In the Navy

Once again a Fiverrrr vendor has missed the deadline without a single communication. Meanwhile, I drew up two cover concepts and restarted my order at 100 Covers. I'd like to cut a deal and order the whole series at one shot, but I am still iterating.

I need to get that cover, finish the description, complete the front matter, upload to KDP, and then I'll be ready to apply at Book Sirens and see if they will let me do an ARC run before release. I'm moving slowly from book prep to publicity. And behind this book, there's clean-up and re-release happening on the previous books -- and the possibility of new books to come.

My old work called and I will be going in for a day or two this week to help with a project. Earnest is months away, at least.

And I am starting to outline the MilSF book (All Systems Blue).

The subgenres merge and blur, but within the SF genre one can generally point at something called Military SF, and within that (and also crossing over heavily with Space Opera) a story form that focuses on the career of an individual. These are books in which the character arc of that individual can only be understood within the frame of their military career. (In fact, it is often understood that their growth is entirely because of the military.) Which means, practically, there are a lot of pages of people doing military things. Not just fighting, but making bunks and having inspections.

The plot I've concocted for this book is mostly planetary setting, with no fleet engagements (at least not yet). I had hoped to start the thing on a planet. Even then, I was going to have to figure out something about how the ships work. Starting on the ship, which is the current plan, just makes that a more immediate problem.

So here's what I've got for a working premise:

A Merchant Marine. This is a system that sits at the heart of space operations, forming a centralized body of training and certification (under the Colonial Administration), operates maybe half the hulls out there, and those CA-flagged ships and people are also available to the CA in times of war.

But let's back up. Started with a colony of Earth. They built up one world and sent their own Navy as protection (strictly a military arm, this). It was an extraction colony, meant to send much-needed materials (partially-processed; FLT ain't that cheap) back to the Sol system. So it was always very industry-focused.

The colony grew, expanded, and in time won independence. By that point value-added had reached the point where the colony was actually competitive in manufactured goods. But standard of living, and the population, were enough that they'd started their own extraction colonies, which in time also grew sufficient populations to desire self-governance.

At this point we've got something more like a federation than an alliance, a strongly centralized government that is otherwise weak in comparison not so much to local rule, but to the large corporations, and the remaining structures of the old Colonial Administration.

The Navy is still there on tax dollars, their aging ships too large and expensive to crew and trotted out just enough to blow the dust off them. They and several other functions of the old CA are largely subsumed into the new government, just another bit of local rule as far as they are concerned.

So the hull and the crew of a typical Merchant Fleet ship come out of one or more of the various "worlds" (self-rule polities, aka states) but are built to Fleet standards and trained at Fleet-qualified and overseen academies, to be given the standardized Fleet certifications. The latter two being true of essentially every crew with an actual rating, and particularly important to officers.

And on paper they cooperate with the Navy, which still has some people out there serving the remnants of "Papa Earth will watch over you to make sure the big bad aliens don't bite."

And yes, that is a hell of a lot of agreements-on-paper and traditional cooperation and all sorts of interesting ways for things to fail. I am fairly sure it did get tested when fighting broke out between a couple of the secondary colonies but I haven't worked on that yet.

In structure, I'm mixing mostly American merchant marine with a bit of US Navy and particularly submarines. For no particularly good reason. Which means I'm bogged down right now with things like watches and titles which I wouldn't have to deal with at all if Keri were to spend the entire book dirtside trying to get back in contact with her ship!

Plus, as an engineering cadet...well, just figuring out watchstanding brought up the matter of the Power Gang. To figure out how the ship runs I need to know how the ship runs -- that is, what it actually looks like when we "take her out, Mr. Sulu, Warp 6."

Yet another wrinkle. So the Merchant Fleet is generically "carry stuff" for commercial trade, plus various government businesses (it ain't wartime so they are getting properly paid for it). The companies have their own vessels, of course, which vary more in design and have their own cut-outs but more-or-less follow the same regulations. The Academies are well-tested by time and the certifications are trusted so... why change what works?

They also have some more specialist branches. Support is the big one for the book here, a fairly vague category of repairs, setting up and maintaining navigation satellites and the like, probably wormhole operations, closely connected with the labs/yards that are busy testing safety systems and so on, rescue services most likely...

So our boat is T4M (Ln). Doesn't get a name (the crew calls it "Tammie.") Support Branch, built like a Swiss army knife for a little fire-fighting, a little repair, a little survey. There's a standardization taken a bit too far for Support, meaning flexibility was optioned over utility (not that they don't have very specialized and very effective single-role ships and crews). Support was really intended to support, well, Fleet operations. Most of them, especially the gopher ships like Tammie, were never meant to go all Starship Enterprise out into the wilds far from the core worlds.

