News – Page 4 – The Viridian System series

9 February, 201615 January, 2016

The Perihelix launches NEXT TUESDAY

Tuesday 16th is launch day!

Today you can pre-order it at Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Kobo. Next week it will be for sale on Smashwords too.

So, why should you buy The Perihelix?

The Perihelix by Jemima Pett

Book 1 of the Viridian System Series

Published by Princelings Publications
Genre: science fiction/scifi-adventure/space opera (for grownups, although I wouldn’t describe it as adult)
Words/pages: 83,000 / 360
Formats: all ereaders and paperback
Price: ebook currently on special offer at 99c (rrp $2.99): paperback rrp $9.99

The Blurb:

Two asteroid miners, three women, one spacecraft, and five pieces of a legendary weapon scattered around the galaxy.

Big Pete and the Swede are rich, or so they discover after bringing their latest haul of orichalcum in from the asteroid belt. So some well-deserved vacation awaits them. It starts out just fine, with one of the men winning the big flyer-race of the season, but they start to receive odd messages, and despite the attentions from the girls, both realise that someone is trying to drag them back to their pasts, pasts they have tried hard to erase.

As they set out to discover who’s bugging them, they are kidnapped by some particularly nasty aliens, which leaves the girls in a mess – stranded on the spaceship with very little idea how to fly it.

What I think of it:

It’s marvellous. I may be biased.

Buying links:

Amazon – Smashwords – B&N – Kobo – iTunes – Book Depository

22 January, 201622 January, 2016

Exciting times

This is getting very exciting.

Here is the copy of the paperback from Blurb (printed in the UK, so I got it in 3 days). Rebecca is kindly proofing the copy of the Createspace one (printed in the US) which only took 5 days to reach her. I would have to wait at least six weeks for it.

Hopefully the insides will be fine, then I can release them in time for the 16th, which is release day for the ebooks.

Even more exciting: I can’t stop writing book 2 in the series, and after I spotted something when I was browsing around another thing I wanted as the theme, it produced a title. So at the moment, book 2 is provisionally called Autumn Harbour. It’s quite a tortuous path to get to it, and it helps if you speak Japanese, and that’s all I’ll say. Except perhaps that my flash fiction last summer the Alien Among Us immediately became a key part of this story in my head. It’s nearly got to the stage of putting that on paper. And then the fun really begins!

4 January, 20163 January, 2016

New year news

Happy new year to you.

I’m reasonably confident that this year will see the publication of at least one and possibly two Viridian System books.

I’ve completed work on my editor’s comments on the Perihelix draft, and followed with amendments to make for better consistency throughout the manuscript. I woke up yesterday morning with a solution to an issue I’d raised with myself, and that my editor had queried, and rewrote the offending part before midday – which is not bad when you think I have five animals to care for in the mornings, and I had a post-new year’s day lie-in.

I’ve also been reading one of my Christmas presents – a self-editing book that reminded me of things I’ve written down to check, but every time I read these hints it embeds them better in my brain. Yesterday I worked through the third draft to find all my adverbs (anything ending in -ly) which was an extensive task. My main aim was to sort out the dialogue tags, but on the way I noticed I use probably, really, definitely and only far too often. One of the editing book’s chapters is ‘Once is Enough’ and I’ll go through my draft on a quest to eliminate places I say things twice, along with rooting out those adverbs, on my next pass. Then I’ll read it aloud to my guinea pigs and check how each character is speaking, and how the dialogue flows. Fairly soon after that, the book should be right.

If that works, then we should be good for a publication date of February 16th. Exciting!

10 December, 201510 December, 2015

Bad news – good news

Well, I have The Perihelix back from my editor, and the bad news is: there is an awful lot of work to do on it. An awful lot. I may even have to have it rechecked afterwards. So I’ve put my provisional release date back to February. It might even go to March. You’ll hear first here, so watch this space.

The good news is that as well as the editing, I’m also working on a Christmas story for you, which should go live in Christmas week, maybe the 21st.

It’s a busy time of year, so good luck with everything you’re doing.

17 August, 20151 September, 2015

Working on revisions

Thanks to super-fast feedback from some of my beta readers, I’m already working on the revisions to the Perihelix.

Naturally I saved a copy of the last file I was working on as a new version to make these changes. About halfway I noticed something. I thought I’d changed that, I thought. Oh, darn, don’t tell me I saved it into the beta version with new edits…. I haven’t found a way of comparing versions on the iMac, so I’ll convert it to Word and compare it with the beta I sent out from the PC laptop.

Well, in response to the feedback I’d put in a new section giving the girls some more background – not their life history, of course, just a bit more to show who they really were under their working image. It’s a discussion point, really. These women are escorts, so of course they are going to do what pleases the men. However, since they get to do things on their own, I can give them full rein to develop in their own personalities rather than their work personas as the story progresses. What? You haven’t got a work persona? I certainly had. I’m not sure whether I have now or not.

There was also desire for more background on the Imperium and the Federation. Part of that fits with the girls’ backgrounds, but I hit on an idea which I hope you’ll like, by giving a snippet from the ‘Universal Word Usage, 2822 edition’ at the start of each chapter. My aim is to make that reference book wholly biased towards the Imperium, and very sanitised (so reading between the lines is useful), and then let the characters flesh it out in their own sweet way, sometimes in the same chapter.

I’m also examining the role of women (and other sexes) in the book. Farsight is the best place to promote gender equality, since it’s an academic planet. Unfortunately the Imperium is very much alpha male territory, and Viridian itself is Wild West, not that there’s any barrier to women asteroid miners, they just don’t tend to get that far; I already have women visitors and inter-sex and non-sexual aliens there, though! The Federation is interesting, since it definitely has reptoids as well as humanoids in its personnel profile.

