science fiction – Page 14 – Science Fiction Worlds of Jeffrey A. Carver

9 Apr 2009

Video for Lydia Fair

posted in: personal news, quirky, religion, science fiction, Sunborn | 0

Another little project I picked up along the way is a small video contribution to what I believe will be a very cool and probably intense and moving arts festival, coming up on April 25 at the Vineyard Church in Cambridge. It’s called Lydia Fair, and it’s bringing together artists of all stripes (painters, theater people, singers, one fiction writer that I know of—me, and heaven knows who all). The theme is Rescue, and it’s a benefit fundraiser for two organizations called Love146 and Rebuild Africa. I’m really looking forward to it; there’s tremendous artistic talent in the Vineyard community.

As for my part…I’m working on a video adaptation of the prologue to Sunborn. I’ve shortened and reworked the audio so that it sounds much better than the mp3 currently up on my website, and am using a sequence of great cosmic imagery from a variety of NASA observatories including Hubble, Chandra, SOHO, and others. A fellow named Adam, who does a lot of video work for the church, is helping me shape it into a “visualization” that we hope will evoke the story of Deeaab, as he wanders the galaxy encountering sentient suns, and wondering how he might rescue them from whatever is killing them. It’ll only be about three minutes long, but I’ve gone from thinking “Hopeless!” a week ago to thinking, “This is going to be cool.”

Afterward, my goal is to put it up online so you can all see it. In the meantime, if you live anywhere near Cambridge, Mass., you might want to check out Lydia Fair.

“We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
—Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”

17 Mar 2009

Free Sunborn Download (Multiformat)

posted in: ebooks, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn | 0

The weather has turned promising, I’ve emerged from tax-return and financial-aid purgatory, and it’s time for a Spring Special! Things are moving more slowly than I had hoped on the Tor ebook front, so I’m taking matters into my own hands. For a limited time, I am making Sunborn available for free download in all major ebook formats! DRM-free, now and always. So come and get it. Tell your friends! Bring your girlfriend/boyfriend and your grandmother. Bring your dog.

How long is a “limited time”? I’m not sure, but when Tor gets its ebooks out the door and into the stores, I expect these will come down.

“You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.” —Maxim Gorky

17 Feb 2009

Boskone 2009

posted in: personal news, religion, science fiction, writing | 0

Last weekend, I was busy at Boskone, the annual February convention sponsored by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). It was a smaller convention than Boskone of years past, but was friendly and good fun, and a chance to catch up with friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while. I spoke on a panel on “Faith in the Future” with a number of other writers, including James Morrow, with whom I have locked horns on questions related to faith and religion on many previous occasions. Jim’s a good guy. We disagree on just about every aspect of faith, God, spirituality, and application to life, politics, and fiction. But it’s a good-natured disagreement, and we’ve always stayed friendly. This year I enjoyed attending his book publication party for his new book, Shambling Toward Hiroshima, a Godzilla story (at least on some level; I haven’t read it yet). I’m a Godzilla fan from way back, and I happily left his party with a wind-up, spark-breathing Godzilla toy.

As moderator of a panel called “Angels and AIs,” I got to be the herder of cats trying to keep things moving in some direction resembling the discussion topic of whether sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences would come to seem like angels to us—or maybe like Cylons. With voices as disparate as Karl Schroeder and Charles Stross, among others, I’m not sure how well I succeeded in keeping the conversation on track. But one audience member told me afterward he thought it was an awesome discussion, so I guess it went okay.

I had long, enjoyable conversations with fellow writers Ann Tonsor Zeddies and Rosemary Kirstein, both of whom share my struggle with getting new books written in something less than geologic time frames. (They’re both good, too; check out their books.) My literary beer brought together many past members of the Ultimate SF Workshop that I teach with Craig Gardner, as well as local fan and writer Dan Kimmel, and in a surprise appearance, math professor Bruce Burdick of Roger Williams University, who—although neither of us knew the other at the time—graduated just a few years after I did from Huron High School, in Huron, Ohio.

