Origin Stories -- Beneath the Lanterns Part One

The Reed Bank

First, a bit of background. I spent over two year writing The Lost Star’s Sea, and it got to be somewhat of a grind finishing it. I vowed never again to write something that long. And I vowed never again to write a sequel to a book that sold less then several tens of thousands of copies. (I have since broken that vow, but it was a case of “any port in a storm,” I needed to write something...) Sequels appeal only to readers of the previous volumes, and not all of them, while with a new, standalone book, you start fresh, so anything can happen, including lightning striking.

So after The Lost Star’s Sea, I wanted to do something new, to appeal to a different, and wider readership. I felt that a fantasy that might attract new readers. Plus, fantasy had a significantly larger readership than that of SF. However, this plan, faced one significant issue – I don’t like fantasy, much. I do have fantasy books on my shelves that I’ve read and enjoyed, but these days, fantasies have pretty much fallen out of favor with me.

I don’t like many of fantasy’s most common tropes. I don’t like magic, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps because with magic, anything goes. A writer can do anything in a story, it’s “magic” after all. Cause and effect need not apply. And then, there’s Evil, with a capital “E.” That unstoppable force of darkness that threatens the world because that’s what Evil always does. No motive necessary. And it is never defeated, for at least for as long as the publisher buys the stories. Nor am I fond of the other capital “E” fantasy trope, Epics. I like more personal stories. And I don’t like war stories – its a cheap, redi-built conflict, and especially those that glory in gore. And then we have the rivals to the throne trope, which is oh, so very common. And yet, I still wanted to write a fantasy.

But if I left out all the tropes that I didn’t like, did I have anything left to write a fantasy with?

The answer is probably no, but I did it anyway. Sort of.

What I did was write a speculative fiction book instead of a fantasy – in my mind. To make it a fantasy, I set the story in a post-SF world with the remnants of this SF world shrouded in mystery and legends. There is no magic in the story, though some unexplained SF elements pass a magic. There is no over arching Evil, only powerful people who are ruthlessly working to achieve a peaceful future for their kingdoms, despite the objections of their pawns in the game. It is not an epic, but rather one of my typical story about people caught up in the gears of statecraft, whose main concern is personal survival. It doesn’t involve a war. Indeed, indeed, I took delight in writing an adventure story featuring a swashbuckling character who drew her sword only once in the story, and none of the characters die in it. In essence I wrote an anti-fantasy fantasy, and had fun doing it.

Birdsong Square

For the speculative fiction elements, I could’ve started anywhere, but I chose to set it in the same “universe” of the Nine Star Nebula – tens of thousands of years in the future where humankind is sending out slower than light colony fleets to populate planets identified by robotic explores a suitable for human life. I set it on a world that has been terraformed for human life in this universe. If humans exist tens of thousands of years in our future, I doubt that they are much like us, but I didn’t care to explore their differences, nor try to make them relatable, so that we have today’s humans as our heroes. In itself that’s a fantasy. By setting the story in this common universe, I could use all the ideas I developed in the Lost Star Stories, at least for the legends of the Elder Civilization. But since that advanced civilization had mysteriously collapsed, I could set the story in a much more fantasy like setting.

I didn’t want to write a Tolkien-est type of fantasy, so I pictured China at the turn of the last century as my model. This would allow for a mix of the old and new ways with the introduction of industrial inventions like railroad and such to give it a distinct flavor. I then littered this landscape and history with the remnants of the Elders – some of them obvious, others not so much.

Caravans on the Steppes

Making it part of my existing universe had pluses and minuses, which I’ll explore in part two of the origins of Beneath the Lanterns. What I want to close with, is a sort of a cautionary tale. As I said at the beginning of this post, I knew that fantasy outsold SF, which was one of the reasons I decided to write a fantasy. (Other than just for the hell of it.) But only after I had written the story did I find out that I had completely misunderstood the fantasy market. (Not that it really matters.)

As you can see from the chart below, the fantasy genre is dominated by Paranormal & Urban fantasy, i.e. vampires and werewolves. If you spin that category into its own genre – which is certainly imaginable since it has, I would imagine, a very specific readership – and you’re left with a Fantasy audience that is probably not much bigger than SF. And thus, nullified my initial premise for writing a fantasy. And then, when you consider that epic fantasy came in second, and I wasn’t writing a million word, multi-volume epic, I was probably chasing a smaller market than SF with my book. 

