Category: Uncategorized

Queen’s Pardon Release

Update 10/27/2018: All looks like it’s resolved now. The title is back for sale and the preorder is set for delivery 10/29. Yay! 🙂

Some of you may have noticed that The Queen’s Pardon is currently listed as “not for sale” on Amazon.com. This is NOT an issue with the release date or on my end.

Amazon appears to be having some problems and several authors have found that one or more books are in this state for no apparent reason.

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Morgan always assumed that if she could survive growing up in the mines of Planet Hillman – feared for its brutal conditions and gravity twice that of Earth – she could survive anything.
That was before she became a starship mechanic. Now she has to contend with hostile bosses, faulty equipment, and even taking care of her friend’s little girl. Once pirates show up, it’s a wonder she can get any work done at all.

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So the question came up in regards to Privateer and Alexis’ use of a comms laser to communicate with Malcomson in normal-space: Why, then, do ships not use this in darkspace? Why the complicated, visible-light signaling process?

Aside from the author’s desire for Age of Sail signaling in an Age of Sail In Space book, of course.

This has to do with the nature of darkspace and dark matter in the Carew universe, and the difference between visible light and lasers.

In Into the Dark, I describe Alexis’ first experience outside the hull in darkspace and the effects of light there:

Merlin’s outer lights came on, shining from the hull and masts but not all at once. Even the light behaved differently here, seeming to pool and flow across the surface of the hull, creeping toward her along the bowsprit and as it reached her, she found it more difficult to make out the far off shapes.

Then her first glimpse of shot from the ship’s guns:

A moment later, the monitors displaying the Chase showed a bolt of laser light flow by the fleeing ship to port. It almost oozes along, Alexis thought, still disturbed by the odd way things behaved in darkspace.

The nature of dark matter in darkspace is very tightly related to gravity, and gravity does effect light. That’s how scientists came up with the theory of dark matter, after all — the light from distant stars was being bent by far more gravitational force than could be accounted for by the visible matter. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter]

So in darkspace, this effect is magnified and with the additional caveat that the greater the amount of “normal” matter (I.e. not dark matter or dark energy) the greater the effect of the dark matter on it. This is one of the reasons there’s an upper limit on the size of the ships its practical to take into darkspace (in addition the diminishing returns of how much normal-space mass the dark energy winds can propel through that dark matter).

This effect on the mass of the ships is somewhat offset by the handwavium of gallenium, which, when added to the ship’s hull and properly charged sort of pushes the dark matter away and negates its effects.

But away from the ship’s hull — away from the gallenium — there is no protection, which is why a person going adrift in darkspace (or at the top of a mast during a fierce storm) feels those effects more strongly. They have no protection from it then.

So light, whether visible or laser, has no protection from the effects of dark energy and dark matter when away from the ship’s hull.

But, wait, some say — light is photons and photons have no mass to be affected.

Ah, but the wonders of physics and relativity tell us that a photon has a rest mass of zero, as measured by an observer who sees the particle with zero speed. But light is never at rest — it always travels at c, and therefore has zero rest mass. Light is affected by gravity and dark matter.

So we get to the difference between visible light and laser light, and their behavior in darkspace.


https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-laser-and-an-ordinary-wave-of-light

Regular light is more diffuse, less energy-dense, and not in phase. From a darkspace theory-standpoint, it’s less “dense”, less massy, therefore the dark matter has less of an effect on it. It travels less distance in darkspace and diffuses quicker, making visible objects somewhat blurry and cutting down on the distance at which something can be viewed. I don’t necessarily call this out in the books, because it doesn’t add a great deal — it’s just something that spacers account for, much as an ocean sailor deals with a morning haze or the glare of sunlight off the water.

Laser light has more energy, more photons, more densely packed and in-phase, therefore, by the same token that the impact of dark matter grows stronger as physical mass increases, the effect on lasers is greater.And the lasers in the Carew universe are extremely powerful — there’s a lot of energy packed into those capacitors. There has to be, in order to punch through and overcome the effects of dark matter to still have energy left at impact with the target.

As the laser shot from a gun leaves the protections around a ship’s hull, it’s immediately affected by the dark matter. It’s condensed, slowed, and even it’s path can be warped by those forces.
This is where the gunnery comes into play, and the laying, aiming, of the ship’s guns. The gunners must judge how the dark matter and dark energy between their ship and the target is warping and altering the laser’s course.

