Starfighter is Out!

Major Jack Conway, ace fighter pilot, has been running since the end of the Interplanetary War. When his freighter stumbles across a conspiracy involving a long-forgotten alien empire and a cabal led by a ruthless Admiral willing to slaughter everyone that stands in their way, he can run no longer. Now he must rally his crew of rogues and renegades in a battle to the death, with the fate of all mankind hanging in the balance...

Link: http://mybook.to/StrikeCom1

Starfighter Incoming!

In a couple of days at the outside, I should have completed work on Starfighter; I'm right in the middle of the final battle write now, but I thought I'd take a break to tell you what you can expect from this book, as well as what I'll be working on next, as well as a provisional schedule for the remainder of the year. (Yes, I'm taking a break from writing...by writing.) I can announce that I'll be hitting the button on June 28th, so sometime towards the end of that day, you can expect to see the new book on sale. Naturally, I'll be posting both here and on the mailing list as soon as it goes live. It will retail at $2.99, as will all subsequent books in this series.

As I'd expected, this book will be around 60,000 words long in terms of story. Somewhere into the final outlining, my original idea of tying this series into the main Alamo storyline faded to black, and this now represents a stand-alone series set in the Triplanetary Universe, chronicling the adventures of Major Jack Conway and the crew of the Free Carrier Churchill. This was going to be a five-book series, but I now think it is more likely going to be six, instead – but unlike Alamo, this will have a beginning, a middle, and an end – this will be a self-contained adventure rather than an open-ended one. Which I'm already feeling a little sad about, because I'm really enjoying writing these characters.

Whereas the Battlecruiser Alamo series covers the crew of a military vessel, this is a civilian craft, with far less might at its disposal than a capital ship. With only a handful of fighters and a skeleton crew, they've got to use different tactics. To put it more simply, if the Battlecruiser Alamo is Star Trek, then Starfighter is Firefly. With guns. More so than I'd originally intended, but the characters and the setting evolved that way as I wrote it. This one surprised me quite a lot during the writing process, if I'm honest!

As I said, there are six books in this series, though at present I only have titles for the next two – Interceptor and Interdictor. Both of these will continue the story arc, and I've got some exciting adventures planned for this crew. (Amusingly enough, my usual problem with alternate stories – that I keep stealing them for Alamo – is in reverse this time. Both of these books had their earliest origins as Alamo ideas, but I realized a few months ago that they'd work a lot better in this new series.)

As well as the story itself, I've written three appendices for the book (shades of Tolkien, here), providing a pocket introduction to the Triplanetary Universe, a description of the rank structure, and a guide to new readers on how to enter the Battlecruiser Alamo saga. I very much stress that this book is completely friendly to those wanting to get into the setting for the first time; no prior knowledge of the other books is required, though there a few bits and pieces that long-term readers will recognize tucked away in there, and I might cross a couple of characters over later on.

As soon as this is finished – and I mean that literally – I'll be starting work on Operation Damocles. I'll admit this one is daunting me a little, as in concept it's the biggest Alamo novel I've ever planned, but I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into it, as I push the current storyline into high gear. (Yes, high gear. Trust me, you ain't seen nothing yet!) As I promised, this book will be out before the end of July, likely somewhere around the 28th again; you can expect monthly releases from me for the remainder of the year at least, and likely henceforth. Work on Interceptor will start as soon as I've finished the next Alamo, around the middle of the month, for a release around the end of August; I've got a very busy July in prospect!

And there comes the fantasy, as well...which will almost certainly soak up my August. As it stands at the moment, it's outlining as a four-book series – a stand-alone first book followed by a trilogy, and if that sounds like the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, well, that's rather what I've got in mind. I want to take my time on this one, so I'll be spending the next month doing some preparation for it, but if it comes out as I'm currently planning, it'll be the longest book I've written yet, pushing into six figures. Yes, I know it's not Game of Thrones, but everyone has to start somewhere!

Anyway, I guess I'd better get back to work. Those fighters don't fly themselves, you know!

