Colonial Vipers

Well, I found "good enough" batteries. A mix of fuel cells and SMES for "around the energy density of gasoline." Nuclear isomer batteries for the higher-energy stuff. It's a good tech for story-telling purposes because while the theoretical energy density is slightly shy of nuclear fission, we haven't really engineered any right now and the isotopes we've been playing with are...somewhat less than that. So right now, a writer can peg it pretty much anywhere from "almost as good as a lead-acid battery" to "atom bomb in a box."

That led to the next problem, and a couple of slow days at work spent reading high frontier stuff, Charlie Stross being cranky and practical, lots more Atomic Rockets, and running into such delightful concepts as "Dutch Disease."

 And...it's really hard to justify a space colony. That power problem is there again. When you peg your energy resources high enough to allow getting all that stuff out there to start a colony, there are a lot of other options you could take instead. Or as Charlie puts it, colonize the Gobi; it's nearer and cheaper.

There's a concept I've started calling the Saturn V margin. You see, you can't get into orbit with a rocket. The energy density of rocket fuels is slightly lower than the ultimate kinetic energy of that rocket in orbit. The only way we can work that trick is with multi-stage rockets (SRBMs are a similar solution).

What I've been working on for the stuff underlying all the engineering that shows up in the story is the overlap between different regimes. For instance, it is only economical to run your spaceship off some ultra-high-density thing (like He3, or even antimatter) that was manufactured somewhere close to a much bigger power plant. (Our wormhole-physics vacuum-energy extractor thing.)

But you can, just barely, refuel with a fission power plant you build at a smaller poorer colony world. Which itself can run any kind of power-hungry planetary vehicles, construction machines, or in-system (aka strictly interplanetary) spacecraft.

Which, in a pinch, can be refueled with petroleum tech. It just takes a lot of it and you need to be patient. This goes all the way down to being able to turn a crank or pedal a stationary bike to recharge the SMES in your emergency radio...because food is within a single magnitude of gasoline, even if you have to add a few more doublers for conversion efficiencies.

The hidden point here is that you can only jump one system. There is no way in hell that stationary bike will ever get you off the planet.

This also ties in with what I've been calling the Fairy Ring model. Not the right metaphor, but there's nothing sufficiently sonorous about the ecological succession I'm thinking of. So you've got a place with built-up industry and a good customer base but raw materials are getting uneconomical.

So you start an extraction colony. Send a bunch of Spanish peasants to dam up rivers and run a mining operation getting silver out of the New World. Eventually there are enough people there, they get their own government and their own industry and their own higher standard of living, and they go looking for somewhere to purchase mining rights that's cheaper than going after the dregs they have in this new home.

The ring of colony growth and industrialization spreads out. It's a fun model. Looks a little silly when you think about the energy needs of getting the stuff across a solar system, much less to another star. If nothing changes the physics, its gonna be easier to mine the ocean floor than mine the moon.

The usual futurist claim is the stuff is heavily automated, probably self-replicating, and made "with local materials" so basically all you have to do is send one little rep-rap printer out to the Moon, plug it into an RTG, and before you know it ingots of lunar gold are raining down from the skies.

That probably doesn't work, for a lot of reasons a lot of people smarter than I am have been discussing for quite a few years. It also, more to the point for the writer, doesn't look a hell of a lot like the Alaskan Gold Rush, or a Cuban plantation, or any of the other cool historically-influenced settings you find crawling around golden age science fiction.

(If for no other reason than our local Bat Durston with his trusty space-mule and atom-pickaxe is wielding what is basically nuclear technology.)

I have what may or may not be two steps in this ecological succession of colonization. The setting for the stories is a as-yet unnamed consortium of worlds founded a bunch of generations back from Earth. Lately, they've been expanding into their own resource-extraction colonies...except that the new space they've sent their prospectors and oil-rig like extraction platforms and company towns has its own thriving ecosystem of several different alien races.

Highly opinionated ones. Friction ensues, plus the pace of the expansion is revealing all sorts of problems of policy and tech, from drill strings snapping to software licensing issues to miner's strikes to...

