Adam Alexander's Blog, page 3

A "Novel" Cure

I am this close to finishing the first draft of The Deep Tunnel - and about time, I hear you say. No arguments here. But here's the problem with first drafts. They're garbage! Right now, in my heart of hearts, I just know this one's different. It's well-paced, well-written, and typo free. Ready to pack off to the agent, in fact.

My head, of course, "knows" different. A first draft's only virtue is that it's finished. And while a finished draft is a HUGE deal, the writing sucks, the plot makes no sense and a fifth grader has better spelling. It needs work - and lots of it. And the only way to do that work is to put a little distance between you and the draft; to lock your heart in the closet so your head can go about the brutal business of fixing stuff part of you believes ain't broke. You need to put the thing away for at least a month to have any chance of doing a decent rewrite. Any sooner and your once-beloved beta readers will tear you to shreds.

In my case, all this waiting when there's a book to finish is a recipe for insanity. After a couple of days, my heart invariably picks the lock, slips out, and convinces me the rewrite can be done RIGHT NOW, TONIGHT, AND IT'LL BE PERFECT!!!! As Shelly and Chris, my still-beloved beta readers can tell you, the results aren't pretty.

So, this time around, I have a foolproof plan. I'm going to start work on a new novel! In my head, at least, it's called Starship 4.

Honestly, beyond a working title, there's not a whole going on here yet except a few slow-moving ideas. The plan is for a straight SF-type novel, set on an aging sub-light starship coming to the end of a 140-year journey. I'm reasonably sure my hero will be a 16-year old boy who works as an apprentice engineer; I think the name of his ship will be the Archimedes; I think he will meet a girl who can't possibly be real; and I think her mere existence will cause havoc with the status quo.

I grew up with the classic "generation ship" stories, like Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky and Harry Harrison's Captive Universe (pictured). But in the classic form of the genre something has always gone horribly wrong - to the extent that the ship's denizens have degenerated to the point where they don't even know they live on a ship. Only the ship itself, omniscient and infallible, keeps everything (more or less) on track. Even modern iterations, like Disney's Wall-E, tend not to stray too far from that kind of premise.

But what if everything went right? What if the mission was succeeding as planned? Wouldn't the mission itself wreak vast changes on the crew - and the ship? And mightn't those changes, the unintended consequences of flawless execution, cause as much mayhem as the catastrophic failures of Heinlein and Harrison? Let's find out!

Half a Novel, and a Novella

Saltlands by Elizabeth Stephens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Abel and Mikey are trapped and Kane is taken. The struggle for survival has never been more strained as Mikey and Abel fight to escape their submerged prison cell, cross the apocalyptic landscape known as Population, and find Kane. Tensions between the two keep their odds of survival bleak as they face off against the obstacles that Population places before them. Rogue Others, starvation, savage scavengers, gangs.

This blurb, taken from the back cover of Elizabeth Stephen’s latest book, Saltlands, the sequel to Population, won’t make much sense unless you’ve read the earlier novel. While that is possibly a criticism of the blurb writer, it’s most likely a side effect of the wretched way Population, an otherwise excellent novel, ended. Which is to say, it didn’t. It just stopped in mid-scene. Do not read this book unless you have first read Population. Saltlands has merit, but it is not a stand-alone novel.

More than half of Saltlands, the first 149 pages to be precise, is really the end of Population. Population “ended” with the protagonists, the human woman Abel, and the love of her life, Kane, a ferocious, passionate alien, being ripped apart by their evil nemesis, Elise. The first part of Saltlands comprises Abel’s attempt to reunite with Kane for the happy ending all good romantic novels promise, and Population failed to deliver. The journey is arduous and well-written, but it is, to be frank, sordid. Much of it comes across as an exercise in sadism. This is definitely not a (half) book for the younger reader.

