R.W. Krpoun's Blog, page 9

In the midst of a massive personal crisis (my search for the right ingredients to make a proper frito pie still continues without measureable success) I have finished the rough draft of Grog 3, weighing in at 92,000 words.

Editing will begin tomorrow. I have no estimated publishing date yet, but I will not dally. However, editing, even at the simplest of books, is not consistent in its challenges, which is why I’m not inclined to make an estimate.

I will also have to choose a cover image, which is a terrible trial for me, and an area in which I take justified flak from reviewers. Still, you don’t pick your aptitudes, and visual arts is definitely not one of mine.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

So I just got a rather negative three-star review of The Zone, specifically the ending. I thought I would explain a bit.

The idea for The Zone was a story of personal redemption. The protagonist leads his people into a house, and that event shadows him for the duration of the novel, culminating with his solo intrusion into another house, complete with the crayon box. The outcome of that final encounter was not the issue, but rather the full circle and the redemption in the protagonist’s mind.

Given he was wearing body armor should indicate he was not suicidal, and that he was going up against computer hackers means he had a decent chance of survival. But I wanted to end the story where it began.

It was a ambitious effort, and one that might have exceeded my grasp. The Zone has sold OK, but it only has 17 reviews.

The Wastrel’s ending has also taken some flak, including a passionate one-star review. When you crank out as many books as I do, a very real worry is that you turn into one of those guys whose every book is just a re-named version of the same.

Plus the story flows where the story flows.

Grog 3 now clocking in at 84k. I lost a little ground when I realized that the final plot arc would require a short re-write of the current chapter.

Meanwhile, my life has been complicated by my efforts to purchase a Nautilus treadmill from Amazon, to replace on that we wore out. First, they tried to deliver it to an address 254 miles from us, then they wrecked the box. The third effort saw an undamaged unit delivered, and I managed to wrestle the thing out of its box and assemble it with the help of my wife in two hours, hindered by instructions which relied upon diagrams drawn by a artist who was was working off a description of a piece of exercise equipment relayed by a guy who saw one a long time ago.

After exercising the full range of my not-inconsiderable vocabulary of profanity, it was together.

Then it would not start. At this point I was ready to drag it out to my range to use as a target stand, but my wife called tech support, and a surprisingly perky young woman determined that we would get another panel and most importantly, a technician to install it.

Such is the background of Human tragedy against which Grog 3 is being written. It’s not the fall of Kabul, but it was pretty annoying. Meanwhile I’m walking up and down my driveway (0.2 mile long) pondering how to ambush the creature who deliberately poops on my driveway every single evening instead of sorting out plot issues.

Anyway, that’s the current state of progress.

Grog 3 is now over the minimum length for a novel, and closing in on the final plot arc. Hopefully I will have the rough draft done in a week or so.

Greetings, all. Grog 3 is currently at 71k or rough draft, with the final plot arc conceived but still needing some arrangement. I’m handicapped as we have (belatedly) hit the 100 degree days and I’m not able to mow, which is my favored venue for the pondering of plot issues.

Browsing in a gun store a week ago, I actually saw the rare double-barreled M1911, the AF-2011. It was a lovely weapon; I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I certainly would jump at the opportunity to fire one (priced at $7500, they weren’t even bothering to let looky-loos handle it).

I’m not sure where the idea came to build what is essentially two M1911s into one handgun, but I suspect it was along the lines of ‘if one M1911A1 is great…”

Sometime you can have too much of a good thing.

This continues to be a very odd summer, with heavy rains and temps in the mid-90s and lower; normally we would be locked in the heart of the 100 days of 100, but while the SW bakes, we are green and damp.

On an associated note, of the herds of deer wandering my place, I’ve seen several does with new fawns, which is very late in the year. Apparently all the greenery is encouraging a bumper crop of deer, which we don’t need (the population is so large already the State has been having to re-write the hunting season every year in efforts to bring things under control).

It is time to chance fate and reveal that my current project, which has topped 60,000 words of rough draft, is Grog 3.

Until next time!

Much pointless and annoying drama has dogged my steps since my last missive, but the current project has reached 53,000 words and feels ready to start the final plunge to completeness.

I have been inspired by a steady stream of wonderful reviews, and sales have been good. Summer is surprisingly cool (mid-90s on the average), but the mosquitos are having a bumper season due to the lower temperatures. Still, you take the good with the bad.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Living in the country is wonderful, but there are drawbacks. One of those is that in the course of repairs, property upgrades, and general wear and tear, you accumulate a sizeable amount of junk, either because it might be useful, or because it is too big or too heavy to fit in a dumpster, and you can’t just leave it by the curb until it gets stolen.

So after over two+ decades, my junk pile was too large to sustain. Therefore, after much putting-off, I addressed it this weekend. My timing was terrible; the long, cool, start of summer ended that Saturday, meaning that in addition to mosquitos the size of pigeons, it was humid and in the high 90s.

