Author Archives: Blaze

The Shipwrecked Mermaid

Yay, I have a new story coming out.

For those of you paying attention at home, I have written elsewhere about CampCon, the annual summer camping/writing weekend in central Oregon. Last year was my first visit (I’ll be back this year, hopefully).

There were about a dozen writers there, all furiously heads-down generating new stuff. During the weekend, Phyl suggested that we should do an anthology on a theme. Considering the circumstances, the consensus was that everyone would do a science-fictiony kind of story related to camping and wilderness. As I have also mentioned elsewhere, my first two stories were fun and turned out well, but didn’t fit the category. (First attempt turned into Valeriya, which led directly to Tatiyana. Second attempt became The Librarian.)

After a fit of silliness and creativity, I ended up writing a story in a whole new universe. The result is The Shipwrecked Mermaid. It’s a story about an alien scientist, a mermaid, who gets trapped inland by a tsunami and needs help to survive and escape. I’m rather proud of it, and I think it turned out pretty good (IMHO).

I liked this story so much that I took the main character, a convict/chef named Rick Pine, and wrote what will turn into my second novel (due out this summer), called Imposters. (More information about Rick, Imposters, and The Collective when we get closer.)

Back to the Anthology.

Irene Radford is the editor. She is an absolutely wonderful lady and I highly recommend her to anyone who loves fantasy and SF. Because Leah is so well organized on the topic, Ms. Radford asked Knotted Road Press to handle publishing it. All told, there are about a dozen authors represented, and we cover science fiction, fantasy, serious, and silly. Sometimes, all in the same story.

The result is Tales From An Alien Campfire. It will be officially published on Tuesday, but it is already available now here. And apparently already has reviews, but that might be because at least one of Dr. Amy’s friends has already ordered it.

All the ways to reach a reader

I have had good teachers.

Kristine Katherine Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith (both of http://www.wmgpublishing.com) are big time writers who have made it their work to train up new writers in the craft of good writing and business of being a successful businessman. What I know comes from what they have taught, largely filtered and refined through my own sweetie.

I am just back from the “Anthology Workshop” for Fiction River (http://www.fictionriver.com). I didn’t participate (this is by invitation to really seriously high-caliber writers), but I got to hang out because Leah was in it (and she sold two stories). I also got to do a lot of baking, goofing off, and writing/world-building. But I also got to listen to Kris, Dean, Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Kerry L. Hughes, John Helfers, and Mark Leslie (yes, go google those names for things they have written and edited, and then pick your jaw up off the floor).

One of the things Dean lectures about is the need to have as many different ways to communicate with readers and potential readers as possible. That means making sure you have a personal web-site (www.blazeward.com & www.knottedroadpress.com) that you keep up to date, plus author pages in as many places as you can: Amazon, Kobo, GoodReads, etc. It means making your work available on as many different platforms and as many different places as you can, because not everyone reads the same thing, the same way, or the same place.

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When The Science Officer became a minor hit, I went out and got lucky to find a fantastic voice guy (Matt Weight) to read the story (available on Amazon, iTunes, and Audible). People who have listened to the audio book have given the story pretty high marks, and him five stars for absolutely awesome radio voice. I am extremely lucky.

After that, I got him to do The Mind Field next.

I am happy (serious happy-dance-time) to be able to say that The Mind Field is also now available for you to purchase on on Audible and Amazon, to go with The Science Officer.

And better yet, I expect The Librarian to be available in the next few days, for those of you who need more Suvi.

Hopefully, I will be able to convince Matt to do more things for me in the future. He has a fantastic voice.

As I wrote this, the thought that has been with me is how important it is to be out there where people could find me, read me, enjoy me. I would be writing without the outlet of publication (I was writing before I met Leah, after all), but it is extra rewarding to be part of a larger writer community, to be able to sit at their knees and listen, to learn as they adapt in real time, and even make my own contributions.

For those of you into audio books, please let your friends know about Javier and Suvi. I think they’re kinda awesome, and hope to share them with more people who feel the same way.

And if you have questions, let me know via FB, on blazeward.com, or goodreads. It’s fun to talk to readers and see what they like, what they want to know, and where they want the stories to go. I have lots of Javier plotted out, I just don’t have time to fit it into my crazy schedule right now.

But the readers are still the reason I do this. I’m just the storyteller, here.

One of THOSE conversations

I grew up in what west coasters colloquially refer to as “flyover country.” Specifically, Kansas. Flat, gold, extreme weather. I grew up hunting and fishing, and doing all sorts of crazy things in the eyes of people from the left coast. (Please note: I am NEVER mucking out a stable again, thank you.)

