A Contest Without Any Prizes!

As I mentioned a while back, the short story "Murder on the Hockflieger Ost," which is a prequel to The Forever Engine, is available as a free download from the Baen Books site. Here's the link again in case you need it. It's a fun read.

But while I was writing it, I had a little fun of my own. There are three in jokes inserted in the story, all of them plays on words, titles, or character names.

In terms of difficulty, I'd rate one of them, having to do with an artifact, a very easy find. One of them, having to do with a location, somewhat harder but not impossibly so. The last one, having to do with a character's name, is so obscure I'd say it was impossible to get, unless you have a mind prone to making associations as odd as mine is.

So any and all guesses welcome. I'll post the correct answers in four weeks and discuss the various guesses, provided I receive any. No guess is stupid--it just may not have been what I had in mind.

No prizes for correct guesses, except of course the people's ovation and fame forever.

The Forever Engine is Live!

Today's the first official day when The Forever Engine is live. Amazon has been shipping the advanced orders and is now posting reviews.(First one's up--four stars and a very nice write-up.) It should be in the stores as well, although I haven't yet braved "The Killer Storm of the Century" to find out if it's in my local Barnes & Noble.

Although the ratings change hourly, last time I looked the book was at number 13 for both time travel science fiction and steampunk on the Amazon best-seller lists, and that's mostly based on preorders. I don't really understand how those rankings work (and they make a point of telling you they will not reveal how they come up with them, I suppose so folks can't game the system) but since the sample size is over a million total book-like products, whatever 13th means, it can't suck.

Of course the book's been trickling out for a number of weeks. The Baen Books eArc (electronic advanced reading copy) was available a while ago and I've heard from folks that Amazon went ahead and sent the Kindle versions upon ordering starting sometime  in December, and we're right at a point in the History of Book-like Things where the electronic version approaches the importance of the physical product. We've certainly passed it for some forms of Book-like Things.

Those of you in the Midwest and east coast: stay warm. Maybe curl up with a good book.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year one and all! 2013 was a busy year for me, and a very good one. I have a number of resolutions for the new year, one of which concerns this blog. I'll leave what that resolution might be to your collective imaginations.


The immediate news is that The Forever Engine will be on the shelves in bookstores within the next week, and also available in all e-formats from Baen Books (here's a link to their site) and also available online in paper and Kindle versions from Amazon. I received a very nice advanced review in Publishers Weekly back in the November 4th issue. Here's what it said, in part, with potential spoilers left out:

"Legendary game designer Chadwick taps into his popular Space: 1889 steampunk setting with this exciting prequel novel, which sees soldier-turned-historian Jack Fargo catapulted from 2018 to an alternate 1888 by a mysterious explosive event. Although alternately amazed and baffled by a world that features airships, interplanetary travel, America split into the Confederate States and the United States, and Europe laid out along different political lines, Fargo just wants to go home. . . .(T)he world building is rock solid, the plot fast paced, the action visceral, and the stakes high. Chadwick balances scientific theory, steampunk imagery, and memorable characters with flair. . . "

I blush.

Relating to the novel, Baen Books (my publisher) and I also have a New Year's present for you. They contracted a short story from me as a prequel to the novel and as a way of giving a little more background on one of the characters. The story is called, "Murder on the Hochflieger Ost," and takes place a year before the events of the novel on an enormous luxury zeppelin plying the Berlin-to-Istanbul route--the Space: 1889 equivalent of the Orient Express. It's a free download at the Baen Books site. Just click on this link.

Tony Daniels, my editor at Baen Books and a fine writer in his own right, had some great ideas for the rewrite and nudged me toward a far better final resolution, in my opinion. A book ends up being a collaborative effort and much of the success stems from the help the author receives from others. It still ultimately comes down to the author, but I think the current trend toward self-publishing risks losing some of the collaborative effect of going through a publishing house. Yes, you can hire editors and proofreaders, but I'm not sure it's quite the same thing. Nevertheless, it's certainly here to stay, and will certainly become an increasing part of the literary scene. The economics of publishing almost dictates it for most writers. Who knows what the future will bring, but I'm happy to be with a publishing house like Baen, one that's still intimately connected to their authors and to their customers.  