Mythica: Quest for Heroes Review

This film is more like Dungeons and Dragons: The Movie, than Dungeons and Dragons: The Movie. Which is quite a relief, as that movie was terrible. I'm not meaning that as criticism, quite the reverse. The strange thing about this genre of film is that for all those claiming that 'we've seen it all before', we hardly ever actually see it! Essentially, this is a good and entertaining adventure, and that's always worth an hour and a half of anyone's time. (I certainly hope so. That's essentially the template for everything I've written!) We've got the usual adventuring party – warrior, thief, wizard, priest, and that could so easily go wrong, but fortunately the writer remembered that she was writing characters, not stereotypes, and that gives the actors something to work with – which they do very well.

I'm not going to pretend this is perfect, not by any means. This was the first in what was at the time a four-movie arc, later extended to five, and that leads to perhaps the only flaw in the story, but I'll get to that later. The benefit of such an ambitious project – and let's face it, it is ambitious. That's two more movies than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and four more movies than the Hobbit should have been, and to set out to try such an epic as an independent film company is a brave choice. That they've actually pulled it off is astounding. (Technically, the fifth movie is in post-production, but more on that at the end of this review. Suffice to say that while not all of them are out yet, we're going to see them.)

To get the technical part out of the way first. The cinematography is excellent, if at times a little on the dark side, but they make good use of the terrain. Actually, I thought it stepped up a notch at about the twenty-minute mark when they left the town and began the adventure itself, but I chalk that up to the hazards of a low-budget production. (I have, I should note, seen a lot worse in films with ten, twenty times the budget.) Sound quality is good all the way through, and the score is good as well. Maybe not quite as good as Dawn of the Dragonslayer, but that was a pretty high bar.

Special effects are always going to be difficult with a low budget. To the film's credit, they did the very smart thing, and solved most of their problems at the script stage. (So many, many film-makers get that wrong. If you've got a six-figure budget, don't plan on doing the Battle of Five Armies. It'll look terrible, and drag your audience out of the story.) What they do use is fine – not great, but it's never going to be. It's kept to a minimum, which is the smart, smart thing, and means that it works when they do use it.

Any film, whether you're filming with six-figures or nine-figures in the budget, lives or dies on two things. Script and cast. People forget that – and it's why so many of the big blockbusters become tedious by-the-numbers flops. It's also why, sometimes, lower-budget movies beat out their rivals. This is most of the way there, and I'll talk about the story in a minute. The cast do a fine job with their material – and good material always helps. Not once did I break focus on the story, and that's the critical thing.

I'm going to break the story down into two areas. One in which it succeeded, and one in which it mostly succeeded. Treating the film as a film – in short, letting pass the elements for future instalments – it holds together fine. It's a traditional coming-of-age story, with a disabled (excellent) heroine (also excellent) as the lead and focus. (Anyone else think of any genre films where a disabled woman is the leading character? Many, many points here.) It runs from event to event with the characters carrying the story, rather than letting the story carry them, always a big plus.

When it comes to the story itself, it's a fairly traditional coming-of-age story in many ways, though bonus points for the protagonists, and not falling prey to the easy adoption of tropes. Even where they do fall into the usual patterns – the dashing rogue, for example – you get the idea that there is more going on under the surface, that this is an act concealing something else. The main focus is on the lead, Marek, and that's where the bulk of the foreshadowing falls; she's going somewhere very dark, that much is clear. About the only niggle I have is that the scene near the end of the film with them walking off camera, having defeated the big bad, would have been a great ending, to the point that the next scene almost seems unneeded, but that's a very small niggle in a good film. I don't do scores – if I don't like it, I don't review it – but I can recommend picking this one up. It's available on Amazon. More to the point – the production team have a Kickstarter for the final film in the series going right now, and I strongly urge you to donate. It's certainly worth it.

Dragons, Starships and the Sense of Wonder

First of all, a quick update on Starfighter. If anything, it's going better than I had expected, and despite a few plot potholes I've had to dance over, I'm well past the half-way stage now. Writing a single chapter a day has, I think, helped, and certainly it's served to lengthen them considerably; I'm averaging four-thousand-word chapters with this one, which for me is certainly unusual. The characters are fitting into place nicely, the arcs developing well, and I'm very much enjoying working on it, certainly! It's looking like it's going to end up about where I expected, a 60,000-word-novel. That's going to be the standard for this series, I think, and I'm just about standing by the original plan that there are going to be five of them, though I wouldn't be astonished if it pushed to six. We'll see. Target date for release is the 28th of this month, though I might do a little better than that.

