Posts tagged as “The Clockwork Time Machine”

Climbing the Mountain

Published April 24, 2015 by centaur

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I recently was talking with Debra Dixon, my editor for the Dakota Frost series, and we realized that if we wanted SPECTRAL IRON, Dakota Frost #4, to come out next year, we needed to get a final book (from me) in her hands by January to have time to edit it before year was out.

Given that when we had this conversation we had not yet finished LIQUID FIRE (book 3) and I have yet to edit THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, this caused some understandable panic.

So, rather than keeping to my schedule to work on part 2 of PHANTOM SILVER (book 5) during this April, I decided to bump up my schedule and work on part 3 of SPECTRAL IRON so I'd have a draft done early this year.

I think it's working - the story is coalescing - but as you can see from above, the copyediting and page proofing of LIQUID FIRE ate up a lot of my time to write SPECTRAL IRON.

So I'm scrambling. Probably few blog posts until this month's 50,000 added words are done.

Onward!

-Anthony

Oasis

Published March 3, 2015 by centaur

One of the roles conferences fulfill in my life is a chance to recharge. I'm driven to pursue writing, art, comics, software, entrepreneurship, publishing, movies - but I was raised to be responsible, so I have an equally demanding day job that pays the bills for all these activities until such time that they can pay for themselves.

Sometimes I describe this as having four jobs - my employment (search engines and robots), writing (primarily the Dakota Frost and Jeremiah Willstone series), comics (mostly related to 24 Hour Comic Day through Blitz Comics), and publishing (Thinking Ink Press, a new niche publisher trying to get awesome things into your hands).

Having four jobs means that you sometimes want to take a break.

That's really difficult if you don't have an excuse. There are literally hundreds of items on my to-do list that I could work on right now, all day and all night. If I finish one, a dozen more are clamoring for my attention - and that's not counting the time I want to spend with my wife, friends, and cats, or the time I need to spend on exercise, bills and laundry.

But a few oases exist.

Layovers in airports are one of those: I deliberately arrange for long layovers, because between plane flights you have nothing else to do other than grab a bite and a drink in an airport restaurant, chill out, and read something. True, I often work on writing during layovers, but it's big-picture stuff, researchy, looking at the picture on a scale larger than I normally do.

Conferences are even better. Whether it's GDC, AAAI, Dragon Con, Comic Con or Clockwork Alchemy, conferences are filled with new information, interesting books, even more interesting people, which spark my imagination - right at the time that I'm in an enforced multi-day or even week-long break from my schedule.

For a long time, conferences have been a great time to pull out the laptop and/or notebook to write or sketch. The idea for the Jeremiah Willstone series started after I saw some great steampunk costumes at Dragon Con; I sold the Dakota Frost series after Nancy Knight saw me writing at Dragon Con and pointed me to my editor Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books.

More recently, I've been adding to this the power of ruts. This is something that I need to expand at greater length, but suffice it to say I used to think I simply had to do something different every day, every week, every month. I used to keep lists of restaurants and tried to make sure that I never went to the same one two days in a row, trying new ones periodically.

But then I noticed that I really enjoyed certain things, but didn't always fully take advantage of them because of this strategy - great places to eat, cool coffee houses, and nice bookstores that I simply didn't visit often enough. Often, on top of this strategy, my schedule would change, making it hard to visit them - or worse, they'd go out of business, and those opportunities were lost.

So I've started cultivating habits - ruts - to do the things that I like. Not too frequently - you don't want to burn out on them - but if you do the same thing all the time, then you can be free to miss it any time. Even better, if you find a great thing that's efficient - like a place to eat near work, with a late night coffee house conducive to writing - take advantage of it regularly.

Because one day it may be gone.

At conferences, I employ this strategy with a series of life hacks - go to breakfast before the conference to up your energy level and organize your thoughts, pick the best breakfast place for writing and reading, break for lunch at 11:30 to 11:45 to miss the lunch rush, and also find the best place where there are no lines and concentration can be had.

At GDC, I've found a good set of hotels near the conference, a few good breakfast joints on the walk to the Moscone Center and a few places to eat slightly off the beaten path that are pretty empty just before noon - and I hit these places again and again, pulling out my notebook and tackling problems which are really big picture for me, mostly related to future game projects.

At Dragon Con I do similar things - hitting the Flying Biscuit breakfast joint that appears in Dakota Frost, getting coffee at the Starbucks in the Georgia Tech Bookstore, hitting the Willy's lunch counter that inspired the Jeremiah Willstone story "Steampunk Fairy Chick," et cetera, et cetera; and at each one I pull out the notebook and work on big picture story ideas.

These places are real oases for me: a break within a break, a special place set aside for thinking within a special time already set aside for recharging. Because of how human memory works, sometimes I can even pull out a notebook (or an older notebook), find my place from last year, and pick up where I left off, plotting my future in an oasis of creative contentment.

This, of course, is my strategy, that works for me - but it works so well, I encourage you to find a strategy that works for you too.

-the Centaur

It was a good weekend …

Published May 28, 2014 by centaur

… and not just because I sold 22 copies of my books at Clockwork Alchemy. Though that was a big part of it, the sales themselves aren't what really mattered to me; it was that 22 copies of my books are in people's hands, and they were in people's hands because for the very first time, I had an author's table.

