Corrosive Knights, a 9/11/20 Update…!

Only been three days since my last update, but as of yesterday, I finished up Draft #7 of Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series…

I went ahead and printed the revised Draft and, starting today, begin the process of reading the whole thing once more while marking my pen & ink revision. As of this moment, I’m quite confident this will wind up being the last full draft I need to do of the book.

By that I mean that while doing Draft #7 I found most of the book required only very light fix ups. There were a few pages, no more than 20 out of 200, that required a bit more work but now that I’ve revised them, I suspect even those pages are very close to good-to-go.

What I plan to do is read through the entire book yet again, make my pen & ink revisions, and once I put them into the computer, that will be the last time I need to go over the book from start to end. If I find any pages that required more than a “little” work, I’ll go over them but no longer feel like I’ll need to go over the entire book.

It’s simply no longer necessary.

I’m hopeful that Book #8 will be done by no later than one week from today, next Friday the 18th. By done, I mean just that: Completely done.

So, from today through next week, there are several things still needed to be done:

First, of course, is to get through the entire novel once more, then take on pages -if any- that require one more look.

Second is to get the cover and back cover commissioned and made (this should take maybe a week or, if progress is slow, two), which means I should have everything done by not much later than the last full week of September.

Once all that’s done, I will make the novel available for purchase ASAP.

I’m beyond excited this novel is almost ready for its release, and I can’t wait to get it out to everyone!

September 11, 2001 and Today

A solemn day, today, given the 9/11 anniversary.

I vividly recall being at home that morning, turning on the TV, and seeing the flaming tower, singular. I witnessed live the second plane hit, then watched in horror as the first building fell, then the second.

Horrible, horrible stuff, and sadly what followed wasn’t all that much better. We invaded Afghanistan, which made sense as Osama Bin Ladin was, the intelligence said, there. But it was also used, sadly, as an excuse to stage the Iraq invasion. Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had nothing to do with 9/11 but President George W. Bush and, I suspect especially, Vice President Cheney were eager to go after him. Hussein had, after all, tried to assassinate his father.

The world we live in today, sadly, still carries echoes of 9/11. We still have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq -and much of the Middle East- remains a mess. The current President doesn’t inspire much hope for any sort of resolution.

Incredibly, 19 years have passed since that attack.

One hopes we’re in a far better place 19 years from now.

Corrosive Knights, A 9/7/20 Update

Last week Tuesday (you can read it here) I posted an entry noting that I was done with the 6th Draft of Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series…

At that time, I was feeling wonderfully optimistic about how things were going with Book #8, and that further the fact that it took me a grand total of two weeks to go from reading/pen & ink revision to putting those revisions into the book’s Word file suggested I was winding down things pretty quickly.

Welp, it seems like that is indeed the case.

Last week Thursday, the 3rd, I started the process of reading/pen & ink revision of the book. I worked on it that day, Friday, skipped Saturday (a whole bunch of crap was going on and I simply didn’t have the time), worked on Sunday, and this morning I spent a little less than two hours to finish up that part of the revision process.

So, in sum, its taken me roughly 3 days and a few hours to read through the book and do those pen & ink revisions, which means starting either today but more likely tomorrow I’ll sit before the computer and begin to put those revisions into the Word file.

The process should be pretty quick. The first 50 some pages of the book (when printed out on 8 1/2 x 11 paper and at 10 point size, single spaced, it runs 197 pages long, so we’re talking the first 1/4th of the book) came out wonderfully well. I had very little to clean up on them.

As for the rest of the book, I’d say there are no more than 20 pages which require some deeper “cleaning up”. I found a couple of instances of the dreaded “I’m repeating myself” issue which almost always seems to pop up, but overall the book is incredibly close to being all ready.

I’m guessing putting the revisions in the Word file will take me no more than the remainder of this week, provided I have the time and won’t find myself forced to do other things.

So that means that, theoretically, by Friday the 11th of September I should be on my way to doing what will likely be the last revision of this book, Draft #8.

And it it takes me even less time than Draft #7 did, I should have the book completed before the end of the month.

Whoa.

When I was working on past books in the series, I noted that Book #8 was originally slated to be an “Epilogue” to the Corrosive Knights story and that, further, I had already written that Epilogue. I noted many times before that I still intend to use it, but that it is rather short (only some 20,000 words long versus my usual novels which go 85,000-110,000 words) and while trying to clean it up, I stumbled into this new story which is the one I’m presenting in Book #8.

When I was getting to the final pages of this draft, a curious realization came to me. I was effectively offering another, alternate Epilogue story to the Corrosive Knights series.

I suppose that was bound to happen, given Book #7, Legacy of the Argus, wraps up so many plot threads.

Yet it was a startling realization, especially given the fact that I’m so near the end of the book’s creation and its release.

I’ll also note, in concluding, that I remain totally blown away by this story. It’s really good, IMHO, and sits proudly among the other works.

The big question remains: When will the book be released?

I’m shooting for the end of September/very beginning of October at this point.

So, yes folks, this book will be available in not all that much more than 3-4 weeks or so time.

Soon, my friends. Very, very soon.

Music Flashback Friday…

Sometimes when you’ve got music in the background while working, you note recommendations appear and, the other day, a 1982 album by Kim Carnes showed up: Voyeur.

For those unfamiliar with the name, Kim Carnes is probably most famous for this song, which was pretty damn popular in its day:

When I saw the recommended album, I figured it must be the one that had Bette Davis Eyes on it. I was wrong, but as it turned out, I was familiar with at least two of the songs on the album.

I can honestly say I haven’t heard either of those songs in a very long time, likely in/around the time they were originally released nearly (gulp) forty years ago.

