BLUF- For time-travel fans, a must-read.

One of the author-ish things I do is help people out with beta reading. Not everyone is familiar with the concept, so I’ll describe beta reading as I’ve done it. Someone sends you a manuscript, either as a Word document or a Dropbox file. Personally, I prefer the Dropbox file. Of course, in theory someone could send you a paper copy. But wow, would that be cumbersome. I actually did this to my father when I produced In the Valley, my very first book. But that was before I knew any better.

You have to force yourself to be honest and analytical about the work you are reading. This is particularly difficult when the writing is really good, as you start getting ahead of yourself. One needs to slow down and look hard for faults, for stuff that doesn’t work, or is unclear or inaccurate. As you go you leave comments for the author, to act upon as he or she chooses. I rarely make a correction without leaving a note that I have done so- it could be that the author doesn’t agree with my change or note, and it’s important to remember that it’s NOT YOUR BOOK.

Now, I am not a master of the Chicago Manual of Style. For that kind of work, you need to hire a no-kidding trained copyeditor, which I am not. What I am is an avid reader, and I like to think I can pick up typos, howlers and flow issues. When I beta read, I try to strengthen a given work- post-publication reviews can be merciless, and there is a subset of people on Amazon who live to one-star books. As a beta reader, you are not doing the author a favor by failing to point out weaknesses or mistakes.

I say all of this by way of full disclosure. I was a member of the beta team for The Golden Minute, and as always I enjoyed the experience immensely.

Let’s talk about The Golden Minute, John Birmingham’s second book in the Girl in Time series. Long-time readers will know that I’m a big fan of JB’s writing. Years ago I used to carry his books around with me in my rucksack or assault pack overseas. I have read and re-read his stuff. So if he publishes something, I will surely buy and read it.

I was delighted by what I encountered in The Golden Minute. From the first few pages, I was struck by a few facts. One. No-one beats JB for creating and sustaining tension in a given work. Two. Birmingham does deep research into his subjects and milieu, partially in this case early Colonial Massachusetts. Three. JB can do complex character development and interaction.

He takes these three points and violently smashes them together into a whirlwind tour through time that is hard to put down. Just when the reader thinks that things are hairy enough, Birmingham clicks the verbal ratchet strap just a little bit tighter, until the reader finds themselves staring at the pages over a half-forgotten pizza dinner at three in the morning.

Seriously, JB, this kind of thing is bad for one’s health over the long term. However, in the short term it’s eminently satisfying. And the short term is where most people live.

This book was a challenging one for a beta reader. I had to repeatedly stop myself from jumping ahead and seeing WHAT COMES NEXT. Tracking the misadventures of the Marshal and Cady and watching their interplay was thoroughly entertaining. The two protagonists are as different as could be, both temperamentally and temporally, yet their stories intertwine seamlessly throughout the work to its conclusion.

At the end, of course you want more. This is as it should be. As is fitting in a second book in the series, many questions remain unanswered, and more challenges lie ahead.

If you haven’t done so, read A Girl in Time. Then get The Golden Minute. After that you can be pissed off that the third book simply isn’t ready yet.

Patience is a virtue, after all.

UPDATE: The Golden Minute has gone wide, you can score a copy on Amazon by clicking here.

 

 

There’s been a lot happening on the space front in the past few days. SpaceX has begun launching and recovering the new Block 5 versions of their trusty Falcon 9 rockets. They still haven’t mastered recovery of the nose cones, but it’s become a routine for them to bring back the rocket’s first stages. And then there are more sightings of possibly habitable worlds. Of course, to reach them, we’ll need an FTL drive. Uh, no word on that happening anytime soon.

A shame.

And then there’s Branson and his little space tourism rocket ship– the latest flight exceeded mach 2 and reached 170,000 feet. Soon we’ll be looking at the first true tourist flights and the monetization of space flight.

And finally, there is the announcement of the possible discovery of liquid water on Mars, possibly a lake under a glacier. It’s about twelve miles long or so. People are excited about this because such lakes sustain life in Antarctica. I dunno. The water, if it’s indeed water, is probably a hellish brine. Probably not drinkable, and possibly too toxic for life. However, there are organisms here on Earth that flourish in those circumstances, so who knows.

Pretty cool that there may be water on the surface of the Red Planet. However, I have long thought that the best chance for life on Mars would be in cave systems well under the surface. Look at all the weird stuff that lives in caves here on Earth- now imagine what may be found on Mars.

