FORGOTTEN HISTORY review on TrekMovie.com

I missed this until now… over the weekend, TrekMovie.com’s Robert Lyons posted his review of DTI: Forgotten History.  The “money quote,” as they say:

Bennett spends generous and balanced time in each timeline, balancing the delicate need for gradual revelation of the Kirk-era timeline in order to leave the reader teased and somewhat in the dark about the development and ultimate resolution of the crisis that presents itself in the later era. In doing so, Bennett revisits and ties together many time-travel incidents from the Original Series and the Animated Series, allowing them to form a consistently woven tapestry behind the formation of the DTI. While the race to ‘connect the time-travel dots’ seemed overkill in the previous DTI installment, the addition of the formative storyline to embrace the original Enterprise’s temporal hopping serves to strengthen the author’s attempt to bring forth a consistent theory of time travel in the Star Trek universe.

 

I’m sorry I haven’t yet updated my website with information about this book.  I’ve had another project demanding my attention for the past several weeks.  But I’ll try to get around to putting something up soon.

FORGOTTEN HISTORY “Interview” on StarTrek.com

StarTrek.com asked me to contribute a piece about Forgotten History for their site, so I used a little imaginary time travel to interview my past self about the book:

http://www.startrek.com/article/in-his-own-words-christopher-l-bennett

We’re number two!

The results of the Unreality-SF.net Story of the Year voting are in, and DTI: Watching the Clock got second prize, with a whopping 343 votes.  The winner by a landslide was Star Trek: Mirror Universe: Rise Like Lions by my friend and colleague David Mack, to whom I extend congratulations (though I was actually rooting for Kirsten Beyer’s Voyager: Children of the Storm).  Still, apparently second place comes with a trophy of some sort, which I’ll be getting in the mail at some point.  And it’s the first time any of my published fiction has gotten any kind of prize, so that’s a notable step.  Thanks to everyone who voted for my book.

I guess I can put my second-place Story of the Year trophy next to the Second-Place Semifinalist trophy I won for the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee back in 6th grade.  (The word that cost me first place was “meretricious,” a word one wouldn’t have expected a 6th-grader to know, since it means “of or pertaining to prostitutes.”  And I was eliminated early from the finals because the lady pronounced “ultimo” in a way that sounded to me like “altimo,” overpronouncing the “U” instead of just saying it normally.  I wuz robbed, I tells ya!)

One book leaves, another arrives…

It’s been a full day for me.  First, I finished proofreading the first-pass galleys for Only Superhuman (i.e. the pages that show what the final text will look like including formatting) and mailed them back to Tor.  I caught a number of typos that I’m amazed I never noticed in all the dozens of prior times I’ve been through this manuscript, like “to use use” or “that was in itself was the result” or my personal favorite, “Sarkar crossed your arms.”  That’s right, she reached out of the book and crossed the reader’s arms.  (In my defense, that was right after a sentence ending with a very emphatic “you,” so I guess there was some pronominal inertia there.)

I also just got my complimentary copies of Star Trek DTI: Forgotten History from Simon & Schuster!  Yup, the book is in my hands now, and it should be on bookstore shelves within the next few weeks.  It’s not as hefty a tome as its predecessor Watching the Clock, but they make a nice pair.

I also just got some reading materials as research for a possible new project, so I’ve got past, present, and future projects (or present, near-future, and more distant future in publication terms) all converging on the same day.  It’s all a bit overwhelming.

Especially since I also had to deal with getting my car towed.  I discovered yesterday afternoon that it wouldn’t start, and had no electrical power whatsoever.  A couple of kind people helped me try to jumpstart it, with no luck.  It was a bit late in the day, and I didn’t urgently need it then, and I still had a lot of proofreading to do, so I put it aside until this morning.  So I had to call the insurance company to find out how to deal with the situation (turns out they’ll reimburse me for the tow), then call the tow truck guy, then walk three blocks to the ATM and three blocks back so I could pay him in cash.  Then when he arrived it took me a few minutes reading the manual to discover how to get the car into neutral with no power so it could be moved into a position where the tow truck could get to it.  (Yes, I actually read the manual.)  Then I had to walk a mile home from the garage, and wait for them to call while I finished up the galleys.

