Jaydium - next chapter up tomorrow

Hungry for “a wild and woolly journey through time and space,” some really cool aliens, and a touch of romance?

Far in the future, an interplanetary civil conflict has ground to an uneasy halt, leaving its human victims bitter and desperate: Kithri, the daughter of a scientist, abandoned on a desolate mining planet with no hope to use her talents, and Eril, shell-shocked pilot, finding adapting to peace more difficult than he dreamed.

Chapter 2 is scheduled for Friday July 13, 2012. If you're new to reading along, you can find a list of links to previous chapters by clicking, "Read A Story."

Jaydium on sale - this week only

For you folks who've been following along and can't wait to see what happens next, I've added an extra enticement to buying the book -- it's on Specials sale at Book View Cafe at $0.99 for one week only.

Do check out our weekly Specials -- you never know what goodies you'll find!

Query Letters Take Practice

"If you don't tell me what your book is about, it's game over,"  says literary agent Janet Reid,in her blog post, "Every query letter must have this one thing."

This seems self-evident, but Janet's blogged about a gazillion different ways writers can get it wrong. Some of that is undoubtedly due to not understanding the function of a query letter. It could also be due to the difficult of changing gears. Harry Turtledove once said that novels teach you what to put into a story, and short stories teach you what to take out. Well, query letters are like short stories all mixed up with novels and then put on diet pills (the kind that make you so jittery, you want to jump out of your skin). Here you've spent all this time developing and deepening and creating interwoven connections and layers of nuance...and then you ask your muse to encapsulate 100,000 words in ONE SENTENCE.

Yep, it's the elevator pitch. Without the snazzy. But with the snazzy. A different kind of snazzy.

Even seasoned writers blanch at the prospect. But look at it this way: in today's publishing market, this is a necessary skill. That's true even if you're self-published - you still need to communicate that nugget of coolness-of-story-experience in very few words. The thing is, we think we can do this just because we can write a novel. It's a different skill. One that we can learn. One that we can practice. (And one that our friends can help us with, by feedback.)

So I remind myself (a) I wasn't born knowing how to do this; (b) having written umpteen novels does not in itself grant me the knowledge of how to do this; (c) just like learning to write said novels, I'm going to make a bunch of mistakes before I get better at it.

Jaydium, Free Chapter

And now, just to do something different, here's the first chapter of Jaydium for you to enjoy. If you can't wait to find out what happens next, you can download the whole thing from Book View Cafe (And the files will play nicely with your Nook or Kindle, as well as other devices). If not, come on back next week for the next episode...

JAYDIUM

by Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler

Chapter 1

Dust, Kithri thought as she shoved her shoulder against the door of The Thirsty Miner Tavern. The pitted duraplast jerked open, sending a drift of gray-brown powder over her boots. My whole life is turning to dust.

Dust was everywhere on the single inhabited continent of the planet Stayman. It clung to the folds of Kithri=s dun-colored overalls and sprinkled her ragged brown curls. Sifting past the shutters or tracked in at the door, it invaded even the corners where shadows lay thick and stale.

The Thirsty Miner gathered its fair share of dust. Other bars catered to in-system traders, the few Federation agents who cared to rub shoulders with locals or the farmers who, when they came into town at all, kept stubbornly to themselves. But this bar, small and far from the center of Port Ludlow, attracted only its regular customers, jaydium miners all.

Look at them, Kithri thought, pausing as the door swung shut behind her. They=re already drinking up every credit they've made on this run.

Old Dowdell and his two tavern buddies, identical in their rumpled miners' overalls and grizzled faces, looked up from their usual places at the centermost table. Kithri turned her back on them and leaned her elbows on the bar. The barkeep set a mug of brew in front of her. 

A few more years, and I'll be just like them.

This was not strictly true. Although Kithri had come to Stayman as a homesick adolescent, she would never be anything but an outsider. One day her clear gray eyes might dull under the faint film that never seemed to leave the other miners= eyes, and her youthful skin might dry up into a mass of crevices like theirs, but she could never change who she was--the daughter of a Federation scientist.

Kithri might not belong to Stayman, but Stayman had left its mark on her. The heavy fabric of her overalls could not hide the long curves of her thighs, or shoulders grown muscular from years of chipping jaydium. She rubbed her nose where it had once been broken and sipped the tepid brew, wishing for the hundredth time that morning there was somewhere else to go, something else to do. She could drag out her outdated astrophysics texts and pretend to study, but what would be the use?

I'm never going to get off this miserable planet! Not to University, not to anywhere!

AMAZING STORIES Interviews begins...

Check out the restored/reinvented/rejuvenated/reincarnated Amazing Stories online. Among other delights, it features a series of round-table discussions with the members of Book View Cafe.

I had such fun participating in this project. Each of us began the discussion of a different question, so that no one person had to set the tone. And because we're all um, highly opinionated people, there's a delicious diversity of viewpoints, as well as ideas building on one another. Except for the format, which allowed only one response from each participant to each question, the discussion has the flavor of a panel at a convention.

From the website, click on  the cover or here to get started. The first questions are, "Is science fiction definable?" and "Is science fiction dying?" Here's my answer to the second one:


I read this question in three different ways.

One, have we run out of sfnal ideas and writers to turn them into stories?
Two, is it so unprofitable to publish sf that the genre is headed for extinction?
Three, are readers no longer interested in sf? Here is my own very brief answer to the first.

We have not run out of ideas, enthusiasm, or writers. In its history, science fiction received two enormous boosts. The first came at the end of the 19th Century, with the Victorian era explosion of technology and scientific discovery. This was the era that gave us Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and the next generations of writers. It also continues to generate tales of mechanical genius, romance, and adventure through the current steampunk genre, which hearkens back to the time when technology was understandable by the ordinary person.

The second boost came with the space race of the mid-20th Century and the focus on science education, plus the coupling of astronomy, post World War II pyrotechnics, and old-fashioned derring-do. Then came a period of disenchantment with technology and with science itself; when invention created more problems than it solved, the future no longer looked so shiny. I hope the pendulum has begun to swing the other way now. Although the frenzied pace of manned space exploration has moderated, today’s crop of space telescopes (Hubble, Chandra, Kepler, and others) bring us the universe as we have never before seen it, so I hope there will be no lack of inspiration in astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, oceanography, computers… and therefore, no dearth of great science fiction story ideas.

Up next: Is literary fiction better than science fiction? Hope you enjoy the discussion!