Last week, we talked about what happened to me (publishing-wise, there was more) last year. The anniversary of that was this Thursday just passed. This morning, I’m out in banjo country without access to the interwebs as I write this, listening to the water boil and watching Fabulous Publisher Babe™ stir and press the coffee.

Last night, I was kinda at loose ends. Had cut up a downed tree and set things up for a fire this morning, done a lot of shopping, and was more or less at a point of roosting, when a voice rousted me out of the chair. So I had to dig out the laptop, set it up on the writing counter, get everything organized, and start planning.

Those of you who have seen me work know that I keep extensive encyclopedae of information of almost any story I write. Two reasons for this: First, I never write just one, but plan for a whole series, so lots of depth and world building happens before I ever commit fiction. Second, I need to keep things handy in a well-organized document so I can quickly reference something on the fly while I’m writing.

Last night, Jessica announced that she was tired of waiting and that I needed to get off my ass and start writing.

As a result, I opened up the Auberon Notes file and spent the better part of two hours organizing, adding, refining, etc. I only wrote about fifty words of the new novel, mostly getting the technical framework in place, but Jessica IV is now officially in motion. The notes file got nearly 600 new words and reorganizing.

It is a different story than the previous three. Partly, she’s in a different place in her life. In Auberon, Queen, and Immortals, she was on defense the entire time. She was working to protect the Republic of Aquitaine at a point when the Fribourg Empire had begun to push home an advantage that might see them win in another decade or so.

Now, she has succeeded in back-footing the Imperials. The costs she has made them pay, during the Long Raid, at First Petron, and First Ballard have been far steeper for them than it has for her. A year and a half has passed (first line of Goddess of War: Date of the Republic December 1, 395 Command Headquarters: Ladaux) and we are about begin a new round in the Eternal War. One where Jessica’s unique genius is going to be pushed in whole new directions.

The Red Admiral won’t be here for this one. He will return later. A character, whether in a book, a movie, or a graphic novel, is only as good as their opponent. If you have boring villains, you have a boring story. Emmerich isn’t evil. He’s not even a bad person. He just happens to be Jessica’s Nemesis (go look up the technical meaning of the term if unsure). I enjoy the opinion he brings to things, where he is very traditionally-minded.

And when he returns, things will get even weirder. One of the rules of good thrillers and good space opera is that you need to keep upping the stakes with every story to keep people coming back for more. I recently had to plot out a story that will involve Summer Baudin, and take place 2,000 years in the future from Last of the Immortals, long after the fall of Imperial Aquitaine. (Yes, you read that right… And no, I’m not telling you any more at this point.)

One other thought: While I understand that some readers have to compare Jessica Keller to Honor Harrington (apparently based entirely on plumbing, as near as I can tell), and complain that she is derivative, I have to share a secret: I only ever read 2.5 of the Honor Harrington books. I’m just not Weber’s reader. I tried, but I just couldn’t finish the third one.

(I understand that people are major fans of Harrington. At OryCon last fall, the Black Rose had a MAJOR contingent of people representing, in full dress uniform. I aspire to having a fan club in RAN uniforms at some con, one of these days. Again, I’m not saying that Weber is a bad writer, just that I’m not his reader.)

The other part of the secret is this: The two women I drew inspiration from when I created Jessica Keller were entirely unrelated to Harrington.

The first inspiration was Anzha lyu from C.S. Friedman’s first masterpiece, In Conquest Born. If you look closely, you’ll see places where I shamelessly stole ideas from her, because that woman writes some of the best grand military space opera I’ve ever read. Seriously, you can’t call yourself a fan of Space Opera without being familiar with that novel. Grand, rich, deep, wide. A wonderful place to play.

The second inspiration is a former co-worker for whom I have great respect. She’s nothing like Jessica at one level, but all the underlying elements: the strength of will, the intellect, even the smile, came from her. (I even reached out to her recently and let her know. Hopefully, she was thrilled by the comparison.)

It is rare that I base a character on anything less than an amalgam of half a dozen people. Usually, I just pull their look and personality whole cloth, based on basic archetypes, and then flavored with depth (hobbies, fears, interests. Something to make them human). It makes them more interesting, and opens the door to do other things with them beyond just have them walk on, deliver a line, and leave.

For instance, the next thing I publish (fiction) will be a novella around Vo Arlo, the security marine from Queen of the Pirates and Last of the Immortals. He had just a walk on part earlier, but he was always a full character, at least to me. He is going to have a bigger part in Goddess of War. I used the novella to flesh him out in greater depth so he can have more fun. That, and I won’t be publishing a novel until summer/fall, and then several all at once (publishing timing).

So, what’s next for 2016?