A small world. Lots of passing conversations with others: Jane Yolen, Greg Bear, Tom Easton, Jo Walton, Mark and Shirley Pitman, people from Tor…ah, I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch—sorry. I finally got to meet the artist who produced the lovely cover for Sunborn: Stephan Martiniere. He does good work!

As do they all.

12 Feb 2009

What’s Hard About Being a Writer?

posted in: Battlestar Galactica, personal news, science fiction, Sunborn, writing | 0

SFSignal, from time to time, asks the same question of a bunch of writers and puts their answers together in an interesting post called MindMeld. They’ve done it again this week, and the question—posed to me, among others—was What’s the most difficult part of being a writer? (That link will take you to all the answers.)

Here’s what I said (but do go look at the others, because they’re interesting):

What’s the hardest thing about being a writer? That’s easy: Writing. Doing it, not talking about it. Not thinking about it or procrastinating to avoid doing it. Not checking the email for writing-related messages (hah). Just doing it. Putting. The words. On. The page. Damn, it’s hard sometimes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. Okay, nearly all the time. Microsoft’s patented Blue Screen of Death can’t hold a candle to the dread induced by the White Screen of No Words on the Page.

I’m not talking about writing in general, but writing a work of fiction. Creating a story out of whole cloth and telling it in words that make the reader want to come back for more. Okay, I’m not even talking about that last part—that comes more in the rewriting phase, which for me is easier. I’m talking about, Who is this character, really, and why is she angry, or scared, or passionate? I’m talking about, What comes next—and why is it interesting or unexpected or inevitable? Why should anyone care?

I got some interesting insight into the different creative tensions in writing a couple of years ago, when I was asked to write a novelization of Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries. I had just finished a first draft of my novel Sunborn, which for a variety of reasons had been a years-long struggle. The novelization had to be done quickly. But I had a DVD of the miniseries (it had already aired), and I had a shooting script (different in many respects from the final edit). The story was there. The characters were there. I couldn’t change them, and didn’t want to change them. But I had to bring them to life. I had to add dimension and depth where I could, and I had to make scenes make sense that were fine on-screen, whizzing by at the speed of TV, but that on closer examination had issues. It was a writing challenge of a particular kind, and I enjoyed it immensely. But it was a very different experience from writing my own books.

What it was, I think, was that my story-imagining lobes were given a break, while my story-crafting and writing-craft lobes did the heavy lifting for a while. I worked hard, while at the same time, part of my brain was vacationing! And afterward, I came back to the rewrite on Sunborn with better clarity and more energy. Based on feedback from readers so far, I think I did good.

Guess what I’m doing now. That’s right, I’m first-drafting a new novel. Blank White Screen of No Words on the Page. Damn, that’s hard.

By the way, for those of you who might not be regular readers of Pushing a Snake, the book I’m working on now is the fifth volume of The Chaos Chronicles: The Reefs of Time. (Will John Bandicut and Julie Stone find each other again on Shipworld?… and other questions, to be answered.)

12 Feb 2009

Do Free Downloads Sell Books?

posted in: Battlestar Galactica, ebooks, science fiction, Sunborn | 0

This, of course, is the question that many authors want the answer to (and also blog-reader Tim, in a comment to my last post). If you believe the Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi school, the answer is clearly yes; others remain skeptical. Publishers range from scared to enthusiastic.

For me, this is an ongoing experiment. The first part was a no-brainer: the first three Chaos Chronicles books were out of print, so it was unquestionably better to get them in front of readers and get them interested in the series. For that part of the experiment, the results are an unqualified—but also unquantified—success. There have been about 15,000 downloads of those books from my own site, with more from feedbooks, manybooks, mobileread, and now the Baen Free Library. Many people have written me, saying they tried my work for the first time with those freebies and liked what they found. Some of them said it prompted them to go out and buy a copy of Sunborn in hardcover. Hurray!

