The Story of the Gilt Dragon 02/01/2010
 The Batavia wasn’t the only Dutch VOC ship to be wrecked on the West Australian coast. In all, four wreck sites have been found and a fifth ship is assumed to have met its fate on the Abrolhos. Not bad, that; of the five wrecks, three ships hit the Abrolhos. Every one of those wrecks has an intriguing story attached. Maybe not so blood-thirsty as the Batavia but fascinating, nonetheless. The Batavia sank in 1629. The next VOC ship to be lost was the Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) which sank in 1656 just north of Perth, capital of Western Australia. Seventy five survivors reached the shores of Australia in a boat. The ship’s captain sent the under steersman Abraham Leeman and six other men, in the ship’s boat to Batavia to seek help, while the rest remained on the continent. Once again showing the remarkable endurance and courage of these early sailors, the boat reached Batavia six weeks later. The governor (by then van Diemen) sent out two ships to search for the wreck and rescue the survivors. The expedition only compounded the disaster. Three of the men landed on the Southland to search became lost in the scrub and were never seen again; a longboat carrying eight men was smashed in the surf with no survivors. No sign was found of the sixty eight folk from the Vergulde Draeck. Van Diemen hadn’t given up. In 1658 other boats sailed along the coast both searching for survivors and mapping this unknown continent. Traces were found of the folk from the Vergulde Draeck on the beach in the vicinity of the wreck and some ships claimed to have seen signs of cultivated crops. During one such foray along the South Land, that same Abraham Leeman and a crew of thirteen men became stranded in a violent storm on one of the islands scattered not far off shore along the WA coast. The ship they’d been on, the Waeckende Boei, sailed off without them. They had been marooned. So Leeman did the trip again. Yes, that’s right. He sailed up along the coast and across the sea to Java in a small boat. This time, the trip took three weeks. Truly a most remarkable man. What happened to the survivors of the Vergulde Draeck remains a mystery. The Admiral's Choice is finally finished 01/22/2010
 This is what a fellow writer said about my newly finished book, 'The Admiral's Choice'. Just finished another ms by an unpublished author. I couldn't put the thing down except for sleep, meals and family conversations. I was inspired recently to finish the book after having left it for many months. Yes, I wrote some brand new stuff - that exciting, pivotal part where all the threads come togather and form an explosion. But also resurrected work I'd written a long time ago and discarded. Sometimes writers are too close to their own work. What's it about? I'm sure I heard you ask. Well, the Galaxy has settled down. This is the sequel to 'The Iron Admiral', in which Allysha Marten, systems engineer, meets Grand Admiral Chaka Saahren. Allysha has inadvertently aided in the resurrection of a killer which could threaten the Ptorix, the dominant intelligent species in the Galaxy. That threat is averted but Allysha has not reconciled herself to the fact that the man she fell in love with under another name turned out to be the bane of the Ptorix - the man who killed her father. Peace - or perhaps a cold war - reigns supreme. But Allysha still doesn't want a bar of Grand Admiral Saahren. He's at his wit's end to come up with some way of winning back her love. A few other people are interested in Allysha as well, for different reasons. The Galactic People's Republic, those who eschew the Confederacy's use of cranial implants, have developed a weapon. But they need Allysha's skills to get it ready for deployment. Allysha's estranged husband, Sean, is recruited to deliver Allysha into GPR hands. If he doesn't, he's dead. The race is on. When Allysha finds out what her skills will be turned to, she faces mind-numbing choices. And Grand Admiral Saahren must make the hardest choice of all. Coming soon to a web site near you. Where in the world... 01/19/2010
 …did all this happen? The Houtman Abrolhos archipelago is a straggling chain of islands for the most part barely above the water line, 30 miles or so off the Western Australian coast. Even now, it’s little known. Cray fishermen base themselves there in the summer catching season, including on Batavia’s Graveyard, now known as Beacon Island. There’s even an airstrip on the High Island (East Wallabi). The satellite images on Google Earth show it all; the relative sizes of the islands, the shallows, the channel. Search for the Houtman Abrolhos and the Wallabi group. Henrietta Drake-Brockman, in her book "Voyage to Disaster" describes the Abrolhos Islands. "The whole atmosphere of the Wallabis is one of elusive form, the spray cast up on the great reefs acts like gauze in a theatre, everything is remote and mysterious, sometimes enlarged, sometimes diminished, never altogether clearly