Space 1889 Game Hits a Homer on Kickstarter!

For those of you who haven't been following it, the Space 1889 roleplaying game on Kickstarter finished its funding window two days ago. It had made its original funding goal within a week or the launch and then made steady progress toward the stretch goals after that. But there was a big surge at the end and it ended up hitting 483% of its original funding goal, with over $100,000 raised. There will be LOTS of supplements and adventures coming, as well as some very handsome 28mm miniatures based on the artwork for the characters.

I am delighted and a little stunned. I expected it to do well, to hits its original funding target easily, and probably double or treble that. But a nearly five-fold increase is amazing, and wonderful. With this game coming out later this year from Clockwork Productions, and the supplements coming out next year, with The Forever Engine shipping from Baen Books in January of next year, with more e-books coming in Space 1889 and Beyond from Untreed Reads, the next twelve months should be about everything Space 1889 fans could want--aside from a working aether flyer, of course.

Final Edits In on The Forever Engine

I received the final marked up copy edits of The Forever Engine a little over a week ago and just express mailed them back to the folks at Baen Books with all of my final changes. Paul Witcover at Baen did a very thorough and professional job on the copy edit and caught a  couple places where I had unintentionally mangled Gabrielle Courbiere's (the heroine's) French. That would have violated one of my cardinal rules: never make a determined woman with a lever-action shotgun look bad. Thanks for the catches, Paul.

In order to check all the edits I had to read the novel again, I had a good time doing it even though there obviously wasn't a lot of suspense for me. I couldn't tell you how many times I've read this, between the rewrites and the chapters I've read out loud at my three writing workshop groups. A lot. But I'm not sick of it, and that's a good thing. I hope you all enjoy it when it comes out in January. Baen will have an electronic advanced reading copy (eARC) out before then. I'll let you know more  when I know more. I'll also be posting at least one sample chapter here, and maybe more, when we get a little closer to publication.

Meantime the Space: 1889 Kickstarter just keeps chugging along. It's at over 250% funding now and has unlocked the Venus Sourcebook as well as a bunch of other goodies. They've added a umber of add-ons as well, including a Space: 1889 soundtrack CD--background music for playing the roleplaying game with friends or even, it occurs to me, while quietly reading The Forever Engine.

It's been a busy summer but a good one.

Forever Engine - A Map of Europe

Baen Books commissioned this map of western Europe in 1888 as a two-page spread in The Forever Engine, due out next January. I like what they did with it, particularly the gears for cities and towns. It covers the area where the action of the novel takes place and from some of the unlikely smaller locations included, you can probably figure out that some of the important action takes place in out-of-the-way places like Kokin Brod. You get a nice look at London and Munich as well, however.

They've also commissioned cover art well in advance and may end up with some interior art as well, so I'm very pleased with the care they're taking with the project. It's not too soon to start some buzz about this book. If it sells well, I can pretty much guarrantee sequels. When we get a little closer to publication, I'll post some sample passages here. As soon as I get the go-ahead from Baen (which I think will mean as soon as they are happy with it) I'll post the cover. Cool cover.

Ode To A Dead Hard Drive

Back in September I flew out to Celesticon in San Francisco – a wonderful game convention, by the way. I ran a fun Mars Needs Steam game and generally had a great time. Because I had a lot of work to do I took along my computer. This was very nearly my undoing. In the course of travel my computer got bumped and started acting strangely afterwards, becoming more and more “difficult” until at least it packed it in completely. The problem ended up being a bad hard drive, perhaps damaged by the bump suffered while travelling. Fortunately almost everything was on my most recent backup and in any case everything was recoverable from the disc itself. Nevertheless, I was out of action for the better part of two weeks and the following two months were a cascading story of backed-up projects and piled-up deadlines. I am at last seeing daylight – just in time for the holidays and more travel. We’ll see what that brings me, but for now I’m caught up on the fiction front. The game rules front is an entirely different story.

