November 2001

This is a Progress Report of my upcoming novel, COUNTING HEADS. I am sending you this report because I believe it will be of some interest to you (refer to "list criteria" at the end of this post). If you have received this report in error, or if you don't with to receive future issues, please send "unsubscribe" in a reply message.


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Friends in fiction--

I have long thought I would put out a newsletter like this when I had concrete news or milestones to report to you concerning my novel-in-progress. Now I do--two announcements:

- Draft One of my novel-in-progress, COUNTING HEADS: THE DAY THE CANOPY FELL, is finished.

- A collection of my short stories will soon be published.

When I say I've finished Draft One of the novel, I hasten to add that it's written in longhand and that there are substantial gaps to fill. It's currently about 200,000 words in length (a 700-page book).

The plan now is to rewrite and keystroke it into the computer as quickly as possible, without a lot of polishing. I will deliver Draft Two to my first readers by February 1, 2002. Can I accomplish this? I don't know. To date I have 116,500 words (or 440 typewritten pages) in the computer. So, there's progress, but it's bound to slow down as I hit the gaps and rough patches. I've worked out a work schedule that calls for writing/rewriting and keystroking 1400 words a day, six days a week. I've followed this schedule now for two weeks and find that it takes me about 40 hours/week.

My first readers are a half-dozen dedicated stalwarts who have read and critiqued all of my stories in ms. form. (Hey guys, get your pencils sharpened.)

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Here's the current novel synopsis:

Counting Heads
A Synopsis

This is a two-book series set on Earth and in space 130 years in the future. Each book will run from 150,000 to 200,000 words. There is an ensemble cast of characters whose individual story threads interweave in an overarching plot.

The World

The year is 2134, and the living is easy.

The Information Age has given rise to the Boutique Economy in which mass production and mass consumption are rendered obsolete. Almost everything one needs—clothing, food, furniture, medicine, electronics, etc.—can be easily fabricated in the home with nanotech assemblers.

Life extension therapies have increased the human life-span by centuries.

Loyal mentars (artificial intelligence) and robots do most of society’s work. What they can’t manage is performed by a contented labor force of human clones.

If this sounds like paradise, it is—but only so long as you make your payments. And that’s the problem. The Boutique Economy has made redundant ninety-nine percent of the world’s fifteen billion human inhabitants. It has retired not only the twin engines of mass production and consumption, but also the masses, themselves--the rivers of people once needed to fill mines, factories, farms, and shopping malls. All are superfluous and wasteful. Not to mention messy, fractious, and hungry. The world would be a much better place if they all simply went away.

Enter the “Garden Earth Project.”

A consortium of a dozen of the West’s most influential private citizens has engineered a brilliantly cynical scheme to improve the quality of life on Earth. In its simplest terms, their plan calls for trading title to land on Earth for settlement rights on an unnamed Earth-like planet in a neighboring star system. One acre of land here entitles one colonist to one thousand acres there, plus passage aboard a generational starship, all of the technology and supplies necessary to tame a new world, and an equal vote in the governance of both starship and colony. All this for one acre.

Garden Earth is a “land swap,” and no other payment but title to land is accepted.

In its turn, the Garden Earth consortium pledges to restore its newly acquired real estate on Earth to a natural, pre-Industrial condition and to prevent occupation or development upon it for a period of two hundred years (consortium members expect to live for centuries, long enough to take possession of and pleasure in a sparsely populated, garden-like Earth).

The first few starships (Oships), each accommodating a quarter million colonists, have been pre-sold. It has proven easy to sell the promise of a new start on a new Earth to the disenfranchised inhabitants of an old Earth still plagued by the sins of earlier centuries: poverty, pollution, disease, and a biosphere poisoned by decades of bioterrorism. Indeed, the worse that conditions become on Earth, the more attractive the dream of renewal becomes.

And conditions on Earth are about to get a lot worse.

Without much in the way of public debate, greater Chicagoland announces the deactivation of its canopy. Its canopy is a region-wide filtering dome structure that protects the city from airborne and waterborne viruses, toxins, and nanobots (a legacy of the terror wars of the mid-twenty-first century). Most of the western world has huddled under similar canopies for over sixty years.

The media declares terrorism dead. The world parliament certifies that Earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere are free of bioweapons and deems it time to wean the Earth’s population from its dependence on costly filtered biospheres. Chicago will be the first city to drop its defenses.

But bioterror is not quite dead.

Urban property values plummet.

Garden Earth does a bumper business.

Book One
The Day the Canopy Fell

This is the day Chicagoland plans to “break out of its shell.” Its region-wide canopy will be deactivated during a ceremony, with fireworks, at 9:00 PM.

By 9:00 AM, however, the day has swerved off its tracks. Eleanor K. Starke, one of the world’s leading citizens (and chair of the Garden Earth consortium), is assassinated, and her daughter, Ellen, is mortally wounded.

