The Fiverrrr hire showed up and completed her work. I started the application at BookSirens to distribute ARC copies on The Early Fox, but one of the things they want is the final cover. So back to waiting on the cover artist to finish. They didn't like the desert, by the by. They liked my other concept better.
I will see. I'm itching to rough out comps for the other covers, but I need to see how the artist changes that cover so I can be going in the same direction.
I also am trying to rewrite all the book descriptions. I mostly got a pass on the one I have, but it needs a tweak or two I haven't been in the right mental space to finish.
Rewriting the books, though... Well, I had a beta reader look through the first book, and there's no easy fix to it. I can't fix the structural issues without writing a completely different book. Fortunately, after the rewrite I just finished on The Early Fox, I feel more up for the challenge of fixing voice, cleaning up the emotional focus and plot beats, and trimming the excursions severely.
That all said.
I've been binging on Douglas Preston lately. He's got a whole series about a female archaeologist based out of Santa Fe and he's pretty much going down the line of New Mexico's biggest hits. The one I'm reading now is Roswell.
The previous, The Scorpion's Tale, was a bit too rich, combining the jornada del muerto/el camino real, the Victorio Peak treasure, the Pueblo Revolt, and the Trinity Test -- there were significant scenes at the (renamed) MacDonald ranch house. It also touched on the plight of the downwinders, the regrowth of the White Sands area after the military took it from the ranchers, and several other things I'd been writing about in The Early Fox.
The descriptions are dense and he captures the landscape better than I do (well, he lives there. Plus he's got forty-odd bestsellers to his name). But the plot sort of goes everywhere.
Really, density per se is not the problem. Preston, the Rivers of London series, the Trina Piper series, all go just as crazy for setting and history. My last beta reader said the only problem for her was the stuff was so fun she kept losing track of the plot. The beta reader before that didn't tell me to gut the stuff, just that I went a quarter to a third too far and just needed to trim back to where the stuff wasn't overstaying its welcome. Which I did, and a little more, in that two months of revisions.
Anyhow.
Made some progress on the space opera that is definitely the next thing I'm writing. My protagonist is finally coming alive for me. I was trying out some terminology to see if it felt right that people from farming worlds might be called "ag-worlders" or even "aggies." I tried a bit of dialogue in my head and the character I was using said, "Oi, farmgirl."
And Sinclair snapped back with "That's cadet farmgirl to you!"
Yeah, that's her. She's got that temper. Holding back, especially after the implant. Aware that fighting back is in her position the nuclear option. But she will make a smart remark, even if it isn't smart to do so.
And that same internal discussion (I do a lot of work and take a lot of notes during long walks) is having me change the rules slightly on cadets. Sinclair is fish and fowl; as a cadet getting what in some wet navies might be called the middy cruise or snotty tour, she is a student, is pre-commission and should not be giving orders or even stand watch without direct supervision. So much like the ratings (who are typical of wet navies in that so many are college age), but unlike them she has two parallel chains of command. The XO is who is supposed to be directing her training. Anything else goes through COB.
Which gets even more complicated as the Power Gang is sort of a world of its own. They are more highly trained and need to be, because not only does the ship not fly without them, with the kind of physics required to move faster than light, doing their job wrong means the ship explodes. They have their own top NCO (the Bull) and of course the chief engineer (officer on engineer track, like Sinclair), and unless it gets out of hand COB leaves them alone. Especially on T4M, the deck apes are his darlings and he'd prefer to be working with them then worrying about the power gang.
But I don't want to get too crazy with this stuff because while it sets up her character arc, I'm only doing a few chapters on the boat before the mining world sequence. The plan is that the abandoned mine Sinclair gets marooned at, and the refugee camp built at what was the landing pad and HQ for Atlas operations there, is the large middle of the book. Then the enclaves planet and some more stuff in space to finish things off.