So what I really want for this is that the Core Worlds are basically on their own. Earth isn't actively dictating policy or sending technical assistance (or demanding their colony send more molasses for the Triangle Trade). And I also want this push, one that is happening fast enough so that nobody is really prepared for it. They haven't done enough local research to understand the problems they are getting into.

And while initially people are going "I hear there were some problems out on the frontier" those problems do not stay local. Eventually that trouble involves the Core Worlds.

The problem is, I don't see a clear way for this to have arisen out of the underlying economics and physics of the setting as so far developed. I could easily argue that there is some sudden rush of Manifest Destiny causing a huge rush of people wanting to get out the Conestogas, but it just doesn't feel organic.

Batteries

Still working up three or four SF novel concepts, and haven't made the hard call which to write first. It depresses me a bit. The standards and expectations have grown faster than I have. So many people have already looked at these problems and came up with elegant solutions that are now familiar to the readership, but I feel slower and sleepier every day.

The "Blue" universe is space opera. Something to scratch that itch of space warfare and planetary adventure. The Space-Hornblower career arc, even if this one starts in something more like a Merchant Marine. The requirements for the tech is that it has enough surface plausibility to keep the reader from stumbling over it, and that it produces interesting story potential.

As I've been reading, I've been running into a lot of examples from early SF in which exploring the ideas was paramount and as a result there are extensive lectures on the tech and its implications. Less so in modern fiction, which trends towards adventure with the majority of the tech left largely unexplored as part of the background. But even that fiction will foreground tech that has good plot implications.

As I'm writing about someone with an engineering background and a hacker's attitude, who is through the plot often faced with questions of "how does this work (and why did anyone chose to make it that way)?" I do want a good basic schema for how the place works...technology, cartography, society.

licensable from Vecteesy

First premise: interplanetary travel takes a real-world magnitude of energy. The energy generation of the civilization is several magnitudes above that, making casual interplanetary travel plausible. 

Second premise; the upper magnitudes of this power generation, starting from around interplanetary travel and moving up through interstellar, is only economically available from large fixed plants, which are effectively infinitely renewable but may need to be sited on the equivalent of a resource node.

(Basically, we're tapping a natural wormhole for power. With a large costly plant.)

So there's two big trickle-downs from this. One is a civilization in the region of Kardashav-1, post-scarcity in terms of energy. Not enough energy to remove the need for "manual" manufacturing, resource extraction, basically an industrial base. It is not economical to transmute or nano-fabricate or otherwise do away with the physical infrastructure of an industrialized society.

The second is that since other methods of power generation fall several magnitudes below what these power plants can provide, the middle space between "takes so little power you can slap a solar cell on it" and "flies to the next star system with a load of cargo" is dominated by the logics of energy transport, not energy production.

I hasten to add, this gets pretty blurred. Gasoline, after all, is an energy transport mechanism that took significant power (and infrastructure) to produce, but is used in something that looks more like a generator than it does a battery. Up through more exotic tech like RTGs, He3 reactors and antimatter, this sort of "spend a lot of power to make a compact fuel for power production" is going to be a mode.

Halo dropship

Point is, if we peg "looks kinda like a battery" on human-scale equipment to let us run a VTOL off it, we've got fairly insane (dangerous) levels of available energy. We can do powered armor or blaster pistols not because they are themselves efficient, but because we've got the energy infrastructure so it is just plug-and-play.

That, and some of the implications of post-scarcity (energy, mind you, not all resources) means the look-and-feel gets close to TNG Star Trek.

All I really need to write a story is a hand-wave name that doesn't sound too implausible. But I've been having a tough time finding something in the right range.

One issue is that the basic rule of chemical batteries (stored power versus discharge rate) oddly holds through the gamut of storage technologies. RTGs score incredibly high for power density but their discharge rate is tiny (and not an easy issue to fix). SMES can handle extremely rapid discharge (and cycle with essentially no waste) but their capacity is down around fuel cells or lower. And fuel cells are basically a little gasoline-powered generator.

When you look at SF, it leapfrogs right over the two or three magnitudes higher density I am wanting into stuff like Kerr-Neumann black holes. And you quickly hit mass conversion and zero point and other not-a-battery stuff -- just an infinite source of more energy.

