Operation Begonia

I was stopped for a day in editing The Early Fox, and went so far as to read a pdf from NASA on economical testing of small-scale NTRs (Nuclear Thermal Rocket engines).

My beta reader complained about "Site Theta" and wanted something that sounded more military and foreboding. I agreed in that I wanted a more official-sounding name for the test pad out in the desert that could be used consistently in dialog and narration.

(That reader also complained about Major Robert Flowers, but I just haven't been able to come up with something that is either boring, or too on-the-nose. I'm settling for reducing the number of times he gets reduced in the narrative as "Major Bob" -- instead of undercutting his power and menace, the narrative will more often call him "The Major.")

Anyhow, after all of that; VICTOR-7 is what I came up with. It ain't wonderful. It will have to do.

(VICTOR-7 is the codename for the test pad and associated. The actual non-code project name for the rocket was KITFOX.)

***

The other progress of the past few days is I've put Blue in uniform. There really is a mode in Military SF of the career progression story. Space Hornblower stuff -- not necessarily with ships that behave remarkably like something Wellington had used. Crossing the T...In Space!

Engineer path, which should change things up a bit. She's not aiming for command and I don't intend for her to spend a lot of her time in the big chair. Plus the setting is more corporate security than front-line Navy -- her first adventure is an SAR mission tasked to a nearby Survey ship.

A thing I hate when Mil-SF goes space opera, is that the protagonists inevitably have to break the rules. That's fine, but then the repercussions are unsatisfying. Either like Captain Kirk they get conveniently tossed into the briar-patch of being forced to command a starship again (instead of flying a desk as an Admiral), or they manage some crazy rules-lawyering by which everything they did was actually legal if you consider this sub-clause of a seldom-read paragraph that only applies when giant mole-rats are eating the sun...

Okay, sometimes they do get put on the beach, or on half-pay. Honor Harrington herself suffered from being taken off active duty (she wasn't cashiered because she has friends in high places. Which is another typical get-out-of-Leavenworth free card). So did Alexis Carew, but that was less for what she did and more because peace broke out.

That both makes a bit of a mockery out of all that insistence on honor and chain of command and respecting the regulations, and also is stuff I just don't feel like trying to figure out (aka, why exactly IS there a rule about giant mole rats?)

But besides genre suitability, there are good story beats I can get out of Blue having to work within a military-like structure.

Better than that; it provides familiar foundation for the story arc. Her having to survive on a frontier world is one thing. Her having to save herself, rejoin her crew, get their ship back, and finish their mission...that's a lot more structure to work with. Even if the story was headed that way originally, making that her duty makes it a lot more direct.

Good news is bad news

I'm half-way through revisions on The Early Fox. I am appalled at how slow it is going.

At the same time, I am learning so much. I've not really engaged with a text at this level before. I've revised at the top level, when major plot points were obscure or dramatic arcs were broken, and I've spent time in the trenches of sentence-level fixes, but what I got from my beta reader is in the space between those. That was where her notes were focused. And that is the stuff her notes gave me confidence to attack.

And one of the things I'm seeing is that I've gotten stronger as a writer, with this being my tightest book so far. And that I've finally found the heart of the series. This just works better; the mystery format, the smaller-scale setting, the personal fears and doubts, the pressure and suspense. All of it works better for me than the over-the-top Indiana Jones type stuff I originally aimed this series, and this character, at.

I really should have been remembering how much I liked Travis McGee and Jim Chee,  Spenser and V.I. Warshawski. Not Lara Croft and Sydney Fox. (Well, okay, I like them too. But maybe that isn't what I like to write.)

Especially now, when the amateur sleuth has gravitated towards people who have technical skills. Sometimes directly adjacent to police work (such as forensics, for Temperance Brennan), sometimes not. And, probably due to increased female readership (and female writers), not just an increase in female-led stories, but a shifting away from primarily fisticuffs to more social skills.

The genres always bleed into each other, as do the characters. V.I. is about as hardboiled as they come.

In any case, this works for me, and I would love if I could just crank them out. And I think there's a market (as much as there is a market for anything, in this attention-deficit, AI-flooded present).

Trouble is, the other books aren't a good fit. That leaves me in awkward position.

***

I haven't had time to do full research on re-staging into "mystery-suspense," but a brief session with Publisher Rocket. I thought the metrics on Space Opera would be better, but turns out they are both flat for growth, the average earnings are similar, but the competition is actually a bit stiffer in Space Opera. In the right category of Mystery you might only have to sell a hundred books to get into the top 10.

