Entertainment, Fantasy, Reading, Science Fiction, Writing

Independent Author’s Toolbag: Reviews and Book Sales

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This post is as much addressed to readers as it is to authors.  Many readers might feel that they are pestered, one might even say harassed, to provide reviews.  Why is that?  Well, it’s simple.  As a reader, when I browse through books on Amazon or B&N, I’ll take a few minutes to glance at what other people said.  Especially if it’s a book from a new or unfamiliar author.  I’ll check what the 5 star raters say and I’ll check what the 1 star raters said.  Why?  Because what irritated someone else about the novel often says more about the author than what someone who loved it might have said.  Also, especially in the era of self-publishing, if I see complaints about poor grammar, awkward sentence structure, or bad plot, I can steer clear.

Apparently, from various market research, ebook sales are highly driven by reviews and ratings.  There are a variety of readers, high consumption readers, who filter by number of reviews.  There is also a prohibition, from Amazon, on ‘reveiw farms’ of authors giving one another incestual reviews.  As an independent author, receiving reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, and other locations can be the difference between selling well and not selling at all.  Full reviews at blogs and websites also help to channel some traffic, but the impulse buyers, the ones who need their reading fix, are browsing for their next fix right now… and does your ebook have the reviews to garner their attention?

The other part of this is sales ranking.  Amazon does this most visibly and has the highest volume of ebook sales in the US, so I’ll use it as the primary example.  As an author, you want your sales ranking high for a number of reasons.  The first reason, of course, is high sales means more people buying your book.  This is good for a variety of reasons.  The next reason is that high sales means that your book will appear higher on the lists when someone searches for ebooks in your genre.  That’s less of other people’s stuff that someone has to filter through before they find your work.  paradoxically, this means that in order to sell well… you need to sell well.  However, there are ways to ‘game’ the system.  Amazon tracks sales over time rather than total sales.  The good part about this is that if you can sell even a relatively small number of books in a short period of time, you can books yourself higher on the book sales ranking… which is good, because when a reader sees your book is #23 on some listing versus #230,000, they’re more likely to read what you’re putting out.

How do you do that?  Larry Correia uses a term called a ‘book bomb.’  When an author releases their new book, the author has everyone they know, who’s interested, buy the book around the same time.  The author’s book sales spikes and their book rises up the charts.  How effective is that?  A solid spike can guarantee that other people will see your book.  They might not buy it, but they’ll at least have the opportunity to make the decision… whereas if they never see it, they’re never given the opportunity.  This is an area where networking, developing loyal readers, and communication are essential.  You can seriously help your book sales by organizing loyal readers (also known as herding cats) to get them to buy your stuff.

What does that mean for readers in general?  Well, keep in mind that the authors you read and enjoy don’t just publish out of the goodness of their hearts.  Authors want their works to be appreciated.  We spend thousands and tens of thousands of hours on writing something to entertain you for a day or two.  We also like to eat, so getting paid for it is a nice form of appreciation.  If you really like what someone wrote, post that, write what you liked and didn’t in a review on Amazon or Goodreads or whatever.  A detailed synopsis like your teachers wanted in high school isn’t necessary.  A one liner “I liked this book, author X is my favoritist person EVAR!” isn’t particularly helpful, either.  A couple sentences such as “X writes with strong characters and a vivid setting.  His story hooked me with the first words.  I really enjoyed the dynamic between Character X and Character Y” tells a potential reader much more, without giving away anything that might spoil the read.  Ideally, if you really liked something, you can take five minutes to write three or four sentences about what you liked.  The same goes for something you didn’t like.  If you bought a book and it was the skunkiest piece of drivel you ever stumbled across, post a review about what you didn’t like.  If the author clearly wrote about a subject they didn’t understand, they had “teh worts grammer evar,” or if they wrote a preachy diatribe about some subject in which you disagree… give warning some other folks.  There’s nothing I hate more than spending some of my hard earned money on a book that isn’t worth the time spent in reading it.  And, believe it or not, some authors want that kind of feedback, so we know what to improve upon.

