In Her Name: First Contact - Draft of Chapter 3
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name, Works in Progress on June 29th, 2009
The usual caveat: it’s a very rough draft! Enjoy!
“Sir? Captain, are you all right?”
McClaren heard the voice as if from far away, through a dull ringing in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, and was rewarded with a thousand hot needles lancing into his optic nerve. He hissed with the pain.
“It’ll pass in a minute, captain,” the voice said again, closer this time. Chief Harkness. “You must’ve gotten a big jolt,” she went on quietly, her hand on his shoulder. Her touch felt very warm. “Fucking alien bitches,” she suddenly spat.
He smiled grimly. Whatever had happened to the ship, he was glad Harkness had made it. This far, at least.
“How many,” he asked her, squinting up into her worried face. “Do you know how many of the crew…are okay?”
For a moment she didn’t answer, but looked up at someone else. His eyes followed her and found Amundsen, kneeling at his other side.
“Twenty-three survivors, sir,” he said quietly. “Including yourself.”
McClaren couldn’t hide his shock. “Twenty-three? Out of a crew of two hundred eight?” They helped him sit up. The aliens had gathered the human survivors in Aurora’s main galley.
Amundsen was only grateful that it hadn’t been the lower galley where he had been forced to abandon Raj Kumar. The ship’s XO was not among the survivors, and Amundsen had seen enough in the rest of the ship to know what must have happened to him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone else is…” He shook his head slowly.
In Her Name: First Contact - Draft of Chapter 2
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name, Works in Progress on June 21st, 2009
Keep in mind that this is just a very rough draft, but this is what the second chapter looks like at this point…
Amundsen knew that he would probably receive a court-martial for abandoning his post in the face of the enemy. But he had few doubts that any of the crew, particularly himself, would survive long enough to have to worry about such technicalities.
While he was the survey section leader, his assigned jump - and battle - station wasn’t in the survey module itself, but in the main damage control point just forward of and two decks below the bridge. Amundsen was a “plank owner” of the Aurora, having been with the ship since she was launched, and in addition to being a first-rate astronomer, he was also an engineer who had intimate knowledge of the ship’s systems. His job was to help the XO manage the ship’s damage control parties during any sort of emergency, and to act as something of an insurance policy for the ship during its many hyperspace jumps.
The compartment they were in, which in everyday use served as the lower crew galley, had one peculiarity that was shared by only a few other compartments in the ship: it had a real viewport, a window to the universe outside the ship, and not just a video display.
After the inexplicable electrical hurricane had swept through the ship, killing all the electrical systems and leaving Aurora’s crew in darkness without gravity, Amundsen had pushed himself over to the viewport to look outside. He could see the huge alien warship off of Aurora’s bow. His eyes, which reflected more anger now than fear, took in the thing’s smoothly curving flank, which was adorned with great runes that stretched from the pointed prow toward the slim-waisted stern. He guessed that the ship must be at least four, if not five, kilometers long. It would have been a beautiful marvel of engineering if its purpose had not been so openly malevolent.
In Her Name: First Contact - Initial Peek
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name, Works in Progress on June 3rd, 2009
I’m just about halfway through (actually, a bit further) the first draft of my latest book, In Her Name: First Contact. While there’s obviously a lot of work left to do, both to finish the initial draft and then begin the oh-so-fun editing process, I wanted to give interested readers a sneak peek or two at what’s coming.
Below is a snippet of the first draft, followed by a link to a PDF file for the remainder of the chapter. Please keep in mind as you’re reading that this is the very first draft! So it may be a bit rough around the edges. Enjoy!
Commander Owen McClaren was extremely tense, although a casual observer would never have thought so. The captain of the survey vessel TNS Aurora was one of the best in the fleet, and to his crew he had never appeared anything but calm and cool. Even when one of the ship’s newly refitted reactors had suffered a breach during their last run into drydock, McClaren’s deep voice had never wavered, his fatherly face had never betrayed a hint of fear or apprehension as he personally directed the engineering watch to contain the breach. A man of unusual physical and moral courage, he was the perfect captain for the exploratory missions the Aurora and her sister ships mounted into deep space in search of new homes for humanity.
For McClaren, though, jumps were different. He had made thousands of jumps in his twenty-year career, but every single one was like the very first: as the transpace sequence countdown wound down to zero, his heart began to pound. It wasn’t fear that made him tense, although there were certainly enough things that could go wrong with a jump to make fear a natural enough reaction.
No, what made the forty-three-year-old former middleweight boxing champion of the Terran Naval Academy tightly grip the arms of his command chair wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. To Aurora’s captain, every jump, particularly out here in deep space, was a winning lottery ticket, the discovery of a lifetime. No matter where the Aurora wound up, as long as she arrived safely, there was bound to be a wealth of astrogational information to help human starships navigate ever further from the epicenter of Man’s origins: Earth. And on rare occasions, precious jewels - habitable planets - were to be found. McClaren was currently the survey fleet’s leading “ace,” with twelve habitable planets to his credit in return for nearly fifteen years of ship-time, sailing through uncharted space…
P90X - My First Week In Review
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in Beachbody Fitness on May 23rd, 2009
I officially finished off my first week of P90X and wanted to give you my impressions of it, rather than a full blown review (which I’ll save for later).
