Category: News

All news except for book launches and published books.

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Introducing Universal Book Links

Sooner or later, all the books will be going over to Draft2Digital. I don’t fit the system for some reason.

But, independently of that, I can give the books Universal Book Links.

This means that you have one link for the book, you click that, and it offers you all the places you can get it. And if you wish, you can make a preference for your favourite online store, and it sends you there next time.

The only downside is that it sends all the Amazon clicks to the Amazon .com store*. This is sad, because I use someone else’s neat link, which sends it to the one for the country you’re calling it from. I may leave it there, and then put just the new Books2Read UBL next to it. Or first.

The other good thing, is that although there is an underlying code in the system, I can call it by its name. so…

The Perihelix is at https://books2read.com/perihelix

Curved Space to Corsair is at https://books2read.com/curvedspace

Zanzibar’s Rings is at https://books2read.com/zanzibarsrings

Quest for Orichalcum is at https://books2read.com/quest4oh

At present, just the ebook links are included, but I will put the paperback links in relatively soon. I have had some requests for audiobooks, but that might take some time.

Do let me know if you have any trouble with it. Especially if you know it’s in another online store and it isn’t linked to it (send me the URL of the store sale page).

At present it’s having trouble finding the URLs I’ve given it for the Kobobooks store for Corsair and Zanzibar’s Rings. It may be that I’m out of date…

*The FAQs on the system say that it does link to the store the user is clicking from. Maybe it didnt when I tested it because the link wasn’t live or something.

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The Quest for Orichalcum – out Tuesday! #QuestforOh #scifi #booksky

The work is done, the wait is over… The Quest for Orichalcum is ready to be published on Tuesday, on all platforms including (subject to distributor actions) as a softcover book.

The ebook has a sparkly modern cover, as do the Viridian series trilogy, but the softcover keeps its original cover (with an amended subtitle) in line with the style of the others.

ebook
paperback

The Quest for Orichalcum: an Asteroid Miners’ Memoir

by Jemima Pett

Hang out with your favourite asteroid miners, discovering how they met, their adventures and misadventures, and the truth behind the rumours.

How did Pete Garcia and Lars Nilsson meet? What adventures did they have before they reached the Viridium System? Did Lars really murder someone? Is Pete invincible at arm-wrestling? Have either ever really loved someone? Did luck or fate make them the best orichalcum miners in the galaxy?

All these questions are addressed in the Quest for Orichalcum, a memoir of your favourite asteroid miners, from before the days when instacomms enabled real connectivity through the galaxy. Before anyone knew what orichalcum was, or could do for civilisations throughout the universe. This is a gathering of tales of the men, their women, their extracurricular activities, disasters, deaths, murders, and surfing. And all before anyone but the people of Corsair had ever heard of the Perihelix.

This memoir of Big Pete and the Swede is a prequel to the Viridian System series.

Buying links

~~Amazon~~ ~~Apple iTunes~~ ~~B&N~~ ~~Kobo~~ ~~Smashwords~~

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Enter the Giveaway

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The Blog Tour: including excerpts and quotes…

18 July Willowdot

30 July Ronel Janse Van Vuuren

1 August Noelle Granger – Sayling Away

4 August Rebecca Douglass

6 August Alex J Cavanaugh; Fundy Blue

7 August Sally Cronin – Smorgasbord

9 August The Viridian System series

12 August Jemima Pett, Author (publication day)

18 August Natalie Aguirre – Literary Rambles

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The Quest for… begins #booksky #QuestforOh

Quest for Oh thumbnail

The Quest for Orichalcum, in fact. I haven’t been able to stop tinkering with it now it’s more or less finished.

I need to do a blurb… something along the lines of:

How did Big Pete and the Swede meet? How did they get to be so rich? And were they always successful with women? What adventures did they have before they reached the Viridium System?
All these questions are addressed in the Quest for Orichalcum, a biography, or memoir, of your favourite asteroid miners, from before the days when instacomms enabled real connectivity through the galaxy. Before anyone knew what orichalcum was, or could do for civilisations throughout the universe.
A gathering of tales of the men, their women, their extracurricular activities, disasters, deaths, murders, and surfing. And all before anyone but the people of Corsair had ever heard of the Perihelix.

draft blurb, The Quest for Orichalcum by Jemima Pett © 2025

Yes, I think that might be okay, as a blurb. I also developed a draft cover, but now I’ve finished tweaking it, so here’s the final version!

