Book Three coming soon

Okay, here's the deal. The Belt Loop (Book Three) is well enough along that I can speculate on a release date: Sometime in the first week of December. Call Miss Cleo and confirm my psychic prediction. Since I can control the horizontal, the vertical, the focus, the sound of this story, the release date just serves to push me to write more each day instead of sitting here reading. I like reading almost as much as writing and sometimes that hurts my production.

History Repeats Itself © 1991 R. Jones
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Just as in the drawing above, there is a lot of strange stuff going on in the universe and this picture is my feeble attempt to show it. Completed during Easter Week in 1990 and subsequently published the next year, this is one of my favorite images. I was sitting on top of Conifer Mountain in Colorado when I drew this and, at a height of 10,000 feet was probably suffering from oxygen deprivation of some sort.

A lot of my writing is derived from snippets of story ideas I have dreamed up over the years; stories about the future, about space, about time. Science fiction is a wonderful place to lose oneself in any and all three of the aforementioned dimensions. In Book Three I make mention of Colonial Navy ships lost to the void, ships that approached folded space at speeds pushing the limits of causal uncertainty, destined to reappear where- and when-ever, but certainly not in the place they set out to travel to. Who knows, maybe they wound up in this drawing.

Update

Here we are in the final stages of the new book. The "pounding the keyboard" part is almost done. I talked to my illustrator and he assures me the rushes on the cover will be done sometime next week.

Writing speculative fiction and science fiction is not an easy thing to do. The idea behind The Belt Loop was born many, many years ago and was put in a drawer along with a lot of other writing projects. Trying to get a good balance between characters, story line, plot twists, and a redemptive conclusion can take the life out of a project that was not well thought out in the first place.

How do the characters interact? What is the emphasis of the story? Is it just a lot of words to describe the action or do the words really have meaning and carry the tale to a logical conclusion? Will there be a sequel to feature the main characters again? Is the story believable, assuming the reader can suspend his or her disbelief to take into account all of the "science" in the fiction?

These are all questions I ask myself as I'm creating. If I can't answer "yes" to all of them, I do a little tampering with the tale until I can.

Next week begins the real drudgery: The Edit. I tend to edit as I go when I write and use my spellcheck and other tools but my eye tends to insert things that are not really there and my head seems to read what I meant to say instead of what I actually wrote. Generally, I will proofread a fresh manuscript about ten times and once satisfied I print out a hard copy and read it again. Lots of time involved but I'm compulsive like that and committed to putting out the best product I'm capable of. Hope it works.

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Fabric Of Space © 1999 R. Jones

In the story I wanted to "invent" a new kind of space travel that used a high-energy field to "push" space into folds as if it were a carpet being bunched against a wall. This folded space can be navigated from fold to fold thus greatly reducing transit times from planet to planet without going through the hackneyed "hyperspace" that most of the future starships seem to be able to access at will in a lot of stories. This folding technology as employed in my new novel produces a very realistic approach to interstellar travel and creates realistic timelines for unfolding events in the process. (I think I just made a pun.)

Next post: The New Cover (I hope).