Once this is completed, I move onto my next project, and this one has surprised even me, because I'm going to be writing the first in my projected fantasy trilogy ahead of schedule. Though with a publication date later than I had planned, but I'll get to that later. In concept, I have the notion of a 'trilogy of trilogies' telling a multi-generational saga, a classic heroic fantasy epic. The first three books will be at the same 60,000 word length as the Starfighter series, but I think the next six that are planned to follow might end up somewhat longer, maybe twice as long each. We're not talking Game of Thrones here, but for me, anything over a hundred thousand words is long!

The idea for this has come from a range of sources, and I'll focus on two of them to begin with. I've long been interested in the structuralist work of the Russian mythologist, Vladimir Propp. If you want an interesting alternative to the Campbellian model, I can strongly recommend picking up his 'Morphology of the Folktale'. Among other things, it presents a thirty-one-point plot guideline for a 'typical folktale', and although I'm not following it completely, certainly it's given me a lot of ideas to do something a little out of the ordinary with the story arcs.

The second is something that surprised the hell out of me. I've been planning on doing some work in the fantasy field for a while – well, to be fair, I've ebbed and flowed on it. I didn't want to do something just for the sake of doing it, and I was searching for a story for a very long time, which I finally think I have found. (I still say that trying to break into the fantasy market at this point is crazy. That should tell you all you need to know about me.) As a result, I've been attempting to keep up with the 'state of the art', certainly where it comes to television. I've got a bit of a love/hate relationship with Game of Thrones, but that's a place for another, probably very long post at some point in the future. What I'm talking about today is MTV's Shannara Chronicles.

Yes, MTV is doing live-action fantasy series now. I was as surprised as anyone else at that. Still more surprised was I to find that it was actually really rather good, and that I'm looking forward to watching the next season. Key to this was an area that Game of Thrones totally fails at – containing the story. One of the biggest problems in the field of epic fantasy is keeping the narrative tight. A Song of Ice and Fire is a great example – meant to be a trilogy, now heading towards seven books in total – and some of those split in two. The classic example probably remains the Wheel of Time, which turned from six books to fifteen.

There's always a temptation to expand everything, to build more and more layers, but at some point, the question has to be asked whether it actually serves the story. Especially in a field where you have a budget to worry about, and television certainly counts as that. If you have to choose where to spend the money, it needs to advance the core story, and the question of whether something can be ditched without hurting the on-going plot has to be asked. The Shannara Chronicles were mostly rather good at that. I won't give any spoilers – though anyone who has read the Elfstones of Shannara will already be thoroughly spoiled anyway – but the core plot of the season is resolved in the season. Yes, there are hooks leading onto the next run of episodes, but you have a satisfying resolution to the plot you have been watching, and my God, that's a rare thing.

I'm going to confess something. I'm tired of Grimdark. If I want to see desperate men doing desperate things, I can turn on the news and watch it for real. For me, fantasy and science-fiction represent both escapes from the world in which we live, and perhaps an example of how things might be better. Different. Wiser. I might not share Gene Roddenberry's utopian idea of the future, but I do hope that tomorrow will be better than today, and write with that in mind. Someone described the Shannara series – and this was the key revelation – as 'black versus light-grey', and that seems a reasonable balance. Yes, have character conflict. Yes, have sacrifices. Yes, accept that you can't always win them all, but at least win something, on some level.

Ultimately, I got into this to write stories, and to entertain. That's my primary motivation, and I think I'm safe to say that anyone doing this successfully would probably say the same thing. When I write a book, I'm not hoping to shake the world to its foundations, I'm trying to tell a good story with interesting characters. I think that's really what readers are looking for. I've been kicking around an epic fantasy idea for a few years now, but I haven't been able to bring myself to put it on paper, and at this point, I suspect I never will – though a few bits and pieces of the plot have been salvaged for this new concept.

Heroic fantasy, I think, is the best way of describing what I actually want to write. Something that perhaps harkens back more to Tolkien than to the gritty realism of Martin, or Abercrombie. I certainly realize their worth and enjoy their work, but I'd rather do something a little more magical, with some of that sense of wonder that perhaps is the main thing that science-fiction and fantasy have in common. A tight, contained series, focused on the plot and the characters rather than the world, though naturally, I'll be exploring the world somewhat as I go.