So anyway, while I was composing the first draft of this post around 4 PM, I realized the narrative had no resolution, so I decided to call the garage and find out how the car was doing (yes, I am a writer, why do you ask?).  Turns out they were just about done with it, and it was a bad battery, which means the warranty applied and I saved some money.  So I have a new battery now, and since the car was in the shop anyway, I asked them to replace the windshield wipers too, since the ones I had were lousy and didn’t do much good.  And as it happened, it was raining lightly when I picked the car up, so I got to try them out right away, and they’re nice and quiet and work better than the old ones.

Plus, as it happens, the garage is directly across the street from the post office, so I got to mail back the galley pages and pick up my car on the same trip — and right after that I drove to the grocery store and did the shopping I was going to do yesterday.  Which is nice, because if I was going to walk a mile for the second time today (plus 3/5 of a mile to the ATM and back), it’s good that I was able to get multiple things accomplished.  (Hopefully including getting in slightly better physical shape so that walking that distance will be easier in the future.)

So now I’m very tired and kind of sore, and that’s even after a long, hot soak in the tub.  But I accomplished a lot today, and that’s a good feeling.

What would SFTV have been like in the STAR TREK universe?

One of the characters in my novel Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock was Clare Raymond, the 20th-century housewife from TNG’s “The Neutral Zone,” and while working on scenes involving her thoughts and recollections, I got to wondering what mass-media science fiction would’ve been like in a universe where there was no Star Trek TV series in the ’60s. I vacillated between positing a reality that simply lacked such a series altogether and inventing a substitute series that could go in its place and fill the same role. (I was tempted to use Astro Quest from the CSI episode “A Space Oddity”. Galaxy Quest wouldn’t have worked, since it was supposedly made in the ’80s.) I ended up going the former route, but I didn’t really develop it in detail.

But the subject recently came up in a thread on the TrekBBS,  and I got into a more in-depth analysis of the subject, which I want to repost here.

—

The thing is, Star Trek had such a major influence on popular culture that it’s hard to imagine how different the media landscape would be without it. Star Trek did a lot to make science fiction a more respectable genre in the mass media. It pioneered or popularized many aspects of the modern fandom experience — conventions, fanzines, even slash fiction. The success of ST in syndicated reruns proved that reruns were more viable than broadcasters had thought and led to a rise in rerun use and a decrease in season lengths. Later on, TNG’s breakthrough success in first-run syndication paved the way for the syndication boom of the ’90s.

So without Star Trek, there might never have been a Xena or a Babylon 5. Not to mention all the shows that have spawned directly from Trek veterans like Michael Piller, Ron Moore, Ira Steven Behr, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Rene Echevarria, and so on. There’s no telling if they would’ve ever gone into SFTV if not for ST. If it hadn’t existed in the ’60s, then SFTV and first-run syndication in the ’90s, ’00s, and ’10s would be a lot sparser. Heck, without B5 breaking new ground in serialized storytelling, we might not have as many of the heavily arc-driven shows we have today, in SF or otherwise. It’s a ripple effect.

Without ST, sci-fi would probably have maintained a reputation as kid stuff, since the most successful exemplars of the genre in TV would’ve been Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space. I think my conjecture in Watching the Clock that the bionic shows would still exist is pretty sound, since they were based on a novel and weren’t really seen as hardcore sci-fi; series producer Harve Bennett wasn’t an SF-oriented type and wasn’t very familiar with Star Trek prior to being pegged to produce the movies, so his ’70s career wouldn’t have been affected much by the absence of ST. Ditto for Bionic Woman creator Kenneth Johnson, who went on to do The Incredible Hulk, V, and Alien Nation. If Roddenberry hadn’t made his mark in SFTV, maybe we’d look back on Johnson as the man who proved that science fiction could be an adult genre, though that proof would’ve come along much later. And we might’ve still gotten Earthbound genre shows like The X-Files and Buffy.

And would there even have been a Star Wars without Star Trek? In the Trek Nation documentary, George Lucas says he’d attended some Trek conventions before creating Star Wars, and he says ST helped pave the way for SW by proving that sci-fi could be successful — and that it could be produced impressively on a tight budget. So without ST, with mass-media American science fiction in the ’70s lacking that one massive success story, would any movie studio have been willing to take a chance on Lucas’s idea to do a Flash Gordon pastiche as a big-budget movie? If they had, it probably wouldn’t have been called Star Wars, a name that I’ve read Lucas chose because it evoked Star Trek. And it might’ve been a much smaller, lower-budget film, and there would’ve been less of a pre-existing genre fanbase for it. And its effects might not have been as sophisticated, since the FX studios for Star Trek pioneered new techniques on that show. Without Star Wars as we know it, there wouldn’t have been an ILM, let alone a Pixar. Sci-fi and fantasy wouldn’t have become the giants in the motion picture industry that they are in our world; the films and franchises that would never have been made are too numerous to list. Nor would there have been a Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century or Jason of Star Command. And without Donald Bellisario cutting his genre teeth on Galactica, there might never have been a Quantum Leap.

