The first book is complete and is undergoing a final polish. To help promote the work while I submit query letters to agents, I've created a blog that will maintain the illusion that the Molly Fyde story is real. A big thanks to the SciForum members that helped shaped the final product. Several of you (and the site in general) will be getting major props in the first book. Follow the blog here: http://mollyfyde.blogspot.com/ And add Molly to your Twitter account: http://twitter.com/MollyFyde Thanks, and spread the word!
The Anti-Cassandra Complex? The Anti-Cassandra Complex? One of the things I try to avoid thinking about is that I'm putting together a puzzle whose pieces haven't even been created yet. I can't help but believe in this story, that it has already happened. Then a date will remind me: I'm sorting through the future. The big joke here is that I am a propellant guy. I work with solid-state fuels. Worked, I should say. Anyway, the last few months before I was laid off, I was becoming more of a chemist than a physicist. And I've never been known as a writer. Quite the opposite, in fact. I tend to ramble and- There. I'm doing it now. So, the joke... Everyone who works at NASA gets the same questions from their friends and families. And none of them have to do with our fields of expertise. It's all about astronauts urinating and area 51 and whatever they saw on the cover of the last Discover magazine about time travel and wormholes. I can't go watch a sci-fi movie with friends and family because they come out expecting me to explain stuff to them that isn't even real. My sister went to the new Star Trek film last weekend and she calls me wanting to know about the "red stuff" and how time travel works. [More...]
Digging for the Science I apologize in advance to my friends at NASA, who are eagerly anticipating the results of my research. Many of them have taken an interest in what I'm doing, but I believe they are going to be surprised to discover something. I know I was. Molly's story is about people and relationships, not about gadgets and gizmos. As a geek, (and someone who likely suffers from an autism spectrum disorder) I was confused by the focus of my source material. The vast majority of it recounts conversations, feelings, people and places. Then, something occurred to me: Would I write the following in my diary?: 5/28/2009 - My wireless personal communicator vibrated to life, sending out a shrill version of a hip-hop song that only sounded decent with the sort of bass impossible with such a small speaker. I grabbed the small device, checking the OLED outer screen that gave me a visual representation of the person calling. It was my wife. I opened the communicator, admiring the arrangement of a myriad number of buttons. What a marvelous device, capable of snapping pictures that contain over three million individual pixels, store thousands of songs, and even log into the global computer network to pull up maps and satellite photos of any place on the planet. The power of the small machine was astounding. I pressed it to my ear, all that technology thrumming in the palm of my hand. "Hello?" I said. [more...]
Update on the books: The manuscript of the first novel is complete and is going through the final wave of editing. I'm making tweaks ahead of my brilliant editor (Lisa Wilson) and she is coming behind me and pointing out the thousands of stupid things I missed. The finished product is going to be around 100,000 words, which should work out to a 300-page novel (depending on the format of the published book). The second book is in rough draft, also around 100K, but expected to grow a smidgen as I edit. The third book is in outline, and will practically write itself. The fourth one is stirring in my imagination. In a few weeks, I'm going to start sending the first manuscript to agents and publishers. I will be cataloging the procedure and posting all of my rejection letters here.
Deconstructing the Humanization of Delphi IV One of the best tools I have for making sure my telling of Molly's story is both honest and compelling is, ironically, her Academy records. I have every paper Molly wrote, from Junior Academy book reports to a pre-action tactical assignment she wrote just prior to the Tchung Affair. Here's a sample from one of her essays (picking up on the second page). I think it's a fair representation of her unique mixture of iconoclasm, creative thinking, and human decency. ************************************* It is clear, therefore, that Dr. Glav Jones has made a grave error in linking societal changes on Delphi IV with first Human contact. His anti-consumption bias, noted above, has him searching for causation where there is mere correlation. Did the arrival of Human envoys to Delphi IV spark a revolution? Undoubtedly. Did Delphi society swing to a consumerist base in ensuing years? Absolutely. Was this, as Dr. Jones suggests, a result of a Human conspiracy? I think the answer is clearly "No." But without a grasp on the universal rules of Natural Selection, it is impossible for Dr. Jones to see why. The Galactic Union has now cataloged over 400 planets that harbor life. More than 80 of these planets had some form of sentience. Almost twenty of those were at least in the industrial phase. In every case, the principles of evolutionary natural selection have been verified. The process is now understood to be chemical, as much as it is biological. We would be just as surprised to find a world which wasn't based on RNA/DNA and the subsequent shortcuts that life stumbles upon, as physicists would be if they discovered a planet on which objects didn't fall toward the center. Despite this, xenoologists such as Dr. Jones continue to rely on soft psychological musings of cultural development rather than on the stricter theories which are founded on scientific principles and subjected to the rigors of peer-reviewed publication. The oversight would be tragic, were it not comical. The experts devoted to exploring the condition of all lifeforms do not study the very theories that govern life. The case of Delphi IV highlights a pattern of sentient behavior seen, not just on other colony worlds, but in the ancient history of Earth. When organisms are given complete freedom, they tend to use that freedom to hoard resources. This is a fact of nature that can be seen in every engorged belly and every stockpile of gathered goods. Evolution rewards the greedy, especially if the organism can make large displays of philanthropy while it is quietly sneaking more away for itself. [More...]