You also have to take into account that Smashwords and Amazon have only so many different sub-genre categories. The only category that I could honestly list Beneath the Lanterns was in “Action and Adventure” and it seems that action and adventure stories are more popular in SF than in fantasy. So instead of chasing a larger market, it seems that I was chasing a smaller one – though in the end, I listed the book in both. Still, the best laid plans…

For some reason Blogger is linking all the captions to the first illustration, and every time I wanted to add a caption, I lost the image. NOTE 18 May 23: This appears to have been fixed. So here are the captions from top to bottom. The First is my  first version of  the Reed Bank Street, Azera in a very impressionistic style that I was playing around with at the time. The second is another version of the scene in the same style. I used part of this one for one of the covers -- I have never much liked my Beneath the Lantern covers. The next one down is Birdsong Square in a similar style. Then there is a scene of the caravan to Treafara that I did as a potential cover. And finally the graph from the Data Guy's 2018 Nebula Award  presentation  http://authorearnings.com/sfwa2018/  And below is another version of a caravan painting

My Library -- Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A Heinlein
image credit: https://bcmuseum.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/robert-a-heinlein.jpg

Ah, the elephant in the room. When it comes to speculative fiction fans of the early baby boomer era, the ones who discovered speculative fiction in their youth, there is one dominate figure – Robert A Heinlein. All of us must have read his “juveniles” in hardcover, with those distinctive black & white interior illustrations. And for many of us, he was one of our favorite, if not our favorite speculative fiction writer. I find that I have a dedicated list of the books of his that I either owned or read from back in the day. The two other dedicated lists I have are for the books of Andre Norton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Starman Jones
Image credit:  https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

Though I read most of the juveniles as library books, I do have some of those books in mass market paperback in my collection as well, purchased in the mid to late 1960’s. However, I first got to know those books on the Greendale Library book shelves. They may’ve held them all. They were mostly good, even great, and were, along with the works of Andre Norton, they were the perfect introduction to speculative fiction.Starman Jones was my favorite SF book for quite a while, along with Ben Bova’s Star Conquers. Everyone has their favorite Heinlein juvenile, and it seems that Starman Jones was not a common pick. But it was mine. Looking back, and looking forward, I think it was my favorite for two reasons. The first was its opening set on a farm. Every summer my mom would take us kids back to her childhood home, a dairy farm in Wisconsin for two weeks, so that the farm setting resonated with me. The second reason is that there was just a faint hint of romance in the story. Though, perhaps I just read that into the story. In any event, given the appeal of Edgar Rice Burroughs books had on me, with their common thread of romance, I think this had to be a factor as well.

Starman Jones
image credit: https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

These juveniles were perfect for a very specific age in one’s life. I reread Starman Jones, just six years later, and I was surprised how “thin” the story actually is. When I first read it, I had been making believe all my life as a child, and I suspect that this ability allowed me to flesh out the story with my own make believe. Later, as that ability faded, and I was left only with the book Heinlein had written, I found it rather disappointing. In any event, I read all of his juveniles, and still remember the plot of Tunnel in the Sky, though all others, have left no specific memories. I think I enjoyed Citizen of the Galaxy a lot, and seem to recall that The Star Beast wasn’t very good at all.

Below is my current collection of Heinlein books:

Like my Norton collection, what is missing is telling. So what is missing? First is Stranger in a Strange Land. I did have a paperback copy, but I got rid of it. Now I usually keep all my books, so when I get rid of a book, you have to know that I really, really didn’t like it. Stranger in a Strange Land falls into that category, as does my Science Fiction Book Club edition of Farnhan’s Freehold. I can still remember selecting that as one of my monthly selections, and being really disappointed it when I got and read it. Beginning with Farnham’s Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein and I started to part ways. My records show that I finished Stranger in a Strange Land on 24 Jan 1966. Following that, I read Gulf,(?) Podkaybne of Mars, Glory Road, Assignment in Eternity and The Puppet Masters all in 1966.

Glory Road was the last of Heinlein’s new books that I enjoyed. Though, strangely enough, I only recently discovered that I had a copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on my shelves. I have no memory of ever reading it, much less owning it. But there it is. However, I can not find it listed on any of my lists, so I may’ve picked it up sometime in the early 1970’s after I stopped recording books I read. Who knows?

Starman Jones
image credit https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

Once again, taking out my “Science- fiction Books I Have Read, 1/5/65” list, I find that at that date I had read and rated the following Heinlein books:

Starman Jones E

Space Cadet E (No memory what so ever.)

Double Star A (ditto)

Starship Troopers B (I’m surprised I rated it that high.)

The Star Beast C (I guess I remembered correctly)

Tunnel in the Sky A (I know I read this twice.)

Rocket Ship Galileo B

Farmer in the Sky B

Between Planets A

Time for the Stars B

The Door into Summer B (Another book that I am surprised I rated it this high.)

Citizen of the Galaxy B (Only a B, but on a later list it is upgraded to an E, perhaps I reread it.)

Podkayne of Mars B

Have Spacesuit, Will Travel B

The Rolling Stones B

Waldo & Magic, Inc C & A

The Green Hills of Earth B (I’m surprised that this collection of short stories is rated so high.)

In short, a solid “B” writer. With a couple of standouts, and a couple of average books. By the end of 1965, I had added, but not rated; Orphans of the Sky, Methuselah’s Children, The Puppet Masters, Revolt in 2100, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Farnhan’s Freehold, Red Planet, and Beyond this Horizon to my list of Heinlein books read. And as I already mentioned, I read six more Heinlein books in 1966. I also have an undated list of only Heinlein books – 33 in total – with my ratings. On it, I had rated Waldo, The Star Beast, Farmhan’s Freehold, 6XH, and Stranger in a Strange Land all “C”s None of my lists include The Moon if a Harsh Mistress.