defined. Having seen the islands, it is not difficult to imagine an unforeseen wreck on Noon Reef or Morning Reef, at night, in moonlight." (p272)  Back off a little. Where is Australia? There. A desolate, windswept coast, lined with cliffs that plunge into the sea anything from thirty to two hundred and fifty metres (about one hundred to eight hundred feet). The desert reaches the sea along most of that stretch. Endless ridges of ancient dune, covered with tough, sparse vegetation. Even the Aboriginal people didn’t go there much. If you're following on Google Maps, don't get the wrong idea from any bits of blue on the mainland. It's salt water. Back off a little further. That’s Batavia up there (now known as Djakarta), through the Sunda Strait which separates Sumatra and Java. The longboat left the Australian mainland from North West cape (that last cape jutting north before the coastline turns irrevocably east. And then Pelsaert in the Sardam had to find these tiny specs in the ocean, all unknowing that murder and mayhem had been let loose and that two camps of Batavia’s survivors eyed each other across a few miles of ocean. The Name of the Book 01/10/2010
 Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death. The Tempest William Shakespeare Somebody who left a comment on Die a Dry Death on Authonomy (you can read seven chapters there) said after reading three chapters, he could see why I used those words as the title. And sure enough the danger seemed to be the forces of nature, the implacable fury of the sea. The first chapter is a prologue and then the next two chapters are all about the shipwreck and the attempt to get the people to dry land. Think about that. The Batavia carried 341 people when she left Holland. When she hit the reef, the ship would have been carrying less people – deaths due to scurvy, desertions at Table Bay. But still, the number was probably around 330. The ship had two small boats; workboats used to ferry passengers and supplies. The longboat could carry forty people; the yawl, ten. That’s it. No lifeboats, no vests, no blow-up dinghies. But the boat wasn’t sinking; it was stuck on a reef. So between them, these two boats and some very brave crew did an amazing job getting people to two tiny islands. By the time Pelsaert and Jacobsz set off for Batavia in the longboat, about two hundred people were crowded onto Batavia’s Graveyard, forty people had drowned trying to get to shore unaided (many people couldn’t swim) and forty-eight made the journey in the longboat. The rest were still on the wreck. Some of these numbers are conjecture but even so, the point, I think, is made. Cornelisz and his cronies killed around ninety-six men, women and children. Sure, some were drowned. But at the hands of men, not nature. So the title of the book is ironic, if you will. Many of those who would ‘fain die a dry death’ – did. On being a beta-reader 01/03/2010
Like many of us aspiring writers, I’ve been beta-reader for a number of other people’s books and I’m about to embark on another. Which led me to reflect on why I do it, what I look for and what’s in it for me? Why is easy. I know how hard it is to get an objective third party to read my own work. I don’t want ‘this is wonderful’, I want constructive criticism to help me improve my writing. I’ve been privileged to have the benefit of that from a number of aspiring writer friends and I think it’s incumbent on me to return the favour. I have to say, too, I get a little thrill when my input helps. And if one of those books goes on to greater glory (like the Authonomy editor’s desk or *gasp* publication), I bask in its reflection, like a stage hand peeking from the wings while the principal actor takes applause. What I look for is more difficult. Really, I don’t look for anything. I just read and record things that don’t work for me. I have my little list of ‘gotchas’, things that will always strike me. Two in particular stand out; incorrect use of ‘ing’ words and ‘there was/were’. Very often people will write things like ‘walking across the room he opened the door’. Er, no. You can’t do both those things at once. Whereas ‘walking across the room he smoked a cigarette’ is plausible. ‘There was/were’ is perfectly acceptable – but it’s often overused and just as often can be either omitted or the sentence can be rephrased to work harder using stronger verbs. Other things I’ll note are word repetition, word echoes, slips in point of view. But the real value in reading a whole book is you can see if the characters are well drawn and behave consistently; see if transitions are smooth, the story arcs flow and are complete; notice any parts where the plot doesn’t ‘work’. Etc. And those things you don’t look for, you just notice them. What’s in it for me? After I’ve reviewed somebody else’s work I look at my own with a fresh eye. The ‘ing’ thing and ‘there was/were’ are so noticeable to me because I was guilty of them myself. Don’t get me wrong. There’s great value in chapter by chapter crits to iron out the nitty-gritties. But the first three chapters does not a good book make. My great fear has always been to write a kick-arse first three chapters, leaping and bubbling down the hill – to end up in a meandering marshland of broken tributaries and a bog of cliché. And only a disinterested third party can tell me if I’ve got it right. My First Book 12/27/2009