Add one more thing into the mix. That moment when Earth figured out how to run an extraction colony far outside of the Solar System, that moment when the extraction colony really, really needed a bigger breadbasket and developed Keri's "Ag-world" home planet as basically a big-ass farm? Well, that moment has happened again.

Keri's world is now developed enough, and with a rising technical competence and population and rising living standard putting the lie to the "bunch of hicks on a farm" stereotype, that they are joining the clamor for markets (and mines) somewhere else other than their own scenic mountain ranges. So is everyone else. And the dendritic network has touched a whole new cluster of potentially rich worlds to exploit and/or trade with. Trade with, because they already have locals.

That's put everyone into running around with their own Bright New Ideas. The CA is jumping out from hiding with a "See, this is why you kept us around!" The Navy is being very wary and enquiring if perhaps they could get that increased budget Real Soon Now. The corporations are eager to show who is most bleeding-edge of the bleeding edge and some of them are going Full MacNamara in wonderful schemes for how they can make their crews safe and effective.

Which is how Keri gets yanked out of her career progression of getting her degree in mechanical engineering and a nice quite job in Fleet HQ running the future space equivalent of a Steiner Tunnel, or helping to develop the next better version of a Halon fire suppression system. Fleet needs warm bodies to fill those new hulls. (And Tammie is so new it still has that new car smell.)

And one of those labs she had hopes of joining has been brainstorming with big-brained Terry expats and has found a way to download terabytes of survival skills into an adult human brain. If they can just get it to work right, this will surely be exactly the thing for crews getting sent to the frontier in this new gold rush.

Blue Coal

The person that was advising me on genre placement -- and we'd just moved into cover design -- got vanished by Fiverrrr. Second time that has happened. Sure, I get the money back, but I've lost all the time I sunk into working with her.

So I've got a formatted manuscript, but no cover. I broke out my old drawing pad to sketch some ideas but that has been going slow. When I get out of this current sick I'll open up some maps and see if I can do something with that.

I need that cover before I can sign up for ARC, and I want to do that sort of thing before I release. So the book is still in limbo; essentially unread, unless you count two editors.

I am currently using a jigsaw puzzle model for the brainstorming portion of a novel. That is; that there are edge pieces which you already know you want in the book, and the more you fill the remaining open space, the more it is clear what shape the missing pieces will need to be.

When I finished the trunk novel -- Shirato -- I actually spread print-out over the floor to try to understand how big the chapters were, how many pages there were between events, and how much more needed to be written. Now I have that as an instinct. And my instinct tells me I'm missing about a third of the plot for All Systems Blue.

Except, this one it feels like it isn't going to add a chunk of new, it is going to elaborate on what is already there until it fills the space.

I just binge-watched Last Resort (it's sort of The Silent Service with an American boomer), a couple of movies so forgettable I can only remember the name of one of them (Moonfall), and read some stuff from Brett Devereaux about the antics of the "Statue Profile Pictures" crowd. And, of course and as always, reading the truly endless pages at Atomic Rockets.

That jostled things enough. Unfortunately, the fleshing-out is pushing me towards a slow burn opening. I wanted to do a Storm Over Warlock; start the narrative with Keri being marooned on a hostile world after her ship sent a small party to find out why a remote mining installation stopped transmitting.

Instead I'm needing to start back with T4M (Ln) still back in the Core Worlds, with time for discussion of their role in Fleet, and for Keri to get into a one-sided fight, plus we get to look at Oberon Power Station before we set out for the Frontier.

But the politics got a lot meatier, meaning there is plenty for my protagonist to do both on the mining world and on the "legations" world; a world where a whole bunch of different aliens (humans included) have set up enclaves for trading and politics. The "Corsairs" are absolutely are an agent of state policy (for much as the Klaathi have a state), and Atlas Metals is not just the victim of their raids; they are ready and eager to return in kind, and may have left the crew on the mining world out to dry for exactly those aims.

One big thing I haven't got, though, is anything cool for her to do with engineering. I've got some moments for The Thing, when she is left without good options and takes the explosive one nobody in their right minds would have considered. But those are mostly leveraging the situation. I want her to be able to do something crazy-dangerous and undoubtably destructive that comes out of the tech and science at play. The "What do you mean, bring up the hyperdrive inside a gravity well?!" sort of thing.

And the problem with that sort of thing is figuring out why people aren't already doing it.

