Battlecruiser Alamo: Ghost Ship is Out!


Months ago, the Battlecruiser Alamo left on its epic voyage across unknown space to find the Cabal. After so long without word, the ship has been written off as lost. When an abandoned starship appears at Spitfire Station with news of the missing ship, Lieutenant-Captain Logan Winter must unlock the puzzle it contains, and the two crews must work together if they are going to prevent the destruction of a long-forgotten human colony by an implacable foe, and at last open the way for the crew of the Battlecruiser Alamo to return home.

Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SP6M7SE
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00SP6M7SE
Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00SP6M7SE

Writing a Series...

One of the more ubiquitous pieces of advice that is floating around the self-publishing community is that ‘series sell, and singles don’t’. Personally, I would advise that a writer follows Neil Gaiman’s advice and treat every book as though potentially it could be the first book in a series, while making sure it stands alone as a good read in its own right. I would also suggest though, that if you can make your ideas and concepts work into a series, it is a good idea to do so. Take a look at the best-seller lists on Amazon, and you will see them dominated by series, and with good reason. In an extended series of novels, there is time to develop characters, stories and plots in a way that is not possible in a single book, even if you go for the doorstop.

I’m going to hit on this today not from a sales angle, but from a creative one - because at the end of the day, writing is about creativity, not salesmanship. I won’t say that I’ve never done things for ‘business’ purposes, because that isn’t true - there are ideas I’ve got for books that I’ve back-burnered because I don’t think they will sell, but that simply is one of the criteria I use to choose which books I want to write. If something really tugged at me, I would likely write it whatever the market thought; as it stands, I want to write military science-fiction, and so I will continue to write Alamo.

Writing a series, from a creative standpoint, allows for evolution in a way that no single novel can permit. I would argue that five sixty-thousand-word books have more room for development than a single three-hundred-thousand-word book, because you are writing them as individual plots. You can choose to focus on a single character; moreover, a character can develop in a different way than you had envisioned, and if you are not tied down to a specific plot for later books, it’s a lot easier to explore different facets.

A perfect example is Orlova. She was originally conceived as a minor character, a roguish smuggler, but when it came to writing Price of Admiralty, I decided that I needed a second POV character, one that was credibly able to do the ‘hit the deck’ planet-based stuff, where Captain Marshall needed to remain on the bridge. That book tangled two primary storylines, the political trouble on the ship, and the civil war taking place on the planet, and I needed two characters to follow each of the threads. It began as an accident.

Then I realized that I enjoyed writing the Orlova parts a lot, and that I was creating a character I liked and enjoyed. Over the course of the last ten books, I’ve been able to grow and develop the character as she matures into her role; and she’s going to be facing a lot of interesting fun in the next few books as well. In a way, she’s taken a lot of the limelight away from Marshall - one of the reasons for the plots of recent Alamo novels has been finding ways to get the Captain back into the leading role again.

Cooper would be another case in point. He’s a spoiler for you - he was meant to die in Battle of Hercules, simply designed as a one-off character who was planned to sacrifice himself during the latter stages of the book. While I was writing his scenes...I just couldn’t do it. He brought a new perspective to the series, and one that I rather liked to write. Marshall is the commander, the decision-maker, and his plots often revolve around the need for him to make the tough call.

Orlova is the maturing character, developing over time, shaping up as an officer - in an odd way, two versions of ‘Hornblower’, if ‘Captain Hornblower’ was somehow serving with ‘Midshipman Hornblower’ on the same ship. Cooper is a pure actor - the man who gets the job done. One of the more interesting things to write was when those roles were reversed, and Cooper was the instigator.

This leads to one of the more important things - that one cannot keep the roles fixed, or you are collapsing into formula. Yes, by default, Marshall is the man who makes the tough call - but he’s found himself stuck in situations before where he has had to become the man on the ground, and isn’t around to make the decision. Orlova was thrust into the Captain’s chair, and had to make the decisions, and watching her react to that was fun to write. Cooper is most comfortable with a gun in his hand, in active duty, but the occasions when he has led missions, again, have been good to watch. (A counterpoint to this is that sometimes you still need to show the people in their normal roles, or they become fixed in different ones.)

