Andrew J. Morgan's Blog: Aspiration Keeps Me Alive, page 7

Chapter 5

Once the first month is out of the way, it’s pretty much plain sailing from there. Everyone has their routines, everyone’s used to one another, everyone’s seen everyone else naked and gotten used to the grossness of it. Here on in, it’s rinse and repeat. We all had our hobbies, and while Sadie was sewing (one of the many things she’d brought in her personal bag was a sewing kit, some thread and some blank sheets of material), I played computer games. Because Sadie needed a bit of elbow room—a...

Chapter 4

During our trip, all the planetary experts are able to wander around the ship as they please, but the flight crew, who man the cockpit as watchmen of sorts, work around a strict shift rotation. They alternate shifts in pairs with the fifth shift off, so each member of the flight crew gets a break every now and then that doesn’t just get spent just sleeping. This meant that it was a while before I’d become properly acquainted with most of them, but as it turned out, they were pretty much all d...

Chapter 3

It was like someone had swapped our flight crew out for a different one: they looked the same, but there was no joking or messing about. They were lined up, smartly turned out, without a glimmer of a smile on any of their faces. They meant business. The reality of it was that the next few days would be pretty much all they’d have to do for the best part of a year before we arrived at HD 85512 B (still not calling it New Dawn). Sure, they’d be keeping an eye on things along the way, but everyt...

Chapter 2

I’m not scared of flying, or heights. What I am scared of is situations that have an inherent whiff of imminent death about them. A tin-pot shuttle rattling like a paint mixer as it hurtles through the thick soup of our planet’s atmosphere is one of those situations. I swallowed down the clammy sweat on the back of my throat, gripping onto the armrests of my seat hard enough to keep me from wailing, but not so hard that Sadie—who seemed fine—would notice. It was too loud to talk, so I kept my...

Chapter 1

I guess you could say I have an interesting job. At least, when people ask me what I do they say ‘Wow! That sounds really interesting, Jake.’ And parts of it are indeed very interesting, but a lot of it is sheer monotony like you wouldn’t believe (‘No way!’ people say. ‘I bet it is interesting really’). What do I do? I’m a planetary geologist. I go to faraway systems to investigate barren balls of rock to see if there’s anything worth taking. I have two degrees (a masters and a doctorate), I...

New Dawn—My Next Novel

Hello all! First of all I’d like to thank you for your overwhelming support of Vessel—it’s doing well thanks to your early purchases and reviews, so thank you very much.

Further to that, I’d like to show you my thanks by inviting you to read the first chapter of my next novel, New Dawn. The premise (as it stands) revolves around a planetary geologist called Jake Brooks who sets off on a long voyage to New Dawn, a planet with possible suitability for terraforming. Everything is by the book, and...

Vessel now available on Amazon

It feels like only yesterday that I wrote the prologue for Vessel, and publication has come around already. That’s right–Vessel is now available to purchase for a limited-time offer of 99c/99p. You can purchase it from Amazon here.

I want to thank everyone for their input and support throughout the journey of bringing Vessel to publication, and I hope you all enjoy the final version. If you’d like to leave a review, I’d be very grateful. Please could I ask that you post it on both Amazon.com a...

Reminder!

Vessel is due out tomorrow, so make sure you’ve got your 99p/99c ready and waiting. I’m going to go back to running around in circles now—bye!

One Week Remains…

Argh!Vessel is out in a week and I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, I’m a marching band of jitterbugs on a trampoline in an earthquake, buzzing with more excitement than the queue at Peppa Pig World, and on the other hand I’d rather scrap the whole thing and pretend it never happened. P-day is incoming and, to be frank, I’m bricking it.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to publish work of your own, I’ll try and lay down how I feel right now about it all. This isn’t a ‘woe is me’ ty...

If not plot, then what?

Following on from a previous blog post where I jotted down my thoughts on plot versus characterisation, I noted that characterisation has to work far harder in the literary medium than it does in the film. That said, I didn’t explore the hows, wheres, whats, whens and, in particular, the whos of characterisation. Why? Truth be told, it’s because I don’t know the answer. It’s a journey I’m taking, a skill I’m learning, and it remains to be seen whether or not I’m getting any closer to the writ...