Section 106 rule changes

 

Anyone who is in American archaeology knows exactly what that headline is referring to. Anyone who has been following the current administration has a pretty good idea what kind of changes are being imposed. Yes, imposed; no discussion, no consultation, just dropped with a typical DOGE chainsaw, administration fiat, hamburder-fueled late-night tweet.

That's Section 106 of the 1966 National Historical Preservation Act. The basis of CRM in the States.

And the changes are not what we could have expected. They are much worse.

Consultation no longer required with SHPO and THPO, as well as local agencies.

Public participation now discretionary. Of a process which now belongs, not to a historical preservation agency, but the contractor that wants to bulldoze that cultural property.

If that wasn't enough, a new class of "categorical exclusions." As in, coal mining gets a free pass, no discussion needed or wanted.

Natural features excluded from preservation rules (say goodbye to that sacred mountain). And there's more. Yes, more, including a clause that the President can at any moment unilaterally declare a "state of emergency" requiring waiving any and all remaining protections.

Basically, it is drill baby drill and who the hell cares about stewardship.

Hired Oscar Wilde

I got The Early Fox back from the proofreader. The main thing he did was change " -- " to "--" and add a trailing space to ellipses when they occurred in the middle of a sentence.

All of my style guides say that the em dash can be used with or without spaces; AP style likes the space, Chicago no space. But the trend is also spaces for journalism, no spaces for books. So I'll go for that. I had already switched to no spaces when used at the end of a line. Which, oddly, my proofreader missed in the one or two spots I hadn't it right myself.

He gave me about a dozen line notes. Of which half changed the meaning of the sentence on the way to making them more grammatical.

So did I get value out of the service? Well, the nature of the changes is a sign this was a human working, not a robot. (He caught the one place Penny returned to her hotel, after she'd kicked up a fuss all the way back in Chapter 3 that she was choosing to call it a motel.)

And he did pick up several annoying omitted words or extra/missing spaces.

But the thing I really gained is assurance. Most of the mistakes he caught were things I needed to learn, and now that I have, I don't need him. The even better thing is what he didn't find; the many pages that didn't have a single note on them.

I am dumping money down this drain, and I haven't even hired a cover artist yet.

The SEO person (that is, Kindle marketing person) has sent me an offer but I haven't signed it yet. She's the one who zeroed in on thriller over adventure, and mystery over archaeology.

Which brings me to the next book.

I'd really love trying to write on deadline. With five (six) books down now, I have a pretty good idea of the tasks and labor and I could break it down to milestones.

Had a bunch of ideas floating around for Penny. Today over brunch a bunch of them fell together -- but not in quite the forms I was expecting or hoping.

The stuff I wanted to do with a EPCOT-like planned community, and my Elon Musk stand-in, and a tech center somewhere in West Virginia or something, packed up, grabbed the science museum I had lying around along with an ex NASA engineer, and went to Greenland.

So now that's the over-the-top one -- but it isn't in conus anymore so wrong for the Bill Bixby arc.

What was left took the coal miners strike, went looking for a crime, and after a weird detour through urban fantasy heroine archetypes, leather coats, and vampires found itself a for-profit juvie center Penny can stage an intervention at -- after a contested election goes through the the help (and hindrance) of a modern-day Mother Jones.

And the only reason to put up with Penny going underground again is that I get to call one of the parts "Enemy Mine."

Anyhow, lots of fun, but not exactly what I was wanting for the next episode. Maybe I should just get that tagelharpa for her and do the viking story next...

If I only I was closer on Blue. I have the basic layout of the place. I have lots of tasty bits with my tech and aliens.

I lack a sensawunda. There's nothing about the place you could put on a cover or in the elevator pitch. They aren't on the back of a giant turtle or doing magic with hair plaiting or have laser shurikans.

I think the problem was going in the Honor Harrington direction. That is, Mil-SF with the focus being on one person's career progression. Because those things do love them politics and engineering but only from the numbers side. Which gets as excessive as their counts of missiles.

(I just read the first book of the Lost Fleet series. Space battles galore. The protagonist is the admiral of a fleet and the POV character. Through the length of the series, we get like five settings, tops. And two of them are his cabin and the galley.)

So I also have a plot currently that goes after one group of aliens and beats them up. I can't make it really go deeper into the politics or philosophy or theme of the place, much less the physics or whatever. It is just "oh, and we have to shoot at some bad guys."

The main reason I'm not quickly switching gears and cranking out the Tiki book instead, is I want to decorate my space to put myself in the right mood first. And despite retiring, I have yet to clean up my place properly.

