The Starfaring Life Background

 

In the distant past, before dark energy was fully understood, faster than light travel was thought to be a fantasy. But for Rial Dunbar, navigating a faster-than-light cargo ship is routine. It’s his job. It can be a demanding job. And sometimes a dangerous one. Especially in the Kanteaon to Aeroday trade in xai leaf where the ships are hard driven to make the fastest possible passage through the shifting currents of interstellar gas and dust of the Kalfer Rift. So yes, Dunbar has some tales to tell.

The Starfaring Life opens with a simple tale. A tale of one downside leave that gets complicated, and dangerous, in the company of one Cera Marn, the power mate of a rival ship. Marn has a problem – a bookie has sent an auton and a couple of thugs to collect a gambling debt. It's a debt that Marn doesn’t feel obliged to pay. It’s a matter of principle with her. The race was fixed. Or so she says. And so she leads her debt collectors on a merry chase, with Dunbar in tow.

A few post back, I talked about the rejection slips I had collected some 40 years ago for a fantasy novel, a speculative fiction novella and a short story. About that time Amazon’s Vella program for serial stories was announced, with a vague start date. I thought it might work for me as an advertising venue for my main work. But if I wanted to use it, before there were 10,000 other space operas, I needed to come up with a story, and fast. It struck me that in my old speculative fiction novella, The Hybrid-Worlder, I had the bones of a quick story in hand.

I forget the exact plot of the original story. The hybrid-worlder was some sort of lost creature on the small, interstellar port moon of Aeroday. Some years later, I used that setting but changed the plot for a comic book idea I was working on at the time. The hybrid-worlder creature became a pet of a gambler who used it to collect credits from deadbeat punters. That, I decided, would be the plot of my proposed serial story, but I’d lose the creature altogether. Instead I’d use an auton, a sentient machine, along with a couple of thugs in tow to be the debt collecters.

I would, however use the “universe” I had created for my narrator, Rial Dunbar, along with the setting I invented for the Hybrid-Worlder.  That was a small moon which was the interstellar port of Aeroday. This little moon had been cored like an apple during its move into orbit from one of the outer worlds, and this core serves as the interstellar port. Think of it as a river port that runs from pole to pole of the moon with wharves, shipyards and factories set on the surface of the core. The moon's surface had been divided up into compounds for the embassies of the former Aerodayian empire, but is now given over to the local population. An artificial gravity was installed on the surface and around the core, which, holds in a livable atmosphere, including in its hollow core.

The original story was based on the China tea clippers of the 1850-70’s. Each season tea was loaded on to the fastest purpose-built clipper ships, which then raced halfway around the world to be the first to deliver the new tea to London. Very serious businessmen spent a lot of money in designing and building of the fastest ship possible for this specific trade. They hired the best captains and crew, and then ran them like racing yachts in order to claim victory in this yearly tea race. An amazing story of a mix between commerce and sport that had enchanted me when I discovered it back in college. I use a similar story as the backdrop of my original story, and retained it for The Starfaring Life. Tea is now xai leaf, and the world of Kanteaon is China, and the Kalfer Rift represent the very demanding navigation required for a fast passage through the South China Sea of old.

And that is the basis of my serial. I have one complete story cycle to offer. More might follow if there is a demand for them. Who knows how this will work out?  Time will tell. But it should go live in mid to late July. Stay tuned.

Something New is Coming

 

This will be reduced down to a small thumbnail on the iPhone

In mid to late July Amazon is going to introduce a new reading experience – Vella – a platform for serialized stories that authors can publish one short episode at a time. It is going to be available only on iOS devices, which is to say iPhones. Readers will purchase tokens and redeem a certain number of tokens to read each episode. Readers will be able to read the first three episodes for free before having to unlock the rest of the episodes at a rate of 1 token per 100 words per episode. I don’t think pricing has been exactly settled, but the sample they provide has tokens costing one cent each when purchasing 200 tokens, with discounts for larger purchases. Readers can rate each episode in several ways, and authors can include notes at the end of each episode to add additional insights and engage with their readers. And that’s Vella in a nutshell.

I’m going to have a space opera offering ready to roll for the launch of this new service.

