You can see it here as part of this interview with Jason at Eleven-ThirtyEight. Tom Lintern is back with another terrific cover. Don’t miss the interview, as it offers some hints about what’s to come in The Rise of Earth next June, a discussion of the Jupiter Pirates series in general, and some talk about some space-fantasy series called … Star Wars?
The Rise of Earth hits bookstores June 14, 2016, but look for a special Jupiter Pirates short story in December.
More to come soon!
It’s a question I can rely on at every school visit and in every in-depth discussion of Jupiter Pirates: How do you name characters?
Here’s an answer about Jupiter Pirates, written for the very cool Suvudu site and wrapped up with a related question: How did Star Wars influence Jupiter Pirates? I get that one a lot from people who know me from my Star Wars books. The answer, as explored further in the Suvudu post, is that Jupiter Pirates wouldn’t exist without my Star Wars fandom, but some of the connections between my little newborn franchise and George Lucas’s big giant one are coincidences or reflect the basics of storytelling, rather than being true influences.
And that comes full circle with the discussion of names. Star Wars fans have asked me if there’s a connection between Tycho Hashoone and Tycho Celchu, Yana Hashoone and Jaina Solo, or Huff Hashoone and Huff Darklighter. Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. In terms of names, Jupiter Pirates owes much more to real-world astronomy and — believe it or not — The Chris Isaak Show than it does to the galaxy far, far away. (Though I did unwittingly give readers of Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare a preview of the name “Hashoone,” as I explain.)
Anyway, enjoy!
A heads-up: I’ve got something cool in the works for members of the Crew, the Jupiter Pirates email list. But it’ll only be for them, so sign up today. As a thank-you, within the hour you’ll get an email link to an exclusive dossier prepared by Vesuvia about the bridge crew of the Shadow Comet, featuring information you can’t get in Hunt for the Hydra. You’ll also get Jupiter Pirates news, peeks behind the scenes and other cool stuff. Thanks!
So I was looking around my office and noticed a big stack of copies of my book Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare.
I want you to have one of them. And I’ll personalize and autograph it. So let’s make this happen.
Here’s how it will work:
1) Take a picture of yourself with a copy of Jupiter Pirates: The Hunt for the Hydra. (Please not in the aisle of your local bookstore, for obvious reasons.)
2) Email the picture to jupiterpirates@gmail.com.
Easy peasy, right?
On Jan. 30 I’ll have my kid pick 16 winners at random. If you’re one of them (hope so) I’ll contact you to get your mailing address and ask what you want me to write in your copy of Warfare. Then I’ll put the book in the mail.
That’s it. Buy a copy of Jupiter Pirates, take a picture, get a chance at an autographed copy of Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare.
Good luck!
(In the meantime, join the Crew — that’s the Jupiter Pirates email list — and you’ll get an exclusive dossier about the Shadow Comet‘s crew. Or if you’d like a sneak peek at Hunt for the Hydra, anyone can read, download and share the first five chapters here.)
I really enjoyed two recent takes on The Jupiter Pirates that I wanted to share.
First up, here’s Jay Shah of Eleven-ThirtyEight on Hunt for the Hydra. Eleven-ThirtyEight is a site for hardcore Star Wars fans (like me), so Jay’s take is from a Star Wars perspective, but he’s really talking about storytelling, which is universal. I hope you’ll read the whole thing, but here’s a passage I really zeroed in on:
Where The Hunt for the Hydra succeeds admirably is how it deploys female characters. The captain of the pirate ship that serves as the main story setting is a female: Tycho’s mother, Diocletia Hashoone. She’s the captain, and basically the head of the family too. The most important part about this, and why I think it is particularly important for a young audience (but really, everyone) is that it isn’t once commented on as unusual. It’s not an issue: mom’s in charge. Her husband doesn’t make a fuss, her father doesn’t make a fuss, and the only person who could have ever had a claim to the captain’s seat is her sister: but Diocletia earned it by merit (how one earns a captaincy is a running theme in the story), and that’s that. Tycho also has a twin sister – Yana – who seems to have a decided disdain for dresses, and there’s a scene where a particularly snooty character remarks that it’s not very ladylike of her to be a privateer but then that character doesn’t think anyone ought to be a privateer, so it’s not a gendered put down. Yana wants to be who she is, and nobody really has an issue with it.
Eleven-ThirtyEight’s review was followed by thoughts from Tricia Barr of FANgirl (who has a cool new book, Wynde, that you should check out).
It’s unclear whether Fry thinks hard about it or if it’s natural, but he tells a story that feels like it is steeped in history, yet it is not lazy about buying into historically sexist standards such as stereotypical gender roles. When I closed the first book of The Jupiter Pirates, I felt like my nieces and nephews would all gain from the story being told.