No one of Eleanor’s stature has died since Stalin. Her passing throws the cloistered world of the ultra-rich into turmoil. Her murder ignites a chain reaction of bloody reprisals among the powerful (the modern equivalent of border disputes among nations).

Before Eleanor can be properly mourned, her Garden Earth Project, its fleet of starships under construction, and the future of space colonization, itself, are up for grabs. Only Ellen, the wounded daughter and heir to her mother’s financial empire, is capable of saving Garden Earth, if she, herself, survives. Her cryonically frozen head is in the hands of her family’s enemies.

A ragtag ensemble of unlikely heroes join forces to rescue Ellen’s head, all for their own purposes. They include family retainers and friends and their artificial intelligence mentars and cloned human helpers, as well as destitute chartists, assorted robots, and a defrocked bishop of a radical Gaiaist movement.

Book Two
The Day of the Oship

Our ensemble of heroes has “won the battle but lost the war.” They were successful in rescuing Ellen, and she is willing to protect her late mother’s interests in the Garden Earth Project. But her mother’s enemies have not surrendered, and soon they launch a vicious counterattack. Ellen is persuaded to drop the project.

Without Ellen’s protection, things get pretty warm for her recent rescuers. They decide to get out of town, in this case, the solar system.

Only one of the Garden Earth’s Oships, the GOODACRE, has been provisioned and loaded with colonists (a quarter-million members of a utopian sect) and is poised to launch. Our heroes decide to stow away aboard this ship.

If reaching the ship and stealing aboard it weren’t difficult enough, our heroes discover other fugitives—several tens of thousands of them—with the same goal. A secret exodus is afoot aboard a ship suddenly too small and fragile.

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As far as the story collection goes, it hasn't been sold to a publisher yet, but my agents are peddling it. It will probably include my six published stories set in the same universe as the novel, and will thus serve as a prequel. Plus, I'd like to include "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz" for the hell of it. I'm pretty excited about this. At long last, a book (in English) with my name on the cover.

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List Criteria

I have taken the liberty to include you in this mailing because:

--You have sent me email about my writing
--I met you at a con
--I met you at a liquor store
--We used to date (or I wish we had)
--You're my agent, editor, first reader, family member, friend, famous person whose acquaintance I'd like to cultivate, fan (and proud of it), or patron (no patrons yet, but I'm still looking).

To date, there are 106 of you on this list.

Till next time,
David

January 2000

It looks like I've finally gotten started on a novel. It's about time.

I started it in January, 1999, soon after I arrived in London. I spent six months in London and wrote pretty much every day (with the supportive encouragement of my wonderful hosts), putting in about 40 hours a week for a period of five months. Then I kinda just went dry. I didn't have a clue what happened next in the story. Also, the thing just kept spreading. I quit working on it on May 16, 1999, when I had already drafted 158,400 words. I had never written so many words on one piece before. That many words is supposed to be a fair-sized book, but my story was still only building to a climax. I felt like I was in trouble.

Here's the first page and all the rest on April 1, 1999, on
my desk in the blue bedroom of Pat and Chris' flat in London.

I let it drop for a few months and took it up again after I'd returned to Fairbanks. I still didn't know what happened next, so I decided to use my time redrafting the beginning, about which I was pretty sure. But one thing led to another, and the story got ever longer. I was feeling pretty hopeless about it until I realized in December, 1999, that what I had was a helluva long story in which there's a major plot climax each eighty to one hundred thousand words, ie. the length of a smallish book. What I had was not a series, per se, but a longer story cut into segments. And I have the first three pretty well worked out.

All of which means that you might get to see the first at least a couple years earlier than I had thought possible.

A Very Brief Synopsis:

The story takes place in the near future universe I've been building with seven short pieces (all published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine). Quite of few of the characters introduced in those stories find their way into the novel including: Eleanor, her Cabinet and her daughter Ellen, Fred the russ, Zorrana Alblaitor (and her sister Nancy) and Nick, Saul Jaspersen, Victor (a cameo), and in a lead role--Samson Harger. In addition, there is an equal number of new characters, some of whom I've been trying to write about for years. Half of this novel, in fact, is material I've been gnawing at for quite some time. The rest is achingly new.

The story takes place in 2134, almost 40 years after the conclusion of "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy." Samson is at the end of his life. He has spent his last couple decades as a member of a soup pot clan, which has nurtured him in his difficult condition uncomplainingly.

Hmmm, I find myself unable to reveal any more here. It would be bad luck. I will just say that I take a close look of the three major classes in those days: the incredibly wealthy and insular stratos, the wage slave clones, and the increasingly disenfranchised "free-range" people. Also that there's as much action with the artificial personalities as with the carbon-based ones.

So stay tuned.