Here’s a link to Larry Correia who wrote a better article on the ‘book bomb’ subject:

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/book-bomb-variant-today-get-a-good-book-for-a-good-reason/

And he’s apparently doing a book bomb for an author right now as well, so check it out:

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/next-book-bomb-chuck-dixon-feb-18th/

 

 

Science, Science Fiction, Society

The Romantic Pessimist’s Argument for Space

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I consider myself a romantic pessimist.  I hope for the best… and plan for the worst.  That said, I’m also a dreamer and most of my hopes and ambitions are tied to space.  Not surprising, then, that I write science fiction, eh?  I’m writing this post as something of a dialogue, a hope that we continue to look out and push the boundaries.

So what do I think of space right now?  Well, to be honest, I’m afraid.  There is a very vocal percentage of Americans who seem to think that space is something that we should avoid.  Their arguments run a gamut of points.  Some are the simple ‘we need to fix things here before we worry about that stuff.’  Some are economic ‘it’s too expensive, we don’t get anything out of it.’  The most insidious, I think, are the people who seem to feel that humanity is somehow a corrupting influence, that we have polluted and destroyed our world and will go out and do the same elsewhere.

I’ll tackle those arguments, since they’re the ones I hear the most.  The first one, the one about fixing things here on Earth, is at its heart, an illogical argument.  What exactly are we supposed to fix here on Earth?  Poverty, crime, war, social injustice, sad puppies… the list goes ever onward.  The truth is, there will always be things that need to be fixed.  Humanity, is at its nature, imperfect.  We can never fix things here on Earth entirely, not without unlimited resources and a fundemental change in human nature.  Poverty is an effect of limited resources, economic factors, and supply and demand.  As wealth increases throughout  a system, it trickles down to others.  This is the free market… which can be imperfect and can be distorted, but that’s a can of worms I’ll open another time.  Crime is caused by a variety of factors, many of which stem from a society plagued by poverty, social inequality, corruption, and a failure of society to enforce the Social Contract.  War is another event triggered by limited resources and economic factors.  Add in perceived injustices and nationalistic fervor.  Sad puppies we can address at another time.  These are big issues, many of which do not have easy or simple solutions, no matter what some politicians say.  Most of them, short of a perfect world, cannot be fixed by us, they have to gradually shift over time.  Are we to focus all of our efforts upon these issues and any others, we still may not change them.  Indeed attempts to end poverty have often shown to make things worse, instead of lifting people up, they pull the rest of us down.  Attempts to end war, peacekeeping, is often a band-aid, which prevents violence while peacekeepers are present but fails to achieve long-lasting solutions.  Saying that we need to fix something first is akin to the man who says he’ll go look for a job… tomorrow.  Putting off a serious investment in space is not allowing us to focus more resources on problems, merely to offset the cost of space exploration to the future.

The economic arguement against space exploration and development is, in my opinion, the most spurious.  People said much the same about expeditions to the New World in the Age of Exploration.  Yes, many of those expeditions bankrupted people and others brought back only meager returns.  Exploration and development is not something that pays off instantly.  It, horror of horrors, requires hard work.  Space requires us to travel further, experience a harsher environment, and to put ourselves at risk… but in return we will gain access to resources and options far beyond what we now possess.  It will require the development of new engines, the construction of a space elevator, and yes, it will cost in lives lost in the effort.  Space is far harsher an environment than any place on Earth.  People have died in explorations of lonely mountains and remote polar regions here… but they expanded our knowledge and they died doing what they dreamed of.  It is far better to die doing something grand, in my opinion, than to live a life where you never accomplish anything.  And yes, I’m someone who lives and may well die by that opinion.  The resources we can harvest in space make our current resources laughable.  A single nickle iron asteroid could meet our steel requirements for a year.  Energy shortage?  A solar array in space could have more surface area than anything we could build in space, be dispersed, and still provide us with power, either directly beamed down in the form of light or converted to microwaves and transmitted down in that fashion.  No, these are not things that will come right away.  These are things we’d have to work for and work hard at… but hey, poverty’s one of those issues we want to fix, right?  Booming industry in space, lots of people needed, trained people.  New jobs created to train them and build the training areas.  New jobs created to provide them with support and services.  Going back to the previous argument, let’s fix the environment.  Don’t care for all those nasty coal plants?  Really like solar power, but you don’t like the nasty chemicals that solar plants produce?  Building it in space won’t contaminate our planet and if we’re smart about it, we could provide power to the entire world.  Cheap power for the entire world.  How’s that for fixing some problems down here?

