UNF Insignia iPhone Wallpaper

Not sure how I forgot this one, but here it is.

Wallpapers Pt. II

Last night, I had a crack at doing the United Naval Forces insignia. Actually, it was more like about 2 or 3 cracks; I couldn't quite get it right. The gold on the insignia didn't contrast too well with the rest of the glass effect. So, I decided to simply make the entire thing out of various levels of white glass. The result wasn't too bad in the end, I guess; it was never going to be an easy logo to recreate.

I've also made some iPhone versions (320x480) of the wallpapers, too. These will be added to the website in the new year, but I'll put them here, now. These images are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative 3.0 unported.

GMail Spam Tip

I expect a lot of people know this already, but I'll repeat it here for anyone else who is interested.

Google's anti-spam works well, but are you still depressed at seeing something that resembles,

Inbox (3)
Sent Mail
Drafts
All Mail
Spam (14)
Bin

Wish that horrible unread spam counter would go away? Simple. Just do the following:

* Go to Settings (top right)
* Go to Filters
* Click "Create New Filter"
* Type in:spam into the "Has the words" box
* Click Next Step. Ignore the warning.
* Check Mark As Read
* Check Also apply filter to x conversations below
* Click Create Filter to finish

Now, whenever spam turns up it will automatically be marked as read. It means that you'll need to manually check your spam box every few days. Maybe once a week or so, but that should make your Gmail look a little more pleasent.

Wallpapers

Whilst still on break from writing and editing (which will resume next Monday!), I've been creating wallpapers and stuff for the update to www.battleforthesolarsystem.com. They're coming along quite nicely and I hope to have them up and ready sometime in the new year. My POV-Ray skills don't seem to have abandoned me yet, so I was able to turn around some nice glass-ified versions of the main naval insignias.

I've still got the United Naval Forces insignia to do, which I'll have a pop at tomorrow or the weekend, or whenever.

I'll be offering them in 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x920 and 1920x1440. They'll be placed under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd 3.0 license.

From top to bottom: CSN Insignia, INF Insignia, Honour of the Knights, Honour of the Knights sans text, Concept cover.

www.battleforthesolarsystem.com Update

Whilst taking a break from working on Book 2, I've been updating the BATTLE FOR THE SOLAR SYSTEM website. What I've been doing is adding in new character profiles, updating others, and shuffling things around. I'm also going to update some of the graphics and offer a few more downloads. Nothing fancy, mind; just the emblems rendered in POV Ray or something like that. I would probably offer them as in a number of resolutions, from 800x600 up to 1920 x 1200. Depends on what people want.

One thing I've been thinking is that I need to be mindful of introducing a load of spoilers into the character profiles. Since they will now contain updates from the goings on from HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS, it would mean that potential readers could have much of the story ruined for them.

Maybe I'll shove in some spoiler toggles into the pages to begin with, so that visitors can opt to filter out stuff that could spoil the story.

Book Review: Two Caravans

TWO CARAVANS is a novel by Marina Lewycka, the author of A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN. The novel follows the story of several migrant workers who come to England, seeking their fortune. They all begin working in a strawberry field for a farmer, living in two caravans: one for the men and one for the women. Primarily the story centres around two Ukrainians: Andriy and Irina.

One of my favourite characters in the book was Dog - a dog. His parts of the book are written entirely in capitals, without any sort of punctuation and in very basic English. Just as one might expect a dog to think.

The book is very witty, playing on some of the naiveties of the characters and their wide eyed innocence of what they might be getting themselves into, whilst others exploit them. It's also something of an eye opener for how migrant workers can be treated how what kinds of jobs they end up doing, as well as whatever-else they have to put up with. I chuckled a number of times whilst reading it. There are also some parts in the book where I felt concerned for the well-being of the characters, such as at the hands of the callus and unsympathetic Vulk, who showed little warmth and treated the workers like cattle.

The one thing that I didn't like about the book, however, was the constant swapping of points of view and writing styles. Some of the characters points of view are written in first person, whilst others are written in third person present tense. This sometimes caused me to wonder who I was reading about and I might not fully grasp the character I was currently following until half way through the passage. In these cases Dog was an easy character to follow, owing to the quirky font and all capitals.

