Autographed Books Make Fine Gifts

I feel compelled to mention this every December, but usually I forget until it's too late to do anyone any good. (I'd say it's borderline, this year.) Anyway, if you'd like to buy a signed, personalized copy of one or more of my books for that special someone on your Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice, or New Year gift list...well, have I got a deal for you! The deal is, I'll sell them to you! No extra charge for the autograph! I'm not like those Hollywood stars who sock you $20 for an autograph. Nope, I sock you $20 for a whole book. (Fine print disclaimer: most books are actually some price other than $20.)

Check it out at http://www.starrigger.net/order.htm. Just click on the Price List for the, you know, price list. I take checks, Paypal, and credit cards (via Paypal).

And...just in time not to arrive for Christmas, the paperback edition of Sunborn is due to be published December 29! But if you observe the Twelve Days of Christmas, you could still get a copy in time for that all-important 12th day. (You'll have to buy from a bookstore, though. I doubt I'll have copies in time to fill orders that soon.) If you like, you can look at the cover, read the blurbs, and even preorder on Amazon:

And if ebooks are more your style, check out my selection, with links to a variety of outlets, including options for multiformat, DRM-free editions.

Happy first week of December, everyone!

Hoping Everyone Had a Fine Thanksgiving

Or at least, those of you in the U.S., where we just celebrated a day of remembering things we're grateful for. For me, it was an atypical one, as my wife is in Puerto Rico with her parents, and my older daughter was at her boyfriend's house. Younger daughter and I enjoyed the afternoon at the home of good friends, with lots of terrific food.

The last month has simply flown by. Teaching at MIT, and simultaneously running the Ultimate SF workshop, has been both time-consuming and thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding. All the students have been great to work with, and have been bringing some real talent to their writing projects. I'll be surprised if I don't see at least a few of their names in print in the next few years. Meanwhile, I've had a bunch of family issues going on, which has taken a lot of my energy and is one reason why I haven't posted in a month. Another is that I've been experiencing serial computer failure. First my laptop: a nasty virus infestation, then a wonky hard drive, and finally the whole machine kacked. Only a couple of days after that, my office computer blew its video card. (That, at least, was fixable.) A few days after that, my PDA fritzed out. It felt almost like a concerted attack. Anyway, I've got a new laptop, a black Dell Inspiron named Cygnus-X for the black holes Cyg X-1 and Cyg X-3 (maybe). I know some people who have had bad experiences with Dell, so wish me luck. It seems like a good machine. What really sold me on it is the keyboard—vastly better for touch typing than any of the others I tried out. Anyway, so far I really like it.

So...back to getting some real writing done soon? Here's hoping! I got some cheery encouragement in the form of actual royalties for my ebooks that went on sale last Spring. That market truly seems to be picking up.

Snow? On October 18?

Yes, indeed. I was driving to the store in the rain—and it didn't really even feel that cold out—when I noticed that some of those raindrops were falling too slowly, and splatting too big on the windshield. By the time it was over, we had a steady fall of inch-and-a-half wide snowflakes. (Two to three centimeters, for you metric folk.)

Just a little joke the warming globe is playing on us, I guess. Or not. (This is not disproof of global climate change, by the way. One of the predictions of the warming of the Earth is that climate patterns may behave in unexpected ways.) For all I know, snow in New England in mid-October is well within the range of our crazy weather, anyway. But it sure felt weird. I was just pondering taking the air conditioners out of the windows, not an hour before.

Our Ultimate SF Workshop began tonight (okay, last night at this point), and it looks like we have a great group of aspiring writers, including people from a variety of walks of life. We almost cancelled the workshop last week because we only had three confirmed students. Today we had eleven confirmed, and one more possible late-joiner. Full house! Lots of good workshopping ahead of us.

"People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. —Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." —Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Tale of the Novels: Star Rigger's Way

Picking up the thread I began a couple of months ago, I'm going to continue spinning out some of my recollections of the writing of each of my novels—how they came about, what sticks in my memory of the creation process.

I talked before about my first novel, Seas of Ernathe, which was also my first novel of the Star Rigger universe—but not the first story set in that realm. That was "Alien Persuasion," a short story that I sold to Galaxy magazine and which appeared in 1975, prior to the novel. (Jim Baen, years before he went on to found Baen Books, bought my second published story.) That was a joyous breakthrough for me. The joy was tempered by my discovery that Galaxy's publisher was seriously behind in paying its writers. Nevertheless, they did publish it, and paid me for it, if somewhat late. (I was still waiting for payment for my first story, to Fiction magazine, at that time—so Galaxy was, I think, the first publisher to actually send me a check.) The story came out with lovely scratchboard illustrations by Freff, one of which I later bought from the artist. It's hanging on my office wall right now.

What does this have to do with my second novel, Star Rigger's Way? Well, after finishing Seas of Ernathe, I was casting about for the next thing to write. I had gotten an agent, Richard Curtis, who was waiting for me to float a proposal. I thought about "Alien Persuasion," a story about a human star-rigger and an alien rigger who had to learn to work together to survive. It seemed to me that what I had so far was the beginning of a story, not the full story. So I outlined a storyline to follow, noting that a rewritten version of the short work would form the first several chapters of the novel, and sent it off to my agent. Time passed. I had, during the writing of the first novel, moved from Providence, Rhode Island to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was doing odd work to keep body and soul together. (Eventually, I worked for UPS as a sorter on the night shift, a job I truly loathed.)

In 1976 or '77, I was wandering around a local SF convention, Boskone, not knowing much of anyone. I had one novel published or about to be, and felt like a fish out of water—a pro, sort of, but not really. I eventually found myself in a quiet room, chatting with a writer and an agent. The writer was Joe Haldeman, whom I had just met at a SFWA business meeting. After a while, Joe and the agent got up to go to a publisher's party, and I meekly asked if I could tag along. Sure, they said. We went up the elevator, to a room somewhere. They went in. The host of the party, standing by the open door, stopped me and said, "I’m sorry, this isn't an open party." (In those days, closed publisher parties were much more the rule.) Then he looked at my name badge. "Jeffrey Carver," he said. "The star rigger story? I have your book proposal on my desk at Dell Books. I'm planning to call your agent on Monday to make an offer. I'm Jim Frenkel. Come on in." And that's how I got into my first publisher party and learned at the same time that I'd sold my novel.

I don't remember much about the writing of it. I've written in "Of Consoles and Dragons' Claws" some of my recollections. Mainly I remember that I was tentatively feeling my way into a career path of writing in much the same way Gev Carlyle, the hero of Star Rigger's Way, was making his way into his career of star rigging. Rather similar, the process of writing stories, and of steering starships in the Flux through the power of imagination—as my friend Jane Yolen later pointed out to me.

I had no idea that I would be writing a series of novels in the star rigger world. I was taking things one day at a time, one story at a time. This was a good beginning. The Science Fiction Book Club picked up the novel, and that got it in front of many more readers than the paperback alone would have. Years later, Tor reprinted it, and I had the chance to do a thorough line edit of the text. And now, just last spring, I went through it one more time, for the Ereads ebook. And rather to my surprise—I really enjoyed reading it again.

If you get the chance to read it, I hope you enjoy it, too.

Joe Haldeman Update: Good News

Things are looking much better in Joe's recovery. According to his wife Gay, he's out of intensive care and in a rehab facility. He's able to sit up, eat a little, talk a little, and—according to Gay—smile a lot. I'm guessing he's really happy to be alive and kicking, and surrounded by his wife and friends. I expect he has a ways to go on the road to recovery, but it's all just so much more hopeful now.

Meanwhile, I'm settling into the business of teaching a university class, and continuing to enjoy working with the students there. Next week, they'll be handing in rough drafts of their short stories, and we'll be dissecting them (in a nice way) in workshop sessions. I got my MIT employee card—I look like part of the maintenance staff—and put it right to work at the MIT Humanities and Sciences Library. There was a book I wanted to use for next week's class, and they didn't have it. Some hunting around established that it was available in quasi-ebook format, and darned if they didn't get it for me to read on my computer in just a couple of days. (The interface to read it is atrocious—the people at netlibrary and the publishers who work with them should join the 21st Century and learn how to make real ebooks—but that's not the fault of the folk at the library. My hat's off to them for being so helpful.)

Meanwhile (again), my own Ultimate SF Workshop is gearing up to start this weekend. Craig (Gardner) and I weren't sure if we'd have enough people to run it, but we delayed the start by a week, and that seems to have made the difference.

MIT SF Writing Class

Today the paperwork rolled for me to become Visiting Wizard at MIT, and I met for the first time with Joe Haldeman's SF Writing class. (Actually, my title will be "temporary lecturer." But Visiting Wizard is so much more motivating, don't you think?) The class went well, considering that I jumped in midstream, and was trying to fill Joe's shoes without too much sense of disruption. The students pitched right in and participated, and I found them to be a bright, interesting, and likable bunch. Good insights, and a lot of enthusiasm. I enjoyed meeting them all and look forward to reading their work. I was helped immeasurably by the volunteer assistance of Antony Donovan, a former student who is now Joe's longtime friend and helper.

Meanwhile, Joe remains in intensive care in a hospital in Cincinnati, with his wife Gay right there surrounded by friends who are helping her in every way possible. He's been under sedation (unconscious, mostly) and on a ventilator for over a week now, following emergency surgery for twisted bowel and a severely inflamed pancreas. It seems to be the latter that's keeping him in stable critical condition with a steady fever. I don't know anyone in the SF field who doesn't love Joe and Gay, so we're all just waiting and hoping. He's got a lot of people sending thoughts and prayers his way.

Flashforward Flashes

It isn't often that any of us get to see our work turned into film or TV, and even less often that it's done well. When my friend Rob Sawyer sold his novel Flashforward to ABC for a new series, I was happy for him—but not necessarily optimistic about what the results would be. Well, so far, I call it a major success story!

We watched the first episode of Flashforward last night, and I thought it totally rocked. Well written, engrossing, good acting with likable characters. All told, I was left eager to see how this series will develop. This is one of Rob's books that I had never gotten around to reading, so I can't comment on how the show compares with the text, but from what I understand Rob is pleased with what they've done.

My only complaint: the credit that said "From the novel by Robert J. Sawyer" was in miniscule print at the end, and lasted for approximately a quarter of a second. Come on, ABC! You can do better than that to recognize the original author!

Otherwise, great job!

Pinch-hitting for Joe

In recent months life has thrown a fair number of curveballs, including some pretty nasty ones, to people close to me. I haven't written about it, mostly because it's personal to those folk (although I might mention that my wife loses her job this week—funding gone—so that one's close to home). The latest is that my friend and colleague Joe Haldeman—whose work I'm sure you know—great writer, great guy—was taken seriously ill last weekend. He's in the hospital in intensive care right now. (Prognosis good, I'm happy to say.) One spin on this particular curve ball is that Joe's SF writing class at MIT was left temporarily without a teacher. I got a call. And yes, I'll be filling in for Joe for however long it takes him to get back on his feet.

So, for at least some weeks, I'm going to be, sort of...part of the MIT faculty. There's a sobering thought. Doesn't MIT, like, run the world or something?

Ironically, I was just gearing up for the beginning of my own Ultimate SF Writing Workshop, which I co-lead with Craig Shaw Gardner. So it looks like I'll be working with student writers on Sunday nights (Ultimate SF) and Tuesday nights (MIT). I think it's going to be a busy next few months.

If you're in the Boston area and are looking for an intensive SF/F writing workshop, check us out! Registration is now open.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Okay, I haven't posted in at least three weeks. Bad dog! I have no excuse, except for the fact that I just didn't feel like posting, and so I didn't. But now I repent, and to atone, I have three great videos. They might not all be new to all of you, but I just saw them for the first time. Not only do I love 'em, I didn't have to do a thing to make them! Kudos to those who did!

Now, I'm not a huge Dr. Horrible fan in the same the way that my daughter is, but when I saw "Dr. Horrible Takes Over the Emmys," I knew I had to post it here:

http://doctorhorrible.net/dr-horrible-takes-over-the-emmys/1066/

Dr. Horrible isn't the only mad scientist around. Pay attention to these researchers from CERN, giving us the Large Hadron Rap! You'll not only get your limbs going, you'll learn something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
and Alpinekat's page, with more rap:
http://www.katemcalpine.com/lhr.html

And finally, just for a little political controversy, here's Will Ferrell, et al., for Moveon.org, explaining just why the proposed U.S. health care reform is a really bad idea!

Protect Insurance Companies PSA
from Will Ferrell and moveon.org

Eventful Week!

Here, I thought I'd gotten myself set up for a nice roll of posts, one for each book—how hard could that be. Ah well, the best-laid plans. That schedule, like summer, has slipped away from me. I'm still going to do it, but for right now, here's a catch-up.

This last week saw us buying a new car (!), thanks to the latest breakdown of our old, much loved, Aerostar van coinciding with the U.S. government's Cash for Clunkers program. We took the plunge on the last day of the program, sneaking in just under the wire after driving all over the greater Boston area looking for the car we wanted. It's a Ford Fusion, and it looks just like this stock photo:

We love our new car. It's comfortable and drives great and gets good mileage for a nonhybrid, and it's like a spaceship cockpit on the inside. Voice-activated control over my Zune, for heaven's sake! Thanks to the Sync feature, I can press a button on the steering wheel and say, "Play artist Dido," and it'll play Dido. Or "Play playlist Roadtunes," and it'll do that. It's just so damn cool. (I'm also extremely grateful to those who helped make it possible for us to buy it, I should add.) By sheerest coincidence, we picked it up on my birthday. I ain't saying how old I am, but it was a milestone birthday, and let's leave it at that.

That very night, I heard the sad news that Senator Ted Kennedy had died. This breaks my heart. He was, I believe, one of the finest senators who ever served in the U.S. Congress. A wealthy man by birth, he devoted himself tirelessly to the cause of the poor, the disadvantaged, the underserved—and he did it right up to the end. Yes, he had personal failings, there's no denying that. But I will be forever grateful for his public service, and his willingness to reach across the aisle even as he stuck to his guns as a died-in-the-wool liberal Democrat. I just pray that someone will step up who can fill those shoes.

Tomorrow the new car, code-named Centauri, takes its first big run. Yes, summer is over and it's time to take Alexandra back to college. Road trip!

Tale of the Novels: Seas of Ernathe

I've posted here about the new editions of my earlier novels, but I haven't talked much about the books themselves, how they came about, and what they meant to me when I wrote them. Well, where better to do that than here on Pushing a Snake Up a Hill, which by the way is a pretty good summary of how my writing career has often felt.

Let me start with my first book, Seas of Ernathe. It's not just my first novel, but my first novel of the Star Rigger universe, a future history that I've enjoyed writing in, and that seems popular with readers. It's not the first story in the Star Rigger chronology, though. In fact, it's the last! It's set in a time long after the skills of starship rigging were lost to humankind. It's about the rediscovery of the art of rigging.

How did that happen? Do I always do things bassackwards? No, not always. But in this case, I didn't actually know much about the history at the time I was writing. I can't say exactly why this particular story popped into my head, but here's how it happened:

Go back to 1974 or 1975. I was living with some friends in Providence, Rhode Island, just off the edge of the Brown University campus (from which I'd graduated in 1971), working on short stories while waiting tables, teaching scuba diving, and diving for quahogs in Narragansett Bay to make ends meet (barely). I'd sold a couple of stories: the first to Boston's Fiction Magazine, for a promise of $50 (collected years later), and the second to Galaxy. In both cases, the magazines went bust not long after publishing my stories—not my fault, I swear! In any case, the story published in Galaxy was called "Alien Persuasion," and was my first expedition into the tricksy Flux of rigger space, where star-pilots navigated through a sensory web in a hyperdimensional realm that was objectively real, but that took a tangible form based on images projected from the rigger's mind. (Remind me to tell you more about that when I write about Star Rigger's Way.)

During this time, I'd been submitting short stories to some of the original anthology editors—in particular, Robert Silverberg for New Dimensions and Terry Carr for Universe. Both had responded with encouraging rejections. On one occasion, in 1974 (or possibly 1975), Terry Carr wrote back with another rejection—but with a twist. He asked if I'd like to write a novel. It seemed he had made a deal with a new SF line to sign up new writers and shepherd their books into print. If I could just send him an outline and three sample chapters...

I stood dumbfounded, his letter in my hand—then flew to my Olympia manual typewriter and began pounding out an idea for a novel—a completely new idea, one that had come into my mind just at that moment, when needed. It made use of my star rigger background, indirectly, and also my underwater experience as a scuba diver. The story was set on a watery world called Ernathe. Visitors to that world wanted to know what strange tricks of the mind enabled sea creatures of that realm, the Nale'nid, to focus on reality in ways that enabled them to travel instantaneously, and to manipulate matter in a variety of ways. Could this be connected to the secret of the lost art of star rigging? Perhaps, perhaps...

I wrote the novel in a little less than a year, if memory serves. By the time it was finished, I'd moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was living with a different set of roommates and working the night shift sorting boxes for UPS. Seas of Ernathe was published by Laser Books in the summer of 1976.

I clearly remember the moment I first saw a copy—not, as you might think, an advance copy from the publisher. No, I was walking down Mass. Ave. in Central Square when I encountered Drew Whyte, an SF fan I had gotten to know during the previous year. Drew always had bags of books with him. On this occasion, he had a copy of my new book, which I had not yet laid eyes on. He passed it to me. There it was. My first novel. In print, at last! I had done it! It was real! Huzzah!

Cover art by Kelly Freas

I hated the cover instantly. Noted SF artist Frank Kelly Freas had been hired to do all the covers for the Laser Books series. Apparently he wasn't given much money or much time, because to say the least, the Laser covers were not the highlight of his otherwise distinguished career. Lord, I didn't know whether to cheer or weep. I settled on cheering.

Seas of Ernathe stayed in print for a year or so, and then it was gone. But it had set me on an important writing path, starting with making the transition from short stories to novels. The next two books were also star rigger books; more on those later. For now, I'm happy to say that Seas of Ernathe is back in print, from E-reads. You can get it as an ebook from a variety of outlets, including Baen Webscriptions and Fictionwise, both of which offer it in multiple, DRM-free formats, including for the Sony Reader, the Kindle, and the iThing. You can also get it as a trade paperback wherever fine SF trade paperbacks are sold! Here, I'll make it easy. :)

Tor.com and Ereads.com Today

It's been fascinating to watch the parade of commentary by SF authors on tor.com today, as we communally celebrate the 40th anniversary of our arrival on the Moon. (The servers there were getting pretty maxed out for a while, so loading was slow, but they seem to have it under control now.) My own contribution appeared during the early hours and has scrolled onto the second page by now, but I'm in good company, coming between Joe Haldeman and Charlie Stross. (Here's a permalink to the Moon Landing Day celebration. More of a directory, though. If you're reading this on July 20, better to go to the main page.)

At first there was no cool picture to accompany my post, but they've now added one, and I'm happy!


Also, whether by coincidence or design, Ereads.com picked today to do a nice writeup on my books. They couldn't have picked a better day for it!

