Tim Campbell, that is. Audiobook narrations. Texas… well, okay, not Texas anything. We're not hillbillies here.

Anyway, many people have asked about an audiobook edition of Fireborn. And I'd like to do it… but I've held off authorizing it because with the kind of book Fireborn is, and its cast, I'd really like to see it done fully cast— or at least, with a team of two narrators, one for the male characters, one for the female ones. Because… well, if you've read the book, you probably understand. There are some extremely intensely emotional scenes, some of them cutting back and forth between two or more female characters, and I have just never heard a male voice (or film) actor who can pull off a female voice — and especially, multiple distinct female voices — convincingly enough to make those scenes work well.

That said, when Robert and I auditioned narrators for Agency, after hearing some of Tim's other narration samples, one of our specific requests was for him to turn down the gravitas a bit. (And he did, and believe me, he absolutely nailed it.)

Today I found myself thinking about that gravitas, as I re-read a passage from Fireborn myself. And the thought came to me that Tim could absolutely pull off Moonshadow. Oh GODS could he pull off Moonshadow.

Whether this gets us any closer to a Fireborn audiobook that I'm happy with, I don't know yet.

But… it bears thinking about.

Human memory is associative. Incredibly associative. A whiff of fragrance drifting on the wind can make you remember that date that was a horrible trainwreck, but resulted in you meeting your partner. A few notes of music can help you remember the mathematical formula that you first learned while listening to that piece of music.

It works the other way, too. Sometimes when I’m writing, the mental outline for a chapter, or some key event in that chapter, or a single line, may make me think of a piece of music. And if that piece of music fits the tone of the chapter, or a single line from it resonates strongly with what I’m writing just then ... well, then the title of that song, or a line from it, may become the chapter title.

Because associative memory. It’s just part of how humans work.

So you don't want to give money to Microsoft, and you want a good word processor. OK, that's easy. LibreOffice.

Now you want to produce yuour own EPUB format eBooks. Well, that's OK, LibreOffice has an EPUB export. Simple, right? And the EPUBs it generates work. But ... they have some issues. Which you want to fix.

So you go into the EPUB.

DEAR MOTHER OF HASTUR RIDING ON A FLAMING VELOCIRAPTOR, WHAT IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING CURSED AND UNHOLY AM I LOOKING AT?

LibreOffice generates atrocious EPUBs.

Or, more accurately, LibreOffice hands off the job to libepubgen. Which is a piece of alpha-quality v0.1.1 abandonware that hasn't seen a single code commit in three years. What it generates technically works, but dear gods, it is a Superfund site of bad markup.

"Please tell me there's a solution to this!"

There is a solution to this.

The solution is to install a tool called pandoc. That's not the WHOLE solution, because pandoc's .ODT reader has some serious bugs. BUT: If you save a copy of your LibreOffice .ODT document in .DOCX format, you can then use pandoc to convert that DOCX file to EPUB (actually, you should specify -t epub3), and you will end up with an EPUB 3.0 eBook that it is meaningfully humanly possible to edit and format.

And then, basically all you should need to do is go in and fix up the CSS to make it look the way you want it to look.

Yes, believe it or not, English has rules of grammar… even when it seems they are honored more in the violation than in the observance.

Nevertheless, there are formal standards. Established standards. Like all standards, they are set by bodies quite certain that they know how English should be written.

Now, a technical standard is one thing. And even those constantly change. When they change, they are updated. There is usually little room for argument over whether the change is correct and for a good reason.

The English language is much more fluid. Every historical attempt to “police” the English language has failed. The language keeps changing underneath the rules. The rules don’t, in the end, dictate how English is spoken or written (although the rulemakers persist in trying to). Instead, the best one can hope to do it describe what is considered the current best practice of how it is written and spoken.

And sometimes that means they are wrong, because they do not reflect how actual users of the language are speaking and writing it. The fact that the rules CHANGE from time to time necessarily means that the rulemakers themselves agree from time to time that some of their rules are wrong.

Today, I speak specifically of the em dash—the long dash signifying a brief pause between words.

In the sentence above, I used it according to the current “official” grammar standard. Which is to way, with no whitespace around it.

But in this case, I believe the standard is wrong.

Why?

Several reasons.

For one thing, in a monospaced/fixed-pitch font, an em dash can be almost indistinguishable from a hyphen. Which potentially confuses readers.

For another, the “no whitespace around an em dash” rule flattens nuance. Whitespace, properly used, has MEANING. And a flat “no whitespace” rule takes away that meaning.

Consider the following two examples:

“I — don’t know,” I said.

“I— I don’t know,” I said.

The first line conveys a momentary pause in speech. The second gives a much stronger sense of speech abruptly broken off, then continued. Remove the whitespace, and a lot of that is lost.

