Suspended Earth

Hello from the mad house!

While it has been a busy time around here, I have not been idle as far as writing goes. I have been doing some work on the first book in the Naradhan trilogy, Naradhan the Silent. So far, it is progressing well. I am enjoying discovering the story and the characters. My antagonist is growing on me fast, and my protagonist, the already known Ian “Iron” Johnstone (Failing Calamity) is also growing into his role well. Those familiar with him from his appearance in the short will recognise him in this, but will also gain a deeper understanding of what makes him the man he had become at the time of Failing Calamity.

As for releases, I have decided on a slow, long winded final run through of Longarm Severed, to ensure it is as good as it can get. My editor believed it was ready months ago, however I am being a bit recalcitrant about releasing it. I am still undecided as to how it will be published – whether I remain indie, or go with a trade publisher, and if so who. I have to admit I am leaning towards the known quantity, but not for any reason other than familiarity. With such a busy life it seems I am like electricity. I am tending to take the path of least resistance. This is not always a good thing, I know, which is why it has not yet been released. Likely in the new year, decisions will be made, after the madness of the next month is over (travel, weddings, family and friends, all the good times of the season, you know I am looking forward to this!)

Looking through some other items, I stumbled on a long forgotten short titled Luddite Says, which I am considering giving a serious edit and assessment. I will in the new year decide if this one gets expanded out to become a short novel, or remains a short story for potential submission to a genre magazine, or is released as a stand alone, like Failing Calamity was. The other option would be to compile a second collection of stories, with this one featuring. There is so much to think about!

So as you can imagine, I am planning a busy 2015. I hope to be more active in the next twelve months with releases than the last twelve months. Longarm Severed, Naradhan the Silent, and Luddite Says all will be released at some point, and there is the potential for more. The long term project Children of Nevermind, sequel to my popular novel Dance of Nevermind, is still a contender for completion in 2015 as well. So stick around, and join me for a great year of new Science Fiction from my ever growing library!

Finally, to all of you, I wish the best of Christmas and new year celebrations. May your lives be filled with joy and good times during the season of holidays, whatever you choose to celebrate.

Until next year,
Martin.

Some of you will be aware that for some time there has been a work listed in my works in progress section titled “The Chronicles of Iron Johnstone”.

That work has now officially been dropped. Instead, the life of Iron Johnstone will eventually be told through the story of a dangerous and mysterious villain, Naradhan the Silent. Naradhan is envisioned as a trilogy of novels, though this is subject to change. The first, Naradhan the silent, followed by Naradhan the Hunter, and finally Naradhan the Rebel. These are working titles only, and may change as the work progresses. The trilogy may be shortened if I do not find enough “meat on the bones” of this villain’s world.

I will list these in the work in progress section as “The Naradhan Trilogy,” but as each book becomes available it will be listed individually in the books section of this web site.

There is still the possibility of a picture book in the style I envisioned for chronicles, but I can not make any promises of it ever coming about. All three novels in the trilogy would occur before the events of “Failing Calamity”, my short story starring Ian ‘Iron’ Johnstone, which is already available in the kindle store.

As for the villain, Naradhan – Who is he? Well, watch this space and you may soon find out! Suffice to say that he is dark, murderous, determined, and incredibly patient. He does not suffer in the same way from the ravages of time that his human victims face, but at the same time, it is questionable if he even lives as they do. His very existence is denied by governments and law makers, and his future is dependent on one thing: He must kill to survive. When his prey eludes him, he must never give up the chase, until that prey has been defeated. He is a traveller, and the travellers are the bogey men of space, the terrifying tales told to children and never believed. They are scary, whispered of in hushed tones on the space lines, and are said to stalk their prey sometimes for decades. They are an item of fiction and make believe, but they are devastatingly real when they catch you. Few survive to tell of these encounters.

Watch for the Naradhan Trilogy, coming soon.

October 1st is the second anniversary of the release of ‘Shades of Farthrow’ on kindle and kobo. To celebrate, this book will be discounted to US99c on Amazon kindle and Kobo, or your local equivalent price, from tomorrow until October 4th (Australian time). That is a 75% saving on the regular list price!