Logan Winter, you ask? Well, he’s a different type again, and I’ll fess up to a little mistake I made; one of the reasons why I decided around October to roll him back into the primary Alamo story was that if I had left him on Spitfire, I’d have ended up with a second Marshall, whereas he is more of a blend of the investigator and the decision maker, but also can work in action scenes as well. He’s got a versatility that I can explore, and he should get to do that more often.

And yes, this means that I’m working now to a four-POV concept for future books. I started with two, and quickly expanded to three, and now am considering four - the important thing being that each character must make their own contribution to the series. That becomes critical, because otherwise there is a danger that characters will blend into each other. Now, I hasten to add that characters cannot be solely established by their roles - certainly not major characters - but we’re talking plots at the moment, and at the base level, a good plot is a series of strands that all tie together at the end. They can start at the same place and link up, but it boils down to different paths leading to the same place.

My instincts have always been that a book - whether in a series or not - needs a definite ending, though I am revising that a little as time goes by. Thus far, the Alamo series can be divided into four parts. The first two books were stand-alone, each introducing the core characters and the setting, and laying down a few seeds. Then the next two were the ‘Expedition to Jefferson’, the first deep-space probe, that introduced the main antagonist. The third - which was books five through nine - was the ‘Expedition to the Cabal’, which had as its goal opening up the universe.

That, I will confess now, changed almost totally during the course of the year. Originally, it was going to run to book eight, and be a lot tighter. (At one point, Captain Marshall was to be killed off and replaced with Major Marshall, but I dropped that idea early on.) The ‘rescue the Espatiers’ storyline came about when I realized that the Cabal had been getting rather ‘tell, not show’ - the only bits that had really been seen were the military, and I wanted to explore the adversary rather more.

The fourth part, which will be ten through twelve, is different again, and I can’t really name it without providing major spoilers, but I will say that ‘Ghost Ship’ does set up elements of the next two books, but stands alone more than any book since ‘Not One Step Back’, while eleven and twelve are another two-parter, I’m afraid, a decision that I’ve only taken in the last week. Originally, they were separate books that linked together, but while plotting them out, I came to the unmistakable conclusion that the plots needed tangling, rather than being left loose. I’ll be starting to write book eleven, ‘Take and Hold’, some time next week - and it’s looking as though it and its sequel might go a little longer than the 70,000 I’ve been working towards.

So, if you are setting out to write a series - and you’ve got through all of this to get to my advice - it boils down to flexibility. Don’t anchor down anything that you don’t have to. Have some strong leads at the beginning, but don’t throw the metaplot in people’s faces right from the start. Introduce the setting, first, and the characters, and show how they respond in ‘normal’ situations - normal to them, that is - before tearing the universe down - because if the reader is going to care about the universe, he has to understand why.

Take the advantage of a series and be free to change plans as you go, to ride what works and to gently discard what isn’t. If you don’t think a story arc is working, wind it up and begin a new one - as long as it has a satisfactory ending, it doesn’t matter if you terminate it early. (Just don’t ignore it. That’s the sin.) Remember why readers like a series - they like to get to know characters and see them develop and evolve over time. Never present a ‘finished product’, always keep them changing. Show what happens when Captain Sheridan becomes President Sheridan, or when the wild Prince becomes King. See how they react - and don’t be afraid to have them fail. Even if they succeed, show what it has cost them.

Ultimately, the greatest satisfaction of a series is the same for both writer and reader - watching the people they grow attached to (I didn’t say ‘like’ deliberately) face different situations and see it change them, watch them build - or for that matter, fall down - over time. That means that you have to bear in mind how each plot with affect the character, what he or she will take from it, how it will change them. And always leave something for the next book, or the book after that, a thread you can pull. And above all else - enjoy it. Because the greatest lesson of all, one I have learned very well in the last two years - is that it is a damn sight easier to write a book you are enjoying than one you aren’t!