The last argument is one of philosophy and outlook rather than one of reason and logic.  Some people seem to think that humanity is, at its core, a vile and wretched thing.  These people point out that wherever we go, we bring war, bloodshed, destruction.  Movies such as Avatar make me sick to my stomach.  Because under all that pretty CGI and ‘big dreams’ there is black withered heart that hates itself and wants to make you hate yourself too.  Those poor oppressed people who don’t really exist and those nasty military-industrial complex types who want to tear their planet apart.  It’s a movie with a message about how horrible people are… and how technology is evil and the only people who want to go out there to the stars are nasty, greedy, self-serving, types.  Why?  Why should we beleive that message, brought to us by Ferngully In Space?  Why should we look back at history and see only the negative… white Christian settlers slaughtering the peaceful Native Americans.  What about the Declaration of Independence?  What about great American artists and writers?  America the Beautiful, the National Anthem, Edgar Allen Poe.  What about the American Industrial Revolution that brought about the rise of the first real free society in the world?  What about standing up to the Soviet Union and showing that a free society is a match for a totalitarian regime any day?

There are people who honestly are plagued by such guilt that they would rather see humanity huddling naked in caves than happy, prosperous, and long lived.  This nihilistic tendency is a nasty, virulent ideology that upholds that people are bad… and all to many of them seem to think that the best thing anyone can do is to take themselves out of the picture.  They hate themselves, and they want us to hate ourselves too.  Rather than conservation, they want nature to remain immaculate, untouched, perfect.  They have some image of the world without people as being pristine.  This would, by necessity, lead to the removal of the human race.  And in, their hearts, they’re glad for that, because not only do they hate themselves, they hate you too.  The very thought of us polluting ‘untouched new worlds’ and the construction that would allow us to reach them causes them emotional agony, not just from the thought of what we might do out there, but also because we might expand, live, prosper… and show that their beleif structure is flawed.  If we succeed out in space, we show them that humanity is not bad and we show the potential that we hold in ourselves.

We have in us a desire to go forth, to see what lies beyond the next horizon.  To pent that up, to reject it, is to reject ourselves… to reject our very nature.  Our past is here, our home is Earth.  Yet in the nature of all children, as we grow up, we must take those first steps away from home, to find our own path.  That path lies in space… and the sooner we begin that journey, the sooner we continue our growth to adulthood.

Here’s some interesting links, people who say some good things… and people who argue the opposite.  Feel free to link anything in that you think pertinent.  Thanks for reading.

http://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/02/07/a-radical-notion-a-guest-post-by-james-cambias/

http://debatewise.org/debates/137-space-exploration-is-a-waste-of-money/

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What’s your deal, anyway?

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I was setting there, reflecting a bit, on the books that have influenced me.  I realized that there are a lot of books that have affected my reading interests.  There are only a handful of books, however, that I can point out as truly affecting me, as a person.  Sometimes I can’t even point out a book, just an author.  When I talk to friends, a some of them point out specific books they read, some of them just the other day, that amazed them or brought up some new information they found profound.  To tell the truth, that seems a little trite to me.  If you read a new book every week that blows your mind and caused you to radically revise your view of the world… well, then your view of the world must be either very simplistic or fundementally flawed.

For me, I can only remember a couple authors whose writing caused me to question my worldview.  Both I read in early adulthood and both authors delivered their messages through fiction.  Robert A. Heinlein is probably at the forefront.  Mark Twain is the other.  These two authors had the most profound influence on me, I think, because I read them when I was young.  Both authors have, at times, taken deeply satirical stances in their writing.  Both have, in various forms, a tendency to preach their stances.  As a weird side note, they’re both from Missouri.  Something in the water there, I think.  With RAH, three books stand out to me: Revolt in 2100, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers.  With Mark Twain, I can’t really point to any one book, perhaps because I tore through almost everything he’d written in a year or so and it all sort of blends together for me.

I’ve also read a lot of the classic philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.  I’ve also read a variety of other philosophers, from John Stuart Mill toto Nietchie, to Emmanuel Kant.  A lot of it I disagreed with, sometimes quite vociferously.  Some of it stuck and the influences it’s had are interesting.  Still, I think in a lot of ways, seeing such ideas played out in a work of fiction is an excellent medium for visualizing these ideas worked out.