So probably the biggest SF fan community would be for Doctor Who, and maybe Blake’s 7 would have a big following too. England would most likely be seen as the vanguard of science fiction in popular culture, though SF would be seen as a genre characterized by cheap production values, and thus would have trouble gaining more than a niche fanbase in the US.

And what about all the people inspired to become scientists and engineers because of Star Trek? If that show had never existed, then modern technology might be less advanced in some respects. There might not have been as much incentive driving people to invent flip phones or pad-style computers. Which might explain why some aspects of technology do seem to have advanced more gradually in the Trek universe itself, although its 20th century clearly had much more impressive progress in crewed spaceflight and genetic engineering than ours.

So all in all, as utopian as Star Trek‘s 22nd through 24th centuries are, it looks like their 20th and early 21st centuries would’ve been rather deprived where mass entertainment was concerned. Maybe that’s why ST’s characters are mainly fans of detective fiction and Westerns and gothic romances and the like — maybe science fiction never really caught on outside its particular niche audience.

Unreality SF Story of the Year voting — final ballot

Thanks to your nominations, Star Trek: DTI: Watching the Clock has made the top ten list and is thus on the final ballot.  Here’s the page where you can cast your vote for the final award:

Ten top tie-ins

The top ten list includes three Star Trek novels, two Star Wars novels, a Doctor Who novel, three Doctor Who audio dramas, and a Torchwood radio play.  You can vote for only one winner (multiple votes from the same IP address will be disregarded), and the poll is open for the next seven days (through the end of Sunday, April 1).

Nominations now open for Unreality SF Story of the Year award

The Unreality SF blog, which concentrates on SF/fantasy media tie-in fiction, is taking nominations for its annual Story of the Year award.  As they put it:

 Starting today, you can nominate three stories. At the end of the week, we’ll count up the suggestions to find the ten that are most popular.

Next Monday, we’ll post that final shortlist and give you seven days to pick one absolute favourite.

And then the authors of the first- and second-placed stories each get a block of glass with their name engraved in it.

This is for any licensed work of prose or comics tie-in fiction published between the start of March 2011 and the end of February 2012.  Two of my own works are eligible:

• Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock, Pocket Books (May 2011).
• Star Trek: Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within (eBook), Simon & Schuster Digital Sales Inc. (October 2011).

And if you need suggestions on how to fill that third nominating slot (or, heck, the first and second as well if you prefer), here are links to some of my fellow tie-in authors’ posts listing their eligible titles:

Keith R. A. DeCandido

David Mack

Dayton Ward

So go and do as you will with this information.

Finished! (sort of)

I just completed writing the epilogue of my spec novel.  After doing the last scene of the climactic chapter yesterday, I wrote the last two chapters (counting the epilogue) today.  I don’t know how many words that was, but it was a lot for a single day’s work.  Things tend to go faster when I’m wrapping a story up.

All in all, I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out.  It still needs some refinement, probably some streamlining of the first two parts, but I’m pretty satisfied with the climactic third “act” and the ideas and worldbuilding I got to develop, not to mention the characterizations (and this book has a pretty large cast of characters that was a challenge to keep track of and serve adequately; I needed to keep extensive notes).  For a while I didn’t think it would ever come together cohesively, and I had my doubts about the revised premise, but right now it feels like it works.  Which, of course, is not definitive, not so long as it’s purely my opinion.  I’ve gotten a lot of rejection letters for stories that felt to me like they worked.

But at least I have a complete manuscript, a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  So I can look at it as a whole, revise it, and eventually shop it around.  If nothing else, I’ve finally reached a completion point after being stalled for a couple of years, and I can move on to new goals.

