K. D. McAdams

Science Fiction Author

Archives for January 2018

A companion for sorting

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Humans are messy and tricky. While I was thinking about artificial intelligence working aboard a space salvage station I realized that there would be some unlabeled parts. This was even before the story about John Young smuggling a corned beef sandwich on board a Gemini-3 launch. When systems can’t identify things, people are going to get the job. Below is a story about a junk sorter from the Off Earth Series world.

Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash

Before the first orbital war there were tens of thousands of pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth. Expended satellites were parked in a geo-stationary orbit where they wouldn’t affect modern, functional satellites. Smaller decommissioned satellites were de-orbited to mostly burn up in the atmosphere though in some cases their mass survived and plummeted into one of the oceans. It wasn’t a great system and many people believe it was the true cause of the first orbital war. A piece of Chinese space debris collided with a United States based space tourist station. One hundred and four customers died and an equal number of staff perished when exposed to the void of space.

When the orbital war was finished the every day amenities people on Earth were accustomed to were gone. No satellite communications, no global positioning and limited weather forecasting. There was so much debris orbiting the planet and so little information available that any space launch was considered a suicide mission.

Then Kai Nazca returned.

Flying the rock now known as Lagrange-4 back from deep space was remarkable enough. But when he saw the mess preventing him from returning to his planet his next idea was pure brilliance. Using old radio wave technology he was able to communicate with the early ruling body that was to become the Planetary Operating Alliance (POA). In exchange for cleaning up the debris circling the Earth he was granted exclusive rights to the stationary orbit of Lagrange-4 in perpetuity and passable to his heirs, as well as complete ownership of anything he was able to recover for a ten year period.

The ten year period for ownership ended long ago. Now they were required to purchase any debris from the owners before it could be salvaged. While every component of a ship launched into space was logged and labeled, humans were less precise. Tourists, laborers and stowaway’s all brought personal affects with them. When a vessel failed and the escape pods were used, plenty of unlabeled items were left behind, eventually needing salvage.

Artificial Intelligence and bots were great at processing individual labeled items. They were terrible at processing unlabeled items or products that were assembled from multiple-labled items. A.I. Would routinely label complex systems as something simple based on the component on it’s surface.

When A.I. And bots fail, humans get involved. That’s how Kurt Plaque ended up in the massive salvage bay of Lagrange-4 parsing through a motley collection of jewelry. The value of gold, platinum and silver dropped dramatically after it was discovered in abundance in several asteroid mines. Here in space there was a market for handmade Earth goods. A gold necklace with a locket made on Earth was worth more than it’s weight in gold.

[Read more…] about A companion for sorting

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The 3 P’s of a Successful Series Writer

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Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Should you invest in writing a series?

Aspiring authors face an overabundance of advice. From what genre to write in to how fast to write there is an expert recommendation at every turn. One of the most common suggestions for success in the author business is to write in a series.

If you just started writing your first novel and you come across this advice it might seem overwhelming “I’m struggling to write one novel and they’re telling me I need to write at least 3?”

Maybe you’ve already written a series and it’s available for sale but not doing as well as you would like. You have a great new story idea, but you’re wondering if you can really invest in creating a new series only to have it not earn back what you put in.

If you’re like me, you have a few series out and they are profitable, but you want more. You have a great new idea but you’re really thinking about return on investment. Will this new series be profitable enough to make it worth the work?

Make no mistake, writing a series is an investment.

Series writers invest time, money, and energy. Regardless of how many words you can write in a week it will take months or years for the average writer to create a successful series.

On top of this major investment there are no guarantees. No one owes you a living. Even if you did everything the experts say and poured your blood, sweat and tears into your series it might not sell. This point cannot be overemphasized, no one can promise you financial success in return for your investment in writing a series.

But there are ways to improve the odds.

The three P’s of a successful series writer

A successful series writer has three key traits – planning, persistence, and passion.

Planning

A successful series writer plans – Writers tend to fall onto a spectrum between pantsing and plotting. It doesn’t matter how you write an individual book, if you want to be a successful series writer you need to start with a plan.

A plan helps you to develop a story big enough to tell over multiple books, engage with readers throughout the process and keep you on track when the going gets tough.