More recent authors have, for whatever reason, not had as great an effect upon me.  Perhaps because my inner philosphies were settled or perhaps just because I’m a more aware reader.  Newer authors have influenced me, to be certain, but not caused any fundemental shifts in my outlook on life.  I deeply enjoy fiction with themes that I agree with, stories about challenging ourselves, freedom, big dreams, personal integrity, and individualism.

So… what authors or stories influenced you?  What books shaped your philosopies on life and molded you into the person you are now?  Who are you, and what’s your deal, anyway?

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Independent Author’s Toolbag: Professionalism

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Professionalism

Earlier today I made a mistake.  In one of the emails I sent, I attached the wrong file, and off it went.  No biggie, right?  Just a simple mistake?  No.  And I’ll tell you why.  Writing is a profession.  As with most professions, your reputation is essential.  Skill, yes, is vital, but professionalism is the difference between writing excellent stuff that no one ever sees and making those essential connections that lead to being successful.  Professionalism is defined as the competence or skill expected of a professional.  The key parts there are obviously competence and skill.  Writing is a skill set that all authors develop.  Some are born with a higher level while some of us have to seriously work at it.  Competence on the other hand, is more complex.  Competence means a lot of things.  It means behaving in a way that denotes professionalism.  It means following through on the things you say you’ll do.  It also means buckling down and writing when you would rather watch the Super Bowl, sleep, or even file your taxes.

Back to my screw-up.  I attached the wrong file, why is that such a big deal?  It’s the kind of screw up that people do often, so why should it matter?  Well, it matters for a variety of reasons.  Attention to detail is a vital necessity for authors.  It’s the difference between there, their, and they’re.  It’s writing a novel without changing the main character’s name midway through.  Another essential aspect of being a professional is not wasting someone else’s time.  The fellow I sent that wrong file to was basically doing me a favor, and I wasted his time when I hit send without checking.  Among a number of other reasons, one more in particular stands out: what does that say about the importance I place upon my own work, when I don’t stop to verify that I’ve completed it correctly?

So why does this frustrate me and what can you, dear reader, learn from my mistake?  Well, it frustrates me because I knew all of that and I made such a stupid mistake anyway.  After eight years in the US Army, I know the importance of professionalism.  I know to check a job is done right.  In a profession where a ‘simple’ mistake can cost lives, it is ingrained in me to act professional.  Yet somehow that lesson didn’t stick as well as I’d thought.  Granted, writing is somewhat less high risk, but to be certain, there is high value in doing things in a professional manner.  People want to read stuff from a professional, not some screw-up who happens to occasional write something worth reading.

What can you learn from this?  First off, think things through, stop to consider repercussions of your actions, especially in how you interact with your fellow writers.  Independent Authors are seldom so popular that they can afford to come across as unprofessional.  We are, as a rule, barely on the edge, some make a living, but a lot of us are just breaking even (or not even that).  Second, pay attention!  Most unprofessional actions are mistakes because, well, us writers tend to have our minds on something else.  Avoid those mistakes by putting your mind on the matter at hand.  You can resolve the plot or character interactions when you’re not trying to make a good impression with someone.  Last, if you do make a mistake, always try to follow through, make your apologies, try to correct it, and if you can’t… well, then I guess just suck it up and move on.

Reading, Science Fiction, Writing

The Fallen Race cover and upcoming release

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The cover for my upcoming release, due on Saturday, 1 Feb 2014
The cover for my upcoming release, due on Saturday, 1 Feb 2014

The Fallen Race, my Military SF / Space Opera novel will be released tomorrow at noon on Amazon and Smashwords.

Blurb below:

Baron Lucius Giovanni, Captain of the battleship War Shrike, finds himself without a home or nation, his ship heavily damaged, and crew in bad shape. The odds against their personal survival are slim. The time of humanity has come to a close. The great nations have all fallen, either to the encroaching alien threats or to internal fighting and civil war. The aliens who seek to supplant humanity, however, have not taken one thing into account: Lucius Giovanni. He and his crew will not give up – not while they still draw breath. If this is to be the fall of humanity, then the crew of the War Shrike will go down fighting…and in the heat of that fight, they may just light a new fire for humanity….

Entertainment, Fantasy, Gaming, Science Fiction

Science Fiction and Fantasy Gaming Overview

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Sometimes your characters are gamers too...
Sometimes your characters are gamers too…

This will be a bit of a different post for me.  Mostly, I’ve focused on entertainment media: movies, books, that sort of thing.  Today, however, I’m going to give a brief overview of SF/F related games.  This is mostly to serve as a base point from where I can discuss it further later.  I’m not even going to open the can of worms that is computer games, not right now.  I’ve been out of the ‘hardcore gamer’ catagory for years (assuming I even qualified for that league).

