Spinward Fringe Awakening: The Final Edit Is Complete

I have to admit, going through Awakening again after not so much as touching it for months was a lot of fun. There were amusing and dramatic moments in this part of the Spinward Fringe series and I enjoyed giving it one final edit.

There was a little cleanup to do, I'll admit, but I benefited a great deal from the look back. As the sort of middle child in the Spinward Fringe Series (at least for now), it got a little neglected. After reading it over again I couldn't help realizing how important some of the events in here are and how well it leads into the next book, Triton.

Now that this final polish is done I've updated all the versions available (MobiPocket, Lulu.com, and the upcoming Amazon.com versions), and once more I can reassure you that there were no plot changes made. The decisions I made the first time were the right ones, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed reading this book over again.

So, update your readers (if you use MobiPocket), by revisiting your online library and give it a read if you have the inclination. You don't have to read it over again, however, as I said before, most of the changes were gramattical and cosmetic. These final edits are being performed so I'll be ready for Amazon.com in January and so I can get a refresher before finishing Spinward Fringe Frontline.

Now I move on to edit Spinward Fringe Triton, the largest and most significant Spinward Fringe book so far. I get the feeling I'm about to get sucked in all over again and I love it.

RL

Spinward Fringe Resurrection: The Final Edit Is Complete

Spinward Fringe Resurrection: The Final Edit Is Complete

Spinward Fringe Resurrection was a much closer match to the science fiction novel I dreamt of writing a little over a year ago, and after running it through the final edit I have to say that the quick character development, rich colour I found in the dialogue was surprising. As with the First Light Chronicles Omnibus I didn't make any plot changes, so no one has to go back and re-read Resurrection.


This fresh final edit is really just a cleanup and a chance for me to look back before going forward. The foundation of the Spinward Fringe series is set in this and the following two books; Awakening and Triton. So far I think the three books are strong enough to support another six, and for those of you who have followed authors before for many many books without conclusion, this isn't the kind of series that completely closes off.


I actually plan to leave something open at the end of every book, especially when most of the plotlines are resolved. The Spinward Fringe series will never be tied up in a neat set of three, six or nine books unless people stop reading them, and as it stands more people are buying the most recent book; Triton. That tells me that there's still an interest, so the fourth Spinward Fringe book; Frontline is more than half finished and there are plans for a fifth as well as a sixth. If I do my job well people will keep following me on this journey and they'll tell their friends about it.


So far, after doing the final edit on Spinward Fringe Resurrection I can tell you that there are so many stories to tell, so many interesting things for these characters to do while they survive in my imagination and on the page that this series could go on for thirty books. I do not exaggerate. Consider that in the space of one year I was able to write six novellas in this universe and it feels like the whole year just whipped by.


I'll post a little more about what I'm thinking going forward once I've finished the final edit of Spinward Fringe Awakening, but until then I thank you for your support and encourage you to keep spreading the word, sharing my work and enjoying the adventure.


RL


All I have done is nothing compared to what I intend to do.

Twelve Months and Twelve Days Later: The First Light Chronicles Omnibus

A while ago I promised that there would be an Afterword added to the First Light Omnibus. It's a little late, but after four drafts I've decided on which one to include. The Afterword is called Twelve Months and Twelve Days Later, An Afterword by Randolph Lalonde. The significance of the title rests in the fact that I started writing Science Fiction twelve months and twelve days before the final edit of the First Light Chronicles was complete and the afterword was added. On January 1, 2008, this journey began as I wrote the first chapter of Freeground. For more details on that journey and the two novellas that followed you'll have to read the afterword, available to anyone who has a copy of the Omnibus in their MobiPocket library or who orders a printed copy of the book.

As I completed the editing and polishing work on the First Light Chronicles Omnibus I was happy to place the Afterword right at the end. Sadly, only people who own the Mobipocket rights to a copy of the book and people who purchase a printed copy from Lulu.com or Amazon.com in the future will have access to it.

Polishing the three books in the Omnibus was a great look back, and now that it's all finished I've updated the individual novellas as well; Freeground, Limbo and Starfree Port. The afterword isn't included in any of those volumes, however.

