Goals for 2016

Sit back and relax, everyone, because this is going to be a long one.

Around this time last year, I said that I had hoped to write a million words. As it turned out, I fell far short of that, and just crept over the half-million mark, finishing the seventh Alamo novel of the year just a few days ago. (All ready to go, by the way, so I’ll be hitting the button in a few days.) What went wrong doesn’t need much analysis - I’d wanted to start a second series, one that was to run parallel with Alamo, but it didn’t happen. I spent a lot of time plotting books that I didn’t write, or working on various ideas that ended up going nowhere.

Having said that, I think it was a good year for Alamo! I’ve tied up a lot of the loose ends from the 2013-14 books, and set up a lot of plots for 2016-17. The hardest - by far - were the two I wrote near the start of the year, ‘Take and Hold’ and ‘Traitor’s Duty’. I keep telling myself that I will stop trying for two-novel plots, but I’ve done it twice now. My belief is that the Alamo series works best as stand-alone novels with connected story and character arcs, and that is definitely the direction I’ll be taking the series in next year. I’m moving to a 56-day release schedule, which means releases in January, February, April and June...I’ll see how that goes after the first half of the year! All of those books are either already written or firmly plotted out, and I can’t wait to get started on the next one.

This year, I wrote seven books. Eight if you count the unpublished Crusader book. Let’s stick with seven. Next year, 2016, I intend to write thirteen and publish twelve. There are two keys to this. The first is the new 56-day schedule between releases, and the second is that darned second series! I’ve been going around and around on this for many months now, trying to work out what to write. I went a long way on an epic fantasy concept, and that still might come to the surface at some point, and again on historical fiction. I had some thoughts about a spin-off, but it didn’t work out.

Why another genre, you ask? There are two reasons for this. The first is that I would like to stretch myself as a writer, and working in a different area would do that. The second, and most important, is that whenever I have come up with a new science-fiction idea, it’s been obvious that it would either work better as an Alamo book, or that I could easily adapt it for the main series. ‘Malware Blues’ started life as the lead book in a series titled ‘Xenopunk’, and ‘Ghost Ship’ and ‘Aces High’ were originally conceived as Spitfire Station books. There’s a series called ‘Fox Company’ that I’ve been playing around with, and that might see the light of day at some point - but I now finally have my second series!

Naturally, I don’t intend to give out any spoilers on this, but I’ve already said that the lead ship is called Churchill, and can say that the secondary ship (yes, two ships in this one) is a Turing-class Techjammer. (A ship concept I originally developed for Alamo, but it fits a lot better in this universe.) There will be lots more details in the coming months, but the characters and the stories for the first four books are locked into place, and it will be taking its place in the rotation early in the year. The first should be out at the end of March, and will alternate with Alamo thereafter. About the only thing I haven’t finalized is the series title, but I always prevaricate with them.

As well as the new series, I have a few other projects I’m working on as well. For a long-time, I’ve been wanting to write a popular history of the Soviet Space Program; it’s a project very dear to my heart, and I’ve been working on the research side for years. If I get a chance, I might squeak this one into 2016 - in current concept, it will be a two-book series, each one about the length of an Alamo novel. I’m at a stage where I have all the reference works I need to get started, and it’s a matter of going back over the material and breaking it down into an outline.

Another possibility - depending on how things turn out - is that I might have a shot at a third series. Historical fiction is still drawing me towards it, and I still want to take a crack at it, though this might end up being a 2017 project rather than a 2016 one. Nevertheless, I intend to get going on the research - either still focusing on the Crusades, or perhaps venturing to another era, I’m not completely decided. (Though in honesty, I suspect I might try a different era. As usual, I’m juggling half-a-dozen ideas in my head at the moment.) No timelines or deadlines on this one, but it’s something that’s going to happen, just a question of when.

