An i-pad reader just pointed out that Defiant is finally available from B&N in e-format! That’s a change from just a few weeks ago. Sad to say, it hasn’t shown up yet at Amazon, though I expect that will change quickly. There’s five different e-formats, at least according to the earnings statements I get twice a year, and if ACE has it out in one format, you can bet its just a matter of time before its out in all of them.

So, Kris is going to Japan, and Spain, and Defiant is finally in e-book. The writer is pleased.

The galley proofs for Redoubtable showed up by e-mail Monday.  I’ve got until Friday after next to get them in.  It was a fun read, even with me having to check the nits raised by the very good copy editor who also went through them.  I laughed and cried . . . and this was my millionth time through them.

I found a really nasty place, the end of the 4th chapter, to leave Kris up a creek without a paddle and you readers wanting more.  I’ll publish those 4 chapters on September 1.

Have fun in the meantime.

Mike Shepherd Moscoe

You readers have come across a couple of issues with the e-format. And I got myself an e-book reader finally!

A fan from the UK writes about a problem he’s having across the pond. He can’t find a way to buy the latest e-book Undaunted. He said Amazon UK didn’t offer the e-format.

I checked. Amazon US had it. Amazon UK isn’t offering that format. Anyone know why, or how to work around this?

Another fan is a lucky stiff and has a i-pad. He bought the last two books in i-pad format and wonders if the other books will be back formated.

Boy, I wish I knew. As most of you know, I’m still trying to get ACE to bring Defiant out in any e-format.

What I discovered when I bought a B&N Nook was that capitalism is alive and well in the e-book arena. Sony, Amazon and B&N all have their e-readers out . . . and none of them will read the other people’s formats. Most of them have some kind of reader software, but you can’t put that software on the other folk’s readers. B&N is hoping to be able to put their reader on the i-pad, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Back in ’83 when I bought my first computer, there were Apple, IBM, and a thing called CP/M. CP/M computers were cheaper, and I bought a Kapro. But their disks couldn’t be read on Apple, IBM or any of the other CP/M machines like Osborne, Sanyo, etc. As we know, there’s only the Apple and Windows machines left.

Like you, I don’t much like having to wait for all this to settle out, but that’s the way it goes.

Saturday, May 15, Kris Longknife Daring was finished. At least the first draft. This is the book for October ’11.

The copy edits for KL-Redoubtable were sent back today, Monday May 17. You can look for it this October ’10. The copy editor thought it was a fun read.

All you folks in e-book land. I e-mailed my editor again about Defiant. I’m discovering just how little impact I have at ACE, but I’m not the only one. My editor thought she’d asked for the e-book after my agent raised the issue for me.

She’ll ask again. We are trying, but we’re just little people dealing with a really huge corporation. Yep, even writers live in that world.

For what it’s worth, the Kris Longknife for ’12, Furious (for now) is starting to come alive, but that requires a new contract.

Good talking to you. Kris

And I’ve got two whole weeks to read them and get them back. I’ve spent the last two days reading the book all the way through. It’s great. It had me laughing and in tears . . . and I wrote it!

I’ll post the cover on my facebook page as soon as I get it and get it up here as quickly as I can. I expect to have the first couple of chapters up by September.

Fun to come.

Today my e-mail had a request from La Factoria de Ideas to begin negotiations to bring Kris out in Spanish! I’m delighted, and passed it immediately along to my agent.

They have worked with this Spanish publisher before and are looking forward to doing the contract work.

I’m looking forward to more amigos.

I received this question from a fan and thought the reply might be interesting to more than just the writer.  Here goes.

“You make some reference to enrolling in a community college writing class and riffing from there. It sounds like a starting point. Could you tell me something more about how you made your way from less-than-concrete ideas in your head to a dialogue-less story about the demise of the Second Coming to writing up successful treatments? Practice and having somebody to tear flawed work to pieces come to mind, but I’m concerned about the supply of the latter if I’m not coming up with writing worth reading in the first place.”

First, I’ve been very lucky.  My local community college had a course on Novel Writing being taught by someone who had actually published a couple of Regency Romances, and, now that that market had died, was writing mystery novels.  Her method of teaching was to let you turn in 10 pages a week and she and the class would comment on it.  Her comments were good.  The class . . . varied from good to forget it.

Everyone didn’t turn in 10 pages.  You only had to turn in 30 pages to get a grade.  My family got used to not going to the movie on Saturday until Dad got in his ten pages.  Last week was a writing week.  I did 127 pages in 7 days, but I still can remember how hard it was to have my 10 pages a week done back in those days.

Comment:  Writing is like football, boxing, track.  You do it and you get better at it.  There just ain’t no way to get around it.  Thinking about writing is not the same as making the words flow out your fingers onto a screen.  Drop and give me 20 pages, worm!

After I published my first short story, I set some goals.  I would write a short story and have it in the mail by the end of every even month.  6 stories in a year.  I’d also write a novel.  You may know it as First Dawn.

A year later, I’d sold three stories . . . and closed down the anthologies that bought 2 of them before getting any pay.  And I had a novel that was getting rejection slips from everyone I sent it to.

And I’d gotten lucky.  A writer who was 2 or 3 sales ahead of me was looking for someone determined to be a writer to join her writing group.  I did and I learned a whole lot about both writing and business from her.