Here are the major writing projects I’ve packed away in that time – just so you know there’s no moss growing on me. I did a science edit of the next Space 1889 and Beyond novel, originally titled To Ceres By Steam but now renamed Mundus Cerialis and now co-authored by Sharon Bidwell and Andy Frankham-Allen. More on that later. I finished the big rewrite on The Forever Engine for Baen Books and sent that off end of October. In November I got the typesetting markups of How Dark The World Becomes from Baen and turned those around, then got the final typeset manuscript last weekend and sent my corrections back for that this morning. How Dark The World Becomes is now out of my hands and cruising toward its February release.  I know it’s not Space: 1889, but it’s a Pretty Big Deal for me, so please bear with me.

Here’s where things stand right now on How Dark The World Becomes. The novel will appear in trade paperback format in February of 2013, just a couple months from now. It is currently available for pre-order on Amazon.com and they have it at a reduced price, under $10.00. (Its cover price is $14.00.) Here’s the link for that:

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-World-Becomes-Frank-Chadwick/dp/1451638701/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353427642&sr=1-1&keywords=how+dark+the+world+becomes

If you absolutely cannot wait that long (and how could you?) it’s now available as an electronic advanced reading copy (eARC) directly from Baen Books. Here’s the link to their main site and you’ll see How Dark features as one of the new e-releases this month.

http://www.baen.com/

You should check out the Baen site even if you don’t intend to buy the eARC, as  the site has the first seven chapters up as a free reading sample. That should help you decide whether the book is to your taste (although really, how could it not be?)

On Villains

It has been a while since I've done a craft-of-writing piece and since I'm struggling with the rewrite of The Forever Engine it seemed an appropriate time to share my thoughts on an issue which confronts (or ought to) all novelists -- their villain. There will be no spoilers in this piece, so no need to worry about that, but that also means it will address the broader issue of villains rather than the specific villain in The Forever Engine -- although the challenges are the same.

For starters, let me say that as a reader I have no patience with cardboard cutout villains, who are evil for evil's sake and whose principal motivation (that I can see) is to give the protagonist an excuse to whup up on the villain's legions of loyal minions. Why they are so loyal to this psycho is often a mystery worth considering, but that's usually the smallest problem I have with that sort of story.

For me, stories really work well when the villain is as  interesting as the protagonist -- maybe even more so. Think of how many really great stories were made great by the stature of their villains: Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Iago in Othello, Dracula in Dracula, and for that matter Media in Media. So I see a four-fold challenge facing authors when it comes to their villains.


Challenge One: What do They Want?
Protagonists have over-arching goals. Villains do as well. What is their life goal? What end-state do they seek? Most importantly, why do they seek it? For their goal and motivation to be engaging it seems to me they have to see themselves as the heroes, the good guys. From their point of view, this is their story. I think the film Open Range is one of the five or ten best westerns of all time, and part of that is due to the villain (Denton Baxter) played by Michael Gambon. In a different story, perhaps one set a decade or two earlier and dealing with "taming the savage west," he'd be the hero. The fact that he's lived past his usefulness and has been unable or unwilling to adapt to changing times makes him definitely a bad guy, but one with some tragic aspects as well. How different is he from the protagonists of The Wild Bunch, or even Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?


Challenge Two: What Do They Have To Do To Get What They Want?
This is a bit more mechanical than the above but still involves some artistry, as well as the need to tie the villain's actions into the genre. Ideally the villain's necessary actions should  be the window to the genre. In Open Range the villain's goals -- protect what's his -- manifest themselves in the struggle between fenced in pasturage and free-range cattle drives, and so show us an issue at the center of a turning point in the history of the west. In a science fiction story the villain's methods should be at the heart of the scientific curiosity of the story.


Challenge Three: Why Are The Villain's Actions So Potentially Catastrophic The Hero Must Stop Them At All Costs?
This is a tough one, but it becomes the heart of the story. It is the essence of the story's conflict and ultimately separates the hero from the villain. Since it's the heart of the novel, how big the conflict is determines the scope of the novel itself. If what's at stake is the hero's life, okay. We understand a person wants to survive in the face of a deadly threat, but that doesn't make them a hero, does it? That's not that big a story. Does the villain threaten other folks we care about? Bigger story. Does the villain threaten a way of life? Bigger story still. Is justice on the line? Is truth on the line? Will something of value to mankind be lost forever? These are bigger issues, and make the story itself bigger.