Lunar Footsteps, 40 Years Ago Today

It's been forty years since we went to the Moon! Hard to believe, isn't it? I was mentioning memories of the lunar landing to some people the other day, and they looked at me like, What is this ancient history of which you speak? This is what I spoke of:





















That's Neil Armstrong, taking one small step for a man (which I watched on live TV, with breath sucked in and a pounding heart); and on the right, Buzz Aldrin getting his chance in the lens. And don't miss this stunning panorama of the Lunar Module and the surrounding area, taken by Armstrong. (It's too wide to put on this page.)

Check tor.com throughout the day for commentary from various writers (including me!) on their recollections of the historic event. Adding a somber note to the memory is the passing the other day of Walter Cronkite, with whom I watched much of the manned space program in the early years.

The one thing I never dreamed as I watched the lunar landing and exploration was that we'd go to the Moon and then not go back for at least forty years. I have guarded hope for the future.

"And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Readercon, BoingBoing, and Lives Passing

Readercon happened last weekend, and as always, it was a good time. The high points for me, this year, aside from seeing good friends and making some new ones, was a series of workshops that were held more or a less as a sideline to the main programming. Barry Longyear held one on writer's block, Ellen Klages ran one on using improv techniques to free up creativity (which kept us laughing for two hours), and finally Mary Robinette Kowal gave excellent advice on techniques for delivering effective readings (just in time for my own reading, which followed shortly afterward). The only downside of all this was spraining my foot, while participating a little too exuberantly in one of the improv skits.

Home again, and back to the salt mines. Lucky thing they serve frozen margaritas in salt mines! I got a request to write a contribution to a remembrance of the Apollo 11 Moon landing for tor.com, which I did, appearing soon. I got the fixed-up, wide-screen version of my Sunborn video put up on my own youtube channel (which I hope to expand with some excerpts from my educational, distance-learning TV series from back in 1995, just as soon as I have time to view and edit them). I sent off a note to boingboing.net about it, because as you probably know, they compile collections of all sorts of cool things. I headed off to bed—and the next morning got a congratulatory note from a friend about my video appearing on BoingBoing! The funny thing is, it was posted—with my accompanying words—a few hours before I sent it to them! Time zones, time zones... or is it something more sinister, something... well, I won't pursue those thoughts further.

The other thing that happened about the same time was reading of the deaths of writer Phyllis Gotlieb, and of Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus. I didn’t really know either of them personally. But I had just seen Charlie Brown in passing at Readercon, and to read of his death the following day was quite a jolt. You can read about both of them at the Locus website, or, for that matter, on boingboing, where Cory Doctorow wrote touching tributes.

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience." —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Sunborn Video

A while back I wrote that I'd been working on a video piece for a theatrical arts festival called Lydia Fair, sponsored by the Greater Boston Vineyard of Cambridge. Now you can see my video on YouTube!

It is what I would call a video narration, or maybe an audio visualization—or maybe one of you can suggest a more elegant name—of the prologue to Sunborn. I recorded the narration and blocked out the basic image storyboard. Then a talented fellow named Adam Guzewicz worked video and sound wizardry on it, animating parts of it from still images (which I gleaned from various NASA websites), and adapting other animation (ditto on the source). I'm lucky, I guess—that I wrote a prologue that actually could be set to astronomical images.

If you'd like to view it in a wide-screen version, go directly to the YouTube page or to my website. (Wide images on this page seem to cause problems for some viewers, so I try to keep them small.)

For best effect, set the viewer to full-screen and high-quality mode, and turn up the sound a bit. Enjoy!

Odyssey Interview

Workshops R Us. A week and a half ago, the advanced novel-writing workshop that I run with Craig Gardner came to an end for this year. It was a seriously good ending, as every one of the six participants is working on material with definite publication potential—some closer to being ready than others, but all good. It was a terrifically encouraging workshop, and I'm especially cheered that the group is going off and continuing to meet and support each other on their own now.

With that done, I'm leaving shortly for a brief stint as instructor-for-a-day at the Odyssey Workshop in New Hampshire, another seriously good program, a much denser and more immersive workshop. I'm going to be working with the participants there on issues of story structure and how plot, conflict, and characterization all play into it.

Odyssey did an online interview with me a while back, and I thought it would be appropriate to reproduce it here, just before I leave. Herewith, the Odyssey interview:

Once you started writing seriously, how long did it take you to sell your first piece? What were you doing wrong in your writing in those early days?

I guess I would call my writing in college the point at which I was writing seriously—by which I mean, trying to produce real stories that someone might want to read, or even publish. I'd had encouragement at that point from family and teachers, including a college writing teacher who told me he thought my work was publishable. It wasn't. I didn't know that yet, but the encouragement helped keep me going as I ever so slowly learned the craft of storytelling. It would be another six years and a file full of rejections before I sold my first short story (to Fiction magazine, in Boston).

If I had realized sooner what I was doing wrong, I might have shortened that learning period considerably. The problem was, I wasn't telling complete stories. I was going with what people told me were my strengths—description and characterization—and missing the need to tell an interesting story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I didn't understand about story structure. I was writing mood pieces, story fragments. My teachers weren't really versed in SF, or even in anything resembling conventional storytelling standards, and they weren't able to give me the direction I needed. I had no workshop to turn to, and was really writing on my own, with occasional feedback from editors like Terry Carr and Robert Silverberg, who liked my work well enough to at least hint at what they didn't like, as they returned my stories. It wasn't until years later that I found a source of good, regular criticism, when I met Craig Gardner and he invited me to join the writing group he was a part of. He and I are still members of that group-thirty years later! And Craig and I now run our own writing workshops in the Boston area.

Why do you think your work began to sell?

I'd learned just enough about putting a story together, and the craft of writing narrative prose, to make it over the bar to become publishable. Little did I know at that point how much more I had to learn—and am still learning! But I think the turning point was realizing, somewhere deep in the subconscious, that I had to bring an interesting character through a conflict and to a resolution of that conflict. I think I had to find a balance between the ambiguity that was interesting to me and the kind of resolution that was satisfying to a reader.

As a science fiction writer, I would imagine you devote a certain amount of time to actual research in order to enhance your stories and their believability. When, in your writing process, do you start researching, and how long does it take? Do you have any tips on making the research process more simple? Any favorite websites you frequent?

The amount of research I need to do varies wildly from one story to the next. Sometimes I do none; sometimes I do a lot. When I say none, of course, I'm sort of lying; all of life is research for my writing. All my human interactions, all my experiences as a kid and as a parent, as a loner and as a husband, come to bear on my characters. All my reading, much of it in areas of science and public affairs, influences my stories. Though I didn't major in science, I've always been a science junkie, and my general knowledge of science has been important to my ability to tell stories with scientific plausibility. For particular stories, I've done targeted research: nanotechnology, cosmic strings, and supernovas for From a Changeling Star; chaos theory and the Voyager spacecraft findings about Neptune and Triton for Neptune Crossing; tachyons for The Infinity Link; stellar nurseries and stellar evolution for Sunborn. For The Infinite Sea, I drew heavily on my experience as a scuba diver and the knowledge I'd gained from that, years before.

I do the research when I realize I need to. That sometimes happens early, sometimes late in the process. My biggest "Oops!" in research was waiting to do some of the supernova research for From a Changeling Star until I was nearly finished. (Stupid, stupid.) I had consulted with an astronomer friend, but hadn't taken his advice to check with his friend, who was a supernova specialist. When I finally did, I learned that I'd gotten some important things wrong. So while my editor was tapping her foot impatiently, waiting for the manuscript, I was busily rebuilding certain key points in the book, getting it right. (I knew that not one reader in a thousand would know the difference. But now that I knew the difference, I had to fix it.) It didn't help that it was an amnesia story as well, and some of these key points were being revealed gradually through the story, so I had to change not just one place, but many places. My advice: Don't do that.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend the NASA-sponsored Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in Wyoming. This is an annual, week-long intensive astronomy course tailored for writers, and covers everything from the basics up through cutting-edge research. A great experience, and one I highly recommend for pro or near-pro writers.

The website I most frequent is Google. Okay, I guess that's not very helpful. I do check Astronomy Picture of the Day every day. And I get the New Scientist and Discover e-newsletters, which send me down some interesting paths. (I also subscribe to those magazines, as well as to Astronomy, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker.) Mostly, though, I just follow my nose when something looks interesting. I also sometimes, when I need to know something about a subject, find an expert and ask. Very helpful, that.

What's the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

Finding time and concentration to write, the same as (I'll bet) for many of your students. It hasn't gotten any easier over the years. Being a parent and needing to earn income in other ways have, at times, had to take priority over the writing. That's just life, and I'm not as good at time-sharing my mental and creative work as some people are. How do I cope? I keep at it, and don't give up (even when I want to). In the actual creative process, I seem to keep taking on story ideas that are more and more ambitious, and more difficult to pull off. This is probably a good thing artistically, and always feels rewarding in the end. But it doesn't always feel good when I'm in the middle of it!

For me, the hardest part is getting a first draft down. Once I have the clay in my hands, so to speak, I find it much easier to work at reshaping it.

Your 2008 release, SUNBORN, is the fourth book of your CHAOS CHRONICLES series. The first book of this series, NEPTUNE CROSSING, came out in 1995 and is unfortunately out of print. Can you talk about what it's like to write a series that spans such a great length of time, in publishing terms?

In publishing and marketing terms, what I did with the Chaos books was sheer idiocy. The long gap between the first three books and Sunborn resulted from my taking time out to write Eternity's End, set in my Star Rigger universe. That book proved really hard to write and took something like six years to finish. It was well received, and got me a Nebula nomination; but the problem coming out of it was that the Chaos trail had grown cold by the time I got back to book four. My outlines no longer made much sense to me, and it took a long time to rebuild momentum. In addition, with Sunborn, I was tackling what turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult narrative challenge: telling a story of cosmic-scale events, but keeping it personal and immediate on the human level. I hope I succeeded, but not without heading down many a wrong path in the process. Still, once I had the initial draft done, I felt for the first time that I knew what I was doing, and I could tackle the rewrite with a clearer sense of the story.

By pure coincidence, the day after I finished the first draft of Sunborn, my editor called and asked me if I'd like to write a novelization of Battlestar Galactica (the miniseries). That was something I was required to do fast, but it was fun and a welcome change of pace. I was retelling someone else's story, so I was able to use other parts of my brain to focus purely on the craft. It was just what the doctor ordered.

Once Sunborn was done, another year or two down the road, the book was scheduled for publication—and then delayed yet another year for reasons internal to the publishing process. That was pretty frakking hard to take, but it did give me an opportunity to revise some sections after having some months away from the book.

So, there I was, with Book 4 of an out-of-print series scheduled for publication. Tricky, from a marketing viewpoint. (I try to avoid the word "suicidal.") I knew I needed to do something to renew audience interest in the series—and to try to bring new readers to it. Creating a national scandal might have been a good choice—but I'm not a very scandalous person. So I went with Plan B, which was to release all the earlier books in ebook format, for free download from my website. (You can download them right now, in fact, at http://www.starrigger.net/Downloads.htm.) The results were immensely gratifying. I got many emails from readers who said this was the first they'd heard of me, and now they were looking for my other books, as well. So it definitely increased interest in the series. Did it boost sales of the hardcover book? Damned it I know. (Well, I'm sure it did, but I haven't a clue as to how much.)

Do you write each installment to be read as a stand-alone, or is each book in the series interconnected, so knowledge of previous volumes is necessary to understand the current one? Do you have any advice for writers working on multiple-book series of their own, and would you handle your own series any differently now than when you first started?

The story is a continuing arc, but each volume is a self-contained story that comes to a conclusion—and sets the stage for the next. I worked hard to build enough recap into the early parts of the stories that someone could pick up any book and enjoy it. But no question, the best way to read the series is from the beginning.

Advice to others? Don't do what I did! (That's my advice for investing in the stock market, too. Watch what I do. Then do something different.) I'm only partly serious, of course, but that part is sincere. I think where I went wrong was thinking that I could write a series of short, snappy novels that cumulatively would form a long, complex story. (This, you see, is what I always seem to do—write long, complex stories. I was trying to find a way to do it in a more sustainable way.) Then each Chaos book turned out a little longer than the one before, and soon I was writing a series of long, complex stories. People seem to like them. I'm proud of having written them. But making me independently wealthy, they're not. :)

Your work is known for strong characterization and internal conflict. How do you use that internal conflict to create a character arc for the whole novel? Do you plan it out in advance, or do you discover it as you write? And how do you tie your characters' internal conflict with the external conflict of the larger story?

Well, geez, if I tell you that now, what am I going to talk about when I get to the workshop?! I'll tell you this much: I always have some vision for the overall story and character arc before I start writing. But much of it, I discover as I write. I seem to require the tension of being in the middle of the story to draw the full understanding of the character conflict out of my subconscious. I'm a very intuitive writer. Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing until I've done it. There are people who can do all of that before setting down a word of the story. I hates them! (Preciousss...)

As a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

To quote the captain in the movie Galaxy Quest: "Never surrender! Never give up!" Or was it the other way around? Anyway, that's the approach you have to take in writing. It can be terribly frustrating and discouraging when you can't seem to get it right, or you think you've gotten it right and then a reader tells you, no, it's actually still just warmed over beetle-dung, and you want to throw it all in the river. That's when you have to remember those words. Not to shout in defense of what you've written, but to take a deep breath and keep at it until you do, finally, get it right.

Oh, and try to write something you would want to read yourself.

What's next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

I am currently doing battle with the first draft of the fifth book of The Chaos Chronicles, tentatively titled, The Reefs of Time. Damn if I didn't once more set myself some challenges that I don't yet know the solution to. Why do I keep doing this?

I'm also working on getting all of my backlist into "print" as ebooks.

And I'm just finishing a short video piece for an arts festival sponsored by a local church: an audio visualization—for lack of a better term—of the fairly cosmic prologue to Sunborn. I hope to have that up for online viewing in a few weeks. I'll put a link on my downloads page once it's available. It's 3 minutes long, and I think it's pretty cool. Stop by and check it out! [Update: I'm still waiting for a few final changes by the guy who did much of the video editing. Soon.]

"If you wish to be a writer, write." —Epictetus

SF Authors at Falmouth MA Public Library

Yikes! Can it really be two weeks since I last posted? Yes, I guess it has been. Well, I've been kicked into action by the need to let folks know (belatedly, yes, yes) about this:

Tomorrow evening (June 17), I'll be appearing with a small group of other SF/F folk at the Falmouth Public Library on Cape Cod. Joining me will be Jennifer Pelland, Michael Burstein, and Walter Hunt, all from eastern Massachusetts. We'll be talking about our work, answering questions, and (we hope!) selling and autographing books.

Falmouth Public Library, 300 Main St., Falmouth, Massachusetts. 7:00 – 9:00

If you're in the area, why not stop by?

And Now On To Baen Webscriptions!

A fine day, book-wise. My whole slate of E-Reads titles appeared today on Baen Webscriptions, along with two Rudy Rucker titles, as part of the E-Reads June package (11 books for 60 bucks). They are, of course, available individually as well. If you missed the Fictionwise sale (now over), this is a great segue: they're on sale at Webscriptions for $6 each, for a limited time. And at Baen the books are always multiformat and DRM-free.

Meanwhile, I got word from E-Reads that the books at Fictionwise have been selling strong out of the gate, which is good news indeed. Before this big push and the free downloads program, my ebooks sold hardly at all. Now, we seem to be turning that around, and a whole new audience really does seem to be discovering my work, and picking up my backlist, as well.

Finally, I've gotten several really encouraging and heartfelt emails from readers who have done just that—found my freebies and gone on to read the others. (Some have made generous donations, as well.) It's just so encouraging and restorative to have folks finding and bring the older books back to life!

Link and Seas Now in Ebook

The final two titles of the new Ereads push appeared yesterday on Fictionwise! Now available in multiple, DRM-free formats are The Infinity Link and Seas of Ernathe. (And for a limited time, they're 40% off.) This is the first time in over thirty years that Seas of Ernathe has been in print. The Infinity Link has been unavailable for close to twenty years.

With the exception of Alien Speedway (see post of a few days ago), all of my novels are now available in ebook format. A number of them are, or soon will be, available in trade paperback, print-on-demand format, as well.

If you were thinking of giving some of these novels a try, now's the ideal time, while they're still discounted! See my ebooks page for all available titles.

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." —Benjamin Franklin

What Do West Wing and BSG Have in Common?

I wrote this days ago, and then forgot to post it! Ah, me. I got busy picking up my daughter from college, and one thing led to another, and here we are. In the U.S., it's Memorial Day, a time to remember with gratitude those who have fallen in defense of our nation. Maybe that's not such a bad occasion to offer some reflections on Battlestar Galactica, whose fictional crew sacrificed much in the defense of humanity.

As we all know, BSG ended recently, and my comments on that (which I posted earlier on another website) will follow in a moment. But lately my family and I have been watching another favorite show, The West Wing, from the beginning. (I picked up the complete DVD set for a relative song on ebay.) I've been vividly struck by two things these shows have in common:

1. Edward James Olmos! I had seen him before, as Judge Mendoza, but had not recognized the actor. Prior to BSG, I wasn't all that aware of Olmos, although I realize now that he's been in a lot of great stuff, including the movie Blade Runner (where, as in BSG, they talked about "skin jobs").

2. Brilliant writing of human drama and engaging dialogue, coupled with a thundering inability to write anything about science. In West Wing, if I feel any reference to science coming on, I steel myself to groan. I know I will. Perfect example: In one episode, Sam is concerned about a UFO that's been tracked for several hours from Hawaii to the American coast. It turns out to be harmless—a Russian rocket booster that (paraphrased from memory) "failed to achieve a high enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity." That's just stupid on so many levels. But let's start with the fact that a reentering booster would burn up in a matter of minutes, not hours, and that the tracking people would know exactly what it was the whole time. In the commentary below, I mention a similar lapse in credibility from BSG. The thing is, the writing on both shows was so terrific otherwise that I was completely willing to forgive these lapses. It's funny, because I would never overlook that kind of dunderheadedness if I were reading a work of hard science fiction. That must say something about the importance of expectations as a viewer or reader.

Here's my BSG commentary, reprinted from SF Signal's Mind Meld:

Much has been written about the end of our beloved Battlestar Galactica. I avoided reading most of it until recently, because I hadn't seen the ending and didn't want any spoilers. (Yes, I wrote the miniseries novelization, and at the time was given access to a limited amount of insider background information—though not enough to keep me from writing a few things that shortly became "noncanonical." But I had no more idea than you did where the story was going in the end.) A couple of weeks ago, I finally watched the last few episodes in one long burst.

Whoa. Not altogether what I'd hoped for—but powerful stuff nonetheless.

My reactions were intense and complex. On the one hand, it was a stunningly choreographed conclusion, breathlessly paced, and to me at least satisfying in the sense that we finally found resolution, and our characters, battered and bruised, finally found a measure of peace. Even Kara. Yes, even Kara Thrace, Starbuck. The change of tone at the very end was perhaps a bit overdone. But I felt our people had earned it.

That they found and settled the world known to us as "Earth" came, of course, as no surprise. Most of us, I think, had been expecting an Adam and Eve story (or should I say, Adama and Eve) all along. How could it have been different? It seemed built into the very fiber of the series, from the start. And while the "Adam and Eve" story is perhaps one of the most clichéd ideas in all of science fiction, there is no reason that even a clichéd story cannot be retold in a fresh and engaging way. So I had long ago decided to forgive that point, granting that if the BSG people could tell it in a sufficiently original way, I wouldn't quibble.

