Exit is now at Amazon.co.uk presumably because of the third party booksellers that now stock it. Not yet at Barnes & Noble. I have several copies now for signed orders. Anyone who wants a signed copy and lives in the British Isles can have one from me for £12 and only a tiny bit more from the rest of the world. Send me an email via my website. http://geoffnelder.com

I’ve asked the Guardian if Eric Brown can review it. There are good reviews posted already at Bibliophilia forum by ~bintarab http://www.bibliophilia.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=854

Also by Annette Gisby here

Exit on Amazon

Exit, Pursued by a Bee appeared today on the Amazon.com website

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1554045940

 

Books seem to appear there in small bits. So the book image and other information has yet to appear even though buyers could buy it. I wonder how long it will take before other booksellers have their cheaper versions of it there too? I’ve added a captioned image that appears when a reader browses details.

 

It hasn’t appeared on Amazon.co.uk. I’m not sure if that will happen automatically or whether the publisher has to add it there himself.

 

I’ve ordered a bunch of copies to send to professional reviewers and to sell at scifi cons. If you want a signed copy send me an email to geoffnelder AT yahoo DOT com but be prepared to pay £11 to cover p&p.

 

 

Whenever I make time to peep at my blog statistics I am struck by the higher number of hits for Tryfan than for any of my desperate attempts to point people at my books. Tryfan is a fine mountain in Snowdonia and I scaled its summit with the help of John last year. North face, too, with a mighty scramble just to reach the first stile out of the carpark! I often wonder whether all those thousands of mountain climbers seeking expert help and information about Tryfan, find my blog and think what on Earth have we here? Books, who wants science fiction books when they could be reading about mountains?

Even odder are the large hit rates I get for car in hedge. Yes, I encountered a car parked at right angles to the road and neatly into a hedge, but I can’t find it on google any more. Yet plenty of folks somehow hit my blog because I plonked it in here.and now I’ve done it again. More hits. Maybe a car in hedge afficianado will also want to buy my Exit, Pursued by a Bee book or at least glance at the fantastic video trailer for it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnr-135u84c

I still look at it, even though my clicks on it don’t add to the score there. It’s the clip of the animated spheres in orbit that grab me. So uncannily like the ones in my book. They do exactly as in the clip. Anyway they are so hypnotic, dreamy…

A marvelous endorsement to Exit arrived today from a writer who inhabits several forums. Her avatar is ~bintarab. Note the tilde ~ what a lovely name to call a scriggly line. She found a few typos in an early version of Exit and at my request was good enough to read it through again to note exactly where they were. She says this: “Since I read through it a second time to make my list, I pulled out the quotes that interested me enough that I might mention one or two of them in a book review; turns out they’re the witty quips and turns of phrase that were poetic descriptions to me. But for all that lovely humor, I did it again: I nibbled my fingernails from about page 197 on. How stupid — I knew exactly what was going to happen, there’s no justification for nail-biting, no suspense, no tension — but there was! It’s proof to me of how good your story is, Geoff, that you enraptured me even the second time around as I was looking for errors! Makes no sense, but kudos to you for it! Best sci-fi book I’ve read in a loooong while.”

Wow. I want to marry you! I’d have to ask my wife first, just to check she’s OK for multiple wife arrangements.

I am rewriting Exit as an audio script – Double Dragon Publishing is going into audio books and I want Exit to be in there. I know I could read the whole of the book myself and use Audacity to record it with a microphone, but my voice is slow Gloucestershire, and the main voice in the book is Phoenix American young woman! Anyway I bet it will be another work of art when finished. There are still some ebooks left if you want to spend that change from the bus – here

Coincidence, or is fiction becoming fact? A Liverpool man reported seeing balls of light floating above Merseyside this week. The UFOs were seen throughout the region with no explanation at present. Weather balloons aren’t normally seen in this area and only 3 are launched in England at any one time by the Met Office.

I have an explanation. The UFOs, balls of light, are none other than the enigmatic spheres from my scifi book, by a Exit, Pursued by a Bee. Excellent!

 

Trailer for Exit, Pursued by a Bee

After working with Kim McDougal for days, selecting stills and video clips, the right words we now have a trailer launched for Exit.

http://tinyurl.com/4a86vy

 

Bottom right of the video is a Watch in high quality link. Try it and be astonished.

 

Rating it would be great too.

I really wanted either the Kasier Chiefs playing their Oh My God song, which starts the story at Glastonbury, or the atmospheric wonder that is the song, Liebstod, from Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde. You could play the video with the sound off and find a recording of Liebstod and play that instead!

 

I’m back after a cycle tour from Chester to Gloucestershire. I took my Sony Vaio laptop so I could add words to stories overnight. I’m working on Auditory Crescendo, a short sci fi story based on my own digital hearing aid experiences. More later. The cycle ride went very well. The first leg was around 65 miles meandering through Cheshire and Shropshire and then climbing ever upwards into the range of hills south west of Shrewsbury. I had to dismount on the 1 in 7 sections that seemed more like 1 in 2. I had to walk behind my bike with both hands shoving overloaded panniers with the handlebars being steered by will power. At Bridges Youth Hostel. I enjoyed a hot shower and rested so I could cycle right over the summit of Stiperstones to visit my former school friend, Peter Gartell, at his pub, The Sun Inn at Marton. Click here for its website. Peter has awards for his cuisine cooking – a must visit. And I visited it, much to his surprise (we’d not seen each other for 42 years!) and hello to Jane his sister, who was my first love all those years ago), after an energetic ride over those hills. At least my cycle panniers were empty for that ride except for essentials such as tools, towel, food, cycle lamps, maps, first aid kit, notebook, laptop… Yes, all right, I know I carry too much. This was particularly brought home to me at the Youth Hostel because there were two groups of end-to-enders staying overnight too. Young folk cycling from Lands End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in Scotland – approximately 850 miles – carrying all their own gear. My round trip was less than half their journey yet my belongings weighed more than theirs even without the computer! Solution next para.

