Author of Sister of the Circuit, Shadow of the Owl, and a recipe for a pretty decent mushroom fritta...
As promised, a long overdue weekend update.
I’m currently working to get the 2nd issue of my newsletter up and ready to send out by 5/1, and was happy to make my self-imposed deadline by sending out the 1st issue on 4/1 complete with a map sketch, bit of talk about the future of Exile, Magus, a dialogue between two characters which shed a bit of light on two ancient civilizations mentioned in Magus - Melexi and Thirosia, and a darkly comedic short story poking fun at a few tropes. For any of you who are interested in reading that first issue then sign up for the newsletter before 4/30. On 4/30 I’ll send out the April newsletter again to everyone who has signed up after it was sent out. On 5/1 I’ll send out the May newsletter of course.
What about the progress of Exile, Magus? Well, its mainly the super dull background work right now. Polishing, contacting artists, and so on. For any of you wondering if I’ll be making another go of trying to fund on Inkshares, yes I will. I just want to make sure I’ve got a full strategy in place instead of jumping in blind again, so for now I’m focused on the dull background work which is why I’ve been so very quiet as of late. Don’t worry though, I’m still here and I’m still working.
That’s all I’ve got for today, so thanks for your time, have good weekends everybody, and of course keep reading and enjoying!
Hi all!
There are a few thing i would like to talk with you about in the weekend update...
But ! First thing first. This is now your chance to be the lucky guy who will shoot the book to being published as we are standing at the moment (Saturday 6:39 London time) on 249 orders!
*** In fact to get you guys ordering - lucky 250 will have his name featured in the novel as a minor character! so i will have to tweak things around (as i said it is already well written). ***
I will come back to update as soon as this happens!
x
Jonathan
After some recent discussions, I felt the need to post this to the project page and send it as an update.
What this Book is NOT:
First, this is not a book meant to answer all the questions. This world the story takes place in is a complicated place where everything has changed owing to the cataclysmic event. As a result, everything you know about society, religion, politics, genders, gender roles, and much more has changed. Second, this book is not "women can’t go on without men." Having lived for 500 years without them, clearly they can. This book is an exploration of that idea: what would it be like if you take the most basic form of diversity and remove it? And then what might happen if you reintroduce it? How would society react? Third, this is not an anti-feminist diatribe. It is also not a Complementarian manifesto. The idea here is NOT to declare one gender is better than the other, or that they can only exist together if they exist in a specific mold. The idea behind it is to explore what would happen if such an event were to occur, not pass judgment on you or anyone else for how they view or believe on this subject. Finally, this book is not going to tell you what to believe or accept about it. This will have a lot of ambiguity in it ON PURPOSE. This is not to avoid conflict, but to avoid "leading the witness." The narrative is going to have a lot of opportunities to make small and big statements throughout. Places where we can hit you right in the face with something just because we want to. We won’t be doing that. The idea here is to create a setting where all of these preconceived notions we carry into our interactions with each other have all fundamentally been altered or vanished. We all are going to approach this story with differing world views and beliefs. That is fine. The goal of this story is to take you as you are and, on the other end, leave you where you choose to be after contemplating the ideas and possibilities herein.
Including today, we have six days left to fund this project.
Did you enjoy your audio gift of chapters 1-3?
Here’s another gift...
That’s right! Your books have all shipped and are on the way!
I’ll be honest, I need you help. I haven’t done this without you, and we can’t finish strong unless we do it togehter!
AMAZON REVIEWS ARE OPEN! Please leave a starred and written review of the book as you finish! I am shooting for 50-60 reviews on or before publication date of May 3rd. WE GOT THIS! The more reviews the better the viability for the book!
Goodreads is also open for reviews! Just copy and paste the review from Amazon; I won’t tell. Pinky swear.
I do a podcast with JF Dubeau called WriteBrain. It’s about Inkshares and crowdfunded writing and publishing. Check out this article on Examiner.com we did talking about the podcast! Also go and nominate us (url:www.jfdubeau.com/writebrain/) for the Podcast Awards (People’s Choice and Arts categories, and nominate up to 20 other of your favorites podcasts)! Nominations close April 30, so hurry!
Speaking of JF, he’s SOOOO close to funding his 2nd book on the Inkshares platform.
