Double Whammy in May – in a good way

The sequel in the ARIA trilogy has May 31st 2013 as the release date! ARIA: Returning Left Luggage is in the final stages of proofing, the art has been painted by Award-winning Andy Bigwood, and the promo engine is cranking up. By sheer coincidence May 31st is the day a while ago that my wife, Gaynor, was born. Luckily, she smiled when I mentioned her birthday is on the same day as the release of ARIA 2. Not so much, as poet, artist and writer Catherine Edmunds comments, a competing celebration – more using my book release as part of Gaynor’s birthday celebration. Yeay!

ARIA: Returning Left Luggage cover art by Andy Bigwood

Of course reading the sequel would make more sense if you read the first book in the series – ARIA: Left Luggage – links at the bottom of this page. Not unique but unusual for a science fiction trilogy is that the first volume has NO aliens, no battles in space, no Earth people going on interstellar travels. I believe it helped making the book more enjoyable as a medical mystery with the infectious amnesia for non-SF readers, although such plot aspects weren’t needed for book one either.

LL-Publications have asked me for a 800-word excerpt to hook readers and media into book 2. It was easy to do this for Left Luggage because the beginning was just right. The prologue told of Jack, who caught the infectious amnesia (ARIA) at work then spread it on the bus home. It was unique – and amazingly the idea of infectious amnesia still is unique in the fiction (and non-fiction) world. A reader tells me she lost some memory and other brain problems when she contracted meningitis so that is a kind of amnesia that is infectious but not retrograde, nor with everyone catching it within a few yards. Any day I am expecting an experienced science fiction reader to say, hey I read about infectious amnesia in this book in the 1950/60/70s by Niven/Heinlein/Asimov but they haven’t yet… Would it matter if they did? No, because it isn’t possible to have original ideas in absolutely every story – tens of thousands come out each year. Each story is unique because of the blend of characters, sub-plots, settings, writing style and factor X. Even so, it is rather cool to have an original idea and to have it published. Come on film makers, contact LL-Publications and buy the movie rights!

The 800-word excerpts for Returning Left Luggage is proving harder to pick. There are many many scenes that I like very much and whittled them down to five. One is of an ARIA victim trying to find his wife in an abandoned port in the South Pacific. It illustrates much of the dystopian problems and scenery created by ARIA. Butbutbut it involves shooting dogs. They are feral and maddened by starvation but even so, it might alienate [sic] dog-loving readers so while it remains part of the whole book it will not appear on the press releases! The others are too long so whichever I choose will involve even more lacerating than in the proofreading. I have enlisted the help of the Orbiter critique group, who helped me edit ARIA and still do so for volume three. So I’ve sent three possible excerpts to Mark Iles, James Odell, Chris Riley and James Steel for a poll on the one they think is best for a hook. Thanks – I’ll let you know the outcome. Daughter voted for a scene where Manuel seeks food in an abandoned shop and is caught – maybe.

I am slowly building up a twitter following at http://twitter.com/geoffnelder but I notice that some people have over 100,000 followers yet only follow a few hundred. Then I discovered that you can BUY thousands of fake twitter friends, youtube likes, and other social media connections. Such falsehood is probably excused by some a marketing ploy but it’s not one with which I would feel comfortable. It’s not much different to those authors who have fake identities to create their own ‘brilliant’ reviews on Amazon and fake blogs. I don’t have many followers on twitter – around 800 – the number goes up and down daily – but at least they are real. I think!

Killed babies? Resurrect them with blogs!

As part of my blog tour arranged by LL-Publications I am this week hosted by writer, Mark Iles at this link. Mark has taken an interest in ARIA: Left Luggage from the beginning when he liked the possibilities presented by the idea of infectious amnesia. An editor of an early draft said I’d given too many examples of the effects of the virus so I had to cut a couple. One was a reversal of the normal day at a US / Mexican border point. In ARIA the infectious amnesia is coming from the north so people are streaming south to Mexico. Ah, but can they? Hence this short scene that Mark includes in his blog. Thanks Mark. you’ve enabled this chapter to be resurrected after all!

