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Late yesterday afternoon, I received an email from Ron Miller, the Hugo award-winning artist who favorably reviewed my first novel. I'd asked him for a blurb and he replied to my request with an email that said "I liked your book so much I did the cover."
To which I replied "wow!" followed by "thank you!" Ron and Eric Reynolds, my editor, are still tweaking the text placement, so I'm not going to show it to you yet, but consider me happy.
In other news, I attended my writer's workshop last night. We didn't have much business to conduct (well, none, in truth) so we decided to adjourn early and gave ourselves permission to go home and write. Which I did!
I've not been deliberately slow-walking this novel, but there were several plot points that I hadn't resolved, which were slowing me down. One of those points fell into place last night on the drive home from the workshop, specifically, fire control.
A warship needs weapons. But a weapon that you can't effectively aim is worse then useless - it's excess weight that could be budgeted for armor or speed. Now, in the "let's blast away at point-blank range 'cause it's visually easy" world of Star Wars and Star Trek, fire control consists of "look out the window."
But here in (simulated) reality, where I'm shooting at thousand-kilometer ranges and where I'll need to intercept a rather small missile fired from that range, "look out the window" won't cut it. Then I remembered that in The Mars Run the bad guys (more accurately, the government backing them) had a real warship. Admittedly the warship was an elderly piece-of-junk sold for scrapping, but it was built by the Chinese military.
So, the fix was that the fire control software was ported to an ex-pirate ship that Space Rescue now has their hands on. Problem solved.
I love it when a plan comes together :-)
To which I replied "wow!" followed by "thank you!" Ron and Eric Reynolds, my editor, are still tweaking the text placement, so I'm not going to show it to you yet, but consider me happy.
In other news, I attended my writer's workshop last night. We didn't have much business to conduct (well, none, in truth) so we decided to adjourn early and gave ourselves permission to go home and write. Which I did!
I've not been deliberately slow-walking this novel, but there were several plot points that I hadn't resolved, which were slowing me down. One of those points fell into place last night on the drive home from the workshop, specifically, fire control.
A warship needs weapons. But a weapon that you can't effectively aim is worse then useless - it's excess weight that could be budgeted for armor or speed. Now, in the "let's blast away at point-blank range 'cause it's visually easy" world of Star Wars and Star Trek, fire control consists of "look out the window."
But here in (simulated) reality, where I'm shooting at thousand-kilometer ranges and where I'll need to intercept a rather small missile fired from that range, "look out the window" won't cut it. Then I remembered that in The Mars Run the bad guys (more accurately, the government backing them) had a real warship. Admittedly the warship was an elderly piece-of-junk sold for scrapping, but it was built by the Chinese military.
So, the fix was that the fire control software was ported to an ex-pirate ship that Space Rescue now has their hands on. Problem solved.
I love it when a plan comes together :-)