Other goals for the New Year? Well, I’m on Twitter now, and I’m actually finding it a lot more engaging than I was expecting. You can find me at @REBTongue if you’ve a mind to. I’ll be using that more next year. I want to do more with the blog, as well; I’m aware that it goes through long periods of quiescence, and I want to do something about that. At least one post a week next year, and I hope for two. I think that’s optimistic enough, but there are a few things I want to write about, and with a new series coming up, there’s room for author’s notes and analysis.

Well, I think that’s about everything. Happy New Year, everyone!

Book Review: The Praetorian Series, by S.J.A. Turney

A valuable piece of advice I took a long time ago, when I was first starting to seriously consider taking up writing as a living, was to make sure to read outside my niche. When I was a kid, science fiction and fantasy provided a huge proportion of my reading, certainly almost the whole of my fiction reading, but I’ve drifted considerably since then. I’d say I read far more non-fiction than fiction these days - always a good source for story and character ideas, no matter what the topic - and while I still read a lot of science-fiction, I probably read more historical fiction than fantasy now.

Something else I have noted increasingly, especially in the last year or so, is that I’m reading on my Kindle even more than I used to. In the ‘old days’, I’d primarily be reading on my Kindle when I was out, travelling on buses or trains, or while waiting for something or another, but that’s less so now that I work from home - and when I go out, more often I’m going for walks rather than taking transport anywhere. Which means podcasts rather than books, as a rule, but that’s another story. Now, I read my Kindle a lot more at home; I’m not even sure why, though the convenience factor must be an issue. (Fiction more than non-fiction; I tend to read almost the majority of my fiction on the Kindle these days.)

That tends to mean that I read a lot more independent authors than I used to, and I’d say that pretty much all of my discoveries this year - of authors whose work I like - were published themselves. I expect that to continue next year, though I do have a substantial backlog of actual paper books that I need to work down. One of these (see, I am getting to the point, even if it’s taking me an age to get there) is the historical fiction writer, S. J. A. Turney, a specialist in Roman fiction, among other things.

I first read his ‘Marius’ Mules’ series, chronicling a soldier serving in the Gallic Wars under the command of Julius Caesar, usually the commander of the Tenth Legion, though if I were to say any more, it would amount to a spoiler, and I detest spoilers. (Which makes it damn hard to write reviews, which is why I don’t do it that often, which is something I aim to change next year.) (Three Witches? Maybe I ought to write Macbeth II: Banquo’s Revenge.) While I strongly recommend that you take a look at them if you have any interest at all in the period, I’m not actually going to talk about them here, but rather at his ‘Pretorian’ series, currently standing at two books, the last of which was released less than a fortnight ago.

As I write this, I just finished the second book, and my only real complaint is that the third book isn’t available yet, but I can be certain that I will be picking it up when he does. As good as the Marius’ Mules series is, this is better. The atmosphere is superb, and the plot twists come thick and fast, even more in the second book than the first; the ending is something I really didn’t see coming, and the characters are well-developed and likable, not always the easiest thing to do. He has a talent for having the reader grow along with his central character, opening up your perceptions on the world as those of the character expand. I’m not going to give any real details of the plots of the two books here, just to say that they have a healthy mix of intrigue, action and character, the triumvirate (see, this is me on a Roman kick) upon which any good book rests.

I’m not remotely qualified to discuss the accuracy of the book, and in a way, I feel attempting to do so would miss the point. I have read enough on the period to know that the feel and tone of the book is spot on, and that I was drawn deep into the world and the setting - and that I didn’t need any in-depth knowledge to understand the plot (though, as a good writer does, I wanted to know more, and will be working on that in the near future) What I did know complemented the story well, but I never got a sense that I was missing anything. Further, he avoids the curse of the dreaded info-dump, painting with a much light brush, something I appreciate and aspire to myself. I know just how hard it can be, and sometimes how tempting it is to just have one of the characters say something, rather than having to tease it in, especially if it is important to the plot. There’s a historical note at the end of each book, something I also appreciate.

What else can I say? Other than once again to recommend giving this series a look. The first book is ‘Praetorian: The Great Game’, and the second ‘Praetorian: The Price of Treason’. You can find them both available on the Kindle, and I believe they are also both in the Kindle Unlimited program, so if you are a subscriber to that, you really have no excuse...

