Good News and Bad News

Other than the announcement that a book has been published, this is the biggest news that has ever appeared on this page.  We're moving to the "right side of the tracks."  Our self publishing days may well be over.

Amazon's Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror "imprint" or publishing house, known as 47North (the latitude of Seattle, Washington, where Amazon is headquartered), has offered a three book deal.  We are currently in negotiations, and there are some small differences between what they are offering and what we want, but I can't imagine any of them being deal breakers.

Under the terms of the current offer, 47North will re-issue the first two "Man of War" novels, To Honor You Call Us and For Honor We Stand in early 2014.  The re-issued novels will be professionally edited and designed, with high quality cover art, hardback, paperback, ebook, and audio book versions, and all the other panoply of major house publication (including something that, for some reason, means a lot to me--justified right margins in the print versions).  So, those little homonym errors, the confusion of EMCON and EMCOM, and those other intensely irritating mistakes that managed to slip past three different proofreaders in eight different proofreads will be eliminated.  The third not-yet-written novel, Brothers in Valor will be written with the advice and guidance of a professional developmental editor and will receive the same treatment.

Meanwhile, the current editions of both books will remain available until shortly before issuance of the new ones.  We hope and expect that people will continue to buy them.

The bad news is that readers of the first two books will have to wait a bit longer to get the third book in their hands.  We were looking for a release of Book III in June or July of this year.  That will now be in March 2014, a delay of eight or nine months.  I know that many readers will find that delay frustrating.  We certainly do.  However, I'm sure you will understand the commercial necessity of issuing the third book under 47North's imprint after issuance of the first two books.  Those publication dates are as early as they can be made because, like any publisher, 47North publishes only so many books per month so that they can receive the appropriate promotion and other resources to make them successful.  The publication schedule is set many months in advance.

The compensation for you readers for this delay will be that you will have in your hands a much higher quality product.  That is not to say that what we have previously issued is not high quality.  We are very proud of the quality that we were able to deliver with the small but dedicated team who brought you the first two books in their self-published versions.  After all, look at the customer ratings--as of this writing both books are in the top 40 of all the Military Science Fiction and War Fiction books ever published in terms of their Amazon customer ratings.  Not a bad job for a 53 year old retired lawyer with heart problems, a retired Law Office Manager/Medical Billing Specialist, a retired teacher, and a retired school librarian.  We have nothing to be ashamed of and believe, along with many readers who have said as much in reviews, that the editorial quality of these books is as high as that they have seen in many professionally published works.  Going through 47North, however, will make the quality even better.  We are going to raise the bar and try to give you Military Science Fiction/Space Naval Fiction as good as anything out there in the market today.  We aim to blow your socks off.

Seriously.  We are huge fans of Timothy Zahn, Tom Clancy, Patrick Robinson's modern naval fiction, and Patrick O'Brian's naval fiction set in the early 19th Century.  And, let's not forget the Olde Tyme and Newe Tyme Greats of Science Fiction:  Asimov, Silverberg, Clark, Heinlein, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Spinrad, Poul Anderson, Keith Laumer, Robert L. Forward, David Brin, Greg Bear, etc.  Huge.  Fans. What we are aiming for is something very simple, yet hugely ambitious:  to forge a new genre--Space Naval Fiction.  There are glimmers of it elsewhere:  David Weber's Honor Harrington Series, the naval and shipboard business in The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (God, what an amazing book that is!).  But we want to put together in one package something that we have never seen anywhere else.  We aim to give readers from the perspective of a space warship in the year 2315 the nitty gritty of the maneuvers, the "how to," the lives of the men, and the "feel" of shipboard life that Patrick O'Brian gives of a British Frigate in 1815.  We want the believable future technology and future tactics of Timothy Zahn, the techno-thriller razzle dazzle of Tom Clancy.  Plus the believable naval characters and grand strategy of Patrick Robinson.  And the hard science validity of Robert L. Forward.  Plus the compelling stories, the energy and the vividly, plausibly-realized alien races of Niven and Pournelle and David Brin, wrapped in the vast sweeping galactic scope of Asimov and the rest.

Not much to shoot for, is it!  Arrogance?  Maybe.  But, we hope not.  Rather, we like to think of it as aiming high.  We know we're not Asimov or Zahn or Clancy or O'Brian or any of these other folks.  We've got two novels under our belts and that's it.  We've got a lot of sweat and long hours and elbow grease until we can even remotely approach that level. Only by making the attempt will we learn whether we have anything like the talent required to accomplish such an undertaking.  Nevertheless, we refuse to aim low.  That is our target:  Space Naval Fiction.  Exciting.  Scientifically and militarily valid.  Gritty.  Epic.  Stories as big as the galaxy in which they are set.