I also felt that the pace of the book slowed down a bit in the last 1/3 or 1/4. Whilst things were still happening, it lacked a lot of the humour and punchy excitement of the preceding pages. The ending also felt a little sudden.

Even so, it was a great read.

The Good: Funny, insightful and quite a page turner.
The Bad: The POV and writing style swaps can be a little jarring and might cause one to lose track of the characters.

Waterstone's and All That

As I had promised to do, I took a walk around the various branches of Waterstone's to see if they would be interested in stocking THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. The answer was yes, but they all then asked me to drop them an email with the relevant details. They seemed rather impressed that I had sold 85 copies since May. Well, hey... most self published books don't sell more than about 10. The average is 100 copies, a number which is skewed by the odd self published success story that will sell thousands; so I'm doing well.

Fingers crossed that they will be interested in ordering in copies.

I'm hoping to get as many branches of Waterstone's as possible stocking HOTK now, so that I there will be a good load of stores on board when it comes to the release of books 2 and 3.

Sales on Book Depository are still quite steady, too. I'm looking forward to see how they affects my sales come Christmas. Hopefully I'll hit 100 copies sold before the end of the year.

Turns out...

... that adding all those notes I had left to integrate didn't take as long as I had thought. I had about 7 or 8 items that I needed to deal with, but I found I was able to tweak them into the text rather quickly. Another readthrough is, of course, required. But I'll do that in a month's time or so.

In the meanwhile I'll get back to pounding the streets and seeing which other branches of Waterstone's are willing to stock HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. I have about 3 or 4 branches left on my list that I wish to visit, so we'll see what happens.

Book 2 Finished

This morning I finished the re-draft and re-edit of BFTSS:Book 2. There are still a few notes to add and some chapters that need to be revisited, but for the most part the book is done.

The word count at this stage clocks in at 141,500.

Over the next couple of days I will make a few additions from a handful of notes that I still have, but these will be very quick jobs that will only take a few hours at most to complete.

Likely the book will need another edit, but it's a relief to come to the end of this for now. I first started writing the second book in the series directly after the first and so I re-write was badly needed. I feel that this book is far better written than the previous and far more than a worthy sequel to HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. I will probably have to shorten it, though.

Tomorrow I'll start on adding the bits that need to be added, but for now I can say I'm done.

Oh... and that cover is still fake.


BFTSS:Book Two Progress (100%)

Book Depository

In recent days I've noticed that the HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS' sales rank on the Book Depository has been rising steadily. To be quite honest I'm not actually sure whether its just their system doing something funny - books being added and deleted and therefore shuffling my novel's rank about a bit. There again, I doubt it would be as extreme as it is.

(click to embiggen)

Today it jumped up nearly 13,000 places, with the days before that leaping a few thousand, too. I don't have any solid sales figures on hand, since they will only appear whenever Lulu decides that they're going to tell me. With luck the constant jumping about means that people are actively buying the book. I would have expected to see a little bit of a rise in traffic to the novel's official website in that case, but it has remained constant so far.

We'll see. Fingers crossed I'll hit 100 copies sold by Christmas.

(The image? Yes, I've written some tools that automatically send me sales data and stuff like that. Very, very useless and very, very geeky. But by now you probably expected that of me anyway!).

Book 2 Progress Update

Yesterday I finished reading through the 22nd chapter of book 2. It's another chapter that will need to be revisited to ensure that it reads correctly and that all the important details have been dealt with and made made appropriately clear.

I now only have 5 more chapters and 50 or so pages of A4 to read through before this re-draft is finished. After that I'll chop, revise and re-edit some more and mark off chapters that are currently as good as they're going to be able to be made.

I'm also planning on adding a glossary to this book, something that, in hindsight, would have been useful for the first. Still, one day I may be given a chance to write a Second Edition of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. That would be a good day.


