Wrath of Empire

Yes, it’s been a year since I last posted. I don’t know why, I guess I just ran out of things to say.

The blogging world used to be a vibrant community, and it still is around those blogs with a sizable established following, but so many of the bloggers I used to follow – and who used to visit The Bald Patch – have fallen quiet over the years. I found trying to post on a regular basis was a game of diminishing returns.

However, today I do have something to say, so I’ve come out of hibernation.

A new novel, Wrath of Empire, is now out there in the usual range of e-book formats. At the moment it’s at an introductory price of $0.99. The paperback will follow once I’ve received and approved the proof copy.

Wrath of Empire is a prequel to Ghosts of Innocence, and follows the catastrophic events that lead up to Shayla’s mission of revenge.

The Emperor wants peace between warring Families on rival worlds. His brother sees peace treaties as weakness; he aims to seize the throne and rule by strength. And then there’s Chalwen, bodyguard to the Emperor’s nine-year-old son, heir to the throne.

Chalwen takes professional paranoia to extremes, so when she suspects treachery inside the palace her superiors dismiss her warnings. Then the Emperor is assassinated. People are angry, looking for a villain, and all evidence points to one of the rival Families. Amid riots and military clashes, the young heir and his ambitious uncle fight for the throne.

Chalwen must protect the youngster while solving the Emperor’s murder to defuse the conflict. But the uncle has powerful supporters opposing Chalwen’s every move. Throw in a deranged arms dealer keen to profit from the chaos, and full scale interstellar war seems unavoidable.

Artwork for sale

Off and on over the years, I’ve looked into ways to make my artwork available as posters. After sitting on the fence for a while, I’ve finally opened a store on Zazzle and started uploading a handful of more recent paintings.

I’m still finding my way around Zazzle. The website is ... let’s be restrained and say ... not very friendly.

Sure, it all looks easy enough, but the site seems to go out of its way to make it hard to tell what you’re actually doing, and gives no confidence that you’ve managed to do what you wanted to do. It’s taking a while to figure out some of the quirks, like clicking on “My products” gives different information depending on which part of the site you just came from. And I just created a collection to group all my posters together, and clicking on “Collections” in the menu bar shows the collection I just created, but clicking the same thing from the navigator panel says I don’t have any. Contradictory and confusing as heck!

Oh well, I have started off by creating some posters, all in the region of 40cm by 50cm to 60cm depending on the width to height ratio of the original. That’s 16” by 20” to 24” if you’re still working in Imperial units.

It’s still a work in progress, but you can find my store here:

https://www.zazzle.ca/store/ian_s_bott/products

May Day

Today is May Day. It’s a public holiday in Britain, not so here in Canada but I’m not complaining because we still enjoy more holidays during the course of the year than we used to back there.

May Day is also our wedding anniversary – our 30^th this year, so it’s a big milestone.

We don’t do much by way of celebrations these days ... birthdays, anniversaries are all low key ... but it’s still a special day all the same.

Big bouquet of flowers in the living room. A special steak dinner this evening. But meanwhile Ali and Matthew are outside making the most of the sunshine today. They cleaned down the deck this morning and are busy assembling the barbecue she bought last weekend as our anniversary present.

Later on this month we’ll get a weekend away, just the two of us. That’s about as extreme as it gets :)

Happy May Day.

Painting again

I’ve gone for long spells before without completing a painting. In recent years, I’ve done several but they’ve all been specifically for book covers, so I’ve had a clear motivation and timetable to work to, and that felt very different from painting for pleasure.

Now, for the first time in over twenty years, I’ve taken up my paintbrush again for pure pleasure and actually crossed the finish line. I’ve started several in that time, but not completed. That’s nothing unusual ... I have many more unfinished works in my portfolio that finished.

This diversion of energy felt right, now that my first draft of the latest novel is written and working through months of critiques. Painting seemed to complement the critiquing activity.

Even so, the subject was actually inspired by a setting in Wrath of Empire. So here is Grand Duke Ivan’s retreat: Greyspire:

 

 

You can get a closer look on my website here:

https://www.iansbott.com/artwork-greyspire 

Weekend Writing Warriors - responsibilities

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

 

 

Continuing with a scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Commander Gregor Pavlenko is overseeing maintenance on a giant plasma cannon on board battleship Wrath of Empire. Last week ended with his lieutenant saying: “You always get that faraway look in your eyes.” She grinned. “It’s kinda cute, you know.”