Right now the most plausible stuff is things like lattice confinement fusion, nuclear isomer batteries, or tricks involving monatomic hydrogen (or metallic hydrogen). And, yeah, just like antimatter, the go-to always seems to be buckyballs or carbon nanotubes. Still, at a theoretical 380 MJ/Kg, protons-in-nanotubes is nothing to sniff at.

(The downside to pretty much anything nuclear is that even if you start with stable isotopes, nuclear reactions are always a scatter plot. Even that nice He3 is only "mostly" aneutronic, and I have a really hard time -- given the philosophy of the story -- hand-waving out all the stray x-rays and neutron embrittlement and exotic short-lived daughter products.)

Really, SMES are damn-near perfect, despite their theoretical power density being just a little small. They have side effects, too, but they are all so delicious.

Looking through Atomic Rockets, Reddit, Stack Exchange, the Kerbal forums, questions like this seem to come up a lot. Mostly because people want their pocket laser pistols, but there is a good presence of electric-powered vehicles in there as well. In any case, just beating the power density of gasoline is tough.

Oddly, even tougher seems to be hitting that goldilocks zone between "better than gasoline" and "black hole in a box" is harder.

Zed-P-M. He's Canadian

Edit

Yeah, that's what slow going on a scene usually means. It means the problems are bigger than that one scene. The new version is simpler in some ways (I'm kicking some of the plot revelations down the road) but in another way more complex; the Egtved Girl is now not just theme, but plot. 

So that's gonna take a couple more days.

Progress on bigger writing questions as well. Sort of. I went looking for editors. The pro a friend turned me on to is asking over $6K. That's not affordable, even if I thought I had a chance of matching that with a publisher's advance. I checked out Fiverrrr but they have a standard rate system that is a bad fit for novel length; pretty much everyone topped out at 50,000 words and above that it was "write and ask me and we'll negotiate."

Reedsy was worse, but in a different way. Had to request bids. With a sample. And as I went through the actually finished books I've got, I couldn't find a single sample I didn't want to stop and edit myself right then and there.

Did I mention? Before I threw the Paris book at an AI beta reader, I deleted the last chapter. Just took it out. The AI didn't notice, and I hardly noticed. It's been at least a year since removed two characters from the Athens book and I didn't regret that either. It isn't that way on Kindle, yet. I still want to do more before I update the file.

So I need and want edit. And that takes time. And that's just contemplating light edit. Maybe just proofreading. What I really want is developmental editing and...

I've barely got time to write a book once. I went back into my blog and the first words on paper (screen) for the New Mexico book were last April. Which wouldn't be so bad, but there was significant time between the last book and those first words!

But throw something else into the mix. Every full year I work sweetens the pot for retirement, sure. But that doesn't mean I have to finish the year. Every month puts a few more $K in savings (very few) and that's a good thing too.

And grabbed a copy of Obsidian to start taking more methodical notes for the SF novel. Brett over at ACOUP has given me lots of interesting ideas about everything from low intensity warfare to the definition of a polity. The picture of the Blue universe is getting clearer and clearer in my head. (The new working title: All Systems Blue.)

The list of SF books I might want to do is getting longer all the time.

At some point I will retire and I will still be short of money. Be pretty pointless to retire from a good job only to work at Wallmart, so I expect and hope to be doing something with some degree of fulfillment, artistic or otherwise.

I miss theatre. I enjoy writing. Whatever it is I do in retirement, it would be better if it at least paid costs (the difference between a business and a hobby is that a business sometimes breaks even). 

How it all falls out at the moment is that I should lean in to the last mile here. Keep working, because that brings the money in and also helps keep me on my feet working at finally climbing out of long COVID or whatever it was. Walking to work most days and bit by bit it is...well, not as bad as it was.

And somehow find enough time in there to finish ANOTHER book. One in a genre that sells, and put the work into it to help it sell, and see what happens.

And now back to my current book and finishing off the last killer mile for Penny, down the Jornada de Muerto after a killer on a horse. 