But wait just a minute. How many extra copies of Sunborn did it sell? Three? Three hundred? How many sales did I lose because I put it up for free in PDF? Truth: I don’t know. In the first place, it’s not like I actually get detailed information about sales; this remains one of the dark sides of publishing, the dearth of actual data coming back to the writer. (Sure, eventually I’ll see totals on a royalty sheet. But that can take years.) Just as important, though, is a question that no one can answer: how many would I have sold without the free downloads. The series was out of the public eye for years. I was out of the public eye for years. I have no doubt the sales picture could have been grim. As it is, from what I’m told, Sunborn is selling at least as well as its predecessor in the stores, Eternity’s End. (BSG is a side trip, and doesn’t really count.)

So what do the publishers make of all this? Well, Tor and Baen both seem to embrace the notion of giving books away as a means to selling more. Tor has had free download promotions from time to time, and Baen has their ongoing free library. On the other hand, I recently had an email exchange with a fellow writer whose new book is on the Nebula preliminary ballot. His publisher was reluctant to let him send out an electronic reading copy or to put a PDF up even on the members only SFWA site, for fear I guess of piracy. This, to me, makes no sense. If a book is published, chances are it’ll be up on the darknet regardless. Better to get people reading it and talking about it.

Tim mentioned the music and film industries as examples of reluctance. The thing is, they’re coming around. Amazon offers free MP3 music downloads. Itunes has a free song of the week. The networks put their TV shows up on the web for free. (That’s how I’m catching up on Chuck, which I missed in favor of Sarah Connor Chronicles, back when they were on at the same time. And that’s even how I’m seeing Battlestar Galactica—on Free On Demand!) And web comics—free. What that may imply for a business model for earning an income from writing is a much bigger question—a topic for another post, maybe.

Bottom line for me: I can’t guarantee that my books will sell better because I’m offering them for free download. The truth is, I may never know. But I don’t think I’m hurting sales, and right now, the enemy with the name Obscurity written on its back is a far bigger threat to me than the chance that some people are reading my books for free.

And wasn’t the hope that people would read my books the reason I wrote them in the first place?

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.” —Isaac Asimov

5 Feb 2009

Free BSG Download and Other News

posted in: Battlestar Galactica, ebooks, personal news, science fiction | 0

With Battlestar Galactica now in the final stretch of its glorious and slightly insane odyssey, I asked for and received permission to put my novelization of the miniseries, titled—wouldn’t you know it—Battlestar Galactica, up for free download on my web site. And so I have, and there you can get it for your reading pleasure. I’ve got it in PDF and EPUB formats. The Mobipocket version is on sale in the Kindle store. Naturally, I hope a few of you might be inspired to buy the paper book, still available here and there. But mostly I just wanted to share the fun.

In other download news, the first three books of The Chaos Chronicles have just gone up for download in the Baen Free Library. (If you already have the Chaos books from my web site, there’s no reason to redownload; they’re the same book files, copied over with my permission.) If you don’t know the Baen Free Library, it’s a wonderful resource to help people get a taste of work by authors they might not know, in ebook form—and it’s got a lot of great classic SF by people like Andre Norton and James Schmitz. Check it out.

Meanwhile, I’m now proofing the text for the ebook version of Seas of Ernathe, my very first novel. There’s a trip down (fading) memory lane! That writer kid, he has promise, I think.

29 Jan 2009

Brief Catch-up

posted in: blogging, ebooks, personal news, quirky, science fiction, writing | 0

Last weekend, I spent a day at Vericon, a small but cheerful convention at Harvard University, which had as its guest of honor Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan and I had met once or twice before, but many years ago, and it was good to become reacquainted. Dinner with Stan, Jim Kelly, and Paul Di Filippo was a high point of the day, though it was also good to offer some students from the teen writing workshop I ran with Craig Gardner a chance to see a con on a small scale.