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“There’s nothing cute about taking your responsibility seriously.” He glanced once more at the dancing lights of the dashboard. Progress was good, but they’d be at it for hours yet.

Gregor swiveled in his seat and gazed across the room to where a small army of intruders crawled behind and under his familiar battle consoles, wrestling a snake pit of wiring harnesses out from open floor panels and knitting them into the fabric of his world. In some sense, he felt violated, but he brushed off the feeling. This was the empire’s new toy. New levels of automation to bring a clinical calculation to battle decisions. Progress. He’d better get used to it.

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ... 

Following the line of his gaze, Una said, “The techs report they’re close to finished hooking their control lines in.”

“So,” Gregor whispered, “it’ll have its finger on the trigger for real this time.”

“With loads of safeties and aborts in between.” Una’s voice was light, but the set of her shoulders said otherwise.

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Weekend Writing Warriors – it’s kinda cute

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing with a scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Commander Gregor Pavlenko is overseeing maintenance on a giant plasma cannon on board battleship Wrath of Empire.

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Gregor settled into his seat and nodded thanks as an orderly placed a cup of unsweetened tea on the desk to one side. He sipped the bitter brew and cleared his mind, then turned his attention to the spread of consoles that surrounded his command post.

One by one, stations reported in. Maintenance crews cleaned pipes and nozzles, reattached wires the width of human hairs and jumper cables thicker than his forearm, replaced worn parts, closed hatches and tightened fastenings.

The plasma cannon was ancient technology, and so simple in concept—rip apart atoms of feedstock to create a star-hot plasma, and belch it out in magnetically-confined parcels of destruction—yet so complex to execute. It had been mastered by the navies of the six Families and used by many Freeworlds and brigand outworlds.

Even after all these millennia it remained the most powerful weapon in regular use. Technically, it ranked second place to the quark bomb, but nobody counted that. Attempts to assemble quark bombs had a ninety percent failure rate, along with lost lives and irradiated continents. They were not practical weapons of war.

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ...

The plasma cannon was meek in comparison, but controlling a high grade plasma and directing it in a tight beam was still tricky. It still needed a small industrial city’s worth of power generation, containment systems, cooling systems, and all the attendant controls and sensors.

As a technology, it was commonplace, but only the Skamensis navy had successfully scaled it up to this level.

“You’ve been to see Violet again, haven’t you?” Lieutenant Una Spelze, Gregor’s most senior weapons specialist, plonked herself down at the next station.

He gave a non-committal grunt.

“You always get that faraway look in your eyes.” She grinned. “It’s kinda cute, you know.”

 

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Just a reminder, I am looking for one or two people to act as alpha readers. This would be for a full read through the rough draft to give feedback on the big picture. Does the plot hang together, how do the characters come across, does the story flow and reach a satisfying conclusion ... that kind of thing.

I’m happy to reciprocate if you’ve got work that you’d like an independent read through.

If you’re interested, send me an email (if you have my email address) or reach me through the contact page on my website.

Weekend Writing Warriors – overkill

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing with a scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Commander Gregor Pavlenko is overseeing maintenance on a giant plasma cannon on board battleship Wrath of Empire.

 

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There was no practical need for Gregor to be here. In fact, he could watch progress on the overhaul far better from his station in the operations room, but from time to time he needed to see the weapon up close. Watching people crawling like ants over its surface brought home the true size of his responsibility. This was military overkill on an arrogant scale. No-one should hold such power without a generous dose of humility and fear. In his five years as Wrath of Empire’s senior weapons engineer, he’d never yet had to point it at anything other than military targets. He prayed, as he did every time he reported for duty, that he never would.

The moment of introspection passed. He steadied himself against the stanchion and pushed off towards the nearest airlock. Outside the weapon bay, and once more in the ship’s artificial gravity, he shrugged on a jacket against the relative chill and headed back to the twilight world of the combat operations room.

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