But all of the above highlights a trend as of late. There is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the space realm. I wonder if it’s the result of generations raised on science fiction who won’t take no for an answer- who want to go out there, take risks and explore.

This is encouraging.

BLUF- If you like alternate history, you should enjoy this.

Usually I pick out books that I know I’ll probably like. Most of the time my guesses are OK- it’s pretty unusual that I get a dog. Also, there are a few authors that I’ll read darn nigh everything they put out, regardless of book description. And those authors rarely fail me.

For me, S.M. Stirling is one of those guys. And this book is not a dog. In fact, this is a book I’ll probably end up reading a few times. Stirling has a few of those titles. I’ve read In the Courts of the Crimson Kings and Conquistador over and over again. His latest, Black Chamber, may fall into the aforementioned book category.

This book has an excellent alternate-history premise. I won’t go into a lengthy description, you can click on this link to find out more in that regard. I will say that it involves the First World War, a hardcore US femme fatale, and an overseas plot that she must foil to save the United States from utter disaster.

Black Chamber does not suffer from a lack of action or tedious descriptions. The tension starts fast, and is maintained admirably throughout the work. There were a number of scenes where I found myself mentally skipping ahead, just to see what happens next. This is a good thing on the author’s part, and I had to force myself to slow down and appreciate what was happening.

Something I liked about this book is that the bad guys usually weren’t caricature evil-doers. In their own way they were brilliant or brave people caught up in monstrous activities. And what they have planned is pretty damn bad. No spoilers here, however.

I will say that I was jarred out of the story a few times by some minor attention to detail slips. Some examples include a “.445 Webley” (Webleys were .455) or “the ribbon of an Iron Cross, First Class worn in his second buttonhole.” An Iron Cross First Class does not have a suspension ribbon, the Second Class does. However, I’m being picky, I just came off a spate of beta reading for a friend.

To wrap things up- I was gratified to see an alternate history involving WW1. Far too little is written about this period, there should be more. If you’re interested, Harry Turtledove did an alternate history of WW1 as well, give it a read sometime. But back to Mr. Stirling’s worthy book- his premise is plausible, his writing is superb, and I enjoyed this work a lot.

You don’t have to twist my arm to read the kick-off to a new universe by Stirling, and I was delighted to see that he did not disappoint in any fashion. By all means, go out and put some dinars in his pocket. If you like quality alternate history, there’s an excellent chance you’ll like what he’s selling.

Entertainment well worth the price of admission.

 

 

 

An article that drew my eye today involved a planet called Ross 128b, a possible rocky world within the goldilocks zone of a neighboring dwarf star. This world is about 11ly away, so it’s not incredibly distant.

I’m always excited by such finds, and they are happening a lot these days. Our technology for detecting such worlds is getting better, and some incredibly bright people are constantly looking toward the stars. Very exciting stuff.

Would I prefer that we had a feasible FTL drive? Sure. However, we do not at the moment. Something that will probably happen within my lifespan is that we may send an interstellar probe out there, in the case of Ross 128b we could reach it using a small unmanned craft pushed by solar sails and lasers.

By the time such a craft reported back, I’m pretty comfortable in assuming that I’d be dead. Oh well- the point of such exploration is for future generations to expand our footprint into space using technologies and techniques that are at present unknown.

It can be done. After all, my grandmother was born in a time when indoor plumbing or electricity wasn’t widespread, and she frequently hitched rides on a horse drawn wagon to school. One hundred years- look at how far we’ve come. It’s incredible.

Imagine where we’ll be one hundred years from today.

If we don’t blow ourselves up, or poison our planet irreparably, the future will be filled with wonders. Our i-gadgets will look quaint and primitive. And maybe, just maybe, we can get off this rock.

Here’s hoping.

I thought I’d take some time today to talk a little about the writing process as I’ve learned it over the last several years.

When this magical mystery tour began I didn’t have a clue as to what I was getting into. There was a story I held in my chest that was waiting to be told, but I didn’t have an idea as to how to get it out there. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted people to read it. That story was the seed for “In the Valley,” the first book in my initial trilogy.