The discount is live on Kobo at the time of this blog post, and pending on all Amazon sites. Links below. *EDIT* Discount now live across all Amazon sites.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009KNLLX8

Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-au/books/Shades-of-Farthrow/9xzVh-t0HkekeSOgHPSxHw?MixID=9xzVh-t0HkekeSOgHPSxHw&PageNumber=1&s=k9hY_YMHE0WeTNlmbd8weg&r=1

Amazon AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/Shades-Farthrow-M-R-Mortimer-ebook/dp/B009KNLLX8/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1389499404&sr=1-6

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shades-of-Farthrow-ebook/dp/B009KNLLX8/ref=la_B004ZJA07K_1_2_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1368331930&sr=1-2

Hi!

This is just a quick update. Longarm Severed is done. Now, I am deciding what to do with it. I am considering whether to send it off to a publisher, or keep it indie. I will let you all know when I decide. Meanwhile, Children of Nevermind is on the desk, slowly being created. Hopefully, with Longarm Severed for the most part out of the way, Children of Nevermind will see some real progress soon.

Not much else to report, but things are indeed moving. Dance of Nevermind is the biggest seller this month, so that is real incentive to get plugging on Children of Nevermind. I hope that it lives up to the expectation of all the fans of Dance!

Anyway, I will post wen I know what I am doing about getting Longrm Severed out there.

Untill then, why not have a read?

Lately, my writing time has been hampered by other things, but i still try to get a bit done here and there as much as possible. Of course, when real life interrupts my imaginings to the extent that writing becomes hampered, it becomes necessary to take a step back and see the bigger picture.

Sometimes, curious people ask me how I might do this. Well, one neat new way is to go to this link and watch the video feed for a while: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/17074538 or this one at NASA: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/HDEV/

That link is to the live stream from a camera mounted on the outside of the international space station. Some of the breathtaking views that can be seen I find both inspiring, and humbling. The NASA site has the feed accompanied by a map to show where the station is right now.

It is a great way to set the mood for a bit of science fiction writing.

Check it out, if you want to see a great view of the earth from above. Be sure to read the notes on the site, explaining why you might be getting a black picture etc. Sometimes you will be looking at the night side of earth, and so see a black feed, which is beautiful in its own way.
Here’s a snap from earlier today:

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Hi everybody!

I am sure you will have noticed, if you stop by regularly, that I have not posted anything for a while. You know how that life thing can be sometimes.

Well, in spite of busy times, I have not been idle, and have in fact made some fairly significant progress on Longarm Severed. I hope to have it ready for a major editing round soon. This story has made some interesting transformations since I first embarked on the telling, and I think it is becoming something special in its own right, as it explores themes around what it is to be not yourself, without having the right to choose what and who you are.

Set in a prison environment, where the prison itself has the ability to modify you, where you are ostensibly free to wander in an immersive world yet not free to think and do as you would have done outside of the prison, this story takes us on a journey of lost memory, lost identity, and the question of how much we can lose before we are no longer ourselves, or indeed no longer human.

Longarm Severed will be available later this year, at which point I will be considering what project to work on next. Children of Nevermind is a likely candidate, but there are others clamoring for attention as usual.

I will of course post further updates here as things progress.

Martin.

I have always loved to hear about things from SF that become real life tech.

It is an extra thrill when it is something from one of my books that somebody has come up with. I watch with glee every time a familiar SF tech becomes reality, or comes a step closer, and yes there have been one or two that I have spoken of in my books that have since become reality, which is awesome.

The latest of these gave me a smile this week. If you are one of the many who have read “Dance of Nevermind” you will remember the fabricators used in constructing the buildings, and Freeman’s Road. Essentially these were a massive 3d printer, that allowed the colonists to “extrude” architectural elements from the machine, feeding whatever local materials (soil, rocks, gravel etc) were at hand.

Many of you loved the idea. At least one bemoaned it as “unlikely and thus unrealistic” to which I replied “why?” and got no answer.

Well, Check this out: http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/building-a-lunar-base-with-3d-printing/

The general idea is, using a special type of machine, you will be able to fabricate architectural elements using the local materials. A wonderful idea, and somebody is actually making it happen. I got a thrill to think that the fabricators from Nevermind might actually be on their way to reality, thanks to the ingenuity of these wonderful innovators.

But it is not just space exploration that could benefit. Imagine a poor community in a desert somewhere, without sufficient housing, if the country could invest in one of these and take it around to such places and build structures for the benefit of those communities? Imagine the low cost housing that could result in time, as the technology becomes cheaper to manufacture? After all, no building materials would need to be shipped in for many such locations. A gravelly cliff nearby could become the walls and roofs of a village.