But then, Project Hail Mary currently dominates in both categories. Which tells you a lot about how firm Amazageddon is with this category and keyword stuff.

Brane and brane, what is brane?

FTL is a necessary weasel of Space Opera. Not all space opera, but it is as generally accepted as is the ability of terminal tuberculosis sufferers to sing an extended aria in that other form of opera.

All of the methods and terms are essentially hand-waves. Some touch lightly on ideas in physics that might do something that, if you squint, vaguely resembles faster-than-light travel, but we skate over all the impossibilities and, in the end, it is no more scientific than reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.

In any case, I'm gonna use wormholes.

The main thing they give me is one big hand-wave that ties together multiple implausibilities into one pill to swallow. In a way I hope will be amusing enough that the readers will go along for the ride.

So we've got the quantum foam, tiny vacuum energy fluctuations. Where we part from physics is that in this universe, they can "clump." Anisotropic distribution forming semi-stable solitons. So, basically, tiny wormholes are constantly forming, lasting for a short time, then coming apart. They are largely outside the cosmological universe and thus exist in multiple places at the same time.

(And yes, black holes, especially quantum black holes, aren't handy tunnels. Well, shush.)

Now, to get them to do what some of the plot requires, they have to have a very selective distribution. Have them everywhere in the universe and the effects would be visible on cosmological scales. Have them clump around gravity sources and they'd change stars in ways that would be astronomically observable.

I could give them a goldilocks zone; assume the radiation of active stars inhibits formation of the solitons, for instance, but that they also don't form well in interstellar space. For reasons. I'd really rather not use the old saw that they are attracted to "life" (however we define that), but it would certainly be handy.

For the purposes of story I'm saying they aren't conventionally gravitational but tend to go where dark matter goes. Which is also anisotropic, but only in certain places (so that part isn't cosmologically significant). 

In any case, it can get very clumpy around these dark matter concentrations, and if you are clever monkeys, you can do some technical things and open a stable wormhole. It still requires such difficult steps as making exotic matter, and the chaotic nature of the clumpy wormhole foam plays out a lot like a particularly rambunctious nuclear reactor; quantum embrittlement and point failures, meaning not only does it cost a lot of tech to build the thing, but you have to have a well-developed industrial base keeping up with replacement parts and other maintenance.

But on the flip side, you get power back. Lots and lots of power. Basically vacuum energy extraction and there is some fear this is destabilizing the entire universe (the old false vacuum problem) but so far the practical thing is that these wormholes tend to rip the universe a bit.

That is, the micro-holes start appearing down a spreading dendritic network, like roots of a tree. And eventually nodes appear where the right civilization could start up a new wormhole.

The first one might not have been artificial. Or might not have been on Earth. But anyhow.

Hand-wave, hand-wave, and a starship can, by applying enough power (and maybe a little exotic matter) open semi-stable wormholes long enough for it to pass through. Which since this is based on encouraging the naturally clumping micro-wormholes, means the best routes to take are along the  Lichtenberg figures spreading from a stable wormhole.

So there are lanes, or maybe currents. 

The idea of the vacuum energy -- done through maintaining a stable wormhole -- is that it puts a top level to the energy pyramid I was getting into with the battery stuff. Ships are largely possible because they carry some very dense fuel (H3 possibly) that is possible because the civilization sending them out has the power available. Power that is essentially a natural resource, and a rare one at that (that is, a place where the holes got really clumpy). So it isn't an exportable technology. They can only send out stored power.

I might not even need gates for travel. Given the right dendritic lanes, ships pretty much explain everything. Oh, and they might get some kind of artificial "kick" if launching from around a node.

The other silly thing you get from this is that the unstable micro-holes happen at planetary surfaces just often enough, and are just big enough, they provide a weird sort of panspermia. The interesting thing here is that they aren't just transporting primordial amino acids. They can transport seeds, possibly even small animals.

As long as the transported material is intact enough and advanced enough relative to its new surroundings, it provides the ability to Galapagos fresh worlds with, let's face it, terrestrial analogs. Since the wormholes are random and rare and more developed life is going to be influenced rather less by small numbers of competitors, the ecologies do diverge, especially the more evolutionarily developed examples. 

