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.

Paperback Edition of "For Honor We Stand" About Three Days Out

We've had a few issues formatting the paperback version of the new "Man of War" book, For Honor We Stand for publication as a paperback.  It should be available in three or four days.  We apologize for the delay to all the folks out there who don't use e-readers.

In other news, the new book is succeeding beyond our wildest expectations. It is the Number 2 Amazon Hot New Release in two categories and #5 in another and is a top ten bestseller in three categories.  As of this writing, it is #4 in Kindle Military Science Fiction.  The new book's visibility has resulted in a boom of sales in the first book, To Honor You Call Us,, which is now a top ten bestseller in two categories and is in the next ten on the other.

Further, based on customer ratings, To Honor You Call Us is now the #12 top rated Kindle Military Science Fiction book and is #11 in Kindle War Fiction, right behind Uncle Tom's Cabin and four slots above Monsarrat's classic, The Cruel Sea, and several places above the H. G. Wells genre foundation book, War of the Worlds.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not suffering from the grandiose delusion that this means my first effort at writing fiction is actually better than these books in any kind of serious, critical, literary sense.  I'm sure people will be reading Uncle Tom and The Cruel Sea long after everything written by H. Paul Honsinger has faded to obscurity, but this rating does say that the book generates a great deal of enthusiasm and approval from readers, which is what I am aiming for, anyway.  I'm not trying to write anything like a "Classic of Modern Literature."  Good thing, too, because I'd fall flat on my ass if I tried.  What we are trying to do is write books that are entertaining.  We want the reader to be engaged, to feel the anxiety and anger and relief and triumphs of our characters.  These ratings say that we are succeeding in that regard.  We will work very hard to get better and better at the craft of novel writing so that we can deliver a progressively better product to our readers.

This has been an exciting journey for us. We hope to entice a great many readers to come along, and that they will feel like they are sitting at the Commodore's Station as Max unleashes his next dazzling ploy against the Krag.

It Has a Great Beat and You Can Dance to It; I give it a Ten!

We're still new at this and there is a lot about being a novelists that we don't know.  One of the biggest of those is that we really have no idea whether the projects into which we are pouring our hearts and souls and intellects are any good or whether they are total crap.  Our wives tell us they are good, but then again they also tell us that we are handsome, a conclusion about which we are extremely skeptical.

So, it is with great pleasure and no small measure of relief that we see that there are already eight reviews of the new book on Amazon.com and that they are all five stars.  Not only that, they are universally complimentary.  Now, there are a few reviews that say that they have small quibbles here and there, and we certainly look at all of those things very seriously (actually, we were already conscious of every one and had planned to do certain things a little different as we go along--mainly as the situations will be different and the characters more mature in their relationships), but certainly nothing major.  In fact, the reviews are better than the first wave of reviews were on the first book, and they weren't bad at all.

And, of course, based on our experience with the first book, we know that good reviews sell books.  Particularly, when people give good reviews on book number two or book number three of a series encourages people to start a series of which they might otherwise be skeptical.  No one wants to invest the time to read the first book in a series and find out that the series fizzles. 

Series die more often than you might think.  I've seen it several times.  Sometimes the writer simply has no new stories of any interest to tell about these characters.  Or, more often, the characters go through exciting and meaningful experiences and emerge from them completely unchanged--they learn nothing, they don't grow, they don't develop, they don't mature. 

Anyway, when people see that the second book is as good as or better than the first, then they have reason to believe that the writer can sustain the series over time.

So, now that there is a second book out and people can see that it is as good as, if not better than the first, we are hoping not only that everyone who read the first book will read the second, but also that people who might have passed on the first will give it a second look now that we have proved we are capable of producing more than one book that is worth reading.  Frankly, this was something about which we, ourselves, were worried.  After all, we didn't know we had the ability to produce ONE good book, much less two.

There is, of course, another dimension to reviews.  They are an emotional pay off.  Sure, if a book is good and if it catches on with an audience, it makes money for trivial stuff such as food and health insurance and car payments.  We like those things. We like them very much.  But, after working twelve and sixteen hour days, seven days a week for three months to produce a novel, it is very gratifying to read good things that people might have to say about it.  We put an extraordinary amount of effort and work very, very hard to develop the battle scenes and tactics, conceive of the maneuvers and the weapons and the back stories, and to get all of the little details just right.  We spend many, many hours sweating the small stuff, and there is lots and lots of small stuff.  These reviews are a reward for those efforts, and it does feel very, very good.