Farmer in the Sky
image credit: https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

From these lists, it would seem that Farnham’s Freehold was the book that started to sour my relationship with Heinlein. But I rated it a “C” so it could’ve been worse, and I continued to buy Heinlein books after Farnham’s Freehold, I guess I took Farnham as just one of those bad apples every writer occasionally produces. I also remember that, while I purchased them, when I came across them, I was never a huge fan of Heinlein’s short stories from the 40’s in those anthology books published by Signet. However, seeing that I seemed to have rated them in my Heinlein only list as “B” books, it is possible that my later falling out with Heinlein has colored my recollections of them. In any event, in 1966 I read five Heinlein books, starting with Stranger in a Strange Land, and only one of his books in 1967. My list of books I read for 1970 has no Heinlein books. Clearly, by the time he wrote I Will Fear No Evil, Heinlein was history.

Between Planets

image credit: https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

I did try, in the 1980’s or 90’s, to read several of his later novels, but I found them so bad – sorry soapboxes for Heinlein, the self-styled philosopher, to preach his strange philosophy from – that I couldn’t get more than a couple of chapters into them. A sorry end, in my opinion. If he aspired to be a philosopher, he should have published his ideas and insights in non-fiction books, not plow them, into fiction “stories.” These days, the more I learn about the man, the less I like him. So, unlike Andre Norton, I no longer have any fond memories of this pillar of my early speculative fiction reading. I guess that rereading my favorite story only half a dozen years after I first read it, and finding it lacking, tells the story of Robert A Heinlein in my life.

Robert A Heinlein
image credit: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/publication-of-new-novel-by-robert-a-heinlein-by-arc-manor-shows-how-small-presses-are-changing-publishing-300915876.html

Lines in the Lawn -- Coming soon!

Lines in the Lawn has been sitting in the "drawer," which is to say a file in my computer, for probably a dozen years awaiting its illustrations. It is a 4,000 word short story that I wrote for a grownup to read to a child. My original plan was to illustrate it with a dozen drawings, but well... I'm not an illustrator and I never quite got around to even trying to do the illustrations. While my original idea for the illustrated book would've worked for a print book, illustrations in ebooks, with their flexible type sizes and layouts, makes illustrations rather clunky. It would certainly loose its original formatting, unless I released it as a PDF. But as a PDF the print would be too small to read. So it sat for these dozen years. Until now.

Now I've, rewritten the story to my current standards, and as, as you can see, I've worked up a cover for it. I still have three or four simple simple interior illustrations to do, but I'm going to keep those very simple, stand alone illustrations that are a map of the yard showing the lines in the lawn left by the lawnmower as described in the story. They will probably take up one page each.

I'll have more to say about the story, in a future blog post, but suffice to say that I wrote the story with the idea of entertaining the reader as well as the child being read too. It's a bit of a mystery story...

Origin Stories -- The Bright Black Sea (Part Three)

A cover featuring the arrival of Cin in the nick of time on Despar

In this my third and last, I promise you, post on how The Bright Black Star came to be written, I want to talk about the things I did and why. And the things I learned along the way.

Rather than starting the story like a scalded cat right out of the gate, (as it seems to be how many writers do it today) I decided to spend some time setting up the premise, the story’s setting, its economics, and then introduce the ship, the Lost Star, its acting captain, and crew. Because I don’t have a visual mind, I see my creations only vaguely, out of the corner of my eye. So, to give them some sort of concrete existence, I imagine all the little, everyday details of life in the universe I create, to build a scene and a setting, piece by piece. There is a lot of that in my writing. For instance, if I wanted dogs aboard the ship, they would need to have magnets surgically implanted into their paws so that they move about when the ship was in free fall, which was much of the time. On the other hand, cats, with their claws, might not need them. And so it goes, lots of little details, that might be considered non-essential, but contribute to my understanding of my world.

I also wanted to create a well rounded world of the “spaceers” central to the story. I tried to imagine how they lived both aboard ship and downside. Side stories, like the moon buggy racing, were borrowed from stories about old sailing ships in anchorage waiting for their cargo. Unlike today, here turnaround times are kept to an absolute minimum, in the old days, idle crews would stage contests – boat races, cricket matches, etc to pass the idle time. I also tried to make interplanetary trade economically realistic. Ships like the “Firefly” that carry a couple of pallets of cargo from planet to planet make no economic sense. And since the days of break cargo are long since gone even today, it would make no sense to move cargo between the planets in anything but prepacked containers. I even thought about how credit might work between mostly economically independent planets. The central story could’ve been told without these sidelights – and I am sure some readers would argue that it should’ve been – but I disagree. I want my readers to look back and have the feeling that they actually visited the Nine Star Nebula. I want them to believe that the Nine Star Nebula is real.