James Scott Bell defines a novel as "the story of how a character deals with the threat of death." The issue may be physical death but, as I noted above, that's often the least involving motivation for readers. But there are many forms of death. Professional death from failure in the character's chosen career. Emotional death from the loss of loved ones. Moral death from the betrayal of the character's core values. Spiritual death from the loss or abandonment of the character's defining principle or faith. Psychological death from the loss of sanity (see H. P. Lovecraft). Death of pride. Death of happiness. Death of hope. All are more involving than the simple issue of physical survival. What the villain threatens constitutes the stakes of the novel, and the bigger the stakes, the more engrossing the story.


Challenge Four: It All Has To Make Sense
This one, ironically, is the toughest of them all. A villain who has a giant organization working with him and whose goal is to destroy the world makes no sense. He's actually in the world. What does he get out of this deal? And yet you see this over and over. A human who betrays his race to alien exterminating conquerors "for power" makes no sense. Power over what? Power over whom? But you see this as well.


More subtly, the way the villain goes about achieving his goal has to be the most logical and sensible approach (at least for him). If he's going to set off an atomic bomb in New York City when he could as easily achieve his goal by robbing a convenient store, that's a problem.


There's a pretty good Denzel Washington film about a runaway train, called "Unstoppable." The villain is a senior executive at the railroad who will not listen to the voices of reason and experience and mishandles the attempts to solve the runaway train problem. But he isn't stupid; he's an experienced railroad man who's simply so used to being the smartest guy in the room he can't credit anyone's ideas but his own. So far so good.


So at one point he gets another engine in front of the runaway train to slow the train to the point that a replacement engineer can be lowered onto it from a helicopter. The train can't be slowed quite enough, the replacement engineer on the cable gets smashed through a window and seriously injured, and other bad things happen. It's a very dramatic and exciting sequence, but ruined (for me) by one nagging question: why not put the replacement engineer in the engine in front of the runaway train, so when they matched speeds and effectively coupled to it, he could just step from one engine walkway to the other? Remember, the villain isn't stupid, but in this case he is required to act as if he is simply so the story can go on. Not very satisfactory writing, in my opinion.


There are few things more annoying to me than a plot propelled forward primarily by the stupidity of the villain, unless (as in the film Fargo) that's kind of the point of the story. So the hardest part of all this, in my opinion, is making all these moving parts fit together as if this is the only way in the world they possibly could. If you can pull that off, that is good writing.

Space 1889 Novel to be Published by Baen Books

Yesterday I promised you some big news and here it is.

I told you several months ago that Baen Books was publishing my novel How Dark The World Becomes. When they contracted for that book they asked if I had anything else for them to look at. I did: The Forever Engine, a Space: 1889 novel. I sent it off, we've talked several times since then, and Friday I signed the contracts and dropped them in the mail. A Space: 1889 novel will see print in the near future from one of the top science fiction publishers.

I don't have a release date yet. I'm working on some rewrites and once those are locked down to everyone's satisfaction Baen will come up with a date. But in the mean time this is very exciting stuff for me.

The novel actually takes place in 1888 and some of the events and characters from The Forever Engine appear as background incidents and minor characters in one (so far) of the Space: 1889 and Beyond stories. But it's not a prequill or a lead-in to other stories. It's a great big story which stands all on its own, and deals with nothing less than the fundamental fabric of the universe.

I can't tell you much more about it now. As we get closer I'll lay some groundwork, but right now publication is well over a year away, so everyne gets to work on refining the virtue of patience.

Back From The Road

I'm back at the keyboard after a long absence. I attended the Cold Wars game show in Lancaster PA on the 9th through the 11th and then stayed over and attended The Write Stuff writers' conference in Allentown PA on the 16th and 17th.

I got to hang out with my goddaughter Diana for a few days in between -- she's 13 months now and a real pistol. She's got about a dozen words and came up with a new phrase while I was there. She waved and said "night-night!" to me one night, the first time she's ever said that. She has one other phrase she's fond of as well: "oh-shit!"

