will be the first book of the second Deep Dark Well Trilogy. There is one whic is the first book of a fantasy trilogy that I wrote five years ago, but I don’t have time for another trilogy right now. And some people have suggested that Aura would be a good series, and I might consider it if I can get sales going for the book. Another book, Soulless (and I know there are other books with that name, so I will eventually come up with another) is a kind of Scifi/Horror mix.

I have found that having a number of books out there have made it possible for me to quit my day job next week. Exodus is making a lot of money, Refuge and Deep Dark Well not as much, but still good, and the other books just add a little bit to the pot. I am hoping to work more on publicizing the books that aren’t doing as well. I believe they are as good as the ones that are selling in gobs. But the great thing about the digital bookshelf is they can stay out there as long as I want, hopefully gathering fans.

Filed under: Alien Invasion, Antimatter, Armor, Barbarians, Comics, Dragons, eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, Genetics, History, Kindle, Magic, Military, Movies, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Plotting, Proofreading, Quantum Physics, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Sword and Sorcery, Titles, Tropes, Typos, Vampires, Wormholes, Writing Tagged: gaming, literature, writing

Oz: The Great and Powerful

I went to see this movie last weekend, and was looking forward to it after seeing the previews before some other movies. You know how that goes; sometimes they live up to expectations, other times they don’t. Now I grew up on the original The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland. It was a big TV event every year, and every year it was a family event to watch it. It was amazing that a movie made in the early days of color was so good. Of course the new movie is a prequel, I guess you would say, to a movie that was made seventy four years ago. Of course the effects and the backgrounds were better, but just because a movie has better special effects does not make it as good. However, Oz did not disappoint this movie goer. From the opening in black and white Kansas, to the land of Oz in full glorious color, to the climax of the film, is was wonderful.

Not to spoil the movie, but Oz is about an illusionist, womanizer and con man working a traveling circus who, running from a jealous boyfriend, jumps on a hot air balloon. He is sucked into a tornado and ends up in Oz, where he is seen as the fulfillment to a prophecy. Of course the con man takes advantage of the situation, and his self serving behavior actually makes things worse. But his very behavior as a con man and illusionist allows him to combat the wicked witches at the end. To this movie goer the coolest thing about the film was how it could seamlessly lead into the original. A lot of origins were explained, and everything was kept true enough to the Wizard of Oz that you could watch them back to back and come away with the feeling that they were made that way. Highly recommended, and I give it five stars.

Filed under: Fantasy, Golden Age, History, Magic, Movie Critics, Movies, Plotting Tagged: entertainment, Hollywood, James Franco, Judy Garland, Oz, The Wizard if Oz, witches

CyberStorm is 99 cents Today.

My friend and fellow writer Matthew Mather has just released a new book called CyberStorm. For those who don’t know Matthew, he is the author of the very successful Atopia Chronicles, which can also be found on Amazon. Atopia has been highly ranked in both the Technothriller and High Tech Scifi categories for over a year in its several incarnations and has numerous five and four star reviews. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you lick it up. Matthew is a very talented writer, and his concepts of future cybertech stretch the imagination. I picked up CyberStorm today and will review it as soon as I read it, which may be in about a month because of my own projects. For those of my readers who don’t have other projects, go ahead and start. CyberStorm also has a number of good reviews already, with twenty listed on Amazon for a 4.9 star average. Enjoy.

Filed under: eBooks, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Kindle, Nanotechnology, Near Future, PhutureNews, Plotting, Quantum Physics, science Fiction, self publishing, Titles, Writing Tagged: Amazon, Atopia, books, CyberStorm, high tech scifi, Matthew Mather, technothrillers

A Funny Flowchart about Safety

I received this in an email a few days ago with a request that I post it on this site or put it in a blog. I have decided to do the latter. I love these kind of charts. There was one about which political party one should belong to, what religion one should adhere to, and so on. This is a flow chart about what kind of protection one might need depending on where you are and what kind of threat you’re facing.

Created by http://www.HomeSecuritySystems.com

Of course I think the Iron-man armor, or even the powered armor from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers would be the best choice for protection. Zombie Apocalypse? No problem. Just mash them to goo and hose the suit off afterwards. Baring that my favorite protection against unarmed creatures would be full plate armor and a broadsword. But enjoy this flow chart as it is.