Battle scene art with the Lost Star and a jump fighter

And yet, because I don’t have a visual mind, I had only the vaguest impressions of what my characters look like – at best. I did do some sketches of them, but in the end, I decided that less was best. Rather than piece together some sort of manikin of a character, I just gave each a vague characteristic or two – perhaps a body shape, or a hair color, and build my characters on what they said and did. I am quite content to let the readers to fill in these blanks themselves. If someone is pretty or handsome, I’ll leave it to the reader to picture in their mind what they think pretty or handsome looks like. I was careful not to give any character a skin color. That too, is entirely up to the readers. And because the story is set so far in the future, and so far away in space, I did not give any character any sort of ethnic homeland on earth. In these stories, those homelands have long since been consigned to ancient history.

I felt going into the story, that the idea that they would have some sort of different adventure on every planet they call on, wasn’t all that realistic. Realistically, the spaceer’s life should’ve been pretty tedious – one orbit like another, cargoes loaded and discharged, around and around they go – even the spaceer dives would be almost the same. Of course, there could be small adventures when downside, but I felt that eventually I’d have pushed my imagination to the breaking point, by having to come up with some new danger or adventure for every planet and every story. To smooth over, as it were, this sticking point, I suggested early on in the story that there was some mystery connected to the ship and its former owners, the “Four Shipmates,” as they called themselves. I figured that that mystery, whatever it was – and I had no idea what it was – could serve to drive the story when an adventure a planet got stale. It could be used to explain at least some of the adventures as the story progressed. As it turned out, I turned to it almost right away, and it became the central theme of the whole book. That was not planned, it just evolved that way. And to tell the truth, the mystery, also evolved as the story went along. It was never clear what the mystery was when I was writing the first three or four, or five episodes. I had several possible candidates in mind, and only settled on the final one, as I went along.

My 2020 cover

This is the way a lot of the story worked. I’d toss things in just for some “color” since, as I said, I focused on little details to build the set and setting. And then, these little color items, like the ghost, Glen Colin, or the Travel Book of Faylyen, or the grandmother from the drifts, or the darq gem ring, somehow became very important and useful, if not essential, later in the story. It was almost spooky how many things that I just tossed in for color, turned out to be essential to the story. It is really the magic of writing.

As I said earlier, I intended to write a variety of different types of stories. I think I succeeded, somewhat. We have an eerie story, a “war” story, a pirate story, some lighthearted times within the stories, some romance, adventure, and sense of wonder, discoveries. But the thing is, I only wanted to write small stories. Stories about people. I believe that one can write thrilling stories where the stakes are only the life of the hero or his friends. You shouldn’t need greater stakes. It seems, however, that I’m in a minority on this issue, with both writers and readers. Almost every SFF book I read about has some great conflict central to the story, even if the story focuses on one character. I suppose I shouldn’t make such a sweeping statement, but that’s the impression I’m left with. Anyway, that is what I tried to do. I guess in the end, they did find something big and important – but only to the characters.

An alternative title and cover

About halfway through writing the story, I came up with the story’s ending – but not just the ending, but with the story I really wanted to tell after the ending, which dragged me into writing its sequel, The Lost Star’s Sea. The locale I created for the ending became ever more expansive as I went along. What was once imagined to be an abandoned space ship with some sort of secret onboard – perhaps a treasure in darq jewels or something – became a floating island in a sea of air, and a revolution. And that sea of air became the Archipelago which continued to grow ever more expansive, so that by the time I got my characters shipwrecked for the story that I thought would be great fun to write, getting them out again became an almost impossible problem. Indeed, I have yet to do so, but that’s the next installment's story.

I think I will take a break from this series of post for a week or two. Coming up next, I will explore my library and talk about some of the books in it, and their importance to me.

Previous cover art

Origin Stories – The Bright Black Sea (Part Two)

An early book cover with one of my working titles, a play on "Ports of Call." I wasn't certain that it would be clear that planets weren't called "Call" though I liked the title.

In my previous post I discussed what inspired me to write The Bright Black Sea. In this post I’m going to discuss the nuts and bolts of how it came to be.

I began thinking about the stories that would become The Bright Black Sea soon after Amazon’s lending library, Kindle Unlimited was introduced. At that time authors were being paid whenever their book was borrowed. It was a flat rate payment per book, so that short books paid the same as long ones. Authors quickly took advantage of this, and started publishing short stories and novels as serial stories, to get paid many times more that a single novel length book would bring in. It was in this economic atmosphere that I conceived the idea of writing a series of connected space ship adventures. My model was Guy Gilpatric’s series of short stories featuring Mr. Glencannon. the chief engineer of the tramp steamer Inchchiffe Castle. Using a tramp freighter space ship sailing between the planets would not only allow me to set my stories on a variety of planets but to write a variety of stories, from comedy to spooky stories, intrigue, romance, and adventure. I intended each story to follow one after the other, so that I could weave some sort of over-arching plot into the series, if needed. And, indeed, this is the formula that I have followed, though I never released it as a serial story. For quite a few reasons.