Some writers hear the word plan and think it’s taking the art out of the process. It’s not. Your story and each of your books are still creative works of art. You can even pants writing each novel.

A plan is a tool for setting expectations with your readers and preparing them to buy your art once it is ready for consumption

Persistence

A successful series writer is persistent – Creating a series takes time. Some of the steps will be laborious. Some days you’ll wonder when you are going to see results. You cannot give up.

Be patient. If you put in the work, results will come. If you set to it every day, and follow your plan good things will happen. Writing a novel takes weeks, months, even years. Planning, writing and selling a multi-book series takes time, don’t rush it.

There will be days when you don’t want to write, days when you think your plan and writing is crap and days when you feel like a complete imposter. We all have those days. The days when you don’t want to write are the most important days to sit down and write.

Bad copy can be edited, revised, and improved while nothing can fix a lack of content.

If you don’t keep at it, your plan will be wasted, your patience will be shot and worst of all, your story will never get out into the world. Power through your doubt and keep working. It will be worth it.

Passion

A successful series writer is passionate – If you love your story, readers will see it. When readers feel the passion in your words they are more likely to stay engaged.

This series is going to be with you for the rest of your life. Family, friends, and strangers are going to ask you questions about it. Is your series something that lights your fire and makes you want to engage in discussion with others? It better be.

If you want others to love your work, you need to love it first and always.

There will be social media debates about your characters and setting. You’ll get good reviews and horribly critical reviews. The best way to keep moving forward in the face of criticism is to love what you are doing so much it drowns out the negative. Unfaltering love of your story will keep you going when anyone else would tune out and shut down.

Join me as I take an idea and build it into a successful series

Over the last 5 years I’ve completed 2 series with 6 books each. All started from a single-story idea and grew after the first novel was written. While I love the stories and the process, I made plenty of mistakes while writing and publishing over 750,000 words.

In an effort to learn from these mistakes and create a new successful series that readers will love I’ve developed a plan for growing my newest idea from a tiny seed into a multi-product series. Join me on this journey and I’ll share my process and plan with you.

Like a good story this adventure is bound to have twists and turns, ups and downs, action and suspense. I can’t promise it will be easy but I will be here with you, sharing the good with the bad.

Along the way, I want to help you plan, write, and sell a profitable series. If you’re working on a series of your own I want to hear about it. Tell me your struggles and successes, ask me questions and share your doubts.

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3 opportunities to make salvage the first successful orbital business

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The new space race is moving quickly but there is a trash problem that could derail it all.

My new Off Earth series was initially an idea about an asteroid mining company. While I was doing research to understand what it would look like to mine asteroids I learned about the debris circling our planet. Asteroid mining became part of the backstory and orbital salvage became a key element.

A visualization of the trash around out planet – Image courtesy of NASA

If you aren’t interested in trash in our orbit, here is the quick update on the Off Earth Series progress –

Book 1 – They Awake
Target release date – 4/13/2018 On schedule!
Last weeks word count/target – 18,802/15,000 (it was a Holiday week, but I crushed it)
This weeks word count target – 22,000 words
Total words/projected – 18,802/95,000

And on to some of the cool stuff driving my story…

Over 29,000 pieces of material, mostly parts of satellites, larger than .10 inches (10 cm) are freely circling our planet.

This debris routinely causes damage to existing satellites and even the International Space Station. There have been times when the ISS was forced to change it’s orbit to avoid a piece of trash. This picture shows the damage something estimated to be the size of a paint chip can do to an orbital vehicle –

Damage to the ISS Cupola Window via EAS/NASA through PopSci

If you haven’t been paying attention to the new space race, it’s very exciting. Private companies are launching rockets and sending real payloads into orbit. There is renewed commitment to landing on the moon and space tourism is on the verge of becoming common. More stuff and more people are going into orbit than ever before.

The orbital debris situation will get worse before it gets better. While I was daydreaming about my story I came up with three business opportunities for an Orbital salvage company.

Opportunity #1 – Disaster mitigation

The first profitable opportunity for space salvage is in disaster mitigation. I believe it is in the best interest of governments and commercial businesses to clean up orbit before a disaster happens. If the ESA, NASA and Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) joined together to offer a time-bound contract for cleaning up orbit it would drive business and innovation.