First off, what constitutes gaming?  Generally, I’d say that there is some kind of rule set or book and there is some representation of the scenario.  Really, that’s all you need.  The rules can be as complex or as simple as you want.  I’ve played with some seriously complex rule systems, ranging from Warhammer Fantasy to Ryfts.  Rules are there to tell players what they can and can’t do, essentially, they create a level playing field where players and game masters (if any) all have a common reference point.

That common reference point is important.  It prevents players from feeling they’ve been cheated, it also reigns in some of the ‘power gamer’ attitudes that you sometimes see.  To be brief, a power gamer does whatever they can to succeed and ‘win’ (if there is a way to win).

What’s the purpose of gaming?  Well, in some ways, it depends on the game system and, in some ways, it depends on the player.  Players get fired up by different aspects of the gaming hobby.  In role playing games, there are literally dozens of ‘types’ of gamers, and very few people fall into perfect cookie-cutter types.  In war gaming, there are also multiple types of gamers… to include gamers who don’t really even like to play, just to model and paint their armies.  As far as gaming systems, there are a variety, but they’re often grouped into War Games and RPGs.  There is also Board Games and Collectable Card Games, but I’ll talk those another time.  War gaming is typically focused on strategy and tactics, but there’s also story and characters.  Role Playing Gaming is often focused on story, characters, and even tactics, character builds, and strategy.  Feeling confused yet?  It’s difficult to break down what people play for without breaking down the systems themselves.

Tabletop War Games

Tabletop War Gaming (sometimes called miniature war gaming) is a broad category that includes Flames of War, Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Hordes, Battletech, Battlefleet Gothic and dozens, if not hundreds, of others.  Most of these games orient around two (or more) players, each having a unit or force, who play against one another with the goal of defeating their opponent’s force and gaining victory.  These games typically involve a variety of rules to simulate weapons, tactics, strategies, and so forth.  Typically, a player will have an army list which contains the breakdown of their forces.

The point of tabletop war games is competitive… but it also can involve elements of teamwork, dependant upon the number of players.  This type of gaming can simulate historical, science fiction, and fantasy settings.  It can contain rules to represent ground, water, space, or almost any combination.  Some games can be tied together to involve dozens of players and even integrate battles in space and on the ground.  Generally there are markers or figurines for units and players take turns manuevering their forces and engaging in combat.  Often the results are determined from dice rolls to give that element of chance.

What’s the point of all this?  Well, to paraphrase Conan the Barbarian: “To crush your enemies, to drive them before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”  These games are inherently competitive, as I said.  However, the extent of that competition is often deceptive.  Most people who play these games do so with friends, and it often becomes a social event.  Sometimes these games will be tied into a campaign to tell a story… other times the games will take place in a tournament setting where everyone fights it out to be ‘the best.’  That said, not everyone participates for the same reasons.  Some people fall in love with the models and they’ll spend days or even weeks assembling painting up one model.  Others enjoy the story exclusively and seek to recreate those battles.

Roleplaying Games

Roleplaying games (RPGs) are typically games where each player has a character that they control.  This character may have a complex background and story or might just be “Human Fighter 1”  Most RPGs have character stats that represent the character and show how good they are at the various tasks that the players might put them through.  Most RPGs have a Game Master, or GM.  The GM controls the scenario and puts together challenges for the player or players to work though.  These challenges can range from puzzles and riddles, to hordes of enemy combatants, and even to diplomatic discussion.

RPGs often involve team work, as players work together to make sure their characters survive and acheive their goals.  Oddly enough, the GM is not there to defeat the characters (though there are some who play in that fashion).  The GM is there to guide the players through the adventures and to (hopefully) deliver to each player what they want to achieve.  As with war gaming, players play for different reasons.  Some want to live vicariously through their characters, others want to enjoy the story, and still others want to slaughter their way through millions of faceless opponents and prove their strengths.

Roleplaying Games include the infamous Dungeons and Dragons, Ryfts, Legend of the Five Rings, Alternity, D20 Modern, Call of Cthulu, Vampires, the Masquerade, and (again) dozens if not hundreds of others.  Various game types represent or provide different settings, rule types, and levels of difficulty for players, along with different tools that a GM might use to challenge their players.

