A Progress Update.

Long time...

It's been a good while since I last posted on here.  I guess I just lost the will to do it.  Anyway, regardless, in recent months I've been busy...

The publishing of 'The Gaps Between The Stars'

After much faffing around, I finally got around to doing a final edit on The Gaps Between The Stars and published it around a month ago.  It's available in paperback for £9.99 and ebook for £3.50.  All of this means I'm now up to five published books!  Have you got them all...?

Works in Progress

Time Off - A Proctor Novel

After completing the edit for The Gaps Between The Stars (which took me a month or two) I picked up 'Time Off'.  It took a while to go back through the chapters that I had written already, edit them and thoroughly re-familiarise myself with the plot.  I had left it part way through Chapter 11, 'Slaughtering the fatted calf' at around 54,000 words.  Since then (in a very busy month for me) I have completed that chapter, added Chapter 12 'A trip to the seaside' and I'm part way through Chapter 13 'Upset? Absolutely gutted.'  I re-wrote some sections during the edit and I'm happier with those bits.

Time Off contains quite a few torture scenes - I continue to find it very hard to write these, but I'm just about done with the last of them, so hopefully things will tick along nicely after this.  The word count is up to 65,000 now - around 11,000 words added in the last month.  I'm not entirely happy with this writing speed - with a target of 90,000 words I'd expect to finish writing it in two and a half months, but as I say, the last month has been busy for me and I spent a while re-reading and editing.  When I do sit down and write, I usually manage to top a thousand words a time, so in theory, I could be done in a month.  Sensibly, let's say eight weeks.

I had a cool idea for the cover blurb for this one when I was writing a Facebook post a few weeks ago...

"Time Off sees Proctor attempting to take a short holiday on the resort-world of Finn. He gets drawn into a bar fight that leaves two local gangsters dead. He plans his getaway and gets to space only to bump into some old colleagues who seem overjoyed to see him and invite him, somewhat forcibly, to join them. Proctor's not so keen. It goes downhill from here and most everybody dies, mostly nastily."

What do you think?

When it's done, I intend to send it around the publishers and see if there's any interest.  I'll give them a few weeks to come back to me with a sensible offer and if one isn't forthcoming, I'll self-publish it. Fingers crossed!

The Product of My Dreams

...remains parked at just under 41,000 words.  I haven't actually added anything to this in two years now.  I might pick this up after I've finished Time Off or I might move on to other things.

Future Projects

Well, the obvious place to start this is with a mention of 'Machine War'.  Now 'The Gaps Between The Stars' is out, it's time I gave serious thought to getting this one written.  Perhaps once 'The Product of My Dreams' is out there, I'll crack on with this, the third book in the Night Time in Shanghai series.

I'm not specifically planning another Proctor novel and 'Machine War' will mark the end of the Night Time in Shanghai series which was always intended as a trilogy.  But fear not - I'm considering a series which has the working title 'The Lost Systems' in which Night Time in Shanghai and her crew will return to explore systems lost since the first human diaspora which happened in a time when the earth was torn apart by war.

And talking of the war on Earth, I think I may add a book about that, perhaps even featuring a ship which departs Earth to colonise another world... anyway, this bit's just my mind racing away with ideas.  I try not to plan too far ahead - it all starts to seem a little overwhelming when I do.

Life...

Where to begin? Life living on a small cruiser can be very difficult, especially during the cold and wet months. ....ermmm which in England is not necessarily seasonally dependent.  The front window of my boat has been leaking and it's made what was difficult into something nearly impossible.  Because of this and other issues (which I'm not going to go into here) I've decided to get my boat out of the water at Redhill Marina on the river Soar (on the boundary of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire) and do some serious work, probably over the course of a few months.

My daughter (who was living with my dad in Mansfield for the last six months) has found a nice flat in Swadlincote in south Derbyshire (near Burton-on-Trent) and I've spent a few weeks helping her decorate and find a few essential items such as a cooker, fridge and washer.  At the moment, I'm spending my time between my boat, Swadlincote and Mansfield.

Once I'm happy with my boat, I'll get it plopped back in and move around to Burton where I'll either get into a small marina (if they have space) or see if I can find a secure online mooring.  This will give me a permanent base and put me closer to my daughter.

Anyway, I can feel 'Time Off' calling to me so it's off to do a bit more writing - hopefully I'll add another blog post without another year passing...

Finally... An Update!

Well it's taken nearly seven months to get around to it, but finally an update!

In this post, I'm going to talk about the personal difficulties I've had (and continue to have) over the last year, books and writing and just general stuff about life.

So what's been going on in my life since I last put up a blog post?

In my last post, I said that my astronomy business had suffered badly due to lost deliveries, things going to the wrong addresses and general delays.  Well, the cable side of my business has now disappeared.  The camera side took a serious knock (along with my reputation), but I cleared all of the debts I had with my customers as quickly as I was able and cleared the debt that left me with my payments system.  Camera modification work dropped off quite seriously and for a while I was trying (and failing) to get by on one or two jobs a month.  My dad helped me out financially as much as he was able, so I just about managed to survive.