Simply looking at the value of communications, navigation, weather and military satellites that each of those agencies represent would warrant a sizable contract. The terrestrial economy is so heavily reliant on orbital technology that the economic impact of a satellite colliding with trash could stretch far beyond the individual satellite damaged.

When we introduce potential risk to human lives it makes even more sense. Can you imagine how our planet would react to losing a space plane full of tourists, or students, because a 50-year-old fragmented circuit board smashed into the crew compartment?

There is value in solving the problem before it becomes too big.

Opportunity #2 – Recovering sunk costs

Getting stuff into space is expensive. That’s a major reason that launch solutions were one of the first pieces of the space economy to be commercialized. It costs around $10,000 per pound ($22,000 per kilogram) to send material into space. That number is coming down but that doesn’t help the launches that have already occurred.

The debris in orbit around Earth represents billions of dollars of launch costs. Letting it float aimlessly is a waste of resources. Allowing it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere or crash uncontrolled onto the planets surface loses that value completely.

Even collecting the material and holding it until we can develop orbital recycling system will help retain some of that launch value. The stuff is up there, we don’t need it back on Earth and getting more stuff up there is still expensive. Feels like a business opportunity in there.

Opportunity #3 – Sparing for non critical systems

Humans like to be comfortable and have some luxuries. Early space adventures will go without in exchange for the thrill of of being in orbit, but that won’t last long. When the orbital population expands there will be an increasing demand for creature comforts.

All the pieces of satellites and machines in orbit could be sorted, inspected and inventoried. If someone needs a spare washer to repair their coffee maker or aroma therapy machine why not take one from salvage inventory to make the repair at a fraction of the cost of launching a new one from Earth.

I wouldn’t advocate for repairing mission critical systems with salvage parts. But there could be a scenario where a suitable spare is in orbit as salvage and could save lives while waiting for newly manufactured parts to be launched from Earth. If we’ve learned anything from our history with trash on Earth, it’s recycle, reuse, reduce.

Challenges

People are currently working on the space debris problem. My guess is they are smarter than me and could discredit each of my suggestions with a few key points. One of them being, all that junk belongs to someone. You cannot simply go into orbit and start collecting other peoples stuff, it’s stealing (see the sunk cost idea).

There are also engineering challenges with trying to capture a piece of material moving at 17,500 miles per hour (almost 23 times the speed of sound). Not just anyone can send something up to try and salvage this debris. A collision with a poorly designed salvage vessel would result in more of the problem it was trying to solve.

But those challenges could help to drive the opportunity. A smart group of engineers and investors could purchase all the debris for a fraction of it’s cost (governments would love to get even a little money back for stuff they have no use for). This would also remove the responsibility for the pieces from the agencies that launched them. Once someone owns it all they would be even more intent on extracting value.

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Becoming Kai

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This is a short story I wrote while planning my new Off Earth science fiction series. It is some deep back story that tries to get into how a human will take a risk so crazy that an artificial intelligence drone refuses to do it. So meet Kai Nazca, I hope you enjoy.

Image copyright Dmitry Islentyev via Dreamstime.com

Becoming Kai
by K. D. McAdams copyright 2018

The launch vehicle rolled and he caught a glimpse of the Nazca plain below. Simple, remarkable drawings sat motionless as they had for thousands of years. Who made them and why could not be answered regardless of how much technological progress humans made.

No matter how far into space humans went there would be no explaining much of their history.

Lowering the blast visor on his helmet, he finally permitted the tears to flow. Dreams of living and working in the stars belonged to his father. His heaven was on the ground, feet in cool damp grass waiting to hear his young daughters squeals of delight.

There was no one left that he wanted to hear squeal and no delight.

People always talked about the pace of change. Some felt it was always coming faster while others insisted it was a constant. He would rather not have had the proof of it’s increasing pace.

Transitioning from peace to war should have taken more time. All of the reporters and pundits promised that cooler heads would prevail, things were going to work out.

And then they didn’t.

The hot heads were in charge. Their constituents all salivating for war. Tired, simple people believing in the glory of standing up for an institution that abused, lied, and coerced it’s citizens at every turn.

