jakegrey

Buy My Stuff!

2018-08-11T11:58:44Z

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Scribd

Also available on iBooks, probably, but I don't have an Apple device.

I recommend buying from Smashwords if possible, because it comes DRM-free and a greater percentage of the cover price reaches me directly.

comments

Short Story "Duty Log" is live on Smashwords!

2018-08-08T23:41:45Z

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/888322

"Outpost 219-A is not a very exciting place to be. High up in the mountains a long drive from anywhere, the only thing the two radio technicians have to do all day is perform a daily inspection of the huge radio antennas that listen to the signals sent by their potentially unfriendly neighbours, fix anything that breaks and make note of local weather conditions and the risk of forest fires.

"Between the tedium of their duties and the taciturn nature of his only subordinate, Warrant Officer Peter Wilson lasts less than a week before he starts treating the "Remarks" section of the log rather less formally or reverently than modern military thinking would approve of.

"After all, he reasons, who reads the logbook of an outpost where nothing has ever happened and probably never will happen?"

comments

Lashings of ginger beer!

2018-07-21T18:39:07Z

Yet more research. What would a bunch of hip, socially and sexually liberated teens and young adults keep in the fridge in their youth club when they're living in a post-apocalyptic survivalist commune? I've spent this afternoon reading up on everything from growing lemons in a rather cold and wet climate (achievable on a small scale if you have a greenhouse, by the way) to recipes for Victorian soft drinks...

This is going to be another one of those minor background details that gets added because the idea amuses me. I have a bit of a weakness for old-school ginger beer, cream soda etc. Not the stuff you get in a can from Barr or Schweppes, but the real deal, brewed the old-fashioned way with yeast to get the carbonation and no artificial anything. The result probably isn't much healthier for you than a regular soft drink, all-natural organic sugar is still sugar as far as your metabolism is concerned, but I guarantee it tastes better!

comments

More worldbuilding

2018-07-05T10:58:35Z

In Chapter 4, there's an offhand mention of "balloon bush", a biofuel crop that has only moderate yields but can grow acceptably well in soil that's too shallow and stony to be useful for anything else. I didn't make that up out of whole cloth. It's based on Jatropha curcas, sometimes known as "bubble bush" among other things. In its current form it's not actually that good a biofuel crop -growing it on marginal land nets you marginal yields, and it needs a hell of a lot of watering- but it's only been cultivated as such for a short time and isn't really domesticated yet. Balloon bush is what J.curcas could be after a few hundred years of selective breeding and a bit of genetic modification.

comments

Research

2018-06-11T10:47:40Z

If you want to know how to write compelling, convincing and relateable female characters and a believable and healthy romance arc, you can learn a lot about what not to do from going to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and reading the negative reviews. You can learn a lot from the positive reviews as well, but the negative ones are much funnier.

comments

Satisfying moments

2018-06-05T20:46:33Z

Running your concept for a nonbinary character past a nonbinary friend and getting a thumbs-up, and a comment about how I'm getting good at developing characters when I don't have firsthand knowledge to draw on for their life experiences.

comments

Procrastination

2018-05-29T22:00:30Z

Things I've done instead of writing today: Update my Smashwords profile. Yes, that really is me in the picture; I think it adds to the "mysterious reclusive artist" image I'm trying to cultivate. Besides, no less than three attractive women said it looked good.

comments

Diversity, again

2018-05-23T20:36:33Z

Really, really good article on the subject: Writing People of Color (if you happen to be a person of another color)

"Recently, a friend of mine asked for feedback on her manuscript. Her novel was filled with complex characters, a thought-provoking plot, and enough intrigue to keep the reader riveted. I did what any good editor and friend would do, honestly praising the good parts, and delicately noting which parts could use work. This part is confusing, I wrote. This part seems out of character. She nodded along while reading my notes, completely prepared for all of my comments, except for one: Where are the people of color?

"When we discussed this later, she (a white writer) admitted she feels uncomfortable adding people of color (PoC) to her fiction, as it feels disingenuous. “Write what you know” and all that. How could she add, say, a Japanese person without it seeming like a token gesture?"

Truth be told, this is an issue I struggle with myself. I've never liked the saying, "Write what you know"; I've always agreed with Joe Haldeman's quote about how that adage is a surefire way to get lots of mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery. But I do believe that you shouldn't try to write what you don't know, and as a white guy from a relentlessly middle-class background in a very white part of the East Midlands I most definitely don't know the first thing about what it's like to be non-white on 21st century Earth. Luckily, science fiction lets me fudge things a bit...

comments

Soundtrack

2018-05-22T23:43:21Z

Music plays a big part in my writing, and indeed my life in general; silence has a way of messing with my head, so I have some sort of music on at all times, even when I'm in bed.

Generally speaking I'll either stream one of a few radio stations I like or just have my massive, sprawling library of MP3s that I've been collecting for over a decade playing in a shuffle in the background, but of late I've been making a bit of an effort to pick out something appropriate to what I'm working on.

For the project I started this blog to promote, that's involved a somewhat eclectic but enjoyable mix of folk and prog rock, vaguely hippyish Seventies pop songs and even quite a lot of ambient nature noise. You could probably infer a lot about the story from the playlist.

In fact, here's a not even close to comprehensive list of the stuff I listen to while writing. Listen to some of it on YouTube and tell me what sort of themes you think the story will contain!