Game on.  

But, we digress.

Back to business.  This offer also includes an "option" on the fourth book, which would be the first book of the second Max Robichaux/Ibrahim Sahin trilogy.  These publishers will have thirty days to accept or reject the manuscript.  If they reject it, we can go back to publishing it as we did the first two novels, or we can shop it to other publishers.  We don't think either of those things is going to happen.  Rather, we are confident that these books will do quite well under the 47North imprint and that you will be reading Robichaux/Sahin novels issued by them for many years to come.

We look forward to a long and mutually profitable association with 47North, and we ask that readers be patient until we and our publishing partners can bring to you a truly excellent reading experience that will keep you coming back for more swashbuckling adventures in the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Galaxy in the early 24th Century.  We will work night and day to be sure that these new books are worth the wait. 

We have Liftoff!!!

Work has officially begun on the third novel in the "Man of War" series, to be entitled (unless something radical happens to change our minds) Brothers in Valor.  The action picks up about eighteen hours after the Cumberland delivers the response to the Krag ultimatum and is returning to Union space to rejoin Task Force Tango Delta.  But something very strange is going on . . . .

Some of the correspondence we get from folks indicates that some people have an extremely inaccurate idea about how we write these things.  Unlike lots of writers, we do not write from a detailed plot outline.  Most of the time, we don't know very far in advance what's going to happen, so we are as much in suspense about how things are going to turn out as you are.  When we started the last book, we knew what the first chapter was going to be about and how it would end, but almost nothing of what happened in the middle.  With the first book, we watched the plot coming into focus usually about a chapter or two ahead of where we were actually writing.

Right now, we have an idea about what we are going to do in the first two chapters and we think we know what the situation will be at the end (plus a really cool idea about the last image to leave in the mind of the reader) but that's about it.  One of the reasons we were so impatient to start writing again was that we were eager to see how things come out.  The suspense was killing us!

Oh, and for those who care about such things, the picture is the launch of Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968.  Apollo 8 was the first time human beings ventured beyond Earth orbit into deep space.  This was the memorable mission in which the astronauts, orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, read aloud from the Book of Genesis and closed with "good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth."  In 1968, we sure needed all the blessings and luck we could get.  

Stupid is as Stupid Reviews

Normally, I just blow off negative reviews, but sometimes a reviewer says something that is so staggeringly ignorant or blindingly stupid as to make me beat my head against the wall.  This stupidity is particularly irritating when it is combined with a one star rating that meanigfully affects the average rating of the book, lowering its ranking on the top rated books page, reducing its exposure, and reducing my ability to support my family through my writing.

Here's the review I'm talking about:

1.0 out of 5 stars Aubrey and Maturin meet alien bats from outer space, March 16, 2013

By 

mikhalych - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: To Honor You Call Us (Man of War) (Kindle Edition)

The recipe of this book is quite simple. Take O'Brian's work, dice and mince it, add a little bit of C.S. Forester, mix together with 15 pounds of military sci fi cliches, sprinkle with young adult flavor and freeze in deep space.

The book is bad. To understand how bad it is just two samples:
1. Pitch and yaw of a presumably advanced space ship is controlled from the bridge by a specially dedicated crew member. I'm wondering if he uses a rudder to do the controlling part. How did 1st WW pilots managed the same task without an extra helper? Yeah, and commands are passed by voice, just like on Sophies's bridge.
2. The said advanced space ship (you know, anti gravity, superluminal travel, etc., etc., etc.,)keeps wood "to shore up bulkheads and build temporary compartments and fixtures".
When I stopped laughing after encountering this fixture, I quit reading.

P.S. The number of 5 star reviews of this book is mind boggling. I know, there are some worse Sci Fi books around, but one will have to look very hard to find them. 

Now, let's examine in detail what a blithering idiot this guy is.  First, he is incredulous that the ship is steered by a dedicated crew member in the ship's control center using some kind of hand controller  (the snarky joke about the "rudder" is just idiotic--the ship's maneuvering thrusters, reaction control system, and inertial guidance system are all clearly described in one book or the other).  I just love how people give two seconds' thought to something and think they know more than someone who has researched it and thought about it for months.