So, did they or didn't they? Well...yes and no.

Plausibility-wise, the notion that the fleet would agree to transport all of the people down to a wilderness planet, equipped only with what they could carry, give or take a few Raptors, and send the rest of their considerable technology into the sun, was absurd. Suspension of disbelief—come back! What else can I say about that? Except it was probably considered necessary to the plot not to have too much star technology lying around to be unearthed by latter-day Indiana Joneses.

But BSG has never been about plausibility in the scientific or technological sense. Do we all remember back in—Season 3, was it?—when the fleet had to fly through an exploding star, instead of...um, going around it? And does anyone believe that after all this time, they would have left the fleet dependent on just one Tylium ship to supply the needs of everyone? Okay, forget scientific plausibility. It was never there to be an issue. When I wrote the miniseries novelization, this was something I encountered in a multitude of small ways, and I did my best to strengthen plausibility where it felt thin. But this BSG has always been about other things, anyway—humanity at war with its own worst elements, and the dark places of the soul where people find the strength to endure, and to fight back. For all of its edges, it was never hard SF; it was pure human-drama SF, and every time it careened near the edge of a cliff even in those terms, it always somehow staggered back.

So forget the scientific plausibility part. What about the angels? Starbuck—an angel? That seemed to stick in a lot of craws, including my wife's and daughter's, mainly because it seemed from out of left field, and not terribly...well, plausible. For one thing, how come Starbuck was a solid, hard-drinkin', kick-your-ass physical kind of angel, while the Six and Baltar angels were purely will o' the wisps, here this minute, gone the next, visible to no one else? And why did Starbuck have to go through such torment, trying to discover who she was? Is she the only angel who doesn't know she's an angel? I grant all of those quarrels. And yet—despite my qualms, I kind of liked it. For one thing, how many real SF shows have ever been willing even to entertain the notion of there actually being a God (even if he doesn't like to be called that, says Baltar), or heavenly or spiritual beings? BSG had the nerve to do that, and do it baldly, in midst of a gritty human drama. Did they do it successfully? Certainly not all the time, and probably not at the very end. But my hat's off to them for trying.

Having written a BSG book in which I was invited to make up answers to some questions that the producers couldn't, at that point, answer for me, I was perhaps a little oversensitive to certain small points in the conclusion. One that comes to mind is Caprica Six, who had no name in the miniseries. I called her Natasi in my novel (and no, I didn't notice that Natasi was "I Satan" backwards until a reader pointed it out). That seemed fine with the BSG staff at the time. Later, David Eick was quoted as saying that he'd imagined that Baltar never knew Six's name, even as he carried on a torrid affair with her. Truthfully, I never found that believable. Then we saw it happening, in the final chapter, and I went, "Gah!" You win some and you lose some.

I will defend the writers against charges of racism stemming from the interpretation that the fleet personnel obviously subjugated and lorded it over the indigenous population, right up through the present day. What (goes the argument) about the African origins of humanity, which present-day evidence strongly supports? Well, as I read the ending, fleet personnel gradually intermingled with the native population, as their remaining technology wore out or failed, and thus 21st Century humanity is very much a blend of the native and immigrant forms of human. So Lucy and Eve and all of our other forebears are still very much a part of the picture. As for the Cylon blood—well, I guess there's a little bit of that in our DNA now. Somewhere along the way, we lost the glowing spines, though. Tough break, that.

But now we know: "All Along the Watchtower" is in our racial memory. It just took Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to give it back to us.

(Check out other authors' comments on the earlier Mind Meld page.)

Alien Speedway to Return to Print

The one book of mine that's been missing from the ebook reprint schedule has been an odd little number that in a way is one of my favorites: Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway: Clypsis. It's a borderline YA novel (actually written as YA, but published as regular SF), the first volume of a collaborative project between Roger Zelazny, author Tom Wylde (who wrote books 2-3), and me. I wrote it quickly, based on a background and outline that Roger had created. (I know: Me? Write a book quickly?)

I had a lot of fun with it, filled its cast with minor characters named after friends and family, and it drew a great response from the audience. For a couple of years, I heard from more readers about Clypsis than about any of my other books. And then it went out of print, and that was that. Ever since, I have been looking for a way to bring it back.

The problem is, I'm not the copyright owner. Byron Preiss Visual Publications was, because it was one of their many concept creations. Then Byron Preiss died, in a tragic traffic accident, and not too long afterward, his company went into bankruptcy. That left this book as a very small fish in a big, sad pond. But, in time, the assets of BPVP were bought by Brick Tower Press. And I have just received word that Brick Tower plans to republished Speedway, in both print and ebook format.

No indication of a date yet. But I'm most pleased.

Stunning Galaxy-rise

My friend Victoria tipped me off to this breathtaking time-lapse sequence of the Milky Way rising over a stargazing party in Texas. If you have trouble viewing it in this window, go to http://vimeo.com/4505537. Be sure to click the little icon in the lower right to set the viewer to full-screen. It'll be the best 48 seconds of your day.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the daughter of man that you care for her?"
— Psalm 8, paraphrased from the NIV

Carver SF on Fictionwise—Buy Now and Save! (really)

I've been promising for a while now that a whole bunch of my books will be showing up soon in new or revised ebook format. Well, I got word yesterday that some of my new eReads titles are now up for sale on Fictionwise.com, as well as all the older ones that have been reproofed and reformatted. That's right, you can get 'em now. As new titles on Fictionwise, they're 40% off for a limited time. These are multiformat, DRM-free—and the formats were recently expanded to include epub.

The new titles are:
Dragon Rigger
The Rapture Effect

Reproofed and reformatted:

Panglor
Dragons in the Stars
Star Rigger's Way
From a Changeling Star
Down the Stream of Stars







(Several of those gorgeous covers are courtesy of the artists—David Mattingly, Shusei, and Jael—who allowed me to reuse the artwork from the original print editions.)

Still to come, early next week I'm told:
The Infinity Link
Seas of Ernathe

All these titles will appear shortly, as well, in the Kindle and Sony stores (though they will not be DRM-free from those sources). In addition, if I understand this correctly, they will appear soon at Baen Webscriptions, where they will also be multiformat and DRM-free.

Time for a book party!

Astronomical Highs

In space, exciting things are happening. Two expensive and high-profile space observatories from the European Space Agency (ESA)—Herschel (infrared) and Planck (cosmic microwave background, or Big Bang radiation), were launched together on a single Ariane 5 launcher. A lot of breaths were being held on that one, but they're both in space now, bound for the L2 orbital point 1.5 million km from Earth, where they'll be able to conduct their observations far from interference. Here's the launch, from French Guiana:



In addition, Atlantis astronauts have been hard at work refurbishing the Hubble Space Telescope. I snipped this image from a much larger one on Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Photo by Thierry Legault

That's Atlantis and the Hubble, caught in silhouette against the sun, by a camera on the ground. Hats off to the photographer, astronomer Thierry Legault, who took the image—and to those astronauts, who have been called upon to whack and grunt at their wrenches, trying to loosen frozen bolts and praying they don't break anything, just like the rest of us working on our cars in the driveway.

I just have one gripe about the mission, which includes attaching a docking ring so that at the end of the Hubble's service life in five years they can hook up a propulsion unit and deorbit Hubble into reentry over the Pacific Ocean. I'd rather they boosted Hubble into a higher, longer lasting orbit, where one day we could retrieve it to bring it back safely to Earth and put it in the Air and Space Museum. Or, alternatively, we could establish it as a National Historic Site right there in orbit—to be visited by space-traveling tourists. Perhaps it could become the nucleus of the future (literal) space wing of the Smithsonian. Surely it has earned that right.

Bread Loaf Without Me

I've blogged before about how much I've enjoyed being a writer/instructor at the annual New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf, Vermont. Well, this year, I had to miss the fun. They rotate the staff, so as to keep the program fresh, and this year I was rotated out. (Unfortunately, most of my writer-friends from Bread Loafs past were there, so now I'm afraid they'll all be off when I'm next on.)

Having said that, I still got to spend most of Sunday making a round-trip drive to Vermont—to pick up my daughter, who was there as a student. At least, I've now learned the route. She reported positively on the conference, but not so much on the head cold she came down with in the middle of it. We carpooled with a couple of other families, so two other delightful young ladies rode back with us. Shortly after arriving home, I found myself in the midst of another writer's workshop—this one in my own living room. The Advanced Workshop I'm conducting with Craig Gardner has just passed its midpoint, and we're really seeing good stuff emerge. I look forward to reporting future successes. I have complete faith.

Thoughts on the Conclusion of BSG

A couple of months ago, SFSignal invited me to contribute my views on the finale of Battlestar Galactica to a special they were running in their Mind Meld section. I couldn't at the time, because I hadn't seen the ending. But a few weeks ago, I finally got a chance to watch the last three or four episodes, all in one go. And yesterday, I grabbed a little time to put together my thoughts. They're online now at sfsignal.com. Let me know what you think!

"Fear not the future, weep not for the past." —Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sunborn Paperback Slated for January 2010

I recently learned that Sunborn has been scheduled for mass market paperback release in 0110 — that is to say, January 2010. Yeah, that's a while, yet. So, if you've been waiting for the paperback — oh, what the hey, you might as well spring for the hardcover now, rather than wait that long, eh? Sure, I thought so, too. :)

Interview at Odyssey Workshop

As I'm scheduled to make a guest-instructor appearance at the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in New Hampshire this July, they put some questions to me, which I answered in an interview that's just been posted online on the Odyssey blog.

As I answered some of the questions that I've probably not gotten around to answering here, think of it as Writing Question #10. (I was going to call it #X because I was too lazy to look back through the blog to see what the last one was numbered. But then I relented and checked, and saw that I'd called the last one #X-Z because I was too lazy then. So I figured I'd better check further. I think this is right.)

I have thoughts on marketing strategy, research, and other matters dear to the hearts of all who are interested in writing. Check it out.

"You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality." —Ray Bradbury

Those Crazy Guys and Their Flying Machines

While we're waiting for the "roadable" airplane, the Transition, to come down to our price range—not to mention fly (but they did get it off the ground, in the first short flight test!)—check out this baby: a flying motorcycle called the Switchblade:

Switchblade flying motorcycle

That's for me! You betcha! According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, "Samson Motorworks has been working on a flying motorcycle, the Switchblade, for two and a half years. The three-wheel motorcycle’s design features three lifting surfaces, like the Piaggio Avanti, and side-by-side seating for two people... The wings will fold beneath the motorcycle’s body... Cameras will provide visibility to the rear, and an optional ballistic parachute will be offered."

Oh man, I can't wait. (It hasn't flown yet, either, but it will. It will.) Buy a lot of those books from me, people—okay? A lot of books!

While we're waiting, here's a picture of the Transition in its first leap into the air.

Transition flight test

"Up in the sky, rocketing past
Higher than high, faster than fast,
Out into space, into the sun
Look at her go when we give her the gun."
—Space Academy Cadet Corps song,
from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet

Mayday! Mayday! Eternity's End Is Running Free!

With any luck, I'll never have to call a real Mayday—but it is May Day! I guess I've lost my marbles, because I'm giving away the store! That's right, everything must go! Come and take it away! Come now, before I come to my senses! Yes, folks, I'm talking about Eternity's End:

Eternity's End (Tor Books)

That's the novel that got me nominated for a Nebula, and took me so long to write, it knocked the Chaos Chronicles on their ass by so many years I had to give away free ebooks of them to remind people—no, wait wait wait wait wait—wrong script! [Dammit, who gave me that paper?]

Let's try again. Eternity's End is my Nebula-nominated novel about a star rigger named Legroeder who sets out in search of the lost ship Impris, Flying Dutchman of the stars. And along the way, encounters interstellar pirates and some deep-cyber romance. This book is free range, free running, cage free, up on the web for you to download for free! That's in multi-format, DRM-free ebook format. Come catch one and take it home with you. And check out the other free ebooks while you're at it.

Paypal donations are warmly welcomed, as always—but only if you want to, and only if you think it's worth it.

Come check it out. Trust me, you'll like it.

And—very important!—kudoes and thanks to Anne King, for undertaking the huge task of proofing the manuscript and wrestling the book into the many ebook formats! Thanks, Ann!

Books, Books, Books

All the RTF files are ready at last, for a big new release of my backlist through E-reads! If all goes well, nine of my titles should be available for purchase by mid-May through Fictionwise, Amazon Kindle Store, Sony Ebook Store, and other places where fine ebooks are sold. Many of them will also be available in paper as print-on-demand titles, under the E-reads imprint. (Not all, because the rights to some are still held by Tor.)

Some are reissues, with covers and formatting corrected from versions presently on sale, and some are all new. Included in the new are The Infinity Link, The Rapture Effect, Dragon Rigger, and Seas of Ernathe. (That last holds the record as my longest-out-of-print title.)

Speaking of print on demand, my friend Victoria sent me a link to a story in the UK's Daily Mail, concerning a standalone print-on-demand book maker, called the Espresso Book Machine, installed in a Blackwell bookstore on Charing Cross Road for market testing. Victoria wondered when we would see these in the U.S. Well, it's already been demoed to the U.S. bookseller trade! Here's the scoop on the E-reads blog. And here's what the machine looks like:



Finally—good news or bad news?—Amazon has just bought Lexcycle, the creators of the Stanza book reading software for the iPhone and iTouch. Ooh. Makes me uneasy. With Fictionwise now part of Barnes & Noble, who knows what's going to happen?

Oh, my head.

J.G. Ballard (1930 – 2009)

Science fiction writer J.G. Ballard has died, at the age of 78. The news took me by surprise when I read the Boston Globe this morning. But what stunned me more was that someone could write an obituary of the man and not even mention that he wrote science fiction, much less that he was a highly influential writer in the New Wave movement of the 1960s.

I discovered Ballard as a teenager, with the short stories gathered into collections such as The Voices of Time and Vermilion Sands, and then the apocalyptic novels The Drowned World and The Crystal World. Ballard's voice, darkly psychological, was a startling departure from any science fiction I had ever read before. I still have the paperbacks:


At the time, I knew nothing about the New Wave movement, I just knew I had discovered a writer who tapped into something in my own psyche—and I wanted more. Unfortunately, his work that followed, such as Crash, left me feeling cold and alienated, rather than engaged, and I regretfully moved on. But those earlier stories left a mark on me, one that I think probably influenced my own writing in subtle ways, and perhaps more than the work of any other single writer shifted my interests toward the psychological in SF.

J.G. Ballard: best known for Empire of the Sun, maybe—but one of the science fiction greats.

Video for Lydia Fair

Another little project I picked up along the way is a small video contribution to what I believe will be a very cool and probably intense and moving arts festival, coming up on April 25 at the Vineyard Church in Cambridge. It's called Lydia Fair, and it's bringing together artists of all stripes (painters, theater people, singers, one fiction writer that I know of—me, and heaven knows who all). The theme is Rescue, and it's a benefit fundraiser for two organizations called Love146 and Rebuild Africa. I'm really looking forward to it; there's tremendous artistic talent in the Vineyard community.

As for my part...I'm working on a video adaptation of the prologue to Sunborn. I've shortened and reworked the audio so that it sounds much better than the mp3 currently up on my website, and am using a sequence of great cosmic imagery from a variety of NASA observatories including Hubble, Chandra, SOHO, and others. A fellow named Adam, who does a lot of video work for the church, is helping me shape it into a "visualization" that we hope will evoke the story of Deeaab, as he wanders the galaxy encountering sentient suns, and wondering how he might rescue them from whatever is killing them. It'll only be about three minutes long, but I've gone from thinking "Hopeless!" a week ago to thinking, "This is going to be cool."

Afterward, my goal is to put it up online so you can all see it. In the meantime, if you live anywhere near Cambridge, Mass., you might want to check out Lydia Fair.

"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
—Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

Still Here

Sort of. Not that you can tell. Turned out I wasn't really done with tax-purgatory, after all. Not when I tried to finalize my daughter's return. You would not believe the ways the IRS has of extracting money from you when you are (or have) a college-age kid whom a generous relative has helped out by putting some money in trust for your education. Turbotax and I nearly came to blows over this one.

Anyway. You didn't come here to listen to me whine about taxes, did you? My family has to listen to that; you don't. (Family is where, when you go there, they have to take you in...and listen to you whine about taxes.)

Right now, we have a house full of college kids. Daughter is home on break, and brought some friends with her. Great kids; it's fun having them here. But I do have to be careful tiptoeing through the house late at night, so as not to trip over sleeping bodies.

The ebook project has been consuming way more time than I had dreamed possible. I probably mentioned, ereads is releasing some new (to their list) titles of mine, to go on sale at Fictionwise and elsewhere—and at the same time, reissuing the ones that have been on sale. A reissue of an ebook sounds wrong, somehow, doesn't it? But it all started because some of the books went on sale with the wrong covers, and it turns out the only way to fix that is to reissue them. And then it turns out there are a lot of irritating formatting errors in at least some of my books currently on sale. So we're just re-releasing the whole lot, along with the new ones. This means a lot of proofing, and a lot of correcting. Fortunately, I have a capable and enthusiastic reader-volunteer helping me with a lot of the grunt work. Thank you, Ann!

Okay, now, back to the proofing, Igor.

Free Sunborn Download (Multiformat)

The weather has turned promising, I've emerged from tax-return and financial-aid purgatory, and it's time for a Spring Special! Things are moving more slowly than I had hoped on the Tor ebook front, so I'm taking matters into my own hands. For a limited time, I am making Sunborn available for free download in all major ebook formats! DRM-free, now and always. So come and get it. Tell your friends! Bring your girlfriend/boyfriend and your grandmother. Bring your dog.

How long is a "limited time"? I'm not sure, but when Tor gets its ebooks out the door and into the stores, I expect these will come down.

"You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better." —Maxim Gorky

That Time of the Year

Every year about this time I suddenly go silent for a little while. That's because I'm up to my eyeballs in tax returns and applications for college financial aid, the first having to come before the second, but the second possibly being the more miserable of the two. (Well, actually, neither of them is as miserable as the realization that I have, once again, failed in my New Year's resolution to keep up with the record-keeping during the year. So I spend a lot of time paging through receipts as a sort of opening volley, before any of the rest happens.)

I'm in the middle of it right now. But I'm about to spend a few days in Washington state, in the Puget Sound area, on family business, so I won't get to finish it until next week.

Lots of interesting stuff is going on: Amazon giving way on the talking Kindle 2, stuff in science, progress on my ebooks, the economy continuing to implode. I'm afraid it'll all have to wait a while. At least for me to comment on it. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Odyssey Workshop Open to Applicants

In a few months, I'll be spending a couple of days as guest lecturer at one of the top SF/F writing workshops, the Odyssey Writing Workshop in New Hampshire. This will be my second time helping at Odyssey, and I came away from the first experience mightily impressed.

They're now open to applications from serious, dedicated writers who are close to that point of getting published. If you're in that category and are looking for an intensive learning experience, you might want to look into it. Here's the info...

Odyssey is one of the most highly respected workshops for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror writers. Top authors, editors, and agents serve as guest lecturers, and fifty-three percent of graduates go on to be published. The workshop, held annually on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH, combines an intensive learning and writing experience with in-depth feedback on students' manuscripts. Odyssey is for developing writers whose work is approaching publication quality and for published writers who want to improve their work. Director Jeanne Cavelos is a former senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell and winner of the World Fantasy Award.