There's more hands I can wave at this one, horizontal gene transfer etc. etc., but basically this means the film can be shot within a day's drive of LA. After humans have encountered a few biomes, they've even identified a few template biomes; "This part of the planet is falls within the parameters of a Vc template; temperate rainforest, coniferous analogues, cool and humid."

And means once you get done playing with tamed wormholes on your bottled energy, you can set down on a place with breathable atmosphere and possibly even edible flora and fauna.

And lastly, since you can't bottle them, create them, or carry them, you can only make use of this wormhole stuff where it is already occurring. No black hole grenades for you.

Starbase

Revisions on The Early Fox are going so very slowly. It isn't a lot of fun to go back again and again to a thirty-page document on everything you got wrong, then try to figure out how to apply those fixes to an 80,000 word novel. I keep having to take a break, both because this takes a lot of concentration, and because it takes a lot of emotional stamina.

No closer to starting the next book, then. Which I still think should be SF. But wading around in Penny's adventures, spending a big chunk of the day with her narrative and working in her voice, I can't help but want to see her in another one.

I have three images right now. Or call them fragments of scenes. There's a novel drifting somewhere between them, but one that still lacks a central plot.

A dying tech billionaire, a man with strange ideas about transhumanism. He wants to do a thing that sounds on the surface insane -- something about "mental renewal" or regeneration -- but after long conversations and some other things she has learned, Penny supports him.

Penny's friend Amelia, the American comic-book fan she met in Paris. Several phone calls over the course of the book, with Amelia exploring her own peculiar comic-book like theory of what has really been going on behind the scenes through Penny's adventures.

Penny serving at a consciously retro diner. That is, it wears a futurist '50s dress, chrome and rocket ships, but is actually serving soy beef patties and smart drinks -- expensive ones, too. And she's not here because she needs work; she's here to investigate something scary that's happening behind the Happy Days mask.

What ties it together is something that looks a lot like a data center; a tech center, an industrial park, served by a company town which is a utopian designed community. Yes, with all the failings of that paternalistic approach that have been well-known for about a hundred years now. 

You know, Elon Musk actually built one? Yeah. We really don't learn from the past, do we.

BTW... that company town in Texas has a tiki bar, too.

Rewrites

 I've just gotten to chapter two.

This is new to me. Having a detailed set of notes, but more than that, having notes that came from an outsider. So it took a week just to digest them and try to shape them into what I was actually going to do to the narrative. And get everything in order and compiled into a single file.

The first chapters are hard because first chapters are always hard. You are trying to simultaneously give the reader enough to understand what is going on, and give them some reason to care. You can't get to "Bob is in trouble and you like Bob," without explaining a little of what the trouble is and who Bob is. But every word you spend on the latter, is time in which the reader still doesn't care.

I've revised before, but usually on a larger structural scale. Even if that does require re-doing entire chapters because the way they were before didn't support the new vision. What I've never had is a chance to revisit those opening chapters with all the knowledge I gained through writing the rest of the book, and really pick and chose what to show the reader and in what order to entice them along.

Aiyla's lakeside stroll just got more urgent, and more dangerous. And she got a name.

Penny is getting slightly more backstory. The way I set up the first chapters to begin with, I was heavy on atmosphere but let the reader pick up on the clues about what was going on the same way Penny was. Now I've got more explanation. And I'm making her more active, too; on the surface, a passive filter, but inside, being analytical and smart. 

But it is slow going.

I'm also still adjusting from leaving my full-time job of the last ten years. Lots of paperwork to do. I've still got NDAs to sign and phone numbers to transfer. Adjusting to new schedules and also trying to figure out how to spend less on food. Finally getting around to re-arranging my place (didn't have the time or energy before) and making some appointments (like optometry) I was also putting off.

Plus, you know, three days in the hospital with an infected leg.

My latest Fiverrrrrr hire is starting to worry me. She promised me a dialogue. She's got a deadline of the 12th and she's had the materials in her hands since the 5th. I'm beginning to think "dialogue" is going to be her doing the whole thing at the last minute, and shooting me a final package with a "any questions?"

At least one of my prior artists is still around. She did good work, we got along fine, she's up to draw me a nice Clovis Point. For the dinkus.

***

I have a plan

 

I'm working to "rescue" the Athena Fox series, not because I'm in love with it, but because that's six years of back catalog and having more books out there always benefits the writer. There's a lot of things to be done, which is why I wasn't able to attempt this before.

Identify market and approach with an outside advisor. I have one now and have some confidence this one will work out.

