The Sojourn

I don’t normally advertise competition, but this looks like it could be an interesting thing, and you can get in on the ground floor! (That was cringeworthy.)

Some of you may know the YouTube channel ‘Spacedock.’ They do analysis videos of science fiction films, TV series, game worlds, etc. I couldn’t say I always agree with those analyses, but the videos are generally entertaining and make some good points about the practicality of the settings and especially the ships from those settings. Spacedock is currently running Kickstarter campaign to fund a planned audio novel series (with 2D/3D artwork to illustrate it), called ‘The Sojourn.’ If you check out the campaign (link above), you can watch the pilot episode and see if you think it’s something you might like. If you’ve got some spare cash, consider backing them. It’s funded to the second stretch goal at time of writing, so it looks like it’s a done deal, and the makers seem pretty motivated to produce what they say they will.

Happy New Year

Thanks for supporting me in 2018, and let’s hope 2019 turns out to be a good one.

The Hellas Find Art Dump

As it turns out, I didn’t do a massive amount of new art for The Hellas Find. However, I’ve uploaded a few of the ones I did do to ArtStation. (Yes, including the purple dress.) Click on the image below to follow the link.

book9-cover1-amazon

It’s Sunday in Australia!

Well, parts of Australia. Sydney, for example.

book9-cover1-amazon

The Hellas Find (aka ‘Fox on Mars’) is now available.

  • Smashwords
  • Amazon, ASIN B07LDC5G9B.
Image

Coming Sunday…

book9-cover1-amazon

50k

Well, I hit 50,000 words and beat NaNoWriMo again. Still got some writing to do to finish the book, but it’s coming along nicely. Of course, now I have to take a quick break to get Fox 9 ready for proofing, but Fox 10 is coming together.

NaNot Going So Well

Six days of actual writing and my NaNoWriMo project is not going so well. I still think the idea is a good one, so I may come back to it. For now, however, it’s a dud.

So, instead of that, I’m going to work up a plot for the tenth Fox book and see if I can get 50k words of that written before the end of November. Three weeks for 50k. Done it before.

Liberty

liberty-cover1-amazon

The new Ultrahumans book, Liberty, is on the virtual shelves.

 

In other news, I have a new Fox Meridian book in the works, due out in December. After that, things are a little up-in-the-air. I’ve had an idea for something which happens to have come out rather close to November, so I’m going to do that for NaNoWriMo and see what comes of it. If that works, it’ll be the next book, likely in January or February. If not, I’ve got a new Sondra Drake story planned out; probably January to March, depending on that NaNoWriMo working or not.

Content Fatigue

Okay, so, if you watch the ‘What I’m Working On’ page, you may have noticed that Liberty is into the editing cycle and I’m now onto the ninth Fox Meridian book. It’s going to be ‘Fox 9’ for a while, I think, though it may end up being The Hellas Find. We’ll see.

Anyway, when Liberty hits the virtual shelves I’ll have done three Ultrahumans books in a row. Two of those were intended to be back-to-back since Guardian and True Dark are heavily linked together. Then I had no ideas for anything else, so I went ahead with Liberty. I’m happy with the outcome (or as happy as an English author can get), but I am really happy to be moving on to a different series. Ultra fatigue has set in. Three consecutive books in the same world is, I think, too much.

I’m used to this with reading. Generally, if I read the same author for a long time, I start to suffer from ‘content fatigue.’ I first noticed it with Anne McCaffrey when I was in my twenties (I think). I had collected the then extant Pern books (this was before they proliferated into the billions) and decided I would read them in chronological order (or as best as possible since some overlap). I was doing pretty well, but by the time I was reading The White Dragon it was getting really hard to keep going. I think Moreta came out not long after and I just couldn’t finish it. Too much of the same world/characters, and the same author’s style.

Writing is the same, but worse. There were seven Pern books to read, IIRC, but it takes a lot longer to write a book than to read one. (With you lot, that seems to be quite an extreme understatement.) Two books should be my limit, I think. After two books in the same setting, I’m starting to get tired of the same universe.

And now, back to researching Mars and living in Fox’s head for a while.

Andrea

twilight-75Here’s an interesting one. I was messing about with something with speech synthesis and I got it to pronounce ‘Andrea.’ You know, the real name of Twilight, Andrea Morgan. It said it in a way which I had not expected, and I was wondering how you, the readers, think it’s pronounced.

So, is it And-ree-ah, or An-dray-ah? Let me know in the comments.