A never published cover

First was that Amazon changed the way the Kindle Unlimited program paid their authors. It is now the number of pages “read” that determines payment amounts, rather than just if the book is borrowed. Serials, or installment novels no longer offered any economic advantage.

Secondly, I was very leery of having to produce a story on any sort of schedule, much less a monthly one. I feared running out of ideas. Which, as it turned out, is a real issue with me. I suppose that I could crank out some sort of a story on demand – but it would be work, not fun, and probably not very good. And as I have said already, I don’t like to work. So the idea of having a monthly episode seemed too daunting a prospect to pursue.

Thirdly, I don’t write short stories. And, for the most part, I don’t read them. Even in my heyday of reading science fiction, I read mostly novels. I never subscribed to any of the SF magazines. And the episodes that I ended up writing reflect this anti-short story bias. All were novella length pieces of between 20,000 to 40,000 words. It would have been pretty impossible for me to keep up a monthly pace at that length, unless I had a hundred stories to write already in my head. Which I didn’t.

Fourthly, as I have already mentioned when writing about A Summer in Amber, I became aware that I did not write tight, fast, thriller type of stories, or as Sargent Friday might say, ‘Just the story ma’am.” My pace is wordy and leisurely, which is not the type of writing that would lend itself to writing old fashioned Saturday matinee adventure serials. To write a story that would keep readers on pins and needles until the next episode, not only would I need to write differently than I do, but I would have to write in a way that I didn’t care to. Episodic serials usually involve ending with cliffhangers. Which is to say, one writes the first ¾ of the story in one episode, but only the finished the last ¼ in the next episode, along with the first ¾’s of that nest episode… to be concluded in the next, as so on. In short, I would have to forego telling the whole story in the hopes of hooking readers by making them wait for the conclusion in the next episode. As a story teller, I didn’t care to do that. It seemed to be to be unfair to the reader. And as I said before, I don’t write stories that lend themselves to that technique anyway. Nor do I want to.

The Nine Star Nebula in color

So in short, the incentive to write serials went away, and the episodes I could see myself writing would be too long and too complete to insure that people would keep coming back for the next one. And I wasn’t confident that I could keep to any reasonable publishing schedule for a serial story.

Yo get around these qualms, my first plan was to release the first three episodes, Captain of the Lost Star, The Mountain King, and Lontria, as one book. Story wise, the end of Lontria was a good story break point, as we were leaving the familiar Azminn solar system astern, and together the three episodes ran well over 100,000 words, making it a good sized novel. My thinking was that by making the first three episodes available to be read without any time gap between them, I could hook the readers into reading the first three episodes, and then they’d be so invested in the characters and story that they would read those that would follow, even without cliffhanger endings.

However, it was such a great theory, that it could be applied to every other episode I would write. Why not wait and release the following three episodes as a novel as well, since it too, had a good break point – which is not surprising since I was, by now, more or less plotting the episodes to make them novel sized installments. Indeed by that time I was writing these episodes, I had abandoned the release by episode idea and was all in on releasing novels, or just a novel.

Now, given how they were written, I could’ve easily released The Bright Black Sea as a trilogy, with three 100K+ word novels – basically how I wrote them. If my goal was to at least try to make money, this would’ve been the best route to take. It is the strategy that almost everyone recommends that a writer should do – especially if you have all three books written and ready to go. However, since I was always intending to release my books for free, maximizing profits wasn’t something that needed to be considered. It wouldn’t matter if I released one book or three books. Except to my ego.

The thing is, not everyone who opens a book is going to like it. That’s a given. And that means that the second book in any series is going to sell less than the first book, as all the people who didn’t like the first one aren’t going to buy the second. The second book may still attract readers on the fence, but by the third book, the readers are either engaged in the story, or they’re out. Quite candidly, I didn’t wish to see that inevitable decline. I don’t need that sort of heartbreak. So, by selling the complete set of episodes in one volume, I would see only the numbers of people who tried it, not the number of readers who liked it enough to read it all the way to its end. Of course, in the end, I did write a sequel to it, so I do see that number, but well, The Lost Star’s Sea came out two years after The Bright Black Sea and is a different sort of book, despite having continuing characters, so it’s a little bit different. And well, maybe I can take disappointment better now. Not that I am disappointed. Like my characters discover, one should be careful what one wishes for. Wishes sometimes come true. I’m happy with my writing, and I don’t think becoming a best seller author would suit me very well. With that comes responsibilities. I try to avoid those as well. So, I’m planning to be famous only after I’m dead.

To the left is the mock up of a cover for what would have been volume 2 of a 3 volume paper release that I considered doing given the size of the complete book. In the end, I abandoned the idea. The titles would have been The Captain of the Lost Star, The Ghosts of the Lost Star, and The Secrets of the Lost Star.

