Monthly Update...

First of all, progress on 'Battle of Hercules' is good; I'm past the half-way stage now, and pushing hard for the finish line. I hope to have the first draft finished by Sunday, get it out to the beta readers and then get cracking on the required changes...with a little luck, it should be on sale by the end of the month, maybe a little bit sooner. I think this probably has the most action of any book I've written.

It's been an interesting process, this time, because I'm actually putting in specifics about the Cabal. Obviously, I know what it is, but I've had the ability to make tweaks and changes over the last year or so, without contradicting anything in the books – now, over this and the next two books, the Cabal really features directly a lot more strongly as Alamo goes toe-to-toe with them, and having to make a host of final decisions has been fun. Specifically, I'm having to map it properly, and that isn't even quite finished yet – I keep making tweaks...

This blog has been...less than I would have liked it to be thus far, and I think I've expressed that in the past. I think it is partly because I haven't really worked out, thus far, what it is and what I want it to be, and so...that's something I need to fix. I guess what I want to do is to provide some sort of insight – for my own benefit as much as anyone else – into how I do what I do. How I work, where I draw ideas and inspiration from, and analysis of same.

There is an obvious 'in' for me with this, and that is...reading. I do a thundering lot of it, there are times when I average a book a day, all of it to support the idea mines required for Alamo and other works. I have a tremendous backlog of books to get through of late, to the point that I'm imposing a moratorium to myself to buying more for a while until I get down the pile a bit. To structure things a little, I'm going to work out a theme for each month, and try and stick to them – and naturally, discuss them in this blog. My goal is, really, to learn, to absorb material for my own future work.

This month, the theme is going to be one of my big heroes – Lin Carter. If any one man can be said to have kindled the fantasy genre, this is he; while his skills as a writer have been questioned, there is no doubt at all that he brought a lot of fantasy novels to wide attention, including the Lord of the Rings, for heaven's sake! He was an extremely prolific writer, and one always gets the sense when reading his books that he was having fun with his work, that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do. Naturally a month is woefully insufficient to cover him, but I can certainly make a good crack at it. I'm definitely covering the Thongor series, as well as the recently released 'Young Thongor', as well as Imaginary Worlds (which I'm reading for the first time, I only just managed to get hold of a copy!) and a few of his anthologies...


Naturally, my reading won't entire focus on one topic for the whole month, so other bits and pieces are going to creep in...frankly – I just plan on doing more posts!

Another new cover!!!


The Shape Of Things To Come

Well, I hit the wall on Battle of Hercules a little early, but it's back on a straight course now and on target for a mid-April release date. Much to my own surprise, I've ended up with another new POV character, one of Alamo's Espatier contingent...really a surprise, because when I planned this one out, I had it as a two POV book, Marshall and Orlova. This time I wanted to show the 'lower decks' a bit more though, and it's fitting nicely into the book, in any case. It's always interesting getting into the head of a new character, especially when he ends up with a plot arc...

Once this is finished, then it is on to Spitfire Station; the cover for that one is on its way, I've seen the initial proofs, and they look excellent – obviously I'll be showing that here as soon as it arrives. That one is pretty fixed in my head now, and I'm shooting for an end of May/start of June release date for it. This one will probably be a two-POV book, Logan Winter naturally being one, and the other being <redacted>.

Beyond that? Well, I have outlined in my head two more Alamo novel – 'Sacred Honor' and 'Wounded Beast' are the current titles of those, another Spitfire novel, 'Double or Nothing', and a series of novellas – which right now has the provisional title of 'Home Front'. This last will cover some of the characters left behind as Alamo went off in 'Not One Step Back', as well as adding more depth to the ongoing plot arc. That's six books in total, and as things stand, all of them should be out by the end of the year.


I've got an extra one in mind, and I'd like to throw this one out a little. Last night I was watching the documentary feature on the 'Red Dwarf X' DVD – which, by the way, I can heartily recommend – and it occurred to me that I might do something similar with Battlecruiser Alamo. Essentially, the 'Making Of'. I've read a couple of similar books in the past, and liked them, and it's the sort of project that I think might be fun. Right now I have only a vague idea of what would go in such a book, and the notion that I would like it completed by the end of the year, so any thoughts or suggestions would be extremely welcome. More on this one to come, because I rather like the idea...

Some news, and a new blog...

A little bit of news to report today...specifically that work has begun on the sixth book in the Battlecruiser Alamo series, Battle of Hercules! Originally, I had planned to write Triple-Cross, the first in the Spitfire Station spin-off, first, but once I wrote the final scene of Not One Step Back, it was all I could do not to start writing the next one there and then. So, Battle of Hercules is going to be the focus of my writing for the next few weeks, and I'm hoping to have it on sale by early April with any luck. This is the first time I'm using an outline that isn't a couple of scrappy Post-It notes, and it's a book I've been looking forward to since Price of Admiralty!


The other piece of news relates to this blog. I haven't been particularly satisfied with my performance on the blog for some time – I had meant to post rather more frequently, and to provide some better, well, content. That I am starting work on a historical adventure series has crystallized something in my mind – I need two blogs, not one. I need to focus a little bit. So the plan is basically for this blog to be the focus for Battlecruiser Alamo, science-fiction, and space...and for the new blog, which can be reached here, to focus on my historical series and all connected with that. I promise to provide some interesting things to read here in the near future!

My Achilles Heel...Names...

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that the greatest problem I face while writing is picking good names for my characters. It's always a trial, made a lot worse when you know that character is going to be a key player in future stories, and there have been many occasions where Find-and-Replace has been used to change names near the end of the last draft. One of my key preparations for writing an Alamo is to prepare a big master list of names of Alamo crewmen – it generally needs quite a bit of updating in between books!

When it comes to just picking names out of a hat for some reason – to name an extra, say – there are two websites that come immediately to my aid. The first one is 'Behind the Name', which has an excellent selection of random name generators for dozens of languages – invaluable, when the Triplanetary Confederation has such a melting pot of cultures – and the second is 'Random Name Generator', which provides names based on the U.S. Census. Often I just flick through those until I find a name that I like.

Of course, that isn't the only technique I use. Sometimes I simply pull names out of the air – there is now a Midshipman McGuire on Alamo because I was listening to 'Creque Alley' while I was writing – and sometimes they are drawn from elsewhere. Lots of cosmonauts – with some tweaks, naturally – have found their way into the narrative, as have a few African generals, for example. (When it comes to ship names, I've been naming the auxiliaries for 20th century astronauts – tenders for astronauts, tankers for cosmonauts. Plenty of precedent for such selections in modern navies.)

For more prominent characters, a lot more work goes into it. 'Daniel Marshall' was named for Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice-president and a figure that has always interested me; maybe he's even a descendent! (If Captain John Sheridan can be a descendant of General Sheridan, after all, why not!) Incidentally, he was originally named William Marshall; that name ended up with his father somewhere during the first draft of Alamo.


Margaret Orlova was a completely different story; I really have absolutely no idea where that name came from! I knew that I wanted a Russian last name for the character, but she went through a lot of changes in that first draft, and her first name was one of those that went through the FAR process at the last minute...after several previous passes through! I think she was called Anastasia at one point...