From my grandfather, I inherited a couple of extremely old firearms. As in, manufactured before I was born and well kept. My dad got most of the old ones, and one of these days, I’ll inherit those as well. And I do mean old. I have a little .22 Short High Standard that belonged to my great-grandmother when she was young. And a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle that was, as near as I can tell, manufactured in Pakistan right after the Partition. Etc. Weird stuff.

Along the way, I started my own collection. Mostly old and exotic stuff. Blame the old DC character Manhunter (the Goodwin and Simonson version, not that green weirdo), and George Lucas. I fell in love with the old Mauser 1896 Broomhandle. And I bought myself one. Rarely shoot it, because ammunition is so hard to find, but I’ve owned it for more than 20 years. The other pieces have similar exotic heritage.

So yesterday, I’m in a room with a collection of writers, most of whom are from the left/west coast and know nothing about firearms, except what they see in the movies. And one of my fiance’s friends turns to me and says “She tells me you own guns…”

That is not a conversation opener I ever enjoy. Especially not with a group like this.

So I look at her and kinda agree, leaving her to fill in the blanks. I’m not really in a mood at this point to explain my culture to her, and I don’t EVER talk politics (or religion) with people I don’t know VERY well. And even then, rarely. Matthew covered this in Book VI. And I figure that this is going to be one of THOSE conversations, since I don’t know this woman at all, except that my sweetie dotes on her.

What she said next surprised the hell out of me.

“I have this western series character I want to write, but he needs a gun and I don’t know anything, except that it needs to be something exotic. Something that can be its own character. Can you help?”

Huh? Oh. Well, sure.

Apparently, among these writers, the word has gotten around that Blaze knows guns. And, if you know writers, they love to find someone they consider an expert so they can pick their brain. For 95% of your readers, they don’t know any specific topic well enough to realize if you get some detail wrong. However, for the other 5%, they can spot any flaw and pick it apart. And will send you (not hate mail, exactly) but nastygrams explaining how much of an idiot you are for not realizing that the screw is one-third of the way back rather that out at the edge. Etc. Not that I’ve ever gotten that sort of critique…

So, I sat down last night and this morning and did a little research for her, looking for something weird and period, rather than just another Winchester carbine for her hero to sling around. My fiance laughed at me, and told me over lunch that several other people had said to ask me gun questions in the group.

I suppose there are worse things. After all, I had another conversation last night where I suggested that every firearm sold should, by law, be required to be one of three colors: Lime Green, Canary Yellow, or Hello-Kitty Pink. And with another writer, I made a couple of suggestions as to what she should consider for home security. (My own preference is a Brazilian Side By Side 12 gauge Coach Gun, but I’m not a nice person and I don’t figure anyone that breaks into my house has my best interests at heart. YMMV)

So this writer has this really cool gun to work with. I haven’t write westerns (yet), but I’m a gamer, and I had to kind of sit down and think about how this particular thing might work, and how it might get into his hands, and what you could do with it. Because it could be a character all by itself, as the best bits of gear are.

I mean, face it, the Millennium Falcon is just a spaceship. Right?

The Zolnerovy Stories

In the Summer of 2014, I got invited to participate in a closed anthology, meaning one that is by-invitation-only, rather than open for submissions. The theme was science fiction and having to do with in the woods, so terrestrial and arboreal instead of space ships.

For writers, the question is never “Where do you get your ideas?” but rather “How do you make them stop?” This is important because at the time I was just about midway through what would become the novelette Moscow Gold, and started noodling on various ideas.

I still have no idea what caused me to come up with the story Valeriya. Seriously. Even today, I’m still at a loss as to where that came from.

But it surfaced, like a great whale broaching from the weird depths of my subconscious. A Soviet tank crew, fighting in the Great Patriotic War (WW2 for Americans), when their lives get interrupted by a time-traveling assassin from the distant future.

Obviously, you change the past by killing someone important, isn’t that how every story tries to work? The people of the future, not wanting to be wiped out, also send someone back into the past to preserve the timeline.

Think about how many times you’ve come across this particular trope. Lots, right?

So I had this interesting idea. And because I have played table-top games that take place in that time frame, I am familiar with it. And I wanted to put them in a poky little British Matilda II tank, because there were a lot of those in Soviet hands until American Shermans arrived and Soviet factories began putting out a mess of T-34x76mm.

For me, what makes this world so interesting is sending someone like Tatiyana back from the distant future, leaping backwards from the fifty-eighth century to the twentieth, and what they encounter. Imagine you being able to meet Herakles, or Iason, or Menelaus in their own day, only thirty-two centuries in the the past from us.