Huh. Really interesting. I guess I need to write that post I kind of promised, don’t I?
In the meantime, many thanks for all the support you’ve given the Jupiter Pirates. Please keep helping get the word out about the book! To assist with that, I’ve got order information for books and ebooks over on the home page, or there’s your local bookstore. If you’d like to give someone a sneak peek at Hunt for the Hydra, anyone can read, download and share the first five chapters here.
Finally, join the Crew – that’s the Jupiter Pirates email list — and within an hour you’ll get a link to download an exclusive dossier about the Shadow Comet‘s crew, prepared by Vesuvia. It’s a thank-you for signing up, and there’s more good stuff to come!
I penned a fun little post for HarperCollins Children’s about inspirations that went into The Jupiter Pirates, from the art of Howard Pyle and Andrew Wyeth (that’s his work above) and the physics of Star Wars to less obvious influences such as Alien and (no really) The Sopranos. (Don’t worry, parents: The Jupiter Pirates doesn’t have chestbursters or a Bada-Bing.)
Check it out — and please join The Crew email list! You’ll get an exclusive thank-you for signing up — a dossier on the Shadow Comet crew prepared by Vesuvia herself. Plus news about appearances, sneak peeks at what’s coming in the series and more exclusive goodies.
Sad news from Oakland: Jack Vance died on Sunday at 96.
I discovered Vance fairly late — his books were too baroque for my tastes as a young teen, but I was ready for him in my 30s, and was amazed at what I’d missed. There was The Dying Earth, and Lyonesse, and Araminta Station, and before I knew it I was hooked, scouring eBay and used book stores for Vance titles. (I eventually bought a good chunk of the Vance Integral Edition, one of the great efforts by any fanbase.)
Oddly, I’d just rediscovered Carlo Rotella’s Vance appreciation over at the New York Times. Among other things, Rotella perfectly describes a key component of Vance’s style as “feral, angling politesse”. He also notes that while Vance made his living as a genre artist (that’s the title of Rotella’s piece) working in science fiction, fantasy and mystery, he transcended those genres. Vance was a writer’s writer, an artist whose breezy way with characters and plots masked a master’s command.
Vance had a gift for world-building, for constructing intriguing societies from odd starting points and making them work. He was a master of archly barbed, mock-lawyerly dialogue — but also of spare, enviably economical descriptions. (For example, he invented about a bazillion superb, evocative names for deadly creatures.) And while plotting wasn’t his strongest suit — his trilogies had a way of blazing through jaw-dropping beginnings, then wandering to mild (but still entertaining) conclusions — he came up with any number of intriguing engines for stories, inventing plots that were intriguingly original and had their own clockwork logic. And he was funny — variously deadpan and dry to the point of astringent — in genres that are often bereft of so much as a smile.
Vance is very, very hard to sum up — I look back on that last paragraph and cringe at how thoroughly it misses the mark. But I’ll give it one last try: His work could be simultaneously light and picaresque and shot through with darkness and terror. His writing had a fierce moral clarity, but he consciously refused to balance it with any assurance that justice was at work. Reading Vance, you never knew when a merry romp might turn deadly, a character might meet a pitiless end, or some bit player would offer a flash of insight that would change the way you think about something forever.
He’ll be missed — but we should all be so lucky to live to 96, lead an adventurous, marvelous, oft-self-invented life, and have our books live on to be appreciated and admired by so many readers and fans.
My style is too different from Vance’s for me to claim him as a writerly influence. But I enjoyed him immensely as a reader, and have paid homage to him as a craftsman: the Super Star Destroyer Whelm and the taking of Kuat in Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare were both tips of the cap to him, and there’s a chapter in the second Jupiter Pirates book that’s consciously and lovingly Vancean.
If you’re a Vance fan, like me, go back and read him again. If you’re new to him, I envy you — there is so much great stuff ahead of you. Here’s a short list for starters: The Dying Earth books, Trullion: Alastor 2262, The Demon Princes series, Araminta Station, the Lyonesse trilogy. Or any of the strange and wonderful stories of the 50s and 60s. Dive in until you’ve read it all, and marveled at it all, and then start again.
A couple of weeks ago I sent the revised version of Jupiter Pirates Book 1 back to my editor at HarperCollins. The revision addressed the comments and requests he’d made — all of which, I’m happy to say, were very wise. But I also had my own goal in mind for that revision: setting up the rest of the story.
When I wrote the first Jupiter Pirates manuscript, I of course had some idea of where the story would go in later books, and I developed a one-paragraph summary of Book 2 as part of the pitch to interested publishers. But I didn’t think too much about the story beyond that — if anything, I discouraged myself from going too far down that road for fear of winding up disappointed if Jupiter Pirates came to nothing.