The rest of the world looked on in horror as the United States tore itself apart. Armed militias stood up to National Guard troops and neighbors drew arms against neighbors. Any slight, real or perceived devolved into a gun battle in those first few days.

Video reporters loved it. Everyone clicked on their links and watched the violence with nervous excitement. Would it happen in their town? On their street?

Never. Most people believed that their own town was exempt from hostility and infighting. It was always the next town over or the people from the nearby city causing trouble.

Until it wasn’t.

Guns were everywhere. You could get shot for anything.

Cut someone off on the street, a barrage of bullets.

Music too loud? Gunned down.

Laugh at the wrong time? Executed in cold blood.

They didn’t have time to pack up and leave. Besides where would they have gone? San Diego had been their home for almost fifteen years. There was no family somewhere else that could take them in. Plus the war broke out so fast.

So they stayed. The bathtub was filled with water and canned goods were inventoried and rationed. Doors were locked and windows covered. Their house truly became their castle.

When the food got scarce he and his wife ventured out. Scavenging for cans and boxes of non-perishables in an abandoned market nearly got them both killed. A hail of hot lead exploded most of the packages they were able to gather. They went home nearly empty handed and shared the meager rations with the girls.

After that his wife wanted to leave. It didn’t matter where they went, she said. Just get my girls out of here before we get killed, or worse.

No, it’ll pass. They have to be almost done, order will be restored. We’ll be get by and start rebuilding, was his promise.

An ignorant man committing to things beyond his control. The bitter argument dragged into the night until they couldn’t fight anymore.

The next morning, before sunrise he snuck out. All he wanted to do was get a box of donuts or some packaged pastries to say he was sorry. She was right, they could leave.

He wasn’t gone long, maybe an hour or a little more. Not long enough for anything to happen.

It hurt to think about the injuries and the pain they must have felt. But their eyes were the things that almost killed him. Vacant, lost eyes looking at nothing but staring intently into the distance. Death robbing them of even the ability to close their lids

His blind rage was impossible to describe. It couldn’t be remembered. A manic animosity was all that was existed in him and it was deep in his soul.

The trail of blood and death was now his legacy. For days on end he prowled the city killing anyone and everyone he encountered. Young or old, man or woman it didn’t matter, they died.

How could a person who had lost what he lost, and took what he took go on? Where in the world was he supposed to go to escape this internal hell?

Nowhere.

By the time he came out of his murderous furry he was deep in the heart of Mexico. He couldn’t remember taking any vehicles for more than a few miles at a time. It was a hell of a walk, leaving him gaunt. But there were fewer people who appeared as threats and here they were not hiding. War was happening somewhere else.

What had been third world countries five years ago were now bastions of hope. Countries that embraced the space economy were too busy to fight amongst themselves. There were launches to plan and support.

And that was what led him to Peru. They needed people to get on rocket ships and go into space. It was dangerous, a better chance of dying than making it into orbit, but it was better than being on the Earth that he had just experienced.
Once he completed the required two weeks of training he had two days off before launch.

He was lucky enough to hook up with a mining crew destined for an asteroid that was out just beyond Mars. Other companies were sending out drones with artificial intelligence to do their mining. But drones were expensive and had a tendency to fail.

Failed drones required humans to fix them. So the company decided that they might as well just send humans, there were plenty of volunteers. A civil war in the most prosperous nation on the planet left enough desperate refugees that people were fighting over the chance to die in space.

There were twenty-eight crew members on board with him. The ones that had killed to get here were easy to pick out. Those that hadn’t had no idea who they were sharing space with and the type of person that last used the oxygen they now breathed.

Several of them were talking and trying to make friends. Typical banter, what’s your name, where are you from. Nerves permeating every word.

How many were telling the truth and how many were living lies? It didn’t matter, up here in space it would be a fresh start. If they made it.

“Hey, how about you buddy. Who are you?” A friendly young woman asked.

The launch vehicle completed its rotation and his view was now out to the black of space.

He didn’t respond immediately.

Who was he?

“Kai. Kai Nazca.” He finally answered.

Did you like it? Put your name in the box below and I’ll send you more like it every other week.

