My dreams, shattered.

Imagine my surprise, at the following letter showing up in my inbox:

Dear Mr. White, 

We are contacting you as a potential candidate for our team of scientists, physicists and engineers dedicated to designing and building the first tokomat-powered intra-galaxy space ship. Your published novels indicate an impressive knowledge of the components and software needed for the success of this endeavor. Our company, Space Trek International, has generous financial backing from several nations and we can offer you a six-figure salary to start. 

We are working in a 10-year time frame so time is of the essence. Please respond if you are available and we'll go into more detail. 

Sincerely,
Barton L. Fitzroy, CBO, DSc

Of course, it was a little strange that they misspelled tokamak, but I figured what the heck, it doesn't hurt to be polite. I replied with:

I am absolutely interested in learning more about this - please let me know what I can do to help.

Warmest regards,
Dain White

How does this story end? In ABJECT SADNESS and TEARS OF IMPOTENT RAGE, as the next reply was:

GOTCHA ~Grampa

It's not even April 1st. How am I supposed to go on after this? There isn't a super secret think-tank team that wants me involved with building a starship? No six figure salary? You mean to tell me I have to immediately and WITHOUT DELAY go back to my mundane existence?

 

 

Are you a literary agent?

On the off chance that by some miraculous quirk of timing and fate, the person reading this is a literary agent that specializes in science fiction, I wanted to let you know that I should be contacting you in the near future on bent knee, begging for a moment of your time and consideration of me as your next author and client.

I say 'should' rather than 'will', because to be honest, I am still pretty overwhelmed by the process of separating the good from the bad in your industry. Trying to find an actual literary agent in a seemingly infinite universe of opportunistic blood sucking pathogens that call themselves literary agents, is a pretty challenging task.

I wish there was an easy method an aspiring-to-be-published author like myself could use to litmus-test my way past the predatory hucksters that seem to have infected your industry to a point at which there may be no hope for recovery.

At first, I thought maybe the agents that distance themselves thoroughly from authors, either by means of setting the bar inordinately high for contact to be made, or by simply ignoring any and all attempts to contact them, I thought they may be the actual real agents... but now I am not sure. Definitely the agents that want to talk with me aren't the ones I need to talk with, I get that... but does this industry need to be so adversarial, so utterly contemptuous to the authors that make the entire publishing industry function?

Surely, there can be a middle ground we can all meet on, somewhere between the greedy hordes of opportunistic budget-sucking parasites that clamor for my attention, and the lofty, unassailable fortress of the upper crust-de-la-crust of publishing society that won't return a call unless it's engraved in platinum foil and delivered by carrier pigeon on Wednesday evenings between 6:53 and 6:57 pm (all other queries will be ignored).

Surely, among you, there is one. One person with a fervent desire to find the Next Big Thing™, with the connections and experience to do something about it. Surely... there is one.

Is that person you?

Reviews as advice

I had a pretty astute reader dive deep between the lines of Archaea and surmise (correctly) that the author must have some sort of background in programming. Her review was:

Grow up with E.E. (Doc) Smith? Learn about life from Heinlein? H.Beam Piper one of your favorite authors? Dain White's Archaea is space opera at its best, complete with a (literal) deus ex machina. Well, maybe not QUITE a goddess, but Janis comes close and she's definitely 'ex machina'. I'm planning to download and read the other two novels about this merry band of space-farers. Some nice touches for those of us who program for a living - a hunky marine for me, a cute (don't call her small) weapons engineer for you plus a good selection of other characters. 

It's not great literature, but it's a great ride while it lasts - and there are 2 more to read! 

Now how can I learn to program without bugs and rewriting?

(emphasis mine)

It's maybe not as well known, but yes, as a point of fact I am a bit of a coder myself, and I started making websites professionally in 1995, and have been developing highly relational, intuitively managed dynamically generated database-driven web applications since 2000. This is part of the challenge I have when faced with writing a person like Pauli. In a way, he's a direct mirror of my own psyche, his insouciant slouch is mine, his furious fingers burning the keys off his board are mine. I can (quite easily) relate to his all-nighter tendencies, his drive to build the impossible, to write the code that can't fail.

As I am first and foremost the kind of person that tries to break the mold in everything I do, I decided to step outside of my science fiction author persona, and answer her question:

If you liked Archaea, I can't wait to see what you think of Janis and Red! As far as programming goes, above all be consistent in your approach, name variables intuitively and either write intuitive, self-documenting code, or put some extra time into comments and documentation. A good approach to application design is to work on the breadth first, then work on the depth, and test and debug as you go. Only add complexity to systems that are engineered with a solid, robust and scalable foundation. Lastly, remember... at the end of the day there really are no bugs, only extremely exciting undocumented features that need interfacing. Good luck, and thanks for reading!

No more fever

Well, it took about 12 days or so, but I finally managed to see my way through a horrible fever virus, called Pharyngoconjunctival Fever. It was awful. At first, I tried writing, thinking that the fever would add some sort of elusive creative spark, and drive me to new feats of eloquence... but in the end it became more and more challenging to make sense of anything at all, and I had to pack it in, and settle for misery.

Being sick sucks. I hate it, and so should you... and if you don't, then you need to seek help. I had a sore throat, a chest cough that hurt but wouldn't do anything, a runny yet stuffed nose, and eyes that felt like they were full of itty-bitty shards and splinters of broken glass. My eyes still feel awful, actually... but the worst part was the day-after-day endless marathon of fever. Not a little fever either, not the kind you can put a brave face on and soldier through. I had the wrapped-in-a-blanket-shivering-uncontrollably kind of fever (at the peak, I hit 103.8 and I was on no less than three different OTC meds!)