“I—don’t know,” I said.

“I—I don’t know,” I said.

The nuance is gone.

So, sometimes I have yielded on this particular rule, and followed it. But I don’t like how it looks. So, more often, I have ignored it, and used whitespace in the way that I think looks right.

I am the writer here, and I insist it is MY privilege to decide how I will use the language, to convey the things I intend to.

Just a fun little fact:

The original mental image that gave me the initial starting point for the Stardock Trilogy came from three things: An illustration in an old copy of the long-defunct OMNI magazine, and two songs. Prologue/Twilight, by the Electric Light Orchestra; and Nova, by VNV Nation.

Shine, shine your light on me

Illuminate me, make me complete...

OK, first of all, the title of this post is a bit deceptive.

I could say that there is no right way to write. But that's a bit of an over-simplification.

Many writers have a strict order planned out in advance of what books they're going to write, and in which order, and for each book, they have a detailed outline before they start of everything that's going to happen in each book. That order may even be contractual.

I'm not one of them. That's why Fireborn, which I actually started seriously working on — turned it from a writing doodle for my own eyes only, into a book — well after I began Bearing Gifts, was actually finished and published first. And it's why Because It Tells Me To, which was started and 70-80% complete before I even began Bearing Gifts, is still unfinished now (but getting closer and closer). It's why I woke up one day with what turned out to be almost the next 100,000 words of Fireborn in my head. And it's why at this moment, I'm making more and faster progress on Becoming Real than on Because It Tells Me To, but haven't even really made a start yet on Godthief. I'm still forming the ideas that will become Godthief.

It works for me. But that doesn't mean it's the right way to write. Because the truth of it is that there is no SINGLE right way to write, no matter what a creative writing class might have taught you.

"The right way to write" is what works for YOU. And the corollary to that is that there is no wrong way to write ... as long as the writing happens, and produces the books that you want to write, and of the quality in which you want to write. It's like the eightfold path of Buddhism, which says in part that there is no such thing as an incorrect — or perhaps invalid — path to enlightenment. There are longer paths, there are shorter paths, there are easier paths, there are harder paths. But any path by which you reach enlightenment in the end must by definition be a valid path. Or it would not have taken you to enlightenment.

Writing is the same way. Write in the way that works for you. Don't let anyone tell you that you're doing it wrong. Accept criticism of your writing, and listen to it. But don't listen to anyone who tells you that your actual methodology of writing is wrong, if it's working for you, just because it's different from what works for them.

It's not so much that there is no right way to write. It's that there is no wrong way to write ... as long as it works for you. You are the writer.

I've seen a few reader reviews that complain that The Stardock Trilogy glosses over a lot of issues of global economics.

Why, YES, yes it does. Necessarily so. Because there would be so much ground to cover there that if I attempted to fully and accurately cover all of the political and economic ramifications triggered by the Stardock and Alex Holder’s efforts to share Cricket technology with Earth, this series would not be about Earth, the Crickets, the Fleet and the K’heert’na, it would be about politics and economics, and it would be deathly dry, dull and boring — and almost certainly mostly wrong.

That’s probably not the series you want to read, if you're reading the Stardock Trilogy now, and it’s CERTAINLY not the series I want to write.

Gentle Readers,

I have in my inbox a pre-production questionnaire from Podium Entertainment in preparation for the upcoming release of the audiobook editions. It includes a number of questions that are really for my readers to answer, not me, because they are questions about how readers react to the books. So I would take it as a favor if readers would please comment with answers to any of the below questions:

• What is the main feeling or emotion that the Stardock Trilogy so far evokes in you?

• What tropes spring to mind when you read Stardock books?

• What quotes from either book do you think capture the essence of the series? Do any particular lines stick in your mind?

• Do any other books, TV series, movies, video games immediately spring to mind as a comparison?

• What kind of reader do you think would love the Stardock Trilogy? What would you say to convince them to read it?

• How would you fill in the blank: "If you love [ ] then you'll love this book"?

Don't feel obligated, but your insights would be much appreciated.

...That there is some incorrect usage in radio chatter in Bearing Gifts.

There will be a correction, later, after I have time to collaborate with the reader who pointed out the errors and correct the text.

I also just uploaded a couple of minor corrections to United Fleet, including fixing superscript formatting, again (LibreOffice keeps determinedly generating incorrect CSS for it, and sometimes I forget to manually fix the CSS).

I'm currently about three quarters of the way, at a guess, through A Line In The Stars, but obviously I can't say exactly, since I don't know exactly how long the finished book is going to be.

... When you go back to check the spelling of a name, and notice for the first time that right from the start, you have somehow consistently mistyped "National Security Advisor" in place of "National Science Advisor."