Just look at those eyes, would ya? Those of you who have picked up A Prince of Mars may have noticed it's dedicated to her, "when she's old enough to read it." Maybe not as long as I thought.

The Write Stuff is sponsored by my old writers' group, the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers' Group (GLVWG, pronounced Gliv-Wig), and it's probably the best small writer's conference out there. They cap the attendance at 150 (because of the venue) but always manage to get great presenters. James Scott Bell was the featured guest this year, did a two-day workshop before the show, several presentations during it, and the keynote address. Bell's been a hero of mine for a long time. He's not just a fine writer, he's written probably the most practical and useful book on writing I've ever read: Plot and Structure, published by Writer's Digest Books. If you are interested in writing, buy this book. Buy it now.

His workshop was loaded with terrific material as well, and I'll share just one bit which was actually almost an aside, and wasn't part of his main syllabus, but is worth repeating. It has to do with elevator pitches. For those of you who aren't professional writers, or aspiring professional writers, the "elevator pitch" is designed for those moments at a writer's conference (and they are way more common than you would think) when you get in an elevator, the doors slide shut, the person standing next to you notices your badge and says, "I'm a literary agent (or acquisitions editor). I see you're attending the conference too. What are you working on?" You now have less than a minute to "pitch" your book. Tou have to say everything necessary not only to explain what the book is about, but also hook the interest of someone who has already heard probably twenty pitches so far that day. If you start with, "Well, it's complicated. . ." hang it up. Either you know exactly what's coming out of your mouth or you don't.

So what Bell gave us was his take on the classic elevator pitch. He argues the pitch consists of three sentences. The first one gives the character's name, occupation, and everything you need to know about their background. "Dorothy is a young girl in rural Kansas, unsatisfied with the dull world in which she lives." The second sentence begins with the word "When," and establishes the inciting event which catapults the character into the main part of the story. "When a tornado picks her up and lands her in Oz, she finds herself the target of a Wicked Witch." The third sentence starts with the word "Now" and explains the main object and conflict in the novel. "Now, with the help of three unlikely companions, she must make her way to the Emerald City so the Wizard can show her the way home."

Why, aside from helping you sell your book, is this so important? Because it also helps you understand your story. One of the guys at the conference later told me he couldn't really fit his story into these three sentences, and that told him he had a story problem. He did not have a clear enough inciting event and he really didn't know what the main objective of his protagonist was. He'd had the feeling something was wrong with the story for some time; now he knew what it was and how to fix it.

Also later in the conference I had a meeting with an agent interested in steampunk fiction. My own The Forever Engine is currently in at Baen Books under option, although I havn't heard yet whether they are going to pick it up. I told her that and that it might not be available but she wanted to hear about it anyway. (Already having another book under contract doesn't hurt.) So here's what I told her:

"Nick Fargo is an historian at the University of Chicago and an Army veteran of Afghanistan, When he is called to England to help investigate an odd cultural resource find at a high energy particle accelerator facility, a catastrophic accident hurls him back in time and into a parallel Victorian world, where there are flying ironclads and interplanetary travel is a reality. Now, joining forces with the British military and a beautiful French spy, he must track down a murderous rogue scientist who may hold the key to his return to his own time and place."

We had more than a minute to talk, but this got her interested. She asked about the protagonist and liked what I told her, because it was different than what she expected. She asked about the heroine and was even more interested, again because what I said wasn't what she expected. She asked about the outcome of the story and liked that as well, because, again, it surprised her. So she asked to see the book, even knowing it might not be available, and I sent it off today.

There are two lessons in this.

First, you have to have a clear and very simple understanding of your protagonist and his or her story in order to engage the interest of readers. (In this case, the agent represents all readers, because she is looking for things which her experience tells her will interest a large number of readers.)

Second, at every step of her follow-on questions, she liked what she heard because it was not what she expected. There are tens of thousands of stories appearing in print and as ebooks each year. The object for a writer is not to fit in, it is to stand out. Readers are not interested in reading the same things they have already read, but rather something different, surprising, even shocking. If you want to tell stories,
those are the stories worth telling.

For those of you interested (and strategically located) Bell is doing a number of multi-day workshops across the country this year. Check him out at this link and then click on the "The Seminar" button.