Two-minute Warning

Date: May 8, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

. . . If you are a tortoise, and not a hare. Which is our way of saying that we’d like to thank all the good folks who offered to beta read MWB for us. We have already gotten much excellent feedback that will make for a stronger book, and we are awaiting some final comments. So we are closing down beta reading at this time.

As soon as we get the final comments we expect and have a chance to assess them, we will announce a publication date. We expect final comments by this weekend, and if that happens, we will post the date this coming Monday, May 12th.

Thanks again to everyone who answered our call!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for!

Date: April 29, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

The draft of The Morning Which Breaks is (finally!) ready for beta read and we are looking for beta readers!

A few notes: MWB is long! (Approximately 510 paperback pages.)

We prefer beta readers who have read the first book in the series (Alecto) and liked it, at least a somewhat. (If you didn’t like it, MWB is not going to be your cup of tea!) It is best if you’ve posted a review of Alecto either on Amazon or Goodreads, or at least have some reviews we can peruse.

PDF is the preferred format in which we’d like to distribute this. We can email it to you (preferred) or post it for you to download from our site.

There is a glossary providing definitions of terms, technical notes, some brief historical background and various other info, that will be attached to the published version, but it is not integrated with the beta draft. The glossary is itself about 100 pages (339 entries plus a biographical list of 91 characters). The glossary will be provided as a separate PDF, unless you don’t want it. The glossary is for your reference. We are happy to get feedback on it, if you like, but it is being reviewed separately, so don’t feel obligated to read the whole thing.

Please leave a comment here if you are interested, and we will email you to fill you in on additional details.

Thanks!

Our Minority Report #2

Date: March 14, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

So what have we been up to since our last update? Mainly contracting bronchitis and trying to recover from it. Other than that, where are we on The Morning Which Breaks? Well, we did get Part 1 back from its first proofreading pass. We sent Part 3 to some additional alpha readers for suggestions and have already gotten some feedback. The main feedback was that we really needed to expand the glossary, and that a list of characters would be helpful as well.

So we did that. The glossary now boasts 247 entries from Admiralty to ZANG, and a biographical list of 86 personalities from Alandale to Zayterland. We will be including the glossary as part of MWB (and all subsequent novels, suitably expanded), as we’ve been informed that having it as separate document made things clunky.

So how else are we doing? Part 2 has expanded to 30 chapters and will likely stay there. Two new chapters have been added and completed, a few other chapters have been revised to account for these new chapters, and we have eight chapters left to complete. Only two are still in outline form; the rest are at least half done. Part 2 is current ~168 pages.

Again, for those who like nitty-gritty numbers, the manuscript is 139,450 words long as of this writing (rounded to the nearest 50 words), equaling ~420 standard paperback pages. (For comparison, Alecto is 54,930 words and 162 pages.) With the glossary included, the full volume will probably break 500 pages on completion.

Finally, we will be ready to release a couple of new chapters from Part 2 to interested parties this weekend..

As always, we greatly appreciate your support for our efforts, and let us know if these updates are helpful to you!

New Chapters and Infodumps

Date: February 25, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

We have two new chapters from Part 2 ready to release those who request them. Please leave a comment and let us know if you prefer PDF or Kindle format, and whether you would prefer to download them from the site or have us email them directly to you.

These two chapters (and probably the next one as well) are rather more infodump-ish than most. Infodumps are one of the main hazards of writing sci-fi. Larry Niven explained it nicely back in the early 70’s (or before) and a short bit I call “The X-ray Laser Problem.” Niven was writing a series of sci-fi mysteries at the time and he wrote the piece to lament that these were tricky. Say you have a locked-door murder mystery (his example). In contemporary fiction, the reader knows all the limitations and such, but in sci-fi, what if the bad guy had an x-ray laser that can shoot through walls?

You can’t just drop that on the reader at the end (if you want to still be read). If there are x-ray lasers in that universe, you have to say so and describe what they can do and what they can’t, and how this adds to the mystery. The problem arises though when the author gets carried away talking about his uber-cool x-ray laser. After all, he did research and exercised a bunch of creativity to invent the thing, and he naturally wants people to know all that. So he infodumps.

Back when Niven wrote his piece, there wasn’t much infodumping. At some point that changed and now some successful authors (David Weber comes to mind) have made infodumps part of their style. I don’t know how this came about (maybe it was Tom Clancy who showed that readers actually liked a wealth of technical detail), but the views on infodumps have evolved and are still evolving, and they seem to be getting more controversial again.