In fact, the ships’ guns in the Carew universe would probably be better described as the “light bullets” here (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/high-intensity-lasers-curve/) than a conventional beam laser.

A comms laser would, necessarily, be of significantly less power, but still have more energy and coherence than visible light. This type of laser is affected by the dark matter and dark energy as well, being shifted in course and diffused to a greater extent than visible light, and making a reliable communications laser impractical in darkspace. The cruder, less dense medium of visible light is used for that.

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Roland Tankowicz wasn’t even legally a person anymore.

The aging cyborg had never really recovered from being betrayed and enslaved by his superiors in the Army, and the final insult of being permanently classified as “defunct military ordnance” had been a bitter pill to swallow. Now, he spent most of his time drinking beer and working as a fixer for the crime families in 25th-century Boston. It was easy money if you were the kind of guy who was bullet-proof and could pick up a house.

But then Lucia Ribiero stumbled into his favorite watering hole dragging a squad of bounty hunters behind her. Shadows from his own dark past, and old debts still unpaid conspired to drive the old war-horse out for one more mission. Like any good soldier, the mission is all that matters for Roland.

Linked by a shared connection to her kidnapped father, the duo will face veritable armies of criminals, mutants, cyborgs, and corporate executives as they search for the missing man. The secrets of the Ribiero family are exposed as they approach the center of the labyrinth, and Lucia’s mental and physical issues present an even deeper mystery than her father’s disappearance.

Roland will have to face the horror of his past one more time, and Lucia will need to get a grip on her future if they expect to survive a running battle with an entire galaxy’s worth of mad science gone awry; and ultimately prevent a terrible history from repeating itself.

Buy on Amazon

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Authors usually do these year-end review things in December … but I’m including my plan for 2018, so January seems a better fit.

2017 was a decent year for me. I published Privateer and Spacer (in the Orphans in the Black anthology) and finally, after years of trying, settled into a really productive writing regime that’s starting to pay off bigly.

Spacer is an expansion of Wronged, which you can get for free signing up for my mailing list, and is the start of another series set in the Alexis Carew universe, called Spacer, Smuggler, Pirate, Spy. Those being the quartet of books planned for the story.

From the actual writing standpoint, though, 2017, at least the first half, was less than I’d hoped for. I went into with the intention, the desire, the plan, to write every day and average 1000 words a day. I didn’t get there at all. In fact, the first quarter wasn’t worth squat.

 

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There are a lot of excuses that can be made when an author isn’t writing, but that first quarter lull can be ticked off to laziness and lack of good habits. In 2016 I’d established a good/bad habit of writing really well on vacations — the time away from home got things flowing well — but that leaves all those days at home to not trigger the writing flow.

I got back to it because I had to — I’d committed Spacer to the anthology and didn’t want to let the organizer down. Especially since it was the first anthology I’d been invited to. Reputations and all that.

So I got Spacer done and started writing more, but those big upticks in word count through May were still mostly time off. I do get a lot of vacation time from my day job, eight weeks because I’ve been here twenty years.

Something else happened, though, which led to finishing the year strong.

I would typically get up early and go into work equally early, allowing me to leave in the early afternoon. (I am not a night-guy.) But we had a policy change that said I had to be in the office from 9-5. This left 7ish to 9ish, my most productive, alert hours, idle.

So instead of dedicating that production to the day-job, I firmly established a writing zone upstairs in my loft (instead of on the couch where the TV is so tempting) and went up there every morning. Well, not every morning at the start, but enough that the habit started getting more and more established and it trained my brain that when we are in this place at this time it is the thing to do to write words.

So Spacer finished, then Privateer finished, then really buckled down on Of Dubious Intent, because it’s been in-process since 2014, and finally, in late September, things clicked.

The last quarter of the year, October to December, saw some of the most productive writing I’ve ever had. I wrote 96,000 words in one 30-day period during this time, and 5500 in one day.

I finished Of Dubious Intent, which will release in March, finished what will be either the first in a new series or the first three — depending on how it’s released — and got started on Alexis Carew #6, still untitled.

Leaving the Carew series (except for plotting) for a couple months and not moving right into #6 was a good decision too. It let me get the stories for Of Dubious Intent and the other series out of my head — they’ve been sitting there, half-finished or never started, for years, with the nagging doubt that I’d ever get to finish them. Now I’m heading into AC#6 with fresh eyes, a sense of accomplishment, and a real desire to continue Alexis’ story as well as the others.

