Delphi in Space

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 loo...

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 inten...

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...