Filed under: Armor, Barbarians, eBooks, Fantasy, Magic, Marvel, Military, Movies, Plotting, science Fiction, Superheroes, Undead, Websites, Writing Tagged: broadsword, Iron Man, plate armor, security, security systems, Starship Troopers, swords, TV shows, zombie apocalypse

It’s ready when it’s ready

Working under a deadline is a new thing for this author, even when it’s one that’s self imposed. I really didn’t expect the Exodus series to take off like it has. Oh, I expected it to be successful, after some advertising and promotion. Instead, it just took off on its own, and now is being advertised on websites all over the net. It came at just the right time, as the day job was literally killing me. Its success allows this author to turn to full time writing. In the past there was no deadline for my writing. I wrote when I felt like it. Some years I was very productive. 2010 is an example, when I wrote Aura, Daemon and Afterlife, as well as the manuscripts for Refuge and Exodus that later became the first two novel in each series. 2011 I started seven books and never completed a one. 2012 I finished three of those 2011 books and also wrote To Well and Back. But again, I wrote when I felt like it. Now I have an obligation to get third books out on three different series. I hope to do that and more this year, possibly three books on Exodus (2 in the main series line and one spin off). Exodus is doing the best of all my books, Book 1 outselling The Deep Dark Well by a three to one margin, despite being out for a shorter time. It is outselling Refuge 5:1. The smart business decision would be to hitch my wagon to Exodus and just let the others sit, for the moment. I actually did jump Exodus up in the writing queue, before the planned third book of Refuge. However, I feel obligated to continue those other series as well. People are sending emails wanting to know when those books will be finished (or leaving hints in reviews). So they will be finished this year. I will also be putting out a book called The Last Invasion of Sol that was written last year and just needs some polishing. People may howl, wondering why I am putting out a stand alone when the series they love still needs continuation. The thing is Sol is ready for a couple of rewrites, and as I will explain below, it fits into the process of how I write, or how I have always written, something I don’t see changing in the near future.

Exodus, and Refuge as well, are very hard novels to write. A story with a main storyline and only enough branches to encompass some of the other action and background to complete the tale; well that is easy. A story with multiple characters in parallel storylines; that’s quite a bit more difficult. I always loved the Harry Turtledove books that used that technique, and first started doing it as a challenge. But it is a challenge to remember everything that’s going on. I normally work on a couple of books at the same time, but an Exodus or Refuge style of book takes too much concentration. With two books I can write up to six thousand words a day. With one book I might hit five thousand some days, but on most three thousand is the limit, or things start getting really sloppy. I also like to put a book away for a year before working on the second and subsequent drafts, and I won’t be able to do that and still deliver a book this year in each of the series. Rest assured that Exodus III, which is a much longer book than its predecessors, also by request, will be out before summer. I hope to get it out by the end of April. Hope being the word here. I have decided to keep writing along in the story for another month, past what I need for book 3, so that a good bit of book 4 will be ready so I can complete it by fall. So from my readers I ask for a little patience. Hopefully, with going full time as a writer, I can get the production line cranked up and get the books out that everyone seems to want.

Filed under: eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, History, Kindle, Magic, Military, Near Future, Plotting, Proofreading, science Fiction, self publishing, Titles, Tropes, Typos, Websites, Writing Tagged: Author Doug Dandridge, Exodus, Exodus: Empires at War, Fans, literature, Refuge, Refuge: The Arrival, rewrites, Sequels, The Deep Dark Well, writing

Making a Book Trailer

Last year I noticed that one of my Facebook friends, Author Laurie Hanan, had put a book trailer up on Facebook for comments. My comment was it seemed really cool, and that it must have taken some time to make such a thing. It had a series of pictures to tell the story of the novel, along with a music sound track, and looked very complicated to me. Not so, said Laurie, and I decided then and there to give it a try. Since then I have made trailers for ten of my books, and also made changes to some as my covers have changed. And now I will try to give all interested the step by step instructions on how I have made my book trailers. A word of warning. My trailers are all at least two minutes long, and more often three or more, while the experts say it should be ninety seconds at most. But who am I to listen to the experts. And choosing the pictures and music is up to you. You know your book or other project better than anyone else, so tell the story.

Now the first thing you are going to need is a movie making program. My computer, like most, came with Windows Live Movie Maker, which is adequate to the task. There are others out there. I think Roxio will do the job, but a search of the internet will reveal many completely free programs. Now with program in hand the next requirement are the pictures to put in the trailer (unless you want to go to the trouble to have actual moving pictures, which is not really necessary). There are a lot of sites that offer royalty free photos and drawing, including many public domain sites where the pictures are absolutely free. They can be googled under Public Domain Pictures or Royalty Free Pictures. Don’t get pictures that charge you a royalty for each use, as this can add up. Most royalty free sites allow use of their pictures for a small one time fee, unless you start using it a couple of hundred thousand times (like on a book cover that sells that many copies), and I for one am willing to pay the extra fee if the book is doing that well. Don’t try to use pictures that may belong to someone and are copyrighted, without permission that is, because it can cost you big in the long run. I get most of my pictures from Shutterstock, which has a selection in the millions and charges $249 for 750 pictures. Canstock has a smaller, but still good selection, and you can buy pictures in smaller batches than Shutterstock. Both sources are good. So gather your pictures, as many as you think you need to tell our story. And now for music. You can do a trailer without music, but I don’t know why, since it will be really boring. That said, I have seen a trailer that had no pictures, only writing and music, and that was just as bad. I get all my music from a site called Incompetech, and the only stipulation to using the free music is to credit them somewhere on the trailer. I try to pick a piece that seems to fit the mood of the book, and the length of the trailer, so I actually wait until I have assembled the pictures and know my length before making the final selection for music.