There are any number of awesome things being developed by our wonderful scientific community every day, and this is only one of them. But with only a tiny amount of imagination, you can see how each and every one of them could be world changing. And to have such a thing come true after describing it in a book? Well, that is a thrill that never gets old, no matter how much some of the ideas might be predictable or common.

If we keep our eyes open to the news our media refuse to give, we can find so many of these advances, happening all the time, that it can not help but instill in me a sense of hope for the future of our species, and of our home.

Hi everybody.

I am sorry for the extended absence. Life does funny things to blogs, I am sure you have noticed, and I would dearly love to have the time and the energy for weekly posts, but alas lately I do not. Even so, here we are, and I figured it was time to stick my head in the door briefly.

2013 is over, with perhaps less projects completed than I had hoped, but a realistic amount of success none the less. Armada’s Disciple was of course released during 2013, and I feel is a worthy addition to anyone’s SF library. If you have not already grabbed a copy, please consider having a read of it and joining the many others who already are finding a fascination for the HRMS Deception, the mysteries it evokes, and the new questions it raises about the universe inhabited by Starlight Hodgens et al.

The second title that was tentatively scheduled for completion was Longarm Severed, which I am taking my time over and is still some time away from release. That said, I feel the book is benefiting greatly from this slower approach. The story is shaping up nicely, with some tight plot lines and plenty of room for the reader to imagine it’s unusual world beyond the confines of the novel. A story of imprisonment, Longarm Severed follows the incarceration of Theodore Longarm, a convicted murderer, smuggler, and terrorist, as he struggles to discover the truth of his identity in a prison that has stolen his past. You can expect Longarm Severed to be completed in 2014. Release dates still pending.

On completion of Longarm Severed, I intend to look at Children of Nevermind, the sequel to Dance of Nevermind. Dance is a regular seller, ticking over in greater numbers than the others, even those released since. There is something about Dance that has captured the imaginations and adoration of many readers, and I appreciate every fan written email I have received, though I do not always have the time to reply straight away. The echo is a creature that is particularly popular, and that species will most certainly play a prominent role in the sequel.

Also I will possibly get stuck into my side project, The Chronicles of Iron Johnstone, which is a sequence of short stories documenting the life of the title character. Ian ‘Iron’ Johnstone is a character many of you will already know from his role in the existing kindle short story “Failing Calamity,” in which he stars. That story will likely form a chapter around the middle of the chronicles. This work I had intended to take the form of an illustrated novel, and I have not commissioned an artist to assist. I will be considering that option once I get into the story, and have a better idea of what form I would like the artwork to take. Obviously I may choose to undertake that part of the book myself, but if the result is not satisfactory, of course I would seek professional assistance.

I have had some readers asking about my possible foray into fantasy, which I will answer with a ‘maybe later’. I do not at this stage had any solid plans, or any ideas I feel are strong enough, or original enough, to pursue. Should something come about, I will certainly embark on that path when the time is right. To offer a potential teaser, there does exist the beginnings of a story I wrote as a child, simply titled “The Tiaras”, which could potentially see an overhaul and completion at some point. Renaming as well as that title does not inspire me in the slightest! That is of course, providing the inabilities of a twelve year old introvert can be overcome by the forty year old version of the writer.

As for the later, as yet unannounced science fiction novels, I have no substantial information to give you at this point beyond what is already mentioned above. As always, there are plans for many, many books, but which ones will progress beyond a mere title or vague concept I have yet to decide. I have plenty of work to do already and I admit it feels nice to have begun to shrink the pile a bit. Of course, there are a couple of ‘front runners’ for the betting people. One likely candidate is a second book to feature the HRMS deception, staring some of the favoured characters from Armada’s Disciple such as Shae Jarzi, and the bounty hunter, George. That does not even have a title as yet, and neither does the potential prequel that details the prior history of that mysterious colony ship found adrift in deep space hundreds of years after launch.

Those and many other projects will come, in time, and I hope you will all continue to join me for the ride as my characters live out their varied lives through you, the reader, without whom they would never even exist. On behalf of all of them, from Danny, Rachel and the crew in Suspended Earth, Starlight and crew in their books, Jessica, Angel, Ajax and the rest on Nevermind, to Kevin, Anelle and all their friends on Farthrow, Thank you for reading, for bringing life through your participation in their imagined worlds, and for living with them all the highs and lows of their lives as figures of change in their personal histories.

As we enter the fourth year that my books will be available for public consumption, I bid a fond farewell to 2013, and would like to say to you all, in the hope that you continue to join me in my imaginings, welcome to 2014!