For the four days that I sat behind that author's table, behind a fort of my books and my postcards and my wife's steampunk gears and shelves and even a small tiger, I became part of a community of people - and not just even the wonderful people at the Clockwork Alchemy author's alley, whom I hope to see again for years and years to come.

No, I became a part of the broader community of science fiction authors, connecting with their readers through science fiction conventions, the way I myself first really connected with the science fiction community, after many years of reading alone. I've been a published author for years, and written in a small community for longer, but now I feel connected as never before.

This is a new level of interaction, a new level of connection, a new opportunity for a whole family to create an author's delight by buying their books and holding them over their heads like mouse ears. Somehow, everything feels more real to me, and I am more inspired than ever before to keep writing and to get the ideas in my head out … and into yours.

I hope we both enjoy it! God bless,

-the Centaur

Sunday’s Events at Clockwork Alchemy

Published May 24, 2014 by centaur

Today's talk on Real Women of the Victorian Era, led by the redoubtable T.E. MacArthur, went well. In a weird bit of synergy, an audiobook I was reading, Victorian Britain in the Great Courses series, had a section on Florence Nightingale which was not just directly relevant … it played just as I was driving up to the hotel. Perfect.

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 25th, I will be appearing on the panels Avoiding Historical Mistakes at noon in the Monterey Room (it is rumored that Harry Turtledove will be on the panel as well) and Victorian Technology at 2pm in the San Carlos room (not 1 as I said earlier), and giving a solo talk on The Science of Airships at 4pm also at San Carlos.

The rest of the time, I will largely be at my table above, which will look more or less like you see it above, except I may be wearing a different outfit. :-D

-the Centaur

I Have Landed at Clockwork Alchemy

Published May 24, 2014 by centaur

I have landed at Clockwork Alchemy. (Technically, I arrived yesterday). In 11 minutes, I am appearing on a panel on Real Women in the Victorian Era, even though it is not listed on my personal schedule.

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Oh, and I almost forgot: this is my very first booth of my own!

The Weird Experience of Marketing Yourself

Published May 21, 2014 by centaur

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This Memorial Day weekend, I will be at the Clockwork Alchemy conference, appearing on three panels (Real Women in Victorian Times Saturday at noon, Avoiding Historical Mistakes Sunday at noon, and Victorian Technology, Sunday at 1) and giving one talk (my old standby, The Science of Airships, Sunday at 4).

Since I won't be at my table the whole time, I decided to print up a series of postcards for all of my books using the service at Moo.com, which I and my wife have found to be great for printing customized business cards with a variety of artwork on the cover. I decided to do one for each book, showing the cover on one side and a blurb on the back.

But then I discovered that, just like for the business cards themselves, while you can have many different covers on the front, you get only one choice for the back. So what should go on that single back cover? What should it market? Then I realized: I don't have a book coming out right away. These cards actually have to market … me.

Ulp.

More precisely, the cards have to market my work. But I'm not a single-series author; I can't (yet) pull a George R. R. Martin and just say "author of Game of Thrones," especially not at a steampunk convention when my most prominent series, Dakota Frost, is actually urban fantasy. "Anthony Francis, author of Dakota Frost - who? Author of what? Ok, fine … but why is he here?"

So I have to list not just one series, but all of them, and not just list them, but say what they're about.

After some thought, I decided to use some of my own comic art that I'd previously used on my business cards as a backdrop, but to focus the content of the cards on my writing, not my comics (sorry, f@nu fiku and Blitz Comics … there just wasn't enough room on the cards or poster), unifying all of my books under a theme of "The Worlds of Anthony Francis". I feel like breaking out in hives when I write that. It sounds so damn aggrandized and pompous. But strictly speaking … it's accurate.

One of my worlds is the fantastic space of the Allied universe, where genetically engineered centaurs hop from world to world like skipping stones in the river (collected in the anthology STRANDED). Another is the hyper-feminist alternate history steampunk adventures of Jeremiah Willstone (collected in the anthologies UnCONventional and DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME). And yet another is the world of Dakota Frost, Skindancer, and the magic tattoos she can bring to life (FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, and the forthcoming LIQUID FIRE). And I hope you choose to read all of them! Enter the worlds, indeed.

But if I want people to read them, I need to tell people about them, in terms that make people, I dunno, actually want to read the books. Normally it's a publisher who writes that copy, but they're generally marketing a book, not me. I don't yet have a publicist, and even if I did, the entire point of me is to do as many of the tasks of creative production myself as is practical, so I can speak at least quasi-intelligently about the process - case in point, the graphic design of the postcard above, which will be a blog post in its own right. But this isn't about that part of the process; it's about the feeling.

One thing I've learned is that no-one knows that you write unless you actually tell them about it, and no-one buys what you write unless they know it can be bought. SO I have to do at least the first stab at this all by myself (not counting help from cats). I have to try to summarize my work, to bite the bullet and actually sell it, and to package that sales language up in ways that get it out to people - starting with a series of postcards to put on my table. And oh, yes, to blog it: to finally lift my head far enough above the waters to shout, yes, world, I am here, and no, I don't need a life preserver: I need you to buy some of my books.

It still feels weird saying that.

I guess I'll have to get over it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the back of the postcards I printed for my table, featuring my own art; me, in a potential author publicity picture; and Gabby, helping me organize my book files and promotional materials.