At the time of this update, the project ONLY needs 71 more pre-orders to get FULL FUNDING on Inkshares. I am super jealous, but I think it’s worth your attention and I hope you’ll agree. Check it out:
A God in the Shed by J-F Dubeau is a Fantasy/Horror story set in the forgettably small village of St-Ferdinand, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. The villagers have been hiding a terrible secret for generations, but when their mysterious captive escapes and gets inadvertently trapped in the McKenzy’s backyard shed, it’s up to Venus and her friends to figure out how to dispose of this terrible and malevolent burden; an Old God of hate and death.
You can find out more about this dark and beautiful book, read sample chapters, reviews and pre-order your copy of A God in the Shed by visiting: www.inkshares.com/books/a-god-in-the-shed
You can listen to the prologue as read by Ageless author Paul Inman (that’s me) here: youtu.be/XJw5oZhqtXo
Need more incentive?
•Each pre-order enters you into the ‘I want to kill a reader’ raffle. The winner will have his name and likeness used in the book as a minor character that gets killed off. The author will work with the winner to find the appropriate means of demise to satisfy both the winner and the story.
•Each physical copy of A God in the Shed will be signed and numbered as an exclusive first edition item.
•Free, exclusive A God in the Shed bookmarks will be included with the physical copies and mailed to eBook supporters.
•Orders of three or more copies guarantees your name to appear in the Patrons list printed at the end of the book.
•You get to enjoy the satisfaction and pride at having supported both art and literature.
A God in the Shed is the first part of a trilogy that pushes the line between beauty and horror by telling a story that changes how we look at magic and the world around us. You have a chance of being part of making this book a reality and supporting a new author on his journey.
However, time is running out! The campaign ends April 22nd. Don’t miss out and order today!
www.inkshares.com/books/a-god-in-the-shed
Thanks everyone! We are in the home stretch!
I want to share a special moment!
As you can see in the screen shot of my project page, Blood Dawn now has 398 pre-orders.
Why am I sharing this and not the moment when I hit 400?
Because I’d like to ask 2 people to please pre-order a copy right now. It would mean so much to me -- in fact, it would make my weekend!
Here is a link to the project page where you can do that:
http://www.inkshares.com/projects/blood-dawn
Thank you to EVERYONE who has shown support and brought us this far. May it continue!
To celebrate our 250th hour along with our Quillification (that’s a fancy word I made up that means the book is definitely getting published), I promised you guys something special today, and boy are you going to get it:
When one is dealing with "hard science fiction" it’s particularly important to get the facts right. For example, one of the best hard science fiction writers, Larry Niven, got a very important fact wrong in his first story, "The Coldest Place" (1964). In this story, the coldest place concerned was the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun. However, Mercury was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance with the Sun before the story saw the light of day, meaning it was published with known scientific errata. Oh well. It didn’t seem to hurt his career much.
Since "The Punch Escrow" is set in the 25th century, I expect that I will have gotten a lot of things wrong. I’ve done my best to avoid such missteps, but since I am only a fan of quantum physics and not a quantum physicist myself, I leaned on my highschool friend Joe Santoro, a real life medical physicist, to vet (and sometimes invent) the science necessary to make my world scientifically plausible. Joe is one of the nicest, smartest guys in the world. He’s probably blushing reading this, but without him there probably never would have been a Punch Escrow. To celebrate our publication, I wanted to share a short interview I conducted with Joe. Consider this the first in a series of interviews with people who have been invaluable to me in making Joel Byram’s world credible.
Tal: I guess first question would be your name and what you do for a living?
Joe: My name is Joe Santoro and I am a medical physicist. I work in a radiation oncology clinic at a hospital on Long Island. We’re the guys that make sure the medical linear accelerator is delivering the correct radiation dose to patients undergoing radiation therapy. We also come up with the treatment plans for patients which dictates where the radiation will get delivered. We’re responsible for routine QA of most of the various components that comprise the radiation delivery chain, i.e. the CT scanners, LINAC, on-treatment imaging, etcetera.
Tal: What was the thing that made you want to get into physics?
