Now available on Audible.com or other sites like Amazon.
Thanks to Pat and to Bernard for letting us know.
Very much appreciated.
Month: December 2016
Categories
R.I.P. Carrie Fisher
Nothing to say, except that you were a role model. Not just in the characters you played, but in how you showed us all how you can rise above your own problems.
Not only that, you were a great writer.
We went for a walk around our neighbourhood last night to see the Christmas lights.
If anything epitomises change, this is it. The students are moving out, families are moving in. And with the families come the family-like things that we hadn’t even realised people around here didn’t do much—until they started doing them.
Young children in the street. People walking their dogs. Decorating the house at Christmas time.
Change has crept up on us.
So has Christmas, and the end of another year.
We’ve been busy, both at work and with writing. Some specific highlights for us were the release of Alliance and Confluence, selling our first foreign rights (Japanese), and the new book.
We’ve both got the week off, and we’re looking forward to relaxing. Reading a book or two, writing some more, seeing some movies.
Here’s wishing all of you a happy holiday and best wishes for the festive season.
Categories
So much to write, so little time
A lot of people have asked when the next Linesman book is coming, and what it will be about.
Here are our writing plans at present. Everything is subject to change, and, also, to contracts, because if we don’t get contracts for the books then we can’t sell them.
We’ll definitely write them, though.
More Ean Lambert
We have another trilogy planned with Ean Lambert as the main character. These books follow on from Confluence.
I don’t want to give away spoilers, but … The New Alliance is settling into the changes that resulted from the end of that book. Captain Terrigal is ship captain, trying to believe that his mentor, Admiral Katida, hasn’t betrayed him, while struggling with the knowledge that his ship doesn’t automatically do what he says first.
The lines ships are starting to get personalities.
There’s a new ship being integrated into the Eleven fleet, because Abram wants the new ship, and the Wendell, to go alien hunting.
But before they can do that, the aliens bring their war to human territory. Along with their ideas on how the lines should be treated.
And those ideas don’t necessarily match with those of Ean’s; or of the ships under his line twelve custodianship.
We haven’t started writing this series at all.
This is about as much of we know of any story plot before we start writing. More than most, because we have backstory we don’t normally have. What we need now is a better idea of the aliens. They’re still unformed.
Stars Uncharted
Edit: March 2020. This post was written after we had finished the Linesman books, and while we were writing Stars Uncharted. We’ve kept the post entire, rather than edit it and what we say about the Linesman books are still valid, but both the Stars Uncharted books are published now.
This is the book we are contracted* to write next.
It is not a Linesman book.
It’s actually the book we started writing while Linesman was doing the rounds. Back when we thought Linesman wasn’t going to sell and we’d have to start something completely fresh. We stopped about a quarter of the way in, to rewrite Linesman. But it was the first story we went back to when we were done with Confluence.
We love it. We’re enjoying it. It’s a space opera adventure with a bit of fun, characters we both love, and lots of things happening. (Less politics, for those of you who found there was too much politics in the Linesman books.)
It’s set in a totally different universe.
*Normally we wouldn’t even say we have the contract yet, but it has been announced in Publisher’s Lunch and in Locus, and we’ve been told we can mention it. Even so, we feel a bit superstitious about even saying this until we get the paper in our hand. Contracts take a long time, and can fall through. We’ll give you more details once we have that paper.
Fact, for all the writers out there. We got our contract to sign for the Linesman books around the same time we submitted the finished Linesman to our editor.
Other books in the Linesman universe
While our agent was first trying to sell Linesman, and before we began Stars Uncharted, we wrote two other stories in the Linesman series. Back then, we weren’t planning to write three books about Ean Lambert. We planned books set in the same universe, but with different protagonists. The first of these was Acquard’s War. (Readers of this blog who remember us talking about Acquard, we’ve recently added the ‘War’, because we now we want to do a second book, Acquard’s Revenge as well.)
This is the story of a retired Balian covert ops team who get tangled up with space pirates, which drags them into the war between the New Alliance and Gate Union/Redmond. It’s set at the end of Linesman, just after the New Alliance is created, but before they move to permanent headquarters on Haladea III.
We don’t know if there’s a market for non-Ean Lambert stories. It’s one of three ideas we offered to Caitlin, our agent, when she asked what we were writing next. She liked Stars Uncharted better, so that’s the one we worked on.
We love the ideas in this story. We adore the characters. And therein lies the problem.
People soup.
Both our agent and our editor (and also some of our readers) think we include too many characters in our stories. (And they’re right.) . The first thing both of them ask us to do in any edit is to reduce the number of characters.
Most times we can. But we’re struggling with Acquard’s crew. She has a crew of seven, and there’s a lot happening in the rest of the book as well. If we don’t fix it, this story has to become a trunk novel.
We’re going to fix it.
When we get the time.
As you can see from the title, we’re in the middle of renovating our kitchen. We’re also in the middle of writing a novel. The process has similarities.
What a great idea
You go in with nothing but your imagination. You have this great idea, and because nothing is real yet, you know this is going to be the best book/kitchen ever.
The reality of the synopsis
Because we’re writing to contract now, the synopsis comes before the book. It sells the book.
Likewise, the design sells the kitchen.
Even so, what’s on the page is only an outline of what’s to come.
Signing the contract
We’ve agreed to this. It’s real. Have we done the right thing?
Day one
The first chapter. It’s basic. It’s rough, but it’s done. The novel shows promise.
Day one of a kitchen renovation is demolition. The bones of the kitchen look old and grotty, but it’s going to look better. You know it will.
The first draft
The cabinets go in. It looks … ordinary. Not much different from what you had before. You wonder if you did the right thing.
The first draft of your novel is rough. It’s the bare outline. It’s a mess in places. You wonder how you’ll be able to pull it together.
Subsequent drafts
In the kitchen the doors of the cabinets go on. The stove goes in. The sink. A plumber arrives and you have a sink and a working dishwasher. An electrician arrives and you have lights that work. A plasterer comes and adds architraves. A painter comes.
It’s starting to show promise.
Each draft of the novel improves it. You submit your novel. Your editor and agent get help you to improve it.
The wow factor
The novel is edited. It gets a cover. It turns into a book. Wow.
Our kitchen hasn’t got its wow factor yet, but we already know it will be the splashback. (Either that or it will be an epic fail.)
It’s like a book. We won’t know the end product until we get there.
Categories
Exhausted
Confluence has been out nearly a week now.
Thank you, all of you, you said some great things about the book.
Lots of you have asked about the next book. We will blog about this later, but we do touch on it in an interview with DJ on MyLifeMyBooksMyEscape which does touch briefly on what we’re doing next.
Again, thank you, for your response to the book.