Goals for 2015: The Rest...

Every year, I try and work out what I am going to focus on, and every year I end up surprised. As the year starts, my two primary focus points are Battlecruiser Alamo and the Westerns, but there are other projects that I want to work on as well, once I’ve got moving up to speed again. The first four projects are Alamo 10, Westerns 1 and 2, and Alamo 11, in that order, and likely Western 3 after that, but then I intend to get a second series up and running, one designed to complement the other works.

One thing I am certain of is that it won’t be ‘space navy’ again; I’m doing that with Alamo, and the last thing I want to do is clash with myself. I’m still in the early stages of planning this one, but I’m currently exploring a few different ideas - there’s a good chance it will be military sci-fi in some form, and in a different universe than Alamo. Right now, I’m considering a ‘ground-pounders’ series; I’ve enjoyed writing Espatier scenes, and working on something more ‘infantry’ in focus might be interesting, though a ‘rebels against the government’ series is also on my list, as is a more conventional ‘rogues in space’ set-up; I’m still playing with ideas, though I suspect in the long enough term you’ll see some version of all of these series coming out.

That’s something I’m currently planning for April, but if it doesn’t pan out in my head, there are some other things I’m playing with in any case. There’s a trilogy of books I want to write on the Mercian-Northumbrian War of the 660s, something I’ve been interested in for some time, and I even have the covers ready to go on that one - it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that it might end up as the summer project, instead of the new sci-fi series. I’ve also got a series based on the Crusades in my head, and with all the castles around, there’s likely something based in 12th century England coming up too.

Something I have given serious consideration to is writing some shorter historical pieces, at the novella length, maybe ten, fifteen thousand words, and releasing them as bundles. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this happens over the course of the year, though I wouldn’t expect to see the bundle for a while; I’d want to have sufficient to make it a decent collection of stories, which means at least sixty thousand words, I feel. I do want to work in the shorter format at some point - hence the Alamo novella, and if I come up with a second idea for a short piece in the Alamo setting, the odds are high that I will write it.

Ultimately, writing at three thousand words a day on average - something I am pretty confident of sustaining over a long-term basis - gives me a good deal of flexibility. I think that I should be able to write an Alamo, Western, and something else in-between the two in length every two months, maintaining what I consider a reasonable release schedule. I’m starting with two Westerns really to give me a good run in with the genre, allow me to play around a little, and to start off with monthly releases rather than bi-monthly. (Little tip for those starting a new series - that’s often a good thing to do, and something I would recommend.)

There are a host of other potential projects in the pipe, though I suspect they are going to drag back into ‘2016’ - just as they already dragged back into 2015 last year! I’ve got all the research material I need to write my Soviet Space History - that’s just a question of a couple of months to collate and write it, but I don’t think I’m going to have the time. There’s a trilogy of alternate-history ‘Space Shuttle’ novels that I’ve had in the planning stages for three years now, but I think they are likely to stay there for a while, and I’ve got vague ideas about an epic fantasy series...but at the moment, I think a lot of people do!

At the end of it all, my goal remains to try for a million words of published work this year, which I hope will translate to at least a dozen published books, possibly more. Setting such a high goal is partly a means to an end - better to reach high and fail by a little than to reach low and succeed. Besides, I might actually make it yet! I won’t publish daily reports or anything like that, but I probably will do something on the last day of each month to let you know how things are going.

On that note, I suppose I’d better get back to work. Ghost Ship isn’t going to write itself...

Goals for 2015: The New Genre

It will, I suspect, come as a surprise to no-one at all that I’ve been interested in American history for a long time; I didn’t exactly pull Alamo out of a hat, and I have a surprisingly large reference library on the American Civil War, and the times preceding and following it. Oh, hell, I’ll skip the preamble and cut right to the point, I’m planning a series of Westerns novels. I’ve been vaguely thinking about it for a while, but a couple of months ago I read Nik Morton’s ‘How to Write A Western in Thirty Days’ and decided to have a try myself.

