All things writing related
It’s here. The print edition is going live now and will be available on Amazon from Thursday, 21st May.
I’ve picked this day for a very important reason. Jane’s birthday in the book is Tuesday, 21st May 2809. Happy birthday!
The publication date will show 20th May, but I wanted it to be available on all channels on the 21st.
The text of the print and Kindle editions is exactly the same, but there are some very small differences in the typography.
I’ve now got the proof, and it looks all right so far. I’ll have to inspect it pretty carefully.
Publication date will (barring accidents or the outbreak of an interstellar war) be this Thursday, 21st May.
This is the sequel to “Run from the Stars” and it concludes this series.
I was up at 4am this morning giving the text a last check. It’s now sitting in Amazon’s servers waiting for me to finish all the other jobs that need doing before it can be released. I have both electronic (Kindle) and print versions ready to go. Kobo and Nook will follow almost immediately.
This is where we are now.
Run from the Stars (book one of two) is available in electronic editions on Amazon, Kindle and Nook.
The proof of the print edition of Run from the Stars is on its way to me, probably sitting in a mailbag at Heathrow by now. If it arrives in time I plan to release the print edition on Thursday 21st May. Incidentally (subject to the usual confusion about dates) this is Jane’s birthday.
The proofs of the electronic edition of Turn to the Stars (book two of two, which concludes this story) are on my Kindle now, and I’ll be checking them over the weekend.
The artist has just sent me the first rough of the TttS cover and it’s totally gorgeous.
There’s no publication date yet for TttS but I’m trying to get it out this month, technical problems and the day job willing.
Amazon have just told me that the proof of the print edition of Run From The Stars is now on the way to me. Check back here for a publication date.
This was the prologue which I wrote for the original version of Run From The Stars, but then dropped from the electronic edition.
Prologue
The Secret Places
Department of History,
University of Astropolis,
Homeworld.
9th Jan. 3001.
This is the story of a work that almost refused to be written.
When, fifteen years ago, I made the final years of the Arcturian Confederation my chosen field of study, I hoped to write a definitive history of this fascinating period. I was encouraged by the wealth of information available in both the Space Fleet Headquarters and University of Astropolis databases.
However, as time passed, I became increasingly aware that the story revolved around one young woman, whose intelligence, courage and sheer determination changed the course of events in a way that, even now, is hard to comprehend.
To understand the autumn years of the Confederation, I had to understand Jane Gould. But, at a remove of one and a half centuries, she was making things difficult for me, just as she had infuriated her contemporaries in the early twenty-ninth century.
The official logs of the spaceships are still in the Space Fleet database at Astropolis, as are some of the personal records of the officers involved. The motivations of William Keefe, Douglas Spence, Ian Sinclair, Heloise McAlister and many others are easily understood from their journals. But for Jane Gould there was no journal, and without it I began to wonder if there was any real hope of completing this project.
Too many crucial events were completely undocumented. Much of what Jane Gould did, she did on her own, without her equipment, and out of range of sensors. My sense of frustration was compounded by the certain knowledge that her journals had once existed. In them she had not only recorded the missing periods, but added her personal comments. In fact she had gone beyond that: In the long, lonely hours when she had cruised between stars in her eighty-footer, she had breathed her hopes, and confessed her fears to the recorders. A few, maddeningly incomplete, fragments remained as appendices to her colleagues’ records. But the journals themselves she had removed from the database.
She said that she had done it because she had told too much. She said that the recordings still existed, but she had put them in her “secret places,” and that they would be returned to the main system when she had the time to edit out everything that was hurtful. But she never had a chance to begin that review of the material, let alone finish it. I believed, as did most historians, that the journals were lost beyond recall.
There matters remained for many years, and probably would have remained for ever, had it not been for a chance remark spoken by a biochemist of my acquaintance over dinner.
“I was on Mercia last week,” he said, “taking soil samples. Do you realise the Gould family are still farming at Hallsfield? You know, where your Jane was born.”
It had never occurred to me that there was still a Gould family. I had committed the classical error that has dogged Arcturian scholarship, and which I had sworn to avoid. I had refused to believe that anyone outside the nine worlds of the Arcturi had better data. Jane Gould left no descendents – but I had forgotten Thomas Gould, her brother. Sixteen hours later I was on a liner bound for Mercia.