Update****

The prestigious SFSignal is carrying on with my blog tour this week with
another missing chapter unearthed from ARIA: Left Luggage. It works fine as
a stand-alone short – in my opinion – and was a favourite of the BSFA
critiquersbefore an editor advised it was an example too far. Read, enjoy.
The bit.y link is to the SFSignal page you may click with safety
http://bit.ly/StiWoc

Acknowledgements for ARIA

ARIA is the new name for my science fiction trilogy of which the first is called Left Luggage. ARIA is an acronym of a amnesia-creating virus released from a case left on the struts of the International Space Station. The book is being published in 2012 by LL-Publications and I thought carefully over the last few days to write a page of acknowledgements. That page is in its first draft but I will post it here because it astonished me how many writers, some famous, have been involved. There have been other folk who I have not named, and who have encouraged me over the years though they have not actually read the manuscript. In particular Gladys Hobson and Brian Withecombe. Like me they had a literary agent, Christopher Hill, who was a sham. He reported to me with detailed progress reports of how Left Luggage attracted interest at HarperCollins and Crown publishers. I was offered a five-figure advance, as were many of his other clients. Sadly, it was all in Hill’s demented mind. He’d not sent our books anywhere and he’d sat in his Edinburgh home in a kind of Walter Mitty stew. I’d even met him over dinner at an Edinburgh hotel and he was smartly dressed, spoke eloquently, and seemed well-educated – all the attributes of what I imagined a literary agent should be. Except he wasn’t as over 60 of his “clients” found out. Many of us belong to a Beyond Hill yahoo group and have had our successes in spite of or maybe because of that weird experience.

So here is the first draft of my acknowledgements page. Feel free to shout if I have missed you or erred.

—-

This novel would not have been possible without Daisy. Her twenty-four gears allowed my legs to rotate up the Welsh slope of Horseshoe Pass near Llangollen making my heart thump so fast my brain – freshly oxygenated – buzzed with an original idea. It was such a novel concept I dismounted at the summit, rushed into the Ponderosa Café and demanded a scrap of paper and a pencil. Thus ARIA was born.

I have trawled files to trigger my memory of all those editors, friends and critiquers who sculpted then polished ARIA to the diamond it now is. Any flaws are not their fault but mine.

The first real editor to lacerate my script and teach me about Point of View and strong characters is Doug Watts from the Jacqui Bennet Writing Bureau. My Hollywood-based pal, Jessie Lilley-Campbell helped me with Americanisms and pushed Left Luggage under the nose of Brad Linaweaver ¹, (Battlestar Gallactica co-writer) who endorsed it. Each chapter cranked their way through the tough critique group of the British Science Fiction Association’s Orbiters including Terry Jackman, Mark Iles, James Bloomer and Ian Clark. Encouragement came from award-winning SF writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood², and Stargate novel writer, Sonny Whitelaw. Urging me on were publisher Neil Marr of BeWrite Books, friend and guru Les Floyd, American writing tutor and award-winning writer, M. Kenyon Charboneaux³, and my American literary agent and friend, Rebecca Pratt. A wonderful writer in her own right, Bec Zugor, advised me on the Italian language uttered by mad Doctor Antonio Menzies. Louise Bolotin of the editing services, Plain Text, helped me with early chapters and query letters.

After all that help, and from too-many-to-mention-others, surely the manuscript would be perfect? Ha ha, but then I sent it to friend, hard-nosed crime writer, and agent, Allan Guthrie. Whoa! Advice from the world expert on pleonasms and tight narrative meant that I started over again.

During this time other novels and over fifty short stories had fled my fingers onto the world, so my style evolved, and is still developing. Perhaps it is in the bronze age now. In the last minutes Zetta Brown and Billye Johnson tweaked and poked ARIA further. Thanks to them and everyone.

None of this would have been possible if my wife had insisted I went out and found a proper job after I left teaching, so ultimate thanks to Gaynor and to my ever-tolerant grown-up kids, Eleanor and Rob. Above all they understand that when I am staring out of the window, I am really working.

NB the image is my sketch potential cover art.

¹ “In Left Luggage Geoff Nelder asks the most important questions of life.”

² “Geoff Nelder wears science fiction like other people wear clothes.”

³ “Memento meets the Twilight Zone.”