A Kindle Worlds Wish List

I read a hell of a lot of tie-in fiction when I was a kid. I rather suspect that a lot of other science-fiction fans can say the same. Mostly Star Trek, if truth be told, though Star Wars figured heavily as well into the list. This being the days before cheap DVD sets, they shaped my view of what those series were far more than the episodes, in some cases. Heck - I read the Alan Dean Foster novelization of Star Wars before I actually watched A New Hope. Some of them still stand out today, the Brian Daley Han Solo books, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, any Star Trek book written by Diane Duane, for example, and that’s just for starters. I could be rattling them off for years.

It’s only strange that I never wrote any fanfiction. I don’t think I ever really thought of it, though that might partly be because I wasn’t exposed to it until I first had regular internet access. Even then, I read quite a bit, but never thought of taking it any further. Potentially, that could always change; when I first heard about the Kindle Worlds program, I figured quite quickly that it was something I could do - if any of the franchises appealed to me, and thus far, none of them have piqued my interest. There are those that would, however…

Star Trek Do you even need to ask. Battlecruiser Alamo for me scratches this itch very well, but in the admittedly unlikely event that this ever appeared, I’d guarantee to have a Trek novel on sale within sixty days. Maybe more than one. Though Amazon, I suspect, would rapidly be totally overwhelmed with them - still, it’s definitely something I would do. Not with the major characters, having said that, I’d want to tread my own path here. Probably set in the ‘Captain Pike’ era. Long, long ago, I wrote a fan supplement for the Last Unicorn Star Trek RPG set in that period, and it’s always been of interest.

Wing Commander Odd, this one, in a sense, because I wasn’t a fan of the tie-in fiction they did for this one, but I played the first four games, and Privateer, for hours and hours. Wing Commander I is the first game I actually remember completing, during a half-term holiday if I remember correctly. Fighter aces, not-Kzinti, a few other aliens scattered about, World War II in space in a great way. I suppose this is another itch I could scratch in another way without too much trouble, though…. (This is one franchise I actually hold a little hope for. It’s been left fallow for long enough that I suspect there would be few qualms about releasing it in this way.)

Star Wars Of course I would, but they won’t.

Traveller This is another one I might hold out a little hope on. For a long time, Classic Traveller was my go-to SF RPG, and I still flick through the manuals on occasion, wondering about what I might do. Technically, there isn’t anything at all stopping me from doing a novel series in the style of Traveller, but I’d like to be able to make use of the canon, some of the threats from the metaplot, that sort of thing. I suppose I really should have put ‘Third Imperium’ up there. In all honesty - I’m almost surprised no-one has done this one. The RPG itself is open-source, and third-parties can write supplements for it without any trouble or legal hoops. Why not open up the setting for writers?

Firefly I watched this when it first came out. On bootleg DVDs from across the Atlantic, a little before it aired over here. One of the few things I have on DVD and Blu-Ray (the Alien Anthology is about the only other one I can think of, and that was largely because for months I thought I’d lost it in the last house move.) As with Star Trek, I’d use original characters - but the setting has so much totally untouched depth to it, and while Serenity did some...not-nice things, there are options running on that could be explored. Again, I suppose there is a chance this might happen - it’s a franchise on life-support at the moment, and open-sourcing it would probably get some revenue back in.

Foundation The original Foundation trilogy, as I’ve written about before, is one of my all-time favorites. I must have read it a couple of dozen times, and I still come back to it again on occasion - if you want to see how to build a massive epic in a very small number of worlds, it’s hard to beat. Even though the science has dated, of course, most of it still holds up well. The nature of the universe would make this one a slam-dunk; there’s room for hundreds more tales of the Fall of the First Empire and the Rise of the Second, and even with Foundation and Earth (sigh) the series still only gets half-way through. The battle between the First Foundation and the Second Foundation for control of the galaxy is a great one, with lots of room left the run. Again...one day, I suppose, this might. The works of Kurt Vonnegut are up for use in Kindle Worlds, after all. Why not the World of Asimov?