Now with the elements in hand I go to Live Movie Maker and arrange my pictures. You can drag and drop them, rearrange them, whatever, until you have your pictures in the order you want. I suggest that the first and last pictures be your book cover, to let everyone know what this thing is about. You can also choose the length of each picture, so that some will stay on the screen longer for emphasis, or others will flash across it. Now you add your text to each picture, using whatever effects the movie maker has to make them move across the screen. And then the music. At the end you can save the trailer in several formats. I suggest the high resolution one for Youtube, and the more compact one for Amazon or devices.

Upload the thing to Youtube, which requires that you get a Youtube account. From Youtube you can embed the trailer in other websites, or point people to it with links. It’s also kind of a kick to realize you have put something of a movie onto this site. And there is is. Not really hard at all. My first trailer took a couple of hours. Now I can get one done in about forty-five minutes after I have assembled all my materials. I don’t know how much these things have helped my sales, if any, but they might help, and will probably never hurt. And here’s an example of a trailer I made, my first one for The Deep Dark Well.

Filed under: eBooks, Fantasy, Kindle, Movies, Plotting, science Fiction, Titles, Websites, Writing Tagged: book trailers, Royalty Free Music, Royalty Free Photos, The Deep Dark Well, video trailers

Afterlife is Free Today on Amazon Kindle.

Today through Sunday my science fiction novel Afterlife will be free on Kindle. Afterlife has one review so far, a five star, and about fifty sales. I think it is a good book, a little different from my others, set in the near future unlike Exodus or The Deep Dark Well. It involves a subject that may become real in the very near future, mind uploading to a computer. Now, unlike most who have approached that subject, I decided to make the procedure a catastrophic one that destroys the physical brain and kills the subject. This in itself strikes some as suicide, especially the major religious groups who have a thing against suicide, unless it is in the cause of their personal interpretation of God (Martyrdom). There are also the legal aspects. Is a computer upload still the same person, with all the rights that person had in life? Or is it merely software running an imitation of that person in a virtual environment? Is it live or is it Memorex? When heirs are chomping at the bit to get inheritances, this could become a big issue, especially if the virtual’s assets are scattered across many different jurisdictions. The world as a whole does not like the idea behind Afterlife Corporation. And the virtual’s, now living the life they have always dreamed of, are not willing to just let the organics come in and pull the plug. So it’s war, in which the brains of the virtuals are pitted against the numbers of the organics. So check out the novel while it’s free, at no risk except to your time. And as always, leave a review if you are so inclined. And now for an excerpt.

“This is the NX-300,” said Colonel Ted Williams, striding out on the field in front of the fighter sized UAV. “This is what you will be flying in simulation today. By the end of the week I hope to have you up in the real deal, in the real world. Those of you who don’t continue to fuck up, no matter how many times we let you take her up.”

Gary looked hungrily at the virtual mockup of the fighter, visualizing the schematics in his mind’s eye. It could outperform any manned fighter in the air, and was much more heavily armed. And it was not constrained by having to carry a vulnerable organic.

“You have all passed your basic flight training on the virtual trainers,” continued Williams, who had been designated Air Force commander for the virtual world of Afterlife. He had the most real world combat experience of any of the uploads, having flown in World War Two and Korea. And he had real kills to his record, as well as many ground attack missions. He was a killer in the sky, as well as on the ball field, and the other virtuals listened to him carefully.

“If there are no further questions,” said Williams, walking down the line of four dozen pilots. “Pilots to your aircraft. You’ll have your own skies to fly in for now, so you don’t run into each other. Now scramble.”

Gary disappeared with a thought and boarded his airplane. He was not in any kind of seat or cockpit. He occupied the aircraft like it was his body, looking out through its cameras and other sensor systems, listening through the microphones built into the wings, feeling the vibrations of the engines as if they were his internal organs.

Gary pushed his turbines to full and opened the vector slats. The fighter lifted with a slow gentle motion, increasing speed as it moved upward. At thirty meters altitude Gary started the closing of the downward vector slats while increasing the thrust to the rear. The XN-300 moved forward, climbing into the sky. Gary increased the lift on the elevators and the craft rocketed upwards.

Gary leveled off a ten thousand meters, increasing acceleration. The flying wing pushed through the sound barrier. A minute later it was cruising through Mach two. A little more than a minute later it was through Mach three and still accelerating. Gary marveled at the speed, knowing that he still had a couple of Machs left in the craft.

“Quit lollygagging around up there, Jeffers,” came Williams’ voice into his mind. “Get ready.”

Gary sent his commanding officer an acknowledgement and started searching the sky for bogies. He knew he was being pitted against Raptors, the standard air superiority fighter of the United States Air Force. And that they would be damned hard to find. If he used active radar he just might be able to pick them out of all the ground clutter, but they would surely know where he was.