Jeremiah Willstone Is on Her Way

Published February 2, 2014 by centaur

At long last, I have sent to the publisher my fourth completed novel, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE: A Story of Love, Corsets, Rayguns, and the Conquest of the Galactic Habitable Zone.

This has been a long time in coming - in part because I had the not-so-bright idea of doing a related anthology, DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME, which has put me a solid year behind on my other writing projects - and in part because I had a lot of work to do. Lots of authors put their manuscripts through heavy revision, but the way I track changes gives a pretty clear view of my process:

Draft History
Started: September 7, 2009
Rough Draft: July 13, 2011
First Draft: March 10, 2012
Beta Draft: March 25, 2012
Beta Read: December 1, 2013
Gamma Edit: December 12, 2013
Gamma Draft: February 1, 2014

What’s less clear is the amount of research that goes into these books. For the story “The Doorway to Extra Time” I read parts of over 20 books on time travel. For THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, with its alternate histories and their intricate relationships, I read far more - dozens and dozens of books and hundreds and hundreds of web pages.

Now all that’s done, and the book is off to Debra Dixon at Bell Bridge Books. Hopefully I’ve learned from previous edits what it takes to make a great book; if not, I’m sure she’ll tell me.

As always, I leave you with an excerpt:

Lightning gouged a chunk of the wainscoting an inch from Jeremiah Willstone’s head and she hurled herself back, bumping down the stairs on her tailcoat, firing both Kathodenstrahls again and again until the oak doorpanels were blasted into sparks and splinters.

Her shoulders hit the landing hard enough to rattle her teeth, but Jeremiah didn’t lose her grip: she just kept both guns trained on the cracked door, watching foxfire shimmer off its hinges and knobs. The crackling green tracers crept around the frame, and with horror she realized the door was reinforced with newly-added iron bands. She’d intended to blast the thing apart and deny her enemy cover, but had just created more arrowholes for him-or-her to shoot through.

Jeremiah muttered a curse: the doors weren’t supposed to be reinforced! The Newfoundland Airship Conservatory was a relic, near sixty years old—and electric pistols had barely been invented when it was built in the 1850’s, much less Faraday armor. Yet this lot of miscreants had managed to erect in a few days barriers proof to the most modern thermionic blasters. In over nine years as an Expeditionary fighting the mad men and women who sought to let Foreign monsters onto the Earth, she’d never encountered a force as well-prepared as Lord Christopherson’s.

It made sense—the man had been in the Victoriana Defense League, and had their full playbook—yet there were dark rumors that he’d been bankrolled by Restorationist forces who threatened not just the Crown, but the Liberation Jeremiah held so dear. Given her history with the man, she hadn’t found the rumors surprising—but the complete lack of women soldiers among his ‘footmen’ practically confirmed them. Lord Christopherson wasn’t just in love with the monsters: he wanted to upend the whole Victorianan order. The man had to be stopped.

As the foxfire dissipated, the crackling continued, and Jeremiah’s eyes flicked aside to see sparks escaping the broken glass of her left Kathodenstrahl’s vacuum tubes. Its thermionics were shot, so she tossed the electric gun aside with a curse and checked the charge canister on her remaining Kathodenstrahl. The little brass bead was hovering between three and four notches. Briefly she thought of swapping canisters, but a slight creak upstairs refocused her attention.

No. You only need three shots. Keep them pinned, wait for reinforcements.

Now that Jeremiah is on her way, I’m returning my attention to LIQUID FIRE, which has a due date of April 1st, with a hopeful publication date in August. Wish me well, and hope that I have a picture like the following for LIQUID FIRE ready in the next month or so…

-the Centaur

The Doorway opens wider

Published July 28, 2013 by centaur

The proof copy of DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME has arrived. I will be reviewing it on the plane and, God willing, we'll have it in time for the premiere at Dragon Con.

I almost didn't get this. By an odd coincidence, I was heading to the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, one of the Dragon Con hotels, right when the proof arrived at the publisher, so they sent it to the hotel, hoping that I could review it over the weekend.

I got off the red eye, scouted locations for LIQUID FIRE, HEX CODE and another Edgeworld project, then checked in to the hotel. No book. I went to the rehearsal dinner. No book. The next day came and went, a good friend got married, but still, no book.

Even when I checked out Sunday, still, no book. I and my friends had a great time at the post wedding brunch, visited the Georgia Aquarium, and ate an awesome meal at Legal Seafood, and then started ferrying friends to the airport ... then a friend suggested I call the hotel.

The proof had been accidentally sent to hotel security.

So at the last minute, I swung by, hung out with the concierge until the guard showed up, then showed my ID to security. Moments later, DOORWAYS was in my hands.

Sometimes, it all works out.

Time to check out the DOORWAYS and make sure they're safe to open. Wish me luck!

-the Centaur

My Labors Are Not Ended

Published June 26, 2013 by centaur

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But I am going to take a rest for a bit.

Above you see a shot of my cat Lenora resting in front of the "To Read Science Fiction" section of my Library, the enormous book collection I've been accumulating over the last quarter century. I have books older than that, of course, but they're stored in my mother's house in my hometown. It's only over the last 25 years or so have I been accumulating my own personal library.

But why am I, if not resting, at least thinking about it? I finished organizing the books in my Library.