The second part of the book is, in effect, a stand-alone novella. It is a tautly written sci-fi thriller chronicling the attempt to bring down the evil Elise once and for all. The denouement is exciting, with a wonderful twist in Abel’s expectations and fortunes.

As with Ms. Stephens’ previous novel, the book is excellently written and well plotted, with crisp dialog and tremendous characterizations. Like its predecessor, however, there is a weakness at the heart of its basic premise. Kane’s race invaded Earth, slaughtered billions of people, and left the rest of humanity to struggle for survival in the ashes. Kane’s race takes whatever it wants for itself, and Kane himself, sitting as he does at the very top of the alien food chain, is directly responsible. He is, in every sense, a genocidal monster. In being asked to root for Abel, the reader is being asked to support her very deliberate choice to sell out the human race and sleep with its murderer. It is a testimony to the quality of Ms. Stephens’ writing that I am prepared to put up with this in order to find out what happened next. But make no mistake, think about it for more than thirty seconds, and you will find Abel’s behavior very hard to overlook.

There are hints that the author will attempt to walk some of this back in her next novel in the Population universe (apparently featuring different protagonists). I doubt she'll succeed, but I'm looking forward to watching her try.

Many thanks to the author, who provided me with an advance copy in return for an honest review.




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Book Cover Design Trends 2016

Book cover is complete! Before I reveal all, however, please consider the wise words of Brian Jens, a graphic designer, who has some interesting things to say about book covers. We'll see how the actual cover matches up!


"Did you know that the designer is only the third person who determines the look of a future book cover? Yes, that’s the sales manager and the publisher who stand at the origins of one or another solution. However, the designer can also affect the quality and marketability of the book cover.
The main thing is to listen to the industry, the audience, and current trends that sometimes completely determine the book cover art. The buyer spends about 8 and 15 seconds on studying the front and back cover, respectively. As you know, one can’t make the first impression twice. That’s why a book cover design is a crucial element in today's book market. Almost all people are visuals, so the visual perception of design greatly affects the purchase decision.
Unwritten laws of book cover design have long been established. First of all, the design depends on the genre: a dragon and a knight with a spear are likely to appear on the cover of fantasy; science fiction fans adore spaceships; a man with a steely gaze and a gun in his hand will indicate that the book is for thriller lovers. As a rule, books of the same genre, as well as publications included in the same series and books of one author have quite similar designs. Such clichés form reading habits that can sometimes be very strong.



However, despite its single-minded focus, book cover design is subjected to the influence of trend. Being recently involved in the discussion of DesignContest professionals on the topic of features that will go in step with young adult literature in the second half of 2016, I’ve found some interesting facts I want to share with you.
Abstract objects. This trend is typical for science fiction and fantasy. You may note that a few years ago, the lion's share of YA book cover was decorated with the look of the main character, usually colorful and conspicuous. However, a human model is relegated to second place in the favor of a single abstract object that best of all connects the reader to the fantasy genre.

Simple and well readable fonts. Of course, it’s not that simple to create an attractive cover, using standard/simple fonts. At the same time, you must ensure the ease of perception for the potential buyer. This is especially important if the person does not know yet which book to choose.

Back of the protagonist. This trend is not new, but it will still be popular. This technique is simple enough: you give a general view of the main character while intriguing the reader. The wolves should be fed, and the sheep kept safe.

Soft falling. Falling can be easily associated with a fall into his arms. Given the features of psychology of adolescents, the trend is quite clear. It’s expected to be especially popular among females.


I hope this prediction will help you to be one step ahead. However, blind adherence to fashion is too dangerous. If you have enough fantasy and skills, try to create something outstanding, avoiding patterns. For example, a white book will stand out against the backdrop of the overall brightness. Is white in fashion? If yes, then try to take a risk and create a splendid black cover. "
Bio:
Brian Jens is a blogger and a designer at one of the leading crowdsourcing platforms – DesignContest. He’s always involved in design market research, so he has a strong background to collect and process information in the best way possible to get to the truth. Feel free to share your ideas with Brian, especially if you’re interested in fruitful collaboration.