I have finished two short stories that a friend of mine wants to turn into graphic novels. (Literally: “I want to do a graphic novel, you write it for me.” Heh.) I have spun up a new press just to handle those, but he’s got a day job and is just starting out, so I don’t expect them to be ready until summer or fall. I’ll keep you posted. When it all comes together, I have a whole raft of characters I can turn into fuel for him. It’ll be fun.

Next: I have finished the Vo Arlo story and will send it off to first readers in a week or two. Spring publishing date. Tentative title: Siren.

I have a short story coming out in the second CampCon anthology (the first was Tales from an Alien Campfire). The anthology is Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and Magic. I have a Brak story in that one (the fourth Brak story, so I might need to write some more of those in my spare time this year).

I just sent off a novel in a new universe to first readers. This one is contemporary fantasy, which is a fancy way of saying superheroes and spandex. It is planned to be a trilogy at this point, but I’ll keep my options open for short stories and graphic novel spin-offs, depending on how y’all receive it.

A number of people have read Imposters, but as of yesterday, nobody had rated it, which is why I’ve never written the next one. A novel is a serious commitment of time. If I get good feedback, I often get inspired. You’ve heard me talk about the popcorn kitties inspiring me. That’s pretty much how it works. If nobody likes Imposters all that much, it’s not worth my time to tell the next story in that universe.

Which brings me to the news. I am about to step off the cliff into the fourth Jessica novel, Goddess of War. I’m writing, as always, into darkness. Or rather, dimly-lit hallways. She’ll tell the story she wants. I’m just taking dictation.

If I finish it by the end of April, it might be out by the end of summer.

Jessica’s next novel is wider, broader, deeper, and stranger than the first three. Moirrey has a major part to play. Vo Arlo has a major part to play. Most of the rest of the cast of weirdoes and heroes is back, along with some new names.

If you’ll bear with me, I think you’ll enjoy it.

shade and sweet water

bd

west of the mountains, WA

It has been an awesome year. A little overwhelming, but utterly awesome.

Earlier this week, Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ put Last of the Immortals up for pre-order on all the usual suspects. Several of you went and already pre-ordered.  That’s even more awesome. And I’m seeing people wander aimlessly through the stacks, reading things. Hopefully, you will find a little bit everything and that will fill your tummy with goodness.

So where are we at?

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Queen of the Pirates ends on a cliff-hanger (because seriously? that was enough emotion for one novel). Jessica has defeated the pirates, killed Ian Zhao, vanquished Jing Du, and thwarted The Red Admiral. She has returned home hurt, scarred, and searching for what her future will hold, having been through so much and being filled with misgivings.

Volume III picks up 40 hours later. We’re in motion. The Red Admiral is taking his battle squadron to Ballard, and he’s going to kill Suvi, the last of the original AIs from the Concord era. The Last of the Immortals. Jessica has to stop him, or die trying.

I had a LOT of fun writing this one. It’s got Jessica. It’s got Moirrey. It’s got Tomas Kigali. It’s got Nils Kasum and Tadej Horvat. It’s even got a little Loncar, my favorite bumbling wannabe villain. It’s got action, pulse-pounding, and combat. It’s got Valse d’Glaive. The whole last third or so of the novel is one battle sequence, Gotterdammerung. It ends with twists that I hope will surprise and entertain the average jaded reader. (Not you folks, being icons of purity and literary aficionados to the being…)

This novel turned out to be almost as long as Queen (85,000 to 92,000 words), so about a third again as long as Auberon. It neatly wraps up the first Jessica Keller trilogy, (yes, first.), and sets the stage for the next trilogy, which I will start writing in the winter, after I finish off the next Science Officer novella (#3, The Gilded Cage), and do some small pieces for other projects that won’t see the light of day until the middle of 2016, give or take.

Something special about Immortals is that it has Suvi. We introduced her in The Science Officer, and at the time she was just a minor character along to provide comic relief and a straight man. Who knew a year or more ago that she would evolve into one of my primary muses? She’s a little over a century old in Javier’s time. She is a little over six millennia old when she meets Jessica Keller at the Battle of Ballard. In between, Doyle Iwakuma (The Librarian) and Henri Baudin (The Story Road). Here, she gets to interact with both Jessica and Moirrey.

I think it turned out really well.

I hope I don’t spoil the surprise when I say that the fourth Jessica Keller novels will be entitled Goddess of War. I’m hard at work on the research necessary for turning out a story with accurate and entertaining details. Especially one that takes place in about 13,443 CE (it being 2,015 CE as I write these words.) Much has changed, but as we learn more about our own past and look back 10,000 years, we see how little really has changed, once you get past the accouterments of technology and being looking at humans as people. Jessica is people. Moirrey is people. Suvi is people.

That’s all I really have to cover today. I have a novel available for pre-order. I’m jazzed because it brings Jessica to a resting point on her road to the next steps. It should bring you the reader some manner of satisfaction that the story is rounded off and you know what happened. And you have the promise of more story as soon as I can write enough things to shut up some of the other voices that have gotten a wee bit jealous of all the attention Jessica got while they patiently waited their turn.