 

What’s the point of all this?  Gaming provides an interactive mode of entertainment that provides a breadth of involvement into science fiction and fantasy, and is a huge component of interest in the same.  Many well-established series often have spin-off games (Star Wars, Firefly, Lord of the Rings, and more).  Gaming is also an exciting way to explore various worlds… and a fun way to spend time with friends.

Reading, Science Fiction, Writing

The Fallen Race upcoming release and sample

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The Fallen Race, my Military Science Fiction/Space Opera novel, will be released on 1 February on Amazon as both an ebook and a paper copy.  The ebook will be $ 4.99, the paper copy will be significantly more.

Here is the back-cover synopsis:

Baron Lucius Giovanni, captain of the battleship War Shrike, finds himself without a home or nation, his ship heavily damaged, and crew in bad shape. The odds against their personal survival are slim. The time of humanity has come to a close. The great nations have all fallen, either to the encroaching alien threats or to internal fighting and civil war. The aliens who seek to supplant humanity, however, have not taken one thing into account: Lucius Giovanni. He and his crew will not give up, not while they still draw breath. If this is to be the fall of humanity, then the crew of the War Shrike will go down fighting… and in the heat of that fight, they might just light a new fire for humanity….

And here is a section from teh beginning:

June 1, 2402 Earth Standard Time

Venture System

Nova Roma Empire

 The seven remaining ships of Convoy 142 writhed at the heart of a maelstrom.

 Baron Lucius Giovanni clutched at the arms of his command chair as the enemy fire battered the War Shrike yet again.  The short, dark haired man peered at his displays with dark, almost black, eyes.  His black and silver vac suit bore the eagle symbol of Captain’s rank on the collar, and his shoulder bore a patch with the snarling wolf’s head of Nova Roma.  He acknowledged the fresh round of damage reports.   His eyes went to his Executive Officer, “Tony, can you get anything past their cruiser screen?”

Commander Doko shook his head.  The confines of the battleship’s bridge seemed even tighter with the acrid stench of ozone and shorted electronics.  “No, sir.  Their cruiser’s firefly systems are too strong.”

Lucius rolled his tongue around a mouth that felt dusty and tasted like ash.  His eyes went to the sensor plot that showed what remained of the ships of the convoy.  As he watched, the destroyer Sicarius dropped out of the formation in a broad cloud of debris and far too few escape pods.  “Very well, keep hammering their cruisers.”

Lucius looked over at his brother in law, “Any new orders from Commodore Torrelli?”

“No, sir,” Commander Reese Giovanni-Leone said from the communications section.  Everyone on the bridge had expected one command from Torrelli ever since the initial ambush.  One battleship couldn’t take on six dreadnoughts, not with any chance of survival.  But if they charged into the enemy formation they would disrupt it.  That might save the convoy.

The hell of it was, Lucius would rather take that chance than watch the convoy slowly vanish under the enemy guns.  Soon enough they’d loose enough sensors or weapons and the enemy missiles would get through.  They already had the bad luck to jump in on the Chxor force in close vicinity to Venture’s refueling station.  The escorts couldn’t survive that firepower much longer and the merchant ships would not survive after that.

 “Don’t know why he’s waiting,” Lucius muttered.  His ship rocked again under multiple impacts.  “Not like the bastard can’t be happy at the chance to give that order.”

***

 

 Commodore Vito Torrelli grimaced as the Augustus shuddered.  The elderly dreadnought had held up far better than the convoy’s other escorts.   The forty year old dreadnought had far more resilience and armor than any other ship in the convoy.  Even so, an early hit had opened the bridge to vacuum and slaughtered most of his navigation section.  Other hits had wrought serious damage on the old ship.  Commodore Torrelli was well aware that his ship was bound to Nova Roma for extensive refits even before all of that damage.  “Order the War Shrike to close in on Regal‘s aft quarter.”  He grimaced as he saw Lucius Giovanni’s ship swing into position immediately.

 He could almost see the aloof expression of the other ship’s commander.  He wants me to send his ship into the throat of the guns, want’s to die a hero’s death, Torrelli thought… as if that could ever make up for what his father did.  “I won’t give him that honor,” Torrelli muttered.  He noticed a flicker on one of the enemy cruiser’s firefly systems.  “Guns, focus on cruiser three, hammer me a gap so we can hit these bastards!”

