Excerpt

    A group of ships were flying in outer space, a place where sound made no sense and speed was difficult to judge. Inside the bridge of a destroyer escort, Sterling Presley was sitting in front of a computer. Despite the military-cut brown hair, he resembled nothing of a stereotypical soldier. His slim figure could be a little stronger. The brown eyes were too calm and solitary to hold patriotism. His skin wasn’t rough enough to match the cruelty of war. If he weren’t wearing a uniform, he would have looked like a junior college professor.

    Weird … He confirmed his suspicion and closed the image on the computer. The recent Battle of the Stony Band was considered a victory, their first victory since the war spread to this system eight years ago, but something about that battle wasn’t right.

    He picked up a phone from the table and said a few words. A moment later an officer appeared at the door. “Sir?”

    “Get ready for unloading at Turning Point Station.” Sterling left his desk and stopped in front of a window. Nothing existed outside, except lights from distant stars. The small planet RA-5 was not distinguishable yet from its background.

     “Unloading?” The officer hesitated. “Sir, I thought we were heading to the fortress.”

    “We are, but …” Sterling wasn’t sure how to explain it. To him, logic and reasoning were most meaningful when one studied a case de facto; at the front, everything should yield to intuitions. Or, things that appeared like intuitions but were outcomes of one’s subconscious logic and reasoning.

      “Just do what I said.” 

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Book Review: Medieval Swordsmanship – Illustrated Methods and Techniques

Rating: 5/5 stars

I don’t usually read about martial arts except when I need to do research for my novels. The only other work I’ve read on a similar topic was a book about boxing, which contained about 10% of the information you can find here. To me, this book is amazing. It’s not something you can learn by going to a school for a training class. It requires studying tons of historical records, pretty much anything that’s remotely related to Medieval swordfights, because, unlike Asian martial-art experts, Medieval fighters did not have the habit or discipline to create detailed documentation. A good comprehension of the social background is also critical for the study.

The illustrations are very clear. Sometimes for a basic posture more than one figure are presented from different angles. Even a layman like me found no problem understanding the principles. The writing is also very good, unlike those scientific papers that merely present facts in a boring way. Font sizes, layouts, everything is reader friendly. This is a classic and I’d like to thank the author for taking all the efforts to do this!

Truth about the Kindle Countdown Deals

Since Amazon launched the new Kindle Countdown Deals for KDP Select members in late October, indie authors seem to have various degrees of success. Some sold an astronomical number, some none. Below is what I’ve figured out about this program based on recent experience.

If you go to the Kindle Countdown Deals page, you’ll see somewhere around 2,800 titles. And if you choose, for example, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Category, there are 377 titles for the moment arranged on 24 pages. Pay specific attention to the “Sort by” option. Although you can choose different sorting algorithms, readers normally go with the default, with is “New and Popular”. I don’t have the exact formula, but I’ve heard that the popularity of a book is not determined by the current rank, but by the amount of books sold in the past 30 days, with a weighing factor of the book’s price.

I’m not saying that visibility determines everything, but if a book is listed on the 5th page, there is no way you can go to that page directly without browsing through the previous pages (you can jump to the second or the third). A title listed on the first page can have 10 times more sales than a title listed on the second page, and who would bother to explore the later pages except the author himself? However---I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is what happens---the rank of a book on this list is determined (and remains fixed!) by the popularity before the book enters the Countdown. Let me give you an example.

I first ran a Countdown with my science fiction, The Starlight Fortress, during the week of Nov 3. Since the book was selling very well in October, it appeared on the second page of the Sci-fi & fantasy category, even though there were 34 pages at that time, and stayed there for the entire week. Consequently, I sold 26 copies of the book with only 6 customer reviews and no extra promotions. Yesterday I started my second Countdown. Because I only sold two copies in the past 30 days, my book appeared on the 5^th page. Although I have other paid promotions yesterday and today, and have already sold 11 copies by far, the book keeps falling in the Sci-fi & fantasy list, making room for new entries that have much lower ranks but were presumably selling better before they entered. There are still several days to go, but I can predict that once the effects of my paid promotions fade away, the Countdown won’t work alone.