Now I'm moving on to the Spinward Fringe Series, it's about time I finish taking a look back before taking a great big step forward and finishing the next novel in the series: Spinward Fringe Frontline. This whole review process takes time, and I thank you for your patience with reassurances that taking a look back is crucial to doing a good job on the next two books.

This is a great universe to write in, you're fantastic people to write for and after taking this look back I'm ready to push forward and expand it once more.

So, if you've got a copy of the First Light Chronicles Omnibus in your MobiPocket Library, go ahead and update it. Even if you don't plan to read the whole thing over again (since I didn't change any plot points, you really don't have to), you might want to take a look at the new Afterword.

Thank you for reading along, the road ahead promises to be longer and more interesting than the one behind.

RL

The First Light Chronicles Omnibus: Final Edit Complete!

Here are the facts:

When I started writing this series at the beginning of 2008 it had been almost three years since I had done work on long fiction.

I was more of a technical writer, every sentence had a period and thoughts were rigidly separated.

I didn't expect anyone else to enjoy the material I turned out for practice at the beginning of the year (First Light Chronicles Omnibus), but I had great fun doing it.

Here's what happened:

I loved the storylines that sprung out of the three novellas contained within the Omnibus so much that I started the unlimited series; Spinward Fringe. To my surprise people enjoyed the First Light Chronicles so much that they wanted more and enjoyed Resurrection, Awakening and Triton.

So MobiPocket took me on as an independent publisher and people started reading these high technology science fiction novellas on their blackberries, other cellphones, ebook readers and laptops. Now that's a happy irony! These books are perfectly suited to small devices as far as I'm concerned. The books have sold quite well for something available mostly on a fringe market (eBooks are still quite unpopular compared to the printed, tree wasting kind), and I'm so happy to have an audience for more Sinward Fringe novellas/novels so I can easily justify more novellas and novels.

The problem:

It had been almost a year to the day since I started writing this series and I needed a refresher. I remembered what happened in the First Light Chronicles, don't get me wrong, but I needed to go through the books once more to clear up some vagaries and make sure I wasn't leaving any minor plot strands dangling loose.

Even though my editor has been through the First Light Chronicles, I also wanted to make sure that there weren't any rough edges left. You know, sentences and paragraphs that were correct, but not smooth. So, another read through / edit was required before I moved on.

The result:

I've enjoyed re-reading the First Light Chronicles, and yes, there were a few squarish sentences and points that needed a little more explanation. I'm happy to say that those have been all rounded out and expanded. Have there been major changes? No! The worst thing I could do is go back and make sweeping (or minor), plot changes that would chance the universe and stories I've already told. The edits I made were actually quite minor, and I can honestly say that I've done everything I wanted with these books.

The Future:

I'm going to take this week to revisit the Spinward Fringe Series; Resurrection, Awakening and Triton. I know Resurrection needs some polish and there are some details I absolutely need to have straight before I go on and finish my work on Spinward Fringe Frontline.

About Fronline:

Spinward Fringe Fronline, simply put, takes all the charm, excitement, characterization and plot craft that you've seen in the First Light Chronicles and the Spinward Fringe series thus far and draws from it. Everything that was exciting and compelling about those novellas (all six of them), is getting pressed into this book just so I can tell the story contained in Frontline properly. I'm not finished, I actually had to take a break at page 166 so I could take this backwards look then make the next mighty leap forward.

I'm hoping to have Spinward Fringe Fronline (the seventh book), completed by Christmas, but if I miss my date it'll be on MobiPocket in January 2009. It's been a great year, and reviewing it this way is a fantastic method of preparing to write in the next.

Amazon.com?

After all that's finished I'll be sending all the books to Amazon.com, where they'll offer copies of the printed book for sale. They're going to use their own presses to print copies as people order them and apply the same specials / shipping savings to my books as they do to everything else they offer on their site. Everyone will finally have a good, trustworthy, well known online store to order printed books from, maybe even in the UK!

So stay tuned, there's more Spinward Fringe news to come!

RL

Oh, about the Afterword that will be added to the First Light Chronicles Omnibus; it's with my Editor and THAT will be out before Christmas. I know, it's not much compared to another Spinward Fringe Novel, but it's the best I can do at the moment, unless someone manages to add an hour or two to our restrictive 24 hour days...