Which is good, because it’s the start of development season for 2013′s Star Trek novels, and I need to come up with a proposal.  Plus I need to get back to that Hub story in progress.  Still, I’ll probably do a full revision pass or two on the spec novel first.  And I’d like to cut it down some.  It came out to a whopping 138,600 words, which I think is a record for me.  Hopefully I can trim off a fair amount of chaff.

Kind of a good week writing-wise…

In the past few days, I’ve gotten two tentative invitations for new writing projects, though one is much more tentative than the other.  I hope they both come to fruition, though.  At least, it’s a good sign that I’ve gotten approached twice this early in the year.

Also, today I finally got paid in full for my latest Star Trek Magazine article (well, latest published, but second-latest written), after the first check got lost in the mail.

Meanwhile, my progress on the spec novel has had a bit of a setback, but in a way that’s progress in itself.  I realized that just trying to keep as much as possible from the old version of the story wasn’t working; there was too much infodump and lecturing and not enough characterization or emotion to make it work, and at the same time I wasn’t making good enough use of the setting and situation at this part of the novel.  I realized there were some things I could do to address both problems at once, so I have to do some major rewriting of this portion and replace a lot of the recycled material with new content.  It entails partly reversing a decision I made before to reduce the number of distinct alien races I used in the story, because the old version was getting too cluttered and unfocused.  So I was initially skeptical of the thought that including another alien race (indeed, one pretty much recycled from some of my old unsold fiction) might be the way to go here.  But it’s okay, because I’ve solved the main clutter/focus problem (by having the central arc of the back half of the novel grow out of an established character and species whose motivations tie into another significant piece of worldbuilding in the novel, rather than tossing in a different antagonist and species that have no connection to any of that), and because I can use this alien race in place of another one that I was planning to use anyway in the final stage of the story (and was on the fence about using at all), so it gives the story more cohesiveness if I set them up here.  Moreover, it lets me showcase the setting more, making it come alive as more than just a backdrop.  So I think that this time it will serve the story integrally rather than sending me off on a tangent like before.  At least, I hope it will.

If nothing else, at least I finally feel my imagination is fully engaged with this project; the ideas are flowing more quickly now and I’m recognizing both problems and solutions that I wasn’t seeing before.

DTI: FORGOTTEN HISTORY plot description now online

The Simon & Schuster catalog entry for Forgotten History has now been updated with the book’s cover blurb (replacing the Watching the Clock blurb that they’ve been using up until now.  Here it is:

The agents of the Department of Temporal Investigations are assigned to look into an anomaly that has appeared deep in Federation territory. It’s difficult to get clear readings, but a mysterious inactive vessel lies at the heart of the anomaly, one outfitted with some sort of temporal drive disrupting space-time and subspace. To the agents’ shock, the ship bears a striking resemblance to a Constitution-class starship, and its warp signature matches that of the original Federation starship Enterprise NCC-1701—the ship of James T. Kirk, that infamous bogeyman of temporal investigators, whose record of violations is held up by DTI agents as a cautionary tale for Starfleet recklessness toward history. But the vessel’s hull markings identify it as Timeship Two, belonging to none other than the DTI itself. At first, Agents Lucsly and Dulmur assume the ship is from some other timeline . . . but its quantum signature confirms that it came from their own past, despite the fact that the DTI never possessed such a timeship. While the anomaly is closely monitored, Lucsly and Dulmur must search for answers in the history of Kirk’s Enterprise and its many encounters with time travel—a series of events with direct ties to the origins of the DTI itself. . . .

Also, the “Preliminary” banner has been removed from the cover art there, so I guess it’s now officially the final version.

A productive week (at last)

This past month I’ve resumed work on the spec novel I’ve been struggling with on and off for a few years now — the one where I had to stop and rethink pretty much the whole second half of the book because the story had gone off the rails.  I’ve had the new outline ready to go for some time (although I had some new ideas that I just recently added to it), but other projects and stuff kept me from focusing on it until recently.  However, it’s been rough going.  Revising the first half(ish?) wasn’t too hard, since I just needed to weave some new ideas and lines into the material I already had.  But then I got to the part where I had to start making some major changes.  And not just writing new scenes, but restructuring what I had, presenting a lot of the same ideas in a different context and order so that they served different purposes in some cases.  Basically I had to take some pieces out of the old version, mix them with some new pieces, and put together the puzzle in a new way.