The enemy dreadnoughts hid behind the massive, pancake-shaped defense screens of the cruisers.  Those overlapped screens and the massive jamming of the cruiser’s firefly systems counteracted the better targeting systems of the Nova Roma warships.

As Vito Torrelli watched the displays, he could hear the unvoiced criticisms from his rival.  It felt like he could feel Lucius’s breath on the back of his neck.  “Dammit, get me a shot!”

***

 

 “That bastard can fight,” Lucius said.  The Augustus had received the brunt of the enemy’s fire.  A comet’s trail of debris, air, and water vapor trailed behind the battered dreadnought, but Commodore Torrelli continued to fight.

“Cruiser three just went down, sir, I’ve got a shot!” Commander Doko shouted.  A moment later both warships poured their fire through the suddenly opened gap and into the dreadnought left exposed.  Every remaining gun and missile tube aboard the War Shrike  fired into the gap. 

Lucius snarled as explosions rocked the enemy vessel.  A massive cloud of debris enveloped the lead Chxor dreadnought.  “Looks like we gave them something to remember us by!”  The Chxor formation adjusted though, and a moment later the damaged dreadnought disappeared again behind the defense screen of another cruiser.

 “Sir! Augustus just sent Code Black!” Reese said.

Lucius felt his stomach drop.  The other warship lay only a hundred kilometers distant, close enough for visual.  He looked at his sensor repeater just in time to see the dreadnought’s port side engines erupt in a chain of explosions.  The massive ship began to rotate as its starboard engines threw it into a spin.  The stresses over-taxed the ship’s frame and the midships section ripped apart in a slow-motion avalanche of sheering steel.

Lucius watched as four thousand crew died… and he could do nothing.

Lucius let out a tight breath.  Only five ships left remained and Convoy 142 had a new commander.  His eyes raked across his navigation display.  The civilian ships didn’t have the acceleration to escape the Chxor.  They didn’t have the time to calculate a jump through shadow space to take them elsewhere.  Even if he threw his ship at the Chxor, the remaining transports couldn’t elude the enemy, not without someone to screen them.

“Message to all ships,” Lucius said, his voice suddenly hoarse.  “Prepare and execute blind jump immediately.”

There was a sudden silence on the bridge.

 “Solarius Endeavor, Unicorn, and Trade Enterprise acknowledge,” Lucius’s brother in law said.  “Regal reports damage to their jump drive and that they’ll have it up as soon as they can.”

 Lucius felt a cold mask settle over his face.  The War Shrike couldn’t take the full firepower of the Chxor, not for long.  “Tell them to expedite and that we’ll cover them until they jump.”  He watched as the other three civilian ships jumped away into shadow.  He wondered if any of them would emerge again.

 As if on cue, a fresh barrage swept in from the Chxor ships.  Alarms wailed and Lucius felt the deck heave as multiple beams tore into his ship.  His eyes focused on the inbound missile tracks.  Without the Augustus, they’d lost most of their interceptor fire.

Lieutenant Livianus’s hands flew across his station.  He took the sensor data and picked off the missiles one after the other.  His precise shots almost stopped them all.

 Two missiles slipped past his fire.  One swept past as the helmsman continued his evasive maneuvers.  The proximity fuse detonated only five kilometers in front of the War Shrike.  The Chxor used missiles based off of captured human munitions.  Fundamentally identical to the pilum ship-killer missiles, they packed a sixty megaton fusion warhead.

 The sudden burst of radiation hammered into the War Shrike’s magnetic fields that held the plasma defense screen in place.  The massive induction coils exploded like bombs at the massive surge of power.

One exploded out into Engine Room Three and killed fifty-eight crew.  The other detonated only fifty meters away from the bridge.  The four armored bulkheads between there and the bridge absorbed some of the effect.  The aft bulkhead of the bridge shattered. 

Shards of steel whipped through crew members and equipment alike. Half the weapons techs died before they knew what hit them.  The concussion ripped Lieutenant Livianus out of his shock chair and smashed him against the forward bulkhead hard enough to leave a red smear.

One shard flew like a spear and slammed into the back of the communications officer’s chair.  Lucius’s brother-in-law let out a scream of agony as it bit through his left shoulder. 

