The cover for FlashWired

... is the outcome of a little more tinkering following your feedback, but here it is in all its glory: Thank you, all. I really appreciate the time you took to come and look and comment.

Whheeee! Writers Workshop

It's up!!

The writing workshop that Sarah Madison, Jennifer Roberson and I are doing at Galacticon is up on the website!!

Delegates will *know* about it now.  They'll have the option of signing up for some yet to be specified time (grins) of minimal pontificating from us and lots and lots of fun filled activity where we flatly refuse to do all the work and will be galvanising the participants with cattle prods into learning something about how wonderful it is to write, write, write.  Or, you know, they'll have the option of deciding that they'd rather go and have a McDonalds instead.  Whatever floats their boat, but while we won't have fries with a side order of plotting and characterisation, we will have origami with post it notes!! How can they resist?

Go here to read about the SOOPER_DOOPER ASTONISHING WORKSHOP WHERE WE IS ALL WRITERS NOW and if you're coming to Galacticon, sign up and come and have FUN!

Another good reason to go to Galacticon, 23-26 May, Houston

They'll be there.

Was Deus, Now WTF?!

The novella formerly known as Deus Ex Machina is in the last stages of preparation. It's had one last read through for typos and errors and I have a first version of the cover to play with (we may go for more gold. I like a bit of glitz). Then came the crushing realisation that the title you'd though was a bit clever and ironic was considered to be a bit clever and ironic by about 16,000 other writers. Type Deus Ex Machina into Amazon and get seriously swamped by the number of books out there with clever and ironic authors.

Now, I'm all for my novella being easy to find, but not if people have to wade through a high tide of its namesakes to do it.

So. Deus  Ex Machina is no more. The search is on for a new  title, and currently I'm wavering between FlashWire and Impedance.

FlashWire (or FlashWired? Mmmn) or maybe Impedance involves Jeeze Madrid and Cal Paxton, the two top scouts on the Pathfinder-class ship, the Carson.  Their job is to find and identify planets ripe for Earth to colonise, while the scientists on the Carson carry out the final testing and analysis and any light terraforming that might be needed. They're also in a relationship that Cal wants to deepen, but Jeeze prefers the way it is. Jeeze is shot down over an inhabited planet with an energy beam of a type that none of the Earth scientists have ever seen before.  What will Cal find when, weeks later, they can finally mount a rescue operation to Menath GTal?

Well, anyway, it had cool machines and cool storage batteries. Deus Ex Machina was the perfect title since Jeeze's full name is Jesús Felipe Madrid Velázquez.  See?  Clever and ironic.  And now I have to think up something that won't be as clever or won't be as ironic, but which should fetch up on Amazon on page one, not page twenty one.

I'm inclining towards FlashWired - or Flashwired or flash wired or flash-wired

Anyway, here's the first go at the cover

and with a title... or two:

Which to choose.  Oh, which to choose?

Two reasons to love the old BSG

This. This is why I'm going to Galacticon in May.

Contact Sport Edited

Had the text back from the Dreamspinner editorial team. All very minor and really rather amusing - where I'd gone through and assiduously removed commas (I always think I over use them) they've gone and put them back. Plus a couple of places where British English differs from American, one of which I'm kicking myself about because I know where we would say 'leapt' or 'leant' or 'spelt' or 'dreamt', the US has regularised those verbs. I should have picked up that one for myself. As an aside, the verbs that the US has apparently made (kept?) as irregular and we have as regular, are the ones I'd have to force myself to use. I'm sorry, US-ians, but to say that 'Joe dove into the water'or 'Joe drug the heavy box across the room' puts my teeth on edge. And let's not get into the usage of 'shined'. I'm puzzled by a couple of places where they've added a formatting change to highlight the text, but I'll ask them about that when I send it back.

No Taxation Without Representation. Yes, indeed.

What a day. I created accounts with all the places I want to self-publish Deus Ex Machina, and found myself staring at the Amazon page in horror when it demanded my US tax number before I could go any further. Not all my telling it that "Hey! British here! And haven't we already a history about taxation, O former colony?" had any effect. The taxation tables have been well and truly turned. A few hours of WTF later, and I am now registered with the IRS as a non-resident alien and I have a tax number. Sadly that confers no rights and benefits, and merely imposes responsibilities on me to cough up a proportion of any money I make in US sales. I'm not anticipating that will be a great deal of money for the Federal coffers - a percentage of a pittance is still a pittance. It would be nice if a green card came with it and I could retire to live in Maine, but we can't have everything.

Deus Ex Machina

Well, it's done.  Novella length, about 20,750 words.  No HAE ending. This is the one I'll test self publishing with. 

Now to persuade Shelley to do the cover for me... something sexy and with fractals.  How hard can that be?

Galacticon 3

Yaaayy! The Galacticon 3 organisers have posted information about the Fanfiction panel that I'm doing with Sarah Madison and Jennifer Roberson in Houston in May! We're also doing a writers workshop that will involve lots of Post it notes and running around being energetic and engaged... I hope. It's all very exciting and it's only two months off!
I need to have finished and published Deus Ex Machina by then. Good lord help me.

Milestone

It's almost 2am here, and five minutes ago I typed the final line of the first Shield novel.  I still have to do a proper edit tomorrow to look for major plot holes, check the pacing etc.  And on a more mundane level, start weeding out the redundancies, the distancing words that push the reader out of close PoV, and sort out those darn semicolons and em-rules, both of which I overuse like crazy.

But I. Am. There.

Big moment this.  And I'm too sleepy to appreciate it!

Busy, Busy, Busy

Work's going on apace with Shield.  I'm about two thirds through the first edit, getting it into a state ready to go to an external editor. It's working well, and I'm cautiously pleased with it.  The two main characters are a great deal of fun, but I'm wondering if I'm lacking real tension here, since there's no real threat to them other than the inchoate menace of the Maess. Well, we shall have to see.

On other projects, I'm going to try for at least one more of Dreamspinner's anthologies, as I have something that might (with a lot of revision!) work for their next one.  And they have a call out for a steampunk story too.  I have about 3000 words of a steampunk story that I abandoned.  I should look at that.

And finally, I've worked out the premis for Deus Ex Machina, which would be a novella of about 18,000 -20,000 words.  I may try self publishing that one, to test the waters. The issue with it is that at the moment, I don't see an actual sex scene in it.  It's more about love that, while not unrequited, has never been consummated.  I'll have to think about whether that will run.