Okay, This Time It's Actually Released! (The Chasm of Color)

Stupid me, I made a post on Monday that said (New Release!) in the title but I ended up looking over my final draft one more time on Tuesday and found a couple more tiny things to change.

Now, finally, The Chasm of Color is out in e-book form!

I'm trying to figure out Amazon's print on demand stuff, so I'll add posts for the paperback and hardcover versions when they come out.

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The Scientific Setting of The Chasm of Color (New Release Imminent!)

The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash.

The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.

The Chasm of Color, a sample

Part of my cover photo, edited from a picture by Matt Donders, courtesy Unsplash.

My next work is another fun bit of science fiction, with another reference to the luminiferous ether, as in What the Soul Still Fears! However, instead of a story set in the modern day, The Chasm of Color takes place at around the same time as the Michelson-Morley experiment, in the late 1880s.

The protagonist, an assistant professor at the fictional Lexington University, has read the Michelson-Morley paper but is not convinced. However, he is unable to figure out a good reason for his uneasiness, until one morning over a year later...

Breakthrough!

Daft Punk Harder GIFfrom Daft Punk GIFs

Yesterday, I finally thought up an answer to a question I've been asking myself about my novel-in-progress for a while!

I finished my fourth draft a couple of weeks ago and wanted to give myself a little time and separation to give the book a fresher look next time I go back to it. (Plus, I was traveling last week and didn't get to do much thinking about writing)

Fourth draft done!

 Just finished the fourth draft of my first novel! At 77k, it's still a fairly short novel, but way better than the ~50k of draft 1.

Also, I'm really starting to like the book.

Audio/Video Story Teasers #1: The Fifth

 

In my earlier post, A New(-ish) Way to Plug, I said I was making some short teaser videos featuring excerpts from some of my short stories, and my initial idea was to throw these on Twitter or use them to make Facebook ads.

Well, I've completed a few of them, and here's what I've learned:

An Unexpected Side-Effect of Editing

Image courtesy Patrick Fore, via Unsplash

Editing a novel is an extremely time-consuming process, I'm learning. I guess I could go faster, but I feel like if I did, I would miss things and be in too much of a hurry.

I've been tracking the word count of the novel through each step of the editing process, and I thought it would be worth making a little point about the length of written works.

Don't worry too much if things seem a bit short on your first draft. As you read through and redraft, you'll find places to add material--character reactions, atmospheric details, etc.

A New(-ish) way to Plug

Yeah Good Idea Butt-head GIFfrom Yeah Good Idea GIFs

I've been reading a bit recently about marketing and all that jazz, and I came up with an idea that I'm sure has been done before, but I hadn't thought to try myself until just last weekend.

Yes, I'm still editing the novel, but bear with me:

Editing my first novel...

Just a little bit of me editing like a goober.

 

Well, phew. About a week ago I finished the rough draft of what (I think) will be the last chapter of my first novel.

I'm writing a longer story about the Misevelin Salvage crew, an adventure where they are trying to get to the bottom of a very strange event that has everyone worried: the appearance of an empty lifeboat near the orbit of Markledge (the planet where Aric & co. are based).

What the Soul Still Fears (Novella preview!)

A photo of Rome by Martin Guido at Unsplash

I am finishing up my next novella, a story of fear even deeper-seated in our beings than those peculiar reflexive reactions we have to certain shapes that suggest predators, or movements that hint at imminent attack.

Have you ever jumped because a moth flew at you?  At a peculiarly-shaped shadow in the night?  Something harmless like that?  These reactions are a part of your brain that is a relic of evolution, so ingrained that you need not even think of it--or more so--even if you think of it, sometimes you cannot resist the sheer instinctive force of your ancient reptile brain.

What if there was something that, instead of terrifying your brain, brought fear to your soul?  Something, perhaps, long banished from this world, that no human has been exposed to for hundreds or even thousands of years.  Would you shake?  Jump?  Scream?  If you did, would it be your brain doing those things?

What the Soul Still Fears follows the efforts of psychiatrist and neurologist Arthur Barstow as he is drawn into a bizarre study of the unknown by his childhood friend, physicist Luca Pellegrino.

Sample below... full version coming soon to e-book retailers!

Edit: Available now!

My Story Has a Laser... (math)

Time for more fun with real physics!

In my most recent novella, I talk about a laser in use by Luca's group in an interferometer.  Initially, I just wrote "The best measurements they had suggested that the beam might be expected to increase in size by one percent over a hundred meters, a fairly difficult feat, considering the diffraction limit at that wavelength," but damn it, I can do better than that, so let's go!