As always, feel free to send me notes and friend me on FB.  Newsletters come out quarterly, unless I have something extra special to announce (nothing planned, yet…) and the next one if due Nov 1. Always looking forward to questions, comments, ideas, refutations. Got a lovely response to last week’s blog, and it just made my whole day. So, thanks, Barry.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

west of the mountains, WA

I had a question from a friend who is a fan of Suvi, and it got me to thinking that other people probably had the same question/observation.

He was reading (re-reading, again) The Librarian, and the thing that jumped out at him was how much detail I left out of the middle, and how the end just kind of dangled instead of being a long, detailed, harrowing-of-the-shire kind of ending.

That was intentional, by the way.

This is important because roughly half the people who read Librarian love it and about half hate it. For those who don’t like it (and I have gotten a LOT of one-star reviews), the general comment is that I don’t go into another couple hundred pages about Doyle setting the forest on fire, or any possible wars with the locals, the whole barbarian-princess-seducing-the-Gods-to-bear-a-demigod/hero-son, etc. And then I have the audacity to talk about what Doyle and Piper will do when they get home, but not actually show all the details necessary to loft the library into orbit.

For my friend, that was what he liked about the story. He could play all sorts of “what if?” games with himself, letting his imagination run wild about the various aspects, and thinking about how things might have unfolded, or failed, or whatever, without me ever forcing him to have only one, canonical, solution. He got to think about those bronze-age barbarians in their little hill fort and wonder what they were like, or how they might have responded to the Gods themselves coming down and starting a new creation myth cycle.

For me, it sums up the best kinds of Science Fiction, the kind that has a strong element of burlesque to it.  For those of you who have never been to a burlesque show, you have a dancer up on stage, generally in some extremely suggestive costume that is well-matched to the music that will start up. (Generally, the dancers will be female, but not always. They will also come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, all the better to entertain you.)

As the music plays, the dancer will slowly move about, allowing the entire audience to get a good view (I’ll use her from here on in, but I’ve seen some really good male dancers as well) of her body, including her sides and back. I like backs.  I prefer a woman with good muscle tone in her back and bottom, and while most burlesque dancers tend to be a little more fleshy than I like, but they are almost always good dancers and emotive performers.

So as the song plays, she will slowly disrobe, one piece at a time: Gloves, shoes, stockings, outer top, skirt, etc. Generally, she will get down to a g-string and a brassiere. The last big reveal will generally involve her turning her back to the audience again, and unhooking the back while holding the front in place, playfully teasing the audience until she finally tosses the top to one side to reveal silver-dollar-sized (and frequently tasseled) “pasties” that cover up all color.  (It is a curious aspect of old laws in this country that made it illegal to display those parts specifically covered by the g-string, or the nipples.)

But at the end, you have been entertained. And yet, you have not seen “everything” she has to offer. She had shown you most of it, but left a good chunk (the most “exciting” parts, if you will) to the imagination. If she is a very good dancer (emotive in a charismatic way, establishing that perfect harmonic with the audience), they won’t care. And they can always imagine the rest, filling in the good parts.

Science fiction should aspire to that same level of artistic performance. Give them a good build-up. Tease them with ever-more-details and sensory inputs. Bring them right up to the edge before pushing them over. But never give away all the goods. Always hold something back from the show.

In The Librarian, we know what will happen, because Doyle has threatened it. But we don’t know exactly how it worked. Only that it did. We know that several months passed while they dig up the facility. We can imagine the problems they ran into, barely-past-space-flight-barbarians trying to understand a fusion reactor well enough to shut it down properly, dismantle it, and transport it home so they could suddenly bring their entire civilization up a level.

There were arguments, threats, pressure, despair, and victory. We know that Doyle and Piper managed it. But we don’t know how. We have to think about it. We have to put ourselves in that exact situation and ask, “How do I think Doyle would have done it? How would I have done it? Could I have succeeded?”

We know they succeeded, because the story Greater Than The Gods Intended takes place later, and contains interesting new technologies that make Doyle look like a wizard. Suvi helped design those systems. We know more about the universe because of Henri Baudin and Jessica Keller.

But I never show everything. There is always something held back, tastefully covered up at the end of the song, because I (at least I, the writer) want my audience to engage their own imagination and fill in some of those details in a way that makes them happy.

For those readers that just flat disliked the story, I’m sorry. It’s one that puts a smile on my face because it isn’t about fighting barbarians in the galactic hinterlands. It is about two people trying to overcome a lifetime of distrust about the other.

Doyle’s been attacked by rogue Sentience facilities. Suvi was trapped here by the fall of galactic civilization, and is afraid that she’s going to be dismantled and abandoned.