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I have an enormous amount of papers, bills, bric a brac and other memorabilia still to organize, file, trash or donate, but the Library itself is organized, at last. It's even possible to use it.

How organized? Well...

Religion, politics, economics, the environment, women's studies, Ayn Rand, read books, Lovecraft, centaur books, read urban fantasy, read science fiction, Atlanta, read comics, to-read comics, to-read science fiction magazines, comic reference books, drawing reference books, steampunk, urban fantasy, miscellaneous writing projects, Dakota Frost, books to donate, science fiction to-reads: Asimov, Clarke, Banks, Cherryh, miscellaneous, other fiction to-reads, non-fiction to-reads, general art books, genre art books, BDSM and fetish magazines and art books, fetish and sexuality theory and culture, military, war, law, space travel, astronomy, popular science, physics of time travel, Einstein, quantum mechanics, Feynman, more physics, mathematics, philosophy, martial arts, health, nutrition, home care, ancient computer manuals, more recent computer manuals, popular computer books, the practice of computer programming, programming language theory, ancient computer languages, Web languages, Perl, Java, C and C++, Lisp, APL, the Art of Computer Programming, popular cognitive science, Schankian cognitive science, animal cognition, animal biology, consciousness, dreaming, sleep, emotion, personality, cognitive science theory, brain theory, brain philosophy, evolution, human evolution, cognitive evolution, brain cognition, memory, "Readings in …" various AI and cogsci disciplines, oversized AI and science books, conference proceedings, technical reports, game AI, game development, robotics, imagery, vision, information retrieval, natural language processing, linguistics, popular AI, theory of AI, programming AI, AI textbooks, AI notes from recent projects, notes from college from undergraduate through my thesis, more Dakota Frost, GURPS, other roleplaying games, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, more Dakota Frost, recent projects, literary theory of Asimov and Clarke, literary theory of science fiction, science fiction shows and TV, writing science fiction, mythology, travel, writing science, writing reference, writers on writing, writing markets, poetry, improv, voice acting, film, writing film, history of literature, representative examples, oversized reference, history, anthropology, dictionaries, thesauri, topical dictionaries, language dictionaries, language learning, Japanese, culture of Japan, recent project papers, comic archives, older project papers, tubs containing things to file … and the single volume version of the Oxford English Dictionary, complete with magnifying glass.

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I deliberately left out the details of many categories and outright omitted a few others not stored in the library proper, like my cookbooks, my display shelves of Arkham House editions, Harry Potter and other hardbacks, my "favorite" nonfiction books, some spot reading materials, a stash of transhumanist science fiction, all the technical books I keep in the shelf next to me at work … and, of course, my wife and I's enormous collection of audiobooks.

What's really interesting about all that to me is there are far more categories out there in the world not in my Library than there are in my Library. Try it sometime - go into a bookstore or library, or peruse the list of categories in the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal System Classifications. There's far more things to think about than even I, a borderline hoarder with a generous income and enormous knowledge of bookstores, have been able to accumulate in a quarter century.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

-the Centaur

The Science of Airships, Redux

Published May 24, 2013 by centaur

Once again, I will be giving a talk on The Science of Airships at Clockwork Alchemy this year, this time at 11AM on Monday. I had to suffer doing all the airship research for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, so you should too! Seriously, I hope the panel is fun and informative and it was received well at previous presentations. From the online description:

Steampunk isn't just brown, boots and buttons: our adventurers need glorious flying machines! This panel will unpack the science of lift, the innovations of Count Zeppelin, how airships went down in flames, and how we might still have cruise liners of the air if things had gone a bit differently. Anthony Francis is a science fiction author best known for his Dakota Frost urban fantasy series, beginning with the award winning FROST MOON. His forays into Steampunk include two stories and the forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

Yes, yes, I know THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE is long in forthcoming, but at least it's closer now. I'll also be appearing on two panels, "Facts with Your Fiction" moderated by Sharon Cathcartat 5pm on Saturday and "Multi-cultural Influences in Steampunk" moderated by Madeline Holly at 5pm on Sunday. With that, BayCon and Fanime, looks to be a busy weekend.

-the Centaur

Blogging is like a job. One I’m bad at.

Published February 17, 2013 by centaur

One of the things I've always felt about myself is that I'm slow. I have ideas for fiction, but before I ever develop them, I see them brought to completion by someone else. When I was a child, I had a wonderful story involving spacecraft made to look like sailing ships, only to turn on my television to find that it had been done in Doctor Who.

Next I read Drexler's Engines of Creation shortly after it came out and planned a series of nanotech stories, before I'd ever read another science fiction author dealing with the theme. I was in college, still trying to finish my first novel, which I'd updated to include nanotechnology, when Michael Flynn published The Nanotech Chronicles.

Now in the blogoverse, things have gotten worse.

It's bad enough that my evil twin Warren Ellis, a man only one year older than me, has propelled himself to the pinnacle of the writing profession using only whisky and a cane while still blogging more than anyone could believe. Warren Ellis has his own ideas and I don't feel like we're competing in the same headspace.