A Moment of Panic Much has been said about my research into Molly, but little about the writing process. If anything, it has been even more manic than my time spent with The Reader. Most of the rough draft of my narrative's first entry was written in a mere week. 76,000 words in seven 12-16 hour days. If that sounds epic, consider that I have become so familiar with this story that it was just a matter of moving it from my brain to the computer. Plus, I have an interactive outline to work with--the documents on The Reader. As soon as I had this draft prepared, I realized that a portion of the next events in Molly's life deserved to be included as well. This brought the word-count up to 85,000. With only 50 pages left to edit, the final count of my first manuscript figures to be right at 100,000 words. If I were setting out to write a science fiction novel, I couldn't have done any better.[More...]
Thanks, Tnerb. I'm expecting to have the entire (first) trilogy written by the end of the year. Ambitious stuff. My latest blog entry is about the Impossible Map: I'll never forget the day I showed Dr. Lisa Robinson, one of my astronomer friends at NASA, what has since become known as "The Impossible Map." We were having lunch together in the cafeteria near KSC HQ (The hub of Kennedy Space Center's inland industrial area) when I showed her The Reader for the first time. As I've said before, this project drove me batty from the first week, and I think Lisa was worried about her old friend. I was flipping through documents and talking excitedly about what I'd found thus far when I realized that Lisa wasn't looking at The Reader--she was looking at me. It's an unpleasant experience, discovering that your close friends think you're crazy. Even worse is the difficulty one has in convincing them otherwise, especially when you are desperate to do so. The absolute worst, though, is when their sincere doubts begin to weaken your own resolve. [More...] CLICK HERE TO SEE THE MAP
Is Time Travel this Difficult? After six months of research and frenzied writing, I have a completed manuscript of Molly's first set of adventures. The work is 100,000 words long and details Molly's search for her father's old starship. After several rounds of editing, I'm happy enough with the story (its readability and faithfulness to actual events) to flirt with publication. You would think the easy part lies ahead, but unfortunately, this is not the case. My sixteen-hour days of nonstop manuscript work will prove to be the relaxing moments in this quest. The difficult part is going to be finding an agent that believes in Molly's story as much as I do, finding a publisher that believes what my agent tells them, and then finding an audience that believes what the jacket of my book tells them. That's a lot of faith for an organization that gets no tax sheltering. What's next and why is it going to be so hard? Well, I just wrote a dandy query letter and I have a list of select agents to send it to. I'm going to attach the first ten or so pages of my work, and see if any of them are interested in reading more. The problem will come from the constant rejections and time spent away from the actual writing. [More...]
A young girl from the 25th-century. There's a small amount of make-believe involved. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I got my first offer yesterday. Small publisher, but they are wanting to pay me to publish my book. I'm gonna wait on a few more avenues to pan out before I decide anything, but my lowest-common-denominator just went from Kinko's to Actual Publication. Wooo-Hooo! Oh... and your support means the world to me. Please follow me on my blog (on the right bar, there), on Twitter, and via Facebook. Join the Molly Fyde fan club, help a starvin' artist out. http://twitter.com/MollyFyde http://mollyfyde.blogspot.com/ http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=87572003623 Thanks a ton. The first 30 pages can be read on my blog, look for the gadget down on the right.
Sweet. I just launched my new author website. Check it out: http://www.hughhowey.com/ I should know within two weeks if I'm signing with a small publisher or taking my chances on being a small cog in a massive machine. I'm just dying to get everything settled so I can debate philosophy on SF again. Trying to write for a living is a ton of hard work!