My throat still aches a bit, my cough is still there, and still not very productive, and my eyes still feel horrible, like they're packed full of grit... but at least I can think again. Fevers are the worst...

Research, lies and science fiction.

Last night, I got a bit mired down in some research for my new novel. After some methodical digging, I came across some research papers written in Russian that Google was kind enough to translate, and I found the moment where science fiction (specifically, my personal brand where 'seat-of-the-pants' science is hurled at the keyboard) meets reality, or at least, speculative quantum physics.

Pulse

This was my contribution to an Amazon author anthology. While I’m not really a horror writer, the concept of vampires intrigued me when I was younger. I drew on my love for the archetypical experience, and wrote the beginning of a pretty fantastic horror story, if I could pull it off. It’s hard, writing books… sometimes, they seem to carve chunks out of your soul. I know you’d rather have me writing my next novel, rather than building a blog, and I can only beg forgiveness. If it’s any consolation, the following story was written last year. Let me know in the comments what you think – would you want to see a book like this?

More Accolades

In my author discussion forum on Amazon, Ronald Moody (quite possibly the nicest person on the planet) had this to say:

Rated all three books at five stars. I think that's the first time that's happened. You sir sure know how to spin a good yarn. You are now firmly in place on my top ten authors list. I read all three books in four or five days. And I think it's the first time for that as well.

This is what it is all about, friends.

First Review

Red received it’s first review today, and I was taken aback. For an author to know someone even read the thing is often it’s own reward, but when someone takes the time to fire up Amazon and let me know, it really offers a glimpse into the mind of the reader – what they liked, what they didn’t. Each and every review, good or bad (and sometimes, especially bad) breathes life into the prose, engaging with it in ways that the author cannot.
As may be considered ironic (not that I do, I wouldn't admit to know what that means) I am my biggest fan, and truly enjoy reading and re-reading these books. In a way, one of my fans said it best, it’s as if I wanted something more from the genre, and set out to create it. Because I have so much fun writing these books, it’s especially gratifying to learn that for at least one other person on this planet, I’ve succeeded.

Hacking the blogger

I guess I am a little like Pauli… deep down, I am a bit of a hacker at heart. I noticed that Blogger has HTML and CSS overrides, so I hacked on it to put my own background in here (the one I am using is too large and Blogger wouldn’t let me update via upload) and then while I was at it, I used some semi-transparent PNG files to make the post and page background semitransparent.

I am trying, somewhat, to match the look I have on my twitter feed, though not really taking enough time on it to try and make it look seamless. I might, later. Breaktime is over, time to dive back into the new story. We’re about to slip to Oort Station, as requested by the Vice Admiral. Something has happened, and it’s a Really Bad Thing™ – you know Gene is not happy about this one.

The moment when…

Goodreads Updated

Hello Goodreaders! I’ve updated my author page to reflect the launch of RED, and linked my brand new shiny blog. Goodreads is an amazing site, though I do admit I am not really sure how to use it effectively. For example as of this writing, I have no idea how to add a link to buy RED on Amazon.com. Live and learn, I guess…

RED hit the top 20 in ‘Hot New Releases’ on Amazon in its first weekend!

I was really amazed, given the volume of sales for Red over the first weekend it was published, that it would hit the top 20 list for ‘hot new releases’. This is an amazing result, considering the sheer volume of books published on Amazon every day.

It’s a great book… have you read it yet?

http://www.amazon.com/Archaea-ebook/dp/B00BCWIBUG

Diving into the next adventure

I’m currently blazing off into the depths of deep space in the newest ARCHAEA adventure – though it has not yet been named, I have a few ideas that go along with the theme of the story. What that is, I can’t say yet… but I will say that the book starts in the next second after RED ends – an instant transition.

I like the idea of readers finishing one book, and being able to dive right in to another without skipping a beat. The story takes off, too - and I don't mean that in the normal eyeball-squishing manner. I am only about 70 pages into it, but they’re some of the most engaging, adventure-packed pages I’ve ever written.

RED Launch and Free Weekend

I launched my latest novel, RED last Friday, and took the opportunity to run a free weekend with a Kindle Direct Promotion for both ARCHAEA and JANIS. I balanced promoted posts on Facebook, with a pretty regular barrage of promotional tweets, and the end result was pretty excellent.

ARCHAEA held the #1 spot for the Space Opera category, and JANIS climbed to #4 in Science Fiction Adventure. ARCHAEA hit #9 for all science fiction on Amazon, and topped out at #281 overall on Amazon. Considering there are millions of books listed on Amazon, to hit #281 was pretty awesome.

I gained about 20 more followers on Twitter, and hopefully didn't lose any... I am always a little apprehensive about spamming people, so I tried to make my tweets interesting (or at least not horribly obnoxious) and didn't tweet flood people too badly.

As far as actual sales went, I didn't do too terribly - as of this writing, I sold 24 copies of RED, hopefully as people work through ARCHAEA and JANIS, they'll want to keep reading the story and sales will continue for a while. It's not really all about sales, of course... I have a day job, and as much as I wish it was writing, it isn't... so I am really most excited at this point to think that there are a few thousand people out there reading the adventures of Captain Dak Smith and the Archaea.