I'm not going to give any spoilers here, largely because there are still a lot of blanks to be drawn in. No Elves or Dwarves, though, I can tell you that much. They've been used a little too often. Dragons, however, are another story, and iconic as they are, I don't see how I can avoid them. I want to play with the traditional tropes a little, subverting them where I can; I have some interesting things in mind. As for a release date, I'm a little torn on this one, though I'm leaning towards having the trilogy completed before I release it – which would mean publishing in November, December and January. (Yes, taking advantage of the Christmas surge – I've got to use my businessman hat for something, after all.) Knowing me, though, I might say to hell with that and launch when ready. We'll have the wait and see.

I've just about got my new schedule working now, which gives me a little more time for the blog. I'm going to try and do some more frequent posts for a while, assuming I can think of something to say. As a start – to accompany something I would be doing anyway – I'm going to be doing some fantasy movie reviews, starting with the available films in the Mythica series. Hopefully, I'll see you tomorrow...

Starfighter, Dragons, and the Writing Process

As I write this, I'm just finished my fourth day on Starfighter, and I'm looking forward to writing Chapter 1 tomorrow. No, I'm not restarting this book, not this time, anyway, but I decided I need to write what is essentially a prequel, as a better way of introducing most of the characters, as well as to bring some of the backstory to the fore. It's important to remember that a book must stand-alone, even if it is the first in a five-part series, and I decided after writing what is now Chapter 5 that the arc of one of the two leads needed to start in a more explicit place.

I'm getting a little surprised by how dark a hole the two lead characters are in, actually. It's one of those things that you only know when you write it, but I'm happy with how things are going so far, and it's all fitting together very well. This is the first time I've seriously started a new series of novels in years, and it's great to put everything I've learned over twenty novels to use in launching a new set of characters on their journey. Already they're talking to me, so to speak, pushing themselves deeper into the narrative, and I think that's a good sign. (Either that, or I've gone a bit mad, but I guess we'll find out that soon enough!)

It's time to talk about what happens next, and a decision I've been pushed to over the last few days. In the past, when I've attempted to get something new going, it's always been a bit of a struggle, but this time it's fitting together like a glove. I want to do it again, and there will be a third series coming very soon, certainly within the next three months. Don't worry, Alamo won't be neglected, and Operation Damocles will still be on sale by the end of July; I think the cover is one of the best I've ever had!

With this book, I'm adopting a new working pattern, and it seems to be working surprisingly well. (No, I'm not off-topic – bear with me for a moment.) Previously, I've written in manic pulses of output, and for the last two Alamo books, I was averaging more than eight thousand words a day. Let me make something clear right now – I would never recommend that to anyone. After each of them (and I wrote the preceding one at a rate almost as rapid) my hands and wrists hurt like hell, and that was definitely not a good sign. Things have had to change...and I needed to try and increase my sustainable rate, anyway.

A paradox? Not really. Instead of writing in bursts of ten days, followed by two or three weeks off, I'm writing every day, but for less time. One chapter a day instead of two, or even three. Three hours in the morning is sufficient for three to four thousand words. Write a chapter, edit a chapter, prepare for future books. Which means, essentially, a book in twenty days rather than eight to ten, but writing every single day. And that's how to increase the output, and frankly, I'm enjoying this new method more. I won't say that I'll never write faster again, but I think this is the way forward – and to anyone out there doing this or interested in taking up writing, I'd strongly advice adopting a method like this.

Anyway, back to something vaguely resembling the point. I've made no secret of my intention to move into historical fiction as an extra series, but that remains something for next year, not this year. In fact, I've signed myself up to a course on Ancient Egypt starting in September, and am planning to take a similar one on Ancient Mesopotamia in January, to help properly prepare me for it. I want to do the very best job I can. For the present, though...

Well, there remains fantasy, and a couple of recent epiphanies. The first is that one of the worst things you can do is write a book specifically designed to target a market. That is not to say that you shouldn't do research in the genre, and get a feel on what works, it simply means that you need to write the story that is inside you, though you might want to make a few changes and tweaks along the way. I'm writing Starfighter because I've had this idea in my head for years, and some of the elements that have found their way into them have been rattling around in my notebooks for ages. A few earlier attempts at this failed, but this one is sticking, and I think that's why.