The air was already alive with the radar coming from a distant AWACS. Maybe if he used that radar’s return off the Raptors, as small as it was, he could get some kind of fix.

Gary’s mind went into full processor mode, a thousand times faster than was possible for an organic. He tracked every return off the AWACS radar, catalogued and checked them, then catalogued and checked them again. He found a couple that looked interesting, and took some time to examine them in higher detail.

Got em, he thought as he looked at a trio of faint signals and cross referenced them with their communications back to the AWACS. It had taken him about five seconds of real time to perform the search. He was sure the organic brains on those targets couldn’t have even started their search.

Gary closed the distance, planning his shots as he went. When he was at the optimal range he opened his weapons bays and triggered his targeting radar at the same instant. The returns were still faint, but he would ride the missiles in with a part of his consciousness, allowing him to home in on the weakest of returns. Six missiles dropped from the bays, two to each fighter, and boosted away, reaching Mach eight in seconds.

Radar was pinging off of his craft from the AWACS, followed closely by the Raptors as they figured out that they were being fired on. Gary picked up missile launches from the fighters as he closed his bay doors and banked into the nearby clouds. At the same time he released a couple of decoy drones that would mimic his ship on radar. They sped out on reciprocal vectors.

Gary noted with satisfaction that four of the incoming missiles were locked onto his decoys, while all of his weapons were boring in on the Raptors. He banked in the sky and headed straight toward the fighters, sure of his ability to outmaneuver the weapons targeting him.

Gary pushed his jet up to Mach four, feeling the heat building up on the composite skin. He contacted his missiles for a moment, looking through their camera eyes as they closed on the Raptors. Gary made a couple of adjustments to the missiles, giving his orders over the encrypted microwave link, defeating the last second jamming and decoy drops from the fighters. The Raptors expanded in the cameras, which went blank. Explosions flared in the sky ahead, his missiles detonating. He pulsed his active radar for a moment, and picked up returns consistent with the spreading debris of two Raptors falling from the sky. His screen also filled with the images of the enemy missiles chasing his decoys, which had increased speed to match that of the missiles. And the two that were almost on top of his fighter, coming in ahead.

At the last second Gary juked his fighter at twenty-five gees, dropping to the left, then spinning over into a change of vector. At the same time he dropped small radar decoys. The missiles couldn’t take the same turn he had been able to achieve with his vectored thrust, and had been caught between a target they couldn’t follow and several that were too easy to home in on. They missed everything, their idiotic computer brains not able to handle the situation. Gary’s fighter moved in a slight rock as the missiles exploded in attempts at a proximity kill. He checked for damage and found only one small chip from the composite covering of the left tail fin.

The Raptor dove away, trying to escape Gary’s closing fighter. The XN-300 had three close in attack weapons, a single barrel thirty millimeter cannon in the nose, and a six barreled twenty millimeter Gatling in each wing. All fired rounds that traveled much faster than the cannon rounds fired from a jet like the Raptor. And the cannons were all angled to intersect a kilometer in front of the UAV. Gary dove after the Raptor, lining up, firing when the pip turned green. The Raptor fell apart in the streams of rounds that merged on its fuselage, blowing out in the spreading cloud of debris. Gary pulled up, missing the debris field but sustaining some minor damage to his left wing as a few particles struck at high speed.

“Report for debrief,” ordered Williams in Gary’s mind. Gary sent a mental nod as he left the simulation and appeared in Williams’ office, the young looking Colonel sitting behind his desk.

“You handled the craft as well as could be expected,” said the baseball Hall of Famer/Colonel. “I think you did a great job acquiring the targets. But you followed too close on that last kill. You got away with it, but a larger piece of debris could have wiped you from the sky. No problem for you, but we would have lost a significant piece of hardware. Any suggestions?”

“You might want to calibrate the cannon out a little further,” said Gary, thinking about the engagement. “I was able to open up right when the weapons intersected, and I’m sure I could have done the same at three to five kilometers, without running the risk of shooting myself down.”

“That problem’s being looked at,” said Williams, nodding. “I noticed the same thing myself, and we’re working on an optimal envelope for a firing solution. In normal speak that means we’re looking at the best range to off the mothers. And the other point? I know you have more than one.”

“I was able to use my own radar to track to enemy, but it did give me away,” said Gary. “They had an AWACS to help them out.”

“We’re working on that as well,” said Williams. “Look at this.”

The schematics appeared in Gary’s mind of a stealthed airship, lighter than air and flying its globe shape very high in the atmosphere. Doors in the side led to hangers, where flying disks that were the radar transmitters were stored, to sortie out as needed for coverage. The entire airship was the receiving antennae.

“We should have a couple of these above each of our complexes within the month, giving us day and night coverage,” said Williams, smiling. “Now I would like you to get in some ground attack practice next. Tomorrow we’ll have you work on playing with others, like a wingman.”