BFTSS:Book Two Progress (81%)

The Rats and the Ruling Sea Signing Event

Last night I attended the RATS AND THE RULING SEA signing event at Forbidden Planet, in London. There I got to meet Robert V.S. Redick, the author. I had spoken to Rob on Facebook a number of times, but had neither met him in real life, nor been to any book signings before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect.

I actually ended up having a great evening. It was an absolute pleasure to meet Rob, who I found was a very approachable, chatty and genuine person. Before attending the event I'd actually ordered a copy of his book off Amazon, but since Rob had come over from America (where he lives) to do the advance signings in London, I decided I wanted one there. I'm now the proud owner of my very own copy of RATS AND THE RULING SEA, signed and with me a week before the actual release date! I was thrilled!

I also met Stephen Deas, author of THE ADAMANTINE PALACE, and his wife Michaela, both of whom were just as charming and nice to chat to. Michaela was exceptionally bubbly!

As well as the writers, I also met Mark and Liz De Jager, who run a blog called My Favourite Books. Again, thoroughly nice people to chat to and very encouraging about my own writing and publishing efforts. They didn't hang around for too long after the event, though - they had tickets for the London premier of THE ROAD. Can't say I blamed them wanting to hurry along to that!

After the signing we went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant, where we had Mexican tapas, beers and chatted about writing, inspiration and all that. I was very interested to hear Stephen Deas' own experiences with writing and publishing. I will certainly be looking into picking up a copy of his novel at some point in the future.

So, all in all I had a great time... and have a personalized signed copy of RATS to look forward to, too.

Re-stocking

Following on from the recent out out stocks, the Brighton and Canary Wharf branches of Waterstone's each received new stock of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. I'll be getting around to signing these copies in the near future.

Nice to see that it appears the stocking issue at Waterstone's is finally getting resolved. Only two more stores left to deal with: Piccadilly Circus and High Holborn.

Amazon Pricing

Looks like Amazon.co.uk have dropped the price of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS to compete with Book Depository. You can now save 10% on the cover price at both stores (so, £8.94 now)! Excellent!

Brighton Waterstone's

I just noticed this morning that the Brighton branch of Waterstone's has sold out of THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. Very pleased with that. Hopefully they'll get some more stock in soon, so I can go in there and sign them. With Christmas coming up a signed book with make a nice present.

I'll keep people notified as to when stock returns. There are still copies available in a number of other Waterstone's branches (8).

9,000 words

That's the length of Chapter 19, The Littlest Things, from Book 2 that I just finished reading and going over. It's clearly too long at that length, so I'll have to find ways of cutting it back. From here on out the chapters become a lot shorter, with one of them being a little more than about 1000 words.

There are 8 chapters left to go over, so it's likely I will finish going over this re-draft by the end of October as I planned.

Right. I'm going to go for a run.


BFTSS:Book Two Progress (70%)

More Signed Copies

I was able to sign more copies of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS this morning. It looks like Waterstone's might slowly be getting back to normal, with Ladenhall Market (close to Liverpool Street and therefore in the heart of the City) have just received their stock of the novel.

I'm a little gutted it hadn't happened sooner, though, since I imagine the novels would have sold very quickly whilst I was in the press all those weeks ago. Certainly it helped to sell the copies in Brighton and a number of other places.

Still, I'll keep signing and promoting them as much as possible.

16 Chapters Done

This afternoon I finished reading through Chapter #16 (currently entitled To Sleep), of Book 2. Like in a few places in the novel, this one contains a flashback sequence, to what happened to the Knights immediately after the end of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. Hopefully this chapter will allow people to get a bit more insight into the characters and what they've recently been through.

Although I'm not disclosing a lot of details about Book 2 right now, what I will say is that it will open 6 months after the end of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS, and will take place over a period of 48 hours or so. So, not the weeks and months that the first did.

I now only have 11 chapters to read through, one of which is very short indeed - it's barely two pages. I expect I will certainly have finished the read-through within the next two weeks. After that I'll tidy up a few bits and pieces and then get back to focusing on promoting HOTK.


BFTSS:Book Two Progress (59%)

Sales Update

I got my latest sales stats this morning: 85 sold. Approaching that magic 100. Would be nice to get some more reviews, though. Still working on finding new and interesting ways to increase the trilogy's visibility, too.