This summer's workshop runs from June 8 through July 17. Guest lecturers are bestselling author Jeffrey A. Carver; award-winning authors Melissa Scott, Patricia Bray, and Jack Ketchum; and Ace/Roc Editor-in-Chief Ginjer Buchanan. The writer-in-residence is New York Times bestselling author Carrie Vaughn. The application deadline is April 8. For more information, visit www.odysseyworkshop.org or call (603) 673-6234.

"Vigorous writing is concise." —William Strunk, Jr.

A Chat with the Authors Guild

I wrote here earlier about my reaction to Authors Guild statements that Amazon's new Kindle 2 may be infringing on rights with its real-aloud capability. (You can hear a demo of the Kindle 2 reading here. It's way better than Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader.) I said that having an electronic gizmo read text aloud is no threat to the performance quality of an audiobook. I still feel that way. But...

I emailed the Authors Guild to say I was worried they were picking the wrong fight, that they were only getting in the way of a technological development that could help make our ebooks more useful—and attractive—to consumers. I got a call back from Paul Aiken of the Guild, and we had a nice, long conversation.

Paul pointed out something that I hadn't really thought of: No matter what we think about the audio experience, and whether it's live or recorded, and whether or not it's good for the customer and bad for the audiobook business, there's something we need to consider—that text-to-speech function may violate existing contract terms. Which contracts? The ones writers and publishers sign with audiobook companies, which specify exactly what is meant by "audio." Kindle might be infringing on rights, for example, that an audiobook company has paid for—such a contract, for example, defining "audio" by terms such as the use of technological means to produce a sound version of the book. These contracts already exist, by the thousands.

(None of this, by the way, has anything thing to do with the rights of the blind—which are secured by law, as they should be—or the rights of a person to read a book aloud. Those are entirely unrelated issues.)

So what does the Guild want? As I understood Paul, the Guild wants to ensure, before this whole thing goes too far, that contractual rights are honored, that parties who have reserved or purchased the right to use technology to produce audible versions of a work be paid for such a use. It doesn't really matter whether we feel that a machine's reading is equivalent to a professional recording. What matters is the definitions in the book contracts.

If the Guild isn't trying to stop the technology, but simply to ensure proper compensation, how might this work? It could take the form of a small surcharge added to an ebook purchase, to enable read-aloud capability—with a royalty for having read-aloud enabled going directly to the audio rights-holder. Many ebooks already have enable/disable switches on their Microsoft Reader and Adobe editions. (My own ereads books, for reasons that escape me, have read-aloud enabled for Microsoft Reader and disabled for Adobe Reader.) If things go this way, I'd personally prefer to see the cost built right into the price of the ebook, and not make it something a buyer would have to think about at the point of purchase. But that's a detail.

While my own gut feeling about synthetic text-to-speech hasn't changed as a result of this conversation, my understanding of what the Guild wants to do has. There are a zillion book contracts out there that define what constitutes an audible presentation of a book. Those contracts can't be wished away by Amazon or by the book buyer, or, for that matter, by me. Although I've previously compared this question to the entertainment industry's attempts to stop the VCR, maybe a more apt comparison is the Hollywood writers trying to get fair royalties for the use of their work on DVDs and the net—not trying to stop the new technologies, but to make sure that structures are in place to guarantee them their fair share of the profit.

This, I'm sure, promises to be an ongoing story. As they say in the TV biz: To be continued...

Diamonds in the Sky: an Astronomical SF Anthology

A while back, I wrote that I had sold a short story named "Dog Star" to an upcoming online anthology called Diamonds in the Sky. Edited by SF writer/astronomer Mike Brotherton, the anthology is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, for the purpose of furthering science education. The idea: to make astronomical concepts more accessible through entertaining stories. Each story takes on a different astronomical theme. In Dog Star, I tried my hand at dark energy and border collies.

Diamonds in the Sky has just gone live!

In addition to my story, it includes pieces by Geoffrey Landis, Wil McCarthy, Mike Brotherton, Jerry Oltion, Jerry Weinberg, and others. (Those last three guys were among my compadres at the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop back in 2007, another memorable event—and Geoff and Wil are really smart guys, actual rocket scientists, whom I bump into periodically at SF gatherings.)

I haven't read the other pieces yet, but now I get my chance along with you.

By the way, plans are afoot to gather the stories into proper ebook format and put those up for free download, as well.

Enjoy!

Boskone 2009

Last weekend, I was busy at Boskone, the annual February convention sponsored by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). It was a smaller convention than Boskone of years past, but was friendly and good fun, and a chance to catch up with friends and acquaintances I hadn't seen in a while. I spoke on a panel on "Faith in the Future" with a number of other writers, including James Morrow, with whom I have locked horns on questions related to faith and religion on many previous occasions. Jim's a good guy. We disagree on just about every aspect of faith, God, spirituality, and application to life, politics, and fiction. But it's a good-natured disagreement, and we've always stayed friendly. This year I enjoyed attending his book publication party for his new book, Shambling Toward Hiroshima, a Godzilla story (at least on some level; I haven't read it yet). I'm a Godzilla fan from way back, and I happily left his party with a wind-up, spark-breathing Godzilla toy.

As moderator of a panel called "Angels and AIs," I got to be the herder of cats trying to keep things moving in some direction resembling the discussion topic of whether sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences would come to seem like angels to us—or maybe like Cylons. With voices as disparate as Karl Schroeder and Charles Stross, among others, I'm not sure how well I succeeded in keeping the conversation on track. But one audience member told me afterward he thought it was an awesome discussion, so I guess it went okay.

I had long, enjoyable conversations with fellow writers Ann Tonsor Zeddies and Rosemary Kirstein, both of whom share my struggle with getting new books written in something less than geologic time frames. (They're both good, too; check out their books.) My literary beer brought together many past members of the Ultimate SF Workshop that I teach with Craig Gardner, as well as local fan and writer Dan Kimmel, and in a surprise appearance, math professor Bruce Burdick of Roger Williams University, who—although neither of us knew the other at the time—graduated just a few years after I did from Huron High School, in Huron, Ohio.

A small world. Lots of passing conversations with others: Jane Yolen, Greg Bear, Tom Easton, Jo Walton, Mark and Shirley Pitman, people from Tor...ah, I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch—sorry. I finally got to meet the artist who produced the lovely cover for Sunborn: Stephan Martiniere. He does good work!

As do they all.

What's Hard About Being a Writer?

SFSignal, from time to time, asks the same question of a bunch of writers and puts their answers together in an interesting post called MindMeld. They've done it again this week, and the question—posed to me, among others—was What's the most difficult part of being a writer? (That link will take you to all the answers.)

Here's what I said (but do go look at the others, because they're interesting):

What's the hardest thing about being a writer? That's easy: Writing. Doing it, not talking about it. Not thinking about it or procrastinating to avoid doing it. Not checking the email for writing-related messages (hah). Just doing it. Putting. The words. On. The page. Damn, it's hard sometimes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. Okay, nearly all the time. Microsoft's patented Blue Screen of Death can't hold a candle to the dread induced by the White Screen of No Words on the Page.

I'm not talking about writing in general, but writing a work of fiction. Creating a story out of whole cloth and telling it in words that make the reader want to come back for more. Okay, I'm not even talking about that last part—that comes more in the rewriting phase, which for me is easier. I'm talking about, Who is this character, really, and why is she angry, or scared, or passionate? I'm talking about, What comes next—and why is it interesting or unexpected or inevitable? Why should anyone care?

I got some interesting insight into the different creative tensions in writing a couple of years ago, when I was asked to write a novelization of Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries. I had just finished a first draft of my novel Sunborn, which for a variety of reasons had been a years-long struggle. The novelization had to be done quickly. But I had a DVD of the miniseries (it had already aired), and I had a shooting script (different in many respects from the final edit). The story was there. The characters were there. I couldn't change them, and didn't want to change them. But I had to bring them to life. I had to add dimension and depth where I could, and I had to make scenes make sense that were fine on-screen, whizzing by at the speed of TV, but that on closer examination had issues. It was a writing challenge of a particular kind, and I enjoyed it immensely. But it was a very different experience from writing my own books.

What it was, I think, was that my story-imagining lobes were given a break, while my story-crafting and writing-craft lobes did the heavy lifting for a while. I worked hard, while at the same time, part of my brain was vacationing! And afterward, I came back to the rewrite on Sunborn with better clarity and more energy. Based on feedback from readers so far, I think I did good.

Guess what I'm doing now. That's right, I'm first-drafting a new novel. Blank White Screen of No Words on the Page. Damn, that's hard.

By the way, for those of you who might not be regular readers of Pushing a Snake, the book I'm working on now is the fifth volume of The Chaos Chronicles: The Reefs of Time. (Will John Bandicut and Julie Stone find each other again on Shipworld?... and other questions, to be answered.)

More on the Kindle 2 and Read-Aloud

In my last post I wrote about the controversy raised by the new Kindle's ability to "read aloud" ebook text files, and the assertion by Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, that this constituted copyright infringement.

There's a provocative (and occasionally surrealistic) discussion of the question at the Mobileread.com forum thread: New Kindle Audio Feature Causes a Stir.

And from someone who apparently is an ex-copyright attorney, this interesting page on Engadget.com: Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2's text-to-speech infringe authors' copyrights?

I'm guessing that this is a question that's going to drag on for a while. Wonder if it'll make it to court. Although I find myself on Amazon's side on this one (odd feeling), I think it's probably a legal gray area.

Someone on Mobileread asked how I'd feel if C3PO read Sunborn aloud to a stadium full of paying guests. I said I thought that would constitute a performance, and wasn't relevant to this discussion. (I didn't raise the question of whether C3PO is sentient and shouldn't be considered a machine, but maybe I should have.)

Now, if someone gathered a stadium full of people all with Kindles with Sunborn loaded, and in unison they started a mass read-aloud, with or without my permission, I would think that was...pretty damn cool!

Someone want to organize that for me? :)

Kindle 2

This week's big news in books, of course, was the official unveiling of the Kindle 2, Amazon's second-generation ebook reader. Michael Gaudet of E-reads offers his appraisal, noting some of the new Kindle's enhancements:

• slimmer, with more memory and longer battery life
• faster screen refresh
• redesigned buttons for navigation
• faster book downloads, and "Whispersync" to keep multiple Kindles synchronized wirelessly
• a text-to-speech voice synthesizer, to read your books aloud to you

These all sound like pretty nice enhancements. But as I look at the device, I'm not regretting my choice of the Sony PRS-700. The built-in light and the touchscreen on the Sony still put it way out in front, in my book (so to speak).

But the Kindle announcement hasn't come without blowback. "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law." (From the Wall Street Journal online.)

Well.

I'm a member of the Authors Guild, and I was a little horrified to hear Mr. Aiken make this claim—because to my way of thinking, having a Kindle (or any device) read a file aloud should be no different in copyright terms from my reading a book aloud to my family. I mean, really.

And yet, I understand why he made the statement. Authors often license audio rights separately from other rights. There's a natural concern about anything that could cut into audiobook sales. But to me, there's a big difference between a machine reading of a stream of text and a professionally produced audio reading by a professional reader who gives the reading inflection and expression, perhaps with the help of music and sound effects. Now, it may well be that some people who like audio books will forego buying audiobooks if their Kindle will read text aloud in a computer voice. (Given that Amazon owns Audible, I imagine there were some in-house discussions about this.) So clearly this is an arguable point. But I still don't agree with Mr. Aiken, even though he speaks for my organization.

I've been frustrated for years that read-aloud is disabled on my own ebooks sold through outlets such as fictionwise.com (a retailer I am otherwise very happy with, I hasten to add). The only format, until now, in which this was relevant was Microsoft Reader format, because only MS Reader had that capability. I've always felt that if people bought my ebooks and they preferred (or needed) to listen to it through a computer-synthesized voice, they should have that choice. Why not? They bought the book. It turns out that the disabling of this feature is the policy of Fictionwise. But I wonder now, in light of the statement from the Authors Guild, if maybe it's based on fear of backlash from publishers who might see text-to-speech as an infringement of audio rights.

What a crazy business. I suppose one day computer synthesized voices, combined with AI-comprehension of a book's content, could produce a sufficiently expressive reading that it might compete with a true audiobook. But that seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.

For now, my basic position is, whatever gets people buying and reading books (both e- and p-) is probably good. Whatever gets in the way of it is almost certainly bad.

Do Free Downloads Sell Books?

This, of course, is the question that many authors want the answer to (and also blog-reader Tim, in a comment to my last post). If you believe the Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi school, the answer is clearly yes; others remain skeptical. Publishers range from scared to enthusiastic.

For me, this is an ongoing experiment. The first part was a no-brainer: the first three Chaos Chronicles books were out of print, so it was unquestionably better to get them in front of readers and get them interested in the series. For that part of the experiment, the results are an unqualified—but also unquantified—success. There have been about 15,000 downloads of those books from my own site, with more from feedbooks, manybooks, mobileread, and now the Baen Free Library. Many people have written me, saying they tried my work for the first time with those freebies and liked what they found. Some of them said it prompted them to go out and buy a copy of Sunborn in hardcover. Hurray!

But wait just a minute. How many extra copies of Sunborn did it sell? Three? Three hundred? How many sales did I lose because I put it up for free in PDF? Truth: I don't know. In the first place, it's not like I actually get detailed information about sales; this remains one of the dark sides of publishing, the dearth of actual data coming back to the writer. (Sure, eventually I'll see totals on a royalty sheet. But that can take years.) Just as important, though, is a question that no one can answer: how many would I have sold without the free downloads. The series was out of the public eye for years. I was out of the public eye for years. I have no doubt the sales picture could have been grim. As it is, from what I'm told, Sunborn is selling at least as well as its predecessor in the stores, Eternity's End. (BSG is a side trip, and doesn't really count.)

So what do the publishers make of all this? Well, Tor and Baen both seem to embrace the notion of giving books away as a means to selling more. Tor has had free download promotions from time to time, and Baen has their ongoing free library. On the other hand, I recently had an email exchange with a fellow writer whose new book is on the Nebula preliminary ballot. His publisher was reluctant to let him send out an electronic reading copy or to put a PDF up even on the members only SFWA site, for fear I guess of piracy. This, to me, makes no sense. If a book is published, chances are it'll be up on the darknet regardless. Better to get people reading it and talking about it.

Tim mentioned the music and film industries as examples of reluctance. The thing is, they're coming around. Amazon offers free MP3 music downloads. Itunes has a free song of the week. The networks put their TV shows up on the web for free. (That's how I'm catching up on Chuck, which I missed in favor of Sarah Connor Chronicles, back when they were on at the same time. And that's even how I'm seeing Battlestar Galactica—on Free On Demand!) And web comics—free. What that may imply for a business model for earning an income from writing is a much bigger question—a topic for another post, maybe.

Bottom line for me: I can't guarantee that my books will sell better because I'm offering them for free download. The truth is, I may never know. But I don't think I'm hurting sales, and right now, the enemy with the name Obscurity written on its back is a far bigger threat to me than the chance that some people are reading my books for free.

And wasn't the hope that people would read my books the reason I wrote them in the first place?

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist." —Isaac Asimov

Free BSG Download and Other News

With Battlestar Galactica now in the final stretch of its glorious and slightly insane odyssey, I asked for and received permission to put my novelization of the miniseries, titled—wouldn't you know it—Battlestar Galactica, up for free download on my web site. And so I have, and there you can get it for your reading pleasure. I've got it in PDF and EPUB formats. The Mobipocket version is on sale in the Kindle store. Naturally, I hope a few of you might be inspired to buy the paper book, still available here and there. But mostly I just wanted to share the fun.

In other download news, the first three books of The Chaos Chronicles have just gone up for download in the Baen Free Library. (If you already have the Chaos books from my web site, there's no reason to redownload; they're the same book files, copied over with my permission.) If you don't know the Baen Free Library, it's a wonderful resource to help people get a taste of work by authors they might not know, in ebook form—and it's got a lot of great classic SF by people like Andre Norton and James Schmitz. Check it out.

Meanwhile, I'm now proofing the text for the ebook version of Seas of Ernathe, my very first novel. There's a trip down (fading) memory lane! That writer kid, he has promise, I think.

Brief Catch-up

Last weekend, I spent a day at Vericon, a small but cheerful convention at Harvard University, which had as its guest of honor Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan and I had met once or twice before, but many years ago, and it was good to become reacquainted. Dinner with Stan, Jim Kelly, and Paul Di Filippo was a high point of the day, though it was also good to offer some students from the teen writing workshop I ran with Craig Gardner a chance to see a con on a small scale.

Last night I completed the proofreading and minor edits on the text of The Infinity Link, and sent the RTF file off to the folks at E-reads, who will prepare it for commercial ebook release. Artist David Mattingly graciously assented to my using the original cover art from the Tor and Bluejay print editions on the ebook, so it's going to look great. Here's the full wraparound, shrunk way down:

The Infinity Link cover art by David B. Mattingly

I made very small changes in the text, mostly to get rid of anachronisms such as the references to the Soviet Union, and some outdated computer terminology. After all the story takes place in the year 2034, and the future simply isn't what it once was.

Now I've begun similar work on my very first novel, Seas of Ernathe, originally published in 1976. It's interesting to see how my writing evolved and grew between my first and fourth novels—and how it compares to my work now. I've definitely grown more skilled as a writer, but I miss the quick bursts of creativity I had when I was in my twenties.

For a good tongue-in-cheek glimpse of how books get from typewriter to bookstore, check out this video from MacMillan publishing. (With thanks to Richard Curtis in his E-reads blog for bringing it to my attention.)

Guide to My Ebooks

I got an email from a reader asking me why it had to be so hard to buy all the ebooks from a favorite author. I knew at once what he meant: editions are scattered across different publishers, different retailers, different ebook formats (some with restrictive DRM, some without). Even trying to follow a particular series within an author's oeuvre can be trying. Why, for instance, can't all the books of a series be bought as a nice bundle, with one purchase and one download?

I thought that was a great idea. And while it's not currently in my power to create bundles, I thought, why can't I at least make it easier for someone who wants to browse for all my ebooks do it from a single page? So I set out to do that.

My new Ebooks page, at http://www.starrigger.net/ebooks.htm, lists all my novels, grouped by series—with links to major online sources, highlighting those that offer multi-format, DRM-free downloads. The latter effectively means eReads and their partner Fictionwise, though I hope soon to add Baen Webscriptions to that list. I've also listed which books are coming soon, and which are farther off.

I hope it's helpful. Check it out and let me know what you think!

"My job is to help you fall in love." —Ray Bradbury

The First Days

Obama's been president for two days now, and so far so good. (How's that for a honeymoon period?) His first actions to start the ball rolling to end the institutionalized injustice of Guantanamo Bay, and mandate greater openness in government affairs, are most encouraging—as is the fact that he's already been on the phone to open dialogues with heads of state in the Middle East. And while we have yet to see what he'll do in the arena of science and the environment, his inaugural speech pointed the way. The New Scientist offers an excellent recap of his statements about restoring science to its rightful place in political decision-making (this, I might point out, from a man of strong faith), and rethinking how we can use the world's resources for the benefit of all, not just the wealthy.