Aye-yi-yi

Shoved the most confused book (the Paris one) at the AI and it didn't tag it as Archaeological Thriller. It liked Adventure, Historical Mystery, and Cozy Mystery for this one. But it still name-checked Dan Brown. Ah, the flip side of stochastic algorithms. Sets containing "Adventure" and "Archaeology" will contain so many cites of "DaVinci Code" that's gonna weight the result something serious.

AI isn't about finding the best example, after all. It is about finding the average and then looking as much like that as possible. Plus a die roll.

So maybe I should wait for that developmental edit. But...after having to crawl through the whole Paris book because I'd never set up the file for exporting in rtf, I really don't feel like dealing with deep revisions.

The New Mexico book, maybe. It is still in draft.

Well, actually, it isn't finished. I'm at the climax but I have a whole Hello, Clarice to get through. And then I really do need to read my new book on Victorio, because I think my Mescalero Apache are acting out of character. And I got a coffee-table book on the Jornada (well, actually, on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro).

Anyhow, there are enough little problems with the other four books to make another edit round advisable. Preferably with a human, because fighting with an automated grammar checker over sentences in two languages in a dual-time novel with flashbacks is just not fun.

The only reason I'm worrying about cover artists now is I've got an order ongoing right now at 100 Covers. Oops.

And I've chosen titles. Not the best...just the best I could come up with:

The Gift of Athena

The Zero Room

The Mirror of Amaterasu

The Montmartre Treasure

The Drake Equation

One part thriller, one part archaeological thriller. Best I can do.

Really, I'm all about the next book right now. There's nothing I can do with the final chapter of the New Mexico book while I am walking or at work, but I can think world-building for "Blue" and take a few notes. 

Eliza, Eliza

I'm in the final sequence of the New Mexico book. It is getting simpler all the time. I just dropped thirty-five bucks on a book about the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro but I went and wrote all 300 words of the vignette set during the Juan de Oñate expedition without it. Might want to read up on Lozen before I write her vignette, though.

I'm still on the fence about whether I will spring for editing, much less developmental edit, on this one. I have larger bread to fry.

Because I need to explore other stories. The four (soon to be five) Athena Fox books I want to think of as back catalog. Potential income and name recognition as I write new stuff.

I narrowed it down to three options for triage, but before I reach out to a professional, I reached out to one that plays a professional (and a human) on the internet. Hey, I had a chit courtesy of the subscription fee I already pay to ProWritingAid.

I trust it here because I'm not looking for value judgements and I'm ignoring the insincere praise; I'm looking for pattern recognition.

Without prompting, without the prod of knowing what I wanted to hear so it could regurgitate it back to me, the bot identified a genre. No, a sub-genre; "Archaeological Thriller," which is so new it still doesn't have a standard iconography.

I trust the AI less on whether the book I showed it checks the right boxes for that genre. It may be entirely ignoring the genre when it went on to talk about plot character and theme. But it produced a picture that works for me; of these books (or at least the first one) as sitting comfortably within the Thriller genre.

As an option within that genre I hadn't had clearly described to me until I found the Paul Tomlinson books, and hadn't really connected to the Archaeological Thriller sub-genre despite there being examples out there.

Paul Tomlinson calls this particular flavor the "Amateur on the run" thriller. 

It works, it has an audience, it is fairly straight-forward to stage for (that is, covers and keywords, advertising and blurbs).

This does leave open the question of whether the other books fit as well. The Athens book had almost the classic on-the-run profile. The Kyoto book could be considered a "wrong man" thriller, even if it dives early into more of an infiltration or even caper. But the Paris book is clearly treasure hunt, without the elements of pursuit, paranoia, or mistaken identity (although there are the elements that critic John Cawelti talks about; disguise, invisibility, and conspiracy). And the London book is essentially mystery, with Penny in the driver's seat for most of it.

I can't ignore how close I slide to cozy mystery, but there are both textual reasons (something I'll get into in a later post -- tentative title; "The Mystery as Post-Processual Archaeology") and stronger market reasons not to go there.