Over the course of the following months, with the onset of autumn and winter, the camera business started once more to grow, but it was very slow and patchy, and in the winter my heating costs go up to around thirty pounds a week.  In December, my trusty generator failed and I went without heating or power for a few very cold days.  Subsequently, I got very ill and ended up spending a couple of weeks with my dad recovering over Christmas.  I have a new 650W two-stroke generator now which just about provides enough power to keep things running.

That doesn't mean my troubles are over - as I type this, I've run out of diesel for my boat's heater, so I'm sitting here in coat and hat, typing in fingerless gloves.  Last night, the temperature dropped well below zero and it snowed on and off.  I was tucked up warm in bed though - fully clothed in a three season sleeping bag under a fifteen tog duvet.  Oh - my water tank (and my cat Lulu's water bowl) has frozen and my gas won't flow either.  Hard, cold times.  Once I get some diesel for the heater, the temperature inside the hull generally will rise and the water and gas will flow again.  I warmed Lulu's dish up enough to get her water again anyway.  It's snowing again now and has been for a while - tonight's probably going to be even tougher than last.

As it's the first of March tomorrow, and I get most jobs in at the start of the month, I'd expect to get a few payments in the next few days so I imagine I'll survive.  That seems to be the basis of life at the moment - survival - but I've camped out in the Scottish winter (back in my winter mountaineering days) in temperatures down to minus twenty-two celsius, so I'm no stranger to this kind of advesity and generally speaking, over the last couple of months, when I've hit such levels of poverty, I've come through it in a few days.

So I get by on camera work which is currently giving me around £500 a month - hardly 'living the dream' but whatever.  I could choose to give up my boat and get a council flat or something and start all over again, but as long as I can just about scrape by, I will.  I chose this life and I'll stick at it.  As I say, my camera work and reputation are well on the road to recovery, so hopefully I'll be able to start managing a little more easily soon.  I don't need much for me and my cat.

Books and Writing.

Night Time in Shanghai and The Proctor Novels continue to sell, albeit quite slowly, and provide an occasional small top-up to my income.  I've had a couple more reviews added to Amazon, and they are almost always five star.  I'm sure I've said this before - I've read thousands of sci-fi novels down the years and only left a very few reviews, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that most readers do the same, but it's very difficult to get any recognition without reviews so please, please, please - if you have read any or all of my books - leave me some reviews on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

Due to the other ongoing hardships of my life, it's been almost impossible to focus on writing and after short periods of writing in August and October of 2017, I came to a halt - surviving the winter took up all of my time.  A couple of days ago, I decided to pick up 'Time Off - A Proctor Novel' and I've spent a couple of days re-familiarising myself with the story line and editing the first eight chapters (adding about 800 words).  I could tell from what I had written that other things were taking precedence in my mind when I was last writing.  Having said that, I like what I've written and the way the story is developing and the editing has been effective, so I'm now very pleased with it.  Later today, I plan to get back to writing chapter nine, though it's a bit of a challenge in fingerless gloves and a coat.  As soon as I've got something new, I'll try and add a quote.  Hopefully, this will mark an end to my writing hiatus.

Andy Ellis, 28 February 2018, in a very cold and snowy Findern.

It's been a while...

Well, as the title infers, it's been a while since I last posted on my blog.  Life has been difficult to say the least, and I haven't been in the right mindset for adding blog posts or for that matter, doing much writing - still, on to the writing in a bit.

My business...

As some of you will be aware, I have a small business called 'Astronomiser'.  At the heart of this business is a modification service for Canon dSLR cameras which makes images such as this possible:

This is a bit of an oldie now - I shot it using a Canon 350D in 2007, but it's still one of the best shots I ever took, so as an example of what can be done using a modified dSLR, I'm happy to show it off, and I'm not using someone else's work - suffice to say, lots of my customers have produced far better.

Anyway - I'm side-tracking myself.  Modifying dSLRs was/ is the core of my business, but I also manufactured a wide range of cables.  Living on a boat, I have had some issues receiving deliveries of parts which companies have sent to old addresses or they just haven't come at all and this led to cash flow problems.  Because of this, I decided to close this side of my business before things got any worse.  I owed six cable orders when I made this decision and most of those people have now claimed their money back through the PayPal payments system that I used on my website.

One person took extreme exception to this and attempted to destroy my reputation on various facebook groups, sent me messages with thinly veiled threats of violence and visited Amazon and left bad reviews for my books, none of which he has read.  Anyway, I accept and understand his annoyance and frustration, but for the sake of forty three pounds which he can reclaim from my payments system, the response did seem more than a little extreme.

I just need to hope that the nonsensical reviews don't put too many people off of giving my books a try and I'll keep my fingers crossed that it won't be too long before positive reviews outweigh these ridiculous negative ones.

Talking of positive reviews, a Goodreads reviewer, Dion Perry read Night Time in Shanghai and left a nice four star review both on Goodreads, on Amazon.com and on my publishers website - thanks very much for this Dion - I hope you enjoy 'The Art of Living' when you can get around to it.   It's pretty pacy compared to NTiS.

I'm going to carry on doing dSLR camera mods for a while at least.  There's no outgoing expense with these, so they aren't affected by my cash-flow issues and as I've done nearly three thousand of them, so they are something I can do easily to provide myself with something of an income until I find other work or start getting royalty payments that I can actually live on.