A comment about writing groups.  They range from good to bad.  I’ve been in ones that the sole reason for its existence was to worship the writer who had one or two minor sales.  I’ve been in groups that were there to talk about writing and complain about how no one liked what they were writing.  Those are the type of groups that you walk away from as soon as you can.  You are looking for a group that has like minded souls that are determined to be published and are going through the pain of sending stuff out and getting back the rejection slips.

Note to reader.  Remember the comment above about writing being like football.  Well, writers may not risk broken legs or backs, but the pain is still there in rejection.  It’s just part of the process.  Get a lot of stuff in the mail, keep it there, and when a rejection comes back, it hurts less.  At least you keep telling yourself that.

I stayed with the community college for a year after it was doing little for me.  I figured I owed it to the others, but most of the 200 pages I cut out of my first novel to make it sell-able was put in there to answer questions my classmate asked that never should have been answered.

The second year was like the first.  I wrote six short stories and sold one.  I wrote Second Fire and revised First Dawn when I got a few good comments in my rejection slips.

Oh, and my wife came down with Fibromyalgia.   We talked things over.  The  most import thing in her life was continuing to work in Hospice.  So, I took over cooking, washing clothes and doing whatever cleaning got done.  Yes, I know how hard it is to hold a job, keep a house running and write.  It ain’t easy!

I stayed with my writer friend through her first 3 novels and my first couple as well.  By the time you’re writing novels, you can’t send them through a group at a smaller chunk that complete.  You need a first reader who can point out goofs.  My wife has always been a great first reader and I’ve found a few more over the years.  Yes, they are very hard to find, but you can’t find them if you aren’t writing.  Strange how that works.

That is how Mike Moscoe and  Mike Shepherd came to be selling novels that you get the fun of reading.

Kris got this question from someone with a hotmail account that we couldn’t reply to because of some sort of security thing.

“I’ve found references to Pulse Lasers, Burst Lasers, and some form of Laser referred to as a “long pop gun” in the various books. What are the differences between the various forms of laser other then pulse lasers usually being a lot bigger then the other. (14 to 24 inch pulse lasers with the others usually around 5 or 6 inches.) Also how do Pulse Lasers work? Mutineer refers to them firing nanosecond bursts but Intrepid says they fire beams.”

Many of the “little boys” in Kris’s Navy carry pulse lasers that “according to the advertising” give them a battleships punch on a little (cheap) ship’s hull.

The 24-inch pulse laser on the USS Wasp and the 18-inch ones on PF-109 in Defiant, pack a big pulse of energy, but it has several shortcomings compared to the big 14-inch, 16-inch and 18-inch lasers on battleships.

First, Pulse lasers have short generation chambers. That causes the beam to bloom sooner than a long battleship’s laser. The pulse lasers have about one quarter the range of the big, long guns.

Second, the little boys have much smaller capacitors to store energy. Thus, while a BB’s laser may keep hitting for several seconds, a pulse laser expends all its energy in a quick pulse.

This last item is important because BB’s have thick ice armor, coated with reflective material. This is intended to ablate away the heat from a hit. They also spin at 20 rev’s a minute. That’s intended to rotate the hit away from the damaged armor and spread it out.

This also melts water off the ship into space which has the secondary benefit of cause later laser beams passing through that same space to “bloom” and lose power.

As we know, Nelly has made some software patches to the Wasp’s pulse lasers so they can fire less powerful bursts.

The long pop gun is a reference that goes back to sailing ships. It’s a small gun put on usually unarmed ships to give them some protection. Say a 3-inch gun when most warships start at 5-inch and go up from there. It’s a minimum protection against pirates.

The Wasp’s class of corvettes also recently took on small pop guns to give them some secondary ability against incoming missiles. Most warships carry smaller secondary weapons that allow them to defend themselves while saving their main battery for the main event.

Now, a few words on background. For those of you reading Kris’s adventures as Hornblower in space, think of the 24-inch pulse laser as the carronades of that age. Short guns that threw larger shot but for a shorter distance.

For those of you who have spotted that my perspective is more WW II than Napoleonic, think of the pulse lasers as the 18-inch aerial torpedoes carried by the PTs and the 24-inch Long Lance, while the BB’s are shooting huge 14-inch guns or better.

Note to tech types. Yes, I know that lasers are measure in wattage output. However, saying a laser is 1 million kilowatts has little or no emotional grasp to it for most readers. An 16-inch salvo brings up thoughts of an Iowa BB and its punch. Please bear with me.

Second note to Tech types. Yes, I know that some people think that laser in the vacuum of space will go on forever. There is an alternate view that space is not a perfect vacuum and what little is there will cause beams to bloom over distance. There’s a third position that SDI solved the blooming problem during the Reagon years. However, my security clearance is way below that level. Purely so I can cause Kris problems, I’ve chose to let the lasers bloom. When someone comes back from the first fight up there with lasers and tells me I goofed, I expect that most of us will have enjoyed some fun reads and likely be long in our grave. So there!

I received more nice mail this week. My agent sent me the signed contract from Hayakawa Publishing for bringing Kris’s Mutineer out in Japanese.

My daughter-in-law is studying Japanese. Finally, I’ll have something for her to read!