Revisions. I'm still collating notes from two beta readers and of course myself, so I can get The Early Fox fixed up. It is actually in pretty good shape but could benefit from a bit of tightening. I am rather less looking forward to working on the others, but will probably go through beta readers again; weighing the potential value of an already-written book against time that could be spent writing a better one.

Editing. Yeah, I want a human edit pass. I haven't figured out yet if I can afford it.

Possible new titles, definitely new covers to fit the identified market approach. I have a stack of Shutterstock pulls for the latter and intend to mock up my own consistent set of recovers for the whole series, then hand those off as concepts to an artist -- preferably a solo human artist, not the front end of a cover mill. Which is also expensive, and I'm on fixed income now.

A release scheme. Probably staged, under new ISBNs. I might purchase my own ISBNs this time. I'd love to do ARCs for reviews, but I don't know if I'm up for that, too.

More cooking at home, because I want to be conservative with my expenses, and I've been meaning to get back to that. But I don't want to be too ambitious with it yet. I need to clear out more space in the kitchen. And that means cooking has to stand behind general cleaning and re-organization.

I have plans but they basically require I lose from thirty to forty percent (by bulk) of what I own. I've done most of the obvious. Now it is down to sorting out old cables and electronics, clothing I don't wear, books I've been keeping in the closet...and then increasingly challenging questions, like do I want to get rid of the musical instrument parts (including a half-built ukulele)?

My hope is to lose the two big bookshelves, shift the two small bookshelves and add a matching third, both opening up more bare wall for space and light and also freeing an entire wall to rack up some musical instruments. In the kitchen, even more ambitious; completely clear one end and stick acoustic material up there so I am less self-conscious about practicing musical instruments at home.

Revisions on The Early Fox are probably going to take a week. Deliverable on the marketing plan is seven days as well. So that's probably the focus for at least a week and, especially if I get into editing and/or revisions on other books immediately, at least the rest of the month.

That thing about making a solid back-catalog is in context of writing stuff that isn't another Athena Fox adventure. I have a floating list of potential books, with two currently close to the top and ready to go.

Those two are a weird contrast. All Systems Blue (working title) is robust in the structure; technology, philosophical ideas, structures of society, etc. But as yet I've done very little on the surface look and feel.

The Tiki Stars is all about the surface. There's really nothing under it. But since the surface is so vivid and mostly already constructed for me, writing it is likely to be easier and it is also (plotting concerns aside) closer to being ready to write.

Or my marketing consultant might convince me to throw more behind Athena Fox.

(I really do want to do another American episode, specifically, a blue highway adventure; dropping off a Greyhound bus into some small town and discovering a big problem. The stumbling block is while I've thought of half of dozen plot hooks already, I can't seem to get archaeology into the mix.)

Football and Knife

I'd heard somewhere that it had been suggested there be a pistol in the Nuclear Football, so before "pressing the red button" and killing millions, the President would have to look one man in the eye and kill him.

Well, turns out the original story is weirder. Roger Fisher, of Harvard Law School and a major thinker in Conflict Management, suggested in the March 1981 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that this be implemented -- in the form of an implanted capsule containing the launch codes, and a butcher knife. The President would have to gut one of his own aides in order to launch those weapons.

That is way too good not to be in the novel. Not because it is a strikingly weird tidbit of history, but because that tension between the remote-control deaths of millions and the twist of a knife up close is what drives the central conflict and resolution of the book.

Anyhow. My knee didn't reach football size, but I had an episode of cellulitis that got caught maybe twenty-four hours before the danger window. Spend two days in hospital getting antibiotics on an IV drip. That, and still being on oral antibiotics and a tight Ace bandage wrap, means I haven't been up for getting my place straightened up properly.

Now that I'm retired and all. Not that I've exactly stopped working. My old work has had me on the phone or coming down to drop off keys for at least a week, they still have me on the roster as a consultant, and I interviewed to light Earnest in July.

So I guess this blog is coming back into its name. I'll be doing theatre again. And I'll be on a more limited budget.

So I've been poking around at new writing projects, plans to go forwards, market analysis...and I'm finally ready to go hit the revisions on The Early Fox. Or The Drake Equation, which is a problem I'm looking at seeing if Fiverrr can help with. Should I re-stage? Probably. Should I extensively revise? Probably not. Should I re-name? I...don't know.

