To The Stars And Back...Or At Least Saturn

The problem with not blogging regularly lately is that news I could be writing about keeps piling up on me. So I'll just hit the highlights:

Today is the 2-year anniversary of me starting the writing of Arizona. Until recently it was one giant novel, but despite my long desire to be the next James A. Michener, I can't write as compactly as he did, so I've broken it into what I figure is the sort of thing Michener might have written if he'd done historical series instead of one-shots. At this point I'm on the closing stretch of Book 3, Copper Heart, with about 20-25,000 words to go. For me that's a closing stretch, especially when I've written nearly 350,000 words in these past two years.

I won't be jumping into Book 4 yet, though. Partly because I wanted the series to take a short rest and let that final novel season in my head for a bit, but also because I was offered a Secret Project last month that I couldn't turn down. This is still in the planning stages--the stage where I seem to come up with two ideas I don't like for every one I do--but I'm hoping that Copper Heart will be finished in the next few weeks, and Secret Project will get underway by then.

I got to see the cover mock-up for The Matter of Camelot yesterday, and it is a bleakly lovely thing. I haven't gotten an OK to show it off yet, so I'll describe it: Camelot's solid wall and keep (which in the book and on the cover resembles Hadrian's Mausoleum, nowadays better known as the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome) against a cloudy gray sky, while in the bottom left corner, below the wall, is a silhouette holding up a sword reforged as a cross--though the blade still gleams.

I described it on Twitter last night as "hard shadows and gray doom". Appropriate since the book begins hours after the death of King Arthur and most of the Knights of the Round Table.

My fantasy and science fiction writing remains almost non-existent, but I continue to dream in F/SF, and those dreams tend to be among the most vivid. Last night's SF dream was so vivid and detailed I could almost take it for prophecy: I was me, and thinking I'm glad I lived long enough to see this, but also an astronaut on the first faster-than-light voyage. The year was 2106. The ship was small and Spartan--I don't remember the name, but we nicknamed it The Duck (I don't remember why). There were six astronauts, four men and two women, including two engineers. The bridge was so small it barely held all six at once. The men's sleeping quarters had double bunks like what I saw on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, with one dresser for clothing. There was also a shelf, empty at present. But when the ship made a longer voyage--the next step was Alpha Centauri if the trial run to Saturn succeeded--each astronaut would get two rows on the shelf, about ten linear feet, for personal possessions.

That was just the general stuff. I can still see my control panel, which was on the left side of the bridge. (I wasn't a pilot--my job was more along the lines of communication, though I'm fuzzy on the details now.) Reading material was a scientific journal article on FTL propulsion--and we all called it FTL, never "warp"--which had four authors, the lead being one Dr. Bernard Dass. We didn't go much faster than 1 c, and it was a fairly substantial trip to Saturn because we had no inertial dampeners; we had to gradually speed up and slow down. We stopped halfway there due to a vapor leak, with the vapor freezing on the outside of the bridge window. We had a satellite we'd be dropping off at Saturn to aid in FTL communication. For some reason beyond my ken we had gravity while going FTL. And so on.

When people ask me where I get my story ideas I can honestly say "Everywhere". But dreams are certainly a big contributor.

Anyway, no Progress Report today. I did write--about 1600 words centered around my opening cameo of Lt. Charles Gatewood and Lt. Britton Davis, who are best known (if a little simplistically) as the men who helped bring in Geronimo when he surrendered for the last time. But apparently I only thought that I saved the new pages to my flash drive. So at the moment they're only on my Writing Computer at home. (I hope.) At any rate, this brings the book total to 110,850 words.

The Publisher

One bit I forgot in my last entry: Absolute Write has about three months' worth of pessimistic posts about Musa, the publisher of The Matter of Camelot, "this is a concern" red flag warnings mostly by folks who aren't Musa authors. One common theme was an apparent lack of publicity on Musa's part, and what stuck in my head were the variations of one particular comment: "Nobody knows who Musa is".

My offhand reaction was that I don't think this is true. My second employer, Publishers Weekly, has had Musa books come through, for instance. There's at least one review of a Musa book that I found on the Historical Novel Society webpage. And so on.

But suppose it is true? I'm not exactly the best marketer I know--though I'm working on learning the marketing ropes--but I found myself getting increasingly stubborn about it as I read through the mostly repetitive posts. When I got to the last of them my one overriding thought was "If nobody's heard of Musa, then I'll make sure they do".

Yeah, a little bit of hubris, I know. But every writer who wants to be published needs a bit anyway.