Phantom Sorcerer

Phantom Sorcerer is ready on Amazon. It has been a long time coming, but it is finally for sale. If it seems interesting, please feel free to take a look. Give it a read.

Felix the Swift, an alias, lived in the land of Agersolum, in the Empire of Aurre. Felix was a thief and a good one at that. He was arguably the best thief in the city. A pimple on the Duke’s rear end.

When his last job, quite possibly his grandest, goes bad it costs his apprentice’s life and the freedom of everyone he has ever loved. His entire family and he are sold into slavery to pay for his crimes.

Felix gets dragged across the globe and thrown into a world of magic, and Gods. He must face High-Princes, assassins, traitorous brothers, Gods, and the scorching heat of the desert. Felix must overcome the obstacles that have been laid against him to become truly free.

Felix must find a way back to his homeland and a way to free his family. Or he fails and the hostile environment will overtake him as it has to so many others.

Welcome

Welcome to the brand new home of the author Nathan Pedde. He writes a wide range of books from Middle-Grade fiction to darker science fiction and fantasy. He writes the middle-grade fiction with his two lovely children who are those books co-authors.

You can find his current projects at the Current Projects. You can find more detailed information about his projects there. You can also find his completed words on his Amazon Author Page.

Here you can find behind-the-scenes information about each of the various projects. They range from ones currently under development to completed works. As well as a blog where we share insights into the writer’s mind and method.

The plan is for additional pages to become available as time passes. Please check in often as the site is in a state of constant change and will be until the final site is complete.

Feel free to look at my concept art page where I will be posting pictures of artwork as it is completed. The first draft of my first book has been posted. Head on over to the concept art page to check it out. Concept art

Or you can check out my blog to read about my writing process and behind the scenes info. Blog Posts

If you would like to be in one of my stories, the adult ones only, for a limited time I will be allowing people to sign up to be included in the books as a redshirt. Click the link to find out more about that. Graveyard

Site Updated

This is a very short update.

With the approaching soon-to-be publication of my debut novel, Phantom Sorcerer: Felix the Swift trilogy Book One, I have updated the site. I needed a better layout as I didn’t have enough room for all of the things that I wanted to do.

I have lots to do and not enough time to do it in. Please enjoy the site and wait for the announcement when the book has gone live.

Until Next time.

 

Plot Holes

I read a lot of books. Well, listen to audio tapes is a better description, but it is the same. I don’t have a lot of funds to spend on books though. So I listen to free audio dramas online.

Which is hard to find good audio dramas. I keep on getting a couple episodes in, and then I can’t listen to them anymore.

And it’s for silly things. I was listening to this one about an economic post-apocalypse. The concept was sound. I listened to it. At the three-quarter mark of the episode, they are in the middle of a gunfight, and one soldier yells to the other, “Throw me a clip.”

What they hell. A clip. They were modern soldiers. Modern soldiers don’t use clips. Clips are used inside rifles. Like they used for the M1 Garand or the Soviet SKS. Modern military rifles don’t use clips.

They use magazines. Magazines are a clip, but it is encased in metal or plastic, and it is attached to the outside of the firearm. Some are attached to the side, while most are attached underneath.

Another one had a lady running down the street with a shirt covered in blood. Not a single person asked her if she was alright. And they didn’t run from her either. Then there were the obvious historical problems when they went to an origin point of a long-lived character. They described the British Empire as it was during the 18th century. There was no British Empire in 1000’s AD.

But that is enough of me whinning.

Until next time.

Time. The enemy.

As a writer, I always meet people that will claim to have a desire to write a novel. They usually hold me in awe and say things like, “You’re an author, I wish  I could write a book.” Or “I used to write when I was younger when I had more time. I’ll write later…” Then they’ll give a vague time frame like, “When the kids are in school.” Or “When I retire.”

I say that’s a bunch of hornswaggle.

They act like writing a novel is something that’s hard. It isn’t all about learning something. Like learning how to ride a bike, play music or rocket science. It just takes time and commitment. If someone wants to write a novel, all it takes is being able to carve out a chunk of time each day, every day to be able to write. A half hour. An hour.

There is a time to start to write that book. That time is now. Not later. And if someone has a desire to write, then they need to do it. Don’t put it off till later. Pick up the pen and do it.

The reason to start now is that life is short. Time is the one precious commodity that we spend so much of that we can’t can’t get enough of. I, personally, don’t want to be old and gray and wishing that I had started to write when I was younger. I do wish that I had done things that I know  I will never get to do. Everyone has them. It happens, but doing something as simple as writing a novel isn’t one of them.

It’s like climbing Everest or fighting in the MMA. It’s something to do when you’re young and too stupid to know any better. But if you have a desire to do any of those things, the time is now, not when you are old and gray.

