Category: Defiant

“Foes and Rivals” A look back

I’m still trying to think my way out of the box I’ve written myself into here with “Tillamook.” To tide things over, here’s a tactical glimpse of the backstory of how Gil Haven and Mackenzie d’Arcy ended up where they they are. From the last chapter of “Foes and Rivals.”

…

“Come on,” Nichole announced, turning west.  “We need to be out of the city and through the tunnels before complete darkness.”

Without further word, her friends followed.  Out of campus and along Montgomery Street, Gil only spoke when, just at the highway that plunged under the West Hills, Nichole abruptly turned left onto a residential street winding sharply up.

“There’s something I want to see.  You two can wait here if you don’t want to climb with me.”

Gil heard Mac’s little sigh and held out his hand to help her.  She took it.

Just above the tunnel’s mouth, Nichole stopped and looked north and east.  Besides the continuing small-arms fire, she heard the occasional crump of mortars.  Many buildings along the city’s northern edge were on fire.

“I am so sorry…” Gil just caught from her.

Leaping from rock to rock and bracing herself against trees when she had to, Nichole made the descent down the hillside to the road and tunnel look easier than it was.  Both Gil and Mac had several slips and scrapes before standing next to her.  There was still electric power, but only one light every hundred feet or so in the tunnel was on.

“S… spooky!” Mackenzie shuddered, still next to Gil after her last near-fall.

“You will be fine, dear friend!” Nichole could tell her eyes were back to normal, as there was no moisture on her face to match the raging sorrow in her processors.  “After all, you have him, now!  No!  Do not speak!”

She took two steps and touched their chests.  With her right hand she fingered the memory crystal in Gil’s pocket.

“I love you.  I might even be a soul.  But, I am not human.  You must find a mate of your own kind.”

She pressed a little more into Mackenzie, who could properly cry.

“Please take care of each other!”

“Ni…” Gil began.

“…chole!” Mac sputtered.

Her shadow vanished into the blackness as Nichole ran away west.

Tillamook, part 1

A small town on the northwest coast of the US State of Oregon. Known for its cheese. While connected to the Pacific Ocean via a good sized bay, that bay is fed from so many small rivers of the Cascade Range that said bay is nothing but silt, sand, and mud flats. All commercial fishing and crabbing is done out of the village of Garibaldi, about five miles north by northwest. That’s where Gil Haven keeps his little trawler, Nichole. And, this is where the SPOLIERS begin.

Gil Haven is the major secondary character of both “Friend & Ally” and “Foes & Rivals.” Starting as a careful friend of Nichole 5 Clarke, who he comes to realize is an android, they later fall in love. Skipping way forward, when things go to absolute shit in the city-state of Portland, he and Nichole’s other best friend, Mackenzie d’Arcy, artist and accountant, are given a special grace to pass west to the coast unmolested by the Huns. Hopelessly in love with Gil but knowing she is an artificial person and can never make children with him, Nichole forces her two friends together. And abandons them.

The story picks up a generation later. Gil and his two teen sons and two hired men are at sea when their boat’s engine begins to act up.

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Continue reading “Tillamook, part 1” →

Podcast 5: Prologue of “Foes & Rivals”

Congratulations: between DayJob and the hundred things I need to get ready to retrieve Daughter #1 from her internship in southern Utah, I’m only able to throw this at the wall and hope it sticks. Nichole 5’s first audiobook is commercially available and I am slogging my way through the raws of the second. This is the opening of that one, Foes & Rivals. As is my wont, I tell you what happens up front. You’ll just have to enjoy the ride once the rollercoaster starts.

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“The end of the world as we know it”

The southeast of the US not getting the gas/petrol they need. One of the Interstate bridges over the Mississippi River is fractured and closed… possibly closing shipping traffic on that river… impacting 20% of shipping traffic on one of the most important rivers of the world. Inflation is taking off like a successful SpaceX rocket.

It’s not as if I’ve given this any thought…

Here, for your edification, is the complete Prologue of “Friend and Ally,” where a couple of Somi Corporation engineers try to figure out just what in the world is going on in the US. If you like this, you’ll like the rest of the audiobook, too.