So, to the people who write the reviews, thank you.  They do mean a great deal to us.

Error! Error! Ster . . i . . . lize!!

I am not NOMAD.  I am not perfect.

Of course, neither was NOMAD.  That's why it blew itself up and got some of its parts recycled into the Romulan Cloaking Device from "The Enterprise Incident."  

A reader just pointed out a rather embarrassing time/distance error in For Honor We Came.  At the Cumberland's stated speed of 10 c, the distance between Radhid IV and Rashid V B, approximately 4 AU, would take just over 3 minutes to cross, not "just over half an hour" as I the book originally said (this is just before the Battle of Rashid V B).  I can see what I did.  I went through the steps to compute the time to cross at the speed of light (1 AU = about 8.1 light minutes, then multiply 8.1 minutes times 4 AU) meaning then to divide the result by 10 because the ship is traveling at 10 c, and then forgot to divide by 10.  Duh.

Well, one of the great things about e-publishing is that we have already corrected the error and uploaded it to Amazon and B & N.  Anyone who buys the book from a few hours from now on will get the corrected version.  If you have already purchased, you should be able to delete the book from your reader (but not, please, from your account!) and then download it again, which should give you the corrected version.

No telling yet whether we will be able able get it fixed in the print version, which is in process but not yet final.

This stuff just makes me buggy.  Time/distance errors are one of the things that annoys me the most in science fiction, especially in movies.  Remember in Star Trek V when the Enterprise goes to "the center of the Galaxy," in about one and a half reels? Well, given that it is about 27,000 light years to the center of the galaxy, and even if we assume that the ship can go 1000 times the speed of light (Warp 8 in the Original Series was 512 c) that's a 27 year trip.  I practically banged my head on the seat in front of me about that one (that and the business about a Klingon ship being picked up on sensors but going unnoticed because no one happened to be looking at the right screen at the right time--as though Spock didn't have something like the "Back Room" on my ships where other people are looking at the sensor data to back him up).

So, anyway, it's fixed.  Thanks to reader RxScram for pointing out the error.

It's HERE!!!

No kidding.  This is not a teaser.  The second volume of the Man of War Trilogy, For Honor We Stand is now available as an Amazon Kindle e book.  The Nook edition on Barnes & Noble and the paperback edition will be along shortly.  It was a good pregnancy, but a difficult birth.  We really like the way the baby looks.  We hope you do, too.

Here is the link to the  book on Amazon.

 http://www.amazon.com/For-Honor-Stand-Man-ebook/dp/B00BFE6IOC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1360786484&sr=1-1&keywords=for+honor+we+stand

And here's a look at the cover.  It should look pretty familiar.

It's Still Coming . . . Still . . . Coming . . . Really!

First the news that people care about:  the new book should be out by the end of the week.  Cover:  done.  Blurb:  done.  Reformatting:  done.  Three edits by authors:  done.  Kathy is on her second edit now.  When that is finished, we will upload it.  It could be as early as Wednesday, but having dashed people's hopes before I'm not going to say we expect it then.  I can't see how, though, it would not be sometime this week, and almost certainly before the weekend.

This book has been a lot harder than the first.  First, it's longer by almost 20,000 words.  That may not seem like much, but it is a big jump in the complexity of the book.  Second, speaking of complexity, the battles, especially the first one, are much more intricate than anything in the first book.  The second battle is no slouch, either.  This stuff has to be checked carefully.  Bearings, ranges, times, distances, weapons deployments, sensor displays all have to be correct and consistent.  This is hard, tedious work and is one of the reasons that there are very few authors in this genre who write battles the way we write them.  Third, there is an inherent issue with sequels.  The first book need only be consistent with itself (and with what is plausible).  The second book must not only be internally consistent, but also must be consistent with the first book.  What deck are the Mids' classrooms on?  What is the order of the maneuvering stations from right to left.  How many status lights are there on the weapons console and what are they?  What's Chief LeBlanc's first name?  If we mess up stuff like that, readers catch it.  All this stuff has to be obsessively checked.

But, we're past that.  The third book should be easier, if only because we are learning from our mistakes.  We're going to compile a "Bible" of names, positions, control configurations, specifications, etc., to use as a reference in future books to keep it all consistent.  The formatting error that took more than a week to root out of the manuscript won't happen again, etc.  Anyway, we are hoping that For Honor We Stand turns out to be worth the wait.  It has been a labor of love.  It's our baby and we don't want it born prematurely or with any birth defects.