“And who will be that wingman?” asked Gary, wondering if it might be Elaine, who was also in the pilot program.

“Why you of course,” said Williams, laughing. “Who could know your moves better? And there’s no limit to how many aircraft you can pilot, as long as we keep making copies of you.”

“Why don’t they just make a hundred copies of you, Colonel?” asked Gary, smiling back.

“Because as good as I am, I can’t think of everything,” said Colonel Ted Williams. “Now get up there and play tank buster.”

Filed under: eBooks, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Kindle, Military, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Plotting, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Titles, Tropes, Writing Tagged: Afterlife, Computer War, Free Ebook, Immortality, Kindle Promotion, Mind Upload, science fiction novel, Virtual Reality

Afterlife is a Free Promotion on Kindle from 2/15 to 2/17.

My science fiction novel Afterlife will be a free promotion on Amazon this Friday through Sunday. I wrote Afterlife in 2010, when I was still producing novels for submission to agents, and had to write them to a certain format. When I decided to self publish I had to take out the underlining, single space the type, change the font, and on and on. Now I write everything for self publication, with the proper format to start. I wrote Afterlife, Daemon and Aura in 2010, as well as the very long first drafts of Exodus and Refuge. Some of my books are doing really well, starting with Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1 and Book 2, which have sold over 12,000 copies between them. The Deep Dark Well has sold almost twenty-five hundred copies after a giveaway of over four thousand. Refuge: The Arrival: Book 1 and Book 2 are both in the thousand range, and even Doppelganger and Shadows of the Multiverse are over five hundred sales. So then I have my problem children that are simply not pulling their weight. Being on the electronic bookshelf they can stay, but I would like to see more from them. So back to the promotions that did so well for the other books in 2012. Will probably do The Scorpion, my worst seller, next, and then on to the others. Now I believe in all these books. Not all are of the same quality, I will grant that, though the drop off is not too severe. All are good stories, with mostly quick moving plots. And all contribute to my portfolio as a whole. Of my other books, most have done well after their promotion, some better than others, and Exodus took off without any kind of giveaway.

Now to Afterlife. Afterlife is set in the near future, about fifteen years from now. A method is discovered for uploading minds into computers. Unfortunately, the technique involves scanning the brain with a laser, a catastrophic procedure that destroys the brain in the process. Not to appealing to most people, but what about those who are terminally ill and don’t buy into the life after death offered by the world’s religions. The Afterlife Corporation is started to offer these people a virtual life after death that is, if anything, more interesting that life. And they are in a world where their mental processes are faster, their memories perfect, able to accomplish things their purely organic forms weren’t. Some of the finest minds on Earth take advantage of the process, scientists, philosophers, engineers, generals, until ten thousand of the best and brightest are existing in this virtual world. But many of the living, the organics as they come to be called, are not happy at this state of affairs. The World’s religions, who see the uploading process as suicide and damnation for the souls of the virtuals. And family members who see the inheritances they believe theirs still in the hands of simulations of their loved ones. Led by a fundamentalist United States President the World declares war on Afterlife. But the virtual minds are not helpless, and develop weapons of frightening power that threaten the existence of the world. And now for the excerpt.

I love this, thought the virtual personality that called itself Stuart James. He had spent the entire night, nine hours since he had been uploaded, using almost the full capacity of the system in the Arizona complex. That had equaled over a hundred days of real time to learn the systems and the weapons he would use to defend the complex. And now he was running on overdrive again in the actual defense of the complex.

So far he had not had to use any of the other personalities, including the copies of himself, in the defense. They were active, but mere spectators at the moment. They could be given active control of weapons whenever needed, but so far there had been no need.

James watched another wave of artillery rounds coming in, a slow motion swarm of seventy-two shells. A group of sixty-four mortar shells arched over the sound screen, while several dozen rockets left their launch racks on helicopters and flew a high angle attack profile. Meanwhile, the tanks were cycling through armor piercing discarding sabot rounds as fast as they could. And all were crawling across his perception.

The defense algorithms were good, good enough in many respects to handle this defense. But James’ personality in overdrive was even better. He spotted the leakers that would have made it through the curtain and allocated the defenses to take them out, shifting resources to cover the new gaps that appeared because of that shift. This went on for hours, as the guardsmen expended ordnance and James stopped it. He could see from his sensors that they were getting tired. The barrages were coming in a bit more ragged and spaced further apart. He, on the other hand, felt no fatigue. He could keep going for many more hours, or the subjective week he had already been at it many times over. He smiled to himself again, looking forward to the next phase of the assault, like a video game’s next level.

* * *

“And we were attacked today by forces of the United States Government,” said Travis Fulcher, his image on TV, beamed from the Montana Complex to a Geosynch satellite and down to the Atlanta studios of CNN. “This was an unprovoked assault upon our persons and property.”