ARCs are now available, if you’d like to review it.

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So, how has 2024 gone?

Of the plans I listed in January

  • website revamped – tick
  • gift fairs attended – tick, although I dropped Chichester and did several two-day events at Lyndhurst. I also had a successful day at Salisbury. Since I’ve had to order more Viridian stock, I’ve definitely sold quite a few!

There are some website pages that will be updated or changed as soon as the Smashwords—Draft2Digital transfer is complete. New links, universal ones, and maybe new blurbs.

Viridian series news

I recently read all three books again (over a long weekend). I’m happy to say I really enjoyed them! And I think The Perihelix is a perfectly good book, now. I’ve had a bit of inferiority complex about it after its dodgy beginning and subsequent revision. Now I can promote it with confidence! I’ve always loved the others.

The main reason for reading them was to check what I’d forgotten about Big Pete and the Swede’s pasts…. Because I’ve been writing their backstory!

It starts with Pete on the Doris Jury hearing he’s got into college. Then he meets Lars, and they go through their college years together. After that there’s about twelve years to cover before they get to the Viridian system, including time mining on Excelsior and Kappa Venturi (a reference I’d forgotten until a second reread of the Perihelix), and about the same again before the Perihelix begins. And I’ve realised that I’ve done something I thought was in place before book one starts, and I’ll have to reread the other two again to see if that ever happened.

There’s no plot, as such, and it tends to be Pete’s point of view. It includes a few stories I’ve done in the past as flash fiction, like The Appeal of Alpha Kenworthy. In the course of doing this (with a lot of mining in it, as well as a lot of girls) I had more thoughts on asteroid mining, and things that might be physically impossible, but then again might not. I might write a feature on asteroid mining sometime.

I’m still not sure whether to publish it, but then again, it revisits their youth, it’s a fun read (and sexy, as you’d expect from these two), and I like it.

Gift fairs in 2025

I’ve already booked fair dates for 2025, starting with two days in Lyndhurst at Easter, and ending in Romsey in December. New for this year is Winchester Guildhall, which I’m doing on three dates, first Sunday of the month. I’ll also be doing Lymington and Salisbury as before.

Check my blog for actual dates: there’s a scrolling ‘next appearance’ on the front page.

Tasks for 25?

  • revamp the tour of the Viridian System on here. I know a lot more about it now
  • develop plans for this backstory project, provisionally called Before Viridium, although a goodly part is set in the system
  • update as needed when I eventually shift onto Draft2Digital

Seasons Greetings

I hope your year has gone well on the whole. Enjoy your holiday season, and very best wishes for 2025.

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Plans for 2024

First off, I have no plans for further books in the Viridian series. Sorry.

In person appearances

I will be selling the paperbacks at Craft Fairs again this year. I have the following dates/venues booked. I may add more after the summer. These are all in Hampshire, UK, except Chichester, which is West Sussex.

  • April 27th – Romsey Town Hall
  • May 11th – Chichester Meeting Rooms (provisional)
  • May 25th – Lyndhurst Community Centre
  • June 8th – Romsey Town Hall
  • June 22nd – Lymington Masonic Hall
  • July 13th – Chichester (provisional)
  • July 27th – Lyndhurst Community Centre
  • August 10th – Lymington Masonic Hall
  • August 31st – Romsey Town Hall

Prices have risen for 2024; I am hoping to keep the paperbacks at £14 for the Craft Fairs while stocks last, but the online RRP is £15. 40% of that goes to the retailer and distributor. Ebook prices remain the same.

Website maintenance

My websites have used the same format (with different colours and some design tweaks) for nearly seven years, which surprised me. I think they are beginning to look their age. So it’s time for me to modernise them, with extra thought on how it presents on mobile devices.

This website will be my testbed, since it is relatively small, intricate enough, and some sections could do with a revamp or update. Sometimes I can try things out and it not show, but sometime you might just come visiting when I’ve made it look a mess. Or when I’ve made it public to get some feedback, in which case, feel free to give feedback!

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Zanzibar’s Rings is touring the blogiverse

Zanzibar's Rings Available now
Zanzibar's Rings virtual book tour

What’s in the virtual book tour?

Guest posts, interviews, reviews, and various other things. I thoroughly enjoyed doing the posts people asked for – a letter to the reader from one, a character interview for Maggie for another, several author interviews. Three versions of 10 things you didn’t know about….