I hope the beta2 version will be ready at the end of the week, if anyone’s ready to give it a reading for me. Should that be beta2 or gamma?

30 July, 201517 August, 2015

A Viridian System Sampler

I’ve just about finished the edit of The Perihelix and will send it to my editor tomorrow. So if you asked for a beta copy to comment on, that will be sent to you within the next day or so, too, if you haven’t already received it.

If you forgot to put yourself forward for this honour (!) then complete the form here to send to me and I’ll be in touch by email.

I threatened you with a free sample of Viridian stories – well, you’ve already seen them, but I’ve collected together eight stories that are part of the Viridian System (including Paradisio, Ghostgum Creek and Hell Hath No Fury, which kind of derive from Paradisio). The plan is to send them out as an ebook, free, via Smashwords, as a teaser for The Perihelix. I am also adding three other scifi short stories – Pilgrimage and Homing Instinct, which are two sides of one story, the Last Ice-cream – and also Traveller’s Return, which is more of a ghost story (but then, so is Ghostgum Creek). Do you think that would put readers off the Perihelix, having other work in the sampler? Should I stick to Viridian-connected stories, or is more better? The twelve stories add up to about 17,000 words, which is a nice sort of sampler, novella-sized, which is why I included the extras.

I already have a lot of short stories which belong after the Perihelix. With a little time to spare at the end of camp, I wrote a few chapters to start the next book in the series!

Your thoughts are welcome, as always!

17 July, 201517 August, 2015

Update on the Perihelix

I’ve nearly finished the main editing of The Perihelix – enough to send it to my editor and to any beta-readers that would like a copy. I could keep tinkering with it for ages, of course, and if I really think it needs changes, I’ll make them, but it would be better to get feedback from beta-readers first!

It’s actually grown in the editing, which is unusual, but that’s because I’ve changed both the beginning and the ending, and I’ve paid attention to more description of people, places and especially smells! I suspect I can do more of that, but I don’t want to go overboard. It’s currently just over 80,000 words, which isn’t that big for a scifi novel. What do you think?

On Jemima’s blog today there is an excerpt from the book, together with some questions that might interest you. Why not hop over and read it?

And while I’m thinking about the book… do you think I should have an author photo without the guinea pig for the scifi series? I have to confess that there is a reference to these wonderful animals in the book, but it doesn’t continue. Hm, that’s just given me yet another idea for the second in the series 🙂

16 June, 201518 June, 2015

Editing the first draft of The Perihelix

Exciting times here, as I start to work on the first draft of The Perihelix to get it into shape for publication. It’s my Camp NaNoWriMo project for July, to get it finished

It may seem a long time to leave a first draft, and I suspect the next book would only lie around for a few months waiting for further attention. I like to be able to approach the story completely fresh to get a better view of what it is, and especially in this series, to make sure that the world-building is correct.

World-building? Yes, well scifi to me needs not only to have interesting worlds but accurate ones. So, I’ve been thinking about the concept of having two planets in more or less the same orbital path as each other – fairly common for star systems, so I’ve extrapolated it to planets – and also my idea that Sunset Strip has a 12-hour period of rotation. If that was the case, then the speed of rotation of the planet could make it uninhabitable, at least at the equator, but then again, if it was a smaller planet, then the speed of rotation would not be such an issue. Imagine a tennis ball and a larger ball like a volleyball: if they both rotated the same number of spins per minute, the surface of the volleyball would travel faster in miles per hour than the tennis ball. The reason speed of the surface matters is because of winds and surface stresses. I’ve made Sunset Strip very earth-like apart from the two sunsets per standard day, so its size and rotation have to be such that it isn’t be ripped by megastorms (which is what happens in Jupiter’s atmosphere).

That’s a very rough guide to the things I’ve been worrying about in the science of my fiction, but I also want to make sure I’m consistent with my technology. I’ve been considering why their technology may only be slightly in advance of ours in some ways. Even a year ago, tablets and thinkpads were much less common than they are now, so will they be ‘old’ in my world? How did my civilisation in the Viridian series get so much more advanced in others (space travel). And there’s a plot point where Dolores and the other girls get worried about having to refuel the ship. The more I thought of refuelling, the more ridiculous it sounded, but I’ve got it worked out now, and the concept of refuelling stands, even though it isn’t a case of putting gas in the tank!

Part of the editing of the first draft will be devoted to these technicalities, then there is the attention to consistency: how they land at the Pleasant Valley space dock is treated two ways in the first draft! I also need to work on building the characters, tweaking the story, building tension and drama, and generally making it a Good Read!

When I’m happy with all that, I’ll do the grammar edit! And then the typos that are still left…

And then I’ll send it to my beta-readers. If you’d like to be one, leave a comment below.

27 February, 201520 February, 2015

An update from Jemima

One of my friends expressed doubt as to whether I’d get all the projects on my plate done this year. She’s right to express doubt. But I think the production of The Perihelix is ok for the autumn. The schedule is only messed up because I devoted six weeks work writing the seventh Princelings book (well, the first third of it, anyway) and that won’t be out this year. I’m a little concerned that the new editions of the first six might not get out in time, and they’ve already been postponed from last autumn.

But The Perihelix… that’s a commitment. I promise.

And to help you keep interested – here’s another flash fiction with Pete and the Swede (and Dolores, still in pilot training mode). It’s set after the Perihelix, just to confuse you. And this time it’s on my blog… it’ll be linked here in the short stories section in due course.