Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Month: October 2024

A Long Time Coming

October 28, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finished the copy edit read through of a novella titled The Head of the Serpent. It will be the first of a trilogy, and the second is already well under way.

Nothing special, you might think, except this one is different. I first had the idea for this story over thirty years ago, before I even moved to the United States. In that first iteration the story was driven by political events at the time.

As with life, there is change. What seemed new and shiny at one time soon became old news. Over the years I’ve put the idea aside, picked it up, made changes and set it down again.

In September, I picked up the idea again, shook my head at some of those early chapters and removed all the “big” world events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan – and tightened it down to the characters in the story. They have always been consistent, although their backgrounds have changed.

After all this time, you’d expect the story to write itself, and in many ways it did, although there were still a few incidents that took me by surprise as the story unfolded.

The goal is to finish putting the copy edits into the manuscript, and publish by the weekend. This one has been a long time in the making, but I’m pleased it’s finally here.

Come on Microsoft

October 21, 2024 /

Over the past few months I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook on the Mac as my main email program for a project I’m working.

It took a while for me to re-familiarize myself with the program as I’ve mainly used Apple Mail for the past few years. It’s worked well for me but I haven’t had to worry too much about calendars and scheduling meetings.

This project changed all that and there I was neck deep back in Outlook, scheduling meetings and making updates.

One thing I noticed. When I updated a meeting invitation to add a new person, or remove someone, every attendee got a meeting update. That wasn’t how I remembered it. There used to be a question asking if you wanted to update all or just changed attendees.

I assumed with Office 365 an the new user interface there was a setting I was missing, and once I found that setting, the question would reappear.

Except I couldn’t find the setting, and my meeting attendees started to grumble about all the emails.

I asked one of my colleagues about it. We went back and forth and scratched our heads, and she asked someone else and we had an answer. That feature doesn’t exist on the Mac version of Outlook, but you get it on the Web version.

What!

I felt like I’d stepped back to the 1990’s.

On one level I kinda get it. As a developer, do I want to work on thirty year old email software or the cool code they’re writing at SpaceX to capture and reuse launch boosters?

I’ve experienced similar situations in the past, and I know it’s a challenge to ask a developer to work on legacy code, but a feature miss like this that’s so disruptive across multiple organizations, is disappointing.

One Small Step

October 14, 2024 /

This past Sunday, I happened to catch a headline that SpaceX were planning to launch the fifth test flight for Starship.

When I saw the headline, it was about halfway through the launch window, so I flipped over the the SpaceX site to see what was happening. It was the first time I’d seen the real time video feed of re-entry using Starlink terminals on the capsule, and it was impressive. There was imagery all the way from re-entry to splashdown, even through the traditional “communications blackout”

Even more impressive was the capture of the Super Heavy booster. I missed seeing it real time, but watched the re-play several times as the booster plummeted down, the rockets fired and it drifted down and was snared by the chopstick arms on the gantry.

There were so many things that could have gone wrong on this initial attempt, but the capture was executed perfectly.

Each test flight is one small step to achieve the ultimate goal of using Starship to send people to the Moon and Mars, and bring them back.

I am of an age now where my participation in such a mission is a non-starter, but I sure hope I’m around to see it happen.

Aligning Timelines

October 7, 2024 /

This past weekend, I was looking at some of the Scrivener projects I haven’t touched in a while. Some were easy to deal with based on the project name alone. Others not so much.

What did I mean with a project named Disciple? It took a while to bring up on my screen as Scrivener needed to convert from an older version before displaying the contents. That alone, gives you some idea how long it is since those files got looked at. Not surprisingly, the story was about the disciples of Jesus, after the crucifixion and resurrection.

And I wrote it as a screenplay, which isn’t a format I’ve used for several years. There were some good scenes in there, and maybe one day I’ll go back to the idea, more likely as a novel.

The next file was more interesting. It’s a historical novel set in South America during the wars for independence from Spain in the early 1800’s. As I read through the notes and story fragments, it all came back to me. For some reason, I’ve never had a clear vision of the different timelines in my head – the story timeline and the historical sequence of events. That’s not been a problem with my stories set in Ancient Babylon, but there were some pivotal events during those wars for independence that obviously have to be covered in the right order – not least Simon Bolivar’s crossing of the Andes in June and July 1819.

It didn’t take much reading through my notes to realize the story and historical timelines were out of sync. It’s not an immediate problem as I have several stories I want to write before I come back to this one, and reading through gave me ideas for another story in the same historical period.

This makes it all the more important that when I do start the writing, both timelines are in alignment. So, I opened up Aeon Timeline and started dropping events and dates into a new Aeon project. Ten minutes in, I started reorganizing the story events. Those small changes have made the story move faster, and now I’m rethinking my 2025 production plan.

A Production Backlog

October 1, 2024 /

Over the past few years my production cycle – that’s the work I do between finishing the story and pressing the publish button Amazon, Kobo etc. – has been pretty ad-hoc. As I finish a story, I think about editing, covers, and sales copy.
That wasn’t really a problem when I was publishing a novel a year.

This year it’s been two novels, and I have on my desk a novella and a short story collection waiting to finish that production cycle, with another novella planned to finish by the end of October, and a third one by Christmas.

Those two published titles I mentioned last week still aren’t published!

I had an inkling this might be a problem when the manuscript for The Corpse in the Courtyard sat gathering dust for nearly two months before I got to the final read through.

It’s a problem I’m glad to have. It means I’m starting to hit some of the word count and project goals I’m aiming for. It also means my production schedule needs more planning than just an ad-hoc set of activities.

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