Outside the organised tour, Patricia Josephine (aka Patricia Lynne) is featuring a post where she asked “why do I write science fiction?” That had me stumped for ages! I’d also like to thank Alex J Cavanaugh, Rebecca Douglass, Shannon at the Warrior Muse, WillowDot (WillowWillers), Steph Wolmarans and Natalie Aguirre for additional support, sometimes linked with the IWSG, sometimes just because they want to.

I’m slightly disappointed at the number of blogs for which I wrote unique content that don’t appear to have any commenters or social media presence. And only two review posts. The tour organiser is sharing them, though, so I hope it will have been worthwhile.

Book tour dates and venues

Tuesday, February 15

Virtual Book Tour Kick Off at PUYB Virtual Book Club

Alex J Cavanaugh feature

Wednesday, February 16

Guest Blogging at The Warrior Muse

Book Review at Book Corner News and Reviews

The Appeal of Science Fiction – guest post at PJ&L

Thursday, February 17

Guest Blogging at The Story Behind the Book

Book Feature Highlight at Jazzy Book Reviews

Monday, February 21

Interview at The Writer’s Life e-Magazine

Tuesday, February 22

Happy Book Birthday at PUYB Virtual Book Club

Book launch – Rebecca Douglass

Thursday, February 24

Guest interview with WillowDot21

Friday, February 25

Guest Blogging at b for bookreview

Tuesday, March 1

Book Feature Highlight at Sybrina’s Book Blog

Wednesday, March 2

Guest feature at Steph Wolmarans, Tea, Sigh, Create

Friday, March 4

Guest Blogging at All the Ups and Downs

Monday, March 7

Guest Blogging at Blogging Authors

Thursday, March 10

Guest Blogging at Lynn’s Romance Enthusiasm

Book Review at The Faery Review

Monday, March 14

Character Interview at The Literary Nook

Feature in the IWSG Follower News (Natalie Aguirre)

Tuesday, March 15

Guest Blogging at Dear Reader, Love Author

Thank you all for taking part. I really appreciate it.

Zanzibar's Rings Available now

Zanzibar’s Rings is the final book of the Viridian System series

Ebook links:  Amazon, iTunes, B&N, Kobobooks, and Smashwords.

Also in paperback

zanzibar's rings available now

See the book pages for full details.

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September 2021 update #Viridianseries #amediting

zanzibars rings draft cover

September 2021. I’ve finished Zanzibar’s Rings. Well, enough to send it off to the editor and beta readers. I’m really honoured they should give up their time for this.

The rest of the plan

I hope to have all the comments on the manuscript back by early November, and work on rewrites until Christmas, and send it for checking again if necessary in the ealry new year.

If that goes to plan then we are on schedule for a launch date of 22nd February 2022. In English, that’s 22.02.2022. I couldn’t resist it when I realised.

Before that, I expect to have a cover reveal in early December, to start to raise awareness, if that’s possible. Although it has slipped out in a couple of places (will a couple by the time December comes, I hope not more than that). The monochrome ringed planet on the draft cover is just for now. More colour is coming! I will need people to host cover reveal (and/or launch) posts, so let pme know if you can help.

Then the launch plan. I don’t know whether to do very much. The last in series launch seems relatively low-key, since if most people haven’t read the first two… well, I suppose it’s an opportunity to grab new readers for the series, and that can only be good.

  • Launch post
  • Guest appearances
  • Possible virtual tour during February and March 2022
  • Giveaway

Those seem to be the things I’ve always done, and I still wonder whether they work nowadays. I probably should be doing video launches and podcasts. But I think I should stick with my skill set for now, and see what happens.

You can pre-order Zanzibar’s Rings!

You can–if you’re really keen, you can pre-order it already. That would be wonderful! Here are the links:

Amazon ~~~ Apple iBooks ~~~ B&N(Nook) ~~~ Kobo ~~~ Scribd ~~~ Smashwords

And, yes, there will be a paperback version. More news of that in the new year.

What comes after…?

I have some ideas for a new setting for a science fiction novel. It might give me scope to try some new ideas (to me, not to the scifi world, I’m afraid.) I may well keep this website as the showcase for all my scifi work, though. I hope that will make sense, in the long term.

Some of the Viridian characters appear in my short story collection Snowflakes and Shivers, due out in October. I have some other pieces written about the Viridian world, and as I’m planning to remove the VS Sampler from the Smashwords shelves, there may be room for a more organised library here.