Well, that and I actually cranked out 7,000 words already -- in one day! -- on a new, nonfiction book.

Go home, LTXV2.3 you're drunk!

...but you have crazy taste in music!

I finished the edit, then handed the manuscript off to a proofreader who will be finding many, many things I missed. In fact, while I was compiling I realized I'd been inconsistent with my hot peppers, and had to find the New Mexico standard spelling for the things. (It is "chile" there, not "chili.")

And celebrating with a short break. I've actually got Wan 2.2 running pretty good on a three-step ksampler with the latest lightX accelerator. SmoothMix high and low, with a fast move Wan 2.2 in the first slot. Then upscaled to final resolution. 

(Especially since I learned on a subreddit that when using lightX (lightning LoRA), 121 frames will quite often return a seamless loop. I did experiment with making cuts, but it is the nature of generative AI to decay over time. Think of it as the xerox effect stitched into a video. Short clips, alas, remain the best option.)

Anyhow, I wanted to try out LTX 2.3. Because LTX also does sound.

Shames me a little, because I used to design sound. I enjoyed designing sound. And neither quality nor control of sound in LTX 2.3 is high. But it does do foley, which is just annoying to cut in to a rendered video. (Without a pro toolset, that is. Doppler and worldizing and stretching to fit are just a pain with something like, say, Audacity and the free filter set.)

However, even a negative prompt won't keep it from adding music. Which is a downside, especially as, if not specified, the music falls into a narrow range of choices that become increasingly familiar over time. Specified, though, it does a lot better than the version of Ace-Step I was playing with a while back. I was able to tell it to give me some lute and recorder and it did. Of course, when I told it to give me some bright pop, my cast started singing. There's that.

Really, the Will Smith is still the stuff that's most fun about AI. Not when it gets it right, even though it can be quite startling how close it can come when it does. But the times it just goes way, way off script into a "please tell me the name of that drug" territory.

(I was in img2vid mode for the first experiments and didn't have much in the folder I could play with. So I was taking some very random stuff and seeing what I could do with it. Got the jet bike to take off quite nicely; that one worked. Another one gave me a power walk that made me laugh out loud. Before I shut down the PC, I'd found something appropriate for "render me this in the style of a 1970s British sci-fi television show" and the results were so hilariously bad in exactly the right way...! The music, in particular, was spot-on.) 

(I also had some water-acrylics-on-white-paper style "renders" I'd done to generate ideas of the various aliens in the Blue universe. I animated those, giving them some dialogue. And I tell you, I have worked with voice actors who were less on the ball in giving me the kind of voice I wanted. The Dren was perfect by take #2. The gestures the AI gave to that vocal performance, though; well, those have given me some character ideas.)

Also turns out it can handle 400 frames without significant degradation. At least, in the more compressed fp8 checkpoint!

Cutting room floor

My beta reader had concerns about pacing and I agreed. I do tend to write fat and then trim. One big reason is I let Penny babble. Both of us love to analogize, and when I do her narration as a stream of consciousness a whole bunch of "this reminds me of" gets in there.

For the pop culture references, I had a plan. I was going to start with her going to that well too much, then have the solitude of the desert quiet that internal monologue until she didn't need it so much. That...didn't happen. So in the last two or three edit passes I've been throwing a lot of it out. I'd trimmed a quarter before the beta reader got there. That was her note as well, and with new confidence, I took out over 2/3 of the remainder.

The "heroes" scene, for instance. That one is all about a bully at a retro diner that drags Penny into thinking and reacting like she's in an '80s movie, and consciously having to move off that.

What survived the last cuts? Flashdance. And that was just in the opening. The whole confrontation and resolution is down to...none.

Similarly, for the whole sequence from the diner to the end of Part III, Penny is complaining that everything is reminding her of a movie, from the Escape from New York street scene of Albuquerque's "War Zone" to the Damnation Alley of entering the Atlas-F missile silo. But my choice in the revisions was to let the reader pick the movies or visuals. I might have hinted in a place or two (she thinks about giant scorpions while she is exploring the illegal radioactive waste dump) but it is stronger if the reader makes the connections.

Besides pop culture, Penny does the history/anthropology thing. The "monkey dance" squeaked through. Most of agriculture went away. The Face of Agamemnon stayed, barely. From things that weren't her: Pueblo language groups and Permissive Action Links went poof. Much of MAD went away and, sigh, the knife in the briefcase never made it in. Ham narrowly missed getting memorialized; the Challenger Memorial (roughly thirty feet away) was less distracting to the flow of the narrative.