Draft of new novella finished: Immaterial Terror (tentative title)

Just finished the first draft of a cosmic horror novella I've been working on the past while.  I had an idea I liked, thought it would make a good short story, and I was 6000 words in when I realized it was going to be significantly longer than I originally thought. The full story comes out at a little under 20000 words.

Sudden productivity...

 Just pushed through a mild bit of writer's block in the last few days.  I had what I thought was an interesting seed idea for a little story, and it's actually looking like it's going to be longer than I thought.  I think that story's up over 7000 words now in just a few days of work.

Also making some more progress on the first draft of the novel, so that's good too.

I think it was an extended brainstorming session that helped get me moving again.  Never underestimate the value of clearing out your mind and writing down a bunch of stuff that's occupying your attention. Also, it's been a little cooler, which helps.

A Fun Time Writing Bad Guys

 One of the quirks of my fiction so far is that I've deliberately avoided writing villains.  For one, I'm trying to world-build a place where aggression and banditry of all sorts are rare.  For two, I find situations of man vs. nature or man vs. himself much more interesting, personally.  I love writing about intelligent people faced with a difficult problem figuring out how to overcome and succeed, and I felt like those sorts of situations were better ways to introduce and develop characters, rather than having some obvious evil for them to rail against.

Six Chapters In...

 Just a little progress report, but I figured what the heck.  That full-length Misevelin Salvage adventure I'm working on, I've got drafts of the first six chapters, coming out at about 17000 words so far.  I'm probably only about a quarter of the way through, maybe a little less.

I just finished writing detailed outlines of the next two chapters, so those are on the way in the next few days.

More Calculations

 This time, I needed to come up with a reasonable gas giant planet's parameters and calculate reasonable and minimum orbit times, so more research and more fun math!

LOL "Calculations"

 It's an easy calculation, but I thought it was funny that I wasn't willing to brush it off.  I'm working on a full novel-length story featuring the Misevelin Salvage team, and had some rough ideas about how far apart some things were, but I just needed to be absolutely sure.  I dunno, I just thought it was funny.

Is this a point in favor of hard sci-fi, or against?  Is it both?!

One Double-Edge of Hard Sci-Fi

 I just wrote the intro chapter to my first full-length novel.  It's going to be a longer, more involved adventure of the Misevelin Salvage team, with a lot more characters and stuff going on.  This is something I've been waiting to start on for a while, because I wanted to spend a little time working on short stories and novella-length works before diving into a full novel.

However, what I want to talk about in this post is how difficult it can be to write in a medium-hard or hard sci-fi system.  I've already set up that there is no artificial gravity, and that most ships don't bother to install a rotating part, since most space flights are relatively short (due to Shelf space travel--FTL, basically).

L. G. Samson Novella Well Underway

 I'm making some fun progress on my new novella.  I'm about 10k words in and really enjoying it.  Lawrence George Samson is a character I introduced in my short story "Old Forests and Older Things Within," (also available at Smashwords for free in a variety of formats) and he's my take on a pulp hero.  Forced into hiding after an incident that consumed the rest of his scientific team, he's put together a good suite of skills and technology to root out and extinguish all sorts of nasty creatures that threaten mankind.

I Guess I'm Back!

 My last post here was back in 2014, and I guess I'll just give a little background.  Around then, I was finishing up my Ph. D. in physics, or at least trying to, and things were bleak.  So I had spent some time writing to help deal with the bleakness.

By the end of 2014, it became clear that yes, I was actually going to graduate, and so I threw myself into writing my dissertation and didn't really have time to do fiction works anymore.  I finished my Ph. D. in the spring of 2015 and got a job in the fall as a real, no-kidding professional scientist.

This brings us to today.  If you look at my Blogger name (or whatever it's called), "Liberty's Advocate," you might guess I'm a freedom-loving guy.  So working as a professional scientist was fun, but it was also working (essentially) for the government (technically I was a contractor), and I didn't want to do that forever.

Then 2020 happened and it became clear that the government would do horrible things to us, seemingly for kicks and giggles.  I spent 2020 and 2021 becoming even more certain that I needed to get away from serving the government.  By the end of 2021, it looked like they were going to demand I give up my medical privacy to keep my job, and I declared my intentions to leave before that became mandatory.

It turned out that it didn't become mandatory.  The drop-dead date got pushed back a couple of times, then disappeared.  But I was already moving along this path.

So, as of the start of October 2022, they found a replacement for me and, after helping to train him on the experiment I was working on, I'm out and I'm going to be working on writing up a bunch of projects I've been building up and sitting on while I had a full-time job.  So anyone who might happen to read this blog can expect to see new pieces start appearing.

Sorry for the lengthy re-introduction, but it looks like I'm back in the fiction-writing game!  I'll be doing some non-fiction too, but I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do with it.