First off, if you’re not already in pretty good shape, you’re going to be in for a rough time. The workouts are all about an hour (an hour and a quarter on the days when you do abs), and Yoga X is ninety minutes. So having enough stamina to make it through is important: if you don’t already exercise consistently, I’d strongly recommend starting with Power 90 like Jan and I did.
Second, you’ve got to follow the nutrition guide if you want maximum results! I can’t stress this enough. People get hung up on the workout aspect, but if you don’t eat right you’re simply not going to capitalize on your investment. You also need to eat enough: P90X isn’t a weight loss program, it’s an extreme fitness program. There’s a big difference. You need to eat a lot to keep your body fueled.
As for the exercises, the toughest ones for me are chinups. There are lots of chinups! There’s a good reason for that, though: they build muscle like crazy, but you really have to apply yourself.
But the workout that’s toughest overall in some ways is Yoga X. I have a lot more respect now for people who do yoga! A lot of it looks easy until you try it, and by the end of this workout I’m
sweating like a pig. But don’t blow it off: flexibility and core strength are critical to the overall progam.
So, there are a few thoughts for now. More to come later!
For more on my Beachbody experience, check out our site at FitClubToday!
Interview With The Book Smugglers
Posted by: admin in In Her Name on May 22nd, 2009
I wanted to tip you off to an interview series at Temple Library Reviews about The Book Smugglers, Ana Grilo and Thea James.
The interview was cool because of a couple of things. First, Ana and Thea have a really great book review site, and they get into all kinds of things. And they also happen to be very nice people, which always helps!
The other reason I wanted to point out this interview is what they say in their answer to question 19 about the growing self-publishing movement. I’ll give you a hint: they mention In Her Name, and it’s good!
So check it out and enjoy!
“In Her Name: Empire” is Now Available for Kindle and Mobipocket
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name on May 18th, 2009
I hadn’t mentioned it in any of the earlier posts (I don’t think!), but I just wanted to make sure that you knew that In Her Name: Empire is indeed available both for the Amazon Kindle and as a Mobipocket ebook, as well as in print.
Enjoy!
“In Her Name” At Number 6 In Mobipocket’s Sci-Fi Category
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name on May 15th, 2009
Okay, if you’ll forgive a bit of horn-tooting, I’m happy to report that In Her Name (Omnibus) jumped up to the number 6 spot in Mobipocket’s science fiction category! Well, at least for today - books can bounce up and down the ratings like ping-pong balls, but it’s nice when they pop up there (and better when they stay)!
Even if you’re not a sci-fi or fantasy fan - maybe you like romance or adventure, even political thrillers - remember that you can check out a sample of the book (free!) on your Amazon Kindle, Mobipocket Reader, and a PDF for those who might be interested in the print version.
Best of all, the omnibus edition contains the full text of the first three novels: Empire, Confederation, and Final Battle. How can you go wrong with that?
The New Star Trek Movie - See It!
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in Reviews on May 12th, 2009
I’m not going to write a big review or anything of the new Star Trek movie, because a bazillion other people have already done that. All I’m going to really say here is that if you enjoy the Trek universe at all, or if you’re at all into sci-fi, this is a “gotta see” in the theater.
Well, I’ll say just a little bit more: this is the first time since the last movie done by the original crew of the Enterprise that I can say I really, truly enjoyed the experience. I know there are a lot of folks out there who really enjoyed the Trek spinoffs and the Next Generation movies, but I wasn’t really one of them. It wasn’t because I was a die-hard who couldn’t accept new faces, it was simply because there was some key ingredient that was missing from the follow-on series and movies. I’m not sure if I can put my finger on it exactly, but there was a chemistry about the characters in the original series (not to mention generally superb screenplays) that was something incredibly special that the others simply didn’t have.
Well, I think the makers of this latest film found whatever it was - some sort of badass cinema cayenne pepper or something - and added it back in! Yes, there are some nits you can easily pick in the story, and a couple of things about the characters and plot that you could quibble with. But this movie was incredibly enjoyable and is one we’re definitely going to add to our Blu-Ray must-acquire list.
So, go to the theater. See it. And live long, and prosper…
For Mac Users: Preparing Documents for Amazon’s DTP
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in Kindle Publishing Guide, Self-Publishing on April 19th, 2009
While Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), which is Amazon’s interface for self-publishers and small presses to get their books into the Kindle Store, has been gradually improving, one thing that remains a major pain in the you-know-where is uploading documents created on a Mac.
As with many systems, Amazon’s DTP is designed for input from Microsoft Windows applications, and doesn’t like the way Mac apps typically encode text characters: DTP won’t accept documents encoded with Unicode, although it does now seem to take (or at least produce) documents with UTF-8. Without getting into a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, those encodings map out character sets beyond the Windows-standard Latin-1 (Western) encoding and English/western European character sets (Unicode provides support for a wide range of international characters).