The economy, of course, will be the real test. Will he find the silver bullet? I guess we'll all stayed tuned.

President Obama!

What more can I say? It was a wonderful and moving inauguration—all those people, as far as the eye could see!—and I came away from watching it with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, buoyed and encouraged and hopeful as I have not been for many years. I did not know until I heard it on the radio later that survivors of the Tuskegee Airmen were present to share the moment. That seemed perfect.

The president has his work cut out for him, and we have ours cut out for us as well. May God bless us all, but especially our new leaders, all of them.

I wish I were there for the party!

Counting Down...

In about ten hours, from the time I write this, Barack Obama will be sworn in as President of the United States. I am excited by this on so many levels, I hardly know where to start. A change in the direction of America's foreign and domestic policies, a man in the White House who thinks and reads and invites discourse and even disagreement, an African American as our highest national official, a new First Dog, and I guess even a new First Mother-in-Law. (We'll see how that last one goes.)

In particular, I hope that the peoples of other nations—allies and adversaries alike—will see a different America reemerging, an America that is readier to work collaboratively, more respectful of other views, and less prone to confrontation. And that doesn't mean an America that is less strong. Strength does not always come from confrontation.

Listening to NPR this morning, remembering the awesome inspiration of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "I have a dream" speech, I began my Monday on a rising note of hope. I expect to do that in spades tomorrow (really, today), as I wake up to watch a historic transfer of the reins of power. I can't wait.

"Laughter is the beginning of prayer." —Reinhold Niebuhr

The Infinity Link—soon to be a major motion ebook!

I wrote recently that I was proofreading the computer file of my 1984 novel, The Infinity Link, for a pending ebook edition. I still am. (It's a long book, and proofreading is a slow job.) That's not news. What is news is how much I'm liking the book. I mean—really liking it! It's a good book!

Cover art by David B. Mattingly

Okay, that probably sounds dumb, because on the one hand you're not supposed to think your own book is bad, but on the other hand, it sounds braggy if you say your own book is good. But...I haven't read through this novel in years, many years, and I was fully expecting to find it—you know, good, but not that good, and full of passages that I wished I'd done a little differently, or kept shorter, or something. But the truth is, I'm not really thinking of it as my book as I'm reading it, and I'm just really enjoying it. I expect any of you who are writers or artists know exactly what I'm talking about, and the rest of you are nodding tolerantly, thinking, there there, have a nice cup of tea, you'll feel better.

The Infinity Link is out of print, but you can still get new copies from me, or used copies online wherever online used book dealers gather. And soon, you'll be able to buy it as a brand new ebook!

"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up." —Ursula K. LeGuin

BSG Meets The Atlantic Monthly (!)

The Atlantic is a terrific magazine, but possibly the last place I would have looked for an article on Battlestar Galactica, the edgy TV series that's probably done more to shake up science fiction on television since the original Star Trek. Nevertheless, in the new (Jan/Feb 2009) issue, James Parker writes in The Atlantic about BSG, just as the show locks and loads for its final stretch (hitting the cablewaves next Friday night!). In Lost in Space, Parker gives a reasonable account of the origin of the reimagined show, except that he brings L. Ron Hubbard into the account—Hubbard having said that space opera was really "the stuff of deepest prehistory, somber emanations from the memory of the species." That dovetails, admittedly, with BSG's premise that Earth is not the cradle of humankind, but rather the latest stop on a long journey.

Parker turns a tad snarky about the direction of the show, saying that "Battlestar Galactica is presenting all the symptoms of a an extended-run high-concept TV series in its decadent phase." Now, he may be right—certainly I've wondered more than once whether the show's writers actually know themselves where they're going with the story. I've wondered that ever since I wrote the official novelization of the miniseries, and had the feeling that there was a lot they weren't telling me about the direction of the show because they weren't sure themselves. Fair enough. Half the time I don't know where I'm going when I'm writing a novel. Why should it be any different for the creators of a years-long TV series?

On the other hand, maybe those writers know exactly what they're doing, and we're just entering the twistiest part of the world's most gut-wrenching aerobatics show. That's my vote, an expression of white-knuckled faith. They better know what they're doing—it's coming back on, and looks like it could be augering in, and I, for one, want to know how they're going to land that baby!

"You write about the thing that sank its teeth into you and wouldn't let go." —Paul West

You Can Have My New Sony Reader...

When you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Just like Charlton Heston and his guns. People, I love my new Reader. I love the built-in light, I love the 150 or so books I have on it right now, with room for about a thousand more. I love the way you can organize them, to make titles easy to find. I love the way, with the help of a program called Calibre, I can import books in other formats and convert them for reading on the Sony, and even share them with Allysen, who is discovering that she loves reading on her new iPod Touch. I've actually been getting a lot more reading done since adopting my PRS-700.

I've named it Plato.

Most of what it's filled with now is free ebooks, either from the general sources like Gutenberg.org, Manybooks.net, and Feedbooks.com—or from the free offerings of Tor, Baen, and other publishers. I've bought a couple of ebooks, including the Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (but, ironically, his iconic and groundbreaking story about the net, "True Names," does not seem to be available in ebook form).

I'm slowly returning the world of productive work, following the holidays. I've signed up my novels The Infinity Link and Seas of Ernathe for the ereads program, which already features five of my novels, so they'll be available in electronic format before too long. (Also, The Rapture Effect and Dragon Rigger should be available very soon.) Right now I'm proofing The Infinity Link, actually reading it for the first time in many years. It was my first BIG book, published in 1984, and I'm pleased to say I'm enjoying it.

Hope you're all having a great beginning of 2009!

"You'll never make much money writing books like that. But the very best people will come to your funeral." —said to Edgar Pangborn, as told by D.G. Compton

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Also, Happy Hanukah, Solstice, Kwanzaa, and any other celebrations I might have missed.

Wow, I've really fallen off the radar this time, haven't I? It's been an incredibly busy December, and we had family here for Christmas week, and basically I just haven't been doing things like keeping up with my blog. So, apologies to all of you! But best wishes indeed for the season.

The highlight of my Christmas was having my daughter home from college (before heading off this morning for an international trip with a group from school), and my brother and his girlfriend visiting for most of a week. It was terrific all around.

The highlight in material terms (toys!) was an exceedingly generous gift from a family member of an ebook reader—a Sony Reader (PRS-700, the new one with the built-in light)—which I have been enjoying hugely and have been filling up with everything from classics to favorite SF from when I was a kid (Tom Corbett, Space Cadet!), to freebies from Tor Books and the Baen Free Library. I've got close to a hundred books on it now, and have barely scratched the available memory. Thanks, Chuck and Youngmee!

Another highlight was an odd counterpoint: my wife handed me another blast from my past—three Tom Swift, Jr. books that her aunt had given to her for me, including Tom Swift and his Diving Seacopter, an absolute favorite from a certain age in my youth. And, to round the story out, DARPA is actually hoping to build a craft just like it—yes, an airplane that can go underwater! Talk about science fiction (once in a while) predicting the future!

I hope you're all having a great holiday season. I'll leave you with this thought from Charles Lindbergh.

"By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space." — Charles A. Lindbergh

Nice Plug on Sci Fi Wire

Sunborn got some nice exposure today on Sci Fi Wire, with an article/interview by John Joseph Adams. It came out rather more techie-sounding than I would have liked; but as it consists almost entirely of quotes from my own email response to his questions, I guess I'm the one to blame for that. Seems to have caused only a modest bump in traffic to my website, so maybe that's why.

"We all know that only about 5% of our advertising works. The problem is, we don't know which 5%." —Some wise person in the publishing industry

To New York, ish, Twice This Week

This last Monday was the date of the annual SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Editorial Reception, where SFWA hosts a big gathering for members, editors, artists, and friends, to generally schmooze and reconnect. I hadn't been to one in years, so I decided at the last minute to go down, just for the day. I treated myself to Amtrak's Acela for the ride down. Great train. Then I hoofed it from Penn Station to the Tor Books offices, tipping my hat to the Empire State Building on the way. (I make it sound like I know where I was going. Yeah, me and my Google map.)

In the past, the publisher's offices were always a gathering place for writers prior to events like this, and I expected to be joining a crowd. Nope. I was the only one there, and all the Tor people were actually working. (!!) But my publicist Sam Cutler took me around to meet all the publicity people, and I waved to all the editors I knew (my own editor not being in town), then I browsed the bookshelves, plucking down books to read. While thumbing through a book, I heard a mutter from the room next door about problems with Mobipocket Creator. Having spent a good deal of time on ebook creation, I poked my head in, and thus met Pablo Defendini, maven of Tor.com, and also the guy who's doing his level best to get Tor ebooks up and running. Great guy, great conversation, and eventually I grabbed some dinner with him and some of the other Tor.com people, as well as Irene Gallo, Tor's art director, all good folk. Then we all went off to the SFWA thing, where I indeed reconnected with some old friends, and even ran into my agent, Richard Curtis!

Coming home on the 3 a.m. train out of Penn Station wasn't quite as much fun (actually, waiting for the 3 a.m. train in Penn Station wasn't as much fun), but hey. A good trip.

Today, I turned around and drove to pick up my daughter and a couple of friends from college, a ways up the river from NYC, then turned around again and brought them home. Could have been a lot worse; the poor souls on the Mass Pike westbound toward New York as I was coming back east were in for a long time on the road!

Safe travels for the holidays, everyone (if you travel, which you probably will, if you're in the U.S.)!

The Page 69 Test - Sunborn

I was asked by Marshal Zeringue, the owner of a blog called "The Page 69 Test" to write an entry for Sunborn. The inspiration for the blog comes from the "page 69 test" that you can use when you're browsing a book in a store: open to page 69, and see if you like what you read. Some people use the "page 11 test." Some the "first and last page" test.

If you'd like to see what I wrote, check out The Page 69 Test: Sunborn.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Writer, Like Dragon

Most working writers are like dragons: they know down to the nickel what's in their hoard. Maybe not their hoard of gold on hand—because usually what they have on hand is a shortage of gold—but for sure they know when the gold is expected. They know who owes them what, and when it's supposed to come, and (if they're honest) how many months late it will probably actually come. It's a survival trait. When food is scarce, you keep a watch on the supply trains.

Except this time.

Our budget has been pretty tight around here of late, and our contingency actions included borrowing some cash. (If you read the papers, you'd think that was impossible. And yet, though GM can't get a loan, the credit card companies continue to offer no-interest balance transfers, even to people who demonstrably are unlikely to leave the debt in one place long enough for it to kick up to the higher rate.) Well, we determined to keep a trusting attitude about it all, and even decided that we needed to be more conscious about giving away a proper tithe of the money that does come in. Giving back to God, paying forward, call it what you will.

Today I opened an envelope from my agent—and what did I behold? A check. A substantial check. It seemed that, most undragonlike, I had forgotten that there was an on-publication check owed me for Sunborn! I had forgotten! (All of my other contracts have called for payment on signing and on acceptance, but this particular one was structured differently from all the others.) I had forgotten! Whoo-whoooo!

I did three things right away. I thanked God, I called my wife, and I took that sucker right to the bank.

"God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by." —Mark Twain

Aliens Smoking Dope Over Saturn!

I've written before about the giant hex socket in the north pole of Saturn, set there uncounted millennia ago by aliens, for purposes unconfirmed. But now...what are those guys up to?

Rhetorical question. You can see what they're up to. They're blowing smoke rings over the poles!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

You cannot tell me that's tobacco smoke. Noway. And aurora? Please! Don’t think I've forgotten about them buzzing the Saturn neighborhood in flying saucers!


Scientists will keep trying to explain it away with fables about moons, and rocks, and erosion, and auroras, and strange turbulent attractors...

Feh! We won't be fooled!

Another Signing—Pandemonium Books!

This Thursday, November 20, I'll be signing copies of Sunborn at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge, along with Joe Haldeman and Chris Howard, who will be signing their new books, as well. In addition to Sunborn, I expect to have some copies of other novels, also—including the earlier volumes of The Chaos Chronicles.

Hope to see you there!

Fomalhaut b — Extrasolar Planet in Visible Light

Yowza! NASA has released images of the first planet outside our solar system that we've directly observed and photographed. Readers, may I introduce Fomalhaut b...

NASA, ESA, et al.

It's a planet probably three times the size of Jupiter. The full image is kind of squished here, but you can see it big at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This is the result of years of painstaking work. Read more about it at Science NASA.

"When I consider the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you have set in place..." —Psalm 8

Fan of John Williams Movie Scores?

Okay, I thought I was the world's biggest fan of the music from Star Wars, Superman, Close Encounters, and all the other films John Williams has scored. But I think I must relinquish that title to this fellow here (but see note below):




Here's a link to the video at scifiwire, in case it doesn't display correctly for you.

[Later note]

Well...as Josh pointed out, it turns out that guy did a really clever job of lip syncing a song actually created by a group called Moosebutter. You can hear (or buy) the song here on their website. Scroll down, and you can see a video of their live performance of the number.

It would have been really nice if the fellow above had credited his source.

Great Success!

Both book signings were terrific successes, with lots of hardcovers leaving in people's hands—in many cases, the hands of people I did not know before the signings. (Always a good indicator.) And the folks at Menotomy Beer & Wine were fantastic, made me feel welcome and even sent me home with a bottle of wine! This continues my experience that the best place to do book signings is not necessarily at bookstores (though I'm happy to sign at bookstores, too!), but at places where something else is going on. Indoor water park, church fair, wine tasting—what'll be next?

Two Signings This Week!

I've added a second book signing of Sunborn to the one previously announced:

• On Friday evening, Nov. 7, from 6:30 to 8:30, I'll be doing a benefit signing at Park Avenue Congregational Church in Arlington, Mass., at the annual fair.
  
  
• On Saturday, Nov. 8, from 4:00 to 7:00, I'll be signing as a guest at the regular wine tasting at Menotomy Beer and Wine, also in Arlington.

Click for a full rewrite, with details and locations. Stop by! Have some lasagna and pie (Friday) and some wine (Saturday).

What a Day! What an Election! Yo, Barack!

Thank you, Barack Obama, for undertaking such a long and exhausting run for the presidency, and for your moving and inspiring acceptance speech. Congratulations, and best wishes and prayers.

Thank you, all the supporters who helped make this happen for all of us.

Thank you, John McCain, for your gracious and forward-looking concession speech.

Thank you, America.

Oh, and...thanks, Starbucks, for the free cup of coffee. :)

The End of an Opus

As an old-time fan of the comic strip Bloom County, I have followed the later incarnations of the strip (Outland and Opus) with decidedly mixed feelings. I love the old characters, but they were mostly gone. And Opus wasn't quite what he once was, though he certainly had his moments.

It's been clear for a while that the strip was coming to an end, and creator Berkely Breathed was taking what seemed to me a depressing route toward the conclusion, with Opus locked away in a dog pound. (I imagine it is hard to bring something like that to a close.) Last Sunday, the final strip ran in the paper, and it...told us we had to go online to see the last panel! It also gave the wrong web address.

But here it is, the final shot of Opus (at least for now). It's too big to show here: take a look for yourself. It's really quite touching, and redeemed all of the darkness of the leadup. Bye for now, Opus. And sweet dreams!

This Blog Endorses Barack Obama!

I didn't want to influence you all too soon, but the suspense is over. Like Republicans Colin Powell and William Weld (except that I'm not Republican) I am standing forth and urging everyone to vote tomorrow for Barack Obama for president! I'm serious. It's time to put an end to:

• Attacks on the environment
• Attacks on science
• Attacks on nations that did not attack us first
• Attacks on the Constitution
• Attacks on the separation of church and state
• Deceptions in the interests of money and power

And time to embrace:

• Dialogue with other nations, including those we disagree with
• Transparency and honesty in public policy
• A leader who reads, thinks, and is willing to listen to opposing points of view
• Concern for the environment, both global and local, and respect for real science
• Concern for the disadvantaged and the middle class, and not just the wealthy
• Sane fiscal policy, including an end to the massive drain caused by an ill-conceived war

I believe Barack Obama represents these values, and that a vote for Obama is a vote for steering America back toward the values that made this country great.

Okay, that sounded like a campaign slogan—but I actually believe it's true. I probably didn't change anyone's mind with this, but I just wanted to go on the record one last time. I urge other Americans to support these Family Values. Amen.

National Novel Writing Month...

...is upon us again! (As reader Marco pointed out in a comment below.) This would be a hard one for me to miss, because my daughter is giving it a shot, along with several friends. Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka... Different people have different feelings about this project, but my own feeling is, if it gets people writing and having fun writing, it's a good thing! Check it out at NaNoWriMo.org.

"I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all." —E.B. White

Recount!

Well, this is kind of depressing. And no, I'm not talking about the election; that's still a few hours off. No, I'm talking about the stats for downloads of the ebooks—especially Sunborn. Turns out that my web logs analyzer, a program called Analog that I've used faithfully for years, has been lying to me about the number of downloads.

Well, not lying exactly, just being stupid.

I think this applies mainly just to the PDF downloads rather than the others, because people can actually open the PDF file right in their browser without downloading the file to their hard drive. And when they do, the file is sent to them in little packets, which you would only notice by the repeated little message at the bottom of the browser indicating activity. As I discovered to my dismay last night, each of those little packets gets its own line in the logs. And Analog has been counting each of those packets as a separate download request! And fooling me like a politician greasing a gullible audience.

To paraphrase one such politician of the past*, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I am not a crook. However, previous reports of the downloads of Sunborn and the other PDF files are exaggerated. A lot. A real lot. As nearly as I can tell, actual complete downloads of Sunborn are in the low-mid hundreds at this point, and the highest, Neptune Crossing, is at maybe a thousand. All told, the cumulative ebook downloads are in the thousands, but I'm not even going to try to guess a more exact number. That's not cottage cheese, but it's nowhere near the 20K plus that Analog was selling me.

To say that this discovery was a downer would be no exaggeration.

Anyone know a better free (or cheap) web-logs analyzer? (I've tried a few, but none quite fit the bill yet.)

*For the young'ns among you, or those outside the U.S.: Richard M. Nixon, the worst president in U.S. history prior to the current one.

"From my close observation of writers ... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review." —Isaac Asimov

Concord (er, Lowell) SF Panel

Our panel at Umass Lowell, as part of the Concord Festival of Authors, went very well. Panelist and new writer Chris Howard blogged about it, and said everything I would say, except that he gave a nice big plug to Sunborn while he was at it. Thanks, Chris!

Funny thing: I clicked on Chris's Amazon link to Sunborn, and noted with my usual scowl that Amazon already listed used copies for sale, three days after the book's release. Then, out of curiosity, I clicked to look at the actual listing—and saw, first of all, that most were actually new, not used, copies from Amazon Marketplace sellers. But here's the funny part—some sellers listed used copies for over $40, or more than twice Amazon's price for new books! Do you suppose anybody would actually buy one of those? It's good work if you can get it.

Nobody's emailed me yet to request a free ebook, but there have been over 4000 hits on the Sunborn PDF in just three days!

Sunborn Is Born!

Sunborn is a book, available in fine stores everywhere! Yay! I even have copies myself! By a wonderful fluke, the case I ordered for the upcoming book signing at the Menotomy Beer and Wine store (see earlier post) arrived on my doorstep today. So I get to see it, too! (This may sound odd, but usually the writer is the last to get copies. Well, sometimes the editor is last, and the writer is second to last. Indeed, there's no telling when my regular "author's comp copies" will arrive.)