One brief session on Amazon later to pick up some soundtracks, and I started digging, working out period, character, and so on, and finally elected on New Mexico and the borderlands, immediately following the Civil War. It’s not exactly new ground, as anyone who has watched the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns will testify, but that’s the area that’s singing to me. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the fighting in the area, battles such as Valverde and Glorieta, not to mention Kit Carson’s activities of 1864, getting a feel for the setting. Certainly in the period 1865-68 there was a hell of a lot going on; I’ve been reading a lot about Jo Shelby lately...

The lead character - and it will come as no surprise that I have yet to name him, as names usually come last with my preparations - is a former Confederate Cavalry Major, a veteran of the Army of New Mexico and participant in the final battle of the war, Palmito Ranch. While the plan is to set the series following the war, I do have some vague ideas of going back into the war for some books at some point, though probably not for a while. (Fun fact - the Confederate commander at Palmito Ranch was none other than John Ford! No relation, I believe…)

My current plans call for books at the 42,000-48,000 word length, to be priced at $2.99, though I already know that I’ll be writing a novella as well, more details on that to follow. I’ve already got outlines for three books and the novella in preparation, and expect to release the first of these books in February, probably towards the end of the month. I’m really looking forward to working in a new genre, and there will be at least three books in this run - though assuming it sells at any level at all, I’m hoping to write six of these this year, not including the novella. Not ruling out more novellas, as well, especially in this new genre; my brain seems more amenable to shorter plots in the western idiom, for some reason - that, and I’m going with single-POV for this series, as opposed to the multiple-POV in the Alamo novels.

It’s probably fair to say that I made a lot of blunders when I started to write the Alamo series - not so much with the books themselves (I hope, anyway!) but with how I organized my notes, and I’m hoping to do a rather better job this time. Hell, having a novella or two won’t exactly hurt. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do with Alamo for a while, though until recently I didn’t have any ideas I could fit into the length in that series. This time, I want to get things right, and I’ll definitely be posting on this later in the month, once I’ve completed ‘Ghost Ship’ and can start to get things down on paper.

Goals for 2015: Battlecruiser Alamo

As I said yesterday, the plan is to publish Alamo novels on alternate months, with the first to come out in the last week of this month. I’ve been holding to that schedule since Battle of Hercules, so I don’t see any problem in maintaining that. The next five are already pretty clear in my head, so we’re set through to September in any event. That will take the series up to number fifteen...sort of.

That ‘sort of’ is something I have planned in between books twelve and thirteen. Pretty high up on the ‘what I should have done’ stakes when I launched the series was an introductory novella, something to be used almost as a sampler to help new readers get into the series, and so...it’s coming, likely in July in a simultaneous release with Alamo 13. I won’t go into plot specifics, to avoid spoilers, but I will say that it will be around 20,000 words in length, and that I intend to price it at 99 cents.

As for the rest, well, the first of the big things is happening in Ghost Ship, the novel I am working on now, and that is bringing the Spitfire Station and Alamo crews back together again - partly inspired by some of the reviews I’ve had, I’ll say, though it was always in my mind to do. For future books, I intend to vary the POV characters a little more than I have been up to now, in order to suit specific stories; it’s a flexibility that I think I will find valuable.

The current arc with the Cabal will be continuing through books eleven and twelve, currently titled ‘Take and Hold’ and ‘Traitor’s Honor’, at which point Alamo will shift into a new story arc. Again, I won’t give specific details, but that is the reason why I am placing the novella in this spot. If the first four books were ‘Season One’, the next eight ‘Season Two’, then this is ‘Season Three’. My intention with this series is more stand-alone books, though still with an overarching storyline running between them; the current run has already lasted two books longer than I had originally planned - Alamo was meant to get home in Book Eight!