So, here is the logic. Let’s say we have Book A, which hasn’t been selling well at a regular price; after it entered the Countdown, for some reason, it is doing well. Then here comes Book B, which has been selling but is currently ranked lower than A. Amazon does not want to put B after A, because B is considered a more promising title. In other words, A has already been deemed as an inferior title at the time it entered, and they do not want the performance of the Countdown to affect the performance of the Countdown (is this clear?). We have to admit that doing so will likely maximize Amazon’s profits. After all, it’s an online retailer, not an author-nurture program.

In summary, if your book hasn’t been doing well on a regular basis, you shouldn’t expect too much with the Countdown, unless you pair it with other promotions.

On Rewriting

What is the so-called voice? The one thing that easily distinguishes a writer and makes him memorable, the one thing itself being so difficult to define and comprehend. Most writers believe they cannot teach how to find or create a unique voice, but one should be able to find his voice through writing constantly and writing well. According to my experience, voice shows up most frequently during rewriting. This is because, in the first draft, we are too engaged in developing the story and the characters, too eager to deliver our messages, too awed by all the possibilities, or too desperate to put something on a blank page.

This is why a good writer may not be a good speaker (most writers are actually shy and nervous when speaking to the public). Speech is improvisatory and requires different skills. To me, writing is not a linear process; it has both feedforward and feedback stages. Sometimes I’m unable to write a sentence without knowing how to write the following chapters. Same thing with dialogue. Now it is commonly accepted that good dialogue should both characterize the speaker and advance the plot. If it fails to characterize, it is “info dumping”. If it doesn’t advance the plot, well, let’s just say there are better ways to do it. However, more than often, it is difficult to achieve both goals in the first draft.

Never fall in love with our first drafts. We may have rehearsed some of the sentences so many times that they have become reality to us, but keep this in mind: few people prefer reading accounts of reality to fiction. Even for historical books that are supposed to accurately relate the past, great efforts have been made in searching the right way to present it. Reality doesn’t need to make sense; fiction does. Things cannot happen out of the blue in a novel, although that’s how things happen in real life. We need to put foreshadow earlier on. Readers need to build expectations, so that they can be either satisfied or misled. That’s what keeps them reading. Sometimes we plant those seeds subconsciously without knowing their purposes until a hundred pages later; sometimes we do need to go back and forth to add them in. There should be no irrelevant information in the dialogue, no random person being paid much attention. These are all to be fixed through rewriting.

Note that I didn’t say revising. I meant rewriting, which includes, but is not limited to, reevaluating the theme and its realization, reconstructing the whole narration, combining or deleting characters. It sometimes means throwing away hundreds of pages. I once read about a writer who would finish the first draft and toss it completely before beginning the rewriting. Many of us don’t have the courage!

I can only imagine how many potential masterpieces have been abandoned in the beginning because the (novice) writer felt he/she wrote something crappy and meaningless. Experienced writers know that a first draft is allowed to be crappy, and it may appear meaningless before going through the nonlinear process I mentioned above. Experienced writers are even happy with a crappy first draft, knowing that this will only add to the pleasure later on when they turn it into a shining piece. In fact, if you happen to write a brilliant first chapter the first time, it can be a bad thing, because in the following chapters you might try too hard to live up to the standard you’ve just set for yourself, or you might be too afraid to explore all the possibilities just to keep the beginning.

Once we are satisfied with the rewrite, we can start revising it. I would suggest refraining from fiddling with it too many times, because doing so may hurt the voice. Once there was a writer who posted a paragraph on a forum, and other writers tried to help him polish it. After a few posts I said, keep your original. It reads like a stranger breaking into your house with a dead wolf on his back, while the revisions are like salesmen gently knocking on the door (unfortunately he didn’t get my metaphor). Writing is not to find the best word from a thesaurus, or to construct the perfect grammar. A language can be bent to the extend that a little more pressure may have it crushed. Someone said, art is to know what to keep and what to delete. We can add, it is also to know when to stop.