To say that this time has been depressing is a massive understatement.  I tend to disappear into a hole of self-doubt and it can be very hard to pull out of this - I watch Netflix all day and just feel sorry for myself.  Fingers crossed that things improve soon - a very bleak winter awaits otherwise.

Location, location, location...

I've limited my travels over the last few weeks.  I have quite a few friends in and around the Willington area so I've stayed on that stretch of the Trent and Mersey Canal though I do plan to move on in the next few days, continuous cruising rules being what they are.  I haven't decided whether to go north or south yet.  I like Fradley Junction (of the Trent and Mersey and Coventry Canals) and the pub there, The Swan, and I'd really like to head down to Hawkesbury Junction (of the Coventry and North Oxford Canals) and the pub there, The Greyhound, via Hartshill and one of my favourite pubs on any stretch, The Anchor in Hartshill, where Neil always provides a warm welcome, good food, good beer and lively conversation.  But, I don't have the money either for three weeks travelling (OK, it's only a few days, but hey - stops, bad weather, plenty of places to visit on the way, etc.) or for spending on beer and food when I get there.  So an alternative is to head back up towards Sawley and go and visit my sister Layla - this has the added advantage of keeping me in the area where I can go visit a few other members of my family so at least I won't starve, something that has been an issue recently.

About this time in my blog I'd normally add a recent pic, but I went for a midnight dip with my iPhone SE in my pocket which really didn't do it (or me) any favours.  It heated up very rapidly indicating a massive short and hasn't worked since.  Maybe I'll see if I can get it repaired at some time in the future, but in the meantime, I'm down to an old iPhone 4S.  Me, on the other hand, I cooled down very rapidly (in heavy rain) and was surprised at how deep that section was - I struggled to get out and was a bit cut and bruised both by the fall and the effort to extricate myself from the clutches of the rather cold water.  Anyway, here's an old pic of The Anchor at Hartshill, from last autumn.  It would be nice to visit them again.

Anyway, on a positive note, this left me without internet for a few days so I did some...

Writing...

I was in the mood for some Proctor so I sat down and over the course of a week re-read and edited the twenty or so thousand words I've written so far in "Time Off", then added about ten thousand words - it's now up to thirty thousand.  I'm sure I've mentioned in the past that the target for this book is eighty thousand words, so at the rate I'm currently adding to it, I doubt I'll finish it before Christmas, still you never know.   Here's a quote from Chapter Six 'Flight and fight'.

"Proctor poured the last of the vodka into his shot glass and linked through a data node to the station's external cameras and watched as the liner detached and moved away from the axle, spinning end over end to align itself with some point on the far distant edge of the system. As he made his way back to the shuttle which would take him back down to the strip, a warp tunnel opened in front of the liner and it sped off towards the outer edge of the system. So he had maybe a dozen hours. In the back of his mind he briefly entertained the thought that she might in fact get away, but as he stepped on to the shuttle back down to a different part of the strip, he shook his head and dismissed the ridiculous idea.

Perhaps it was because he was distracted, thinking about Amaneeta, or maybe it was just the flask of synth vodka that he'd drunk in the last hour that made him miss the monk that followed him on to the shuttle. Whatever it was, he didn't see him. Maybe if he had seen him he wouldn't have immediately paid him very much attention, but if he had taken a second look, he would have recognised him. Not just for what he was, he would have actually recognised him. In the same way that he himself had been recognised. Instead, he just kept his head down until the shuttle once more approached the strip. For some reason, he didn't bother to link to the cameras out on the strip as the shuttle settled to a stop and the doors slid open. Then it was too late."

I think that, for now at least, I'll focus on 'Time Off', with everything else that's going on in my life.  I know where I want to go with it and I know how I'm going to take it there and anyway, I enjoy ramming poor old Proctor into new and ever stickier situations, so maybe writing it will give me some release from the depression of real life.

Andy Ellis, 3 August 2017, Currently in Derby.

Ring Worlds, Dyson Spheres, Time Off and Marina Living

As followers of my blog will be aware, I'm currently writing two books simultaneously.  How's this going?  I'll get onto that in a bit.  Around two weeks ago I switched from writing "The Product of My Dreams" (a virtual reality novel) to "Time Off, A Proctor Novel".  I was feeling a little wrung out from writing The Product of My Dreams - it's a difficult book to write - so I decided to have a few days off from writing and this turned into ten days.  Frankly, life's a little tough at the moment and I sometimes allow myself to drift into depression, so perhaps that had some bearing.

Anyway, personal issues aside, on Tuesday of this week, I read through what I had written so far for 'Time Off', did some editing and yesterday, I finally got back to doing some writing - more on that in a bit.

Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres.

OK - this has nothing to do with 'Time Off' but instead refers to 'The Product Of My Dreams' which is set across millennia - actually, that's not entirely true, but you'll have to read the book to understand - it would be too great a spoiler to explain.  What is time anyway?  Like 'space' and 'distance' it is a human construct.  Current thinking has 'spacetime', an inextricable combination of space and time as the bedrock of our existence.  To split this into space and time is a misunderstanding of the nature of the universe.  Anyway - forget about that, it's not actually relevant - The Product of My Dreams might appear to mess with the underlying principles of physics, but it actually doesn't.  Remember, this is a Virtual Reality novel and as such, things are often not quite as they seem.