Coming Less Soon 2.0

You may recall, Dear Reader, that back in January I related a sad tale of stone-age incompetence, namely, my complete failure to back up the MS of The Deep Tunnel, my intended sequel to The Shifter's Trail. If there's any justice in the world, there will have been much amusement at my expense. After all, I disappeared two-thirds of a novel through idleness and complacency.

Well, I've gone and done it again. Sort of.

So, 10 days ago, the family and I took a vacation to the UK (highlight? 300 feet underground in an old coal mine - where there was no light at all, high or otherwise), intending to push on with the MS and perhaps even (gasp!) finish it. Yes-siree, I am that close.

I had, of course, reckoned without my beloved sister, whose idea of a good time is to march children, dogs, and various flavors or resisting adults up hill and down dale until everyone is so exhausted, they can hardly bear to wash the mud off when they get back to the hotel (or, in my case, pub). Napoleon's retreat from Moscow could hardly have been more demanding than my sibling's idea of a "little jaunt."

Needless to say, I did not find either the time or the energy to finish the draft, but I did get a fair bit done nonetheless. And even if I say so myself, we were moving towards a pretty exciting climax.

And then the hard drive on my laptop failed.

Not to worry, I hear you saying. The idiot has learned his lesson, hasn't he? Backed it up every night like he promised, so he wouldn't lose anything, I'm sure.

Well, no.

In my defense, while the Alexander family are not the worst travelers the world has ever seen, it's a pretty close call. Imagine cockroaches scattering in random directions when exposed to sudden light and you have some idea of what goes on in our house minutes after the absolutely last possible time you can leave for the airport. I did know I had failed to pack my back-up thumb drive as I scrambled into the cab. But I also knew I was heading to divorce court if I took the time to go get it. So, while I'm still married, 10 days worth of writing is MIA.

The IT guy who deals with techno-failures at my local computer superstore tried to retrieve my data and failed. So now the hard drive has been sent away to an undisclosed location to see if anything can be lifted off of it. I'm not holding out hope.

I think it's time to move out of thumb drives and into the Cloud. What could possibly go wrong?

Mislabeled Fun

Population by Elizabeth Stephens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The day the sky ripped open and the Others descended on Earth marked the beginning of the World After. Twelve years later and violence is Abel’s native tongue in a world run by monsters, ravaged by gangs, and fueled by the desperation of hunger. The list of rules she lives by keeps her among the few humans left living, but when her best friend’s daughter is taken by one of the Others, Abel discovers that to get her back she’ll have to break them all.

The blurb and the marketing for this book is targeted at the YA/SF audience, which is a shame, because, fun to read as this book is, it’s not YA/SF. What it is is a good old-fashioned bodice-ripper. Admittedly, there’s a bit of sci-fi around the premise - and more than a bit of vampire novel in the story as a whole – but, at bottom, it’s about a feisty young woman seduced against her will (almost) by an incredibly handsome, incredibly powerful, and unbelievably wealthy older man. Viewed in that light, the book is well-executed, with a decent story arc, terrific characterizations, and confident, often funny, dialog. The romance is melodramatic and breathy, but that is no criticism in a bodice-ripper, it just adds to the fun. The protagonists, Kane and Abel (biblical joke? Homage to Jeffrey Archer?), have great chemistry, and the reader finds herself rooting for the two of them, first, to find each other, and then to overcome the obstacles put in their collective way. If there’s a weakness in the writing, it’s with the fight scenes. They are simply too drawn-out to hold one’s interest. The strength of this novel is the romantic interaction, not the violence, and the romantic interaction is good, raunchy fun.

Viewed as a YA/SF novel, Population has serious flaws. There is no rebellion against oppression for our heroine to either join or instigate, there is no hope held out for humanity’s future, and the heroine herself is a sell-out, opting for a life of comfortable servitude rather than inspiring her fellow humans to free the planet. If YA/SF is what you’re looking for, this book is not for you.