Think about it this way.  What's the closest analog to the Cumberland in our world?  Simple--a nuclear submarine.  It's a large, heavy vessel steering in three dimensions through a hostile environment.  Submarines often need to make extremely precise maneuvers under control accurate to within fractions of a degree, just like a warship would be in space.  The Cumberland is much more like a submarine than the light, nimble, one man airplane that the reviewer refers to.  How are nuclear submarines steered?  Well, here's a picture taken in 2008 from the Control Room of the USS Ohio, a high-tech, nuclear powered warship that moves in a three dimensional environment.  




Look familiar?  It should.  The way the ships in our books are controlled is patterned on the way one controls a nuclear submarine, except that on Union warships the controls are connected to a fly by wire system that translates the crewmen's movements into appropriate actions by maneuvering thrusters, propulsion thrusters, intertial control mechanisms, etc.  It is reasonable, though by no means certain, that the control interface will be no different in ten years, or in three hundred.  The same function needs to be performed, under tight control from a chief (who normally is positioned where that silver bar is between the two guys at the controls).  The point of structuring our control interface the way we did was to establish continuity between the Navy you see in this picture and the one in the books.  While our prediction of the future in this regard is not guaranteed to be accurate, it is reasonable both technologically and dramatically.  It is certainly not a decision that is worthy of scorn and laughter from the ignorant.

All of which is not to say that Chief LeBlanc doesn't have the capability to enter a course change directly into his console, command the ship to come to a new heading by clicking on a box that says something like"Come to new heading" and then enter something like 145/212 on his keypad and have the ship come about.  Or, that he couldn't program a series of course changes that could be executed at a keystroke.  However, just because he can do that doesn't mean that, in a service that reveres tradition and that is suspicious of change, most course changes wouldn't be made by human beings under human control.  Again, course changes could easily be entered digitally on submarines and aircraft carriers today, but we generally steer them with yokes and big brass wheels.  Tradition.  If you don't get that, then you don't get Navy.

Second, he gets a laugh at commands being passed by voice.  Huh?  These guys are only a few feet away from each other--what are they going to do, send an email?  Voice commands are easily given, require no computer inteface, easy to understand, and easy to verify.  Using a voice link to speak to people in distant parts of the ship is also reasonable.  We have computers, email, text, and other means of electronic communicaiton on our naval vessels, but orders for immediate execution are passed by voice channel.  Why?  It's easy, clear, immediate, and provides a means for an instant acknowledgement.  Further, it doesn't require interfacing with a keyboard or similar input device--you just punch up the channel and start talking.  Why is it unreasonable to assume we would be doing that into the indefinite future--I note that virtually every science fiction book I have ever read of this type has people talking to each other over some kind of intercom.

Third, he guffaws at the idea that the ship would keep wood on board "to shore up bulkheads and build temporary compartments and fixtures."  Given that the most advanced ships in every navy in the world do just that right now, including the high-tech Virginia class attack submarines we are building and launching at this very moment, I don't see why this is so laughable.  With what are they going to use to do these things in 300 years rather than wood?  Metal, which requires special tools to cut and machine and fasten?  Polymer that is brittle at low temperatures and melts at high?  Carbon fiber that requires special tools to work and needs to be assembled with special fasteners and adhesives?  Or wood that any idiot can saw and nail together in the dark or the cold or in any other emergency?  Hmmmmm.  While it is possible that wood may not be used in the year 2315, it is not an implausible or laughable decision.

Essentially, this review writer demonstrates that he knows nothing about how things are done on high-tech naval vessels currently, so he is spectacularly ill-equipped to make any judgment about how they will be done in 300 years.  I'm also amused that the reviewer didn't finish the book.  I find it hard to imagine the kind of staggering, Olympian arrogance that it takes to write and publish for all the world to see a review of a book that you haven't even read completely, much less to offer views on the technology discussed in the book when you don't know squat about the current technology on which the book is based.  Why would someone who knows so little and who hasn't even read the whole book think that any opinion he has on the subject would ever be of any value to any other person under any circumstances.  He suffers from delusions of relevance--he thinks his opinion carries some weight when it carries none.

I've looked at this guy's reviews on Amazon.  He seems to make a habit of giving one and two star reviews to books that are rated highly by other readers, perhaps to gratify his contrarian impulses, and also of reviewing books that he hasn't finished reading.  I have reported the review as being "abusive" given that he didn't finish the book.