Honestly, I don’t have any realistic expectation that any of these will come available. Some of the franchises are too big for it to happen, and others are, oddly, too small, in that I suspect either no-one has thought of it (if that is the case...get to it!) or there is a thought that there would not be the interest. In the case of Traveller, it’s almost surprising that someone hasn’t done something like this, given that it is, as I said, open sourced….

In Defence Of Space Fighters...

Latterly, I’ve been thinking about about space fighters and carriers. Conventional wisdom suggests that neither would have a role in a hard-science-fiction setting, but I strongly disagree with that assessment. As usual, there’s a lot more to these concepts than is often thought, and I think there is a lot of life in the manned space fighter yet. Which means that those flat-tops still have a place in space warfare.

The use of a ‘carrier’ is, in my opinion, without question. Even if you postulate some sort of drone-based work, they’ll have to be based out of something, a mobile base where they can be maintained/constructed/operated, and that’s going to mean a carrier, even if it just a drone carrier. Then we have the space marines! Ultimately, taking and holding something means boots on the ground. Whether human or robot. That suggests Commando Carriers, something like the helicopter carriers operated today. Different requirements, but a not-dissimilar design.

That keeps the carriers in service, then, but I’m going to go one step further and suggest that there will be space superiority fighters, that they will have humans on board, and that they will operate from carriers. Heresy for many in the hard sci-fi, crowd, I know. Normal ‘doctrine’ suggests that some sort of computer-based control would be the norm, or remote operation from a distant base, but there are two reasons why that could be problematic. The first is time lag. When the Soviet Union operated the Lunokhod probes on the Moon, they operated them with a two-second delay, something that made them challenging to drive. Operating the rovers on Mars is many orders of magnitude more difficult. Imagine trying to do that in a combat situation, if they were robotic tanks? You can’t wait seventeen minutes to decide which target to attack. You’ve to be close, close enough that you are probably already in the theatre of operation anyway, and therefore, vulnerable.

Fine, then they can be remotely operated. The concept of automatic combat-capable robots is worrying enough, but let’s not forget that if it is programmed, it can be reprogrammed. A talented hacker could conceivably hack into the First Fighter Squadron and render it inert, or send it careening off back towards its point of origin. Whilst certainly there can be defences, making such vehicles impervious to electronic attack is damn near impossible - and human supervision requires local presence without an unacceptable time-lag, putting us back to square one.

Let’s look at what a fighter is likely to do, anyway. Three roles suggest themselves. Intercept, Assault, and Aerospace. The first is designed to prevent against threats to the carrier, or to cover other vessels. The second attacks capital ships, launching close-in assaults. The third is tasked with close-orbital and upper-atmospheric defence, designed to reinforce or prevent planetary assaults, or for customs duty and interdiction. I’d argue that a mix of all three will be required in the space navy of the future, though doubtless penny-pinching politicians will try and multi-task!

(There’s a point here that is often forgotten in military science-fiction. Not everything will be built to the optimum level. Cliques in the military, or in government, will have their own pet projects that may or may not make sense. Corners will be cut to save money, resulting in inferior equipment or some designed to fill too many roles. Take a look at any military here on Earth and tell me that everything related to it makes sense. It doesn’t. Humans are fallible, and any fictional military should reflect that.)

Wars in space are going to take place in a hostile environment, and I’m not talking about the cold vacuum of space. Electronic warfare is a major issue today, and that’s going to get worse. Imagine trying to launch a bombing run on a battleship while the crew on board is attempting to trick your sensors, to steal control of your missiles, to send false signals through your communicators. All of that is going to be a factor, suggesting that either every pilot will also have to be a hacker, or two-seater vehicles will be the norm. Not Pilot/Navigator as in the RAF, but Pilot/Hacker.

