Tag Archives: Plague Confederacy

Catching up: February-April, 2014

Derek Newman-Stille interviewed me for his Speculating Canada blog. Derek has published an academic paper about and presented at conferences on the Darkborn trilogy, and he asks good, probing questions.

I was one of the readers at ChiSeries Ottawa on March 18, 2014, whereupon I discovered it is indeed possible to go to Ottawa and back in an evening (It was a Tuesday, I had a Wednesday morning meeting, and the 0625 train held very little appeal). The piece I read was the follow-on to the posted section of Breakpoint:Nereis. And it's on YouTube.

I was invited to speak at the Ampersand 2014 conference (theme Science(Fiction)) here at McGill on March 22, 2014.

I went to Ad Astra 2014, April 4-6, 2014, and launched a book!

My wandering starship finds a small press home

Old news, now, in this social networked age, but two of the three novels I wrote between Cavalcade and Darkborn have found a home with Bundoran Press, a Canadian small press. Their (current) titles are Breakpoint: Nereis, which is due out in April 2014 (in time for LonCon3, hurray!), and Contagion: Eyre, currently scheduled for April 2015.

When asked what they are about, I have described them somewhat cheekily as “Star Trek meets medicine.” They concern the voyages of the 50-person starship Waiora (one of nine) on a mixed humanitarian and diplomatic mission to re-contact human colonies in the aftermath of a plague that collapsed an interplanetary human civilization. Their purpose is twofold, to try and ensure the immediate survival of the colonies they contact, and investigate the source and nature of the plague.

Sounds straightforward, right?

But the people on the surviving colonies have their own ideas about what they want, and they’re not shy about asserting them. Aeron Ivesen wants her lands back and its invaders defeated. Creon McIntyre will do anything to ensure his people’s freedom and survival. The history of colonization has left its own legacy of bitterness and distrust, and the sponsoring colonies of the mission are anything but united. And two of the crew of Waiora have a separate agenda that could threaten the whole mission.

Draft 2 (and rantlet)

I now have a complete Draft 2 of Graveyards of Nereis, pending spellcheck and proof-read. Though spellcheck is a doleful prospect. My default spelling is British, since it was in Scotland that spelling was drummed into me, as far as it went. (Much rewriting of misspelled words; much learning of synonyms to circumvent use of certain words, such as ‘receive’). But I’m using MS Word. And I’m writing SF. There are going to be a lot of squiggly red underlines to pick through, with trips to my old red Chambers or my newer Collins as final arbiter, because I am not a confident speller, and I don’t dare put anything into the spellchecker memory without verification. But I won’t let MS Word grammar check for me. I am a law-abiding person, but grammar must be subordinated to (a) sense and (b) sound and rhythm. To take an example, some sentences simply need the softness of ‘which’ in them; ‘that’ is just too harsh if the other words in the sentence are soft ones, or I am trying to characterize the speaker as someone gentle or diffident. And I will resist to my last misplaced comma the devolution of the wonderful, supple, quirky English language into a form dictated by the programmers at Microsoft!

M(es)s, glorious m(es)s

If 7151 words in a day is not a personal best, it’s in the top 10. That takes me from 0715-1130, 1300-1500 when the phone made such weird noises I had to answer it, 1545-1630 when I noticed the sunset (yes, it was a gorgeous clear day wot went by) was shaping up to be photographable. 1815-2145 when my brain gave notice that it did not have the oomph left for an emotional epilogue. Not to mention the bone-deep ache in both wrists, and in the base of my right thumb, which I hope are a consequences of starting weight training and not RSI – I promised them not to disregard their complaints too often. I switched off the sound on the phone, the answering machine – and it still persisted in wanting attention, so I unplugged it after I spoke to my parents – and the Internet – next door, at the wall where the cable comes in. If I could have gone down to the street to unplug it, I would have done so. It is such a time-suck, so easy to drift over when my concentration cycles down, and drop half an hour guddling pointlessly around. So, unplug the Internet.

But that 7151 words means that as of now the m(es)s stands at 135 541 words with the story so nearly told that by the end of tomorrow (if I don’t fall in the lake, trip over the dog or drive off the road tomorrow on the way to and from my I-am-reforming-and-getting-more-exercise-if-it-kills-me run in the morning) I will have have a sort-of-complete-but-holey-as-an-old-washcloth, drafty-as-an-old-pair-of-knickers REAL LIVE FIRST DRAFT to print out by the end of the weekend. It’s lacking essential descriptions, vital plot connections, dialogue refinement, consistency in terminology, and for that matter consistency in minor character names and descriptions, and too many people sound the same. I will no doubt have contradicted myself a dozen times, and I can only pray that none of those contradictions torpedo my climax and denouement, because I likes it the way it is. Writing for me is like building a bridge that decides to turn left in midstream and connect to another continent entirely. But it has life, by gum, it has life: a mob of bloodyminded characters out to get their own way – some of whom I will I discover I have forgotten entirely by the wayside and will need to account for, a roll call of the movie cast, or the prisoners; a problematic and not too implausible ecology that I will get to refine further; lots of decor; a certain amount of geography and weather, one of those climaxes that makes me wonder what would happen if they gave me the MMPI. Murder, mayhem, and the road to hell reached by the best intentions. It’s a mess, but it’s a glorious mess, and it’s all mine!