Lucius’s gaze locked on the shard of metal that pinned Reese to his seat.  He felt something twist in his own guts as he heard Reese’s scream. 

The explosion itself vaporized fifty meters of armored hull and opened the ship’s entire forward section to vacuum.  The hard radiation and the wave superheated plasma took the lives of two hundred more of Lucius’s crew in an instant. 

 The first missile’s simple tracking system lost the War Shrike and continued past.

 The Regal had no countermeasure systems to prevent that missile from acquisition.  The missile detonated on top of the unarmored transport.  It vaporized the aft end of the vessel and sent the ship’s fusion plant into overload.  Lucius grunted in anguish as the seventy five civilians aboard died almost instantly.

Luicus shook his head.  His sensors told him that only his ship remained.  He cut his seat restraints and staggered through the smoke and noise of the bridge.  He shoved a corpse off the top of the navigation station.  Lucius flipped up the clear plastic cover, the surface slick with blood.

His fist hammered down on the jump initiation.

Hope you enjoyed!

Fantasy, Reading, Writing

Steampunk World Building

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So, there I was… knee deep in dead vampires and choking on coal smoke when it hit me… what was the name of this country again?

Come to think of it, why was it named that, what was its history, and why are they still playing around with steam engines in the 1950’s???

I’ve something of a confession to make: I’m a world builder.  I love to put together a vibrant, expansive world, populated by people, organizations, nations, and machines that are interconnected and that make sense.  I’ll spend days, weeks, sometimes even months thinking about the economic systems, technology, and culture.  What does that get me?  In theory, it means I know what motivates characters and what has shaped them.

This gets a little more complicated when you’re writing alternate history… especially steampunk alternate history.  There’s a certain expectation in steampunk for larger than life characters along with odd, sometimes absurd, contrasts between our own world and the created one.  That requires a mix of attention to detail, quirky humor, and enjoyment for building that sort of structure.

So where do you start?  Well, it depends on you, really.  I tend to like to start with whatever big thing is different in that other world than here.  Was some genius born who developed air ships and steam engines?   Did some major event change the course of history?  Why is this so important… and what impact did that have on the world, from the bottom rungs of society to the mightiest nations?

For me, it’s important to explore those changes even before I really start writing.  There’s nothing more annoying to me than to be mid sentence and realize I don’t know why something isn’t possible or where something comes from.  If something is different in this other world, there should be a reason it is different… and sometimes ‘just cause it’s cool’ isn’t good enough.

So, in example, I’ll give a run down of how I started my world building.  In my universe, there was an inventor in England who discovered aetherium, a substance that, when heated with steam, produces power for use in weapons and aircraft.  This discovery came just before the outbreak of the American Civil War.. and the British Empire intervened in favor of their trade partners within the Confederacy.  After they conquered the North, the British appointed a Grand Duke to govern their wayward colonies and turned their attention to other lands.  The Confederacy has since split up into several independent nations, all of whom have abolished slavery, mostly from pressure from their allies, the British.  The Americas have become something of a back water, while Europe has remained the center of technology.  This has changed just recently, as some bright new minds have come up with new, refined aetherium powered weapons which threaten the balance of power yet again.

This gives me a rough basis of the world, in broad strokes.  It’s not perfect, but it gets me started.  From there, I’ll go into the details of what individual nations are up to, the societal pressures which have crafted the conflicts between characters, and the setting itself, from the technologies that they use commonly every day to the way they talk and interact.

For anyone else with steampunk on the mind, hopefully this helps out in making your story work.

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Playing With Minds And Hearts

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An excellent post from Sarah Hoyt. For those of you who are aspiring writers, this is something essential to remember.

Sarah A. Hoyt's avatarMad Genius Club

 

It took me till I’d been published for seven years or so, before I realized I was doing it all wrong.  Now this is fairly normal.  Okay, it’s fairly normal for me – I don’t know about the rest of you zombies.  I’m either unusually dense, or I need to have some sort of a running start to get the rest of the view of the field.

Anyway. here’s the thing: I’d been published for going on seven years before I realized that writing was not about ideas.

By then, I’d sort of gotten used to the idea that it wasn’t about words.  Okay, that took Dean Wesley Smith telling me to get over the word thing, but you get my meaning.  I’d got it.  I’d realized that while writing can use incredibly beautiful words, the one thing I got for free in the craft – words – were…

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