So, not having any manual as to how to go about writing and producing books, I started searching the internet for options. Learned a lot of intimidating facts. One was that sending an unsolicited manuscript to a traditional publisher was a sure way for your work to end up in a “slush pile,” where some poor intern MIGHT read more than a page of what would cost you months of work. Then you would probably never hear back from said publisher.

After learning about that, I decided not to go that route. Struck me as a path towards madness. Sooo, I read up on indie publishing. This was more attractive to me because it seemed that yes, you could publish a book on your own terms, and then put it out on a site like Amazon where you have the potential to reach millions of customers… if you could somehow get your book out where people could consider it.

Ran across some more daunting facts. Don’t know if its true or not, but I saw somewhere that the average indie book sells about a hundred copies. I would later learn that this is about right. Also, I learned that indies are notorious for bad editing, layout, etc., and you simply have to pay good money to have your little darling polished and prepped. These bits of info almost scared me off again before I committed a single word to the page.

However, I can be stubborn. As I had nothing to do in the winter of 2014 other than await the judgment of the Army Medical Board, I said “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!” and started to write. During this period I found out that I lapse into a sort of fugue state while writing- I feel a need to write, it doesn’t stop until the last word is written.

I vomited the book forth, and to my surprise I had a 96k manuscript after a month of intense work. Previously, I had never written anything longer than forty or fifty odd page papers in college.

A mistake I made is that I didn’t have an outline, there was no trace of deliberation, and I only showed my mangle-script to my dad after I had sent it to my one-stop-shopping publisher, CreateSpace.

Looking back on it, the book had serious flaws that could have been corrected before I submitted it. As it was, my editor actually sent me a positive feedback letter after the copyediting was done, but I didn’t have the jack to correct the book with some of what he suggested for a second round of structural editing.

The money wasn’t there, so I had to go forward with what I regarded as a flawed product. However, the many grammar mistakes had been squared away, I had fixed issues with POV shift, and it seemed to be a pretty decent book with an acceptable cover, so I hit the PUBLISH button on the CreateSpace page, and within a day or two the crazy thing went live on Amazon.

It was a proud moment, while it lasted.

No-one bought “Valley” for over a year, other than friends and family. Eventually I grew embarrassed of the book, I didn’t mention it to anyone. I figured I had joined the ranks of the “one-hundred books” club, and my work would sink into oblivion.

Also, I had a personal hang-up about “Valley” that was only obvious to those who knew me well. The book was chock full of stuff that had actually happened, only it was related through the lens of science fiction. The book was somewhat my story, a lot of stuff was too real. My shrink (to whom much is owed) told me that “In the Valley” was an unconscious mechanism for distancing myself from bad events, it helped to place a fictional veneer between the trauma of the past and my life in the present.

Given the above context, I recognized “Valley” as kind of a screwball form of therapy, and I grew content with it as such. If no-one ever read it, then OK. Hey, at least I had completed a book. Many never get so far. Writing as such wasn’t in the cards for me, I walked away from the desk.

But my book was still out on Amazon. It could be found by anyone.

One day, out of the clear blue sky, I received an email from a gentleman up north. He liked my book and he wondered when I would write the next one.

Now, I had kind of left a hook in “Valley” on the off chance that I might consider a sequel. Doing so was something I had seen again and again in fiction, so I had built such a device into “Valley.” However, I had never seriously considered writing a sequel. As far as I was concerned, “Valley” was a one-off, a smoldering garbage fire of embarrassment and failure.

Just because I thought my book was a pretty decent write-up didn’t mean that was actually so. But here was a random stranger asking for more of my writing. And he had demonstrated that he was willing to pay for it. By definition a professional writer gets paid for his or her work. And here was a guy who had dropped cash and was asking for more.

I am still in contact with this gentleman, and he may know who he is when he reads this. Brother, you were the snowflake that started the avalanche. Much obliged.

It was a turning point for me, the late fall of 2015. I made the decision to write a sequel, only this time I would take a systematic approach and I would study the methodology of the best out there. So I started reading, and I found the personal websites of some of my favorite authors. Most websites weren’t that great, but a few were pretty awesome. One author in particular had an amazing website and a whole collection of books. Also, he talked a fair bit about the writing process and how he would tackle projects. Before I ever “spoke” with him, I had learned a lot.

With new weapons in hand and the encouragement of some key actors, I sat down to write “The Captain’s Cauldron,” book two in what I decided would be a trilogy.

More follows some other time. J.