“The government is saying little about this assault on your Arizona complex,” said the CNN anchor, looking up from her desk on her side of the split screen. “We’ve only heard from them that there was action taken in Arizona, but nothing about the results.”

“We were not harmed in any way,” said Fulcher, a smile on his face. “And we harmed none of the Federal forces. We simply used defensive systems to stop their ordnance before it could impact on the mesa under which our complex is built.”

“The Arizona National Guard has claimed that there were casualties from today’s exercise,” said the anchor woman, her face serious. “They claim to have lost six people due to the actions of Afterlife. How do you answer that claim?”

“With this satellite footage,” answered the spokesman for Afterlife. The screen switched to an overhead view. Two attack helicopters collided as they maneuvered for shots at the Afterlife complex. One moved away with smoke trailing from its engines, still under control. The other, two of its rotor blades snapped and the remaining four twirling off balance, twisted in the air as it fell. It landed on top of a Bradley IFV, turning both air and ground vehicles into a ball of flame.

“The Guard lost its people due to an accident over the battlefield,” said Fulcher, his face grim. “An accident they could have avoided if they had just left us alone. Which brings me to my second pronouncement of the day.”

“And that is,” said the CNN anchor woman, her eyes narrowing.

“We of Afterlife hereby declare ourselves to be the citizens of an independent nation,” said Fulcher, his eyes looking with intensity from the screen. “The territories occupied by our Arizona and Montana complexes have seceded from the United States of America. We seek the confirmation of the other nations of the world, through the United Nations, of our status as a free and independent nation. And we offer this warning to the Government of the United States of America. You have seen what we were capable of today. Don’t push us, or you will be sending letters to the homes of young service men and women.”

The image of Fulcher went away and the screen expanded to show only the anchor woman.

“And the government had this response,” said the woman. The screen switched again to show a severe looking white man in his fifties, the triple stars of a general on the collar of his camouflaged fatigues.

“For all we know they knocked one of those helicopters out of the air and made them collide,” said the man, chin jutting out in defiance.

“And what about their warning, General Mitchell?” asked the off screen reporter.

“They’re only two small compounds with what, fifty or sixty square miles under their control,” said the General with a smirk. “Not even that in Arizona. We’ve taken all but a couple of square miles away from them there. And they’re threatening the most powerful military on Earth. Just who in the hell do they think they are?”

The scene switched back to the anchor woman in Atlanta, her intense eyes looking out from the screen as she looked up from some papers to her front.

“In related news, National Guardsmen and women from the land and air National Guard have been called to duty and activated to Federal service. Guardsmen from Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota and California have been called to active duty. Regulars are also getting ready for this developing national crisis.”

The screen switched again with the placard Foot Hood at the bottom. Occupying the screen was a young black man, microphone in hand, train cars with tanks in the background.

“Everett Murphey here,” said the man, looking into the camera. “Behind me are tanks from the First Cavalry Division, which are being mobilized for deployment to Arizona. I will be embedded with the First of the Seventh Mechanized Infantry of the First Brigade. We are expected to cross the state lines out of Texas by evening, and be in Arizona by the next day.”

Fulcher continued to watch the TV broadcast, as well as all the other newscasts, on a separate channel of his mind, just as he was sure all the other virtuals in the room were doing.

“What do you think?” he asked of the other virtuals, and the avatar of General Maxwell, who had joined the meeting from the real world board room.

“I think they’re getting ready to stomp us with ten league boots,” said Jasper Delaquort, a journalist who had made his company into a worldwide megalith. “It might have been a mistake to make that declaration of independence.”

“But we’ve gotten some results already,” said Marlene Joaba, a billionaire who had been the US Ambassador to the UN for over a decade. “China and Russia have both acknowledged our existence.”

“Only because it discomfits the United States,” said Lucious DeFaulq, the automobile maker. “It really does no practical good. Those countries aren’t willing to go to war with America over a virtual country.”

“I think our response is more important than their response,” said Walt Disney, his young voice firm. “We have what, four weeks and some off days before Odyssey orbits. And then we’re home free.”

“Maybe not home free,” said Ted Williams, dressed in his officer’s dress uniform. Not the uniform of the United States Air Force, which was no longer his service. The new uniform of the Afterlife Air Force, which was much more twenty-first century. “We still have to stand off the world’s most powerful military.”

“Half of which is deployed overseas,” said Fulcher, calling up a rotating globe of the Earth over the conference table. Red dots flashed all the US Military assets, and there were indeed a lot of them off the North American Continent. Most at sea, but many in the Middle East and Asia.

“Still,” said Disney, looking up from something he had been studying. “Half is still a lot.”

Gary had been listening to the others with half an ear. Of course, with a virtual that meant that he heard exactly everything said, and could play back the conversation in his mind verbatim, with all nuances and tones intact. There was never a misunderstanding in the virtual world of anything anyone said. He had loved that part of it with Elaine, no arguments. But it had hurt politicking as usual here. It was hard to lie, and then say you didn’t.