And I was planning at one stage to put the Cavalieri-Chang Universal Word Usage entries here (the snippets beneath each chapter heading.) I’m not sure whether I will or not. It seemed a suitably offbeat thing to do in 2013, but now? Well…

Plenty to think about!

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Zanzibar’s Rings – now editing

zanzibars rings draft cover

Zanzibar’s Rings has reached the stage of editing. This process is likely to take some time…

My process

First I read through and made immediate changes to typos, wrong words, and marked where I felt I had a potential continuity error. I also added notes about checking the science (there is some!), and a few other technical issues. If you read my blog regularly you’ll have heard about these, probably in my IWSG posts.

The next stage is to go through line by line and think of how the sentence works, how the scene works, and whether my Point of View is correct. I’m finding that difficult, particularly when I’m in third person POV for Pete, say, then he starts thinking or calculating his way out of a problem. I’m trying to treat it as unvoiced speech, but it looks odd.

I’m also making more notes on bits of plot that seem to contradict each other, or where I’ve started with one intention, then not carried it through. I’ll have to come back and rewrite bits later once I’ve decided what really happens. For now I’m trying to make it reasonably good.

After this run through, I’ll ponder the plot points that need untangling, and do anything I’ve told myself I have to do/decide before I go further. I know the timeline, and whether my current flow of scenes works, are part of that.

Next version

When I think I’ve got it in shape, I’ll write anything that’s missing, and cut things that don’t work (I’ll save them as an older draft and create the next file version).

Then the biggie… going through with a bit of computer help to find all my favourite words that I overuse, and all the trigger and filter words that need to be worked on. There’s quite a long list, but experience helps, and the computer finds every occurrence of them.

Then I’ll do another read through, probably out loud–someone gets the computer to read it for her, which sounds amazing and I might try that instead. That’ll pick up more wrong words, typos, run-on sentences, and things that just don’t sound right.

And after that, it should be ready for my beta readers….

And what I’d really like to do now is work on the cover, as I have to get a banner made for September. Watch for news of why!

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I’ve finished writing Zanzibar’s Rings! #viridianseries

zanzibars rings draft cover

Finishing a book is a great feeling, so why was I so sad last night?  Well, I’ve written the last Viridian System book, and have to say goodbye to many people I like.

I’ve been fairly useless in the real world for the past week, I was so immersed in the world of my imagination.

First draft of Zanzibar’s Rings

zanzibars rings draft cover
Draft cover

This of course is just the first draft.  It is covered with notes to myself, whether the need to check (with the text written already, or with someone knowledgeable). There are several plot points that haven’t made their way in. Some names may be changed. There are places more description is needed. And apart from going through with the spellchecker, I need to go through looking for typos, including names inconsistently spelled, and my favourite over-used or wrongly used words. Plus generally just improve it; tighten up scenes, clarify some things I’ve done too cryptically. It’s currently just over 88k words. I expect it will finish up at around 84k or so.

I’ll set it aside for a month or so, to come at it fresh, and hope to work on it enough so that my beta readers have a copy to comment on by late summer.

At present I’m working on a target publication date of 22nd February 2022.

Pre-order already!

I’ve registered the ebook as a pre-order with Amazon, iTunes, B&N and Kobobooks. It’s listed as $2.99 but that might change (up or down). The date might change, too.

Here’s how the blurb looks now. It’ll be improved, and extended, as we near publication.

A Galactic crisis: the entire comms system destroyed. No waypoints, no navigation aids, no database access… and how will spaceships in flight get home–or to any destination? Dolores is stuck in warp with a very dangerous passenger, Pete gets his shuttle back home on manual. But how come anything in close contact with pure orichalcum fixes itself? Just flying through Zanzibar’s Rings solves the problem–as the Federation’s fighters find, as they descend on the Viridian System to take possession of the planets.

Zanzibar’s Rings by Jemima Pett, expected 22 Feb 2022

Beta readers wanted

I’m always happy to hear from people who have read the previous books and would like to be considered as beta readers.

Beta readers have to pick holes in the plot, spot inconsistencies in the story, generally give a reader’s view in the sort of nice way that doesn’t send me into the depths of despair, and get your responses to me in the right timeframe.

Just leave a comment to if you’re willing below, and I’ll pick your email address up from the system.