My confidence in Fiverrrrr is low at the moment. I started looking at the beta readers, and one that jumped out advertised: "I will a service of beta reading." Clicking on the details, she claims to be an English speaker, and goes on to inform that, "Over the years, Ive developed a sharp, detail-oriented eye..." 

Ah, yes. Details other than apostrophes.

As usual, it is a futile project. What I want is someone to A) look at the series as currently presented at KDP, including reading sample chapters, B) confirm or disagree with my current understanding of the correct market, and C) give an opinion on changing the titles.

What I am looking at is people who want me to define genre and hand them all the operational keywords, at which point they will then as efficiently as possible (quite possibly using AI) throw into some boiler-plate blurbs and SEO. With this desire of theirs for maximum return and minimum variation strongly supported by a vendor (Fiverrrr) framework that wants to turn every transaction into a Set Menu.

At least one thing is solved. I have a basic idea for new covers for the whole series, and I've started hauling assets into Affinity Photo. I'll rough them up, then go out to a proper cover artist (possible Miblart again) for a package deal of taking my mock-up and doing their magic on it.

Ben Franklin was not an alien spy

I was thinking this morning about urban fantasy. And then I wondered if there was a way of using magic to break history.

And not with the usual hidden history garbage. Something that happens now, in the contemporary world, that makes the fun stuff of pseudo-history --  the mysterious secrets of the ancients, glowing swords, and multi-level ancient tombs -- possible now when it wasn't how history unfolded then.

Well, I did think of one. "The Fae Lords."

I'd just read the first book of an urban fantasy series that very much did not have a masquerade (as TVTropes calls it). In this series, the magic came back, and was so deeply antithetical to tech it made a ruin of Atlanta. Well, the whole world, but the setting is Atlanta. What I mean is an urban ruin; the kind of charm of big city urban decay that got people so riled up when lead additives to gasoline were still a thing.

Life goes mostly on but the usual underfunded infrastructure is now dealing with lycanthropes and necromancy in addition to car crashes and fentanyl.

Well, that's an idea I like. 

So here goes; "The Fae" (whatever they are) show up suddenly in the modern world, complete with most of the powers and attitudes you'd expect in many contemporary depictions. And they fit right into the existing power struggles and other issues. Humans don't suddenly get the ability to throw magic around. Tech doesn't stop working (the Fae would like you to think that, but mostly they just like to hang wifi jammers around their spaces).

And they are fascinated by human history (there's some reason I haven't figured out yet). But this is the shallow fascination of cheap AI YouTube channels, pushing the fast-and-fun myths (water was so foul medieval people lived on beer) over anything with more substance.

The Fae love that kind of stuff (and maybe other aspects of pop culture...haven't gotten that far). And...this is something that has been going on for a long time already anyhow in this our real world...rich dilettantes are buying up historical things in order to more fully realize their fantasy version of that history. Only these particular arrogant, ultra-rich, strangely popular tech-bros can work magic.

The whole point of this (something that seems like a sideline, and almost certainly is a sideline to what they are doing to economics, politics, etc.) is that space I was trying to explore with Athena Fox; both having the real history of the Palais Garnier, and having an actual living breathing ghost-haunted Paris Opera House complete with hidden passages, half-masked weirdo in the basement, and a non-OSHA chandelier.

Basically, a mad wizard did it.

Anyhow.

I gave up on the plan of kicking another novel out in six months while I continued to work and put money into the 401K. Had a chance encounter of my own (plus a couple of other things). So it was time to quite the day job and go back to contracting. For the moment, I actually have time to write.

Which was great, because the more I looked at it, there was no way in hell of getting any book kicked out in six months. "Blue" is coming along (now with the subtitle "tales of the Fairy Ring." Probably). I was spending time on energy mostly to nail down the easy stuff first, and have a firm foundation to grow the rest of the world-building.

Now, I've got several books and at least one TTRPG campaign under my belt to know better than to succumb to world-builder's disease. But that doesn't mean there isn't work to do, and I may have underestimate how much work.

Which makes two reasons why the Tiki book might be what I should be aiming to write next.

The world-building of the tiki book seems simpler, as it isn't attempting to make sense of the used furniture. Also, as I realized taking notes today, it comes out of pulp, which doesn't delve into structural reasons (what set SF aside, at least as argued by Campbell and others). There's a revolution, but who really cares what the true causes were, or who is in the right, or even who wins. Instead it is a situation where adventure can ensue. We may have a rebel character who has their own strong emotional reasons for what they do, but this is character, not world-building.