The first was the song the album was named after, Voyeur

Man, do I love the song… a beautiful distillation of 80’s synth new wave…!

But, man (redux), pretty depressing video concept, no? Abusive boyfriend, an implied murdered woman (with Kim Carnes herself being the next victim?)… huh. I wonder if the downbeat nature of this video might have harmed the song in the long run. Who knows.

The second song I recognized was Looker, though the version I was more familiar with I’ll get to in a moment:

The original version of the song was by Sue Saad and was the theme of the film of the same name, the Michael Crichton written/directed Looker (the video below shows sequences from that movie, in case you’re wondering. The film was about supermodels who are being killed for… reasons. The film didn’t make a whole lot of sense, even if some of the women presented were quite gorgeous!)…

Weird that the film would be released with the song in 1981 and then Kim Carnes would do her version only a year later in Voyeur!

Finally, there was an extended version of the song Voyeur. It runs nearly two minutes longer than the original version of the song…

This has been your 1980’s synth/new wave flashback for the day!

😉

Annihilation (2018) A (Mildly) Belated Review

I know, I know…

I should be working on my latest draft of my latest Corrosive Knights novel but I was feeling a bit fried and wanted to let my head cool off a little before taking the plunge.

I checked out my voluminous DVR list (as opposed to my voluminous Digital Movie list… another day!) and found the 2018 film Annihilation there.

I’ve been curious to see the movie since hearing it was like a modern version of an H. P. Lovecraft story (I think more specifically The Colour Out of Space, which was made into a film with Nicolas Cage in 2019 and is another of those films on my list to see… when I get the chance!).

Annihilation has plenty of stars, the biggest names of which are Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac, and Tessa Thompson. However, I recall it was released and didn’t do all that well in theaters and was gone pretty quick. Afterwards, though, when the movie reached home video it seemed to find some love and now and again I stumble upon people who offer good words about the film, which is the principle reason I recorded it and decided to give it a shot.

Here’s the movie’s trailer:

Based on a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation is indeed similar, IMHO to other works, not least of which is Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space but also thematically very similar to the wonderful (and, if we’re going to go there, far better) 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker.

Just for the hell of it, here’s the trailer to Stalker

Natalie Portman plays university biologist/ex-soldier Lena, a woman whose husband has disappeared a year ago after being sent on some top secret mission and who, we come to find out, tried cheated on her husband with a fellow professor but that went to hell (I have to be upfront here and say: This romantic subplot, IMHO, was totally unnecessary, at least in the context of the film proper. Maybe it meant more in the book).

So her husband’s disappeared and she feels guilty because maybe her husband knew she was cheating on him (this part is rather vague) and then one day, out of the blue, her husband re-appears.

However, he is… strange. He doesn’t seem to know where he was or how he got back home. Worse, he says he doesn’t feel well and spits up blood. An ambulance is called but en-route to the hospital some dark SUVs surround the ambulance and drug Lena.

She awakens at some army outpost and is told her husband is dying. Turns out a year or so ago a meteor fell by a lighthouse (we see this in the movie’s opening seconds) and since then a weird color field has been expanding out of it. Turns out Lena’s husband and a group of soldiers entered that field and didn’t come out… so how did the husband show up?

Further to that, Lena learns a new group of women are going into the field. She asks to join them and is allowed to.

What follows is a journey into some serious weirdness, tragedy, and death…

By and large I enjoyed Annihilation. While it shares the “group goes into the weird zone to explore it” plot found in Stalker, Annihilation presents a far more grounded and simple story when all is said and done.

That doesn’t mean its a bad film, not by a long shot.

There are some brilliant moments in the film, including a couple of truly eerie and horrifying ones, and the mystery of what is going on -which, again, when resolved proves rather simple- is nonetheless intriguing enough to keep you interested during the film’s runtime.

The problem, for me, is that when it ends -indeed how it ends, too- seemed so very… blah. I don’t want to spoil things, but when all was said and done I felt as I said above: This film, while eerie and at times haunting, simply wasn’t all that deep in its conception and resolution.

In other words, it kinda ended like I thought it would.

Still, I can’t fault the producers/director/writers/actors for this film. They obviously put in a great effort and, again, there are some very startling scenes.

The film is certainly worth a look but if you want to try something really head-spinning which features a similar concept, you’re better off checking out Stalker.

Corrosive Knights, a 9/1/20 Update

Though I thought I might not be ale to do so, I wrapped up Draft #6 of Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series last night…

Though I printed out Draft #6 on 8/8/20, I didn’t get to it until around 8/17/20. The first step was reading through it and marking up corrections in pen/ink. Once done with that, I then transferred the corrections to the book’s Word file.

Having finished this process yesterday, it means it took me a grand total of two weeks to finish up the process, start to end, of getting Draft #6 done.

As I’ve noted before, when a novel I’m working on is near finished, the process of getting the draft done becomes very quick. Early on, it was not unheard of for a draft to take three or four months to be finished up.

Again: It took me a grand total of two weeks to get this one finished.

So today my intention is to print the latest corrected version of the book and, either tomorrow or the next day (we’ll see), I’m starting up Draft #7.

If all goes as it should, it could well take even less than two weeks to get this draft done, meaning I’ll probably be done with it in the middle of September.

I strongly suspect, however, that Draft #7 won’t be the final one and that I’ll need to go through a Draft #8 before the book is indeed completed.

In theory, we’re talking about maybe one more month of work, which means the book…

ta da!

…could well be released by October.

In fact, that’s what I’m shooting for, an early to mid-October release.

Hang on folks, its just around the corner now!