22 Aug 2008

Neptune Crossing PDF Added

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After much sweat today, I beat the Mobipocket Creator software into making some final tweaks to the MobiPocket version of Neptune Crossing. Then I lit into the PDF version, which seems to be a popular format, although in my opinion it has little to recommend it for viewing on a PDA or other handheld. That’s especially true here. I have a nice, pretty PDF display for viewing on a computer or for printing. And I hope that’s how most people who choose PDF would do it.

What I didn’t master was getting a file that’ll reflow the text onto a small screen. First my wife was doing the conversions for me on her Mac, and they looked good but were pretty fat files. Then I tried Adobe’s free online conversion, and that gave a much smaller file, same appearance. But neither did the tagging needed for text reflow on a PDA, and I don’t know how to do it. (And if this is all so much gibberish to you, more power to you!)

I think that’s it for Neptune Crossing! On to Strange Attractors!

“I have not yet spoken of the esthetic appeal of strange attractors. These systems of curves, these clouds of points, suggest sometimes fireworks or galaxies… A realm lies here to be explored and harmonies to be discovered.” —David Ruel

21 Aug 2008

Neptune Crossing — Free Download!

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I finished it today! You can now go to my web site http://www.starrigger.net and download a free ebook of Neptune Crossing, in any of several digital formats! I’ve got html, MobiPocket (Kindle and Pocket PC and others), and eReader (Palm and Pocket PC) formats up now, and expect to add PDF in a day or so. I may add Microsoft Reader and Sony ebook formats, but I don’t know how much demand there is for them. Maybe I’ll come back to that after I get the next books up.

It’s been a real bear. First getting all the copy-edits typed in (my daughter helped with that). Then fixing the formatting; the original files were in WordStar for DOS, and the conversion to Word left some problems. Oy—the formatting. A nightmare. But I finally managed it. I have the Mobi and eReader versions on my own PDA right now, and they look good.

I’m finding that I enjoy reading on my PDA, more and more. I have about 50 books on there right now, and I can read it in bed in the dark without waking my wife. (With the font set at largest, I can just read without my glasses!) I’m rereading some old favorites from when I was a kid—some Tom Corbett and Andre Norton. But I’ve also got a bunch of classics, ranging from The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to The Call of the Wild to the Bible, for when I want something different. I’m a convert to ebooks!

Anyway, come and download Neptune Crossing, and tell your friends! Free books!! Help me out and pass the word!

“You’ll never make much money writing books like that. But the very best people will come to your funeral.” —said to Edgar Pangborn, as told by D.G. Compton

14 Jul 2008

Readercon: July 17 – 20

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Readercon happens this coming weekend, just outside Boston. It’s one of my convention-going highlights of the year, being full of people who truly love reading and love science fiction! I’ll be on a few panels, and doing a reading. The full text of the Program Guide is online as a PDF. But here’s my schedule:

Friday 4:00 PM, Salon F:
If Free Electronic Texts Are Good Promotion, What’s Piracy? — Jeffrey A. Carver, James Patrick Kelly (L), Cat Rambo, Graham Sleight, Gordon Van Gelder

“Webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free . . . [are helping convert] the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.”–Howard V. Hendrix, former Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). In a recent issue of _Locus_, Cory Doctorow summarized the evidence that giving away free electronic versions of books actually helps rather than hinders sales of the printed versions… What are the differences between giving away a text electronically yourself, and letting others disseminate it without your knowledge and/or permission? …If “piracy” is actually good for all except the best-selling authors, how do writers reconcile this reality with long-standing and deep-rooted feelings about intellectual property rights and getting paid for work?

Friday 7:00 PM, Salon F:
Waking Up Sober Next to a Story Idea — Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeffrey A. Carver (L), David Anthony Durham, Kay Kenyon, Barry B. Longyear, Jennifer Pelland

Really, it seemed absolutely beautiful once upon a time. Now that you’ve had intimate knowledge of it (say, midway through the novel), you can see all the less-than-flattering sides. You may even wonder, What the hell was I thinking? How do you recover enthusiasm for the work? Now that you see the flaws, how do you begin the process of fixing them?