And I had a very hard time figuring out how to do that.  I don’t know what it was, but I got really, really blocked and couldn’t think my way to a solution.  I had all these tenuous thoughts floating around in my head, drifting in and out of my awareness, and there was nothing I could grab onto and go, “Yes, this is how to start the scene, and the rest falls into place like that and that.”  My mind just couldn’t hold focus on it.  It got so frustrating that I was starting to fear I’d lost my talent.  (Because it wasn’t just this book; I’ve been equally stumped on a Hub story in progress for months.)  Although in retrospect I think lack of sleep may have been a factor.

So I did what I’ve done in the past when I had trouble focusing: I took my laptop over to the campus library so I could work there without the distractions of the Internet, the TV, the kitchen, etc. — and just so I could get a change of scenery to stimulate the little gray cells.  Though it helped a lot that the night before, I’d finally thought of a hook to get me into the first reworked scene.  I reminded myself — and it shows how far off my game I was that I forgot about this — that the key was to find a character angle, a way to give an emotional hook and viewpoint to the scene so it wasn’t just exposition.  Once I understood what the scene would be about on a character level, I was able to work it out.  And once I had that starting point, plus the quiet of the library, I was able to succeed at reassembling that chapter in its new form.

And in the couple of days since then, I’ve been continuing to make steady progress, a mix of writing new scenes and plugging in or revising old scenes that still fit.  Maybe I’m cheating a bit; there are some important story revelations that my revised outline had suggested approaching in a new way, but I fell back on just a slight variation on the old way so that I could reuse a lot of old text and make some headway.  But I’m not sure I’ll keep it; this is an early draft, after all, and I’ll have plenty of opportunity to refine it.  Right now I just want to get the basic story structure put together, and then I can go back and polish the details.

Anyway, I’m now to the point where I have to come up with some major new scenes, though there’s probably a certain amount of dialogue from the old scenes that I can fold into them.  Basically, the core plotline of this part of the novel is much the same, but the key character who comes in at this point and sets the protagonists on the path toward the climax has been replaced with a different character who serves a different and more interesting agenda — besides being a member of a species already established in the novel so that she has closer ties to an existing character, and so I don’t have to add in two further species and all their respective culture and history and psychology and all that extraneous stuff that was cluttering up the novel before and sending me off course.  That lets me tell this part of the story in a more focused and compact way.  But since most of what comes next is new material with a new character, I have some thinking to do before I can get into it.  I’ve been reviewing all the stuff I’ve written over the years about this character’s species, both background notes and an unsold story about them, to refresh my memory and help me get into the right mindset.  Although there’s not as much of it as I’d like.  (I wonder just how many good ideas I’ve had in years past that I’ve forgotten now because I didn’t keep detailed enough notes.)

So I need to write maybe two major scenes and one minor scene mostly from scratch now, and after (and between) those are a half-dozen more scenes from the old version that I can plug in with minor changes… and then I’ll get to the point where I stopped work on the old version and it’ll be all new material the rest of the way (basically the climactic action and the denouement).  I’m finally making real progress, and I hope I can keep up the momentum.

Luckily, something that I was afraid would derail my burgeoning momentum didn’t happen.  According to the production schedule my Star Trek editor sent me a while back, I was due to get second-pass galleys on DTI: Forgotten History sent to me for review, with less than a week before the deadline.  So I was expecting to have to spend much of this week poring over galley pages again.  But as it turned out, I simply got an e-mail from my editor containing a mere five proofreader queries which I was able to fire back answers to in less than an hour, and that was that.

ONLY SUPERHUMAN copyedits are here (and other news/tidbits)

Things are starting to pick up with the process of getting Only Superhuman to publication.  Not only is the cover nearly done, as I mentioned the other day, but I’ve just gotten the copyedited manuscript pages sent to me for review.  Over at Pocket, this is being done digitally now, with the copyedits sent to me as a Word file with tracked changes, but apparently Tor (or at least Marco, the assistant editor who’s handling that part of the process) still does things the old-fashioned way, with printed pages delivered to me.  And it’s a hefty sheaf, over 400 pages that I need to work through by the end of the month.

And here I was just starting to get some momentum going on the reworking of my second spec novel.  I just finished revising the first of the book’s three parts (the one that’s an expansion of my first published story, “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide”) and am about to start on the second, which is the part where the revised plot begins to diverge more substantially from what I’d written before (before I realized that I was writing myself into a corner and needed to back up and take things in a new direction).  Well, hopefully I’ll be able to spare enough attention for both projects, though of course the OS copyedits need to take priority since they’re the project I have a deadline for.