No, my it's my nemesis John Scalzi, who has not only beaten me to the punch on the serialized novel The Human Division - I'm pretty sure my own designed-for-serialization novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE predates it, but my novel is still in beta draft while his is like, you know, released to accolades and stuff - but also somehow seems to have plugged into my brain by beating my blog to the punch on his Hobbit at 48 Frames Per Second impressions and his attempts to tame a feral cat - I mean, come on! Everyone saw The Hobbit but even if Scalzi has a direct pipeline to my brain, how does one arrange to have a feral cat fortuitously run by one's door so one can tame it right when someone else does? Is there a service for such things? Synchronicity Unlimited?

Now dark mental wizard Caitlin Kiernan has beaten me to the punch by blogging about the correct pronunciation of kudzu.

Sigh.

Alright, thanks, Caitlin, for breaking the ice on one of my pet peeves. For the record: if you are recording an audiobook and have a Southern character speaking or thinking, they will pronounce the Borg-like pest vine kudzu "CUD-zoo." A character who lives in another part of the country can call it "kood-zoo" all they want, but in my 38 years in The South I never heard it pronounced that, nor, after nine months of research, have I been able to find anyone from The South who calls it anything other than "CUD-zoo," nor have any of those people ever heard anyone from anywhere call it anything other than "CUD-zoo". (And Wikipedia backs me - it claims the pronunciation is /ˈkʊdzuː/, with the first u pronounced as the u in full and the second pronounced as the oo in food).

It wasn't so hard to say that, was it? Why didn't I say that earlier, nine months ago, when I first heard it in an audiobook (I think in The Magnolia League, but it might have been Fallen)? I know I've been busy, but how hard was it? But, according to the timestamp on the image I downloaded of Loki at the start of this blogpost, I've been at this "little" blogpost for about an hour.

What I'm saying is, blogging is like a job. You find things, reflect on them, and post about them; it takes time to do it right. But I already work two jobs: I've got a slightly-more-than-full-time job at The Search Engine That Starts With A G, and I'm also a slightly-less-than-full-time writer. So this, my third job, has to come behind hanging out with my wife, friends and cats. I'm taking time out from editing an anthology to write this, and that's taking out time from Dakota Frost #3 and THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

So: yes, I know. Lots to say, lots to do. Gun control. The Hobbit. Meteors falling from the sky and a drill making its way to a creepy buried lake in Antarctica. I'm working on it, I'm working on it - but two editors have claim on my writing first, and the provider of the paycheck that pays for this laptop has first claim on my time before that.

So if the freshness date on these blogposts is not always the greatest, well, sorry, but I'm typing as fast as I can.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, our non-feral outdoor cat, who has grown very fat and but not very sassy given lots of love and can food.

Going Gonzo

Published January 26, 2013 by centaur

It would be hard to adequately describe the story I'm working on now in between gaps of finishing up the anthology Doorways to Extra Time, but from the reading list I have above, you can fairly assume it's going to be gonzo.

Of course, everything that has Jeremiah Willstone in it is a bit gonzo.

-the Centaur

Viiiictory Seven Times

Published November 29, 2012 by centaur

For the seventh time, I've won the National Novel Writing Month "contest", completing 50,000 words of a new novel in just 30 days. Actually, it took me just 29 days. Woohoo!

This year's entry, SPECTRAL IRON, is the fourth book in the Dakota Frost series, my urban fantasy series featuring the best magical tattooist in the Southeast (and she's not afraid to tell you that herself). SPECTRAL IRON was a bit of a detour from the work I was doing to edit LIQUID FIRE, the third entry in the series, but I'm glad I did: SPECTRAL IRON taught me a lot about what makes a book coherent and I can use that to edit LIQUID FIRE.

So what is SPECTRAL IRON about? Originally, I was thinking the story was about a villain that murders ghosts, but now it's looking like the villain is a ghost who's a murderer. Maybe. There are some very interesting plot complications developing. Let me see if I can pull out an excerpt that doesn't give much away. Well, maybe it spoils a minor surprise, but it doesn't give away the plot. This is the kind of thing they'd put in a movie trailer. Regardless ... SPOILERS:

Now, all that was left was to walk down a hundred more yards of train tracks in the dark.

The dolly had left us, but the spotlight had not. The mobile klieg operator wheeled it forward, slowly, tracking me, Ron and Sunny as we walked down the pathetic, waterlogged track. The further we went, the more layers of mystery were stripped off, one by one, by the light.

By the end, we no longer stood in a chasm of night. We merely stood in a dilapidated warehouse loading bay, a long, low brick-walled chamber, weathered with graffiti, with chained-up wooden doors atop its loading dock and beer bottles in the puddles between its train tracks.

“Nothing here,” the Lady Nyissa said. “Nothing obvious, at any rate.”

I stopped before the back wall of the loading dock. It stretched up before us, a mottled wall of brick thirty feet wide and fifty feet high, with a notch cut out of its bottom right by the platform and another cut out the top by a door. Rusted zig-zag metal stairs led up to it.

“Well,” I said, putting my foot on the train-brake at the end of the tracks, staring down at the pathetic mud puddle rippling before us between the end of the tracks and the wall. “It looks like The Exposers have found another Al Capone’s vault.”

Oh, me and my dumb mouth.

From the water erupted a foul spray of black—topped by a bone white mask.