Oh, one more thing, there aren't any "bats" in the book.  People who can't tell bats from rats shouldn't be writing book reviews.   

Bottom line, if you don't like the book, you don't like the book.  Tastes differ.  Given readers might not like the way the plot develops, or they way the dialog is written, the writing style, the tone, or any number of other things about the book.  I get that, and dealing with that reality is part of what one goes through when one publishes a book and makes it available to literally the entire world.  Fortunately, it seems that many thousands of people love these books (given that the second book is selling as briskly as the first--telling me people like the first one and are buying the second).  But, I don't get why a reader would simply jump to the conclusion that we're stupid and that basic things like how the ship is controlled weren't the subject of serious through and mental development.  We've been thinking about this stuff for years.  I have been mentally working on the issue since 1966 and, over the decades, have even talked with pilots, submariners, aeronautical engineers, two men who worked in NASA mission control Staff Support Rooms in the Gemini and Apollo programs, "human factors engineers," and James McDivitt (Gemini-Apollo Astronaut and former head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office)(McDivitt is a U of Michigan alumnus and spoke on campus when I was a student there) about how a future large space warship would be controlled in three dimensions.  The UNANIMOUS answer was something along the lines of "I'm sure it would be something like the way submarines are controlled now" or, "given the difficulty in precisely controlling pitch, yaw, and roll with the same controller, you'd have to put two guys on two different yokes."   They all said that small fighers would probably be controlled with a stick like current fighter aircraft but that large "space battleships" would be steered like submarines are today.

So, we might be wrong about this, but the answer we came up with isn't stupid.

Frustration Unbearable . . . Must . . . Write

We thought we would take a little more time off and do some more reading and research, but isn't going to happen.  We've been edgy, irritable, absent-minded, not sleeping well, and haven't been able to put our fingers on the reason.  Then, miraculously, it occurred to us--we're not writing.  We've been writing continuously for six months, enjoying the hell out of it, and suddenly stopped for a few weeks.  Our brain can't take it.  It needs the stimulation of being in the year 2315, standing in CIC right behind the Command Station, watching what Max and the rest of the gang do in the next crisis in the lives of the crew of the USS Cumberland.

Having created that universe and populated it with interesting people and races, we have found that we are supposed to spend at least some of our day there every day.  So, we've cleared our calendars ahead of schedule and will begin writing of Brothers in Valor, the concluding volume of the "Man of War" Trilogy tomorrow.  We still have some reading and research we want to do, so we'll probably split our time between writing and those activities, instead of writing 10 to 18 hours a day as we did for the first two books. 

Strange, how this activity of which we never thought we were capable has so quickly become such an integral part of our lives that we find ourselves miserable if we aren't doing it. 

There's also the beginning of the germ of an idea for another series, set in the same universe, beginning in the year 2034, telling the story of the formation of the United Earth Space Force in the face of the emergency posed by the Ning-Braha's occupation of the moon, followed by the acquisition of stardrive technology as a result of the war and Man's first tentative steps into interstellar space.  But, don't worry, we have no intention of writing that until we have finished this next book and probably not until we are done with the next trilogy of Robichaux/Sahin novels. 

In other news, we're under some pressure to start tweeting.  I'm very ambivalent about the idea.  I mean, who cares what I have to say in 140 characters or less?  The people who write about how us independent authors are supposed to promote our work all say that we should tweet.  We'll think about it.

Paperback now available

The paperback version of For Honor We Stand is now available in the Createspace store.  Here is the link:
https://www.createspace.com/4194358.

It will be available on Amazon.com in a few days.  There is no difference in the product as purchased from the two different sites, or in how your order will be fulfilled (Amazon owns Createspace).  Although the price is the same in both locations, we make a slightly higher royalty on Createspace than Amazon so, if you're thinking of buying, there is no reason to wait for it to be available on Amazon.

Here's Something for You Nit Pickers

Spent much of the day with my new white board working out a fairly detailed map of the Union and surrounding space. I shot a picture of it with my camera phone and it came looking pretty good. Coreward is at the top, rimward at the bottom, spinward is to the left and anti-spinward to the right. The approximate border of the Orion Cygnus arm of the galaxy is just below the top of the board and just above the bottom. The Rendezvous point marked is the rendezvous at the end of Book II. I reserve the right to refine this significantly as we write.

The picture is offset in order to get the glare from the flash off of one of the most critical parts of the sketch.

Obviously, it's a good thing that the books are selling as I would clearly starve to death as a stellar cartographer.