Last night I completed the proofreading and minor edits on the text of The Infinity Link, and sent the RTF file off to the folks at E-reads, who will prepare it for commercial ebook release. Artist David Mattingly graciously assented to my using the original cover art from the Tor and Bluejay print editions on the ebook, so it’s going to look great. Here’s the full wraparound, shrunk way down:

The Infinity Link cover art by David B. Mattingly

I made very small changes in the text, mostly to get rid of anachronisms such as the references to the Soviet Union, and some outdated computer terminology. After all the story takes place in the year 2034, and the future simply isn’t what it once was.

Now I’ve begun similar work on my very first novel, Seas of Ernathe, originally published in 1976. It’s interesting to see how my writing evolved and grew between my first and fourth novels—and how it compares to my work now. I’ve definitely grown more skilled as a writer, but I miss the quick bursts of creativity I had when I was in my twenties.

For a good tongue-in-cheek glimpse of how books get from typewriter to bookstore, check out this video from MacMillan publishing. (With thanks to Richard Curtis in his E-reads blog for bringing it to my attention.)

22 Jan 2009

Guide to My Ebooks

posted in: ebooks, personal news, science fiction | 0

I got an email from a reader asking me why it had to be so hard to buy all the ebooks from a favorite author. I knew at once what he meant: editions are scattered across different publishers, different retailers, different ebook formats (some with restrictive DRM, some without). Even trying to follow a particular series within an author’s oeuvre can be trying. Why, for instance, can’t all the books of a series be bought as a nice bundle, with one purchase and one download?

I thought that was a great idea. And while it’s not currently in my power to create bundles, I thought, why can’t I at least make it easier for someone who wants to browse for all my ebooks do it from a single page? So I set out to do that.

My new Ebooks page, at http://www.starrigger.net/ebooks.htm, lists all my novels, grouped by series—with links to major online sources, highlighting those that offer multi-format, DRM-free downloads. The latter effectively means eReads and their partner Fictionwise, though I hope soon to add Baen Webscriptions to that list. I’ve also listed which books are coming soon, and which are farther off.

I hope it’s helpful. Check it out and let me know what you think!

“My job is to help you fall in love.” —Ray Bradbury

9 Jan 2009

BSG Meets The Atlantic Monthly (!)

posted in: Battlestar Galactica, quirky, science fiction, writing | 0

The Atlantic is a terrific magazine, but possibly the last place I would have looked for an article on Battlestar Galactica, the edgy TV series that’s probably done more to shake up science fiction on television since the original Star Trek. Nevertheless, in the new (Jan/Feb 2009) issue, James Parker writes in The Atlantic about BSG, just as the show locks and loads for its final stretch (hitting the cablewaves next Friday night!). In Lost in Space, Parker gives a reasonable account of the origin of the reimagined show, except that he brings L. Ron Hubbard into the account—Hubbard having said that space opera was really “the stuff of deepest prehistory, somber emanations from the memory of the species.” That dovetails, admittedly, with BSG’s premise that Earth is not the cradle of humankind, but rather the latest stop on a long journey.

Parker turns a tad snarky about the direction of the show, saying that “Battlestar Galactica is presenting all the symptoms of a an extended-run high-concept TV series in its decadent phase.” Now, he may be right—certainly I’ve wondered more than once whether the show’s writers actually know themselves where they’re going with the story. I’ve wondered that ever since I wrote the official novelization of the miniseries, and had the feeling that there was a lot they weren’t telling me about the direction of the show because they weren’t sure themselves. Fair enough. Half the time I don’t know where I’m going when I’m writing a novel. Why should it be any different for the creators of a years-long TV series?

On the other hand, maybe those writers know exactly what they’re doing, and we’re just entering the twistiest part of the world’s most gut-wrenching aerobatics show. That’s my vote, an expression of white-knuckled faith. They better know what they’re doing—it’s coming back on, and looks like it could be augering in, and I, for one, want to know how they’re going to land that baby!

“You write about the thing that sank its teeth into you and wouldn’t let go.” —Paul West

« 1 … 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 … 28 »