Books by Randolph Lalonde: Six Steps Back To Take Six More Foreward

The First Light Chronicles Omnibus has spent over two months in the top spot on the MobiPocket Science Fiction section. That's huge for me, it's exposed this book to hundreds of people, and every few days I get an eMail from someone whose enjoyed it and moved on to Spinward Fringe. I couldn't be happier that people enjoying my work, especially since I want little more than to entertain people for a living. I'm so very close to living that dream, to continuing my efforts full time.

That's why I'm taking a short break from working on Spinward Fringe Frontline (I know, that's not what you want to hear), to look over all the previous books and ensure that they're exactly the quality and style I need them to be before going forward into 2009. No plot points will be changed during this final edit. Frontline is still on track to be finished by the end of the year, regardless of this break, but looking back before going forward is especially important at this point, partially to ensure the quality of the plot and characterization in the new book and partially because everything will be submitted to an Amazon.com subsidiary company so all the books will be available in print for competitive cover price early in 2009.

2008 was an amazing year for me. On January 1, 2008 I started writing an unnamed science fiction novella, and eleven months later I'm working on my seventh. A few hundred people have found my work and find real enjoyment in it. There are so many possibilities from here, and there are projects under way that involve the Spinward Fringe Series that I still can't talk about.

For the few out there who heard that our family just suffered a loss and there were some personal issues, I'm very happy to reassure you that the storm is over and everyone is going to be fine. I'm back to work and we're all set to have a great couple weeks leading up to the holiday season. My editor is also very, very anxious to dig into Spinward Fringe Frontline, so you can trust there will be no delays there!

Thank you all for the bounty of support during 2008, things are looking fantastic for 2009!

First Light Chronicles: Starfree Port

The first draft is finished.

I'm starting on the second draft and as I do so it's pretty plain that this book has gone from novella to novel. The only other thing I can tell you about the story is that there's an ending.

Does that mean that it's the end of the First Light Chronicles? No.

From the beginning I wrote this series just like I would a television show. The first book, Freeground, was written like a television pilot. The second, Limbo, was written like a pair of episodes and if you read the book with that in mind you can even pick out where one episode ends and the second begins. The third book, Starfree Port, is written like three episodes. Put all three books together and you get a six part mini-series. Will I redraft all three into teleplays some day? Almost certainly, but only after I finish all the other books in the hopper (looks to the right of this post at the list of books to come...).

My point is that the third installment of the series; Starfree Port, certainly has an ending, an ending I love, an ending I wrote a dozen times in my head before I started typing the first book. This could have come at the end of this book, or it could have come at the end of the tenth book. As it turns out this ending fits right where it is, in the third book. I'm not going to tell you anything else about the plot, I just hope you all enjoy it as much as you have the first two.

Back to work I go!

RL

All Is Well In Randyland

Well, the great flood of 2008 is finished. It taught me a valuable lesson that I had obviously forgotten somewhere along the way. Don't put all your eggs (or files) in one basket.

I went out and bought a full sized laptop, one of those desktop replacement thingies just in case my main computer ever went kaput for any reason. I feel much better now, secure even. Sadly I couldn't go with a little eeepc simply because it couldn't hope to replace a full on desktop in it's wildest miniaturized dreams. Perhaps I'll buy one when the 9" screen version is cheap.

My new Toshiba (which is made to look a bit like an expensive Macbook, a plus, but came loaded with Vista, a big minus, booooo!), is going through severe testing as I pound out the second half of First Light Chronicles: Starfree Port, listen to numerous mp3's, customize the shoddy OS (Vista has blue screened on me three times), and watch a couple videos. I even installed Ubuntu on it for a few hours only to discover that the drivers weren't available for this chipset just yet. I wouldn't really know how to install them if they were available, but I'd be willing to learn so I could avoid Vista!

Anyway, back to work I go, churning out what I think is the most interesting and exciting part of the First Light series. I just hope I don't lose anything because of Vista, the operating system that lives up to the dumb blond stereotype better than any blond I've met. It's pretty, it's even a little sexy, but it's as dumb as a fencepost and tends to slow everything down as it flourishes and poses during common, every day tasks.

If anyone happens to know how this Linux beginner can get his Toshiba A200 running without Microsoft, please drop me an email.

Back to work I go!

RL