So, there's a few thousand more words of brain dump to go, and then it's back to editing LIQUID FIRE, revising THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, and working on the DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME anthology, oh, and revising my own story for the anthology, "The Doorway to Extra Time" ... aaaa! But at least I have this year's Nano victory to console me:

Regardless, now that Nanowrimo and 24 Hour Comics Day and the Google Holiday Toy Collection are all behind me, I'm looking forward to getting back to my other projects, including all my writing, the Dakota Frost blog, and, heck, I dunno, my wife, friends and cats. Onward and upwards!

-the Centaur

National Novel Writing Month – Spectral Iron

Published November 3, 2012 by centaur

"Everyone's favorite skeptical witch is back for her fourth foray in SPECTRAL IRON!"

Sheesh. I do find it hard to write marketing copy. I just had to stop, right there.

SO ANYWAY, National Novel Writing Month, 2012. My one, two, three, four, five, six ... seventh, SEVENTH time writing 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. It's quite the challenge, but it's the second best thing I've ever done for my writing other than join the Write to the End group - more writing comes out of Nano than (almost) anything else.

How much writing, you ask? (Or maybe you don't, but hey, it's my blog post). Nano itself six times would be only three hundred thousand words, but it was the seed for seven hundred thousand words of text and four completed novels. The Nano's I've done so far were:

DELIVERANCE - 2002 - 150K words - IN PROGRESS
Seven hundred years after the Fall of Humanity, a rag-tag crew of a human spacecraft at the Frontier of space encounters a distress call from a ship owned by the aliens that took the Earth - and encounters one of the humans they left behind, who doesn't seem to think Humanity fell after all ... even though she barely looks human.
Didn't finish this one, even though I eventually got 150,000 words into it. Hope to get back to it someday. My story "Stranded" in the anthology of the same name is set in the same universe, with a YA version of the same setup - the protagonist of "Stranded" is actually the granddaughter of one of the protagonists of DELIVERANCE.
FROST MOON - 2007 - 100K words - DONE
Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist who can bring her tattoos to life, is asked by the police to track a serial killer preying on the magically tattooed around the time of the full moon - and then she encounters a werewolf who wants a tattoo done before the full moon to control his impulses. Has she found the killer ... or the next victim?
Finished this one in 2009, published in 2010.
BLOOD ROCK - 2008 - 150K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now fighting a plague of killer graffiti that is attacking vampires, werewolves and humans alike. As Dakota struggles with this new plague, she finds that fighting it threatens her relationship with her friends, custody over her new daughter---and ultimately, her life.
Finished this one in 2010, published in 2011.
LIQUID FIRE - 2009 - 120K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now struggling to keep her head above water in a magical world which threatens to consume her. A chance meeting on a plane leads her to befriend the beautiful fireweaver Jewel Graceling - but as Jewel increasingly comes under attack, can even Dakota save her?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013.
JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE - 2010 - 100K words - DONE
There's no better defender of the Liberated Territories of Victoriana than Jeremiah Willstone, and she'll tell you that herself! But when her rich and powerful uncle calls down a monster from another world and escapes with it in a time machine, is even the stoutest defender of Liberation up to the challenge?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013.
HEX CODE - 2011 - 55K words - IN PROGRESS
Cinnamon Frost is a street cat turned domestic - where by cat, we mean weretiger, and by domestic, we mean adopted. But can someone who grew up running the streets really learn to settle down in class? Even if they have her favorite thing in the world, math, there's always English class - and if that's not enough, someone may be trying to kill her.
Still working on this one. Hope to finish it in 2013, have it come out in 2014.

Now it's on to SPECTRAL IRON, book 4 in the Dakota Frost series. Pictured above are some of the books I'm reading to "feed my head" for the plot of the book, which involves magical tattoos, piercing, the fae, ghosts, three kinds of zombies, television, and the appropriate relationship of science to skepticism. From the site, here's my blurb:

Dakota Frost is the best magical tattooist in the Southeast - but she's not in the South anymore. Her new role on the Magical Security Council has taken her to the underbelly of San Francisco, and she's got a camera crew dogging her every step as she's trying to map the magical Edgeworld. But when she runs foul of the fae, and is forced to do them a favor, even one of the world's most skilled skindancer may be in trouble.

Because if you don't know how to kill a ghost, how can you track down his murderer?

You need to write 1666 words a day to succeed at Nano, and so far, so good. Halfway through my day, and more than halfway through today's progress. I should easily catch up to where I should be (missed ~300 words yesterday because me and my wife decided to take a long walk and then crash after that, rather than me getting my late night writing run in).

But most of the day is ahead of me. Alright, enough procrastinating. Back to work!

-the Centaur

DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME closes … for now

Published October 15, 2012 by centaur

The submission period for my anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME ends tonight, Monday, October 15th. I turned in my story, "The Doorway to Extra Time" (see what I did there) to my co-editor Trisha Wooldridge a few hours ago; our invited contributor Jody Lynn Nye turned hers in earlier today. The theme of the anthology:

In our busy world of meetings and microwaves, car radios and cellphones, people always wish they could get an extra hour in the day. But what if they could? Doorways to Extra Time is an anthology that explores ways to get extra time (be it an hour, a day, or a decade) and the impact it would have (whether upon a single life, a family or an entire world). We’re looking for stories with a touch of the fantastic--whether mystical, magical, mechanical, or just plain mysterious--but they can be set in any time or any genre: contemporary or historical, science fiction or fantasy, horror or magic realism. We could even find a place for a nonfiction essay if it was truly exceptional. In short, show us something showstopping, and we’ll make time for you.