The other reason, though, being the tasks of writing a story that isn't a linear whodunnit in a single POV. I have to re-learn how to construct different kinds of plots and different ways to present them. Now, the Tiki book is episodic. So more like a string of short stories. Blue adds the complexity of more continuity with these episodes being parts of a long continuous story.

But basically the one is like a story-board; a form that lays out the writing problems in a way that is simpler to understand.

Cooking

I am looking forward to getting back to cooking. I was gifted a wok. And I found a new cookbook.

 I have a grocery store next door with a great selection of fresh produce, bulk produce, and harder-to-find ethnic items. And if that always fails, I have a few of these:

I hope I don't regret not taking the whole box.

I'm also hoping to finally get some cleaning done. And, well, writing. Less money coming in, though -- a lot less. But it was time to make the move. For that, too, I hope I don't regret it.

Turnip Tesseract

So you are hiring an editor and want to know if they are as familiar with science fiction as they claim. Or you are hiring an artist and want to know if they are familiar with ligne claire.

Well, between Google, Wikipedia, and now AI, all you need is an insulating layer of text between the questioner and the target. Now any hungry slop merchant can pretend expertise long enough to get you to fork over the money.

I've got two beta readers on hire right now, several developmental editors I've been talking to, and new art needs in the future and I am in dire need of a Turing Test. How do you hold an oral, a books-closed exam, a calculator-free test, when you can't see if the person at the other end is answering out of their own expertise or is frantically typing away in the background to let Claude answer for them?

Before you drop $2K to $6K on an editor?

Think of say SF. In my lifetime, there was a time when you had to have read the stuff. There were some Cliff's Notes and the like but basically you could ask them if they knew the book that put powered armor on the map (Starship Troopers), or the name of the protagonist (Johnny Rico).

When things first became searchable online, the data was there but not the associations. Ask them to compare two "big dumb objects" and they'd have to go into their own memory to realize that both Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama had suitable examples.

Now Wikipedia has much more associational and analytical pages which fill in the connections between the raw data. And increasingly, you can ask AI, which can very quickly do some very subtle associations based on questions created on-the-fly.

When you get the work back, then you have the volume and the leisure and the real-world application of those promised skills, and that is where failure will show (and AI will become obvious). But what do we do in the hire?

I got the beta read back and I am in an uncomfortable position. It was detailed and echoes many of my own thoughts and that's given me some actionable stuff to do. 

Yet, the beta reader is aggressively asking me to post a rating. Not comment or critique, just stars. And there are so many weird little not-quite-red but certainly-not-green flags about her work and her presentation.

I am very sensitive to cadence. The cadence of her speech in all (but one) text communications is different from the cadence of her report. This isn't just the formality level. It feels different in a way that word choice and grammar wouldn't cover.

I've never had a beta read before. I had the impression that they should spend their energies in top-level impressions. Did the story hang together, did the ending feel deserved and complete, was the protagonist sufficiently something to keep the reader interested in them.

This report seemed to get down in the weeds very quickly. Sentence level corrections, down to typographical errors. Organized in bullet points. Too much praise. Now, there are things that feel like a human hand was involved, but I'm still getting the smell of AI off it.

The positive reviews for this beta reader on Reedsy are...strange. In fact, some of them have the same cadence. The negative reviews are clearly human and one of them (there's not that many reviews overall) questions whether this reader understood the assignment. This switching back and forth from business-speak to something very idiomatic feels to me like someone who isn't comfortable with English and is using artificial tools to bridge that gap.

If she is using AI, it is part of a process. I can't tell what percentage of that process is hers, however.

I'm not comfortable leaving a good review. I also am not comfortable confronting her on this. And as I said, she is being very aggressive about asking for those stars.

The next million words

I finished the New Mexico book. I think the series went sideways, and it never went as commercial as I intended, and I don't seem to be able to find my readership for it.

But this what I've been doing since 2019. Six years of work (and change). A series, five books and counting (and that's another half a million words there). That's a bit too much of my writing life and output to shelve it.

So now I'm back in that terrible limbo I was in when I finished Shirato (my actual trunk novel, now) as I shopped it around to publishers and never heard back. 

I have a vague plan forward, which is multiple steps of scouting expedition. Get some beta readers to tell me if I'm writing books, or absolute crap (and I should go back to fanfiction and stop tricking people into paying for it).