Artists: Ballycotton, Blackmore's Night, Varttina, Beltaine, Jefferson Starship (particularly "Blows Against The Empire"), Yes, Electric Light Orchestra

Stations: Radio Rivendell, Radio North Sea International, BBC Radio 3, assorted ambient nature noise longplays on YouTube

comments

Progress

2018-05-21T14:52:07Z

406 words in the last 24 hours. Not my best but not bad either.

comments

Genres

2018-05-21T09:52:32Z

What Is Solarpunk?

Apparently there is actually a word for the genre my novel is in.

comments

Before I found out that "solarpunk" was a thing

2018-05-21T09:47:42Z

It just occurred to me that I'm basically writing a novel about hipster survivalists. I'm not quite sure how to feel about this.

comments

jakegrey @ 2018-03-16T10:20:00

2018-05-21T09:46:30Z

Thought for the day. Deliberately refusing to specify any human character's ethnicity: Progressive or cheating?

comments

jakegrey @ 2018-04-03T23:31:00

2018-05-21T09:45:01Z

Things I've been distracted by instead of writing, number I dunno what: Thinking up sufficiently idiotic band names for the protagonist of the sequel to name his new spaceship after, because naming the spaceship you just bought on a mad impulse after your favourite death metal band makes sense when you're drunk.

comments

Landies

2018-05-21T09:44:16Z

I have decided that my survivalist commune on a post-apocalyptic planet thousands of years in the future use 3D printed replica Land Rovers for most of their motorised transport. Such vehicles are ubiquitous on frontier worlds settled by humans because the design is easy to manufacture by hand, extremely versatile and happened to enter the public domain right when we were getting serious about conquering space.

Besides, Landies are awesome.

comments

Accents

2018-05-21T09:43:11Z

So, having arbitrarily decided that the characters in my novel who hail from the rainy, overcrowded city-planet all sound like they're upper-class Londoners, I need to decide what the characters from the planet that nuked itself to buggery a few hundred years back should sound like. I'm currently torn between generic Northerner and wherever the hell the cast of The Archers are supposed to sound like they're from.

(If Doctor Who can do it, so can I.)

comments

Music

2018-05-21T09:41:10Z

My writing music for the evening. I'm not sure when this novel developed all these utopian countercultural themes, especially given it started life as a videogame fanfiction, but I'm not upset.

comments

Anarcho-Pragmatists?

2018-05-21T09:39:03Z

More writing stuff: The settlement where most of the action takes place was originally founded on anarchist principles, but after a while they noticed that one or two particular individuals seemed to talk the most sense, so after a while everyone expected them to know what to do whenever there was a problem. At some point they decided that if this did not constitute a mandate from the people then they didn't know what else did, and so the town acquired a mayor and a Justice of the Peace.

Not everyone was happy about this, but at least it meant things got done.

comments

Space Condoms

2018-05-21T09:34:49Z

If "3D-printed condom" isn't the oddest search I have to make as research for this book, I can't wait to find out what is.

(Well, I've got to have some explanation for how the idyllic counter-cultural utopia can have a relaxed attitude to monogamy centuries after the apocalypse without worrying about STDs, haven't I?)

comments

Hippy Lit?

2018-05-21T09:32:46Z

In the course of writing a science-fiction novel, I have spent the past five days reading up on the theory and practice of organic farming as part of my background research.

I'm pretty sure that is not a sentence anyone has had reason to say since at least the Seventies.

comments

Diversity

2018-05-21T09:28:45Z

162 words of exposition whose sole purpose is to stick a not very subtle middle finger up at a certain author who casually inserted a bit of rather ugly BS "race realism" into an otherwise forgettable military SF work.

I'm not sorry.

comments

Nostalgia

2018-05-21T09:23:15Z

Weird how writing one line of description in a story can send you back on a nostalgia trip, particularly something as trivial as the distinctive, low-pitched whine certain old car gearboxes make when tackling a steep hill.

comments

Well, here I am...

2018-05-21T09:21:42Z

I figured I might just as well start a blog to collect all my ramblings about my ongoing project in one place (and stop annoying my Facebook friends with it) so this is that blog.

So, what ongoing project would that be?

Extended Vacation, a science fiction novel. I haven't actually thought up a good blurb as yet, but here's the best I can do so far:

"When it comes to getting away from it all, it's hard to do it more thoroughly than going all the way to another planet...

"That's what a small family from the overcrowded, polluted and unpleasantly damp planet of Arawath decided to do, and luckily for them they're in one of the few solar systems in the Known Worlds with two habitable planets in it. In comparison to Arawath, the planet of Pasteur is positively... well, pastoral, in spite of the unfortunate nuclear holocaust it suffered a couple of hundred years ago. Two weeks of camping, hiking and enjoying the natural world... what could be better?

"Unfortunately, thanks to a passing freighter choosing to jettison its trash at exactly the wrong moment, they find themselves making a rather abrupt landing in a remote area. The good news is there's a small town nearby, where they find refuge. The bad news is, they're a very long way from the nearest spaceport and winter is closing in, making a road-trip a dicey proposition. This vacation might be a bit longer than they'd intended.

"But as they get to know the close-knit but welcoming community they've landed amidst, with a drastically different way of life, the question they're all going to have to ask themselves is whether they want to go back at all."

Sounds interesting. Can I see?

A preview chapter will be made available shortly.

Great... Hey, wait a sec. If this is your first entry, what are all those back-dated ones?

Well, remember how I mentioned rambling about the story on Facebook? I'm cross-posting them to here so they're all collected in one place.

comments