The Curious Case of the missing Amazon Reviews

For the last few months had three reviews of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS up on Amazon.co.uk. The other day they completely vanished! I have no idea why or where they've gone. It's possible to visit the reviews individually if you have the link, but otherwise they are nowhere to be seen.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Honour-Knights-Stephen-Sweeney/dp/0955856108/

Does this happen often? What can I do? Anyone out there know?

UPDATE - It actually looks like its affected a few other things. A very popular fantasy book, THE PAINTED MAN, used to have over 150 reviews. It now doesn't have any either..!

Progress and stuff like that

I found out the other day that the Waterstone's in Trafalgar Square finally got in copies of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS. How long has that taken..? Hmmmmm, about two months now; maybe longer. Still I popped in and signed them. I saw as well that the Greenwich branch of Waterstone's only has one copy left themselves, which is nice. It's also nice that they put it on the shelf, facing out. I'm a real stickler for making sure that gets done; especially if it has the "Signed by the Author at Waterstone's" sticker on it.

Still, it's nice to see that they are slowly trickling back into the system. Sadly, that still leaves 5 other stores with orders placed that are waiting to be fulfilled: Brighton, Ladenhall, Piccadilly, Holborne and Canary Wharf. Oh well, hopefully it'll get sorted by Christmas time. A signed copy of a book would make an awesome Christmas present for some.

Sales of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS are still good, however, and I'll be looking into new ways of increasing the book's exposure next year. I've got a trick up my sleeve, but I'll keep it there for the moment and play it when the time comes. Whether it makes any difference or not... well, it'll get people talking.

Book 2 continues to go quite well. I've realised now that parts of it are overwritten (well, at 138,500 words that sort of goes without saying). I suspect my read-through will conclude before the end of the month, I'll take a short break and then go in and tweak and chop the bits that I don't like.

Just under halfway there, now.


BFTSS:Book Two Progress (48%)

Book 2 Update

This weekend I covered off the three chapters I had aimed to do, reading through one per day on Friday, Saturday and today. One thing that struck me today whilst I was reading it was being a little shocked at the brutality that I had inserted into a torture sequence that I had written.

I've looked at it and wondered if I've taken things a little bit too far. It's not HOSTEL or SAW type torture - people aren't losing limbs and it certainly doesn't fall into the "torture porn" category of things - but I pondered if I should tone it down.

Problem is that the torment is being inflicted by the story's main antagonists, so I have to consider that editing it down might soften the impact that it otherwise seeks to deliver. I sort of feel stuck between a hard place and a rock, right now.

I'll see how the beta readers feel about it, I guess.


BFTSS:Book Two Progress (37%)


(also - why are my progress bars so big in Blogger? My HTML is fine. Is there a minimum height for tables specified some place?)

Proof copy of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS available for review

After a copy of HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS for review? I have a proof copy sitting on my shelf that is available to a science fiction blog / website as a review copy. As a proof this does still contain a number of typos, but the crux of the story is intact (I guess regular book reviewers are largely used to this, though).

Ideally I'm looking for someone who lives in England (or Ireland, Wales or Scotland), as I can't guarantee that posting it abroad would permit it to arrive in good condition. However, exceptions can of course be made.

If you're a reviewer or contributor to a [modestly] popular science fiction blog / magazine, etc. then get in touch and let me know. You need not read it immediately, of course; I understand that a lot of reviewers are drowning books.

Here is a link to three sample chapters:

http://www.battleforthesolarsystem.com/download/knights-3-chapter-preview.pdf

Also, sorry to be rude, but please don't contact me if you're just after a free copy of the book.

Please email stephen.j.sweeney@gmail.com with details.

Book 2 Progress Update

I recently finished reading over two more chapters, bringing my read-through progress to just over a quarter of the way there. The chapter I just read - chapter 7 - feels too long, however. Likely it'll be something that is dealt a heavy blow on the chopping block when it comes to the final editing.

With any luck I should be able to get through another 3 chapters or so over by the end of the weekend.

BFTSS:Book Two Progress (26%)