Order now from:

Amazon • Barnes&Noble
BooksaMillion • Borders
Powell's • Local Bookstore

If you'd like to read before you buy, here's the deal on downloads. I've put up a regular PDF version for free download. This will look nice on your computer (but probably not so great on your small device). In addition, I'm offering anyone who buys the hardcover a free ebook in other ebook formats, straight from me! Buy the book from me or from any store—and just send me proof of purchase of any kind. Details are on my downloads page.

I don't quite have the ebook ready at this moment. I've been untangling the formatting on Tor's typesetting file, which required a somewhat messy Quark to Word conversion. That's just about done, and very soon I'll be able to start converting it into the formats that ebook readers prefer.

The long wait is over!

Coming Personal Appearances

For those of you in eastern Massachusetts or southern New Hampshire, or...okay, for those of you in the continental U.S., or neighboring countries...

The evening of October 30 will find me moderating a panel at the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus, called "We May Be On to Something Here (Science Fiction in the 21st Century)." Part of the Concord Festival of Authors, the panel will also include Craig Shaw Gardner, new writer Chris Howard, Alexander Jablokov, and Matt Jarpe. We'll kick off at 7:30 p.m., jawbone interestingly with each other and the audience for a while, then segue into a book signing hosted by the university bookstore. This will be my first opportunity to sign Sunborn—and in all likelihood the first time I will have set eyes on the actual book myself.

If you can't make that—or even if you can—you'll have another chance to say hello and pick up a signature on a shiny new hardcover (if that appeals to you, and why wouldn't it?) on Saturday, November 8, from 4-7 p.m. The venue will be a little different this time; I'll be signing at Arlington's Menotomy Beer and Wine store, while a free wine-tasting swirls around me. The wine tastings are a popular event at the store, and it's a great bunch of people, with some interesting wines. Stop by and say hi!

Another signing is tentatively planned for later in November, but more about that when details firm up.

And don't forget: you can download the first three novels of the Chaos Chronicles for free in ebook form, so even if you haven't read them yet, you can grab them now and be all up to speed for Sunborn. Go for it!

Baby, Let Me Fly My Car!

Some of us still haven't given up on a combination airplane/car, and some of us (fortunately) are aeronautical engineers from MIT. Carl and Anna Dietrich, cofounders of Terrafugia, Inc. ("Flee from Earth") in eastern Massachusetts, are building such a craft now, and they hope to fly it by the end of the year and be selling them in another year. You can read the Boston Globe article here and see more video and read more about it on the company website.

Terrafugia Transition, a "roadable airplane"

Personally, I think they need a snappier name for the airplane than the "Transition," and probably a cooler name for the company, too. But if I had a couple hundred thousand dollars burning a hole in my pocket, you can betcha' I'd have my deposit down by this time tomorrow!

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings..." —John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Incredible Sun

Reader Charlza mentioned this in a comment further down, but it's too awesome to leave buried in the comments. Take a few minutes to browse a most astounding set of high-res photographs of the sun, taken by various research telescopes and sats and collected on boston.com. Many of them are familiar, but it's a truly breathtaking gallery. Here's one, in thumbnail:

NASA/TRACE image of the sun

Also breathtaking, but in a less wonderful way, is the long list of comments following, where battle rages between those who would thank God for the magnificence and those who bridle at the very notion of "God" being involved when it's all physics. Me, I thank God for the incredible thing that is the sun, and scientists for the incredible pictures that let us see it and begin to understand the physics of how it works and how it got there.

Also on Boston.com is Way Too Tired?, an article on why, when you're tired (or even just getting over being sick), what you may need to do is not nap, but get up and move around: jog, skate, bike, walk, whatever. Here's why, in abbreviated form:

Scientists are now convinced that fatigue has a real, molecular basis, and that at least two major biological processes are involved: An excess of natural chemicals called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which the body pumps out in response to infection. And sluggish mitochondria, the tiny organelles inside cells that make energy...

[B]ecause both cytokine and mitochondrial problems get worse with excessive rest and improve with moderate exercise, it means exercise is an obvious, and readily available, remedy. A large body of research has already shown that exercise dampens down the "bad" cytokines and boosts the number and efficiency of mitochondria.

This doesn't mean you should go run a marathon if you've got the flu. Quite the contrary. In the acute phase of any illness, your body needs all its available energy to heal. But it does mean that, as soon as possible, you should get out and walk, even if it's just around the block for starters.

I read that just as I was getting up and around again from a nasty cold, and I did indeed get out rollerblading a few times last week, even though exercising was the last thing I felt like doing. It helped.

"Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives." — Socrates

Old Time Radio Shows

For the last couple of days, I've been laid up with a nasty cold, and haven't been in shape to do much of anything. Couldn't sleep, couldn't read, couldn't work. But one thing I could do was close my eyes and listen to my iPod. And luckily, I had something new to listen to: some old radio drama from the Old Time Radio Show Catalog. I'd only just learned of this site, and had just downloaded some sample tracks. I was glad I had.

They've got all the great old science fiction shows: Dimension X, Beyond Tomorrow, Buck Rogers, Tom Corbett, Superman, Space Patrol, and more. They've also got mystery shows (Mercury Theater, CBS Radio Workshop, and tons more), westerns, war, comedy, British...the list is long. They sell CD collections (in mp3 format, so you get a lot on a disc) for only $5 per CD. I listened to dramatizations of Heinlein's "Requiem," and Bradbury's "Marionettes, Inc.," and if you have any taste at all for the classic old work, it's great stuff. Take a listen. You can grab a free download, it would seem, from every CD—so sample before you buy.

Highly recommended!

Salon on Politics and Psychology

Reader Marco sent me to an interesting article on the psychology of voting—and whether we're willing to change our minds in the presence of new evidence or information. Neurologist Robert Burton writes on Salon.com:

In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to “their candidate”; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong.

Most of us don't seem to be very good at that. It also turns out that the less competent we are, the less likely we are to be aware of our own incompetence. Burton quotes from a Cornell psychological study:

People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.

I also stumbled across this on Salon (but now can't find it again). It appeared first in the Baltimore Sun, and is an open letter to John McCain, which says in part:

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered...

In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.

You have changed...

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

I didn't know until I got to the bottom that this was Frank Schaeffer, author of the book Crazy for God, calling McCain to task for inciting (or certainly tolerating) the flames of hatred at his rallies. It is true that Senator McCain stopped one woman who was denouncing Obama as an Arab—though it might have been good if he had also noted that "Arab" does not equal "bad"—but where was his reaction when people start shouting "Kill him!"?

(By the way, I've read Schaeffer's book, and it's a fascinating story of journey as a member and leader of the evangelical right who later left the movement in complete disillusionment. Not a political story so much as a personal odyssey.)

"Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear if it is allowed to be still." —Deng Ming-Dao

Sarah Palin and Mirrors on the Moon

No, as far as I know, Sarah Palin isn't advocating mirrors on the moon; astronomers are. But an interesting response to Sarah Palin came across my desk today, and so did a piece about, you know, mirrors on the moon. So, two birds with one stone.

In the recent VP candidate debate, because it was clear that with Sarah Palin's looks and folksy charm, Joe Biden was in a match with both hands tied behind his back, and maybe his feet, too. I thought he did just fine. Probably the best commentary on the debate was Saturday Night Live's dead-on impersonation of Palin by Tina Fey. If you missed it, you can catch it on NBC's web site.

Today, though, I saw a particularly incisive written commentary from England, by Michelle Goldberg of The Guardian, who said in part:

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.

And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity....

Read the whole column. It's so, so true.

On a far cheerier note, NASA's science newsletter today reports on proposed plans to place giant, liquid-metal telescope mirrors on the surface of the Moon. The reason? Huge mirrors outside Earth's atmosphere could do astronomy that would make the Hubble seem like a school science project. And liquid mirrors could do that for far less money. Basically, you put the liquid in a stable basin, and you spin it at a very moderate speed. The result: a nearly perfect parabolic mirror surface. At Science@NASA.

"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination." —Edward Hopper

Dog Star

I can't believe I forgot to mention this earlier. I recently sold a short story—the first short piece I've written in years—to Diamonds in the Sky, an online anthology edited by Michael Brotherton and funded by NASA to promote astronomy education. It's going to be available online realsoonnow, I understand. The anthology is intended as a free online resource for astronomy teachers and students, bringing together a group of science fiction stories each of which illustrates a particular astronomical concept. The hope is that the stories will be a fun way to learn science, and might even make some difficult concepts clearer than a straight expository approach. It's to be kept "in print" indefinitely, so that teachers—and their students!—can always go back to it.

In a way, it's a throwback to the Golden Days of Science Fiction, when men were Real Men, and the science in science fiction was Real Science. (Sometimes, anyway.) It should be interesting.

Oh—the title of my story is "Dog Star." It's about a boy and his dog and asteroids and dark energy.

Ultimate SF Workshop Full

Registration has closed for the Ultimate SF Writing Workshop. We got a full house for this year's class. You never know how these things are going to work out. Last year we worked extra hard on publicity and registrations trickled in, barely meeting the minimum (though it was a terrific group!). This year, we scrambled to get word out in time, and we got students in abundance. Craig Gardner (my co-leader) and I are looking forward to getting started with it next week!

As I've said before, Mars needs writers!

Audio on Ice

I've taken a hard look at my audiobook project and reluctantly decided to pull the plug on it for now. Oh, it would be great to have Sunborn available in audio format, and no doubt it would bring in new readers. It's something I enjoy doing, too—when I'm not feeling pressured to get it done, and to do it just so. But it was just taking too much time for too little result, and it was cutting way into my writing on the new book. So I'm putting it on ice for a while, or at least on the back burner.

I don't consider the time wasted, and I hope some people listened to and enjoyed the sample recording. (Besides those who have posted here, I mean.) I learned a lot in the process. One thing I learned is that it's not an easy thing to do well, and you need to spend almost as much time editing the recording of a chapter as you did editing the text in the first place. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but still. Another thing I learned is that I probably need better equipment—microphone, headphones, and so on. That will have to wait.

I do hope to return to it at some point. I may keep fiddling from time to time, to see if I can make the process go more smoothly. But for right now, I've put a lot of time into work that one way or another is to promote Sunborn. It's time I started putting more of my time into The Reefs of Time.


"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing." —John Steinbeck

The Financial Meltdown and You (and Me)

It's hard to open the paper these days without dreading what you're going to read about the financial situation. Yesterday I heard Congressman Barney Frank tell us on NPR that an agreement was near; today I opened the paper to read that it had all fallen apart. Meanwhile, the taxpayers are left wondering why the government can think of coming up with $700,000,000,000 (yeah, it looks like more when you put in all the zeroes, doesn't it?) to bail out greedy and moronic financial institutions and their CEOs, but it can't help individuals who are losing their homes. If you want to read a serious and sober analysis, you could do worse than this summary from Common Cause: Ask Yourself Why...They Didn’t See This Coming.

That'll get you bristling about the way Congress gets bought off by special interests. But a perhaps more entertaining look at the matter is found in a Powerpoint presentation called The Subprime Primer. (This came to me in an email, but when I did a search, I found it on a bunch of sites. This is just one.) If you click the link, it'll ask to open a file in Powerpoint. My Avast! virus-scanner said it was okay.

It's hilarious. And it's also the most concise explanation you could ask for, of how this all happened.

For another funny take, go over to Woot! and read their description, ostensibly, of an iRobot Scooba that was up for sale yesterday. (You'll have to scroll down. I didn't write this in time to clue you in to the sale on the Scooba, but they keep their descriptions for a while in their blog. So zoom down the blog until you come to a Scooba.) It's great fun.

These days, we need all the fun we can get. Right?

Free Ebooks Round Three! The Infinite Sea!

They're all up, now—all three volumes to date of The Chaos Chronicles. They're all free all the time, on my downloads page. (The Infinite Sea still has a few formats unfinished, but the most popular formats are up now.) Thanks, as always, to my friends on the Mobilread forum for their help with conversions.

And do come try the audio podcast of Sunborn. Word on that doesn't seem to be getting out as fast, or maybe the audiobook people are a different demographic. But if you know people who listen to books while they drive, or on their mp3 players while they jog, send 'em my way. Right now I have a starter file of the prologue and chapter one. It's an exacting and sometimes frustrating business getting a good reading down, and chapter two has been giving me fits. But we'll get there. If you record it, they will come—right? Let's hope so.

"Half of my life is an act of revision." —John Irving

Free Sunborn Audiobook Sample

I've been submerged in the recording studio (my office) for the last few days, and have emerged with the first taste of what my audiobook of Sunborn will be like, if the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise. I've put the prologue and first chapter up for free download, pretty much in finished form.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

http://www.starrigger.net/Audiobooks.htm


"Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do."
—Anne Lamott

Auction Time — Be a Character in My Next Novel!

This comes under the "better late (I hope) than never" heading. Tonight—yes, tonight, Saturday Sept. 13—there will be a fund-raising auction for our church, Park Avenue Congregational (UCC) in Arlington, Mass. If you're in the area, come by and bid on good stuff. One of the good stuff is a chance to be a character in the novel I'm writing right now! That would be The Reefs of Time, which I just spent the week hammering on while on retreat on Cape Cod. I'm back now, and I'll be there. (All the details are under that link.)

Last time there was such an auction, a few years ago, the bidding for character-rights was energetic. We finally awarded rights to two bidders, and those characters will be appearing at long last in Sunborn.


*Our other church is the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge. Yeah, we're part of two congregations. Weird, huh? But we have great friends and community in both. If any of our Vineyard friends are reading this, I hope you stop by!

Back on the Cape

Thanks to the generosity of our friends, I am once more ensconced alone in a house on Cape Cod. Time to forget, just for a little while, about making ebooks and fixing the cars and fixing the washer and all the other things that siphon my attention. Time to get a little restored, and get some writing done.

On my way here, I stopped off at the Cape Cod Canal, where a beautiful bike path runs along the water (on both sides, I believe). I'd thrown my rollerblades in the trunk, so I took an hour to skate along the canal and mellow out. It is simply beautiful, and should be added to anyone's list of places to go in New England. I took some pictures with my cell phone camera—but wouldn't you know it, I left the connector cable at home, so I have no way to get the pictures onto my computer to post here. (No, my phone doesn't support emailing the pictures. How dumb is that?)

Okay, I have some serious relaxing and writing to do. Bye, now!

Publishers Weekly Thumbs Up on Sunborn

Actually, I haven't seen the full review myself. Didn't even know there was a Publishers Weekly review until I stumbled across a post about it on Mobileread.com. Here's the excerpt someone put there:

"The long-anticipated fourth entry in Carver's Chaos Chronicles (after 1996's The Infinite Sea) is space opera at its most agreeably and classically science fictional. . . .With such a large cast and a parallel plot involving a threat to Earth itself, character development is necessarily sketched broadly. Some may find the narrative overly stage-managed, but Carver skillfully rotates viewpoints and weaves the choreography directly into the plot. This installment is a cut above the earlier books and will be entirely accessible to any reader who appreciates high-powered stellar and n-dimensional physics blended with old-school space-faring."

Or maybe that is the full review. I don't get PW, so I guess I'll find out when someone tells me. I tried to scope it out online, but couldn't get to it.

But I can live with what we've got right here!

P.S. Over a thousand downloads of Strange Attractors in one day! I think I only posted here and on the above forum, but word virused out with amazing speed. Rob Sawyer posted a very nice notice on his blog. Don't know where he first saw it, but thanks, Rob!

Ebooks Round Two! Ding! Strange Attractors!

I've just released Book Two of The Chaos Chronicles for free download. That'll be Strange Attractors, now on your cyber newsstand in html, Mobi, PDF, RTF, yadda, yadda, and yadda. With yadda formats soon to come. Seriously, with the help of the good ebook lovers of Mobileread.com, it'll be in about eight different formats within a few days, more than likely. Most of them are up now.

This, if you're just joining us, is part of the great windup to Sunborn coming out as a Tor hardcover at the end of October. I can also report here that all signs are Go for Sunborn to also appear as a Tor ebook at around the same time, or soon thereafter. (This represents a change in my arrangement with Tor, a change I agreed to with the understanding that it would appear in a timely fashion, and in a DRM-free form.)

So, I'm psyched.

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time." —Carl Sagan

Killer Asteroids? Moonbase? Hmm...

I wrote earlier about an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Gregg Easterbrook, called The Sky Is Falling. In it, Easterbrook laid out some reasons why we should perhaps be more attentive to the possibility of disaster raining down on us from space, in the form of Earth-impacting asteroids. The probability is small that we'll be smacked by a planet-killer, but the cost if it happens could be civilization itself. Go ahead and read the article; it'll open in another window. Done? Unfortunately, it suggested arming ourselves for asteroid by abandoning our plans to return to the Moon. Here's my response. (The Atlantic didn't publish it, so I'm publishing it here.)

Gregg Easterbrook gets it half right in "The Sky is Falling" (The Atlantic, June 2008). He argues incisively for the need for those in the space community to take seriously the planetary threat of wayward asteroids and comets. NASA isn't interested, as Easterbrook says, and the Air Force is hardly seizing on it with gusto, either. I spoke recently with a USAF officer whose job is strategic planning, and his unofficial comment was that the Defense Department could be considered criminally negligent in its failure to recognize planetary defense as a crucial part of its job description. If an asteroid-strike occurs (or threatens), are NASA and the Air Force just going to shrug and say "Not my job"? As Easterbrook says, that needs to change.

Where he gets it wrong is his dismissal of the return-to-the-moon program as a waste of money, detracting from other efforts. While balancing funding is always difficult (and the space budget is vastly smaller than most people think, accounting for only about half of one percent of the U.S. budget), a return to the moon could be a promising next step indeed. Learning to homestead other worlds is the next step toward what Captain Kirk famously called "the final frontier." The point is not that a lunar base will be a launch point for a Mars mission--no one suggests that. It is that living on the moon will give us necessary experience for future exploration (to Mars and elsewhere), in a place where help is three days' travel time away, not six to twelve months' travel time. Further, a moon base could be the first place for serious mining of extraterrestrial resources, signaling the beginning of the end of humanity's sole reliance on Earth-based metal and energy resources. Why mine minerals on the moon? Well, if you want to get metals into space--for example, to build satellite-based solar energy systems to beam nonpolluting energy to Earth--it's potentially a lot cheaper and easier to lift tonnage from the low-gravity moon than from Earth, especially if you build solar-powered electric launchers for the purpose. This is a good argument for mining asteroids, as well.

This brings us back to the wayward asteroid and comet problem. While Easterbrook mentions several promising technologies, the best long-term solution may be to build an infrastructure for living and working productively in space--not just one low-Earth space station, but a community of space habitations, complete with multiple, varied, and redundant transportation systems. Instead of hoping someone can get off a nuke to deflect one of those wayward asteroids, let's build a permanent capability to move large objects in orbit. If a deadly ball of rubble comes along, we could nudge it away. If a metal-bearing asteroid comes along, we could move it to a parking orbit. Then, instead of watching it destroy our civilization, we could turn it into a mineral-lode, and put it to work building our new future in space.