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Breaking Bad

My voice finally seemed able to start recording again. I spent time last evening reviewing the opening chapters of “Foes and Rivals,” realizing I need to create voice for old Mrs. Brunelli, John’s mother and now Nichole 5’s friend. An old woman. Yeah, sure… I’ve got that ready right here…

That, coupled with today’s wonderful spring weather, had me behave badly and go out onto my deck with the laptop rather than down into the basement. My personal fail. To my credit, I guess, is that while I’m not supposed to be writing anything in this time of audiobooks, I put down 3500 words in the last six hours. And, I had so much fun doing it! There’s more of Prince Edward and Livia below the fold. Later, there is a confrontation largely between Empress Faustina and Prime Minister Reina (of Russia), with Ed playing a bit part as something of a sacrifice. That surprised me!

Forming on another chapter, Edward and his little group makes their way to Galveston and Captain Rupert/Princess Ryland. I’ve just seen their meeting. I had thought her divorced. I was wrong. I… I think it explains a little about Liv, in retrospect. Speaking of whom…

Continue reading “Breaking Bad” →

Libel and Slander

The mnemonic I developed for these is that “libel is literary and slander is spoken.” Neither of which has anything to do with this post.

Point One: the 650 raw minutes of the audio of “Friend and Ally” are complete. The first-pass rough editing is complete. Thanks to a friend’s gifted “how to use Audacity” course, it now is taking me 45 minutes to flog a chapter into shape for ACX rather than three hours. Better: I see how I can improve that for next time. The nagging issue is that I AM EFFING SICK TO DEATH OF HEARING MY OWN VOICE! I didn’t really hear it while acting (and audiobooks is voice-acting, not reading) but having to go through this twice…! Sick of it! And Wednesday is almost upon us!*

Point Two: I’d been sitting on the first three paragraphs of a micro-story for two months now. Again with Chief Daniel Hill, but this is at the other end of the telescope, when he first settled his people as the hundred million dead of the Breakup was happening around them. No such things as coincidences, a stranger wanders through their kononia.

*I shall be appearing as the featured guest on the Star Chamber on Wednesday, March 10th, at 2100 Eastern US time. It’s recorded, so don’t think you have to get up early or stay up late.

Below the fold: an unexpected visitor to the tribe of Sardis Lake.

Continue reading “Libel and Slander” →

“Friend and Ally”: audio raws complete

Twenty chapters plus prologue and epilogue… that’s about 650 minutes. At least when I’m editing all that I don’t have to be in my Fortress of Quietude in the 45F basement. Step one will be removing my screw-ups; those are the spikes on the image below the fold, from a typical file. When I flubbed something, I would cough or yell “pop!” into the mic to give me a visual cue of where I need to fix something. Still, I’ll have to listen to everything in its entirety to make sure.

Once that is complete, then I can turn to the technical bits of Noise Removal, Normalization, Equalization, and so on. My target for commercial release is Easter, so I’ve less than forty days to go. The steepest learning curve will be getting things into a format that will satisfy ACX… I recall problems when I experimented last July. So long as my liver holds out, I’ll make it.

Continue reading ““Friend and Ally”: audio raws complete” →

Audiobook waypoint

Having begun recording on January 24th, just today, February 4th, I have completed the raws for Part One of Friend & Ally. That’s about 230 minutes of me yammering into my microphone and pausing Audacity whenever the dogs start barking or someone flushes the toilet upstairs.

Part Two will be much rougher on my voice as one of the tertiary characters is General Tessmer. His voice is based upon that of Admiral Halsey’s from the movie Midway (2019). That should have me mute for most of the rest of this month and into March. How will I manage Part Three?

Writing. It’s a mental illness.

The group blog of Liberty’s Torch is well worth your time and well worth your follow. I think I may have wandered in there via Gab but I drink much and recall little. Anyway. The lead blogger there, Francis W. Porretto, had a post today about writing. Many of my heart-cockles were warmed by it. Rather than hijack his comment section, I hope to take excerpts of his essay, Post Partum, and add my observations.

“It’s a difficult period in any novelist’s life: he can’t go forward while his thoughts are wrapped around the book he just finished, and he can’t go backward with the revisions he’s already thought of until the others involved have registered their various contributions.”

That only briefly happened to me once, at the conclusion of “Echoes of Family Lost.” It was a follow-on to “The Fourth Law” and once complete I had no idea what to do next. Was I a writer? Did I have more stories to tell? Five years ago, I carved out a space here on WordPress and started throwing 800-1500 word-salad at the screen. Some stuck. I kept going. By the time I got a cover design for EoFL, I had met Chris and Kat, from “Cursed Hearts.” A romance/horror? WTF? I hate both of those! I shut up and wrote what they told me to.