It took eight hours of wrestling with dirty, heavy, awkward, often sharp-edged junk while mosquitos fed with wild abandon and the air felt like a sauna to rid my property of the mess, and I was very thankful that I hired someone to do it for me.

There was a time when I would have done it myself, but with age comes money, and money lets you hire several someone elses to do the suffering.

Anyway, the place looks great, and the current project stands at 44,000 words rough draft.

Not a lot to report; the current project is at 36,000 words rough draft, with some plot issues but still has room to work.

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.

“Go check it out,” Damarus motioned Remmie forward.

“It’s a door. I can see that from here,” the tired, filthy Scraver snapped. “What more do you want to know?”

“Is it locked, is it booby-trapped, that sort of thing.” Damarus was as filthy and tired as Remmie and the others, but he bore up under discomfort with true Li Halan stoicism.

The Templars had gotten a hot tip through an Engineer contact of Quinn’s that a covert Scraver dig in the Tepest Desert had stumbled across signs of Antimony.  They had gotten an Imperial Runt-class shuttle to drop them and a borrowed Mech-Mule loaded with supplies at the site of the dig.

But things had not worked out as hoped or expected. The Scraver base was unmanned; equipment was smashed and supplies looted or ruined; the Templars had taken some ammunition, weapons, and cylumes from the mess, but had few clues as to what had happened to the personnel who were supposed to be conducting the dig.

Until they had seen the nomad war bands darting from cover to cover, working their way in. Their background investigation (actually, a few minutes spent perusing a gazetteer while the shuttle loaded) of the desert had warned them of tribes of black-eyed Changed roaming the nearly lifeless desert, but nothing in the book had suggested why they would be concentrating at this point. Quinn had pointed out that it seemly unlikely that spear-using primitives could raise such a force when the tribes were scattered far and wide, but the fact remained that they were here.

Quinn had managed to get a portable think machine they had found in the ruins of the Scraver camp working by connecting it to a mapper unit’s screen. From it they had learned that the Scravers had been searching for a smuggler base that had been hidden in this area at the fall of the Second Republic, before the desert had claimed this continent. Another Scraver expedition had supposedly reached the base three hundred years earlier, than vanished.

The mapper unit had showed the Scraver progress towards their goal, and the Templars, armed with tools salvaged from the Scraver work site, headed underground, reasoning that they were better able to defend themselves in the rat’s nest of tunnels and crawlspaces than on the surface. From a daring recon by Illidan they learned that a thick maxicrete wall was less than forty feet of collapsed corridor from the Scraver diggings, and that the nomads were in the maze with them.

It took over eight hours, but the Templars cleared the corridor until they reached the wall, and a steel door set into it.

Remmie sighed and moved to the door.

***

Remmie howled as he raked a long, barrel-heating burst across the lines of advancing nomad spearmen, ending it in a curse as the bolt slammed forward on an empty magazine. Punching the mag release with his right thumb as he ripped another magazine from his load-bearing-vest (LBV), the Scraver trotted towards Hal, who was calmly pouring fire into the massed archers as arrows flashed down in hissing clouds.

It turned out the reason the nomads had not ambushed them while they cleared out the corridor was because they were waiting for the Templars at their destination. The door in the maxicrete wall had opened into a sizable underground hanger, which contained a powered-down starship and over two hundred nomads. They had archers atop the ship, and spearmen below.

Damarus let his empty submachinegun drop against his chest and ripped his katana from its scabbard, combining the draw with a single fluid stroke that beheaded the closest spearman. He was under the ship, thus sheltered from the archers, while Remmie shot up the spearmen further aft.

The young noble was calm, the inner quiet of a true swordsman, welding blade and body into a killing machine while his brain struggled with their dilemma. They had opened the door causally, took some arrow fire, and immediately charged, only to find themselves staggeringly outnumbered. They had the massive advantage of full auto weapons, and the effects of a flash-bang grenade upon the spearmen, but they were burning ammunition at a staggering rate, and they had nowhere to retreat.

Believing attack to be stronger than defense, Damarus had led a charge, but the full group had not responded. Spotting the dim lights of a control panel next to a cargo elevator hatch on the underside of the ship, Damarus side-stepped to it as he sliced open a nomad’s throat. To his right, Remmie and Hal had taken cover behind some crates and were laying down covering fire.

Big Thunder roared out an eight-round burst, the cloud of triple-ought buckshot sweeping away a half-dozen archers. “Yeah! When Quinn the Engineer gets here, everybody’s gonna wanna cruise!” the big Tech bellowed. He was trying to cover the retreat back into the corridor. They had all started after Damarus, even Ragnar, who had had a leg crippled by an arrow earlier, but Illidan had taken a shaft to the throat, Ragnar had been hit in another leg, and the charge had been stopped in its tracks.

Cody dragged Illidan into the corridor, then raced back out to help Ragnar, who was backing towards the door, his H-6 machinegun roaring into the ranks of the spearmen.