“What about that special project Dr. Frankle has been working on?” asked Walt, looking over at Fulcher. “That held some promise, did it not?”

“Probably not enough to help us through this current crisis,” answered Fulcher, the defacto President of Afterlife. “We could still probably develop a weaponized version of the device, even if we can’t teleport ourselves out of here.”

“I, for one,” said Disney, his eyes growing fierce, “will not countenance the use of extra-dimensional weapons on Earth. The horror and devastation we unleash could be unprecedented. I’ll not see that done to my home.”

“Even if it could save your virtual skin?” asked Fulcher, looking Walt squarely in the eyes.

“Some things come with too great a cost,” said Walt, looking around the room as several others nodded their agreement.

“What do you think, Jeffers?” asked Fulcher, breaking Gary away from the project he was still caught up in.

Gary left the project with his copy in the lab and turned all his attention to the meeting. He thought for a moment before answering. Frankle was a genius in astrophysics and cosmology, who was working on practical applications of twenty-one dimension theory. Some of those applications were wonderful, possibly opening up faster than light travel by way of the almost infinitely small dimensions. Some were terrifying, such as the creation of singularities, and could be used as the most destructive weapons imaginable. Gary couldn’t even follow some of the math involved, but was gratified to find that the brilliant scientist couldn’t make heads or tails of some of the magnetic field equations that Gary used in his work. But all in all.

“I agree with Walt and Ted and the rest,” said Gary, nodding to those around the table who thought it too risky. “Maybe when we get into space we might want to fool around with some of the theory. I would say far off from wherever we happened to be at the time, since I don’t want to see the inside of an event horizon. But right now I would say, no. Don’t use that stuff on Mother Earth.”

“Even if it saves your life?” said Fulcher, his eyebrows raised.

“Not even if it saves my life,” said Gary, looking at the man’s eyes and not liking what he saw. “Some things are not worth that kind of risk, including all of us.”

“OK,” said Fulcher, in a tone that meant it was anything but. “We’ll table the development of extradimensionals for the time being, and concentrate on what we already have in hand. How about the development of the battle robots?”

“They have advanced about as far as they are capable at this time?” said Gary, smiling as he looked at what he had developed for the common good. “We will have infantry support that is every bit as intelligent and mobile as the human forces we might face. And much more mobile in other respects.”

“Invulnerable warriors?” asked Walt with a laugh that spread around the room.

“Not invulnerable,” said Gary, shaking his head. “But damned tough. You’ve all taken rides in the last model, but these are much more agile. You might want to run some sims and see how they handle. The real deals are undergoing the last of the modifications. In other words, the bugs are working on them, and they’ll be ready and able to go by tomorrow.”

“And how do you feel about releasing them on living humans who are trying to destroy you?” asked Fulcher, a tight smile on his face as he looked at Gary.

“I have no problem with that whatsoever,” said the electronics expert, returning the smile in kind. “If they want to end me, I say bring them on.”

Gary stopped and thought for a moment while the conversation continued in the virtual room. He replayed that last sentence he had said in his head, and the thoughts and emotions that had gone along with it. He didn’t think he had been that gung ho a month ago. He was sure he worried more about the well-being of his fellow man, especially those vulnerable specimens out in the real world. When had this change of attitude come about? Had he changed, as people were wont to change in the real world as they went through trials and tribulations? Or had he been reprogrammed without his consent?

I’ll think about it tonight, he thought, also resolving to discuss it with Elaine, to use her as a sounding board. And if he figured that someone had been changing his mind for him? He would consider his options then.

Gary looked at Fulcher as the man continued to speak. How had he become our leader? He thought. Had it been because Fulcher had been a big wheel with the Afterlife Corporation? Or because he had been the first of them to be uploaded? Or something else? Again Fulcher looked at Gary, his eyes gleaming with predatory intensity. Gary felt himself shudder for a moment, then looked away. Tonight would be soon enough for these thoughts. Today was time for the strategy of survival.

Filed under: Agents, eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, Kindle, Military, Multiverse, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Past, Plotting, Proofreading, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, steampunk, Sword and Sorcery, Titles, Websites, Writing Tagged: Amazon, electronic bookshelf, empires at war, empires at war book, science fiction novel, self publication

Formatting for Kindle: How I Do It.

I attended a workshop this weekend on producing and marketing a book. There was not a whole lot on Ebooks, my chosen medium, but I was announced at the workshop as a symbol of success in selling eBooks. Not really where I want to be yet, but getting there. And I was asked a question later by one of the participants that I have been asked many times in the past, how do I format a book for sales as an eBook? This is a confusing topic for many people. I know it was for me when I first started. I sent what looked to me like a perfect Word manuscript to Amazon to be placed on their site to let their little formatting widget have a go at it. I was sure that the Kindle doc (Mobi) would also be perfect. It turned out to be anything but. My first review, of The Deep Dark Well, talked about how good the story was, then gave me three stars due to formatting problems. I looked at the book on Kindle, the novel that I thought was so perfect, and sure enough, there were a whole bunch of distracting formatting issues there. Changing fonts, changing spacing, changing indentation, sections that had lined up perfectly in the manuscript that were now all over the place. I fought with it for weeks, and correcting one problem just led to another. I bought several eBooks on how to format for Kindle, and most proved next to useless. One book even recommended copying the manuscript to Notepad, which stripped out all the formatting. Not really good for this writer, as I still like to use Italics for characters’ thoughts and names of things like ships and planets.