In their own day, the Zolernovy are fairly powerful psionicists, but not overlords. They see themselves as protectors. They are, to quote themselves, the Children of the Soldier, zolner being a cognate into Russian of soldier. They are descendents in line from Sergey Orlov and his mate, Valeriya, whom he has not yet met during the war.

And family legends get a little twisted over the centuries, even for telepaths, so they don’t quite understand that the Valeriya who was with Sergey during the war was his tank, named Valeriya for the woman who haunts his dreams, rather than the woman herself. But they went to the beginning, to where the legend began, not realizing that they caused the legend in their own way. Because altering the past is never easy.

From the distant future, they knew that something happened in 1944, but not what. They knew that in 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, Sergey Orlov would do something that would keep the Nazis from suddenly fighting back and winning.

Sergey knew that he was special, able to catch glimpses of the future that always came true. He could see, but could not control it. It took the presence of his many-times-over great-granddaughter, Tatiyana, to help crystallize his powers. When she died, part of her soul became bound up in his, teaching him some of the very basic techniques that would help him survive.

So, I had this story. And it was kinda awesome. It still makes me tear up to read it, so much emotional baggage.

But the anthology I was invited to participate in was not scheduled (at that time) to come out until mid-2015. Midway through writing Valeriya, I realized that I had to write the second story, Tatiyana, as well. And I didn’t want to wait until summer 2015 for the first story to come out, and then fall so I could publish the second one. (That anthology story, by the way, turned out to be The Shipwrecked Mermaid and is coming out in March 2015 as part of Tales From An Alien Campfire.)

So I decided to put them into Beyond The Mirror: Volume 3, Alternate Worlds as the bookend pieces. I plan to write another short story in that universe in the near future, after I finish the novel I am currently in the middle of.

This makes Zolnerovy the second of the science fiction universes I plan to work in over the next several years. The Shipwrecked Mermaid (modern SF) will introduce the third, and Rick Pine (and Laurie Bradley) will be the main character(s) there. Now I just need time to write everything in my head.

Auberon now available for pre-order

After a lot of work, I am finally able to announce that the first novel in the Jessica Keller series is now available for pre-order on several sites (see links below).

Amazon
Kobo

The novel is entitled Auberon, and is the beginning of a series of novels that takes place in the Alexandria Station universe, roughly 1100 years after the story The Librarian. It is pure military space opera SF, dealing with the commander and crew of a Republic of Aquitaine Strike Carrier (RAN Auberon).

As you read this, I am about halfway through the sequel to Auberon, which is called Queen Of The Pirates. Its expected publication date is this fall.

For those of you keeping score at home, the third book for this initial trilogy (yes, I plan another one after the first) will be entitled Last Of The Immortals, and Suvi, your favorite AI Librarian, will make an appearance. A special guest-starring kind of appearance.

Once Queen Of The Pirates is done, I would like to go back and write some more about Javier Aritza, continuing that serialized story arc. Unfortunately, there is only one of me, and I still have to be a geek for living, but I’m writing as fast as I can.

Languages in the Future (or why I want a Bulgarian Fan Club)

I got asked the other day why I had Bulgarian as a language in The Science Officer. And in The Librarian. It’s a complicated question to answer, because it goes to the heart of what I see in science fiction, or rather, one of the things I see wrong. Many authors (myself occasionally included), use a single language and ethnicity for the names of their characters.

I live in a very international city, at least by American standards. I work at a high-tech job where the team members were born in nine different countries. People have names from their own cultures, many of which are extremely old.

Javier Aritza will be born in the year 7510 C.E. Doyle Iwakuma will be born in 12,263 C.E. Suvi becomes self-aware in 7426 C.E. (And yes, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I have all of this in a spreadsheet and a document encyclopedia).

That’s five to ten millennia from now. A little over three millennia ago, Agamemnon’s forces stormed Troy. Two millennia, Roman Britain was a barbaric outpost on the far edge of the world.

So what will the future look like? I don’t know. I don’t have to know. (I hope, someday, centuries after I’m gone, I have some scholar reading this and laughing at me.) I look at where we are and contemplate where we will be going. In Javier’s time (as referenced by Doyle in The Librarian), these are the major trade languages in the galaxy: Kiswahili, Hindi, Mandarin, English, Arabic, Spanish, and Bulgarian. Kiswahili because of Doyle and his story. Most of the rest, because the languages that are dominant today, at the transformation between the past and the technological age, will probably be the languages that continue to dominate, in some form, as we explode out and explore the whole galaxy.