Yes, I just suggested that the space fighters of the future will be crewed by late-teenage computer hackers using fast reflexes and expert systems to win their way through. I defy anyone to tell me that isn’t a cool concept. (My suspicion is that training times are going to go down again. When your job is to make the decisions and stop people breaking into your systems to stop them from being enacted, that can make for a far more focused training. I leave to everyone’s imaginations what that Fighter Pilot school looks like, but I still say that it is a pretty neat concept.)

Space fighters have been a part of science-fiction for a very long time. I’m not going to try and predict the future, but I do think that the concept of the mobile fighting base is here to stay. It just makes too much sense. It might look like the Battlestar Galactica, or it might look more like a mobile Starbase. I suspect, frankly, a big box with lots of room for VTOL-style landings and a pressurized space inside for shirt-sleeve maintenance and refuelling. Nevertheless, there is still room for them, even in hard-sf series.

New Series Announcement...

Well, it’s been a long while since my last blog post, a lot longer than I had hoped, but Malware Blues proved to be rather more...involved than I had expected. However, the hard part is now all behind me, and I can confirm that the book will be on sale on January 4th, just within the New Year. I’m not going to go into spoilers, but this one is a bit of a big deal; it ties up a lot of loose ends, and sets Alamo onto the course it’ll be taking for 2016, back out into unknown, unexplored space. Most of the characters are put through several types of hell, but it would be a rather boring book if they didn’t, I think!

Another piece of housekeeping is that I am now using Twitter! My handle is @REBTongue, and I’m trying to use it semi-regularly. At the very least it’ll give more frequent updates on the progress of books than I’ve historically managed on the blog, and I’m hoping to do rather more with it than that. In fact, I’m rather hoping to do a lot more on the social media front this year than I did last year, so with a little luck, my posts here will be considerably more frequent, hopefully at least twice a week.

I started the year with the goal of writing a million words, a very lofty ambition, I know, but going in I rather expected that I would fall short, and I have. Nevertheless, I’ve written seven Alamo novels this year, as well as the unpublished Crusader story, and I’m reasonably satisfied with that; it just about tops the half-million mark. Next year, though, I aim to do better. As I announced on the mailing list, I’ve moved to a 56-day schedule for Alamo releases, rather than two-month. Which among other things suggests that next year, you’ll be getting seven Alamo novels rather than six.

Even the trickier books tend to take me about three weeks to write, which has meant a lot of, well, dead space in between books, which I have primarily occupied with a variety of projects that never went anyway. I spent months beating my head against the epic fantasy war, and there was the Crusader project - which I did want to do more with, but it never seemed to happen. Things are at last beginning to change a little, because I think I finally have the second series I have been wanting, and it’s going to be another military science-fiction series.

My hold-up until now was coming up with something that would be distinct from Alamo, sufficiently that I was not going to be stealing ideas back and forth. Finally, I have a plot that is working for me, and something that I can seriously get my teeth into. Alamo has worked on the single-ship scale primarily, and given where I see it going for the next six to ten books, it will likely be staying in that arena. Something on a higher scale, then, more at the ‘Admirals and Ambassadors’ level, is where I’m going with the other series, as well as rather more on the ‘space opera’ spectrum. Fleets of dozens, hundreds of ships, facing off against each other, while the politicians and diplomats feud.

I’m surprisingly well advanced on this one; the characters are forming up nicely, as are the overall plot arcs, and I’m working on the nuances of the setting right now. I can tell you that the primary ship is the ‘Churchill’. I haven’t yet come up with a permanent series title, though I am using the working title of ‘Lucky Thirteen’, but I know that the first book is called ‘Minstrel Boy’, and the second, ‘Broad Pennant’. It’s planned as a nine-book series, three sets of three, which again makes it distinct from Alamo - in that Alamo is an ongoing series, whereas this one has a definite beginning, middle, and end. You can expect ‘Minstrel Boy’ to be on sale on March 28th, and for each book in this series to be released at 56-day intervals, in the gap between Alamo books.

There will be a lot more detail in my New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day posts, going over the lessons I learned this year and what I intend to do next year, as well as the dreaded New Year’s Resolutions! For now, I’ll just wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!