So how do I find the time to write? It is like climbing Everest. You don’t just wake up one day and hop on a plane to go to Mount Everest. It is something that you must commit to. You must train. Practice on smaller, easier peaks before you try Everest.

Writing is the same. You must spend a huge amount of time practicing, sucking before you get any better. You will write a large amount of ugly, gross words before they start to look golden. That is how you do it.

You need to spend the time to get good at it. NASCAR drivers do it. They practice hours on the track. Pilots do it, they must log hundreds of hours to learn how to fly before they can take a plane out by themselves.

It’s the same with writers. You must practice, practice, practice.

So to all those non-authors that wish or desire to sit down and write something. What are you waiting around for? Get that butt in that chair. Turn that computer on, open that notebook and write.

Stop desiring to write. Write.

In the immortal words of Yoda. “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try. ”

If you want to write. Do it. Take the dive down the rabbit hole. Follow the white rabbit. You may like what you find. You may want to stay in wonderland.

Until next time.

Differences between Hard and Soft Part 2

A few days ago I published a blog post about the differences between hard and soft science fiction stories. I talked about that the difference is the rules that are applied to the story and that in Hard Sci-Fi, the scientific community and the public make the rules. The author does not.

The reason for that is that science exists and is a real tangible thing, and therefore, the rules are already set and in place.

In the fantasy realm, there is a big difference between hard magic and soft magic. But the difference between hard and soft magic is the same as hard and soft sci-fi. It is about the rules that govern the story.

In storytelling, rules govern every aspect of the story. You create rules on what a character will and will not do based on that character themselves. Some won’t eat meat, some won’t take a human life to save there own. Some will always that oggle something pretty if it crossed there path.

Same with the world building. If the rule states that the time it takes to get from city A to city B is three days of traveling by foot, you can’t have it take 6 hours the next chapter over unless you give a good reason for it.

In the use of magic and magic systems, magic falls into one of two categories with a hybrid of each in the middle making a possible third.

Hard Magic is where the author gives distinct rules of it’s us. How it is performed, what it does and how. Hard magic systems turn that magic into a science. Science has distinct rules that it must follow.

Those rules limit its use. They give it tangible consequences for its use. Cause it is more interesting to see what a magic can’t do, then what it can. Better to have the character overcome the magic system in some interesting way. It can also be used to solve story questions. The limiting of the magic allows for that. It allows you to write a novel where the magic is a central part of the story. The main character can be a magic user. Think Brandon Sanderson’s Mystborn series.

The problem with this system is that having a limited system and the constant of writing the character into corners. Sometimes the magic system that you created will not dig your self out of the hole that you dug. The characters are screwed, and you know it.

Soft magic, however, is not explained. There are no written rules on what can and cannot be done using magic in that story. It gives the book a sense of wonder cause you have no idea what can be done and it is cool to see what the author can come up with.

The use of the soft magic should not be used to solve a major story problem. The main character should not be a magic user and magic should not be a central part of the story. Think Lord of the Rings. Gandalf doesn’t tell the hobbits how he uses magic. He just does. He also uses it at unexplained times and then a sword at others.

There are problems with using this system. A soft magic system comes off as too god-like if used too heavy-handedly. The solutions feel forced, and the ending will come off weak. Lackluster. Better to abandon magic at that point and have the characters use a non-magic means to solve the story problem.

Brandon Sanderson’s First Law

Brandon Sanderson’s Second Law

Brandon Sanderson’s Third Law

Those links are a direct path to Brandon Sanderson’s site which gives a better explanation of the ideas of hard and soft magic and the rules of using hard magic.

Any discussion on this blog post or the earlier one is most welcome. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

Until next time.

Cheers.

Goodbye 2017 and Hello 2018

2017 has been quite a year. Lots of things have changed in such a short amount of time.

The first thing of note is that I sold my house and moved across the province to the warmest place in Canada. The only part of the country that gets little or no real winter. And it has been awesome. We moved primarily to get closer to a good university for my wife who is going to art school. You can see some of her work here.  Grace Pedde’s Instagram

The kids are in school, and they both love it. They are learning lots and excelling at it. Something that I could never do. I wanted to be outside playing in the mud. Not inside reading some dusty tomb about salmon eggs. My kids love reading about that. My son’s favorite subject is rocks and minerals. He has a hardcover book that he reads. He also wants to become a video game designer. But he is seven, and that may change.