There will, naturally, be changes. Some characters will be cycling out of the series, others that had departed will be coming back in - prizes if you can guess which ones! The idea that a complete command crew would stick together throughout their entire careers is extremely unrealistic, but I’ve got something interesting in mind that will resolve that little problem, and certainly some of the characters will be remaining on Alamo. You’ll have to wait and see for that one!

I know I’ve said this before, but there really will be aliens appearing in Alamo at last shortly; I never had an opportunity to really introduce them up till now, except as name-drops and part of the background, but that is going to change, especially after the current Cabal storyline is completed - not that it will mean the end of the Cabal as a major element in the universe, of course, but...well, you’ll have to wait and see what happens in the next three books, especially those being released in March and May.

Current Release Schedule
January: Ghost Ship
March: Take and Hold
May: Traitor’s Duty
July: Broad Pennant
July Novella: Empty Chair
September: Not In My Name
November: Into the Abyss

Goals for 2015: Introduction

Well, it’s that time of the year when I start working on my resolutions for next year. One of the keys here is an article written by Dean Wesley Smith a little while ago, about writing speeds, and paradoxically, the answer I’ve been seeking to increase my output might actually be writing a little more slowly. At the moment, I write in long bursts, with gaps in between; this year, I managed seven novels writing that way. Next year, the plan is to concentrate on writing an average of three thousand words a day, every day - to put that into context, that is about two hours work at the keyboard. The rest of the time I can spend editing, researching, planning, or just thinking.

Which leads me to my primary goal for the year - to publish one million words of material. This is at least theoretically attainable, though I won’t be disappointed if I don’t make it. As the old saying goes, ‘a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ I agree completely with that - aiming for a million and falling short by a quarter of that is still ten good novels in the year. Having said that, though, I would like to try for it, and I think that it is possible. The key to this business is to sit at the keyboard and do the work - and that might be easy to say, but it often is very, very hard, especially when there is that blank screen in front of me.

I know I said this last year, but I intend to blog more often than I have, at least once, preferably twice a week - I’m going to set a target of eighty non-book release posts for the year. Having said that, I still intend only to write when I actually have something to say - I’m not planning to provide constant status reports of my writing targets, though I likely will do ‘end of month’ reports. I want to write a little more about the craft than I have, especially with some of the other things I am planning for 2015, so hopefully I will manage to come up with something interesting.

Last year, I tried a fantasy novel, ‘Swords of the Damned’, and while I’m proud of it, the book hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. I’ve been thinking a lot about writing fantasy novels lately, but if I’m truly honest, I haven’t got anything in mind that is singing to me, at least not at the moment. A few concepts, but nothing that I really feel ready to put into print. That’s something I might consider for 2016, or later. It’s strange, because I would actually like to write fantasy, but whenever it comes to the concept and development stage, I can’t manage anything that really satisfies me. I am intending to branch out into a new genre, having said that, with a release potentially as early as the end of February - for more on that, take a look at my post on Saturday.

Just as last year - though I am hoping with considerably more accuracy - there will be three pages of posts on my writing plans for the year, with what I have in mind for Alamo this year coming tomorrow. Last year, I planned to write four novels and ended up with five, so there at least I exceeded my targets - though the less said about Spitfire Station and Adventures Dark and Deep the better, I think! Rest assured, Alamo will go on, and while I will be going into a little more detail tomorrow (well, a lot more detail, having to fill up a whole post) the short version is that you can continue to expect an Alamo novel every other month during 2015 - which means six next year, building nicely - four in 2013, five in 2014, six in 2015!

As for the rest, well, there is a post that might come as a bit of a surprise on Saturday, and on Sunday I’ll be looking at the ‘bits’ - projects that I am currently seriously considering, but which might not get beyond the ‘pilot’ stage. I do intend to get another science fiction book series going next year, though a lot of the specifics are still not nailed down - more on that on Sunday. So, coming tomorrow - the fate of the Battlecruiser Alamo…