Depending on that, both see if I can learn what I'm doing badly and should work on going forward (in hopefully more commercial work), and potentially, do some developmental editing on the way to revising the books. And, simultaneously, get opinions on how to best place these books in genre and towards audience.

And depending on how good I feel at that point, spend the money and time for more robust editing.

And then, depending on what I might have changed in order to find a market, change titles, covers, re-issue under different ISBN and so on.

What hurts, though, is that during all of this, the book isn't being read. It doesn't really "exist" because it is only on my own computers right now. There's no way for someone else to encounter it. I think I might be less attached to this one than any of the others. Hard to tell; I've been feeling very detached from everything lately. 

Failure

I finished the New Mexico book. Most of the things I was trying for...didn't happen.

I wanted in this one to fill the pages with empty desert and open road. I wanted to luxuriate in those descriptions, and give Penny space to clear her head. On the mystery itself, I didn't want her usual friends and supporters (or her increasingly complicated back story). I wanted her isolated emotionally as well as physically.

It didn't happen.

First off, backing away from her expertise meant I was trying to describe desert when she couldn't even name or recognize a Saguaro cactus. And she couldn't talk as much about the complex and fascinating history, because, well, she didn't know enough of it.

Worse, having her in an unfamiliar place meant I fell right back into having people explain it to her.

I made the people she interacted with unfriendly but they still ended up helping despite themselves, because that's the nature of a mystery. You have to get the clues somehow. And turns out, not being supportive and friendly is not the same thing as not having an emotional connection. Lon is annoying, Mary angry and sarcastic, and Dylan blissed out but she's still emotionally involved with them. There's even an arc.

As usual, the space was too big. All I wanted at the central core was to juxtapose nuclear secrets with the first humans in the Americas. But I couldn't leave the Native Americans out of either story. And that brings in frontier history and the cowboy stuff is something parts of New Mexico wears on its sleeve anyhow.

And set loose someone who still has to be weaned from snarky internal monologue crammed with pop-cultural references, and there are gonna be a lot of cracks being made about, well, everything. (Besides that, "be mean to Penny" for the characters Lon and Mary ended up being a lot of "be snarky," so I've got pop culture and trivia coming from three directions or more.)

The mystery didn't chunk as well as it should have, either. My idea was to make each clue a distinct moment that drops hard, that feels like the plot advances, and that often changes the ground. I mean, there are places it sort of worked. Realizing UFO nuts were yapping about the radioactive body in the desert changed the mystery of that body, and sent Penny on a road trip towards Roswell.

But the mystery wasn't quite deep enough to provide many of those moments. Same problem with using the mystery for the long drives; there wasn't enough to puzzle over. Worse, the changes in how the story plays out, like Penny having to go walk through an illegal dump site with a Geiger counter, or getting side-swiped by a Hummer and fleeing in near-panic, were constrained by the mechanics of plot and geography.

I spent weeks trying out different combinations, and none of them really made the plot clunk along like the intermittent gear I wanted it to be. Instead the physical aspect, the change in the world, the emotional moment and, oh yeah, the progress in the mystery didn't track that well.

But it is done. Or at least, the second or third draft is done (I revise as I go).

I've been looking for developmental editors and/or beta readers. Finally dropped a hundred on Fiverr for one of the latter, because it costs almost as much to use ProWritingAid's AI. So at worst case...I'm overpaying. A weird one. Her communications were exceedingly casual (as in, not even trying to spell simple words).

But not as weird as the Dev I'm talking to at Reedsy. Reedsy requires a sample, he told me he was going to mark that up as an example of his work. That's more than what was expected. However; he returned an rtf without tracking, highlighting, or other marks of what he did. It took me a while to notice he'd gone and added a scene break, and a chapter break. It took me longer to find out he'd added one sentence (again, without marking it in any way). A sentence explaining the joke (or possibly being really literal-minded) about one of Penny's pop-culture drops.

This is not what developmental edit usually is. On the scale where proofreading is at one end, this is about as close to the other as you can get. Developmental is looking at the big picture, of story arcs and character arcs, of plot and theme, of world-building. Moving around chapter breaks might come out of it, but that's not really what it is about. Also, editing is about discussion. Editors mark their changes, or suggest a change be made. They don't insert a new sentence.

It seems to me I've been through this before. There are reasons other than being stubborn or stingy as to why I've ended up doing my own so often.

(I told my cover artist to stop trying to understand the difference between Mexico and New Mexico, and I'd try to draft something myself. Yeah.)

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.