Just finished the first draft of one of the manuscripts I didn’t finish in 2011.  Feels good to finish one.  And now it will sit in the dark on my hard drives and thumb drives for a year.  That gives me some separation from the novel before approaching it again.  Now it’s on to the next project.  But first some time to reflect on this tale, especially the ending, a line from which actually gave me the working title, The New Armageddon.  I originally got the idea from Independence Day, the block buster movie that was all special effects and no intelligent story line.  You know the story.  The aliens come here in big hawking space ships to take all our resources, as if there weren’t more and better resources for the taking in space.  The vibrations of the ships are so damned strong that they shake the footprints of the first men on the moon from the dust, I guess as a foreshadowing of what they intend for us, despite the fact that vacuum does not transmit sound waves.  Then the humans, after arguing about the use of nuclear weapons that might pollute the world, despite the fact that the aliens are going to pretty much wipe the Earth clean, use the backdoor of the alien’s Microsoft DOS System and put a virus in the works.  This allows a small tactical nuclear weapon to destroy a ship a quarter the mass of the moon by going off in the hanger deck really far from any of the vessel’s power sources.  At which point the humongous space ships blows up but does no harm to the planet it hovers over.   The intelligence of the script just shines through.   I would have thrown more than one of the planet’s twenty some thousand nuclear weapons at the evil aliens and cleaned up afterwards, if there was one.  But the movie sparked an idea that I had thought about for years.

First off I thought about using aliens that were traveling slower than light, and they first hit one of our colonies, Tau Ceti.  Of course this is set in the future, six hundred years or so.  So we know they are coming, we can see them coming, and we have time to prepare our war machine.  The aliens are much more advanced than we, in most technologies.  They do not have much in the way of medical science and have completely ignored nanotech.   And this ties in with the reason they are coming after us.  They are death worshipers.  They believe that life is bad and their mission is to wipe all life from the Universe, one solar system at a time.  And they have stolen their tech from another species that they, you guessed it, wiped out.  So we prepare for them and don’t do very well  at first.  They destroy whole fleets, kill off the populations of planets, and look like they are going to win the trophy.  Until…..

Well, you’re just going to have to wait to read the book when it comes out.  So on the same day I celebrate finishing a manuscript, always a big deal even it it is number 23, I receive a letter in the mail from an agent.  These form rejections used to break my heart.  Now that I am self publishing it is not such a big deal.  I still feel compelled to put each book through the agenting process.  And then if they are rejected I go on and publish that book online, then move on to the next agent submission.  This agent’s form letter stated that the novel, a High Fantasy that has been read by professionals and amateurs who thought it good enough for publication, was not for their list.  That’s OK, because it’s now for mine.  Another favorite response is “it’s not for me,” to which I can now respond to myself, “no, but it’s sure for me.”  So I will continue down my path, and the gatekeepers have become minor players in my career.  Still important, but not really such a big deal.