Right - I seem to already be well and truly off on a tangent, but just bear with me - we'll get to Ringworlds and Dyson spheres soon.  The Product of My Dreams is full of twists and complex ideas, right from the first chapter (which, by the way, is called 'Grab the spade and run').  Also, there's plenty of action.  When I say that the ideas are complex, it's not important to understand all of them - at back of it all is a story which delivers (as I say) plenty of action and comes together in a way that is not hard to understand, though it may be surprising.  I'm really enjoying writing it, but it is difficult.  It's one thing creating a universe and a time-frame and technology set, it's quite something else developing half a dozen of them, all at differing technology levels and then keeping all of that in your head.  Thank god for copious notes!  Though of course, that slows things down... ho-hum, labour of love and all that.  Oddly, this brings me on to (yeah, right, finally, I hear you groan) Ringworlds and Dyson spheres.

We're not that far off, ya know!  In all truth, we could start building a Dyson sphere around the sun within a few years.  All you need to do is mine a few asteroids, make a few solar panels and you're off.  The more solar panels you make, the more spaceships you can build and the more mining you can do.  Might take a while - especially at the start when you maybe only have a few space ships, but the process can feed itself and be largely automated, so as you collect more and more material, build more and more solar panels, gather more and more energy, the faster it progresses.

So what is a Dyson sphere?  No, I mean a lot of people will understand the concept of building a sphere around the sun to gather all of it's energy.  And I mean 'all', you silly scientists who think that a Dyson sphere would glow in the IR.  You are too closed minded and imagining a future where our technology hasn't really advanced.  How very nihilistic of you. (side note: not nihilistic in it's true sense, but if I said Duellistic would you know what I meant? Google Duell - and he didn't really mean it - it was something that pre-dated him "Everything that can be invented has been invented" is the quote, anyway - just some late 19th century tish.  Not really along the lines of 'all life is meaningless', anyway, so perhaps nihilistic isn't really appropriate, that's the point.) Tangent city today, huh?

So back to the question of what is a Dyson sphere.  A sphere around a star that gathers all of it's energy.  If we want to live on the inside surface of it, then the radius will have to be ~92,000,000 miles, giving it an internal surface area of 10¹⁷ square miles - to put that in context, the earth has a landmass area of ~10⁸ square miles or put another way, a Dyson sphere of the same radius that the earth is from the sun will have a billion times it's surface area.  As we're squidging seven billion people into one earth, that would suggest that we could squidge 7,000,000,000,000,000,000 (seven billion billion - a billion times as many people as we have now) people into a Dyson sphere and that would be without even building that many skyscrapers - we don't use a huge amount of the earth's surface area anyway.  Point is - it's vast.  And what if the whole sphere had three internal levels? ten? fifty? So why would we bother?  At least for thousands of years, we wouldn't need it and the way I figure it, the maintenance would be something of a nightmare.  So what would we do?  The answer seems relatively obvious.  A ringworld - a ring with a radius of 92,000,000 miles.  Add to this solar collector hemispheres much closer to the sun, and energy and space wouldn't be an issue for a very long time to come, and when it is? Well, we get on with building a Dyson sphere.

OK, so what would living on a ringworld be like?  I googled some artwork.

Very pretty, but really?  If the radius is 92,000,000 miles, then it would need to be at least in the order of four thousand miles across to give it any stability at all and would you really see it curve up and away from you?  It would be millions of miles before the curvature was noticeable and the atmosphere would preclude being able to see that far.  And what about night?  The sun would always be directly overhead.  OK - a series of solar panels that move around the inner surface of the ring, gathering energy and closing it off every sixteen hours to give eight hours of night.  Sounds reasonable, right?  Well - to get more, read The Product of My Dreams.

To get an accurate picture of what a Dyson sphere might be like is even tougher.  The tech would be so far beyond us - to quote Arthur C Clark, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".  Now, being a writer of (somewhat) 'hard' sci-fi (sci-fi that stands on an understanding of science - no midichlorians here - really 'hard-science' fiction) this doesn't sit entirely well with me so I have to stretch my understanding of science as far as it will go and a bit further - very hard work.

Anyway - enough on ringworlds and Dyson spheres - they appear in abundance in The Product of My Dreams - when it's out, read it and you'll get a good idea of where I'm going with all this.  To finish this segment, a quote:

"...she turned right and began a slow and lazy walk across the University campus. Quadrants and well-kept gardens separated the grand skyscrapers. At ground level you were hardly aware of the University's buildings soaring skywards. In Trentham, on the surface of the ringworld, apart from when you passed through groves of neatly pruned fruit trees, there was little shade, the enormous buildings needling towards the sun which was always directly overhead. In the few places where you could see through the tall buildings towards the horizon, the ringworld was so vast, that long before you could notice the curvature, the land was lost in atmospheric haze. Some years earlier, Cristie had looked through a college friend's telescope at the distant gap when one of the ring's enormous collectors covered most of the sky, but had found the dull grey line centred in the image unconvincing and certainly not the celebration of human achievement that her friend considered it to represent."

Time Off

OK, so now I'm back to writing "Time Off, A Proctor Novel".  It's very different to "The Product of My Dreams".  If you've read "Night Time in Shanghai" or any of the Proctor Novellas (I'm actually beginning to regret calling them 'novellas' - The Art of Living is 136 pages of 9 point script, so it's as long as a lot of full-on novels - just that to me, a proper sci-fi novel needs to be upwards of 200 pages), you'll know what my universe of that time is like.  As humanity is still in the process of spreading out to the stars, the worlds are often relatively low-tech and the society can be somewhat dystopian.

All my Proctor books are aimed at being fast-paced action stories, generally falling into the 'thriller' genre.  Most people who read them find them hard to put down - the action and the questions raised always drag you along to the next chapter.  This was always the aim, and it's reassuring to hear from readers that I've achieved it.

So here's a quote from chapter two:

"A few scars on his face and shaved head showed that this wasn't the first party he'd been sent to break up. Proctor took in the extent of his boosts. Sure, he was strong – probably stronger than Proctor himself, but he doubted if the man's bone and muscle augments were anything like as good quality as his own. His muscles were bigger but they looked over developed. Too much steroids and time in the gym and not enough time doing the sort of things that made a man naturally strong. They'd slow his actions in any fight, and although he clearly didn't realise it, he stood no chance against someone with the skills and speed of Proctor himself.

“Look, I don't give a fuck about whatever petty fight's going on between you and this whore, I just want another drink.” Proctor said to the man. Anger flared in the man's eyes and Proctor sighed. Oh well."

As you can imagine, violence follows.

So - writing two books at once...?

Well, to be frank, I'd quite like to get back to writing "The Product of My Dreams" but before I do, I *will* bring the word count of "Time Off" up to twenty thousand.  Currently it's 12,500 - halfway through chapter three.  "The Product of My Dreams" is forty thousand.

Anyway, when I'm writing one, I'm always keen to get back to the other.  They are very different books written in very different styles, and the anticipation of getting back to the book I'm not currently writing, gives me a surge when I finally do and I think that because of that, I'm writing some good stuff.  Also the switch between the two means I don't get too carried away with ultra-violence in "Time Off" or too introspective in "The Product of My Dreams" so for now at least, I'll stick with it.

Marina Life...

Still sat in my boat in Mercia Marina.  I plan to leave on 17 June and head south, eventually to Oxford.  I plan to pick my daughter up in Rugby on the way.  It's a few weeks of slow, lazy travelling.

Building work here goes on a pace - the steel framework of the new building is about half up now.  The riveting's a bit noisy.

You can see the back end of my boat in the pic - gives you a good idea of how close I am to it.

Spring is duckling/ gosling and cygnet time.  An onslaught of nature-cuteness abounds in the marina.

This weekend, there's a small floating market in the marina.  I get to meet up with my Facebook friend, Sue and also buy some joss sticks - all cool.

Anyway - enough - this has already taken up half my day, and yeah, OK, it's writing, but I need to get on with "Time Off".  So that's it for now.

"Proctor: The Art of Living" is now 99p for kindle, so go buy it.

Andy Ellis - Mercia Marina - May 2017.

Still Writing Two Books at Once, Visitors and Springtime in the Marina.

Still Writing Two Books at Once.

I spent about three weeks on The Product of My Dreams, adding around fifteen thousand words, and a couple of days ago, I switched back to writing Time Off.  So far, I've just re-familiarised myself with Time Off, edited the first two chapters and added around a thousand words, bringing it's word count up to eleven thousand.

For those that haven't read earlier posts, The Product of My Dreams is a virtual reality novel with a complex and deeply involved three thread storyline, written from the points of view of a young girl - six at the start of that thread - a young woman and an old woman.  The three storylines tell individual tales which seem only loosely linked to the story's end.  The story also studies the nature of stacked virtualities and ultimately, the nature of the universe.  The book should be around one hundred and forty-five thousand words when completed or approximately five hundred and thirty pages.

Time Off is a Proctor novel and follows on from the three existing Proctor Novellas, The Art of Living, The Art of Killing and The Art of Dying, all of which are available from Amazon in paperback or ebook.  My Author Page on amazon features these as well as my first full novel Night Time in Shanghai, published by Austin Macauley Publishers.  Time Off follows on in the action-packed fast-paced style of the Proctor Novellas, but as a novel, the book is more immersive and the storyline more complex.  I expect it to come in at around seventy-five thousand words or two hundred and sixty pages.

The Product of My Dreams

As I've said previously in my blog, The Product of My Dreams is very challenging to write.  As a middle-aged man, it's quite difficult for me to write from the point of view of a young woman in her twenties and even more difficult to write from the mind of a six year old girl.  The third thread is quite different to the other two and says more about the nature of stacked virtualities than it does about the old woman who is the protagonist of that thread.  I'm not sure if it would be easy to write from the point of view of an old woman, but the nature of the complexity of 'virtual space' makes this thread quite difficult to write anyway and when I do, I draw deep into my own mind, contemplating the nature of the virtual worlds and the universe in which they reside, and it can take me hours to get out again and manage normal human interactions once more.  So in three weeks or so, I've added around fifteen thousand words which isn't a massive amount, but I'm very happy with the way the story is developing.

A few quotes.

This section is from chapter six "Dreaming".  This is the second chapter of the six year old Claudia story thread.

"Claudia ran across the road, weaving between the holes in the smartmac surface and ducked through the open door of the bar. It was quite dark inside. One of the windows was half covered by a big shutter and the other was in the shadow of the building. Claudia stood and blinked a few times until her eyes adjusted. Behind the bar, someone had made a mess of the normally neatly stacked bottles. The floor was strewn with metal flasks, and lots of the glass bottles that normally stood there, containing a variety of brightly coloured liquids were gone. She knew the rebel mercs had been in here, so maybe they'd stolen them. Well, they were rebels and Claudia imagined that was the sort of thing rebels would do – take things that didn't belong to them."

A fairly short quote and certainly not the best I could have picked, but I don't want to post spoilers...

This next quote is from chapter seven "Heading home".  It's from the second chapter of the young woman - Cristie - thread.  I posted a few quotes from this chapter on Twitter, but this one concerns the nature of the 'real' and the stacked nature of virtualities.

"Most people simply accepted the life they lived as the 'real' but Cristie's own gut feeling and later, her training at the University, led her thoughts in another direction. Statistically, it was more likely that her own life was simply another twisting, miniscule thread in another equation that, once picked apart, would portray another elaborate tapestry that itself was a virtuality existing within a virtuality. It really shouldn't be hard to accept this, but most people simply didn't, or perhaps just didn't want to. To a majority, the whole concept seemed ridiculous – of course they existed in the real - “Just look around you, for god's sake!”. But then again, the virtualities where they took their holidays felt equally real, there was just something in the mind-set of the average human that didn't want to accept their existence as anything that might be perceived as anything less than 'real'."

I'm not going to add a quote from chapter eight "Substrate" as just about anything from the old woman thread would be a spoiler.

Time Off

I'm quite used to slotting myself into the head of Proctor, having first done so in Night Time in Shanghai and then revisiting for the three Proctor Novellas.  Time Off sees a somewhat world-weary Proctor attempting to find some peace and quiet in a small resort town on the holiday world of Finn.  But as usual, trouble comes knocking and Proctor's never one for not answering the door.  What seems like a relatively normal but deeply dangerous situation develops when Proctor runs into some old 'friends'.

Here's a quote from chapter two "Time for a few drinks"

"“For god's sake!” the woman shouted again. Proctor lifted his head a little and looked into a small mirror advertising one of the local brews called 'Saint Michael'. He moved his head to one side until he could see the woman. She wore a tiny pair of tight, denim-blue shorts with a matching bikini top. She had light but well tanned skin and a huge volume of curly bleached-blonde hair that cascaded all around, just past her shoulders. And the heavy make-up that seemed popular amongst those that shared her profession. Proctor had no time for whores and finding one that had got herself into trouble wasn't a rare thing. He returned his attention to his drink and emptied and refilled his glass once more. He shook the flask. Maybe half a shot left."

Writing two books?

So how's it going?  A good question.  Would I have written more if I'd just stuck to one?  I honestly don't know.  I find the first third of a book hardest to write - getting the story off the ground, inventing and describing new worlds, new characters and new situations.  At times, I can slow right down, barely managing a couple of thousand words in a week, and to be able to switch from one to the other at this stage, does seem to keep me focused.  As to the impact of changing from what is a fast paced, actiony storyline to a more complex thoughtful one, does seem to be helpful.  As I said in a previous blog post, going back to The Product of My Dreams and editing the first five chapters again, added a focus and brightness to them which had perhaps been a little lacking, and I was far happier with them after.  I held that focus for the following three chapters and when I've added a good chunk to Time Off, I'll go back and edit those.

I suppose this all means that I must think there's some value in writing the two books at the same time, but I do wonder if I'll feel the same way when the books start getting over one hundred thousand words combined.  When switching, I basically have to re-read everything I've written up to that point and that takes time.

Visitors and Springtime in the Marina.

Construction work continues in the marina.  The noise made by the groundworks was far less than the weeks of pile-driving that saw dozens (possibly hundreds) of fifteen foot piles sunk into the ground, sometimes doubled up.  They then added concrete footings to these and have just started on the steel framework of the building.

The steelwork's a bit noisier than the groundwork, but not as incessant as the pile driving was, so I don't find it distracts me too badly.  This shot was taken a couple of days ago and they've significantly added to it since.

There's quite a few ducklings popping up in the marina, but unfortunately, these seem to be mostly short-lived.  I've seen a mummy duck with thirteen ducklings and another with twelve, but only once each and I didn't see them again.  Apparently pike regularly take ducklings and in the marina, there's very little fishing (you can fish from the back of your boat, but not from marina property, and very few do) so there's lots of big fish around.  It always seems sensible not to wander around the jetties holding a camera (too much stuff goes 'plop' too regularly for me to want to do this) so I haven't managed to get any good shots.  This one - and you'll have to take my word for it - shows a mother duck with a dozen ducklings grouped around her swimming across the marina...

My daughter, Natasha and my very good friend David Metcalf have both been to visit me for a weekend each.  I gave up the main bed on my boat for both of them and slept on the back under the cockpit cover.  It had been lovely warm weather the week before Natasha arrived, but for the two nights she spent with me it was chilly.  We had a lovely meal in the Boardwalk Bar and restaurant in the Marina and I always treasure time I get to spend with my wonderful daughter, who I miss immensely now that she's at University.

When David came, the weather was a different story making it far more cosy on the back of the boat.  We went for meals at a local Indian Restaurant called Nadee and the most excellent Dragon in the nearby village of Willington.

So all in all, I'm having a great Spring and thoroughly looking forwards to taking my boat out for an extended trip along the canal.

As a side note, a twitter artist, @julesartvan did a quick sketch of a selfie I posted to twitter - if you feel inclined, you can bid for it on ebay - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/322503961853

Anyway - this post is getting a bit 'TL;DR' worthy, so we'll call it a day.  More soon.

Andy Ellis, Mercia Marina, May 2017.

Writing Two Books at Once and Easter in the Marina.

Writing Two Books at Once

As followers of my blog will know, a while back now, I parked a book I started - a Virtual Reality novel called 'The Product of My Dreams'.  At the time of parking, I was around twenty-five thousand words in, just heading into chapter six.

Recently, I started work on 'Time Off: A Proctor Novel'.  Anyone who has read a few of my books will also know that although Night Time in Shanghai is still quite action-packed, I allow myself longer to explore the characters I create and the universe they live in.  The Proctor Novellas, on the other hand, are solid action from start to finish - I try to keep the pace up and give the reader plenty of action to get them flicking from page to page.  As 'Time Off' will be somewhat longer than the novellas - in the region of two hundred and fifty pages, compared to an average of one fifty for the novellas - it makes sense to slow it down a little and try and make a fuller, more descriptive story.  This may make it longer than the predicted two hundred and fifty pages, but I want to draw the reader in deeper than I did for the novellas, so I decided to aim for something pitched somewhere inbetween Night Time in Shanghai and the novellas.

Which brings me to the reason for revisiting The Product of My dreams.  As I have mentioned in my previous blogs, there's building works going on in the marina at the moment, and whilst the ground (water and boat) was shaking, it was hard for me to allow my mind to wander and achieve the extra depth that I hoped to put into Time Off, so although I have written most of the first two chapters (a total of just under ten thousand words) I decided to re-visit The Product of My Dreams and allow my mind to slip into a more in-depth and thoughtful mode.

The Product of My Dreams is a far more involved story with plenty of complications and three story threads.  It has proven to be quite difficult to write, but there's still plenty of action to keep the reader hooked.  Having said that, if you are to read it until it's end, you will have to put up with feeling a little confused until the pieces finally fall into place and you finally grasp how the three story threads come together and relate to each other.  As an idea, I was always very pleased with it, but it has been challenging to write it so far and I have little doubt that it'll be challenging to read and will be deserving of a re-read once you grasp the point of it.  Here's the first page of Chapter Three - Claudia.

"Claudia rammed her little hands tight over her ears and scrunched her eyes tight shut. Still, though it was all she could hear. Bang! Boom! Screech! The rat-a-tat tats and the deep throbbing sounds that just seemed to go on forever and made her tummy feel sick. Her mummy squatted down in front of her and pulled her hands away from her ears and Claudia's eyes snapped wide open again. Her mummy's face and long thick tied-back hair were covered in a mixture of black soot and grey dust, like it had been that time when she'd cleared out the old shed in the tiny back yard of their hab-mod and part of the back wall had fallen in. Mummy had been hurt then and that was all Claudia could think about now, her mummy being hurt. Mummy slipped her fingers from Claudia's wrists until she held her small hands enveloped in her own. She looked at Claudia's face and a couple of tears ran from her eyes. She sniffed and let go of Claudia's left hand with her right, and wiped her wrist across under her nose in the way that she'd told Claudia never to do. Black blended with grey on her mummy's face but a couple of clean streaks were added now and Claudia could see the medium brown of her mummy's skin underneath.

“It's not safe here darling!” her mummy shouted over the noise. Claudia looked at the mess and destruction all around her. Cars and vans were strewn around the main street, some pushed on to their sides, large holes torn through them or their roofs crushed in. Most of them burned, some of them so hot, it felt like sitting between daddy's legs in front of the fire at home. She wanted to go home, but that was where mummy said the rebels were coming from. The buildings that lined the streets were in ruins, some of them virtually levelled, others with holes big enough to drive a car through, torn into the cheap printed sheeting that made up most of them. Some of the brick and stone buildings had fared a little better, just every window smashed through, and in places flames licked out from inside. But where Claudia and her mummy were right now, behind a low stone wall in front of a small flower shop set back from the street, looked to be the safest place they'd been ever since she'd been hurriedly rushed from her school that morning."

I don't know how well this is going to work, but I picked up a somewhat jumbled half-written six chapters and spent the week editing and refining them and added another three thousand or so words to chapter six.  The word count is now nearly thirty thousand words and I'm far more pleased with it than I was when I decided to 'park' it.

After I've written another couple of chapters, I'll re-read what I've written for Time Off and maybe do some more editing there and write a few more chapters of that.  The aim is for Time Off to be somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-five thousand words (nearly three hundred pages), and as I say, I'm ten thousand words in.  The Product of My Dreams will be a far weightier tome - perhaps as much as one hundred and forty thousand words, or five hundred pages.  The aim will be to finish Time Off with The Product of My Dreams around three quarters written, then whilst Time Off goes out to a few publishers and agents, I can finish The Product of My Dreams.

So will it work?  Will I be able to keep  both story lines straight in my head whilst writing the other?  Frankly, I doubt it.  I think when I switch between them, the first few days will be spent reading, editing and absorbing what I've written so far.  Perhaps this means that they'll take me some time longer than if I'd just simply written them one after the other, but the point is that it will hopefully mean that when they are finished, the end products will be better.

It's my intention to take them both back out to publishers and agents and see what response I get rather than simply taking them to my existing publisher or self publishing them, but we'll have to see how that goes.  Sci-fi publishing is a very competitive market, and the big publishers take on very few unestablished authors... though maybe I am starting to establish myself more now, it's hard to say.  Plenty of people have now read Night Time in Shanghai and The Proctor Novellas... As always - if you have, get me a review on amazon.co.uk (pretty please!)

Easter in the Marina

As the weather warms, the canals get busier and more visitors jump into their cars and drive out into the country.  The Boardwalk Bar and Restaurant fills and people sit out in the sun.  And most of my friends are off work.  Barbecues are lit around the place and sausage sandwiches and bottles of Newcastle Brown start to flow, as does the traffic on the canal.  My feet are getting itchy, but as I'm sure I've said before, having the address makes working a lot easier for me, so I'm still humming and hahing about moving on.  There's always the idea of spending a few weeks out travelling around and seeing a bit more of the network and I'm sure that come the summer months, that is exactly what will happen.  But do I keep Mercia as a permanent base?  Or do I just move on to another marina.  When I've decided, I'll let you know.

Today (Easter Sunday), there's live music on and the place is bustling with visitors.  Righty... talking of The Boardwalk - I think a pint might be in order.

Andy Ellis, Mercia Marina, April 2017.

"Time Off: A Proctor Novel"

Just a quick post - this is the first page and a half (or so) of Time Off.  It's raw and unedited and may look quite different in the finished article, but hopefully it'll give you an idea of what I'll be aiming for in the finished novel.

It's progressing quite well - just under 4000 words at the time of posting - I expect it to be around 70,000 when finished, or 240 pages, so not an epic.  I'm pitching it somewhere between the deeply descriptive Night Time in Shanghai and the more pacy Proctor Novellas.  The Proctor Novellas are best read in order as they occasionally reference the earlier books, but this one is aimed to be more 'stand-alone'.

"Chapter One

Spreading the Good News.

He pulled the dark brown rough woollen robe over his head and stuffed his arms into the voluminous sleeves, then pushed the hood back and smoothed himself down. He reached for the white rope cord and swung it around his waist and tied it, then slipped on his sandals. Finally, he picked up his long thin-bladed knife and wiped it on the small yellow dress hung over the back of the cheaply printed white plastic chair next to the bed and slipped it's shiny ceramalloy blade into the sheath in his left sleeve. He looked around him.

As was usual with rooms aboard space stations, the ceiling was low. On three sides, the walls were covered with smoky mirrors with red light strips recessed behind the tops, casting an eerie soft light upwards on to the matt white ceramalloy. Set into the fourth wall's left end was a door which took you out to a corridor. Next to this was a cheap white shelving unit covered in worthless knick-knacks and trinkets of the type that you could pick up for a small handful of loose change in station markets and planetary bazaars across the whole of human space. Maybe some of them were gifts from her regulars. The only thing of any interest was a brass-bound dark wooden box with a small key jutting from it's front, pushed back on the right side of the shelf slightly higher than Sirdar's waist. He quickly rifled through it and removed a few items of jewellery which he stuffed into the right hand pocket of his habit. Maybe a few more gifts from punters, not really worth much, but she wouldn't be needing it any longer.

A large double bed filled three quarters of the floor space, butting up to the three wall mirrors. At one end of the bed, half a dozen large puffy pillows were covered with ruff-edged deep red faux-satin pillow cases over a sheet made of the same material. In the middle of the bed the small young woman lay, beaten and bloody, her body bruised and her life crushed out of her. Pools of blood seeping from the wounds in her chest looked black under the red lighting. The seeping would soon stop. Sirdar looked down at her and crossed himself and said a short prayer. Then he turned to leave. As he opened the door, he connected to the room's cameras and made sure that the short loop of video of the young woman fast asleep was still feeding back to the brothel's systems. He turned and looked once more at the small, dead, crumpled form laying on the bed.

“Tonight you shall rest in the loving embrace of Our Lord.” he said, softly and tenderly. ..."

Anyway - I hope you enjoyed that taster - back to writing it now...

Andy Ellis, 1 April 2017 (in Mercia Marina, but maybe taking a short trip out today if the rain holds off)