Hmm… It seems that this post has run on long enough, but since I still have more to say, there will be a third episode of Origin Stories – The Bright Black Sea, in which I’ll talk about actually writing the story. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to avoid, and how it evolved as it went along.

Origin Stories -- A Summer in Amber

Evening, Maig Glen

I suspect that I had begun working the first “episode” or two of that would become The Bright Black Sea prior to starting A Summer in Amber, but since A Summer in Amber ended up being published first, I’ll discuss it first.

Perhaps I should begin by saying that I blame it all on Edgar Rice Boroughs. Boroughs was experiencing a great revival back in the mid-1960’s when I started reading science fiction, and I was a big fan of his stories as a teen. Still, I never realized just how much of an influence he had on my tastes in stories until I started writing my own. All his stories had an element of romance in them. There was always a princess to fall in love with and rescue, usually many times. I realized, only after I started writing my stories, that I always wanted that element in them as well. They didn’t seem complete without one, nor would they be as fun to daydream about. I am, however, very careful to make certain that my princess are usually the ones doing the rescuing. They’re more fun that way.

The Maryfield Road

Now on to A Summer in Amber. The first files I find for the story, then titled The Rhymer’s Gate, date back to March 2013. This fits with my time line, since I know that watching the first two seasons of Downton Abbey on Netflix sparked my desire to write this story. I enjoyed the atmosphere it created, both visually and with the music, and the romance. I was, however, certain that I could write a better one using the same theme – a commoner’s intrusion into the world of the upper classes – while avoiding that show’s soap opera entanglements. i.e. no dead bodies need be hauled around the house.

My first thought was to write it as a period piece, like Downton Abbey. But I rather quickly rejected that idea. First, because it would require a great deal of research to get all the little details of everyday life in England in 1910 right, since I know that historical fiction readers are very picky about getting those things right. This would mean researching all sorts of things, from train schedules and times, to how telephones worked, as well as the manners and speech of the English of all classes of the time. And a thousand other things. It could, and no doubt has, been done. But it would involve a lot of work. I don’t really like work. And, well, in the end, I would mean that much of the backdrop of my story would reflect the research, work, and writings of other people, which made me uneasy.

Glen Road

I can offer two examples of this phenomena from my experience. Many years ago I started reading a fantasy book that featured a sailing ship. As I read the description of this ship, I experienced a sense of deja vu. It seemed that I was reading an almost word for word description of the tea clipper Cutty Sark. Tea and tea clippers where an interest of mine in my youth, and so I happened to be quite familiar with such ships – in words, anyway – and the passage struck me as something I’d read before. Maybe it wasn’t. I never bothered searching for the description in the Cutty Sark book that it reminded me of, but it just seemed so eerily familiar.

And then there is Connie Willis’s Blackout. I was also an avid reader of life in England in 1940, and the blitz. So that when I was reading her story, I got the distinct feeling that she had read, and incorporated into her story, incidents related in the sources I had also read. I know that she had spent a year researching the books, so this is not surprising. And while this is just a sense of deja vu rather than any suggestion of plagiarism, the fact that I could see, as it were, the bones of her story from my own reading in the history of the period, made me leery of doing something like that myself. I feared that if I wrote the story as a period piece, the work and writings of others would inevitably creep into my story. I didn’t want that. I wanted it all my own.

Bridge over the Maig River

The other reason I decided not to write it as a period piece is that history is an iron master. If I set it in the same time period, all the young men would be going off to war in a couple of years, and the world would change in ways that are well known. So, unless I wanted to make a historical fantasy out of it, the future of my characters would be dictated not by me, but by history. I didn’t care to cede control of my characters and story to history. And if I was going to write a fantasy, I might as well make it all my own.

However, since I wanted that old-time feel to my story, I decided to set the story in a post apocalyptic future. One that would allow me to bring in all the old-timey stuff I wanted. Not only I could then mix  old stuff together with some modern stuff as needed, but I could give the book a vaguely haunting, nostalgic air to it, like Downton Abbey had.This would also give me complete freedom to make up whatever I wanted, without a tremendous amount of research, which is to say, it saved me from having to work. It would be my world, and I’d call the shots. I figured that a story like this could fit – more or less – into the steampunk genre that was fairly popular at the time, and might still be. Sort of.

Road to the Highlands

The second major ingredient of A Summer in Amber was Scotland. The locale was inspired by the work of John Buchan and the stories he set in the Scotland of the first several decades of the twentieth century. Stories like The 39 Steps, John Macnab, and Huntingtower, plus the Scottish stories of Compton Mackenzie like Monarch of the Glen, Keep the Home Guard Turning, Whisky Galore and Hunting the Fairies. All these stories and their vivid description of the Scottish countryside brought that land to life in my imagination, and I wanted to revisit them in my story. I had traveled about Scotland on an extended holiday after I graduated from college, so I could bring a bit of personal experience to the stories as well. I should also credit the 1959 movie The 39 Steps with Kenneth More and Taina Elg. It is one of my favorite movies. It offers a rather romantic version of Scotland of the 1950’s. No low, grey skies to be found in its Scotland. The bicycle weekend in the story was inspired by a scene in the movie.