Well, the time to make time has just about passed. You've got roughly an hour left, Pacific time, to turn in your stories to Spencer Hill Press. (Eastern, you're already out of luck). We've gotten roughly 100 submissions (so far) of which I've seen about 50. I've been excited, though my first time dealing with a "slush pile" has led me to wish for one of the signature doorways of the title.

Now ... on to reading the NEXT 50 stories in the list!

-the Centaur

Pictured: our outdoor cat Loki, about to get the shock of his life as my wife Sandi's TARDIS leaves on its first test flight.

“The Doorway to Extra Time” in Beta Draft

Published August 25, 2012 by centaur

I've just finished the beta draft of "The Doorway to Extra Time," my own contribution to my own anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME (see what I did there?) forthcoming from Spencer Hill Press. It ran a bit long, but that's why I have a co-editor. (Or maybe I should stick to my plan of letting the stories in the anthology be the length they should be). Regardless, here's an excerpt:

“I know what you’re going to do,” the old woman said, “because I’ve done it.”

Jackson flinched from the sparkling deranger that threatened her. It was as yellowed with time as the crone who held it: twin chambers of glass cracked like the woman’s bared teeth, gas capsule as battered as her top hat, glass sights as dented as her spectracles.

“I—I have no idea what you mean,” Jackson said, voice quavering less from fear the gun would addle her tubes than from the fact her statement was ridiculous: the old woman had barred Jackson’s path just as she was about to step one hour into the past through the Riemann Gate.

The Gate was a thing of beauty, a four meter brass ring as fresh as the century, its Art Nouveau outer hull intricately filligreed, its elaborate Tiffany-style service windows hinting at the movement of the original escapement, eternally spinning within a ring of Tesla magnets.

The shimmering plane of its opening swam with possibilities, tiny fluctuations in the shape of space itself. When it was dark, the doorway sparkled like a sky of twinkling stars—but even though it was night, the view through the Riemann Gate was not dark.

Fading sunlight flickered through the Gate, filtering down through the glass roof of the Curie Center’s containment dome from the surface of Fresh Lake above—because, on the other side of the Gate, almost a full hour in the past, the sun had not yet set.

"The Doorway to Extra Time" is set in the universe of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, forthcoming from Bell Bridge Books, and while The Machine doesn't make an appearance, it does star Doctor Jackson Truthsayer, one of the characters of the related short story "Steampunk Fairy Chick" published earlier in the year in the UNCONVENTIONAL anthology also by Spencer Hill Press.

This was a fun story, though the stack of books you see in the picture is only the thinnest slice of the immense number of time travel, gravitation and wormhole books I read while doing it. Most of that reading ended up on the cutting room floor, or, sometimes, an immense amount of reading changed only one word of my writing. But it's as accurate as I could make it.

Perhaps I'll do The Science of the Doorway to Extra Time someday...

Anyway, it's off to my loyal betas now ... may they be insightful!

-the Centaur

The Science of …

Published June 24, 2012 by centaur

I've finally put up the presentation for The Science of Airships onto the site. Right now it's a ginormous PDF presentation linked off that page (no, really, it's huge, be warned, that's why I'm sending you to the parent page and not giving out the direct link), but I'm planning to break it apart into pieces that are easier to digest, which I'll work into the regular flow of the blog.

This is part of a more general The Science of... series I'll be starting on this blog. The pages are skeletal right now, just HTML, but I'm going to integrate them into the WordPress engine so that I can add to them more rapidly.

The plan (ha! ha! I kill me!) is to first I'll go through the +500 or so articles in this blog and reblog articles that fit under this description and link them of http://www.dresan.com/science/, then I'll start adding presentations. I'm thinking the next presentation will either be The Science of Steam or The Science of Rayguns, suitably steampunk titles ... though the Science of Spacecraft and The Science of Spacesuits won't be long in following.

-the Centaur

The Science of Airships at Clockwork Alchemy

Published May 18, 2012 by centaur

I'll be giving a presentation on The Science of Airships at the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk conference on Sunday, May 27th at noon. UPDATE: The panel description is now up:

Science of Airships

Anthony Francis

Steampunk isn't just brown, boots and buttons - our adventurers need glorious flying machines! This panel will unpack the science of lift, the innovations of Count Zeppelin, how airships went down in flames and how we might still have cruise liners of the air if things had gone a bit differently.

I started researching this topic for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE and it's fascinating! Come one, come all and find out how much each of you are buoyant!

-the Centaur

P.S. The first diagram was generated in Mathematica using the following code:

sphere = SphericalPlot3D[1, th, phi, PlotPoints -> 5][[1]];
Zeppelin =
Function[{length, width},
   Scale[Rotate[sphere, 90 Degree, {0, 1, 0}], {length/2, width/2,
   width/2}]];
Graphics3D[Translate[{
   {LightGray, Opacity[0.6], Zeppelin[7, 1]},
   {Yellow,
Table[Sphere[{i, 0, 0}, 0.2 + (2 - Abs[i])/20], {i, -2.7, 2.5, 1.0}]},
   }, {{2.5, 0, 0}}], Ticks -> Automatic, Axes -> True,
Epilog ->
Inset[Framed[Style["Zeppelin", 20], Background -> LightYellow], {Right,
Bottom}, {Right, Bottom}], ImageSize -> {800, 600},
ViewAngle -> 4 °]

The second diagram was generated in Adobe Illustrator based on calculations done in Microsoft Excel.