I wrote the first Jupiter Pirates manuscript on spec, as I knew publishers probably wouldn’t take a chance on a relatively untested author without one. That didn’t bother me, because my work on Star Wars and Transformers: Classified had taught me how to develop a workable story treatment and turn that into a young-adult novel relatively quickly and efficiently. I used the gaps in my winter schedule to plan and write Book 1, knowing that if it didn’t sell I’d be discouraged, but not out an exorbitant amount of time and effort that I could have devoted to paying gigs.
When Harper acquired Jupiter Pirates, I was able to move the rest of the story off the back burner where my subconscious had been stirring it and poking at it. And I quickly developed a plan of attack that I think has proved successful.
While waiting for notes back from my editor, I dug into Book 2, expanding the one-paragraph overview into a detailed story treatment that included not just the twists and turns of the plot, but also bits of dialogue and notes on the characters’ motivations. When finished, that treatment weighed in at more than 12,000 words. I haven’t started on the manuscript for Book 2, but I bet those 12,000 words will represent about 20% of its ultimate word count.
I know some writers see story treatments as drudgework, or think they sap the wrting process of its vitality and interest. I can’t disagree strongly enough: Planning in this way has revolutionized my writing, making the process much more efficient and improving the results.
Here are this convert’s four arguments for a detailed outline/story treatment:
1. Writing a novel without one is like driving to a place you’ve never visited without a map — you will get lost, sometimes hopelessly and/or irretrievably so. The treatment is your map, not a prison — as you drive, you’re free to take side trips, eliminate stops, try alternate routes and so forth.
2. Finding and fixing plot snarls, uncertain motivations and places where characters have too little to do is much simpler in an outline — you’ll save yourself lots of pain and toil by seeing the problems there, instead of when you’re two chapters into a narrative box canyon and have spent five stressful days looking for an alternative to retreating and scrapping those chapters.
3. Don’t regard the treatment as mere preparatory work, because it’s not: When you’re writing one, you’re writing the novel, with the treatment your down payment on the rest. Some writers think of treatments as scaffolding for what they’re going to build, but I think you’re building a foundation.
4. Plans change — you may have to put a story aside for months or even years. I have old story treatments tucked away, and when I read them I can feel the story come back to life inside my head in a way that wouldn’t happen from looking at scrawled points in a notebook. That will prove valuable somewhere down the line.
I completed the treatment for Jupiter Pirates Book 2 before I turned my attention to my editor’s notes on Book 1. This was deliberate on my part: It meant I’d be returning to Book 1 knowing in great detail what would happen in Book 2, and that allowed me to revise Book 1 to set up Book 2 better.
In writing the treatment for Book 2, I thought up characters and institutions I hadn’t had in mind when I wrote Book 1. I also realized I wanted historical events referenced in Book 1 to unfold differently than I’d first imagined them. And I thought of a good reveal for later in the series. Lining all this stuff up better didn’t take an enormous amount of work: Book 2 characters got included in a list of folks in a crowd, or institutions/events were briefly referenced in dialogue. Sometimes the effort was even less than that — it was rewriting something in a way that kept a narrative door open instead of shutting it. (And, in turn, having revised Book 1 I can now return to the Book 2 treatment with fresh eyes.)
I’m a huge Star Wars fan, so I kept a specific scene in mind during this process. In the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that Obi-Wan’s former Jedi pupil Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Luke’s father — only to have Vader reveal in The Empire Strikes Back that in fact he is Luke’s father.
That revelation is the pivot point of the entire Star Wars saga — the lightning bolt that turns a nifty Flash Gordon homage into something much more. It’s one of the great moments in movie history, but it requires some awkward backtracking: In Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan answers Luke’s understandable questions by explaining that when Anakin Skywalker fell to the dark side, he became Darth Vader, and this new persona destroyed the good man he’d been.
“So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view,” Obi-Wan concludes.
Luke isn’t particularly convinced, and truth be told neither are we. That moment doesn’t sink Return of the Jedi, let alone the whole saga — the conflict between father and son is so elemental and iconic that we acknowledge the bumpy patch and get on with it, eager to find out what will happen.
But we feel the bump nonetheless — and a little more narrative ambiguity in the original Star Wars might have prevented it, allowing us to conclude Vader had killed Luke’s father, be shocked by the revelation in Empire and understand in Jedi how we’d made an incorrect assumption.
I’ll be an enormously happy writer if anyone thinks the revelations in Jupiter Pirates are one-tenth as good as Vader’s iconic reveal. And I know I’ll think of developments for my larger story that I’ll wish I’d set up better. But my hope is that more rigorous planning now will mean smaller bumps encountered later — and fewer certain points of view.