Which brings me to Bulgarian. I was asked at some point, what my measure of success was. That’s an even more fuzzy question. For me, off the cuff, I said “a Bulgarian Fan Club.” Not because that is a measure in and of itself, but because, if I have people translating my books into Bulgarian (a language I would have to pay a lot of money to do myself), then I have a serious fan base, world-wide. And because, little known outside their own space, Bulgarians have a very proud and successful tradition of good SF, most of which does not get translated into English (at least, that I am aware of. And I don’t read Bulgarian to enjoy it natively.)

So as I’m writing the future, Bulgarian takes on its own mythical quality. I could see them colonizing a dark corner of the galaxy, well away from everyone else, and happily living their lives. Later, when the Earth is destroyed (in 10,397 C.E., mark your calendars), and most of the galaxy falls into a dark age, those Bulgarian descendants keep plugging along.

When Doyle helps rebuild Suvi as Alexandria Station, and turns her into a Great Library, she helps spark a renaissance of culture and learning. In the process, those happy little Bulgarians will create a new Republic, called Aquitaine, and absorb Ballard and Suvi as they go. Because they are a meritocracy leavened with republicanism, the best and the brightest are elevated, regardless of birth, and join with a stable semi-aristocracy. In Jessica Keller’s first novel (Auberon, coming soon), the Republic is represented by what are called the Fifty Families. Those clans tend to have good Bulgarian names, because of where they are. But there are a tremendous spectrum of names that you will encounter.

For me, the writer, it comes down to a fantastically rich, random name generator website I found. You select a culture (or several), a gender, and hit go. It randomly spits back at you a name, with an explanation of what the name means. Because it is random, I get hit with exotic names that come from everywhere, especially if I pick non-adjacent ethnicities, like Japanese and Italian. And it reminds me that there might be a trillion humans alive in the age of Jessica Keller, scattered across hundreds of thousands of planets and stations. And love will follow humans, not cultures.

So I see this fantastic cross-pollination of cultures in the future. And I get to write about it. And hey, fans in Bulgaria: you figure out how to get me there, I will come. 🙂

20140215 – bw

Alexandria Station

When I started out with the science fiction, I had a couple of interesting characters in mind. Separate characters, living in their own worlds.

It was only later that they all got together and explained to me that they lived in the same universe. They were just spread out by time.

So I sat down the other day and figured out all the timelines.

The Science Officer series is about Javier and Suvi. And a few others.

Doyle finds Suvi thousands of years later, living in a lost temple of knowledge.

Jessica Keller (novel: Auberon) comes along about a thousand years after that.

For me, the fun of writing is the world-building aspect. Creating rich places for interesting characters to wander around in. I don’t go deep into explicit detail, but having all those words and pages of notes (LOTS of both) lets me insert tidbits of microsetting here and there as I go. And it builds up, like pearls growing slowly.

But now, I had to assemble a very long timeline, one that spanned a tremendously long amount of history, so I knew where everyone was in relationship to each other. Not that there is any time traveling in this universe, but because it’s useful for a character to be able to say that Shakespeare lived 11,000 years ago.

So I had this wonderful universe built. It filled in things, and caused me to think about some of the gaps in it and what happened. More universe building.

Then my publisher asked me what it’s called, since I am in the process of setting at least three major series in it, across the centuries.

I had no idea.

How could a single phrase cover everything from the beginnings of space flight to when the earth gets annihilated by bolide strike about midway, to the whole galaxy kinda having to reset itself when that war causes everything to collapse.

It currently runs up to the year 15,006 CE

But Suvi is the key. She knew Javier. She saved Javier’s life by flying a sensor remote during the book: Shipwreck, five thousand years prior to when Doyle rescues her. And she’ll meet Jessica eleven hundred years forward from that point when Jessica has to save her from the Fribourg Empire. Everything kind of rotates around Suvi, not because she’s a goddess, but because she was there.

She remembers being a starship named Mielikki. She will become a university orbiting Ballard in Doyle’s time. She will be there when Ballard turns from a powerhouse into a piddly little back-water in an unfashionable corner of the galaxy. She will be, in many ways, the narrator of history.

So it became clear what I needed to call this literary universe, to keep it separate from (at least) four other Science Fiction futures I plan on writing. Because they are all three very different places. And I have even worked out the little marketing logo/bug I will use to let the reader know that this is Suvi’s universe.

It will be called Alexandria Station. That is the place that Suvi will call home during Doyle’s lifetime and as well as Jessica’s.

I have other story arcs planned well before Javier (several places there, depending on my energy and time), and at least one well after Jessica.

I hope you will enjoy them all.