Saturday 12:00 Noon, Vinyard: Kaffeeklatsch (meet the author)
Jeffrey A. Carver; David Anthony Durham

Saturday 2:00 PM, RI: Workshop
Writing Jujitsu: Turning Writer’s Block into Stories. — Barry B. Longyear with participation by Jeffrey A. Carver, Barbara Krasnoff, Sandra McDonald, et al.

You can’t sell it until it’s on paper and you can’t get it on paper if things keep eating up your time, nag at you, bully you, or you’re filled to the brim with illnesses, insecurities, or crushing doubts. Longyear presents a how-to workshop for beginning writers and those who have been there on how to turn what’s blocking your muse into stories.

Sunday 1:30 PM, VT: Reading (30 min.) — Jeffrey A. Carver reads from his forthcoming novel Sunborn.

If you’re going to be at Readercon, I hope you’ll come say hello. (I won’t have a designated autographing time. They had too many authors, and since I don’t currently have anything new out, they triaged me. But I’ll be around. Grab me after a panel, or come to the Kaffeeklatch.)

“First you’re an unknown, then you write a book and you move up to obscurity.” —Martin Myers

14 Jul 2008

Unusual Book Signing Planned

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This weekend, I was at my usual early-Saturday-evening haunt, which is the free and very friendly wine tastings at my local beer and wine emporium, Menotomy Beer and Wine in Arlington, Massachusetts. I was looking around, and had a sudden inspiration: why not a combination wine tasting /book signing? A natural, no? (Could be a beer tasting, too; they do those on Friday evenings.)

I suggested it to the management (“I have a crazy idea…”), and they loved it. Turns out they’ve been *trying* to get local artists in there to display their work for free, just to liven things up even more. I believe their exact words were: “You’re here. It’s a done deal.”

So if you’re in the Boston area, mark that on your mental calendar for sometime in November, when Sunborn is published. I’ll post more later.

28 Jun 2008

Speaking of Free Books

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

I’ve been considering the possibility of making Sunborn available for free download, perhaps in installments leading up to the actual pub date (end of October). A number of writers, including Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi, have offered their books for free download and discovered that it seemed to increase their audience and interest in the novels, and thus sales of their books. While there are no doubt some readers who will read only the free version and skip the hardcopy, it seems that many more decide they’d like to own the actual book once they’ve read the electronic version. At least, that’s what these writers have reported. Past experience is no guarantee of future performance, though, as the mutual funds tell us.

I’d be interested in knowing what you folks think. This is new territory for all of us in the fiction world, and I’m feeling my way in the dark just like everyone else.

(I’ve already used this quote, but it just seems to fit, so here’s an encore…)

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow

2 Jun 2008

Sunborn Galleys Done, and Other Updates

posted in: personal news, public affairs, science, Sunborn | 0

It’s been a busy month. I got my name landed on Mars, and I’ve put my characters deep into the Orion Nebula. In other words, I just finished correcting the galleys (page proofs to check the typesetting) for the hardcover edition of Sunborn. That’s pretty much the end of my work on the book. I’d promised my editor, Jim Frenkel, that I’d have them in the mail by end of day on Friday—and I got to the post office literally about thirty seconds before they were going to close the windows. Package sent, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I like this book, but I may have read it as many times as I need to, for a while.

To help decompress, last night I wrote a letter to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, both praising and protesting this month’s cover story, The Sky Is Falling, by Gregg Easterbrook, about the hazard to Earth from wayward asteroids and comets. Seriously, it would take just one good-sized rock from space to kack most of human civilization. So NASA’s gearing up to protect us, right? Ding. Nope. NASA’s head’s in the sand. So far, I’m with the author.

Where we part company is where he dismisses our planned return to the moon as a waste of money detracting from our ability to do other things in space, like defend ourselves from big rocks. In fact, I believe returning to the moon is the next step toward building a permanent infrastructure in space, which among other things will give us the ongoing capability to do such things as capture or divert asteroids before they can divert us (from our future).

If they don’t publish the letter (and the odds certainly are long), I’ll post it in its entirety later.

“Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.” —Flannery O’Connor

20 May 2008

Bread Loaf Conference

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

As I hoped and expected, the New England Young Writers Conference at Bread Loaf was a great time, and entirely too short. My daughter Julia attended the workshops led by another fiction writer, while I worked with a talented and extraordinarily open and enthusiastic group of fourteen high school students on their fiction writing. That was just the core of it; there were also readings (from the podium where Robert Frost used to hold forth—I did one myself), additional writing sessions open to all, conversations with writers of all stripes, good food and good company, and—wonder of wonders—sunshine on the mountain. I was sad to leave. But I’ll tell you this: there are some excellent writers coming up in the years ahead! Be warned. Be heartened.

The Sunborn galleys arrived for my inspection and correction just before the conference, and I didn’t have time to so much as glance at them over the weekend. Now I’m working on them, but I’m also getting ready to leave on another trip, this time to meet with another group that wants to pick the brains of SF writers.

I hope you’re all enjoying your spring.

“I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” —Peter De Vries

8 May 2008

Sunborn Available for Preorder

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For years, readers have been sending me emails saying, “When is the next Chaos Chronicles book coming out?” or, “I’m not getting any younger—will there ever be another Chaos Chronicles book?” or even, “Thanks a lot for leaving me hanging, because it’s obvious there’s never going to be another book, you jerk.”

Readers of this blog have known for years that Sunborn, the new Chaos book, was coming—or at least it’s been my word against the doubters. (Sometimes, I’ve been among the doubters.) Well, you no longer have to take my word for it! It’s up on Amazon. And you can even preorder it. Now. Today. Go ahead, click the link! It won’t hurt.

I was surprised it was up this soon (the pub date is October of this year, from Tor Books). In fact, I didn’t even know it was up until a kind reader in Germany sent me a note telling me about it. I quickly discovered that they’d misspelled my first name on the dustjacket, at least as displayed on Amazon, but a note to my editor resulted in that being fixed pretty quickly. (I hope it stays fixed. I’m sure it will. Nothing can go wrongg.)

That’s the news from here. I might not get this written up before I go, so I’ll just mention that next week I’ll be heading up again to the Bread Loaf writing center near Middlebury, Vermont, to teach at the annual New England Young Writers Conference. If you are, or are the parent or teacher of, a young writer of high school age, you really should look into this for next year. It’s a terrific program. I’ll tell all about it, after I get back.

And did I mention? You can preorder Sunborn from Amazon.

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” —Red Smith

2 Apr 2008

Sunborn Copyedit Finished

posted in: personal news, Sunborn, writing | 0

For the last seven or eight days, I have been up to my ears in Sunborn again. The copyedited manuscript arrived for my review, and as usual, they wanted it done yesterday. In case you’re not familiar with the process, when a book manuscript goes into production, after it’s left the editor’s hands, it goes to a copy editor. This person does all the fine marking up for typesetting, plus proofing of all the fiddly little details, querying the author if something seems wrong or unclear, and checking spelling, hyphenations, commas, all the little stuff that can drive you crazy—and make the book look unprofessional if it’s missed or done wrong. Copy editors are absolutely essential to the bookmaking process, and a good copy editor is priceless to an author.

The problem is that the author then has to go over everything, approving or not approving of changes, and reconsidering every little comma and word choice, pulling his or her hair out over things that he thought (ha ha) had already been settled. It’s also a chance to make last-minute revisions if a passage doesn’t seem right. It’s my least favorite stage of writing a book, it’s excruciating, and it’s necessary to do it with great care. Usually by the time you get to this point, you’re sick to death of the book and the last thing you want to do is read it one more time. But you do. For one thing, even the best copy editor will make some changes you don’t like, and this is where you catch them and fix them.

Anyway, I did all that, and have just shipped it off to my editor. Now it goes back to the production department and off to typesetting. I’ll have to do it all one more time—when the page proofs come for checking. But for now, I can rest. Sleeeeeeep!

“You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” —Gustave Flaubert

17 Sep 2007

Sunborn Excerpt Now Online!

posted in: Sunborn, writing | 0

By popular request (well, by request of one or two people, anyway), I have uploaded the first three chapters of Sunborn, so you can get a taste of what’s coming. I finished the final final final drop-dead revisions on the early chapters last week, and it should be going into production shortly. (Going into production, of course, means that it’ll be out in a year. But even if I drop dead now, the book will survive me. Which, er, ought to be some consolation.)

Anyway, check it out, on my website at starrigger.net.

“I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.” —Moliere

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