Joe: Now you’re making me use my way-back machine. I guess I would have to narrow it down to 3 things at a really early age; astronomy (just looking up at the sky), magnets (which are cool at any age), and a fascination with things just crashing into each other. I subsequently became obsessed with meteorology to the point where I was making weather reports daily and posting them on the classroom door. Incidentally I didn’t end up “specializing” in either meteorology or astronomy but these early interests were springboards into studying (particle) physics and mathematics later in life. To this day I still love a great meteor shower, looking up at the moon, or a spending hours a day on Wunderground.com
Tal: In science fiction books, scientists are often presented as characters with no sense of humor. I think that’s why The Martian is so beloved by the scientific community, because it presents hard science side by side with toilet humor. It was something I wanted to capture for the Sylvia character in the book, she’s a quantum physicist, but she’s also happy to drop a dirty joke. As a professional physicist, how much of a role does humor play into your daily work life? Can you give any examples?
Joe: It’s funny you ask that. When I think back on the influences that shaped my personality as a scientist (and just a regular person), I think of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters) and Chris Knight (Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius). Perhaps it was just a function of watching and re-watching these movies at a really mentally malleable age, but both characters made the prospect of being a scientist seem like something really cool to aspire to.
I think having a good sense of humor allows you to deal with the absurdity, randomness, beauty and cruelty of the universe in way that complements science’s attempt to establish some sort of framework for all that. I think taking oneself too seriously is a hazard in both scientific pursuit and life’s pursuits. After all, what’s the point if you can’t have a good laugh every now and then?
It goes without saying that working in a radiation oncology department can be extremely stressful and tragic on an almost daily basis. I’ve been at places where joking around is discouraged and I can tell you, people don’t last too long at those places. Without being able to joke around with the people I spend the better part of my day with, I think I would want to throw myself in front of train at the end of the day.
Tal: I’ve asked you to help me convert mosquitoes to flying steam reformers, keep self-replicating nanos in check with ecophagy cages, and make human teleportation possible with density functional theory, among other absurd requests. Your one caveat to me was to ’beware of using too deterministic language in the story’ - Can your elaborate on why you said that?
Joe: Did I say that? It sounds quite serious. I guess what I meant is that when talking about things inherently “Quantum”, it requires us to use the language of chance and probability instead of certainty. Quantum physics describes the world of the extremely small and at these scales, familiar quantities like the position, velocity, momentum, and energy of an object become fuzzy and probabilistic. Instead of specifying these quantities as definite values like we’re used to for say a car traveling on a road, we have to instead speak of the expectation value of these quantities for an object like an electron. Quantum physics can say that the most probable location to find an electron orbiting a proton in hydrogen atom is the 1.5 times the Bohr radius but nothing more definite. This is in contrast to saying that saying that our car is at position X,Y,Z, traveling at velocity V. It’s definitely a different way of thinking about reality and I’m not sure anyone really ever gets used to it.
Tal: Last question before I let you go back to saving the world one patient at a time: What one quantum physics breakthrough would you like to see happen within your lifetime?
Joe: That’s a doozie. If you’re going to make me pick just one I would have to say commercially viable quantum computing coupled with photonic data storage and transfer. The exponential increase in processing capability of a quantum computer will enable humanity to solve all sorts of currently intractable problems across dozens of disciplines. This also has to be accompanied by a completely new ways to move and store such enormously large quantities of data which means moving away from electronic data storage and busses to light speed photonic data storage and bussing. There are even some people using organic compounds like DNA as a means of storing extremely large quantities of data. The coupling of these nascent technologies can potentially change the course of humanity in unimaginably fantastic ways.
I can’t thank Joe enough for helping me build the world in which The Punch Escrow takes place. And I can’t thank you all enough for helping me bring that world to light. To that end, I’m unveiling the first three chapters of The Punch Escrow. Please note that these are still from the first draft of the manuscript, so there will be errors and the chapters as they appear in your books may be differently worded or organized. I hope you enjoy them.
Lastly, for those of you participating in the t-shirt giveaway, there’s a short survey here about the color/ink options.
Happy Friday. The production process continues on Women Like Us, with the copy edit due back to me for review next week. I can’t wait to see it! In the meantime, cover design is almost complete as well. There’s a new post on the book’s Facebook page, and you can check that out here (and by the way soon there will be a page for the book on Amazon too). Here’s that Facebook link. Please hit the like button on the page if you haven’t yet.
https://www.facebook.com/womenlikeusnovel/
Also, while I have your attention, check out fellow Inkshares author JF Dubeau’s A God In The Shed, which is almost at full funding and is most worthy of your attention. Here’s that link:
Thanks all, as always, for the support.