—

Anyway, I printed out the OS cover art at about 7×10″ size and hung it over my desk, next to my own pencil/colored-pencil renderings of Emerald Blair.  The more I look at the cover, the more I like it, and I hope it isn’t much longer before I can share it publicly.  (I wonder what the title font will look like.)

—

Meanwhile, this seems to be my week for seeing covers, since today my Trek editor at Pocket e-mailed me the cover mechanical (i.e. the flat version of the full cover, front, back, and spine) for Star Trek DTI: Forgotten History.  No surprises in the cover art, but now I’ve seen the back-cover blurb too, and hopefully the final cover and blurb will be publicized soon.

—

And in other news, as I’ve already reported on Facebook, the Twitter page set up by my impersonator has now been shut down.

To prove that I was the real me, I had to fax proof of identity to Twitter, and since I’m not set up for telefacsimilating from home, I had to walk up to the nearby FedEx Office place — and by bad timing, today was just about the coldest day we’ve had all winter.  I could’ve driven, but I wasn’t sure about parking availability, and I wanted the exercise, and it was only 7-8 minutes to walk either way.  Still, even such a short walk in such cold weather can really take it out of me, and I’m still feeling the fatigue.

The STAR TREK Novelverse flowchart

This is cool: A poster on the TrekBBS calling himself Thrawn had the idea to put together a flowchart showing the interconnections among the various Star Trek prose-fiction series that Pocket Books has published in recent years.  It’s not a completely comprehensive chart, since that would be way too cluttered, but it’s an impressive overview.  It’s being hosted on 8of5′s Guide to the Trek Collective, and you can see it here:

The Almighty Star Trek Lit-verse Reading Order Flowchart

You can click to enlarge it.  On my browser it works best if you right-click and open, but maybe that’s just my browser.

The list includes seven of my works (at least implicitly, since I had a story in Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows), but doesn’t have room for Ex Machina or The Buried Age.  At least, not in its current form.  Thrawn went through about five drafts in one day putting this together, so who knows?  Maybe there will be future refinements.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out (and Thrawn does, on the left-hand side of the chart) that this web of interconnections doesn’t mean anyone is required to read all these books to understand what’s going on.  For the most part, except for the outright duologies and trilogies, you can read and understand any novel on its own, because we authors know any book is going to be somebody’s first and thus needs to be accessible without prior knowledge.  (Heck, I know my books may be read by friends or family who aren’t too familiar with Trek in the first place, so I always try to make my books understandable for them.)

Anyway, it’s a cool reference guide to Trek literature, so it’s worth calling attention to.

TrekMovie.com votes THE STRUGGLE WITHIN best Trek story of 2011

TrekMovie.com has put up several “Best of 2011″ posts lately, and in their “TrekIn2011: Best Star Trek Books & Comics” post, they gave top honors to my e-novella Star Trek: Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within, calling it “[t]he clear winner for short stories and novellas (and in fact for all Star Trek fiction in 2011).”

Now, even getting just the short-fiction nod would be an honor, because the other candidates would’ve been the four novellas comprising Vanguard: Declassified, and that’s mighty tough competition.  But best of all Trek fiction of the year?  That’s rather mindboggling — and heartening, because frankly I wasn’t too happy with The Struggle Within and feared it wouldn’t work at all.  Personally, my vote for the best of 2011 would’ve been Voyager: Children of the Storm by Kirsten Beyer.  But I’m gratified that TSW has been so well-received, and I thank the TrekMovie staff for the recognition.

My “Best Trek Gift” story is on StarTrek.com

StarTrek.com is doing a holiday feature entitled “The Best Trek Gift You Ever Gave or Got,” for which they interviewed a bunch of people associated with the Trek franchise, from actors and production staff to tie-in authors including me (and it’s flattering to be included on an equal level with the stars of the shows).  So I passed along the story of my most valued and most missed Star Trek present from my childhood, my Mego bridge playset, along with the photo of it under the tree which is my only surviving relic of it.  I’d expected them to cut down my rambling reminiscence and just use what they needed, but they actually published the whole thing (though they cropped the photo), and you can read it and the other Trek-gift stories here:

The Best Trek Gift You Ever Gave or Got – Part 1

There’s also a second part with further gift reminiscences, including more bridge-playset reminiscences (truly it was the Holy Grail of classic Trek toys).

