The cover of Tales of a Dying Star: Siege of Praetar is complete, and I subjectively think it's amazing.
Thanks to Kyle Guay for the fantastic work. If you'd like to hire Kyle for your own work, shoot him an email here.
Release date: December 25!
Review of Sphere, by Michael Crichton
Oh yes, the Michael Crichton lovefest continues.
There truly is a formula to Crichton's works:
- Protagonist is brought to help with some problem
- They take a helicopter to the place, which is always in an exotic location
- Things go wrong, shit hits the fan
- Protagonist escapes
But you know what? I don't even care.
Crichton's writing is crisp and simple from the beginning. Within the first page you find out everything you need to know: they're in the Pacific, visiting a plane crash. Normal Johnson is a psychologist flown-in to help with the survivors, or so he expects. He hopes he'll be home in time for his wedding anniversary.
He soon learns there are no survivors, because it's not a plane crash. A UFO has been found on the floor of the Pacific, which crashed 300 years prior (they're able to deduce that based on the amount of coral that has grown). Norman, who wrote a half-joke report on alien encounters for the Carter Administration, is there to help the team. There's a mathematician, marine biologist, and astrophysicist. And Normal's job is to supervise them as they visit the spacecraft, 1,000 feet underwater.
Most of the book takes place in DH-8, the Diving Habitat erected for the scientists. The team arrives, meets a few of the Navy employees already there, and then visit the alien ship.
The ship, however, has words printed on the outside. In English. After some investigating they realize the ship isn't alien, but American. How did an American craft crash in the Pacific 300 years ago? Why, it traveled through time, of course!
It was at this point the book's age began to show. The ship passed through a black hole, and Crichton spent several pages explaining to the reader what a black hole was. "Who doesn't know that?" I thought, annoyed with the over-explanation. But black holes weren't generally understood until the 1960s, and Sphere came out in 1987. Their existence was something I've taken for granted.
Anyway, on the ship they find an alien artifact: the sphere. One of the scientists eventually finds a way inside the sphere, and that's when things get weird.
The sphere begins communicating with them via messages on their computer. It's child-like in its innocence, but quickly grows bored and angry. Manifestations appear outside the diving habitat: one Navy crewmember is killed by thousands of jellyfish. The sea floor becomes infested with shrimp. And then the giant squid appears, shortly after they discuss Jules Verne. The habitat is attacked, and more people are killed.
The rest of the book is a fantastic thrill-ride, gripping on every page. A few twists round everything out, leaving the reader excited and satisfied.
I'd seen the movie years ago, but had never read the book. It didn't disappoint. Sphere is one of those novels that gets your imagination churning and makes you want to read more. It gave me plenty of ideas as a writer, and made me want to jump in front of a keyboard.
I'm still not sick of Crichton. Up next on my reading list is Timeline, one of his later works.
Self-editing Checklist
Writing is hard. Editing your work afterward is harder.
I'm in the middle of editing Tales of a Dying Star: Siege of Praetar, and it's tough. A writer is blind to his own work, and it's difficult to read it as a critic. Taking some time off between writing and editing helps, but it's still not easy.
TheWriteLife has a really nifty self-editing checklist. Here it is, in all its brutal glory. It's helped me, so hopefully it'll help you.
Review of Prey, by Michael Crichton
I grew up on Michael Crichton. Jurassic Park is one of those rock-n-roll books that grabs you from the beginning and doesn't let go, and I similarly enjoyed most of Crichton's other work. And so, wanting to step away from the fantasy genre for a bit (which I've read exclusively for the past year), I went back to some of my favorites.
Prey was the first one I picked off my bookshelf.
It was a quick read. I started it on Monday and finished Thursday, maybe six or seven hours altogether. Like most of Crichton's books the premise is simple: there's a facility in an exotic location, and things go wrong. In Prey it's a fabrication plant building medical nanobots: robots so small they can swim in your bloodstream, giving a better view of your insides than any MRI machine. The plant is in the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert, and Jack, the protagonist, is hired to visit the plant to help with some problems with the computer code.
He has ulterior motives to visit the plant, however. His wife is an executive at the company, and has been working at the Nevada facility for weeks. She's secretive and begins acting strange, and Jack suspects that she is having an affair. Visiting the plant gives him an opportunity to determine what she's really been up to, as well as relief from months of being a stay-at-home dad during unemployment.
Upon arrival at the facility he finds out that a few million nanobots were released into the desert, due to faulty air conditioning filters. The nanobots keep returning to the facility though, in human-sized swarms. Like a big pack of gnats. Things quickly spiral out of control from there, and the reader finds out that the swarms have some biological functions as well, and are able to enter a human's brain through their blood stream and possibly control their impulses. Eventually the 'nest' of the nanobots is destroyed, as well as the facility itself.
The book is paced well. The first 1/3 of the book is Jack slowly realizing that his wife is hiding something from him, and reads like a mystery/murder. Crichton does a great job of making the reader feel that something is wrong, so when the protagonist figures it out the reader is already ahead of him.
Then the book switches gears and becomes more like a thriller/sci-fi novel at the facility. The formula is similar to his other books Sphere or Jurassic Park, where chaos and danger slowly escalate out of control, but in Prey it's different enough that I didn't mind. The characters are what are really important, and by then the reader cares about Jack thoroughly.
Even having read the book 15 years ago, and remembering the general premise, I enjoyed Prey very much. The nostalgia factor was high, and I'll definitely be rereading some of Crichton's other books next.
I Love Statistics.
You're supposed to just write. Sit down, type, and turn a white page into black. Not let anything else matter except the story you want to tell. But I can't help but keep track of the meta-data for my writing.
I note the time when I start, and after 30 minutes check to see what my word count is. Another check is made at the hour mark. I typically average ~500 words an hour, so this is where I decide if it's going to be a good day or a bad day. Either way it keeps me pushing forward, and has ensured that I write at least 1,000 words every day for the past three months.
I'm in love with the statistics about my writing. I have an overall spreadsheet to keep track of estimated completion dates for projects, and average weekly word counts. Only 4,000 words this week? That means the first draft of Pillars of Wrath won't be done until November 30. That bumps into my timeline for Tales of a Dying Star, so I'll need to pick up the pace next week, or write a bit longer on ScifiSaturday.
Each individual project gets its own spreadsheet too, with outlines and word counts for each chapter. Pillars of Wrath is 92,024 words. I've completed 21 out of 28 chapters, averaging 4,382 words per chapter (though varying between 2,900 and 7,200). Seven remaining chapters at that average means a final word count of 122,699 before editing. But, the last three chapters I've written have averaged 5,620 words, so I'm starting to stretch out more.
If you could see my spreadsheets you'd swear I was autistic.
I find it comforting to create an order in the madness. All this data doesn't inhibit me (aside from a little wasted time), and even helps me feel a sense of accomplishment with each new update. Instead of several projects in vague states of incompleteness I have measurable progress toward a specific goal. I wrote, the word count incremented, and I'm that much closer.
Only with immense willpower do I avoid doing this with the books I read. I don't note that I read 40 pages of Prey in an hour, and at that pace I'll finish by Thursday, which brings my yearly total to 14 books, but I could bump that up to 19 if I increased my daily reading by 20 minutes!
Nope, I don't do that. That would be really crazy, whereas I'm only mildly crazy. But I think about doing it.