I’m approaching this concept from an old time weekday newspaper comic strip perspective. Think of Mary Worth, or Flash Gordon. Which is to say, brief episodes that move the story along in small steps. The episodes range from 1,200 words to 1,600 words – or about 12¢ - 16¢ per episode. I’ve written the first draft of a novella length story to kickoff the experiment. The story is complete in and of itself, but open ended so that I can built on to it, if it should prove worth my effort. I want to offer a complete story right from the start so as not to leave readers hanging, should I decide not to continue it. I have the option of making all the episodes available at once, or on a schedule. I believe that I will release them all at once for simplicity’s sake.

I am doing this primarily as an exercise in free advertising. It costs me nothing but my time, of which I have plenty off. I’m hoping that there will not be 10,000 space opera available at launch, so that I’ll have a fair chance of getting my name in front of readers who usually do not venture beyond the Kindle Unlimited Program, or who avoid free books as a matter of policy. I’m not expecting this will generate much in the way of revenue, but for me, money is not the point. Advertising is.

The title of my series is The Starfaring Life. It is a space opera –  a new "universe" for me, with starships this time around! The launch story focuses on a starfarer's one night’s leave downside. More on the story, next time.

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom Blurb

 

Below is the first draft & unproofread version of Shadows of an Iron Kingdom's blurb.

“I’d like to believe that I can take the rough with the smooth. I didn’t complain about the hundred petty inconveniences of the Iron Kingdom. Not too much. It was the werewolves, superhumans, and mad scientists who haunted its black forests and ruined castles that got to me. Still, what did I expect in the company of Vaun Di Ai?” – Rafe d’Mere from Shadows of an Iron Kingdom.

Rafe d’Mere and Vaun Di Ai  return once more in this sequel to The Secrets of Valsummer House. Rafe d’Mere, after turning the Fix-it-all Shop back over to its owner, follows his heart instead of his head. Concerned, after not receiving a radio-packet from Lieutenant JG Vaun Di Ai for months, he sets out for the planet of VanTre to assure himself that she’s fine. There, he finds that she has resigned from the Patrol – an unthinkable act on her part. So, with some help, he follows her to the small, airless planet of Ironlode, merely to find out what she’s gotten herself into this time. It was danger, of course. Danger in a Gothic inspired throw-back society. A primitive, almost feudal society where mythical werewolves, the size of large bears, were said to roam its dark forests. They proved to be more than imaginary. And even so, they weren’t the most dangerous creatures that inhabited those forests. Di Ai, d’Mere, and Di Ai’s colleague, the all too handsome and charming (in d’Mere’s opinion), Tarvis Byn, set out to find the secret of these monsters.

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom is the third book in the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series. Set in the same universe of The Bright Black Sea, these stories chronicle the early adventures of a character we first met in The Bright Black Sea, Systems Tech Rafe GilGiles, a man of a hundred names.

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom Cover

Above is likely the cover for my next book. Font, font size, and text placement may be tinkered with, but the art is a done deal. This is actually the second attempt at a cover. The first one was just too bad -- I used part of it to illustrate the blog post below. Originally I wanted the scene to be at sunset, so I painted the sky in yellows and oranges. But the mood I want is sort of Gothic gloom, and I think the blue sky works better to achieve what I can of that mood. But you can judge for yourself, as below is the sunset sky version. The color change was done digitally in Gimp, so it is the same painting.

If any of you have a preference, drop me a line in the comments section. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

And just for shits and giggles, below is my first attempt at a cover. Not only is it is too primitive and half-assed, but there is no place to put a title that can be read. There was a time that I might've been able to bring off a piece like this, but that was a time when I still had the patience to take my time and work at it. That time has passed.

I will no doubt use parts of this piece for the back cover illustration for the paper version -- it will be small, and likely only the castle part. Nothing goes to waste.

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom - Done

 

Just a quick update this week. I finished writing the third Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure -- Shadows of an Iron Kingdom -- this week and have turned it over to my first proofreader, my wife. After she goes through it, I will send it along to my volunteer beta readers for their input and corrections. I anticipate its release in the first half of July 2021.

I finished the first draft on 2 May 2021, took a couple of weeks off to work on another project, and returned to do the second and third draft, finishing the third on 2 June. I wrote the first two drafts in LibreOffice. This time, I uploaded the second draft to Google Drive, and did the third draft in Google Doc. Google Docs has a more robust grammar checking feature than LibreOffice, highlighting correctly spelled, but wrong words which LibreOffice doesn't do. 