The most significant thing that I have done this year is creating this site. The site has gone from an unused blog to a website. There are still places that it can go, and it is an evolving thing. I have pages to show some art from my worlds. I only have a couple, but more will come eventually. You can find it here. Concept art

I have also opened my graveyard. It is a place for those morbid peoples that want to see their name in print. No matter how. And I always need names of victims to slice open in my adult works. It’s a win-win. That can be found here. Graveyard

At the moment, I have no published works. Nothing exists out there. But I can tell you that I have made some real progress.

The first is that I have book one of my Felix the Swift trilogy getting edited. I also have four middle-grade works that I co-wrote with my kids to be edited as well. Three out of four Space Courier Books are done, as well as one out of four Evana Sweetland books. I am currently working on fixing Book 1 of my Culture Shock Trilogy. It is going through some significant changes. Once I get that one closer, I will talk about it soon.

And that was 2017 in a nutshell.

The big question of the day. What are my plans for 2018? I have mentioned some of them before, but here they are now.

The plan is to publish a title a month. I say title as if I say that I will publish a novel a month, people will think that I will publish 12 full-length adult books. But I don’t only write adult books.

I write a mix of adult books, middle grade, and young adult fiction. I say titles as a middle-grade book is generally smaller than an adult one. Fewer words mean that they are usually quicker to write.

I will be writing a blog post about the differences between the age groups later.

I also have a schedule. Most professional authors create some sort of plan on what they want to work on and when. Sometimes they have outside forces like a publisher that dictates what they write about. I don’t have a publisher. I AM the publisher. I create my own schedule. I am the eggman, I am the walrus…coo coo ca choo…

My schedule is:

January 2018- Phantom Sorcerer: Felix the Swift Book 1
February 2018- Missile Attack: Space Courier Book 1
March 2018- The Dragon Heart: The Adventures of Evana Sweetland Book 1
April 2018- Culture Shock: Land of Ash and Fire Book 1
May 2018- Saboteur Confronted: Space Courier Book 2
June 2018- Untitled: The Adventures of Evana Sweetland Book 2
July 2018- Under the Shadow of Giants: Felix the Swift Book 2
August 2018- Untitled: Space Courier Book 3
September 2018- Untitled: The Adventures of Evana Sweetland Book 3
October 2018- It Begins: Inescapable Game Book 1
November 2018- Untitled: Space Courier Book 4
December 2018- Untitled: The Adventures of Evana Sweetland Book 4

That is subject to change as life happens. Things change, and it may not be tenable. Only time will tell.

But, I will close things off with a couple sayings that I have adopted as my mantra. I will do blog posts on each later.

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”
“If you don’t risk failure, then you don’t deserve Success!”

Until next time. Happy 2018.

Cheers.

Differences between hard and soft

First, let’s get the elephant that is in the room, out. Happy New Year. There I said it.

Now to more important things.

A friend and I got into a discussion about a story. Well, that on its own is nothing new. We talk all the time about some story, whether it is his or it is mine. He doesn’t write novels, he works in film. He has many projects on the go, just like me.

We are planning to co-write a project in the next few months. At the moment, I can’t tell much about it. But in the course of discussing the project in question, we got into a discussion about hard and soft science fiction. He was leaning towards more hard sci-fi and I did not.

That got me thinking. A dangerous proposition, I know.

But I thought about the differences between hard and soft Science Fiction. You can take any sci-fi story, and you can place it into one of those two categories. It doesn’t matter what the sub-genre is. You can have hard space opera as well as soft space opera. You can have hard military sci-fi and as well as soft.

But what is the difference?

The difference is how you talk about one of the most important parts of a science fiction story. The science.

Hard Sci-fi has to use all known rules and laws of science. It must take them into account. That means no FTL travel. No Lasers. No handwavium artificial gravity. You can only use something if there is good science that explains it. This is a limiting factor.

A very limiting factor.

It means that you must have a Ph.D. in some field of space science to get the science correct and even then you will still get things wrong. And when an author gets things wrong, the reader will let you know.

Many times.

In angry emails and bad reviews.

There are a couple main reasons that an author gets the science wrong.

The first is obvious. Most people only think that they understand the science of space. Most have incorrect ideas that they haven’t been corrected on yet. High schools don’t always teach the correct science and it takes years in college to get to the real science. There is also the problem with the media showing incorrect science. Like a bullet throwing the victim backward. So you can get the science correct and people will still send you that angry email.

Another is that the science of space is changing at a rapid pace as new things are discovered. Most times the scientists only have theories on the reasons why. And there are usually conflicting theories. They just discovered the Higgs boson particle and that changed things. They are also discovering new planets and moons. As well as new anomalies. Like the colors of plutos surface. Who saw that coming? Most sci-fi that I have seen always showed Puto as a dark brown rock. Not as brightly colored as it is.

