Tag: preview

That Wizard of Oz Moment …

When the Author realizes he is the elderly man pushing buttons in the background.

In 2019, I got 80,000 words into the middle trilogy of a triple-trilogy series and took a side trip to write the last trilogy.

It’s a thing. George Lucas did it. I should be so famous.

The Anye Migration trilogy kicks off a few days after the final scene in Resilient, published and buyable here.

Which makes the opening in Vacuum Forged a Part Seven of a six-parter.

First-draftish. Not so much a book as a collection of ideas on their way to becoming a book.

Thirty-five chapters of which are now published on Substack, prematurely, because it’s mine and I can do what I want.

Click on the image if you’re curious.

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in media res

An early cold-open. Should I have left it in the book?

0 ~ Campfire Tale

Las Cruces, New Mexico

It was 6:03 AM Mountain Time, 26 minutes ahead of sunrise, 43 degrees Fahrenheit in town, 35 in the desert, mostly clear, the eastern sky shining pale blue with a tinge of pink.

To the northwest, still dark and full of celestial wonder, a colorful ionized-gas display marked a position downrange of the solar system’s galactic path, where Star Forge Partners, a Jivada-based materials manufacturing company, was suctioning space dust into an electrostatically charged funnel.

Furry aliens from outer space and their human partners, mitigating the potential of a cosmic-gas-fueled micro-nova burning half the Earth to a crisp, 15 years hence.

At street level, an Anye-tech fighting drone named Titter spotted a black Chevy Suburban taking a position near the Fowlkes residence.

Continue reading “in media res” →
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ChatGPT Categorizes Maroli Tango

I am not anticipating a movie deal

Click here to read the entire novel, near-final-draft, for free.

Your book sits in a strange intersection:

Becky Chambers + Lois McMaster Bujold + The Expanse + Ada Palmer + a family chronicle + frontier settlement comedy + theological space opera.

The nearest neighbors:

Lois McMaster Bujold

Especially the Vorkosigan Saga.

Bujold is probably your closest craft cousin for mixing space opera, family, military/political institutions, romance, comedy, competence, and moral consequence. The Vorkosigan books are long-running SF/space-opera works with major attention to family, hierarchy, personal honor, military culture, and social continuity; the series won the Hugo Award for Best Series. (Wikipedia)

Overlap with you: huge cast, aristocratic/merchant-military structures, moral comedy, family as civilization-bearing unit.
Difference: Bujold is tighter, more novel-shaped, more character-centralized around Miles/Cordelia/etc. Your work is more mosaic, serial, and civilizational.

Continue reading “ChatGPT Categorizes Maroli Tango” →
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I Made a Video With UtopAI

Considering the effort I put into it, the clip is amazing.

If making movies was easy, beggars would direct.

The clip is out of a pre-release version of UtopAI, on a freebie beta test invitation — and if I were motivated, I could have made better use of the opportunity, or at least different use.

However, what I did was upload Maroli Tango Chapter 1 straight out of the manuscript, plus seven reference images.

This is not what a moviemaker does to prepare for a shoot — not even close.

I spent two-and-a-half hours. Two hundred hours would have been more appropriate.

The outcome is a lot better than anyone should expect.

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