Quinn ripped another burst into the nomads, then howled as an arrow punched through his armor into his side. Cursing at the pain, he emptied the drum and slapped another in place as he backed through the doorway.

Kicking the door shut, he turned to Cody, who was crouched by Ragnar, working on an arrow. “How’s Illidan?”

“Dead. Watch the door.”

“I’ve got an arrow in me, when you’ve a free moment,” the Engineer observed as he pulled the door open, ripped off a burst, and then kicked the door shut. Arrows clattered against the steel portal’s far side.

***

“This is that black water the book mentioned,” Remmie yelled to Hal as he slid another magazine into his hot machine pistol. “Looks like liquid tar.” He bobbed up from behind the crate and fired a burst into the spearmen, who were badly intimidated by the savage volume of fire they were receiving.

“Thick,” Hal agreed as he reloaded, flicking his weapon so the empty mag landed on the hanger floor and not in the liquid, where expended brass floated. “I think we’re gaining fire superiority. Damarus still alive?”

“Yeah, the spearmen are withdrawing.” Remmie hastened their retreat by cutting two more down.

Hal bobbed up and picked off another archer. “Hey! Damarus is calling you.”

“Really? My communicator battery must be low.”

“Yeah, he’s saying you should come up to where he is.”

“What? Couldn’t quite hear you.” Remmie ducked down to reload.

“Get yer butt out there, boy.” Hal jerked a thumb towards the ship.

“ ’Boy’ this, you stupid peasant,” Remmie snarled as he raced towards the knight. “I’m not some damned Marine, you know.”

***

“It’s a League Sentry-class Escort,” Remmie announced, leafing through the papers he had found in the ship’s safe. “From the dates and the recorder we found, I’d say this is the ship used by the missing expedition.”

The Templars were gathered on the ship’s bridge, which was illuminated by a couple cylumes.

“All right, good work. Quinn?”

“Its been powered down for a couple centuries. There ought to be just enough juice left to start up the power plant. Once its on-line, we can get the ship’s systems going and start storing enough power to get out of here.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” Hal pointed out. “The nomads are back under the ship, and we have to get the roof hatch open, or we’re not going anywhere.”

***

Remmie slapped another magazine into his machine pistol as he leaped over a dead nomad, cursing under his breath. Snapping a burst at a retreating spearman, he kicked closed a steel door identical to the one they had entered through and twisted the deadbolt. It had been his idea to close and lock the six doors into the hanger once they had driven off or killed the nomads under the ship, in order to prevent more from coming in, but he wouldn’t have suggested it if he had known that it would become his job to carry out the plan.

Quinn had rigged a power cable from a line stripped out of the ship’s turret, and had improvised a sort of barricade on the cargo elevator. Once the ship’s engine had powered up and the systems were running, Ragnar, Remmie, and Damarus had dropped the elevator into the nomad’s midst (after a volley of grenades). The sudden wall of firepower drove the nomads off, and Hal and Quinn had then exited through the two torpedo-tube-like Marine portals near the bow. Hal had covered while Quinn hooked the line to an exterior power port on this ship and then ran it to the roof hatch controls.

Remmie flipped a frag through the next door and ducked away from the blast, then darted forward and slammed the portal shut. Tripping the centuries-old lock, he mopped away sweat and eyed the hanger as he trotted towards the third door. Ragnar was clinging to the side of the ship with several limbs while he blazed away at someone on top; more archers, the Scraver guessed. Hal was up past the bow firing at nomads on top of the ship; Quinn lay nearby, an arrow jutting from his back.

Weaving to make himself a poorer target, Damarus darted to Quinn’s side. “Quinn, are you all right?”

“I’m dying, dammit!”

“Hang on, Cody’s on his way.” The slender nobleman grabbed the coiled cable and scuttled to the controls, paying out the cable as he went. Flipping open a dusty cover, he slotted the connection into a emergency power socket.

‘That’s [I]IT[/I]?!” Quinn roared, his voice hoarse with pain. “I took an arrow for [I]THAT[/I]!? Why couldn’t someone with better armor have carried the cable?”

***

“Are the crates aboard?” Damarus asked as he climbed into the pilot’s chair, the age-worn material of the seat ripping at his weight.

“Yeah.” Hal tried to fasten the buckles of his safety harness in the co-pilot’s seat, then gave up at the old clasps failed to close. “Lets hope this works.”  Lights flickered from red to green on the panel before them. “The elevator’s secure.”

“Not any too soon.” The grinding of the hatch system overhead changed in tone, and sand began pouring in from above.

“We’re secure, sealed, and probably safe to take off,” Quinn announced as he trotted onto the bridge.

“Probably?” Damarus and Hal said in unison.

“Well, everything [I]looks[/I] okay, but without shipyard equipment, I can’t say for sure.”

The young knight sighed. Nothing was ever easy, simple, or as he expected.