Penny and her journey is still the selling point, with the mystery being the excuse for it. She remains outsider to the cultures she encounters. She makes friends but largely fights alone. And the action is physical, much more in line with thriller (or urban fantasy) than the more cerebral process of detecting. Like Nancy Drew, she may be smart, but what she has aren't cases, but adventures.

So thriller is the right umbrella. Not cozy, not mystery, not history, not travel.

I am also feeling strongly that leaning on the dual role of Penny Bright/Athena Fox is not the right approach. Part of her hero's journey is becoming the mask, part of the wrong-man thriller is being mistaken for the mask, and there is much humor in the way the real world either echoes or fails to echo the kinds of situations a fictional archaeologist-adventurer would encounter. But this is better thought of not as theme, but as part of the character package, like Nero Wolfe and his orchids, or Bones and whatever uncatalogued neurodivergence she is supposed to have.

The iconography and other genre traits of Archaeological Thriller are still being formed. As evidenced by not a few writers choosing the term "archaeological adventure" or even "archaeological mystery" instead. The Amelia Peabody books are more genteel, and could certainly drift towards cozy mystery, but are still being staged as thrillers.

Where I want to and believe I should lean in my staging (advertising, blurbs, keywords, etc) is the amateur hero, finding surprising strengths within themselves. And, again within that particular thriller umbrella, exotic settings, unusual situations, masks and disguises, conspiracy and mystery, and being alone and often on the run, unsure of who they can trust and up against impossible odds.

I don't need to emphasize archaeology, history, or even the exotic settings (they are assumed to come with the meal). And I also see no good coming out of trying to emphasize the retro, or the idea of movie situations made real, or any of that.

What I am planning is a re-release. And there is an additional wrinkle.

I need to drop the cozy titles. I can get series/brand recognition through other elements than having "Fox" in every title. It was feeling like a stretch anyhow.

I checked with KDP and they are find with issuing new books under a different title, as long as there is a clear "previously published as..." in the description. Done this way, this would give me a chance to release five books on timed intervals. And possibly sweeten the pot with ARCs as well.

Developmental editing is still on the table. I will do another line edit, at least. There's enough small stuff even I have noticed to make it worthwhile.

Thrillers and archaeological thrillers, oddly, converge on titles. There is a strong tendency for the MacGuffin in the title, as well as something more conceptual. The only difference is that the archaeological thriller almost always has something clearly historical about one of the title elements.

Which again underlines how the archaeological thriller is a thriller. And once more helps me understand why this is a good brand fit; if anything, the Athena Fox stories are a better thriller fit than they are an archaeological thriller fit! (Since the latter trends strongly towards world-threatening artifacts and well-armed heroes, where the former can more easily support an everyman hero and a pure MacGuffin that never actually does anything.)

So thriller titles, basically. With, when possible, a historical name in there. I can get an "The X of Y" out of most of them pretty easily.

And covers. I do not understand what book covers are doing with the human figure now. We went through the floating heads phase. We did (and Urban Fantasy lingered) on the black-leather-against-burning-city look, somewhat aped for a while in the more protagonist-led military SF (swap out the black leather for power armor). There was the very small silhouette for a thankfully brief moment, now we seem to have the slightly larger back-to-the-camera silhouette. Still not an attractive look.

So leave that off. Thrillers, in particular, go for a conceptual cover and whether it is a one-shot hero or a series hero, they get identified not by having their mug on the cover but by having their name.

This leaves artifacts, settings, and symbology as the big cover elements. All generally with a dark thriller-esque look to the rest of it. Settings are more likely when there is something big and archaeological and easily recognizable, like the pyramid group in Cairo. After that, it stops being archaeological and more generic thriller cover, with modern city or exotic city being largely obscured with dramatic lighting.

I am not enamored of artifact titles or artifacts in the cover (and, yes, the AI had at least one to suggest for me). The dotted-line-on-a-map doesn't work for me now, either, because I don't believe in the retro thing as being a good approach.

But that doesn't mean I can't use graphics. And sometimes these graphics might be a map. Or have map-like elements. But this is what I'm getting out of the current (and not really there yet) cover design I have over at 100 Covers; graphics are cool for a thriller title, and I can go something more graphically interesting without losing the strong genre identification (and the thumbnail readability).

