{"id":5287,"date":"2024-11-19T19:23:50","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T02:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5287"},"modified":"2024-11-19T19:23:50","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T02:23:50","slug":"the-end-of-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5287","title":{"rendered":"The End of the Beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The first draft is now structurally complete. It isn\u2019t finished, exactly. I\u2019m still rewriting much of Chapter 57, which just didn\u2019t turn out right. And there is a lot of other work to do. The first draft now stands at 128,000 words. I\u2019m hoping to get it down to 125,000 and probably will. That edit pass is still to come.<\/p>\n

The idea dates back to 1997, when I got the ideas for both The Everything Machine<\/em> and The Cunning Blood<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, so I began that novel first, under the original title No Way in Hell<\/em>. A publishing colleague warned me that bookstores might not shelve a book with \u201chell\u201d in the title, so I thought of The Cunning Blood<\/em> and went with it. Not long thereafter, I was in our local Bookstar store (RIP) and while browsing stumbled across a book called F\u2014k Yes!<\/em><\/a> (minus the hyphens) by the unlikely Wing F. Fing. Face-out, already. So much for bookstores being afraid of the word \u201chell.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was ok; I quickly decided I liked \u201cThe Cunning Blood\u201d 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, \u201cI came real close on this\u201d which at the time made me feel a little<\/em> better.) While shopping it I wrote a novelette on the other concept called \u201cDrumlin Boiler.\u201d I sold that to Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em> in 2000, and it was published in April 2002.<\/p>\n

That was about the time that Coriolis went under. I was depressed for a couple of years and didn\u2019t write much fiction. I finally sold The Cunning Blood<\/em> to a small press in 2005, and it reviewed well in several places, including Analog<\/em> and Instapundit. In 2006 I started some conceptual work on a novel I called The Anything Machine<\/em>. I wrote concept scenes and tried to get some momentum going, to no avail. I started Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

I tried to get a novel-length plot together here and there in the teens, without much success. I published Ten Gentle Opprtunities<\/em> in 2016, and Dreamhealer<\/em> in 2020. Finally, on January 5, 2021, I created a new document and got underway. I changed the title from The Anything Machine<\/em> to The Everything Machine<\/em> for reasons you\u2019ll understand once you read it. (Keep in mind that I took a year off the project to rewrite my assembly book for X64.)<\/p>\n

I used an edited and slightly enlarged version of \u201cDrumlin Boiiler\u201d 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<\/em> in 2011, particularly the Bitspace Institute and its three ruling consuls. One consul died in Drumlin Circus<\/em>, 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\u2014and burn spectacularly.<\/p>\n

The Everything Machine<\/em> is by all measure the most complex story I\u2019ve 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\u2019t expect: Good as it was, I was getting a little tired of the drumlins concept. I\u2019m 72 and healthy, but I\u2019m also a realist. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Today was only the first hurdle of many. I still need to finish rewriting Chapter 57. I then need to do an intensive \u201ccontinuity pass\u201d to make sure un-shadowed foreshadowings are deleted, names of things don\u2019t 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\u2019ve done it before. It will be done.<\/p>\n

So the adventure continues. In the meantime, meditate on the number 2E256. That\u2019s roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe. It\u2019s also the number of things that the thingmakers can produce, given a 256-bit binary code tapped on two pillars. That\u2019s a lot of things to make. Where do all those designs come from?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll be surprised. Promise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t finished, exactly. I\u2019m still rewriting much of Chapter 57, which just didn\u2019t turn out right. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5288,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5287\/revisions\/5288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}