“The first requirement of any storyteller is a mating between characters and crises: people upon whom to impose problems they must solve, or at least cope with. I developed a bunch of attractive character sketches almost by accident – I still wonder from time to time where those fictional figures really came from – and immediately found ways to cast them into conflict with one another.”

I take exception to almost every word in this. The first requirement of a storyteller is to tell stories. It is the height of arrogance to think you really know what the characters’ problems really are. As to where these people come from? Well, if you’ve read along these few years, you know how I have addressed that. Further, I’ve never made a single ‘character sketch;’ they walk onto the stage/screen and act. I just write what they show me.

“But characters don’t struggle with their problems and one another in some sort of white space separate from all else; at least, mine don’t. They need a place to be. I had to pick a place, or conceive of one, that would provide a suitable stage on which to act out their destinies.”

My parents married unemployed with no money. I didn’t grow up poor, but summer vacations were KOA’s and the grandparent’s place in Los Alamos, NM. I saw a lot of the US Mountain West. Later, I learned some of the Kentucky/Tennessee regions. All of that curled up in the back of my mind… and waited. When I needed to put ‘boots on the ground,’ I had scores of places to choose, right behind my eyes.

“Of the sixteen full-length novels I’ve written to date, only four have stayed completely outside Onteora County: three far-future science fiction novels and one magic-based high fantasy. The others have wound up there regardless of where they started or where I wanted to put them. Worse, the characters from my other Onteora Canon novels keep insinuating themselves into my new fictions.”

Knoxville, Tennessee is my game park as Onteora County is for him. I’m thinking about moving there in 5-10 years; Knoxville, that is. It will be easier for me than, say, St. Petersburg, Russia… Osaka, Japan… or Mars.

“And by jingo, it happened again! Characters from just about every other Onteora Canon novel started insisting that they belonged in this new one. I managed to fit a few new faces into the tale, but the “old Onteora crew” is there in force.”

This is where I decided to write this huge response. One character leading to another… As I mentioned, “Echoes…” was a natural continuation of “The Fourth Law.” “Cursed Hearts” lead to an unpublishable novella (I set it in someone else’s sandbox). But the two books of The Saga of Nichole 5? That main character shows up in many more books. Three year old Gary, holding little Henge’s hand at the end of “Echoes…” announces they want to be married. Ten years later, they have their own novel, “Worlds Without End.” Writing that, I met Gary’s kid sister, Faustina. Nine years later she puts together a private army and decided to attack the Chicom PLA garrison in Savannah, former Georgia. To-date, I’m finishing a damn trilogy about her, starting to come out in November. The father of the young women from “The Fourth Law” and “Echoes…”? He’s got a book. I’ve dozens of people like this, scattered all over my stories. Just because they do not have their own book today means nothing for next week.

“I don’t feel an urge to go back and “straighten it out.” I plan to publish it essentially as it is. There are a few elements I’ve decided need buttressing, but not to the extent of “de-hybridizing” the book as it stands. I look forward to hearing what its readers will think of it.”

While I cut my SF reading teeth as a kid on the hard science fiction of Niven and Pournelle, and my future history of Machine Civilization is bedrocked on sentient, sapient machines, I admit I take fantastical, Clarke’s-Third-Law leaps with the tech in my stories, so long as it tells the story. I read much, do research, make sure I’m talking about qubits in the right way… but if I need to use handwavium, that is what the story gets. I’m talking about people; some of whom are bags of bolts; some of whom are bags of blood. They are people.

“I can’t help but wonder how many more books I have in me. I’m old, and not in the best of health. But storytelling is an addiction, a tough one to shake. And I imagine that those damned Onteora characters, settings, and institutions will continue to have their way with me. At least, they have so far.”

I am a semi-professional alcoholic with chronic hypertension just turned fifty-four. Once the trilogy of Faustina’s “American Imperium” is released to the wild, I’m spending Winter 2021 recording audiobooks. I’ve no idea how long I have, either, but we have been given a priceless gift: to touch other’s minds with our ideas. I will keep at it until I die, later or sooner.

Having said all that to say this: thank you for your inspiration and your hard work, Mr. Porretto. As Empress Faustina cries to her legions, Deus vult!