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The End of the Beginning

Whew. That was work. Earlier today, I finished the epilogue to The Everything Machine, the big drumlins novel, which I have worked on in fits and starts (and slogs) since 2006.

The first draft is now structurally complete. It isn’t finished, exactly. I’m still rewriting much of Chapter 57, which just didn’t turn out right. And there is a lot of other work to do. The first draft now stands at 128,000 words. I’m hoping to get it down to 125,000 and probably will. That edit pass is still to come.

The idea dates back to 1997, when I got the ideas for both The Everything Machine and The Cunning Blood in one bizarre evening. I was sitting on the edge of our pool with Carol when my brain just suddenly boiled over with ideas. I was days taking notes. What I had was a whole new universe to write in and about. I had a little more concept on The Cunning Blood, so I began that novel first, under the original title No Way in Hell. A publishing colleague warned me that bookstores might not shelve a book with “hell” in the title, so I thought of The Cunning Blood and went with it. Not long thereafter, I was in our local Bookstar store (RIP) and while browsing stumbled across a book called F—k Yes! (minus the hyphens) by the unlikely Wing F. Fing. Face-out, already. So much for bookstores being afraid of the word “hell.”

That was ok; I quickly decided I liked “The Cunning Blood” as a title a whole lot more. I finished it in 1999 and tried to shop it to the big NY SF imprints, without any serious luck. (The editor of one press said, “I came real close on this” which at the time made me feel a little better.) While shopping it I wrote a novelette on the other concept called “Drumlin Boiler.” I sold that to Asimov’s SF in 2000, and it was published in April 2002.

That was about the time that Coriolis went under. I was depressed for a couple of years and didn’t write much fiction. I finally sold The Cunning Blood to a small press in 2005, and it reviewed well in several places, including Analog and Instapundit. In 2006 I started some conceptual work on a novel I called The Anything Machine. I wrote concept scenes and tried to get some momentum going, to no avail. I started Ten Gentle Opportunities about that time, which sucked up most of my creative energy for a couple of years. In 2011 I got together with my friend Jim Strickland and we did a tete-beche double novel with two short novels set on the drumlins planet, as a tribute to the legendary Ace Doubles I had grown up on in the 1960s.

I tried to get a novel-length plot together here and there in the teens, without much success. I published Ten Gentle Opprtunities in 2016, and Dreamhealer in 2020. Finally, on January 5, 2021, I created a new document and got underway. I changed the title from The Anything Machine to The Everything Machine for reasons you’ll understand once you read it. (Keep in mind that I took a year off the project to rewrite my assembly book for X64.)

I used an edited and slightly enlarged version of “Drumlin Boiiler” as the first part of the novel. It introduces the concept of the thingmakers and the drumlins they create, plus several key characters. I drew on the background work I did in Drumlin Circus in 2011, particularly the Bitspace Institute and its three ruling consuls. One consul died in Drumlin Circus, so I was left with Alvah McKinnon and David Orsi. That was enough to light a fire under the main conflict of the book, in which David Orsi goes savagely insane to the point of murdering his own people. Oh, and I threw in airships, because airships are dramatic—and burn spectacularly.

The Everything Machine is by all measure the most complex story I’ve ever told. I had had some faint hopes of writing a whole series of novels about the drumlins world, which I originally named Valinor and later changed to Valeron. (The Tolkien estate has lawyers; Doc Smith (as best I can tell) does not.) But toward the end I got a feeling I didn’t expect: Good as it was, I was getting a little tired of the drumlins concept. I’m 72 and healthy, but I’m also a realist. I don’t necessarily have another 15 or 20 years to slowly reveal the mystery of the thingmakers. So I tossed everything into the pot and across the book explain the whole shebang, with maybe just a couple of minor exceptions that might serve as hooks into future sequels, should I choose to (and are able to) write them.

Today was only the first hurdle of many. I still need to finish rewriting Chapter 57. I then need to do an intensive “continuity pass” to make sure un-shadowed foreshadowings are deleted, names of things don’t change along the way (I spelled McKinnon as MacKinnon here and there) and then timeline problems, yikes. Covers, double yikes. I know what I have to do. I’ve done it before. It will be done.

So the adventure continues. In the meantime, meditate on the number 2E256. That’s roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe. It’s also the number of things that the thingmakers can produce, given a 256-bit binary code tapped on two pillars. That’s a lot of things to make. Where do all those designs come from?

You’ll be surprised. Promise.

4 Comments

  1. Jim Dodd says:

    Congratulations, Jeff. This sounds great. It is amazing that you were able to write your most complex story at this point in your career. You are indeed getting better at your craft. I always like it when you go back to tell the story of how you developed through time. I’m so sorry about the end of Coriolis but how many people could have even had the experience of having your own publishing company? An amazing feat!

    1. Writing–especially difficult writing, which fiction generally is–can be a factor in keeping your brain operating at full effectiveness. That’s half the reason that I will never stop writing. The other half of the reason is that I just like writing, any kind of writing, from little things on Xitter to much bigger things here, and gigantic book-length things as time allows.

      Part of the connection to brain health is that writing requires learning, and learning new things has been shown pretty clearly to improve brain health. Different challenges in writing, like my short YA novel Complete Sentences, probably work the same way. As short as the book is, I had to do a lot of thinking about how I met challenges at age 12, and how I wobbled between silly kid stuff (Halloween was on Saturday!) and more adult stuff, like studying astronomy and telescopes. 12 was a cusp for me, and that was the heart of the story.

      Coriolis was probably the most important thing I ever did. Keith and I taught a lot of people a lot of things about programming, both in our magazine and our books. We won awards, and I became moderately famous in my niche. It was a great deal of mental exercise, and as sad as losing it was, that exercise has served me will as I move from middle years to later years.

  2. Jeff, thank you for sharing. I met you through your book “Complete Turbo Pascal Third Edition.” I was a 28 year old Marine who took an idea from a magazine article and turned it into a software product under your tutelage. Thank you! You are like the “big brother” I never had. [HUG]

    Grab a camera. Record your yourself. Put it on YT.

    1. Every Marine I’ve ever met was a man of skill and total integrity. (One of them is my cousin John.) I have always honored you for that reason–and always will.

      My writing has three goals, not all necessarily in the same piece, though sometimes two outa three: make people learn, make people laugh, and make people gasp. As soon as I knew what words were, I started writing. (My father taught me to both read and write–when I was 4.) Since then, I’ve learned to make words kneel at my feet and do my bidding without fail.

      As for video, hey, it’s worth a try. I’ve had some practice as a presenter, and did standup comedy for most of an hour at my 40th grade school reunion in 2006. I have to get this novel (and a longish novelette) up on KDP before I start another big project.

      I have about 6500 words down on a second FreePascal book that starts with OOP and moves into Lazarus GUI programming. I’ve got some text to draw on from my Delphi books, as well as all the code I’ve written since Lazarus came to me. (They’re working on V4.0 now!)

      I am honored to know that I helped you learn skills that allowed you to do something that important. I get letters from people now and then telling me that if it wasn’t for my assembly book, they would have failed out of their CS program. I call that total success. My old man’s teaching paid off.

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