That's what I told The Atlantic, and I still think it's true. Sometimes you just have to bring your own soapbox.

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." —Leo Tolstoy

Barack, Tor, and Me

I mention Barack because I'm watching his acceptance speech as I write this. I can't tell you how much I hope this guy will be our next president. I really do. I haven't caught that much of the Democratic convention, but I did hear Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and all I could say was, right on, dudes! Time for a change, indeed. Obama is giving a great speech, as I write.

But this isn't primarily a political entry, because I've actually been thinking about and working on other things. I just came from reading a touching post on Tor.com—my editor Jim Frenkel reminiscing in an entry called Still Waters Run Deep about the many years we've worked together, from Dell to Bluejay Books to Tor. It was a treat to see those years through his eyes.

I continue to be amazed by the support and generosity of the ereading community on Mobileread.com. By the time I was done with Neptune Crossing, four different people (none of whom I knew a week ago) were working on format conversions for me, or helpfully tweaking my own files. At the same time, people have been saying thanks with Paypal donations, and/or letting me know they've gone to buy my other ebooks. The dollar amount maybe won't buy us a new washing machine (the damn Calypso died again today) but the feeling of support, encouragement, and community doesn't have a dollar sign on it. It's just been great.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to report that Strange Attractors draws ever closer to being an ebook available for download. Expect word soon.

"People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power." —William Jefferson Clinton

More, More!

My Neptune Crossing free downloads are up over two thousand now, and over on Mobileread.com, there's been lively discussion and lots of encouragement and support from the people who truly love ebooks. In fact, on the first day, someone came forward and offered to do a conversion to the Sony reader format. In the process, he caught some errors for me, and he just sent me the file. As soon as I can find the software to view it and vet it, I'll be putting that up, too.

Meanwhile, I've just uploaded a PDF(2) file, which will work on a handheld screen—meaning that the text will reflow to fit the smaller screen. That was a project of many hours, using an old version of Framemaker I have on my computer. (Framemaker has to be about the least intuitive program I have ever used in my life.) So if you really want a PDF on your PDA, go for it! (I still recommend Mobipocket or eReader, though.)

I added a Paypal tip jar to my download page, and yesterday my first donation came in, from Bob of Bloomington. That was interesting also because he learned of my downloads on the Amazon Kindle forum, which I didn't even know existed. And my work was completely new to him. That was followed by my first international donation, from Joerg of Germany. Many thanks! (Another came in, as I was typing this.) I am extremely gratified that people are responding so generously. Go readers! You rock!

So does my family, who as a special birthday present sat as a tag team and typed in boring copy edits for Strange Attractors. Family, you rock!

So do you blog readers, as a matter of fact.

"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing ... the rest will follow." —my wise friend Jane Yolen

The Virus Turns, and I Get a Surprise

I couldn't resist checking the web logs for the last two days to see if people were downloading Neptune Crossing. Sure'n, they are. Seems word's spreading faster than I'd hoped: I got an email from a reader telling me he'd seen a notice about it at Teleread—a very nice write-up by Chris Meadows. And he'd learned about it on Baen's Bar, where someone had posted a note. I tried to post a note about it on Tor.com, but couldn't get past some stupid Fatal Error every time I tried to submit. Despite that, the viral distribution seems to be off to a good start! Keep it up, please!

Oh—and this summary of a kerfuffle on Tor.com is pretty interesting, mainly because of what it says about human nature. Seems some people are pretty peeved with Tor for giving them free ebooks when they didn't have the sequels ready yet for ebook distribution. (I'd better watch it.)

Meanwhile, I was pretty surprised to see the breakdown of downloads by format. I have fallen in deep like with the MobiPocket format, and the eReader format seems very good, too. On the other hand, I've never much liked PDF, which is slower and less clear on a handheld device, and I'm still working on the problem of getting a clean file that also allows the text to reflow to a smaller screen. (Making progress. I have a file that looks good, but is huge.)

So as of midnight tonight, here's what the comparative stats looked like for the last couple of days, the inaugural days of the download page:


Palm/eReader - 19 downloads
RTF - 26
Mobi - 40
HTML - 62
PDF - 381

What?! Hey, I'm happy for people to take it in any form they want. But if you haven't tried downloading a free Mobi Reader or eReader, give it a try. They're good.

"Dude! Writing's hard, dude!" —Anonymous

Neptune Crossing PDF Added

After much sweat today, I beat the Mobipocket Creator software into making some final tweaks to the MobiPocket version of Neptune Crossing. Then I lit into the PDF version, which seems to be a popular format, although in my opinion it has little to recommend it for viewing on a PDA or other handheld. That's especially true here. I have a nice, pretty PDF display for viewing on a computer or for printing. And I hope that's how most people who choose PDF would do it.

What I didn't master was getting a file that'll reflow the text onto a small screen. First my wife was doing the conversions for me on her Mac, and they looked good but were pretty fat files. Then I tried Adobe's free online conversion, and that gave a much smaller file, same appearance. But neither did the tagging needed for text reflow on a PDA, and I don't know how to do it. (And if this is all so much gibberish to you, more power to you!)

I think that's it for Neptune Crossing! On to Strange Attractors!

"I have not yet spoken of the esthetic appeal of strange attractors. These systems of curves, these clouds of points, suggest sometimes fireworks or galaxies... A realm lies here to be explored and harmonies to be discovered." —David Ruel

Neptune Crossing — Free Download!

I finished it today! You can now go to my web site http://www.starrigger.net and download a free ebook of Neptune Crossing, in any of several digital formats! I've got html, MobiPocket (Kindle and Pocket PC and others), and eReader (Palm and Pocket PC) formats up now, and expect to add PDF in a day or so. I may add Microsoft Reader and Sony ebook formats, but I don't know how much demand there is for them. Maybe I'll come back to that after I get the next books up.

It's been a real bear. First getting all the copy-edits typed in (my daughter helped with that). Then fixing the formatting; the original files were in WordStar for DOS, and the conversion to Word left some problems. Oy—the formatting. A nightmare. But I finally managed it. I have the Mobi and eReader versions on my own PDA right now, and they look good.

I'm finding that I enjoy reading on my PDA, more and more. I have about 50 books on there right now, and I can read it in bed in the dark without waking my wife. (With the font set at largest, I can just read without my glasses!) I'm rereading some old favorites from when I was a kid—some Tom Corbett and Andre Norton. But I've also got a bunch of classics, ranging from The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to The Call of the Wild to the Bible, for when I want something different. I'm a convert to ebooks!

Anyway, come and download Neptune Crossing, and tell your friends! Free books!! Help me out and pass the word!

"You'll never make much money writing books like that. But the very best people will come to your funeral." —said to Edgar Pangborn, as told by D.G. Compton

Back to Real Life

Coming back from the retreat brought me a fun afternoon fixing the washer (which I actually sort of enjoyed—you know the retreat did me good!). Of course, that was followed promptly by the exhaust system on one of the cars falling to pieces—and when did exhaust repairs become so expensive? Ai caramba!

Still, life is good, and our older daughter is coming home soon from her West Coast summer job, so we'll actually see her for a week before she heads back to college. Yay!

"Time, what is time? Time is our beginning and our end, time is the cradle of our search for God, time is the elastic that cuts circulation on the leg of life." —Allysen Palmer

Writing Retreat

Or, if you will, a sanity retreat. A recharging of the depleted solar batteries retreat. A restoring of the humor and soul retreat. When I last posted, I'd just begun the cleaning of our downstairs apartment for the arrival of our new neighbor, Jill. That turned into a week-long enterprise, which was crowned at its conclusion by the sudden failure of our wondrous [hah!] Whirlpool Calypso washing machine. (&@^*$^!!) Plus, I'd been writing very little, and all of it sludge.

That pretty much brought me to the end of my rope. Fortunately, salvation was at hand, thanks to my wonderful wife Allysen, who had secretly arranged for me to have three days on Cape Cod, all to myself, in the vacation home of some friends of ours from church. (Thanks, Frank and Deb!) My instructions were simple: Do nothing that I did not want to do. Except rest, and relax by the ocean. That I was required to do, or the deal was off. (I didn't fight too hard.) If I found energy and inspiration to write, fine. If I did nothing but rest and empty my mind, fine.

Well, who could argue with that? And that's where I've been for the last three days. Yes, I've spent a little too much time doing fiddly stuff on my laptop—things that needed doing eventually, but not just now. (Stop that! Breath! Go to the beach!) Well, a couple of afternoons spent floating on my back in the ocean, and watching charming little sandpipers scurry in and out of the waves, has done wonders for my soul. I began to feel the first feather-touches of creativity creep back into my mind. I even began to think of answers to some of the questions I've had about book-in-progress! Today, I began to write some new material that has actual promise.

Tomorrow, I head home. But I'm told I have a few more days booked in September. What a gift!

"I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die." —Isaac Asimov

Robots at Work

Quick note: I've spent much of this week getting our downstairs apartment ready for a new tenant. We own a two-family, and we just lost one set of neighbors and have someone new ready to move in. That's the good part. The bad part is, it's amazing how much grime accumulates in just a few years, even when people are taking good care of a place. So...I put the robots to work. Two iRobot Roombas (Snarf and Red Leader) did the sweeping—and man, did they pick up a lot of dirt. Then the Scooba (Nemo) set to work washing the floors—freeing me up for such fun work as cleaning the stove and refrigerator. (Ugh.) Those little mechanical guys earned their keep this week, for sure. Let's hear it for robots!

I know, I know—I should have taken some pictures. Thing is, I was busy cleaning the stove, you know?

Soon I hope to get back to more inspiring endeavors, such as getting the first three Chaos books into shape for free e-book release.

Tor Free e-Books—Last Chance

If you were sort of thinking of snagging the e-books Tor.com has been offering on a weekly basis, but never got around to it, or missed some, it's not too late. With the launch of Tor's new web site, they're making the whole lot available one more time for procrastinators. Check it out this week only on this page at Tor Books. There's a bunch of cover art available for download, too. Through July 27. Don't wait!

I just today installed the free Mobipocket Reader software on my Pocket PC, and loaded a whole slew of books in Mobipocket format onto the storage card. Though I've only played around with it a bit, I have to say it's a pretty nice way to view the books, especially considering that the PDA itself (a Cassiopeia) is now something of a vintage device. Tor is offering the books in a variety of formats, but the Mobipocket seems the most compact, and works best as long as you have the software.

Also, thanks to a tip from Rob Sawyer, I purchased on ebay, from a nice lady in England, a DVD containing 10,000 e-books from the Gutenberg project. All kinds of classics, ranging from the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to H.P. Lovecraft, all in the public domain. It's only $24 including airmail from England. To find it, do a search on ebay for ON DVD 10.000 MOBIPOCKET ebooks for the KINDLE READER — and you'll find it.

"A room [or PDA] without books is like a body without a soul." —Cicero

Readercon and E-Books (Part 2)

Okay, on to the Readercon panel on e-distribution of our books and stories, which was titled, "If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What's Piracy?" I was on the panel along with James Patrick Kelly (moderating), Cat Rambo, Graham Sleight, and Gordon Van Gelder (editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). The basic questions, which are seriously intertwined:

1. Is it good for a writer (or publisher) to give away your goods for free on the net?
2. If the answer to (1) is yes, is it so bad if someone else decides to give your stuff away for free on your behalf (e-piracy)?

I'm not going to be able to repeat the exact points made on the panel, so let me try giving the gist, in the form of Q&A.

Q. Does it really help writers to put their stuff up for free? Does it help book sales, or hurt?
A. No one knows. Anecdotal evidence (ala Doctorow, Scalzi, and others) suggests that it helps. But that's very anecdotal, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has released any actual sales figures as evidence. But no one seems to feel that it hurts—and the fact that Baen gives away free e-books, and Tor too (and the fact that Tor is fine with my giving away my books if I want to) lends some authority to that position. But...this could well just be the early adopter effect. And while it's seemingly helped some people, is it also reinforcing a perception in the public that stuff online simply ought to be free, dammit? What will happen when e-books are a bigger part of the whole publishing picture? Will readers be willing to pay for the cow when they're used to getting the milk for free?

Q. Is it better to emulate the drug dealers, and give the first one for free—and try to hook them, so that they'll pay for the ones that follow?
A. No one knows. But that's kind of what Baen Books does, and it seems to work for them. So should I put up my new (forthcoming) book Sunborn for free, along with the first three books in the story arc—or is three enough, and if you like those, c'mon, just buy the next book, please? No one knows. Or at least I don't. (But that's how I'm leaning at the moment.)

Q. How do audiobooks and podcasts fit into this?
A. It's sort of the same deal. Some authors, Jim Kelly in particular, have been energetically giving away podcasts of their own readings, as a way to promote the printed stuff. According to Jim, when he won the Nebula Award for his novella "Burn," it had probably been heard by more people as a free podcast than read by people on the page. His audio promotion probably has increased his readership, and now it's resulted in a paid arrangement with audible.com.

Q. Is it okay that strangers are scanning in our books, or hacking the protected e-books, and putting them up online on BitTorrent sites, in complete violation of copyright and common courtesy?
A. No, it's not okay. It sucks. It's piracy, and it's illegal and immoral. Only one person should decide whether a book or story goes up for free—and that's the author.

Q. What if I ask the question again. Will you give the same answer?
A. Maybe not. Unquestionably it's free publicity, and it may well draw new readers into the author's fold. After all, what's the bottom-line difference between someone finding a pirated version of your book on BitTorrent and grabbing it for free, and someone paying a penny for a used copy on Amazon? Neither one makes the writer a cent in royalties. But there's that new reader thing; we like it when new people discover our stories. Sometimes they go on to buy other books, or even the same ones, in royalty-paying copies. (Sometimes they don't.) But at least they're reading our stuff.

Q. Are there any other parallels with the music biz, beyond the audiocasts?
A. The emusic/itunes/etc music model of selling songs for a reasonable price has clearly established that many people are willing to pay a fair price for a legit copy of something they want—even if they could get it for free in pirated form. Clearly this is working for the mp3 retail industry. But is it actually working for the artists? (By which I mean the midlist artists.) I don't know. One thing I do know is that the e-book industry has yet to fully grasp the concept of fair price; most legit e-books still cost way too much. And I include my own in that. (However, I have no control.)

Q. Would it make sense for a magazine like Fantasy and Science Fiction to go to a free, online, giveaway model?
A. Sure, if the purpose was to put it out of business. That's the opinion of publisher Gordon Van Gelder, and the experience of online magazines seems to bear it out.

Q. How much time and effort should a writer put into all this, if he/she desires to put stuff up for free.
A. That's a good question, because every hour spent making corrected book files or audio files (or writing blogs) is an hour not spent writing new stories. And it can be stressful. Sometimes very stressful. And creatively draining.

Q. There are a lot of unknowns here. When are we going to start seeing some answers?
A. Nobody knows. But if you're just joining the conversation on this blog, scroll down a few posts for more on the subject.

I hope I've been able to clarify the picture for you. (Hah.) No doubt I've forgotten some things that were said on the panel. If so, perhaps someone out there can add it in a comment.

"When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out." —Vickie Karp

Readercon and E-Books (Part 1)

First of all, let me say that Readercon was great this year—which I measure primarily by the enjoyable and interesting people I talked to. A partial list would include Jim Kelly, Rob Sawyer, Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Geary Gravel, Rosemary Kirstein, Tom Easton and his wife Kate Savage (who let me hold an Amazon Kindle in my hands for the first time, and even put some of my books on it!), Michaela Roessner, Terry McGarry, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jim Freund, Judith Berman, Victoria McManus, Dan Kimmel, and—neither last nor least—a bunch of members of the writing workshops I've led with Craig Gardner. In that latter group, Chris Howard was positively glowing. His first novel, Seaborn, is just out. It looks terrific. (Two short sections of it went through critique in our workshop.) And Chris figured he'd made it—because his book was already pirated and up on someone's BitTorrent site. And probably was before the print version was even available.

Whatever you think about that last, good or bad—congratulations, Chris!

On the subject of e-books and piracy, I participated in a lively panel on the subject of e-piracy versus the rising trend of folks making their work available for free online. Our panel moderator was James Patrick Kelly, who has been in the forefront of putting his work up in audio format, initially as free podcasts, which eventually led to a paid appearance on audible.com. We batted around a lot of ideas on the subject—which I promise I will talk about tomorrow. It's late now. Time to get some sleep.

"I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn't, I would die." —Isaac Asimov

Readercon: July 17 – 20

Readercon happens this coming weekend, just outside Boston. It's one of my convention-going highlights of the year, being full of people who truly love reading and love science fiction! I'll be on a few panels, and doing a reading. The full text of the Program Guide is online as a PDF. But here's my schedule:

Friday 4:00 PM, Salon F:
If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What's Piracy? -- Jeffrey A. Carver, James Patrick Kelly (L), Cat Rambo, Graham Sleight, Gordon Van Gelder

"Webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free . . . [are helping convert] the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch."--Howard V. Hendrix, former Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). In a recent issue of _Locus_, Cory Doctorow summarized the evidence that giving away free electronic versions of books actually helps rather than hinders sales of the printed versions... What are the differences between giving away a text electronically yourself, and letting others disseminate it without your knowledge and/or permission? ...If "piracy" is actually good for all except the best-selling authors, how do writers reconcile this reality with long-standing and deep-rooted feelings about intellectual property rights and getting paid for work?

Friday 7:00 PM, Salon F:
Waking Up Sober Next to a Story Idea -- Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeffrey A. Carver (L), David Anthony Durham, Kay Kenyon, Barry B. Longyear, Jennifer Pelland

Really, it seemed absolutely beautiful once upon a time. Now that you've had intimate knowledge of it (say, midway through the novel), you can see all the less-than-flattering sides. You may even wonder, What the hell was I thinking? How do you recover enthusiasm for the work? Now that you see the flaws, how do you begin the process of fixing them?

Saturday 12:00 Noon, Vinyard: Kaffeeklatsch (meet the author)
Jeffrey A. Carver; David Anthony Durham

Saturday 2:00 PM, RI: Workshop
Writing Jujitsu: Turning Writer's Block into Stories. -- Barry B. Longyear with participation by Jeffrey A. Carver, Barbara Krasnoff, Sandra McDonald, et al.

You can't sell it until it's on paper and you can't get it on paper if things keep eating up your time, nag at you, bully you, or you're filled to the brim with illnesses, insecurities, or crushing doubts. Longyear presents a how-to workshop for beginning writers and those who have been there on how to turn what's blocking your muse into stories.

Sunday 1:30 PM, VT: Reading (30 min.) -- Jeffrey A. Carver reads from his forthcoming novel Sunborn.

If you're going to be at Readercon, I hope you'll come say hello. (I won't have a designated autographing time. They had too many authors, and since I don't currently have anything new out, they triaged me. But I'll be around. Grab me after a panel, or come to the Kaffeeklatch.)

"First you're an unknown, then you write a book and you move up to obscurity." —Martin Myers

Unusual Book Signing Planned

This weekend, I was at my usual early-Saturday-evening haunt, which is the free and very friendly wine tastings at my local beer and wine emporium, Menotomy Beer and Wine in Arlington, Massachusetts. I was looking around, and had a sudden inspiration: why not a combination wine tasting /book signing? A natural, no? (Could be a beer tasting, too; they do those on Friday evenings.)