In 2017 I only managed to write on 174 days, but wrote over 300k words on those days. I also passed 1-million words written, between the books, shorts, essays, and to-be-published works since I started writing with the intent to sell in 2013. That’s a significant milestone and I’m glad I hit it — coincidentally right on December 31st.

So now we’re heading into 2018 …

 

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That’s my daily writing spreadsheet, and tracks daily progress, as well as goals and projected completion dates, plus metrics because I’m a data geek.

So as of today, if we look in the column headed AC#6, that’s the next Carew book and I’ve competed nearly 14000 words, or 11% of the expected 125k word length. It maybe longer or shorter than that, and I’ll adjust the expected length as I get closer to finishing and can project it better, but both Nightingale and Privateer were in the 125k range.

There’s also a date in that column of 4/25/18 — that’s not so much a deadline as a projected completion date. Meaning if I average 1000 words a day, every day, then I’ll hit the target length on that date.

That’s a words-complete date, not a release date, so don’t get excited.

After that comes editing, so about a month of me reading through it more than once in the afternoons and tweaking things, which is when it will go up for preorder, then my fiance will do her edits (another month) then my main editor (two weeks) and then I will give the edited manuscript to Elizabeth for narration (another month) and then we’ll have a release.

The two columns Rocks and Rocks#2 are the new series that doesn’t have a name yet, and DA #2 is the sequel to Of Dubious Intent — all of which are looking to be words-complete this year, even if the next bit of that “Rocks” series won’t release until 2019.

My goals for 2018 are:

• Write on 300+ days.
• Average 1000 words per day, for over 300,000 words.
• Finish and publish Carew #6
• Finish and publish Dark Artifice #2
• Finish the next installment of the ill-titled “Rocks” series, either as a single book or shorter entries as a trilogy in the series, depending on how that works out.
• Start on Carew #7

On a slightly different note, being the financial side of things, I’ve long had a goal of quitting the day job and writing full time. In 2018 I’ve purchased a house and will be moving in come April, then after that I hope to live off the book income with the exception of health insurance and the mortgage. Both of those will come out of the day job paycheck, with the remainder of that paycheck being split between savings and paying off the mortgage faster.

The purpose of this plan is to pay off the house quickly, thus reducing monthly expenses and making it easier to live full-time off the book income for everything. Once I can do that, and write full-time, productivity should be even better — and I’m really looking forward to that.

So that’s the plan. 🙂

I know there are some Carew readers who’d prefer to have Carew after Carew after Carew releases, but the diversity of series both lets me write Carew better and will pick up new readers — which translates into full-time writing sooner, which brings more of all the series quicker. It’s a positive feedback loop. 🙂

I’m also going to try to post more on this blog, especially about the progress — both so my readers can follow what’s going on and hold me accountable. If I put out a words-written graph with another big flatline and no explanation, feel free to email nags at me until I get back on track. 😀

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Earth in 2064 is politically corrupt and in economic decline. The Long Depression has dragged on for 56 years, and the Bureau of Sustainable Research is hard at work making sure that no new technologies disrupt the planned economy. Ten years ago a band of malcontents, dreamers, and libertarian radicals bolted privately-developed anti-gravity drives onto rusty sea-going cargo ships, loaded them to the gills with 20th-century tunnel-boring machines and earthmoving equipment, and set sail – for the Moon.

see this book on Amazon

I backed this book and its sequel on Kickstarter and have been hounding the author to get it out there so people could buy it. He finally has and you should!

If you liked Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress, then you’ll love this series.

The premise is sound, the science is hard — with only one conceit that isn’t entirely plausible given today’s science. The writing is polished and solid, well beyond what should be expected of a first book. The story and characters are entertaining and compelling.

I can’t recommend this one enough! Buy it now!

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Since being court-martialed by the Star Empire, smuggler and thief Joan Shengtu has done what she needed to do in order to survive—gaining a reputation along the way. When a new client’s mission goes sideways, Joan finds herself caught in the middle of dueling gambits between the Star Empire and the Trade Federation. Recruited to perform the heist of a lifetime, the fate of the Star Empire rests in her hands.

On the opposite side of the galaxy, Regency BioTech manager Dario Anazao sees an unsustainable situation brewing that promises a full-scale revolution. The megacorporations of the Trade Federation have kept the population in horrible working conditions, violating their human rights. With no one else to help, Dario must take it upon himself to rescue the workers of Mars.

Can two heroes from warring factions come together to make a difference in the galaxy?

 

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