I read more about the problem, and found out that word processing programs leave a lot of junk formatting in the document, behind the lines and invisible when reading the document in Word. And if your use multiple programs the problem is even greater. The Deep Dark Well went through many programs; Word 2000, Word 2010, ODF, and all left their marks, like land mines waiting to spring when triggered by the proper program like Kindle Mobi. I tried Notepad++, which shows all the formatting, and there was just too much there to deal with. I tried converting on Caliber and sending that doc to Kindle, and ended up with the same problem. This was driving me crazy. I wanted a clean doc on Kindle, one in which the only mistakes were due to my shortcomings in spelling or punctuation, not due to some junk hiding behind the scenes. Instead, I was getting a mess. TDDW also would not convert well enough on Smashwords to meet their premium standards. I never did get it to work there, and just gave up on that platform.

I finally came up with a process that works, and I will discuss this for the rest of the post. First off, you need four programs. One, Wordpad, comes on almost every computer that runs Windows, so that is not a problem. The other, Word, comes on some computers and not on others. I still recommend it as a good investment. Open Org works, but it also adds too many errors for my tastes. The third program is Kindlegen, which can be downloaded from the Amazon site for free. Kindlegen will convert a Word Doc (and not Docx) to a Mobi file, which is what Kindle uses. The final program can also be downloaded at Amazon, and that is Kindle Previewer, which will allow you to look at your finished Mobi file as it will appear on Kindle devices. With these you are ready to go.

First off you want to save your Word doc in 1997-2003 document format, because the new Docx doesn’t play well with Kindle. This is also a good time to look for errors, like words that are still underlined and not changed to italics. This can be done with the find feature. Word of warning, when using find and replace make sure that the option is set for whole words only, or you can get humorous results like I did when I capitalized the word Elves and got changes like oursElves and themsElves. Also, make sure that there are not any extraneous spaces in the doc. Take out all indents made with the space bar and change to indents made with the format paragraph function. And make sure that the chapters end with page breaks, and not lots of enters. There should never be more than two consecutive blank lines created by enter in the document, as Kindle does not know how to handle them well. Now for the really easy part. Click on your doc and hit ctrl a then ctrl c, to highlight and copy the entire manuscript. Now click on the blank open Wordpad document and hit ctrl v, and the entire document will copy into Wordpad. Next repeat the process in Wordpad, ctrl a, then c, then click into a new Doc in Word and ctrl v it all in there. Wordpad will have stripped out all the unused fonts, line spacing and other things that make converting to Kindle a nightmare, while leaving indents, the font being used and italics. So now you have a Word doc that it free of all the extra HTML clutter. I would save this doc, again in 1997-2003 format, with a file name that is the name of the novel. This will show up in the header of the Kindle document, so I would name it something the reader will recognize as your book.

The next step is the conversion to an HTM doc. Now you want to convert to a Web Page, Filtered. Save this to desktop, then make sure it is closed, because Kindlegen won’t be able to convert it if the HTM doc is open in Word. Next open Kindlegen, which looks like something from a 1980s computer, a black box with a dos prompt. I have the shortcut for Kindlegen on my desktop as well, so I get to it by typing cd desktop and then hitting enter. Having Kindlegen and your document both on the desktop relieves you of the necessity of specifying paths during the conversion process. So type in kindlegen kindlegen Documentname.HTM (and putting the HTM or HTML is very important, or it won’t work). Kindlegen will now take the HTM document and convert it to mobi, which will appear on your desktop. There may be some warnings in the kindlegen box. Ignore them, as they don’t seem to mean anything. Now click on the mobi file and it will come up in Kindle Previewer. Look through the document from start to finish to see if there are any errors of formatting. This also allows you to see things you might have missed before. And when you’re satisfied with it upload the file to Amazon along with your cover, descriptions and anything else it asks for. And in twelve hours or so you will have a properly formatted book on Amazon.

Now one thing I really like about this whole process is if you find mistakes later, or they are found for you by one of your helpful reviewers, you can complete this process in minutes to upload a revised document. Surely not the only way to do it, but it works for me, and works quickly. So happy uploading.

Filed under: Caliber, eBooks, History, Kindle, Plotting, Proofreading, self publishing, Titles, Typos, Websites, Writing Tagged: Amazon, formatting, HTM, HTML, Kindlegen, Mobi, Notepad++, Word 2000, Word 2010, Wordpad