The third is that space science is very complicated. There are many different aspects to take into account in just a simple trip to the moon. Motion doesn’t work like it does on earth. Neither does navigation. You can’t just aim at your ship at the destination and hit the go button.

Well… you can, but you will burn up a large amount of fuel. You see, in space, there is no standing still. Even if you are are not using a single thruster, you are still moving. You are in some type of orbit. Either around a planet, or a moon, or the sun. And that means that you are moving. Sideways, but still moving.

The gravity of that planet will also pull you back towards it as you lose momentum. And you won’t follow the same path as you did before. You will curve in some fashion. And if there is another large object, like a moon, in your way, that will change your orbit more.

And speeding up doesn’t necessarily catch a target that you are chasing. Cause you are in an orbit, as you speed up, it changes the orbit in relation to your target. Meaning that you may miss them completely. Or catch up, but have a ten-second window to shoot at them.

See what I mean, complicated.

Soft Sci-fi is where you take the rules that you want to talk about and then ignore the rest. ‘Cause honestly, no one cares. Not really. They want to read about the space marines shooting things up or sex in zero-g or plethra of topics and plots. Not astro-navigation and orbital mechanics. And that is the best way to go.

The first rule of novel writing is that the story comes first. Do not put something in it unless it enhances the story in some way. If you want a story about an alien invasion or the first trip to another solar system, then don’t worry that FTL travel isn’t possible. Decide on a make-believe method and just write it.

But if it is better to write soft sci-fi over hard sci-fi, then what about hard and soft magic?

Well. That will have to wait until next time.

Until them.

Phantom Sorcerer

Ladies and Gentlemen. I mentioned in a previous post that I have a plan for the new year. Well, that plan is moving forward. At best possible speed.

That plan consists of publishing as many titles as I can with the first book to drop in the month of January. Where in the month exactly, I am not sure. Time is short and there is still lots to do.

That first book is going to be the book that I have renamed to the Phantom Sorcerer.

Here is a brief synopsis of the title.

Felix the swift, not his real name, is a thief and a good one. When the last job goes bad, it cost the life of his apprentice and the freedom of himself and his entire family. He gets dragged across the globe into a world of magic, and Gods. Faced with High Princes, assassins, traitorous brothers, Gods and the scorching heat of the desert. Can Felix overcome these the forces laid against him and become truly free and find a way back to his homeland to free his family? Or will he fall to the hostile environment?

The cover posted above is made by my wonderful wife and cover artist, Grace Pedde. She is an excellent artist and designer. She is an art student that wants to work on book covers and to illustrate children’s books.

The cover is actually the third version of it. The first one was very “Airbender”, while the second was very “Horror”.

Both good covers in their own right, but they don’t suit my story. They were both my cover ideas and it wasn’t until I let her do what she wanted that she came up with the latest one. I think that I will be letting her come up with ideas for covers as she has much better ideas than I do. I am told that the other covers are for sale to anyone looking for a good cover.

Her site is here. And I am sure that the images will be posted sometime later today.

The cover posted above is the first draft of it. I am sure that it will change a bit. I still have at least a half a month before I need to make any final decisions on it.

Enjoy the day and let me know what you think about the cover.

Until next time.

 

The Past and the Future: 2017 eddition

December is upon us. December is traditionally used as a time of reflection and planning.

People reflect on the past year. What did they do? What they didn’t do?

Me? I sold my house, moved across the province to a warmer climate. I have made progress on my blog. I have made a URL, a professional email account and started my brand. All important things for an indie-author to do.

I have also been active writing, but nothing has been published at the moment. I haven’t gotten as much stuff written yet, but that is not for a lack of trying. I just had too much on my plate. I am done writing books 1 to 3 of the ‘Space Courier’ novel, as well as the first ‘Evana’ book. Information about those is on my current projects page.

While not important in the short term, I have also made and ordered business cards. It is hard when you talk to people and forget what your email address is.

But what about next year. I have high hopes for 2018. I have a plan. I have secured a really good cover designer and artist. Her work can be found here. with her website, here.

Yes, she is my wife, but she is very good at what she does.

I also have a schedule of work. I have projects planned to drop all year. I am not going to release that schedule as it may change.

Have I failed at things this year? Yes. But I feel that the important thing to do is to reflect on what you have accomplished. Ignore the failures, and look at the positive. I could feel down that another Christmas has gone by and I am still unpublished. I could moan that I didn’t make my unrealistic NaNo goal. But I am not.

I will be working on the positives, which are that I have five manuscripts first drafted or better. They need edits and covers. I have a sixth that needs a revision to fix plot errors. That is many work that can be published.

So this is chow. I may or may not have time to post another time before the next year. If I don’t it is cause I am busy.

I wish you all the best. Until next time.