They must learn how to work with someone that might be the enemy, to accomplish something far greater than they dreamed might be possible. But the burlesque is what makes Librarian  work. I don’t want to go into several hundred pages of detail about how.

And hopefully, you are interested in letting your own flights of fancy roam.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

I’ve been writing a whole bunch over the last half year in the Alexandria Station universe, mostly concentrated on the far end of the calendar, specifically Jessica Keller and Henri Baudin (a name you’ll meet next week when The Story Road drops). It dawns on me that I really haven’t spent a lot of time on Javier Aritza lately. Partly, that’s because Jessica has been all-consuming, like and an itch I can’t scratch.

It’s my plan (still on plan, btw) to work on the third episode of The Science Officer once I finish the first Jessica Keller Trilogy (update: about halfway through Last Of The Immortals, and Queen Of The Pirates is coming out in August).

We left our indomitable hero at the end of The Mind Field, right after Sykora has departed with Wilhelmina Teague, returning to that place called civilization. Javier has made his peace with his lot in life, currently. Suvi is mostly safe from discovery. Javier has decided that he can make a life with the rest of the crew, once he figures out how to deal with Sykora.

I’ve had a lot of comments from people who expect the two of them, Javier and Djamila, to end up as an item together. That may entirely happen, but I hope you aren’t holding your breath.

Those two hate each other.  I mean, planning on how to make it look like an accident kinds of hatred. There are a lot of ways to wrap that up in a pretty bow, but there is a lot of animus there. The Concord is a very sexist place, relegating women frequently to a second-class status. It is also a very status-conscious place, more like part of modern South Asia, or parts of the UK, where it is extremely difficult to overcome the situation of your birth. Javier is a guy, and he comes from a planet that is pretty well connected.

Sykora, however, comes from a much different place. Neu Berne is a very Teutonic kind of place. Their militarism was a driving force in the Great War that just ended 80 years ago, shattering all major powers in such a way that The Concord kind of had to step in and take over. She was a tall, kind of dorky girl from the wrong side of the tracks as a youngster, who rose as far as she could by being as close to edge of human physical perfection as one could get, but she would never make it any farther, except as a trophy wife. And suggesting that to Djamila is a good way to get bones broken.

For her, Javier is almost everything she has been fighting against for her whole life. That he’s a sarcastic, mouthy sh*t around her does not help things.

Finally, I’m the writer, and, unlike other things I write, I see this as a tremendously long arc of stories that need to be told. In my head, The Science Officer is just the first episode of a very long television show on cable, maybe broken into arcs in the way the old Dr Who episodes used to be (and I mean the first  Seven Doctors here). It is the Pilot episode, if you will. The Mind Field could be considered to be the first episode of Series One. I already know what the next story will be about, although I have no idea what it is named yet.

In many television shows, the best parts are always related to the tension that arises between two characters they that might otherwise be attracted to each other, but who have a hatred that evolves. The best shows evolve that into a rivalry that eventually grows into respect. With luck, they drag that out for a long time, with the “will they? won’t they?” aspects keeping the audience on the edge of their chairs. For those of you old enough to remember the show, think about how Moonlighting handled it.

For me, I plan to write a lot more stories about Javier and Suvi and the crew of the Storm Gauntlet. The crew dynamics fascinate me, as you have this complete outsider who probably could turn his life around and become an up-standing galactic citizen if he left, surrounded by people who are not scum and dregs, but generally down-on-their-luck following the end of the war. The economy has not recovered, but it will one of these days. For now, they are just making their way.

And it’s not that I don’t see Javier and Sykora’s relationship changing over time. Both are extremely competent people, doing what they want to do, and doing it well. But there are powerful tides at play that will have to work themselves out. Plus, I get mortally offended at the common trope that the girl is supposed to immediately fall in love with the leading man and betray herself, her side, and everything she believes in, just for a chance to win his love. (See Bond, J, most of for really cheesy examples thereto).

Djamila is a warrior. An Amazon in exactly the way the Hellenes saw them, three millennia ago. Bad-ass warrior babes from north-east of what we call today the Black Sea, who do not need a man to give them worth and definition. Or the Etruscans. Or the Vikings. Neu Berne does not appreciate a woman like that, except as a trained attack dog.

Javier is a twice-divorced goofball who doesn’t much like people, being around them, answering to them, behaving by their rules.

To him, she’s just another stick-up-the-butt authority figures that he instinctively rebels against. To her, he’s just another man-child coasting on the benefits of his birth and up-bringing, and refusing to take anything seriously.

But l like them both. And I have several more episodes to write to see where they will take me. After all, Javier will have been born 5,895 years before Jessica Keller. I have space into which to put stories. Way more stories. Yet more people who have not yet introduced themselves.

They all fit in a nice happy little bucket, with room to play, while at the same time leaving room for everyone else, in their on slot of history.

After all, Suvi is the only one who gets to live forever.