Population has another serious flaw, one that cannot be swept away by redefining its genre. The ending. It’s terrible. Stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and while that may be a cliché, the thing about clichés is that they are also true. This book just stops in the middle. Not just in the middle of the story, but in the middle of a scene in the story. I understand the author was looking for a “cliffhanger,” but this is not the way to go about it. To get a satisfying cliffhanger in a novel you need to end the story you’re telling, and begin the story you’re going to tell. In that regard, the ending of this book is an epic fail. I cannot emphasize enough how irritating the ending to this book is. But will I read the sequel? Probably. If the author pulls another stunt like this one, though, I’m done!

If you can get past the fact that Population does not do what is says on the tin, this is a racy, well-written page-turner for those of us who want to be swept off our feet and taken away from it all, if only for 240 pages.

Many thanks to the author for providing me with a free copy in return for an honest review.




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Mars By Light?

(Video screenshot by Michael Franco/CNET)

According to Michael Franco at CNET, NASA is giving serious consideration to a technology that could get spaceships to Mars in a few days instead of months and years. Citing work by professor Philip Lubin at UC Santa Barbara, he says it should be possible to push a spacecraft into deep space using the power of light. Lasers to be precise. The ship would have to be wafer thin, so it acted like a sail, but after that, the only issue is finding a big enough laser. Apparently,

"using the same amount of time (10 minutes) and chemical energy (50-100 gigawatts) it will take to get the Space Launch System (SLS) into orbit, his proposed system could propel a craft to 30 percent the speed of light -- getting a 100-kilogram (about 220-pound) robotic craft to Mars in just a few days. The SLS is the world's most powerful rocket, now being developed by NASA for an eventual manned mission to Mars."

Now, to be fair to Prof. Lubin, I doubt he is actually proposing a Mars Mission like that, because, if he was, he would be cray-cray - and not in a good way.

What that example entails is accelerating a spacecraft from zero to roughly 56,000 miles a second in 600 seconds. If my high school physics hasn't deserted me, that's like 15,000g!!!!

Think of it this way. If you were lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and your home was accelerated away at 15,000g, your eyeballs would weigh about 470 pounds! Things would get real squishy, real fast.

And even if a spacecraft could survive an acceleration like that, it's traveling at 200 million miles an hour... and it can't stop! How are you going to take pictures or do anything else when you get there? Mars is about 4,000 miles across, so you'd pass the entire planet in about seven hundredths of a second. Bad idea!!!!

On the other hand, what if you had kindler, gentler lasers at both ends? An Earth laser to get you up to speed, and a Mars laser to slow you down. You could still get there in a few weeks, slow down enough to enter orbit, do what needs to be done and, hopefully, come back home again. Hmmmm. Maybe, somewhere in all that, there's a novel!

Er... that's it.

So.... I finished writing Archangel today. I mean, really finished. Drafts, re-drafts, re-re-drafts. Edits before submission, edits post-submission, edits to get ready for the printer, everything. So far as Archangel is concerned, there is literally nothing left to write. Even the back cover verbiage is done. It's a funny feeling. I've been at it so long, I'm kinda scared to let it go.

With The Shifter's Trail I couldn't wait to get it out the door, but this one is different. Part of it is, I just enjoyed tinkering with it so much. But another part is that now I have to market it, and that is a much tougher thing to do than write. The only thing I like about marketing is meeting readers - you guys are awesome! I always come away thinking two things: first, it makes all the other marketing BS worthwhile; second, I'd have written a much better book if I could have talked to my readers first!

Hmmmm. It's just occurred to me. I don't have the cover art back yet. Still time for one more look???

Not the biggest problem in science fiction

Canterbury doing a flip and burn, courtesy of NBC Universal's "The Expanse."