The Best Trek Gift You Ever Gave or Got – Part 2

Sometimes they come back

Yesterday I went down to the apartment building’s laundry room to do my laundry — and sitting there on top of one of the dryers was a sock I’d lost the last time.  Maybe the sock-stealing dryer demons learned the true meaning of Christmas.  Or something.

Otherwise it’s another quiet holiday season for me.  I think I just get so overwhelmed by family Thanksgiving that I prefer quiet and solitude for a while thereafter.  I wouldn’t mind finding a comfortable middle ground, though.

But I’ve got stuff to keep my occupied, like proofreading the galleys for DTI: Forgotten History.  And after that, I hope to get back to work on that spec novel.

TrekMovie reviews STRUGGLE WITHIN, and new ST MAGAZINE article now out!

Two bits of Star Trek news that I’m happy about:

One, TrekMovie.com’s reviewer Robert Lyons has posted a review of my e-novella Star Trek Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within, and he has some very nice things to say.  My favorite bits:

 Bennett provides a timely story, inspired by very recent real world events, combined with an accessible yet still alien background (in both the A and B story!), that completely engages the reader.

…

While “Zero Sum Game” may be the best novel in the series, “The Struggle Within” is truly the best story of the five… and an outstanding conclusion to the series….

Very flattering.

—

Also, Star Trek Magazine #38 is now out, and it contains my entry in the ongoing Star Trek 45s series, examining every 45th aired episode of ST one by one.  My piece is on one of my favorite Voyager episodes, “Concerning Flight,” and it has an absolutely gorgeous title-page illustration of Janeway and Leonardo da Vinci which you can see a small version of here.  My thanks to the magazine’s designer, Philip White, for giving my article such a great accompanying image.

FORGOTTEN HISTORY copyedits done

I just e-mailed the copyedits for Star Trek DTI: Forgotten History off to my editor.  For all my loyalty to WordPerfect, I have to say, MS Word’s Track Changes and Compare features really streamline the copyediting process.

However, I wish the copyeditors of the world would catch onto two things:

1. There’s nothing wrong with using “which” instead of “that” in a defining relative clause (e.g. “the planets which they visited” instead of “the planets that they visited”).  It may be a little old-fashioned or formal, but just because one guy wrote a book a while back proposing that “which” shouldn’t be used interchangeably with “that,” that doesn’t mean it’s actually ungrammatical.  And sometimes it flows better or fits a character’s voice better than using “that.”
2. The word “spacetime” is not hyphenated.  Dictionaries of lay usage may hyphenate it, but in scientific usage (such as the dialogue of scientist characters in fiction), it’s a single unhyphenated word.

E-books on the rise?

I recently signed on to the Simon & Schuster Author Portal, which among other things (that I haven’t gotten around to investigating yet), allows us authors to see sales figures on our books and e-books published by S&S and its imprints.  The specific sales figures are confidential, of course, but I’m noticing an interesting trend.  While the overall sales figures of my books are much higher in print form than in e-book form (since all my Trek novels are available in e-editions as well), in recent weeks the e-book sales numbers are generally competitive with and often higher than the print-book numbers.  In fact, I didn’t really count them precisely, but the impression I get from the latest week’s figures is that the majority of my backlist titles sold more electronic copies than print copies.  Which would seem to confirm that e-reader use is significantly on the rise, at least for older books that might not be readily available on store shelves (though would still be available for purchase online or through special order at bookstores).  It’ll be interesting to see how the print and electronic sales figures for next year’s DTI: Forgotten History compare to one another.

The unfortunate thing, though, is that my two Marvel Comics novels, X-Men: Watchers on the Walls and Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder, apparently aren’t available in e-book form.  I’m quite proud of both of those novels, but they’re not selling very actively these days, and maybe they’d be doing better if there were e-editions available.   (Although of course I’m hoping that by mentioning them here and posting purchasing links I’ll prompt a few more sales.)

New version of DTI: FORGOTTEN HISTORY cover!

The Simon & Schuster digital catalog has posted a new (but still not final) version of the cover to Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History, this time in color:

I think if they’d stuck with a more monochrome look, it’d be a better match with the Watching the Clock cover, but maybe the colors will be tweaked in the final version.  And the image of the Enterprise is clearer, though it appears to be the pilot-era version — again, maybe that will be addressed in the final cover.