Where Mac users run into problems is that 1) DTP won’t accept the more typical Mac documents natively produced by Pages or TextEdit, and 2) if you’re preparing the print version of your document in Pages, you can’t output directly to HTML (which is a really silly oversight, methinks).
There are other programs, particularly InDesign, that many Mac users use to format their print versions; I can’t help you with those, because I only have Pages and TextEdit, but hopefully what I go over here will help.
So, let’s say that you have your book set up in Pages and it’s ready to go. Here’s what I did that seemed to work:
Step 1: Save it as an RTF file.
Step 2: Open the RTF file in TextEdit.
Step 3: In TextEdit do Save As -> HTML
You can then edit the HTML file as (or if) necessary in an editor like Taco. Once that’s done, take the HTML file and any image files it needs, zip them together - you must use a program that has a “Windows-friendly” zip option (like YemuZip) or DTP won’t accept it! - and then upload it to DTP.
I wish I could say that I could guarantee you that this will work for your document, but with the vagaries of DTP, I can’t. I know this worked for my novel In Her Name: Empire, and as long as you use an English or western European character set you should - I hope - be fine.
However, if you’re using another character set - let’s just take Chinese as one of many examples - it will not work. The Kindle is still very limited in what it can do compared to web applications. It looks like DTP has moved up from accepting only Latin-1 (Western) encoded documents to at least accepting UTF-8 encodings, but you may still run into trouble: if you try to upload your HTML and DTP comes back with a long unintelligible error that has “unicode” buried in it, chances are this is the problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any immediate solutions to that: my first recommendation would be for you to go back and make sure your HTML is Latin-1 (Windows) or UTF-8, not Unicode (these are all separate options for encoding, depending on your app).
In Her Name: Empire - Now Available!
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name on April 15th, 2009
The first book of the original In Her Name trilogy is now available in print on Amazon (and will be soon from other retailers)!
In Her Name: Empire contains Book One of the original novel (ISBN 978-0615208534), and tells the first part of Reza Gard’s story. From the description on Amazon:
This is the story of Reza Gard, a young boy of the Human Confederation who is swept up in the century-long war with the alien Kreelan Empire. Nightmarish female warriors with blue skin, fangs, and razor sharp talons, the Kreelans have technology that is millennia beyond that of the Confederation, yet they seek out close combat with sword and claw, fighting and dying to honor their god-like Empress. Captured and enslaved, Reza must live like his enemies in a grand experiment to see if humans have souls, and if one may be the key to unlocking an ages old curse upon the Kreelan race. Enduring the brutal conditions of Kreelan life, Reza and a young warrior named Esah-Zhurah find themselves bound together by fate and a prophecy foretold millennia before they were born.
In Her Name: Empire will soon be available for the Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket Reader, as well!
First Proof of In Her Name: Empire
Posted by: admin in In Her Name, Works in Progress on April 7th, 2009
The first proof copy of In Her Name: Empire is on it’s way from CreateSpace! I can hardly wait to see how it looks.
And once that’s approved and ready to go, I’ll finalize the Amazon Kindle and Mobippcket versions for publication. Yay!
“In Her Name: Empire” - Cover Revision
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name, Works in Progress on March 29th, 2009
I just wanted to thank my friends at KindleBoards.com for their help in coming up with the covers for the upcoming trilogy release of In Her Name!
While I posted an earlier concept of the cover for the first book, Empire, here’s the final version that we came up with on KindleBoards:
“In Her Name: Empire” To Be Released Soon
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in In Her Name, Works in Progress on March 27th, 2009
After a lot of contemplation and recommendations from several reviewers, I’ve decided to split In Her Name up into a trilogy. There are a number of reasons for that - not least of all that the original novel is simply huge! - but the strategy here is that the original novel will become an omnibus edition, and each of the three books it contains will be split out into their own releases. The first novel - In Her Name: Empire - will be released roughly on 1 May 2009 in print, Amazon Kindle, and Mobipocket formats.
Just for fun, here’s the cover art concept:
Updating Books on the Kindle - A Big No-Go?
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in Kindle Publishing Guide, Self-Publishing on March 23rd, 2009
One of the attractive options about publishing through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) to the Kindle Store was that books could be updated, and folks who had bought an earlier copy could re-download the revised one.
Now, I’ll be darned if I can find the documentation on that (although I very strongly recall that it wasn’t just urban legend), but a recent post on the DTP forums put a torpedo in that particular ship. One of the folks on the forum called Amazon support and was told that there currently is no way for readers to download an updated version of a title, unless they ask for a refund and then repurchase the book. And, of course, Amazon apparently won’t allow that as a general rule.
Hopefully they’ll add that as a feature, because it would be an extremely powerful advantage, particularly for “how-to” books that can be updated periodically with the latest information. Come on, Amazon, push the envelope a bit, would you?