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How I turned a single book idea into a 6 book series (Twice)

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So you’ve written your first novel, way to go! It’s a major accomplishment you should be proud of yourself.

But now that you’ve made it through that challenge you see that conventional wisdom recommends writing in a series. What do you do next?

This is exactly what happened to me.

My first book, Annihilation,  was a story I had been going over in my head for years. It was actually something I made up to help me fall asleep at night. When my brain was creating fiction I couldn’t stress and obsess over the laundry list of tasks on my plate. The characters were basically my family (with plenty of embellishments) and I loved that story.

But it was just one story.

Initially it was written just for me. But once the words were down and I shared it with my wife and a few other people I was encouraged to-

  1. Get an editor
  2. Explore self publishing

The story went through several rounds of editing and proof reading (the manuscript was on it’s 20th iteration before I started laying out the ebook) while I researched indie publishing. My research showed that publishing a book was possible by yourself, but the best success came to those who were writing in a series.

Of course writing in a series makes sense. If a reader likes your first book it’s a lot less work to convince them to buy the next one. The problem I faced was how to turn this one story into a series.

How do I go from “A teen genius discovers dark energy” the concept of my book, to “A rag tag group of humans survive the apocalypse and venture off into space” the concept I had for a series?

In order to move from a book to a series I had to grow my world. That meant I had to stop thinking about the main character and start thinking about all the characters. Looking at his story and where he was headed, wasn’t enough, I needed to understand where he came from and what the back story looked like. I kept digging down on the why and what of how this one story came to be.

The bad news is that you have to ask yourself lots of questions. The good news is that you’re writing fiction so you can make up all the answers!

I started asking about Seamus’ youth. Did he discover dark energy and invent his reactor overnight? No.

Did he learn from anyone else? Yes.

If he was learning about something so powerful from other people was it possible that no one knew who he was? No.

If people knew about Seamus and his genius would the government leave him alone? No, something this powerful could be weaponized.

Was there anyone in his life that could have a big secret from him? Yes, his mother traveled often for business and had their families best interests in mind.

The world of my story grew. This teen genius was working with incredibly powerful technology, but not trying to hide it. Leading scientists and the government were watching and helping him. His mother wanted to keep the family safe so she was willing to make a deal when the secret agents approached her.

My initial story had a main character and a supporting cast. Now I had multiple characters with their own motivations and goals. I also had a conspiracy that involved Seamus’ mother and secret agents. If she wanted to keep the family safe, there had to be a threat.

The apocalypse, which was mysterious when I started writing the book, became a government plot. While it was too late for my characters to go back and stop the plot I could go forward. A plot audacious enough to wipe out life on Earth had to have an equally remarkable contingency plan.

Ideas for the next four books came to me quickly. The survivors from Book 1 have to evacuate the planet book 2, colonize a new planet book 3, deal with aliens already living on their new world book 4 and then grow into their new setting book 5.

While I was planning book 2 I realized that there was a book 6 that capped it off. These humans could not have been able to survive completely by accident. There had to be some justification for humans being able to planet hop, even if it seemed like a miracle.

Because I’m a slow learner my second series, Dylan Cold, started out in a similar fashion. I decided to write a book for a concept that I had thought about for a while. But again it was just one book. Fortunately I was only half way through when I realized I needed to expand some of the pieces if I wanted a series.

In this case my characters back story was already detailed and held no room for conspiracies. To come up with a series I needed to look forward. If Dylan survived the predicament faced in Book 1, how was his life going to change? Did the events from book 1 make him different or just highlight the real Dylan?

This series could explore Dylans struggle to become himself. But there needed to be some conflict. To find this conflict I built out the other characters so that they would have goals and needs that might cause Dylan to make concessions to what he wanted.

The back and forth Dylan was about to experience could be played out over several novels. As these are thriller novels, I determined his character struggle first and then fit a crime around it. This series has 6 books so far, but there is no telling how many adventures Dylan Cold may undertake.

If you’ve written a book and are now struggling to turn it into a series don’t fear, it can be done. Get deep into multiple characters and ask lots of questions about their world. Chances are if these characters were involved in an interesting story once, they will get into more trouble that’s worth writing about.

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