So I had a theme inspired by Downton Abbey, and a setting inspired by the books of Buchan and Mackenzie. What I needed was a story to get my narrator to Scotland and on to the estate, if not into the house of the wealthy upper class laird.

Evening in the Glen

I set out to write a mystery/thriller centered around a legendary invention. I explored many ways the story could play out. At one time the secret was a theory that would lead to a great scientific revolution which was devised by one Hugh Gallagher who stayed at the estate – owned by the department head of the college that he taught at – during the Storm Years. There, with the aid of his wife, Selina, he had perfected this theory, or so legend had it. It was lost, and would be found… Another version, closer to the final version, had a lot more industrial spying, intrigue, and action in it. Rival firms were actively attempting to steal the secret that Sandy Say was deciphering, including waylaying him, stealing the papers, along with chases through the countryside. But… after working on it for a year and more, I realized that I wasn’t that type of writer. I couldn’t get that type of story to work. And so, in the end, I just decided to write a simple “What I did during summer vacation” romance.

To compensate for the elimination of the industrial espionage elements, I made the “The Rhymer’s Gate” more central, mysterious, and dramatic to the story. And for this element of the story, I was inspired by a Popeye story by E.C. Segar. He drew and wrote a story entitled The Mystery of Brownstone Hill, which ran in the newspapers as a comic from early June 1930 to early November 1930. It featured a mysterious house on Brownstone Hill, where one Doctor Wattey rented. He took with him only a few boxes, and then, well he was never seen again, and for 20 years not only did nothing grow within half a mile of the house, but no one was able to get within a quarter mile of it before they fled for their lives. While E.C. Segar's story is quite different from mine, I used some of the elements from it, the mystery surrounding it, and the inability to get close to it, for my Rhymer's Gate. 

So A Summer in Amber owes its existence to such diverse inspirations as the TV show, Downton Abbey, the old thriller, The 39 Steps, the Scottish stories like The Monarch of the Glen, and a Popeye comic. Go figure.

The story is actually based in a real place, though I changed all the names, slightly. If you find it, you can see, on Google street view, what the countryside looks like now. Though, of course, after the Storm Years, it looks somewhat different in the story – more overgrown and abandoned.

My goal as a creator is to bring something new into the world. And yet, as you can see, the seeds for whatever is new to the world in A Summer in Amber, were in the world already – brought there by creators before me.

The aurora over the highland

NOTE: The illustrations for this post are samples of the chapter heading art I had created for an early version of the book. Art in ebooks is somewhat problematical (for me) and I decided that black and white versions for the print book wouldn't be worth the effort.

New Covers for 2020

Just for shits and giggles, and with time on my hand, I decided to work up new covers for my books. Last time around I was looking to create a consistent look for branding, and since my stories are pretty old fashioned, I wanted to give the covers a rather old fashioned look. And, well, I should also mention that I didn't want to spend any money on them, so I use my own artwork and create the covers using Gimp, with Gimp's provided fonts. In short, there is nothing elaborate in the process.

This time around, I'm looking to give the books a more contemporary, literary, and print published look with bolder text and brighter colors. They are not the type of covers best selling genre ebooks boast. In the fast lane of ebook sales one wants one's covers to look just like all the covers of all the other best selling books. I didn't care to do this for, well, as I mentioned, I don't care to spend money on them.That said, I also really don't like the stock photo montages that constitute a lot of the most popular books in their genres. As I said, I'm shooting for a more literary look to my books.

These are the current versions of the new covers. They are subject to change, and depending on sales, may be dropped after a month or so. In any event, I will be changing the covers over on the 1st of February 2020. These changes will apply only to the ebooks, though I could, depending upon results, develop a back cover and change the paper covers as well. But given their sales, it would be a lot of work that would simply make my paper books even more collectible than they already are.

I used the same artwork for A Summer in Amber, though without the people that were added in Gimp for the cover. I also used the same artwork for The Bright Black Sea, though I made fairly significant modifications. I eliminated the planet, changed colors of some of the nebula, and smoothed things out, adding a lot more glow to get that black and bright sea look. I used new artwork for Some Day Days -- mostly for its bright colors and rather graphic look.

For The Lost Star's Sea I used different art work. I had done a series of paintings depicting something like the Pella, some years ago, and I decided to use one of those paintings instead, adding a bit of black outline to it. I also changed the cover for Beneath The Lanterns. It really has nothing to do with the story, but I think it works for creating the mood I want. Lanterns imply darkness, and though this is not strictly true in the story, I think it works for the cover -- dark and light.

And, as you can see, I also changed the artwork for Sailing to Redoubt. This was a rather sketchy painting of a sailing ship, that I photographed, and ended up painting over. However, I still have the photo I took of it, and by tilting it and adding some black outline in Gimp, ended up with a fairly nice, if abstract image of a ship. Again, it does not really correspond to any ship in the story, but it works to set a nautical mood.