What I don't know now is the timing. I need to finish the current book. Not sure if I'm going to release "formerly titled The Early Fox" to eBook with nothing but the basic edit, or send that one through a longer pipeline first, or wait and save my money (developmental editing ain't cheap) for a book I feel more positive about.

New covers, I'm sure of. New titles, probably. At least some editing, certainly. But deeper editing? That's the triage, still, and to really decide I need to be talking to a human.

Too much?

My cover came back with revisions. And the same mistake was still there. I'm not talking something subtle like the wrong cacti or architecture that is clearly Guadalajara, not Taos. I'm talking a full coastline.

So I sent them a Power Point.

I'm going to stop going to the cover mills and hire an artist direct next time. Still want to redesign, possibly rename -- and that comes with having to re-write, because KDP might get cranky otherwise.

***

Oh, and I was slowly building the info on KDP. Kindleprenuar has a nice little web widget that will let you drape your book description in Amazon-approved HTML. They are rather restrictive as to what they allow and how it needs to be done.

Of course, being the age this is, there was a "spice this up with AI" button on the page. I tried it. This is actually, in my opinion, one of the things AI is best for; to recognize the trends you are stumbling around the edges of, and give you a funhouse mirror version of them so you can be reminded of what they look like. It is an expensive, power-intensive, possibly immoral way of drawing a circle around what you hit so you can recognize the barn you and others have been aiming at.

Here's the "call to action" it ended with:

For fans of fast-paced thrillers and strong female leads, "Footprints in the Sand" is a must-read. If you enjoyed books like "The Da Vinci Code" or "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"...

Hilarious. About as on-target as my current cover artist, though.

The final chapter

Another week, and weekend, of not a lot accomplished. Some of those stupid little plot wrinkles to work out for the last chapter. Every time I thought I had it, something else came up; "Where did he put the horse trailer? Why didn't the police take the computer? Why didn't he reload?" 

Put on some '80s music and did the third revision of the Dynel scene, the scene I hadn't realized I wanted. I think it is going to work now, along with the second (or is that third?) revision of the scene with the cop. Neither of those had been in my outline, by the by.

Oh, yeah, and Charlie Bauer and the German expats who were leaving Alamogordo (the German Air Force training center at Holloman AFB closed the year of the story) came to life briefly, then went away again. Giving Dynel's bully a name a backstory and an excuse was too much apologizing for his behavior and it took away from her. And this added scene is the one where she finally gets her own voice.

I'm going to need even more concentration for the next sequence. The "thrice-dug grave" worked with a fairly simple revision (Penny was being too flippant, and her former digging buddies were too at ease with her new focus). But now I've got a showdown with "Major Bob." One of those scenes where I have to balance an emotional outbreak, frustration and failure, against actually getting some useful plot information.

That, and I had to go back again and clarify who exactly knew what about what had been secretly removed from where. It may be a MacGuffin and some of it will never be revealed to the reader, but I sorta need to know so what happens looks like it happened for a reason.

And once I've gotten through the final chase and confrontation I still need to go back for some clean-up. The nuke museum scene might end up simpler. I may not need to touch on NERVA engines there at all (it also might be too early). And there's two other places I could hit MAD; if nothing else, Technical Sergeant Johansen could explain all about it within the Lambda Logs. That sequence talks about it at length.

About the only thing I'm sure of for that scene is Penny needs to see the game boxes and bobblehead because ever since the museum, every time she finds herself in a ruined and radioactive facility she's been cracking jokes about "the little blue guy."

I was about to say something about how important Dynel's scene is here, since there are so very few female characters in the book. Intentional. I didn't want Penny to have anyone she could lean on or confide in. I wanted her isolated.

Really, there's Dynel -- who only talks in this last snippet of a scene -- and Mary Cartwright. Except that Mary's aunt has a scene and there's a conversation. And a server at the Pueblo Kitchen has a few lines. And there's a saleswoman at a fleet rental company Penny calls at one point.

And then there's Senior Airman Sanchez. She's got two scenes, with lots of lines. 

So, no. Dynel isn't "the only other woman in the book."