Month: June 2022

E________, first draft: 56,800 words

For those of you who have visited my home page in the last couple of days, I am well aware that I have some explaining to do. What, I hear you ask, was I thinking? An SF author writing a murder mystery? And in Pittsburgh of all places! Outrageous!

I promise to tell you the creation story behind A Quiet Teacher in due course. I had, in fact, intended to tell it today, but something else came up.

As a brand-new author, publishing continues to be one surprise after another. One of the odder ones (at least if you work for a mega-corp like yours truly, or, say, in retail) is that after Braking Day was published on April 5, no one could tell me how many books had been sold. Publishing is a business, after all, and someone has to know how many units are being shipped, to where, and who is paying for them. But that person is buried in a hole somewhere and not allowed to see the light of day except twice a year in October and April when the royalties are reported. There are surveys that will provide educated guesses (for a fee), but there is no way for me, as an author, to know how many copies of Braking Day you folks have got your hands on so far. For all I know at this point, it could be zero.

Well . . . except for a couple of things. First, some of you have left (mostly very nice – thank you!) reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, which means at least a few people have cracked open the book. Second, I have started to receive readers’ letters, which means that I have, well, readers. These have been, almost without exception, both kind and thoughtful, and it has been my pleasure to reply to each and every one personally.

Which brings me (at last!) to the point of this post. I recently received an interesting email from Rich H., who wrote as follows:

“Almost done with Breaking Day, couple of pages to go.

Enjoyed naming the star ships after physicists, especially Chandrasekhar who was unknown to me until I looked him up on Wikipedia.  I imagine not many Americans have heard of him either.

One thing though.  Clearly in the book water is precious, even to the point that it is used as the medium of exchange.  However I noticed many references to frost growing on surfaces inside and outside of the starship.  Just curious if water was so precious why was there no effort to recover or harvest the water from that frost?  Is there some underlying physical or engineering reason for not harvesting?

Thanks, please publish more!”

I don’t think Rich H. is a bot (though if he is, he’s a very nice one), but when I tried to reply, all I got was a bounce-back email entitled “message undeliverable.” I feel bad that Rich went to all this trouble to write an email to me and he’s never going to get an answer. Because it’s an interesting question, I thought I might share with you what I tried to send by way of a reply – and (hoping that Rich might find his way here) salve my conscience at the same time:

“Rich:

Thanks for the kind words.  They are very much appreciated!

Re your intriguing questions about frost: moisture on interior surfaces isn’t really lost, as it will return to the atmosphere when the relevant compartment warms up (obviously, there needs to be some humidity in the air as people don’t do well when it’s too dry).  As for the exterior, a ship like the Archimedes is certainly large enough to have a gravitational effect, so water that escaped from the hull would undoubtedly settle on exterior surfaces.  My thinking though (totally made up as I have never been on an interstellar voyage!) is that all sorts of other molecules would have an opportunity to land on the ship over the course of 132 years.  A lot of deep space bodies (Pluto, for instance) appear to have a reddish cast because the ices on the surface are laced with tholins.  I figured the same might occur with Archimedes over the course of its journey.  That’s why the exterior frosting is often described as pink. Tholins are poisonous, so cleaning up the ice is a task that, up till now, has not been worth the effort.  The ship still has water, after all, and it has almost arrived.  However, if the Bohr were to continue its journey into deep space with people aboard, there would come a time when the ongoing water losses would justify having drones recover as much ice from the exterior as possible.  It would be a matter of life and death!

Take care and all the best”

Reading this again, I am reminded that, for an author (or, at any rate, for me) worldbuilding is more than what you see on the page. As I’ve explained elsewhere, worldbuilding for me consists of setting a couple of basic ground rules (in this case, “real” physics and no suspended animation) and then asking and answering a bunch of questions (Why would people leave Earth? What would their descendants, who had no say in the matter, feel about colonizing a new world?). Once you’ve done that, you have a framework for your characters to live in, and then all you have to do is make sure that nothing they do or say is inconsistent with it. However, just because you know what the answers to your questions are, it doesn’t mean you can dump those answers on the page. It’s not an exam, after all. If it doesn’t drive the story – and particularly if it’s not something your characters would think about in their day-to-day – extraneous information like the cost-benefits of ice recovery will turn your hoped-for propulsive story into a bad wikipedia entry.

It’s still a shame, though. I should at least have found a way to say “tholins.” How cool a word is that?

E________, first draft: 55,000 words

Just back from attending the Cymera SFFH book festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Awesome, just awesome. It was held in the Pleasance, one of Edinburgh University’s atmospheric stone buildings near the center of town: a rambling rat warren of rooms and stages where, no matter where you turned, there was always something going on. It was fun getting lost in it. And if you were tired of getting lost, there was always a helpful volunteer nearby to put you right. So many panels, so many interesting discussions, I lost track. It was incredible. I’ve never been to a book festival before, so I’ve nothing to compare it with, but I will definitely set aside time next year to just go as a visitor, or maybe even as a volunteer. I am totally hooked! My only regret was that my day job kept intruding (thank you, President Putin), otherwise I would have been there every second it was open.

My own panel “Ad Astra,” with Ken MacLeod (Beyond the Hallowed Sky) and Harry Josephine Giles (Deep Wheel Orcadia) and moderated by Annie Rutherford was a blast. The venue was an actual theater, so it felt like being on stage for the high school play (pretty much the last time I trod the boards!) and, like a play, the stage lights were so strong I only had the faintest sense of the audience, which, for me at least, is a cast-iron shield against stage fright. Just as well because we were required to give a short reading from our books. It was intriguing to hear authors read their own works. Ken, having written 18(!) books, is clearly an old hand at this. If you like SF stories about space exploration, Beyond the Hallowed Sky is definitely one for your to-be-read list. And then there is Harry Josephine. Their book is written in the local dialect of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, with an English translation. I had wimped out and only read the English, so listening to the Orcadian, as it’s called, was fascinating. And not so hard once you hear how the various words on the page are pronounced! We then answered a slew of intriguing questions from Annie and the audience, not one of which was what are you doing here, which I half expected to be fired my way any minute.

After that the three of us did a book signing above a Blackwells pop-up bookstore (I felt like I was in a movie scene rather than real life) and then down to the store itself where (as I did on several occasions) I bought way more books than I intended. My checked bag on the way home barely came in under the weight limit. Twenty pounds of book will do that for you.

The last panel I was able to attend was Sunday afternoon’s “Growing Pains” with Kate Campbell, Judith Crow and S.K. Marlay, on the subject of YA fantasy. On top of the inherent interest of listening to authors talk about their work and why they are attracted to it, I was reminded about how hard people work at this. Stella Marlay, for instance, had to write most of her novel, The Stone Keep, in her car because it was lockdown and there was nowhere else to work. Not something I would have had the fortitude to do. The Stone Keep was my last purchase – and I got it signed!!!

Book festivals. Awesome.