I am a huge fan of "The Expanse," the SyFy TV show based on the book series of the same name by James S.A. Corey (who is actually two people!). I am not alone. So is Rafi Letzter at The Business Insider, who wrote a fun piece entitled This amazing sci-fi show reveals the biggest problem everyone ignores about space travel.

Here's the thing, though: it really doesn't. The point of the piece is that high-g acceleration is brutal and that there's no good way to travel across space without it. This, apparently, is "the problem."

But it's not a problem at all. And it's certainly not the biggest problem. Kudos to "The Expanse" for not ignoring the physics of acceleration, but what they don't tell you (and can't) is how the engine producing all that acceleration (and the pretty blue lights) actually works. THAT, gentle Reader, is the biggest problem in space travel: propulsion. What kind of engine design can move us from giant fireworks to an everyday motor that can move us about the solar system as easily as we presently sail across the oceans? Crack that, and the SF visions of the future we authors have been dreaming about for eternity might finally come to pass.

And it needn't be high-g, either. So long as you can keep accelerating, you can pretty much go as fast as you like. Assuming you could somehow blindside Einstein and find the energy, 1g of acceleration (an equivalent force to standing here on Earth) would get you up to light speed in about a year. Forget Mars, you could go interstellar at that sort of speed, and all without smearing yourself into a gooey paste against the bulkhead.

So c'mon engineers. Sort this out already. I'm getting old here!

The Unexplained Star

Take a look at this entry from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog. Since the news broke late last year, astronomers have been spending time looking at an object called either KIC 8462852 (if you're dull as ditchwater) or Tabby's Star. The thing about it is this: it's not a National Enquirer story. This is a star that's behaving in a really weird way, and scientists have not been able to eliminate aliens as an explanation. Tabby's Star is 1400 light years away. Assuming they receive our earliest radio transmissions, we can expect to hear from them in about 4715. Check it out!

Coming Less Soon - The Deep Tunnel

I don't know about you, but I frequently get told that nothing you write on a computer ever goes away; that short of smashing and burning a hard drive, "bad people" can always access your information.

Yeah, right.

I only have myself to blame for what follows, but... several months ago, I started work on The Deep Tunnel, the follow-up to my first novel, The Shifter's Trail. I plotted it out, wrote an outline, and started work, mostly keeping to my self-imposed target of at least 600 words a day. Andromeda and her friends started on their latest adventure. Day by day, the word count added up. Slowly at first: 652, 1,312. Then to more impressive totals: 10,111, 22,498. The project was going well. I got past 40,000 words and had entered what I think of as the "downhill" part of a novel, the part where you don't have to agonize about what happens next, because what happens next is the inevitable consequence of what you've already written. Even though it was still 20,000 plus words away, the end was in sight.

And then I lost it. All of it.

To this day, I don't know what happened. I opened my computer to start work and it had disappeared. I searched everywhere. No luck. I sent my drive to a vendor who specialized in retrieving lost, deleted, or corrupted files. No luck. The whole thing was gone.

Now, you might be asking (like everyone else who hears this sorry tale), "Didn't you back it up somewhere?" To which the answer is, "No. No I didn't." I have no explanation or excuse. I backed up The Shifter's Trail, and Archangel religiously, but, for some reason, couldn't be bothered to do so with The Deep Tunnel. After all, nothing you ever put in a computer really goes away, right?

Well, I've learned my lesson. The "new" Deep Tunnel is backed up every which way imaginable. Just last week, I wrote my 40,000th word. Again.

Interestingly, I did not simply recreate what I wrote the first time around. Even though the plot is unchanged, the story is significantly different. For instance, a major character I originally wrote as a squirrelly introvert has now become a braggadocious show-off. And even though the plot requires her to do particular things in a particular order, she does them differently. The effect on my main characters has been to send them in directions that diverge markedly from the original draft.

I like to think this new version is better than its predecessor, but we'll never know, will we? Because, sometimes, what gets lost, stays lost. Even in a computer.