After leaving Bridges I called in on Peter Tomlinson, who writes the great series of fantasy books, the Petronicus Legacy series. Check them out at the Bewrite Books store here.  He took me to the Olive Tree cafe in Ludlow and I easily found a vegan buffet to scoff – thanks Peter – and enjoyed writerly nattering with the man himself. Excellent boost to energy and enthusiasm for climbing the hilly miles onto Leominster and Ledbury.

When I reached Ledbury, I met my daughter and her newly acquired husband, Gareth. They arrived in a car so took off me a big bag full of spare gear I decided I was better off without! We all travelled to Cheltenham and had a great reunion with my sister, Lin and her daughter, Shelley. Then back to Ledbury for lunch with my dad and stepmum, Rosemary. My visiting wasn’t over. Another former school friend is David Hargreaves. I knocked on his door and a strange woman answered. ‘You’re not David,’ I said. He’d moved a mile away but I tracked him down. One of the snags of having Exit, Pursued by a Bee, published as an ebook is that it’s not so easy to give copies to friends – especially signed copies. Oh well maybe DDP will bring it out as a paperback soon.

 

Hooray, the rain slowed today sufficient for me to leap on my bicycle for a between the showers ride to fetch a morning paper. Because of a dislocated finger last month and the rain, gales and busybusy life, I’ve not had a chance to do any long hilly rides, so I rode slowly. I’d forgotten how exhilirating it is to cycle through the countryside, challenge and beat the hills and freewheel down them. I think it was President Clinton who once remarked that cycling was one of the few simple pleasures everyone should experience regularly.

I’ve also been busy writing and editing. Also I’ve had the pleasure of critiquing several short stories at Cafe Doom a great crit site mainly for horror writers. Many of us there write in other genre too but generally in a noir fashion. One aspect of the stories I critiqued intrigued me as it is true of many of the submissions I’d read for the Escape Velocity magazine. Many writers are great at describing what they see, and often have good characterization and dialogue but forget to engage all the readers’ senses. I recently read two 10,000 word stories neither of which had any smells or tactile experiences to offer. Along with taste, odours and feel are part of the way we use SHOW instead of TELL. Allan Guthrie of Hardluck Stories, once showed me that where I’d written about a man sat next to a rancid tramp on a train, I could convert it to real show by adding – as if a pint of sour milk had been poured over him. Excellent. Doesn’t your nose wrinkle now? Hah.

I’ve been having fun revisiting an old favourite article of mine lately. I’ve been asked by Marilyn Peake to contribute a couple of articles for a print version of a newsletter she is publishing in 2008 on writing issues. In 2004 I was commissioned to research and write an article on why dogs bark at and chase bicycles. I used Yahoo and other forum groups to ask basic and then more specific questions to groups of dog owners, cyclists and sound engineers. I’d received over 2000 responses along with long correspondance with ethologists. I’ve always intended to write an article on how I did that research including some amusing aspects and so the draft is done.  I’ll read it again in the next few days and send it off. Peter N. Davidson took some great photographs for me and I’m hoping one or two will be used again. Here is his gallery.

Good news from our forum members of survivors from Christopher Hill’s crashed Literary Agency. As time heals our wounds, more of us are writing again and gaining recognition. Gladys Hobson wrote a romance novel, Awakening Love, which has won a highly commended award at the London Book Festival this week. Well done that lady! A link to her books is here.  Others in the group have made progress too, including Lanaia Lee where her ‘Of Atlantis’ has released a YouTube video here. Another member, Brian Withecombe has his The Seagull & Le Corsair book published here
http://tinyurl.com/276fup
Other members are singing like Elvis! Well done, Bob Taylor >>> http://www.myspace.com/tuesdaynightatthebootandshoe

It really is worth listening to. Congratulations Bob.

My contract for my sf novel Exit, Pursued by a Bee is with Double Dragon Publishing in Canada now, so I look forward to working with J. Richard Jacobs my editor.

Exit, pursued by a Bee

Canadian e-book and paperback publishers Double Dragon Publishing Inc (DDP) are to publish my science fiction novel, Exit, Pursued by a Bee. Marilyn Peake has been appointed as their editor and as an admirer of her fantasy novels I look forward to working with her! The photo has been in this blog before and shows how I used a desk-globe to model a crucial aspect of the premise in Exit. In a near-future Earth, mysterious metallic spheres emerge from under six hills / mountains that hold a special mystical interest for humans. eg Glastonbury, Uluru, El Capitan, etc. Although I also use mathematical modelling, I wanted to see if the location of these quasi-religious sites were equidistant and so used long matchsticks stuck onto their locations – yeay, they are equidistant! I’m not giving too much plot away here, but I really enjoyed writing in the use of time decoherences in quantum physics as a means of communication and some space-time manifestation gives rise to time-quakes and other Earth-threatening phenomenon. The plot, intriguing as it is, is delivered by feisty astronaut, Kallandra, and her feller (s). I had so much fun researching and writing this novel, and it generated plenty of discussion at my critique group in the BSFA orbiters. I’ll let you know progress.