Covers are not a science. There is a general belief that covers sell books -- and to some extent this is certainly true. But what covers sell? For some readers who are looking for stories just like the last one they read, a cover that looks just like the last one they read may well make them more willing to give the new books a try. I don't sell to those readers, so that isn't a concern for me. I sell books to people who try one of my books, like what the find, and try the rest of my stories. I think that by casting a wide net -- writing books in a variety of genre and now, using a set of different covers to attract a wider spectrum of readers, these covers might work for me. Or not. As I said, it's not a science. But I'll give them a few months to see if there will be any significant change in sales. Truthfully, I rather doubt it. But, as I said, I had time on my hands.

However, 1 February I am starting my 2020 story (yet again). This time I'm only shooting for a novella -- 30K to 50K words that will be a sequel of sorts, well, more of an epilogue, to one of my existing stories. I hope to have the first draft written by the end of the month, and the book out by May 2020. But as I have found out, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So we'll see.

A New EBook Cover for Beneath the Lanterns

As I've mentioned in several previous blog posts, I had had a great deal of trouble coming up with a cover for Beneath the Lanterns. I'm not an illustrator, and really can't picture things or people in my mind.So even knowing the story inside out -- it was very hard to come up with a scene from the story that I could envision and could paint in my impressionistic style. In the end, I settled for a scene from the book, I was never all that happy with it. And so...

I've been painting regularly for 35 years now. In the beginning I painted with watercolors with a fair amount of detail. I mostly painted imaginary scenes. By the time I switched to a thicker paint; oils and then acrylics, I lacked the patience to learn how to use them to paint with any details. Instead I opted to paint in the impressionist style, a style, however, that I really like. Fast forward 16 years, and these days I have an even shorter attention span, and have run out of new imaginary places to paint, so it has been hard to paint. 

This week I tried something different. Imagining a scene and painting it with nothing specific in it, just implying the scene. My first effort was a rainy evening street scene of sorts "Rain" 

I liked how it came out, and well, the bulk of it took about the length of three or four Angus and Julia Stone songs to paint -- within my attention span. I then got the idea that I might try the same technique using a lot more colors and to kill two birds with one stone, try a scene from Beneath the Lanterns, in this case the Reed Bank -- a street in the story lined by townhouses on one side and eating houses, tea houses and drinking houses lining the shore of a lake on the other.  So today I did "The Reed Bank", a detail of which I used for the new cover. I pictured the Reed Bank on the last day of the Bright Days, with the Yellow Lantern setting behind us and the street filled with carriages and rickshaws -- but of course, the idea is not to actually paint them, just imply them. (Or anything else you might imagine.)

So the cover new cover of the ebook version of Beneath the Lanterns is actually of nothing at all. It is, however in a long tradition of science fiction book covers. If you are old enough to remember buying paperback SF books in the 60's & 70's, you'll remember all those books with some sort of abstract, "science-fiction-ie" style of art -- with lots of weird shapes that were supposed to be, well, who knows what? Usually it meant a book I wouldn't like. But anyway, my new cover is in that tradition, except that it is more colorful than most of those.

A New Cover for Beneath the Lanterns

Here is my latest attempt at a cover for Beneath the Lanterns, “Caravan to Traefara.” I think this one is better than the last, if only because it represents, more or less, an actual scene in the book – unlike the last one. I still have time to try something else, so this may not be the final version. Stay tuned.

As I no doubt said before, I’m not an illustrator, and my talents in both art and writing are rather narrow. In art, with this type of thick acrylic paint, I’m pretty much an impressionist landscape painter, and that is pretty much what this painting is – an impressionist landscape enhanced in Gimp with a filter to add the black outlines. 

This is something like my fifth or six attempt to produce a suitable cover. I run into a number problems making my covers. The first being that I can’t really picture a scene in my head, at least as a complete scene. Hopefully you can from my words. The second is that I have a lot of trouble with “camera angles,” which is to say, how to frame a scene into something that I might be able to paint. The third is, as I said, I don’t paint realistically, though I’m better at that type of painting with watercolors, but even then… And well, it would be too inconsistent with my other covers. (And these days, I probably lack the patience for detailed work anyway.)

They say that covers are a very important part of selling a book. Maybe.

With my covers, my first priority is “branding.” All my covers have the same design – just like those old Penguin paperbacks with the orange color and one standard design.

My second priority is legibility as a thumbnail. I’m not selling books on bookstore shelves, so it is important to have the book title and author legible in a small format. I see many books were the title and author are lost in the art. 

My third priority is that they should look, if not professional, at least neat and original, and not too amateurish. I am not a graphic artist, and know just enough of Gimp to produce my covers. You can buy covers or hire designers, but not on my limited budget ($0), so I have to work within my skill level and resources. The result is a book cover stands out from the great mass of books in their categories. Whether people try them because of the covers or in spite of them is an open question.