Note: My apologies. Amazon temporarily paused it.
As if life wasn’t crazy enough,…
In the midst of moving from my sweet home on Whidbey Island to a sweet tiny house in Port Townsend (from one art community to another – aka MyTinyExperiment.com), I tripped over a deadline.
New and improved, Firewatcher, my first sci-fi novel has been re-released. Now, with page numbers! I tried to get it out months ago, but life happens. Before more of life happened, I decided to claim at least partial success.
Readers seem to like the book. Their most common comment is extolling me to get the sequel done!
Some readers and almost all of my editor friends could see the items to be improved in the first edition: primarily, page numbers and punctuation.
Read below for more of the story about the story, which is also some insight into independent publishing. Some contraints and motivations have little to do with semi-colons and more to do with calendars and current events.
So, here it is, the Revised Edition of Firewatcher.
Now, with it out of the way, it is time to get back to the sequel – after I’ve unpacked, recovered, and settled back into being a writer.
excerpt
Firewatcher – revised edition – foreword
The future is happening fast.
Firewatcher started as an image and an idea in the mid-2010s. I regularly follow trends in science, technology, and society. We humans are an interesting, developing, and maturing species. How can anyone be bored?
At the time, several trends were projected to reach critical levels in 2100. Artificial Intelligence, climate change, and political and societal shifts were projected to alter our world. Media reports frequently used the term ‘conservative estimates.’ Conservative estimates are delivered as safe ways to ease people into the awareness of dramatic situations.
I was trained as an engineer. I knew that the term ‘conservative’ was not political. It was partnered with two other terms. One was ‘nominal.’ Nominal as in normal, expected, predicted. In rocket launches, you want a nominal launch, no surprises, and no reason to blow up the rocket because everything is under control. There was no set opposite to conservative. Liberal just confuses issues. Aggressive overstates the situation. Optimistic is probably closest, but only if the extreme is good news.
If there was a conservative estimate for climate change, I knew to look for the nominal and the pessimistic. I also knew that, in an unknown system like our planet, our range of guesses of the possibilities could be far too narrow. My read on the media was that 2100 was too far off. My suspicion for each of the affects could be more like 2040.
If the world was going to change that soon, I should write the book soon.
And then the world started changing faster than our guesses suggested. Artificial Intelligence was reaching goals in the 2020s instead of 2040. Chat GPT is only a prelude, and it isn’t done. Climate change accelerated. The sinkholes in Siberia convinced me while glaciers melting convinced others. Political and economic systems were being dismantled and discarded without viable alternatives. And I’ll not bore you with trends in dozens of other fields that tell me the future is happening fast.
I think the Digital Singularity will eclipse them all.
My life is more than one book. If I was going to accelerate my appropriate projects, I was going to have to make compromises. Good-bye, page numbers. Timing and financing meant delaying further editing and polishing. Hello, torrents of unsolicited advice, and pleas from my more friends about obvious imperfections.
I am glad I did what I did.
As if to reinforce my decision, yet another trend accelerated. This time, it was something that was integral to the story. In Firewatcher, the technological shift on Earth and the enabling technology for the ship was the invention of a pocket fusion generator. ‘Pocket’ merely meant much smaller than a nuclear power plant, but I was ambitious enough to image something the size of a home appliance that would allow people to disconnect from the grid – or ring a ship with a new type of rocket motors. As I was preparing some final polishing, a firm, that was ironically only a few miles from my house, announced the production and commercialization of a small fusion generator.
2100? 2040? 2020? I shouldn’t just write the book soon; I should publish it almost immediately. It was more important to be in synch, or at least not too far behind, modern science and current events. My apologies to my friends who are professional editors. I understand their pain, but I don’t feel it because the story and the situation haven’t changed. My feelings are more directed to the trends.
And yet, why a Revised Edition? If I was going to add page numbers, I had the opportunity to get an automated editor, Grammarly, to at least catch some extra typos, and put the commas in the right places, sort of. The page numbers would be via a professional editor. I’ve been told by others that page numbering is as much of a hurdle for them as it is for me. Five months later, even a professional formatter couldn’t reconcile a conflict that might, might, be some software battle between Microsoft, Adobe, and Google. Having edited the book for the tenth(?) time, I am pleased to see that the story remains valid. Some even call it entertaining. The page numbers I added certainly are worth a chuckle. Which is more important, story or format? I leave that assessment to every reader.
Ironies continue. As I type this, I am working on more than enough other writing projects. I couldn’t do it all myself, but I also couldn’t afford the money, nor the time coordinating with another person’s schedule. Fortunately, you see, there’s this program that is now available that helped a lot.
The future is happening fast. I’ve having to learn to run just to keep up. Are you?
tomthewriter.com 
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