Somehow, the Daisy Track, Colonel Stapp, the refrigerator and all managed to stay. 

Another big cut was that almost 2/3rds of Penny's "Now lets go over the facts of the case" stuff went away. In the final chapters, everyone but the White Sands girl, the Juan de Onate, and Lozen got cut -- even Joan Hinton, her words moving to "Ginny." And almost all of the explicit discussions of theme went, stripped down to one thin paragraph in the last scene.

Some of them my beta reader complained about, and my feeling is now that this is a bit like describing emotions. Don't feel the emotions for the reader. Let them take those emotions from what has happened. And by analogy, let them make the connections, understand why a character acted a certain way.

Anyhow.

I extended the WIPP sneak-in with a longer sequence of stuff. I couldn't quite get her into the mine itself, but how I staged it let me at least mention the Salt Hoist and the Salt Room and the Transition Line (yeah, there's a lot of salt involved). The climb out of the missile silo is also longer and harder, but mostly different; she's doing it with a hurt shoulder now.

With all of that, I'm still at 73,000 words. Hell of a lot of work for a book that's shorter than today's publishing norms...

Half way through running ProWritingAid across the revised manuscript. And, what have they done to my boy? ProWritingAid is sucking in new and surprising ways. I have decided, for instance, that it has no idea and no ability to understand when a semicolon or a full colon is better, and so is programmed to alert on all colons and wait for the user to do something about them.

In the early iterations it (like most grammar checkers) couldn't figure out dialogue punctuation. Now it has over-corrected. If I write; "I have finished." Tom closed the book and stood up? Well, PWA will flag that first period. "This should be "I have finished," it tells me. Because Tom can't possibly be doing an action that follows a closing punctuation; he can only be there to be followed by "...said."

(Or would that be, "...concluded?")

The death loop is back with a vengeance. And not just for clauses; now it will argue with itself over tenses. Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word use "send." Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word...

And stuff so blindingly weirdly wrong. We're talking Grammarly level wackiness. I need to go back to their site and make sure they haven't changed how they use AI again. And find out how to switch off the increasingly aggressive "We can rewrite this sentence for you, just press the AI button..."

Or maybe it is time to dump that subscription. In any case, I need a human editor. Spend thirty minutes fixing capitalization of "colonel" until I realized I had done most of them wrong and put them back again. I hate capitalization. And hyphens.

It saddens me that software can't be relied on to capitalize "Sir" correctly, put a comma after dialogue followed by "said," or determine if it should be "desk top," "desk-top," or "desktop." Because these seem to be simple things.

Where I would want a human editor is with ungrammatical speech, especially when it is conscious, mixed, and rapidly changing formality levels. Half my cast are archaeological field techs, which means they switch from precise and technical to slangy and casual at the drop of a trowel. Penny more and more admits to doing a sort of Valley Girl act to put others off guard. And that's before you get to Jackson and Sanchez, who speak distilled 1980's Army.

And tense, because story-telling tense is peculiar. One of the ways of achieving the effect of events happening as they are narrated is for the free indirect speech to be in present tense. I am tempted to say that tense in a mystery is almost as bad as tense in a time-travel story; "Now I knew that I wouldn't have given Richard the locket then because all the while I had been searching the mansion I had thought it was there, and not, as I knew now, on the boat -- or at least I hoped it would be when I'd finished searching there tomorrow."

Finis

I just one minute ago typed the last word. The Early Fox is now revised.

What remains is to edit it again. I think I can't face the round of beta reading et al again. Sure, making a good book would and should take more than one round of revisions, but a self-published mystery that will be lucky to sell ten copies?

Maybe All Systems Blue will get the proper beta reader treatment.

I am telling myself that the process took as long as it did this time because, like almost everything about writing The Early Fox, I was re-learning how to write. Having a detailed set of notes from a beta reader let me take a long step back and look with new perspective on a lot of the things I was doing.

Some relatively easy to spot, like big chunks of lecture. Some harder, things I needed the Golgi Stain of a beta reader's notes to pick out from the text, like the way I belabored certain points in repetition. That one is also an indication of a problem in process; writing small chunks with long intervals between them meant I couldn't always remember if I'd already done a thing.

But it is done.

The next step is debridement. I left all the trimmed bits in the manuscript. Some of them inline, even; when I had a line or a full paragraph or two I'd decided (based again on those notes and that new perspective) I didn't need, sometimes I'd leave them in place and just mark them with a highlighter.

Really, I should re-read from the top and make sure I don't need those little bits after all. Maybe I will.

Right now, I'm just happy to be done with the hard part.