A look at the fantasy genre, coldly and dispassionately, should send any prospective writer running to the hills. The lists are stuffed, full beyond belief with novels, and the odds of making any headway are far slighter. While I know that, I also know that it doesn't matter. I'm going to try it anyway. Because I'm getting to the second point, and that is an old axiom. To quote William Goldman, 'nobody knows anything'. Look too deeply at the analysis of fantasy fiction, and you'll be put off. You need to break through that, and damn it, just write the story that is in your head. For better or for worse.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I'm projecting 'Curse of the Dragon' for an August release. I'm taking a long look through the genre at the moment, and have a Kindle full of recent indie fantasy to read, and I'm putting a lot of my old notes together. I'm not planning monolithic epics – these will be at the usual Alamo/Starfighter length, anywhere between sixty and eighty thousand words. I have no intention of attempting to reinvent the entire genre. My ambitions are far smaller than that; I just want to tell a good story. At the end of the day, I think that's what readers really want.

Tales of Starfighter...

About a week ago, when I sent out the email to the Alamo mailing list regarding the development of Starfighter, I outlined a few details of the concept. Now that I am actually starting to write it – and, on the second attempt, I have an outline that I'm actually satisfied with – I can share a little more. For a start, I can confirm that you're going to have it by the end of this month. Though it's possible I might scrape it by a few hours like I did with Final Testament, Starfighter will be released in June.

This book has gone through almost as many iterations as the original Alamo. I actually dug up some of the earliest drafts a few days ago, and interestingly, I rather liked some elements of them. They needed work, but they took things in a very different way than I ended up going. Commander Marshall was the commander of a task force, for example, right from the start, and there were a lot of bits about alien races I had completely forgotten. I might post these at some point in the near future, or at least make the available in some way. (Periodically, I consider slamming together a 99-cent ebook of 'Alamos that never made it', but at this stage we're talking about a couple of hundred thousand words...)

My goal was to put together something that could lead to Alamo, and right up to the final draft, that was a key part of the story. Until I realized that it was weakening the story and had to be removed; now this stands completely alone, albeit still in the same Triplanetary Universe, with the occasional reference to characters or locations. I won't say there will never be a cross-over, but probably not until the series has finished, when I might bring over some of the characters.

Yes, this series actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the moment I'm mentally picturing it as a five-book run, though I had a potential idea for a prequel today that I might end up doing as well at some point, though that's very vague in my mind. As usual, this has surprised me immensely. The ship and crew have dragged a lot closer to Firefly than I was originally intending, though I don't actually think of that as a bad thing, not at all. I loved that show.

There are two point-of-view characters in this one, and at this stage I don't think it does any harm to identify them. The first is Ensign (Reserve) Nicola Hunter, a one-tour Espatier who left the service to do a degree in anthropology, before being recalled to the colors to help with an archaeological expedition. The second, a retired Lieutenant, Jack Conway, a fighter pilot from the war (no real spoilers here, but starfighters are involved in this book) the owner-operator of a tramp freighter named the Churchill. (The name is from its origins as a military vessel; she was originally a fighter tender, back during the Interplanetary War between the Triplanetary Confederation and United Nations.)

Something I'm working hard on with this one – and it's proving quite a challenge, in all honesty – is to make sure that this book does not require any knowledge of the Battlecruiser Alamo series. I usually try and at least drop some refreshers into the first few chapters of a new release, but this time I have to re-introduce the universe in a manner that won't bore those already familiar with the setting, though also provide satisfaction to those exploring it for the first time. Without any 'As you know, Professor,' moments, preferably.

What I do know is that I'm having a lot of fun with this one, and the characters are already leaping to life. As usual, someone who was supposed to have only a line or two has decided to make himself a major character, and there are quite a few I'm looking forward to later in the book – as well as one who will only make an appearance in the next book, who I have to introduce here. (And amazingly enough, I'm going to get to use the original storyline for Forbidden Seas after all, which is a bit of a relief. The problem there was that Alamo was too powerful, the ship too obvious, for that sort of mission. When we're talking covert operations, however, it works a lot better.)

The work's going pretty well now, and I'm on a nice curve to finish my part of it by about the 24th, with luck. Unless there are any unforeseen delays, I think the 30th is quite possible, and given my usual practice, I'll likely end up speeding up as I get nearer to the end. I want to find out what happens to these characters as much as anyone else, after all!