I suggested it to the management ("I have a crazy idea..."), and they loved it. Turns out they've been *trying* to get local artists in there to display their work for free, just to liven things up even more. I believe their exact words were: "You're here. It's a done deal."

So if you're in the Boston area, mark that on your mental calendar for sometime in November, when Sunborn is published. I'll post more later.

More On Free E-Books

There's been a lot of interesting stuff written in just the last few days, fortuitously (some of which was brought to my attention by Charlza in his comment to my last post). Simon Owens has a long article about the Tor free e-book program on his blog, bloggasm. He notes several authors' impressions that book giveaways have helped sales, and quotes extensively from Tobias Buckell, a newer writer who seems to be doing very nicely. There are some provocative comments from readers, on both sides of the question.

Rob Sawyer responds on his own blog with a much more analytical approach to the question. Pointing out that there's really no hard data for us to base judgments on, he does a nice job of extrapolating some likely ranges for increased sales (and earnings) for writers. In his view, the benefits are probably far more modest than suggested by anecdotal reports. A key point in his argument is that Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, who have reported such apparent good results, are not necessarily typical cases. Both of these writers have huge online presences, and probably got way more downloads than the average writer would. (Certainly they have far more active blogs and web sites than I do.)

So where does this leave me? I learned from reader Pascal that a fair number of my earlier novels are already up on Bit Torrent networks in pirated PDF editions. He got copies to me so that I could look at them, and I see that they range from barely readable hack jobs to thoroughly professional-looking work. I must say it was a shock to see how many novels by how many SF writers are floating around in pirated editions. I'm of two minds about it: On the one hand, it's clear copyright infringement, and to a significant degree badly done infringement. On the other hand, it's free publicity.

One of my workshop students suggested, why not find the pirate scanners who did the good job and see if I can get them to scan in the first three Chaos books for me. Then I could put at the top of the PDFs:

"This electronic edition, and no other, has been distributed with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will download it, and no other."

(If you don't recognize the source, it's from Tolkien's note in the Ballantine Books edition of The Lord of the Rings, following the Ace pirated edition, many decades ago.)

So am I any closer to a decision on whether to post Sunborn for free when it's published? Not really. But leaning now towards putting the first three up to introduce new readers to the series, then letting the book carry it from there.

But we'll see.

"Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject." —E. B. White

Speaking of Free Books

I've been considering the possibility of making Sunborn available for free download, perhaps in installments leading up to the actual pub date (end of October). A number of writers, including Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, have offered their books for free download and discovered that it seemed to increase their audience and interest in the novels, and thus sales of their books. While there are no doubt some readers who will read only the free version and skip the hardcopy, it seems that many more decide they'd like to own the actual book once they've read the electronic version. At least, that's what these writers have reported. Past experience is no guarantee of future performance, though, as the mutual funds tell us.

I'd be interested in knowing what you folks think. This is new territory for all of us in the fiction world, and I'm feeling my way in the dark just like everyone else.

(I've already used this quote, but it just seems to fit, so here's an encore...)

"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." —E.L. Doctorow

BSG Novel—Free at Tor.com!

The e-book version, that is. This week only, you can download my novelization of Battlestar Galactica (the miniseries that began the new BSG) for free from Tor Books. And by the way, if you like e-books, Tor offers a weekly free book. If you sign up for their email newsletter, you'll get a reminder notice each week when a new title becomes available. You have to act fast, though, because when a new one comes, the old one goes away. (Sort of like woot.com, but without the price and the funny descriptions.)

Speaking of e-books, here's a reminder that many of my novels are available as e-books in various formats. Go to e-reads.com for a complete listing. And, of course, you can also order new, bound-paper codices (books) directly from me.

"The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business." —John Steinbeck

Sunborn Galleys Done, and Other Updates

It's been a busy month. I got my name landed on Mars, and I've put my characters deep into the Orion Nebula. In other words, I just finished correcting the galleys (page proofs to check the typesetting) for the hardcover edition of Sunborn. That's pretty much the end of my work on the book. I'd promised my editor, Jim Frenkel, that I'd have them in the mail by end of day on Friday—and I got to the post office literally about thirty seconds before they were going to close the windows. Package sent, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I like this book, but I may have read it as many times as I need to, for a while.

To help decompress, last night I wrote a letter to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, both praising and protesting this month's cover story, The Sky Is Falling, by Gregg Easterbrook, about the hazard to Earth from wayward asteroids and comets. Seriously, it would take just one good-sized rock from space to kack most of human civilization. So NASA's gearing up to protect us, right? Ding. Nope. NASA's head's in the sand. So far, I'm with the author.

Where we part company is where he dismisses our planned return to the moon as a waste of money detracting from our ability to do other things in space, like defend ourselves from big rocks. In fact, I believe returning to the moon is the next step toward building a permanent infrastructure in space, which among other things will give us the ongoing capability to do such things as capture or divert asteroids before they can divert us (from our future).

If they don't publish the letter (and the odds certainly are long), I'll post it in its entirety later.

"Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it." —Flannery O'Connor

Phoenix and Me

The successful landing of Phoenix on the northern polar region of Mars was a sensational event (which live coverage by the Science Channel managed to make dull; how could they do that?), being the first rocket-powered soft landing on Mars since 1976, when the Vikings landed. You've all seen pictures from the Mars surface, no doubt--but you might not have seen this picture, the first time any craft has ever been photographed landing on another world:

MRO-HiRISE

If you go to the full image at Astronomy Picture of the Day, you'll see the magnificent crater near which Phoenix landed.

Phoenix is not just a national and international triumph; it's a personal one, as well. I was reminded by the Planetary Society that my family and I are personally represented on Mars by this craft: it carries a DVD that bears our names, along with those of 250,000 other people who signed up for the mission. It also bears a library of science and science fiction works about Mars, to be recovered and enjoyed by future explorers. Here's a picture, taken by Phoenix itself, of the DVD on Mars.

Planetary Society

Now that's a good feeling, knowing that a part of me is up there on Mars right now.

Bread Loaf Conference

As I hoped and expected, the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf was a great time, and entirely too short. My daughter Julia attended the workshops led by another fiction writer, while I worked with a talented and extraordinarily open and enthusiastic group of fourteen high school students on their fiction writing. That was just the core of it; there were also readings (from the podium where Robert Frost used to hold forth—I did one myself), additional writing sessions open to all, conversations with writers of all stripes, good food and good company, and—wonder of wonders—sunshine on the mountain. I was sad to leave. But I'll tell you this: there are some excellent writers coming up in the years ahead! Be warned. Be heartened.

The Sunborn galleys arrived for my inspection and correction just before the conference, and I didn't have time to so much as glance at them over the weekend. Now I'm working on them, but I'm also getting ready to leave on another trip, this time to meet with another group that wants to pick the brains of SF writers.

I hope you're all enjoying your spring.

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." —Peter De Vries

Sunborn Available for Preorder

For years, readers have been sending me emails saying, "When is the next Chaos Chronicles book coming out?" or, "I'm not getting any younger—will there ever be another Chaos Chronicles book?" or even, "Thanks a lot for leaving me hanging, because it's obvious there's never going to be another book, you jerk."

Readers of this blog have known for years that Sunborn, the new Chaos book, was coming—or at least it's been my word against the doubters. (Sometimes, I've been among the doubters.) Well, you no longer have to take my word for it! It's up on Amazon. And you can even preorder it. Now. Today. Go ahead, click the link! It won't hurt.

Preorder now!

I was surprised it was up this soon (the pub date is October of this year, from Tor Books). In fact, I didn't even know it was up until a kind reader in Germany sent me a note telling me about it. I quickly discovered that they'd misspelled my first name on the dustjacket, at least as displayed on Amazon, but a note to my editor resulted in that being fixed pretty quickly. (I hope it stays fixed. I'm sure it will. Nothing can go wrongg.)

That's the news from here. I might not get this written up before I go, so I'll just mention that next week I'll be heading up again to the Bread Loaf writing center near Middlebury, Vermont, to teach at the annual New England Young Writers Conference. If you are, or are the parent or teacher of, a young writer of high school age, you really should look into this for next year. It's a terrific program. I'll tell all about it, after I get back.

And did I mention? You can preorder Sunborn from Amazon.

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." —Red Smith

Spring Is Here!

Spring has sprung here in Massachusetts! And most welcome it is! I don't know why, but this last winter felt like the longest I've ever known. I've been counting the interesting species of wildlife I've been seeing right around our house here in the Boston 'burbs: cardinals, bluejays, black-capped chickadee (I think), mockingbirds, crows (making a comeback after nearly being decimated by the Nile virus), a cute little rabbit, a toad, and—just a few days ago—a wild turkey. (It practically cut me off as I was coming up on my moped; it was flying up the street at an altitude of about six feet, then landed in a neighbor's driveway.) Oh and, yeah—termites.

Blasted termites ate a piece of wood paneling in our downstairs rental apartment. So now I've got to hire a Terminator. Jeez, that's an expensive proposition! And it's not just a matter of getting estimates and picking a terminator; I have to decide which approach I want to take—pesticide injection into the ground (the tried and true method), or bait trapping (much less pesticide, but newer, less tested, and more expensive).

Which reminds me that my wife and I have become big fans of the new show, Sarah Connor Chronicles. I just read that it's been renewed for next season. Yesss! And BSG has started up again. We've only watched one episode so far, but clearly they're going to be messing with our minds for the rest of the series. And I mean that in a good way, of course.

I haven't had as much time to pursue my Roomba hobby as I'd hoped, but I did bring an ailing Scooba back to life! Turned out have some defective soldering inside. I never would have found it if someone on Roombareview.com hadn't suggested that I solder a couple of leads for a voltmeter in there, so that I could see what was happening. Lo and behold, the act of doing that solved the problem. And I just got a very nice note from someone in Italy, telling me that my method worked for him, too! (No, he didn't put leads in, but he did remelt the solder on the crucial connection—and that fixed his Scooba, too.)

In keeping with the theme of BSG and Roombas, I present here a couple of funny videos I stumbled across on youtube. The links will open new windows in your browser.

Cylon Roombas!

And I, Roomba, a Roomba love story, of sorts (a little long, but cute):

I, Roomba

(I tried embedding the videos, but they played erratically for some reason.)

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." —Cicero

Sunborn Copyedit Finished

For the last seven or eight days, I have been up to my ears in Sunborn again. The copyedited manuscript arrived for my review, and as usual, they wanted it done yesterday. In case you're not familiar with the process, when a book manuscript goes into production, after it's left the editor's hands, it goes to a copy editor. This person does all the fine marking up for typesetting, plus proofing of all the fiddly little details, querying the author if something seems wrong or unclear, and checking spelling, hyphenations, commas, all the little stuff that can drive you crazy—and make the book look unprofessional if it's missed or done wrong. Copy editors are absolutely essential to the bookmaking process, and a good copy editor is priceless to an author.

The problem is that the author then has to go over everything, approving or not approving of changes, and reconsidering every little comma and word choice, pulling his or her hair out over things that he thought (ha ha) had already been settled. It's also a chance to make last-minute revisions if a passage doesn't seem right. It's my least favorite stage of writing a book, it's excruciating, and it's necessary to do it with great care. Usually by the time you get to this point, you're sick to death of the book and the last thing you want to do is read it one more time. But you do. For one thing, even the best copy editor will make some changes you don't like, and this is where you catch them and fix them.

Anyway, I did all that, and have just shipped it off to my editor. Now it goes back to the production department and off to typesetting. I'll have to do it all one more time—when the page proofs come for checking. But for now, I can rest. Sleeeeeeep!

"You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word." —Gustave Flaubert

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008)

One of the last of the towering giants of our field is gone. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. I learned of it when my daughter called from college to tell me she'd seen it on the BBC news site. (There's a much better obituary in the Washington Post, also reprinted in the Boston Globe.) I was stunned, even though I knew I shouldn't be; his health had been frail for years. Nonetheless, I feel deeply saddened, and at the same time grateful for the wonders of the imagination that he brought us all. Like many of my generation, I grew up inspired by AsimovHeinleinClarke, as well as many of their contemporaries. With Sir Arthur's passing, that towering triumvirate is all gone now. In this world, all that remains is their work, and memories. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty impressive monument.

Photo from AP, via Boston Globe

I never met Arthur Clarke, but we corresponded briefly when I was in college. (Correspondence is probably glorifying it, but that's how I choose to remember it.) When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, Arthur Clarke was there with Walter Cronkite, covering the story. Being a big fan of Clarke's at the time (in particular, I loved his short stories and the short novel Against the Fall of Night), I wrote to him in care of CBS News, telling him how great it was to see him there on TV with Walter Cronkite. A week or so later, I got a postcard back from him, thanking me. He'd written it as he was departing for his home on Sri Lanka.

He and I shared a love of something besides science and science fiction, particularly science fiction with transcendent themes—and that was scuba diving. That's something I'd always wished we could have talked about. It was not to be, in this world. Maybe in the next.

"All writing is a form of prayer." —John Keats

Taxes, Life, and Consultancy

The last few weeks have been jammed, with one thing after another, some better than others. Doing taxes (mostly, getting a year's financial records caught up so that I could do our taxes) took a big slug of time. In my new model for life, it had to be done not by an April 15th deadline, but by the deadline of submitting all the application materials for my daughter's college financial aid. Ironically, in the midst of this, I needed to bring said daughter home for a week of enforced rest. She bonked her head real good on a lighting fixture at the theater where she works, and got a concussion. Being a college kid, she of course wasn't resting as needed for recovery. So home she came.

The day we drove her back to school (a 3 1/2 hour drive each way) was the day we had torrential downpours throughout the northeast—so we got on our way for the return trip home just in time to avoid flooding roads, and then drove for 3 1/2 hours through the hardest pounding rain I've seen in a long time. Made it okay, though.

That segued right into preparing for one of my most unusual trips (from which I've just returned). I flew to D.C. and joined a handful of other SF writers for a 2-day meeting with people from the defense department, or technically the Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP), brainstorming futuristic notions of how we might better prepare our soldiers for future combat. Now, I am not a military type at all, and there I was with a group consisting of military thinktank guys, ex-servicemen, and a few representatives of actual arms manufacturers. It was extremely interesting and educational, and I hope I contributed some useful ideas. Mostly I focused on nonlethal weapons and information systems and nanotech possibilities, because I think our people in the field ought to have more choices than doing nothing, or pulling a trigger and killing someone. (That's greatly simplifying, of course, but the fundamental image is a 19-year-old kid with an M16, kicking down a door and making a split-second decision about whether the person on the other side is a threat or not.) We had some very interesting discussions (although the bureaucratic mode kicked in once in a while, such as when we "affinitized" our ideas, then went for—what was it?—a "Plenary Consensus on Affinity Grouping of Concepts").

Following that meeting, most of us SF writers went on to meet with people from the Department of Homeland Security, who were eager to solicit our thoughts on how to anticipate threats in the future, and how to avoid them and/or adapt to them. That again was extremely educational, and I hope we got a start at useful brainstorming with them. They're a lot smarter than most of the public probably thinks they are. And they're interested in continuing to work with us.

And so I came home, where younger daughter was there to greet me, but wife was not. No, nothing bad had happened; we just missed each other, as she'd flown to London this morning to help her mom deal with some family business. You do what you have to, to get affordable air fares, right?

Anyway, I came back encouraged as much as anything else by the fact that there are some decision-makers in Washington who actually think science fiction writers have some useful thoughts to contribute. That alone was worth the trip.

"Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something." —Isaac Asimov

Sunborn in October 2008

How could I forget this? I have word now that Sunborn (the continuation of the Chaos Chronicles) is firmly scheduled for October of this year, from Tor. That's the hardcover. I don't know yet when the paperback will be out, probably a year or so after.

Meanwhile, a reminder that you can read the beginning of the book online right now!

By the way, one of the many things I'm thinking about doing is getting some decent recording equipment and producing my own podcast or audiobook-style readings of some of my stuff. This is something that author James Patrick Kelly has been doing pretty successfully. What do you all think? Should I start with some short stories, or do Sunborn? Lemme know.

"I have written eleven books, but each time I think, 'Uh oh, they're going to find out now. I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out.'" —Maya Angelou

If This is Tuesday, It Must Be...No, No, That Can't Be Right

So I don't know what day it is, anymore. What else is new? Last weekend, I was at Boskone, which is an always-enjoyable Boston SF convention. In the art show, I was startled to see the cover painting to one of my older books, The Rapture Effect! Beautiful painting by David Mattingly. Besides that, it was good to catch up with people I haven't seen in a while, and devote yet more time to the question of how to make a living at this racket. (The writing racket.) More and more, it seems, writers have to look for other gigs to bring in income—even writers who are well established, and who you might think have it made. (There's a good chance that they don't, that they do something else to pay the mortgage.)

This isn't going to pay the mortgage, but I've started a new business-hobby: Roomba resurrection. It started with my fixing my own Roomba when it seemed dead, then thinking, well, if I could get some people to give me their old, dead Roombas, it would be a great home school project to take them apart with my daughter and her home-school buddies. But it turned out nobody wanted to give me their old Roombas, so I started looking for some cheap on Ebay. Turns out there's a constant stream of them being sold there, and it started to seem like a good idea to buy a few as cheaply as I could, fix them up, and see if I could resell them for a profit. I'll let you know how that works out. (I still want to do the home-school project, though. If you have an old Roomba you want to lend to the cause....)

Interesting news notes:

From the Washington Post comes this: Scientists "have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made—about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black. The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons—light checks in, but it never checks out." It involves carbon nanotubes (what else?) and has got people thinking ever deeper thoughts about invisibility cloaks.

Meanwhile, U.S. plans to shoot down a defective and falling satellite have the rest of the world wondering what else those military tech-types might be thinking about. I take no position on that question—sure, they could be viewing this as a great practice opportunity, and probably are—but does that mean they shouldn't do it if it might reduce the risk of an accident on the ground? I don't have enough information to form an educated opinion. But I do like what space.com has offered us—a chance to consider the question: "What Cosmic Duo Would You Trust to Destroy a Wayward Spy Satellite?" Look through the list. It'll amuse you, and bring back some fond memories!


"A man who had to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already." —Lin Yutang

Chameleons of the Deep

Whatever I was planning to write about next—probably Slicing Open Golf Balls for Fun and Profit, or something equally edifying—got knocked right out of my head when I encountered the web site, Talking Squids in Outer Space. That site by itself is pretty cool; I had no idea there were that many SF stories with squids in them. But even better, I followed their link to this video, which is real footage of cephalopods doing amazing things in the ocean. Watch it; it's worth your time. If it doesn't display properly in this page, go to http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/206.



Tell me these critters aren't amazing.

"Imagination is the eye of the soul." —Joseph Joubert

Virgin Galactic's Spaceliner Design Unveiled

So you're ready to fly into space, but you don't have $200,000 handy to buy a ticket? Me neither. But we can dream together, can't we? Virgin Galactic has released designs for SpaceshipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, currently under construction at Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites air/spacecraft factory. This thing is gigacool. It's one of the best reasons I can think of for winning the lottery (and I can think of quite a few). They've also got a video, with some animated depictions of a flight. New Mexico spaceport, here we come!

It's been a few years now since I wrote my short story, "Rocket Ride! A Short Day's Journey into Space," about traveling in just such a machine. But you can still read it here.

"And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr