For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
Here’s the gorgeous new cover for Crucible of Time, the second of the new books! Art by Chris Howard. I really should do a post on all the back and forthing we do to come up with an image that works for me. The man has the patience of… wait, who’s the dude with all the patience?
Coming September 10th! I’m proofing the print layout now!
Job, that’s the guy.
A week ago, we had a movie night/book launch party at my home, and we watched First Man, the excellent biopic about Neil Armstrong, which of course culminated (SPOILER ALERT!) with the successful first landing on the moon.
A few days after that, I watched First Men in the Moon on Turner Classic Movies, an oldie based on the H.G. Wells novel (how closely, I do not know). In this film, the first explorers traveled to the moon in 1899, and the story was rather different. The plot revolved around our hapless explorers finding a race of large, bug-eyed creatures called Selenites living in the moon, in a complex of caverns beneath the lunar surface.
Now I’ve just finished watching the recent Nova episode: Back to the Moon, about how and why we might—after 50 years!—return to the moon to stay. Most of the information was familiar, but something new I learned is that apparent sinkholes have recently been discovered on the moon—holes in the surface, possibly connected to subsurface tunnels and maybe even caverns! The upshot: One location real lunar settlers might pick to build their shelters is in existing tunnels and caverns beneath the lunar surface—just like the Selenites!
You go, H.G. Wells.
This photo and the following review landed in my inbox, from someone calling hirself “The Porg Apprentice” (or “Poppy Bunsen”). Seriously.
The meeting of the Porg Book Club is called to order!
Ingrid: “Today we are discussing The Reefs of Time, a new book by Jeffrey A. Carver. It is the story of friends who work together and make a good team. In previous episodes, I mean, books, they have saved the Earth and other planets from being wiped out by meteors and evil civilizations that try to reprogram people’s minds with nanotechnology. In this book, the friends are split up to fight the nanobots, which are trying to infect hyperspace. I liked it. I finished it in a weekend. What did you think?”
Sherie: “I liked the theme that friends can become found family. It reminded me of the Rebels and the Resistance who are a team that become family, and how sad they were when they were split up after Hoth and Crait. But they still had hope.”
George: “I thought it was funny that the people in the retro 1950s spaceship were somebody else’s UFO on a different planet!”
Lucky: “Because my friend Tag will ask, there are no porgs in this book.”
Snowy: “But there is a cat that exists in different dimensions! I wonder if Loth-cats and gokats can learn from each other?”
Sherie: “I liked that this book can stand alone, and I didn’t have to read the other books to understand this one. I missed the last book because I had a nest of porglets to take care of.”
Ingrid: “So I think we’re agreed, two wings up?”
Lucky: “Yes! Two wings up! You can find it on pretty much any bookseller, or ask your librarian nicely to order it from Ingram. They’ll know what that means.”
I should have mentioned this yesterday. For my book launch, John Scalzi graciously offered me a guest spot in the Big Idea feature of his mega-popular blog, Whatever. I wrote about the big ideas inherent in both the writing and the story of Reefs. Here’s the opening…
Big ideas are the meat and potatoes of classical science fiction, but sometimes they collide with one another like bowling balls on a pool table. In The Chaos Chronicles, I have played with some pretty cool cosmic ideas: sentient suns and sentient singularities, supernovas and hypernovas started (or stopped) by the likes of humans and their alien friends, the starstream (a cosmic superhighway for star travel), an enormous Shipworld at the edge of the galaxy serving as refuge for species who have lost their home planets… and in my new book, time travel a billion years into the past, via quantum entanglement. I love this sort of thing! They are part of the driving energy of these books.
But long before I rolled any of that into this story, I had a big idea of a very different sort… read more
We have a launch! The Reefs of Time is riding a pillar of fire into the sky, shooting for the Moon! We are on our way!
You’ve been waiting for eleven years. I’ve been waiting for eleven years! This new chapter of The Chaos Chronicles, Part One of the “Out of Time Sequence,” is now available in all major ebook stores, and in print from Amazon and other booksellers*! Grab your copies while you can. The price is reduced for Launch Day. It will go up soon.
Please help me spread the word!
(Part Two, Crucible of Time, will launch on September 10.)
*Regarding print copies: On sale now are trade paperback copies (a nice, hefty-but-comfortable 5.5in by 8.5in trim size). Thanks to cover artist Chris Howard and cover designer Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, both talented writers themselves, it’s a great-looking book! Regarding availability in bookstores and libraries, it is available to all through the major distributor Ingram. But that doesn’t mean it will magically appear in your local bookstore. You might have to request it. I encourage you to do so! Ask them nicely if they would consider stocking it. If they want to know the ISBN, you can give them this: 978-1-61138-799-5.
I still plan to release a hardcover edition, and hope to have it ready in a few weeks. I’ll let you know.
Celebrate with me! Please let the far corners of your social media know, and let’s shoot for the Moon together!
Everything worked out for the print edition! Maya, who does my cover designs, came through for me from vacation and tweaked my cover so that both Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) and Ingram Spark accepted it. There will be a trade paperback edition on sale next Tuesday! You can pre-order it right now!
The pricing is a little weird, though. Bear with me on this. I set different prices at Amazon and Ingram, because the profit margins are very different between the two places. At Amazon/KDP, I can make a decent profit on a sale at $20.99 for the print version. (That’s higher than I would like, but print-on-demand publishing is still more expensive than the old way.) At Ingram—which is the company that libraries and most bookstores would order from—I would make almost nothing at that price. So my Ingram price is $22.95. That still gives a pretty thin profit margin, but I can’t see going any higher.
That part’s a little weird, but here’s the really weird part: Amazon doesn’t allow pre-orders of their own version of a paper book, but they do allow pre-orders of the Ingram version! So the pre-order displays at $22.95. On launch day, I plan to release the Amazon version at $20.99—so on launch day or soon after, that price should go down. So you can pre-order today, but I have no idea whether you’ll get the Ingram edition at $22.95 or the KDP edition at $20.99! They should be pretty much the same, though they’ll come from different printing plants.
Anyway, as of now, everything is go for launch!
Edit: I forgot to add, I am planning a hardcover edition, but have had to delay it. I hope to get it up in a couple of weeks, but it’s dependent on when other people are free to help with the technical aspects.
Also, the paperback edition is a trade paperback (i.e., large format), 5.5″ x 8.5″, which is the same size as the planned hardcover.
I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again: These are the words I want on my gravestone:
I have been proofing and proofing and uploading and proofing, and correcting and uploading and proofing for the print edition of The Reefs of Time. I am heartily sick of the whole process! With thanks to my daughter Jayce for reminding me, I formally request that my gravestone, when the time comes, read: “The Typos Are Your Problem Now!” I can think of nothing that would better honor my life!
(Neepery warning) There are two widely-used channels for putting out self-published print-on-demand editions: Amazon (formerly CreateSpace) and Ingram Spark. Amazon is suddenly refusing to accept the cover file that they were just fine with on the last proof run, even though nothing has changed but the corrected interior file, with the exact same page count. And my cover designer just left for a two-week vacation.
Ingram squawked about the cover, but let me override. And their proof looks fine. Except… after a week of refining the print layout and getting rid of all widows and orphans, what do I see? Widows and orphans! Augh! I have just gone through and weeded them out. Again. And await Ingram’s processing once more.
I will have a print version available on launch day, come hell or high water. But the hardcover will be delayed until I can get the cover design expanded for the dust jacket. Not by long, I hope.
Augh. Augh. Augh!!
I need your help! Are you going to be attending an SF con or other similar gathering where it might be helpful to put out some of my promotional freebies (flyers and coasters)? I’d really appreciate it.
I already have volunteers for Necon, Worldcon, Ad Astra, CanCon, Confluence, and Dragon Con. Is anyone going to Readercon? Other gatherings?
Please let me know, and I’ll mail you a batch of materials!
Also, if you haven’t already joined my street team—the Starstream Troupers—and would like to sign up to help me get the word out, please let me know! (You don’t have to be on Facebook to help me, of course! But if you are, and would like to join that FB group, that’s where the most organized action is. Also if you join there, you can download an advance reading copy of Reefs/Crucible, both as a thank-you and to give you something to plug!) Come join the team!
So, the last couple of weeks were pretty hard, with my brother’s passing—and thank you all for your kind thoughts and wishes. Now I’m trying once more to get up a head of steam. The Reefs of Time launches in just three weeks!
What I’m focusing on now is proofing and correcting the print edition of Reefs, and yes, this is getting close to the wire. (And any corrections I make that are not just formatting, such as bad hyphenation, uneven spacing of justified text, and so on—meaning word or punctuation or italicizing corrections—all those have to be copied into the ebook and the source file, as well. It’s an incredibly finicky business.)
Due to unavoidable scheduling conflict with my brother’s memorial service in August, I have canceled plans to attend Worldcon in Dublin. That hurts, because I picked the launch date specifically to have the book out in time to promote it at Worldcon. Well, family first, and no regrets about making that choice; I just wish it hadn’t happened. And I mean that in every possible sense.
Okay, this 460-page book isn’t going to proofread itself. See you later.
Charles S. Carver left us yesterday, after a long and often painful struggle with cancer. The academic world and the University of Miami lost a world-class, distinguished researcher in social psychology. Countless people lost a dear friend. His beloved wife Youngmee lost her husband. And I lost my only brother.
The final battle came on suddenly and unexpectedly, and we initially thought he would pull through it and recover. But that didn’t happen. Chuck wound up in the ICU on life support, and after several days on life support, when hope for recovery was gone, he was allowed to slip away peacefully. Youngmee was at his side, along with my wife Allysen and me, and several members of Youngmee’s family.
His professional accomplishments are legion, and he was awarded the American Psychological Association’s highest award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions “for significant theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of goal-directed behavior and self-regulation.” His publications include ten books and hundreds of articles, and his work has been cited an astounding 120,000 times in scientific publications by other researchers.
To his friends and colleagues, he was a curmudgeon and mentor loved by all. He was quietly and extraordinarily generous, both professionally and personally. He would have responded with an acerbic denial if you said that to him. A former football player and wrestler (at Huron High School, Huron, Ohio), he loved watching sports. He was the only person in the world who could get me to sit down and enjoy a football game on TV. He was utterly devoted to his dogs Tntn and Jahng, who it must be said are totally charming little rascals. He helped me and my family in ways I cannot even begin to describe, and I will not try. He was perhaps the first person in the world to believe in my writing. He loved good science fiction. Among his favorite writers were William Gibson, Rosemary Kirstein, N.K. Jemison, Connie Willis, and Linda Nagata.
To describe Chuck as a brother is difficult. As kids, we fought all the time. My mother once wrote back to relatives from a family vacation, “I have been asking myself why we didn’t leave the boys at home, or in cages.” Yeah, I can see that. He was two years older and stronger than I was, and I could never win. I bought a set of weights so I could get stronger, but I never liked using them, and he did. So guess who got stronger.
In high school, he started taking an interest in being a big brother in a good way, and he strong-armed me into joining the wrestling team. I didn’t like it that much at first, but it grew on me, and in time I became dedicated to the sport and valued it for the remainder of my high school years. It was because of Chuck that I ventured way out of my comfort zone for colleges and attended Brown University, where he was a junior. At some point during this period he asked me, “When are you going to start writing again?” And he nudged me for copies of my stories to read.
In our adulthood (when the hell did we become “adults”?) he was relentlessly helpful, especially after I had a family.
He waited many years for a chance to read my forthcoming book, The Reefs of Time. He only got halfway through the first book before he was struck down, which is supremely unfair. But that was long enough for him to find a word-o that had escaped all of my readers and proofreaders, and me.
I’m going miss him like hell.
Here’s Chuck and Youngmee, taken on a trip to Fiji, back 2009.
