Delphi in Space

While lying in bed this morning, waiting on the heat, I was in that drowsy state between sleep and awake.  During this state the general outline for book seven crystalized.  YEAH!!! Now I have to go back and fix the roadblock I inadvertently put into book six, fortunately, I haven't sent it to my beta readers yet.  And I'll have to check book five as well.  I'm pretty sure it won't need changes; if it does, my copy editor (Wife) might beat me severely about the head and shoulders:). I always want a solid outline of the next book before I release the current one, preferably the next two.  It is amazing how you can inadvertently write yourself into a corner.  Read my post staying out of corners. But you are now assured that books 5 and 6 are on their way, and book 7 is starting to take shape.

I just typed the last line of the sixth book Delphi Federation.  Now I need to let it sit for a few days.  Then I'll reread it and fix up a few things, then I send it to my beta readers to be shredded :(  Hopefully, I won't have to start over.  I'm sure they'll love it.  Won't they? Now to the joy of working with my Editor to finalize book five, Delphi Alliance.  I keep hearing things like "WHAT!" so I'm afraid there's a lot of work to do to get it ready for release before the end of January. Maybe she'll let me spend some time plotting book seven.  One can hope.

Today I had to fix three typos and two formatting errors in Delphi Station.  One of my readers ratted me out to the Amazon police.  And I want to thank them so much.  It is amazing how many errors get through the copy editor, proofreader, and tools like Grammarly.  It is embarrassing, but I'm happy to be able to fix them so my future readers don't get confused. Jonny, I've got a $100 Amazon gift certificate for you if you want to claim it. Feel free to email any mistakes you find to me at  delphi.in.space@gmail.com. Thanks Bob

I find that when I'm working on a section that I know I'm going to have to come back and tighten up, it's hard to stay focused.  I guess I'm spoiled by the parts that I seem to just be able to write from memory, all those daydreams.  When I have to buckle down and write, knowing a major rewrite is in order, I look for other things to do.  Even editing is more attractive. Back to plowing through that chapter.  My beta readers are going to hate me.

All four books are in the top one hundred for science fiction.  WOW!!! I'm working hard on the next two.  My editor hasn't killed me yet for all the comma splices I leave in.  She's given up on getting me to spell things right:) Still shooting for late January for book five, she's editing away, but I make the job hard, or so she says. Book six is plotted, and I'm three-quarters complete with the first pass.  I'll have to have this one beta read a few times.  It's getting sticky to keep all the pieces moving in the same direction, to keep it interesting,  I hate a blah-blah-blah section in a book. If you want to connect, comment here, or email me at delphi.in.space@gmail.com. Keep on reading Bob

Did you know that the gravity on Saturn is less than the gravity on Earth? Weird, huh, but it's because gravity is defined as the gravitational force on the surface of the planet. Saturn is ten times more massive than Earth, it is also one-tenth the density while being ten times bigger in diameter.  So the math works out that Saturn's gravity is 9 m/s2 vs Earth's 9.8 m/s2

Today, I made it to #28 in SciFi Authors, we'll have to see if it last. I've been holding steady around 68 for the last week. Sales are amazing; I don't know what I'm doing right, but I'll keep pretending if you will. Our house is on a charity home and garden tour today, I'm sure you don't care, but it means that tomorrow my Editor will finally get back to the next book. I hope to publish it in mid-late January. Book 6 is still kicking my ass, but I think I'm getting control of it. Look for it in March.

Wow, I just made it into the top 100 Science Fiction Writers on Amazon.  Wonder how long I'll be able to hold onto that spot. I have all these red marks on my body from pinching myself.

For Delphi in Space , I really wanted to avoid painting myself into a corner, so I decided to write the first three books before I published anything.   Also, I’ve read that readers tend to postpone starting a series without at least three books in it. The mistake I made in the Stone series was giving the main character too much power.   If your character is a superman, it’s hard to come up with tension and crises that are believable.   I teeter on the edge of that in Delphi in Space .   I’ve had to go back and modify the first three books numerous times to balance out the plots I wanted for future books.   Winging it on how many people were in the crew, and things like that, came back to be an issue when I was working on the fifth book.   I had to go back and fix up all those numbers. I’ve worked hard to keep the science reasonably believable, but sometimes it’s easy to blow it.   A math error can really make the writer look foolish.   I kept trying to figure ou

Writing: I use ‘MS Word’ to write my books. It does get cumbersome and slow when over 50K words, but I already have it, my editor (my wife) knows how to use it, so I stick with it. ‘Scrivener’ is recommended by lots of writers, they like it, they get $ to advertise it, but I haven’t tried it since there are only so many tools one can use. Publishing: I currently only publish on Amazon. I started out using ‘Kindle Create’. It’s actually pretty good. I did the first series with it, but it would not let me format the chapter titles the way I wanted, so I found a tool called ‘Sigil’, it’s techy, but that’s okay with me. It lets me do exactly what I want since I’m actually editing the HTML that the ebooks use to display books. My nephew uses  http://publishxpress.com/ . It seems to work pretty well, I looked at the code for his book and it was very clean. Editing: The bane of all writers is editing. It’s hard because you know what you meant to write, so you keep reading what you intended

As my profile says, I’m an avid reader. I like lots of genres: historical fiction, mystery, spy thrillers, and my favorite, sci-fi. But when I’m daydreaming, I’m not thinking about being a spy, those guys get killed; or a detective, too many late nights on stakeouts plus they might get killed; and I don’t believe in time travel. When I daydream I think about what thing I might invent, I’m an engineer; or a superpower I might have and what I could do with it, still a little boy at heart; or why some alien would contact me to take him to my leader:). I’ve always thought it would be cool to write a book, but a few attempts never really went anywhere. Then my first book, Matthew and the Stone, kind of wrote itself on a long flight to Singapore. I actually wrote it in two weeks after the trip; it was all mapped out in my head. The Stone series was like my practice series. It never took off; I didn’t put much effort into advertising it. I made a few mistakes, wrote myself into corners I did