I am nearly completely blind to typos -- I "read" what I expect to read, regardless of what is actually written, and so, despite my best efforts, my manuscripts are riddled with typos. I'm always looking for ways to lesson the burden on my proofreaders.

For the last book I uploaded the manuscript to Google Doc after the final draft, but this time I decided to combine making the corrections it found with my third draft. After going through it once, I downloaded back to a LibreOffice format, and then uploaded and converted it back to a Google Doc just to see if it would find more errors, as it doesn't always find all of them, for some reason, things like the most obvious ones -- double words. It highlights some, while overlooking others. Anyway, the second run though did find more mistakes -- some of which I may have made in my corrections. Which would seem unlikely -- but then, well, I'm good at making mistakes. But to be fair, LibreOffice does not underline typos until after you enter the next character, which, when going through the manuscript making corrections, the previous correction may well be off screen by the time you type in the next character, thus, you never see your new typo... That anyway, is my story, and I'm sticking with it. In any event, running it through Google Doc the last time significantly cut typos -- but did not eliminate them, as I had hoped. We'll see if this method of double checking yields a better result.

I haven't written the blurb  yet, nor painted an acceptable cover, so those will have to wait until next week.

Writing on the Edge

 

The edge in the title is end of writing for me. I have no idea how close it is. I can’t see very far into the future. With any luck at all, I’ll die before I reach it. But you never know. It's one of the reasons why I make it a point to sit down at my desk almost every morning and write for several hours. I’m afraid that if I stop for too long, I’ll find it hard to get back into that habit again.

This fear is not unfounded. I’ve drawn and painted my whole life – and I have a couple thousand paintings in a closet to prove it. But, after struggling for six years to come up with subjects to paint that interest me, I’ve finally given up painting. Indeed, I almost hate painting today. These days I only do it, gruelingly, for my book covers. Most of my paintings came from my imagination, the same place my stories come from. And if that wellspring of painting ideas could dry up, so could the wellspring for my stories. Indeed, it is far more likely, since I’ve not one of those writers who have so many story ideas that they don’t have time to tell them all. I have to work to come up with every story, and don’t finish all of the ones I do come up with. So it’s a real possibility that the next story I write will be my last. If that happens, I’ll have to find a new creative outlet – planning ahead, I think it’ll be game design.

At present I’m finishing up the second draft of Shadows of an Iron Kingdom. Its still on track for a July 2021 release. I’m more than halfway through the first draft of A Starfaring Life, a novella that I am writing for an upcoming Amazon iOS app dedicated to serial stories. I’m looking to write 20 episodes of around 1,000-1,500 words each. This will be my starship space opera. I’m writing it mostly as an exercise in free advertising. So I've got stuff coming up for the next six months  or so. But after that, nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. I have an idea of the type of story I’d like to write. I’m currently working on the setting -- a minute here, 30 seconds there.... But as yet, I don’t actually have a story. Moreover, I want to write a longer novel than my last five books -- something in the 100-120K words range. And even if I come up with a story, I don’t expect to start putting it into words until sometime in the fall. So there is going to be a break of several months when I’ll not be writing. Well, it’s summer and I never want to be inside in our all too brief summers, so it’s not unusual for me to take some sort of break during the summer. Still, and idea is not a story, and not writing is not writing, so we’ll see how close to the edge I am.

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom is my current working title for my next novel, and likely its final title. The story is the third book of my Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series, and the final one, for now. I'm going to take a break from that type of story to try a few different story ideas next. Once again this story features Rafe d'Mere, and Vaun Di Ai. It is, however, set on an entirely different world -- Ironholm, a minor airless planet dominated by a dissenting throw-back society that exists in rift valleys under the domes. This society is much more primitive than Fairwaine's Agrileaa Co-op -- something like the Transylvania of gothic fiction. 

So it should come as no surprise, given the setting, that I'm going for a Gothic vibe in this mystery adventure, complete with ruined castles, beasts like werewolves, people like vampires, and the odd mad scientist. The final version of the Iron Kingdom the story is set in a little more "modern" setting than I when I had first imagined the idea for the story, as the demands of  moving the story along seemed to require more than horse drawn carriages and dark little villages in darker forests. I haven't written the blub, so I'll save more details for another post. At present I'm working through the second draft, and I expect to have it to my proof and beta readers early in June -- on target for an early July release.  I've also sketched out my first attempt at a cover. Stay tuned for more details.