Our Minority Report #1

Date: February 23, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

As we have ceased posting new chapters here, we thought it might be nice to give people a report on the completion of The Morning Which Breaks. We will endeavor to update this periodically (weekly is the goal, but we all know how that sometimes works out) so our readers can stay abreast of our progress.

To recap, MWB is presented in three parts. The current status is as follows:

Part 1 is completed in beta draft form and is being proofread.

Part 2 is still in work.

Part 3 has been completed as an initial rough draft and is in alpha review (a silly name for us rereading our own work).

The breakdown for each part is as follows (page refers to a typical paperback page):

Part 1 is 194 pages long and consists of 23 chapters, plus Prologue.

Part 2 is currently 145 pages long and consists of 27 to 28 chapters: 18 of these have been completed as a rough draft; 4 are ~50% complete; 5 or 6 are in outline form only.

Part 3 is 56 pages long and consists of 12 chapters, plus Epilogue.

As writing is an elastic business (especially the way we do it), the numbers for Part 2 are soft, in the sense that we may discover the need to add chapters to it as the story continues to evolve. And it is possible that as we complete Part 2, it may be revealed that we need to add to Part 3. (The closer you think you are to being finished, the more holes have a way of making themselves known.)

For those who like nitty-gritty numbers, the manuscript is 131,650 words long as of this writing (rounded to the nearest 50 words). For comparison, Alecto is 54,930 words.

Finally, we will be ready to release a couple of new chapters from Part 2 to interested parties shortly. Check back in a day of so for updates.

As always, we greatly appreciate your support for our efforts!

‘Morning’ Beta Cover Reloaded

Date: February 8, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

We made a new cover for The Morning Which Breaks! This is the beta version, still with some clean-up needed on the figures, but we thought we’d put it out for comment. You may fire when ready! 😉

MWB_Cover-new-800x500

Chapter Headings?

Date: February 7, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

It has been suggested to us that perhaps we should replace the chapter headings with a location and date, maybe like this: Deimos, Mars; 040842 GAT. The location is already shown in the subheading, so the only new info would be the date. Dates can be a bit problematic in a narrative like this and we are not sure how much they add to the reader’s experience.

The primary reason for the question is Part 3 for MWB, which is even more episodic than Part 1 and switches rapidily among locales and does not have a smooth timeline. The though was offered that changing the chapter heading for that section might aid the readers with the more episodic structure of the narrative.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this issue below.

Read an Awesome Book, Do a Good Deed!

Date: January 4, 2014 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

I’d like to bring your attention my good friend’s awesome novel, The Floating World, now for sale on Amazon for Kindle. In addition to the fact my friend’s novel is deserving of much praise, I have a particular reason for urging our wonderful readers to check it out.

My friend has been disabled and unable to work for the last several years. Last fall, she was able to get back the rights to her out-of-print novel from the original publisher (Ballantine) so she could offer it herself on Kindle, and it went live just after Christmas. So please, give it a look and if you feel so inclined, for $3.99 you can read a fascinating book and support a worthy cause. $3.99 may not seem like much, but every little bit helps. And if you have friends who like to read, pointing her book out to them would be even more welcome.

Thank you and best wishes for an excellent 2014!

Where is that F@&$*#’g Sequel?

Date: August 23, 2013 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

Excuse me for channeling Kris there for a moment, but it’s been one of those months. Now that I have that out of the way, allow us to apologize for not releasing ‘The Morning which Breaks’ as we planned.

Here’s what happened: we wanted to try to get the sequel done in July, because Jordan is gone most of this month (she’s returning early September), and use August to do the final editing on her novel so we could release that. But we got mugged by Life in July and we also concluded the last section of ‘Morning’ needs extensive revision.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with getting Jordan’s novel wrapped up and then get back to work on ‘Morning’ as soon as ‘The Erl King’s Children’ is released.

Our apologies for being too optimistic and keeping all our loyal readers waiting. We beg your forgiveness and forbearance, and we’ll announce a date here for ‘Morning’ once we have one we can adhere it. (‘Morning’ is already over 100,000 words long, which close to twice the length of ‘Alecto’, so you have a lot to look forward to.)

In the meantime, we will continue to post prerelease chapters here for your perusal.

The Alecto Initiative is Number 1?!

Date: June 12, 2013 Author: Owen R. O'Neill

Okay, so maybe we’re bragging a little here (or a lot) but during our last free promo day on Amazon, Alecto hit Number 1 on Kindle Free best seller list for military science fiction. Yes, this is a fleeting bit of glory, but for two new authors it’s still a pretty big thrill. So we hope you will forgive us, just this once.