P.P.S. And yes I know that it's a bit weird to do calculations in Excel when I have Mathematica, but (a) I didn't have Mathematica when I started working on this problem, but someone donated me a free copy of Mathematica Cookbook and that convinced me to give Mathematica a try for some of my diagrams, and (b) after having worked with Mathematica's notebooks and with Microsoft Excel I'm still using both, each for different things, and have come to the conclusion that an Excel spreadsheet model powered by Mathematica's symbolic reasoning engine would be thirty-one flavors of awesome!

One day.

Prevail, Victoriana!

Published April 29, 2012 by centaur

Today I finished the first hundred pages to the screenplay to JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, officially winning Script Frenzy 2012! Prevail, Victoriana!

I'm super happy about this, of course, but this has been a very interesting experience. Even though I've left out much of the story and many of the nuances, the script is coming in massively long - 100 pages translating to about 150 of a 450 page book, probably resulting in a 300 page script with a four-hour running time.

I'm learning new techniques to cut things out - breaking things into self-contained scenes which could be deleted wholesale, streamlining conversations, recasting thought as action that illustrates the same point. I probably could easily cut this script down from 100 pages to 70 or even 50 ... but then I wouldn't have succeeded at Script Frenzy.

I believe that you can't really tell what to cut out until you FINISH YOUR WORK (a philosophy shared by many in my writing group). Writing is not editing, and often you can't tell what a story really needs until you finish it. (If you're an expert author and have passed this stage in your development, bully for you; above, I'm talking to the not-finishers). For example, can this scene be cut? It might disappear, it might become one offhand line ... or it could be expanded to a fullblown argument, if we need to highlight the tension between our heroes:

Jeremiah leans back, her eyes narrowing at her companions.

JEREMIAH

Let me guess. He lied.

GEORGIANA

(nods)

I do love dear Albert, Jeremiah, but the reason I stole your mark was to make a personal appeal.

PATRICK

Einstein was about to rediscover the weapon that ended the Civil War. In the Victoriana, the Peerage suppressed that knowledge.

GEORGIANA

The point of the mission was not to steal Austrian secrets, but to convince him to keep them secret.

Jeremiah scowls, looking at the both of them.

JEREMIAH

And you kept this from me.

GEORGIANA

The mission was ... Need to know.

JEREMIAH

What kind of mad dictator came up with that rule?

(points at Patrick)

And why did he get---

PATRICK

To confirm what he was up to. The Lady Georgiana had to train me to operate the Crookes counter.

Jeremiah is glaring daggers at the two of them...

At my stage in scriptwriting, it's going to be far easier to tell what to leave out after I've put it all in. So, even though I'm going to shift gears back to Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE and the Science of Airships panel at Clockwork Alchemy, my plan is to finish THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE script in its entirety. Then I'm going to cut it mercilessly until it hits a 2 hour (ish) running time. Then I'm going to hold a reading where a group of friends will read the script aloud so I can see how it sounds (a trick I learned from my friend the playwright Jim Davies). And then I'm going to cut it again.

And then Script Frenzy will probably roll around again, as I'll have to squeeze all the above in around regular work and writing. But if I keep at it, after a few years of writing scripts I'll probably have something pretty tight, something that might actually be salable. Not that I won't try to sell THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but I won't let failure to sell the first script I've written in twenty years stop me.

I'm in this for the duration.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

UPDATE: I forgot to mention SCRIVENER. Scrivener, Scrivener, Scrivener: without you I wouldn't have finished THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE on time. I don't know if you'll replace Microsoft Word -- I've been using THAT for almost a quarter century --- but you made the process of producing a script effortless. Thank you.

Back on Track

Published April 28, 2012 by centaur

We made it to "back on track". 94 pages, which is just enough to finish up by Monday if I do 3 pages per day. I'd rather "finish" Script Frenzy tonight, so I can relax a bit tomorrow and get back to LIQUID FIRE. Let's see what we can do to do that.

Oh, right, excerpts. I can't do latest excerpts as we've moved past the first twist of the story. Here's a bit from a bit further back:

Jeremiah arrives moments after Georgiana, who's wearing a slit-front traveling dress over boots and pants and has a leather satchel. She's discreetly checking a deranger.

GEORGIANA

Well, Jeremiah, have you everything you need?

She dry-fires the deranger, while Jeremiah checks a first aid kit she keeps in her left pocket.

JEREMIAH

Whether I'm to stab or be stabbed for the queen, I'm ready.

GEORGIANA

Is that a literal or metaphorical stabbing you're hoping for?

Patrick arrives wearing an aerograph pack, not unlike a cross between a television and a World War II field radio.

PATRICK

Oh, gentlewomen, please.

(notes blunderblast)

You've quite taken to that. I should give it to you.

JEREMIAH

(smiles)

Yes, you should. Check your pack?

Check your pack, wind your braces, buckle your chin-strap.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

UPDATE: Taking a break at 96 pages. That should be enough for tonight, and I've just about closed down the Coffee Society ... but if I get more beans and vinegar, who knows?