Driving up to Hallsfield Farm was a deeply moving experience, seeing for the first time the roads that Jane Gould herself had used a century and a half before. I presented myself, and was ushered into a warm, dimly lit parlour. I was introduced to Karin Gould, sixty years old, but quick witted and bright eyed. She explained that she was Thomas Gould’s great-great-granddaughter, and quickly understood what I was doing. She sent a teenage brunette with brilliant blue eyes to get what she called, “Auntie Jane’s Box,” and poured black coffee for both of us while we waited.
When the girl came back she was carrying a green container the size of a small suitcase, and I felt a sudden thrill. It was a Confederate Space Fleet emergency medical case, and the date code was late in 2829. Jane Gould herself could have handled this box. I held my breath while Karin opened it. On top was a blue silk evening dress, ragged with age, but obviously made for a very small woman. From beneath this Karin removed a jewel box and laid it on a side table. Finally she pulled out a cracked leather shoulder bag, from which she produced a case containing five little plastic rectangles. Hardly daring to hope, I slotted them one at a time into my wrist unit, and each time I was rewarded with a flood of data.
They were Jane Gould’s personal journals, and they were complete.
I have of course made the original journals available in both the Space Fleet and University databases. But in this series of books I have tried to tell the true story of the woman who was dragged against her will onto the field of history and, through her own inner strength and unshakable courage, went on to remake that history in her own image.
I’m now actively working on getting a print edition of Run From The Stars ready. The price is expected to be about £7 or in the USA $10 and €10 in europe.
This is my first review, thanks to Holly Lisle
R Billing takes hard SF, accelerates it way past the speed of light, and runs it directly into a wall of suspense that knocks you breathless. And I love Jane—she can take a beating and stay on target—and I cheered her from start to finish.
I’ve had several requests for a print edition of “Run From The Stars”. I’m now actively looking at costings and hope to have something to report soon.
When I decided that I was going to write the sort of story that spanned dozens of planets spread around our galaxy, I realised that I’d need to do something about time and calendars.
Because no two planets will have the same length of day, or for that matter year, I needed to come up with a way of sorting it all out so that clocks and watches would do something vaguely useful. This is the solution:
She (Jane) glanced at the map on the screen of her personal, and chose, almost at random, a spot called Baie des Poissons. ‘Fish Bay,’ she said to herself. ‘I hope that means they catch fish, or at least eat them.’
Three hours later Jane was installed in a little cabin at the back of the broad sandy beach, and was wondering how best to enjoy herself.
She glanced at her watch, then reset it to show only four-time—local solar time in hours and minutes. Six-figure atomic accuracy and interplanetary correlations could wait until she was back on duty. “Getting on towards time for dinner” was all the precision she needed at the moment.
Planets are only considered for colonisation if they have a length of day that’s within about ten percent of Earth’s. That means roughly twenty one and a half to twenty six and a half hours. Also the length of their year has to be between twelve and eighteen months by Earth’s calendar.
The length of a second is exactly the same everywhere, and is measured by atomic clocks. “Six-time” is hours, minutes and seconds using sixty second minutes, sixty minute hours and twenty-four hour days. Any clock with a second hand or displaying seconds as digits is on six-time. It’s the same everywhere in the galaxy, so if I’m on Greenworld looking at a lovely carved wooden clock with a second hand, and talking on Starline to you while you are having a drink before lunch in the Tharwa Grill on Canberra, looking at a chrome and glass six-figure digital clock, we’ll agree about the time. Stopwatches also use six-time, so if you time someone running a hundred metres through the Greenworld equatorial forest, and I time someone putting in a hundred meter sprint on the Savernake beach, we’ll know which is faster.
This isn’t very useful for times of trains or knowing when the restaurant opens, so for that sort of thing there is four-time. With four time, which is used by clocks without seconds hands or seconds digits, the length of a minute is adjusted to suit the planet that the clock is currently sitting on. With watches this happens automatically, as you get off a spaceship you watch picks up the local wireless net and resets itself. There are always 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, but the length of a minute can be anything between 54 and 66 seconds by the standards of Earth. You can still have an 8:14 train that gets you to the office before 9:00, even if the next day isn’t 24 hours later.
I’ll talk about calendars in another post.