 The first book I ever wrote is ‘The Iron Admiral’. I read it again just the other day, after not having touched it for the good part of a year. And I must say, I enjoyed the read. Very much. Sure, I tweaked a little. (I’m a writer. You always want it to be the very best.) But not much. So yes, I’m pretty happy with my work. Mind you, I thought it was pretty good when I finished the book maybe two years ago. I started writing it probably four years ago. I cringe a little at the memory. It reeked of Jedis and superior mental powers, all by other names, of course. All that got tossed out quite early, rest assured, never to resurface. It was always going to be about an admiral and a conflict with an alien race, though. And a girl. I didn’t think about it at the time but really it was inevitable that I’d end up with star-crossed lovers. It makes me smile, now, when I think about my amazement – and yes, embarrassment, when I recognised I’d written a Romance!! I read ‘serious’ science fiction as well as fluff like Star Wars; Asimov was a long-time favourite, as was Arthur C Clarke and many others. These days it’s Jack Mc Devitt and Elizabeth Moon. I suppose, in reality, I read some romance books, too. But never the Mills & Boon types where the romance was the whole story. Still and all, after I’d accepted that’s what I’d written, I went along for the ride. Certainly the characters in the book I read the other day are not the same as the ones I started off with. They’ve grown and changed and in parts of the story, they simply told me that’s NOT how it would have happened. He wouldn’t have done that; neither would she. I listened to my characters and I feel I’ve ended up with a good book. And now I feel I can go and finish the second book, “The Admiral’s Choice’. They deserve to be together. On the subject of aliens 12/20/2009
Have you ever noticed how often ‘Aliens’ (especially in the movies or the TV) are humanoid? They usually have two arms, two legs and one head, two eyes and they speak with a mouth. Or maybe four arms or legs just for variety. Check out Star Trek sometime. And what’s more, in Star Trek they can actually mate with humans and produce hybrid beings like Spock. Or so we are led to believe. Yes, okay it’s not always like that. But cast a glance at the Cantina scene in Star Wars I, or even the new arrival, the being in the new movie Avatar. What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in a way, nothing. After all, we’re not talking intelligence here, we’re talking technology. Sure, you can have all sorts of aliens inhabiting other worlds. Look in a pond on mother Earth, or in the ocean trenches or in the deepest caves. Life abounds in all sorts of conditions. But not much of it uses technology. Take dolphins; acknowledged to be very, very smart with abilities (like echo location) we can only dream about. But I can’t see your average dolphin building a spaceship. To do that, it seems you need first the desire and secondly the digits to make it happen. Enter the opposable thumb. Oh, and some brains. And suddenly all those humanoid aliens become a little more understandable. You need things like fingers to build machines. So smart lizards would fit the bill. Very common, your lizard-like alien – especially if it’s a baddy. Okay, so there might be other ways of building technology that we quite literally cannot imagine. That’s not much use to a writer, is it? So let’s accept that our aliens will have to have some way of getting around (we call them ‘legs’ in our part of the universe) and some means of manipulating material (fingers, hands). But there are other issues. They’ve just found an ‘earth-like’ planet seventy light years away. That means lots of liquid water, a reasonable temperature range. Just one small catch, though; it’s three times the size of Earth. Can you imagine the effect of gravity on a planet that size? I reckon we’d have trouble walking. Unless we can invent some sort of anti-gravity suit. And what about the air? What if there’s too much oxygen? Or not enough? Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t been the way it is now for most of its existence. Indeed, we need breathing apparatus if we go above a certain altitude on our own planet. So it’s pretty hard to imagine all those aliens in the cantina scene all comfortably breathing Tatooine’s air. Yes, I know some of them wore respirators or some such. But not very many. Really, when you start looking at the difficulties the solution used by more and more SF writers makes a stack of sense. Bioengineered planets, terra-formed to suit humans. You’ll find them in Elizabeth Moon’s books and Jack McDevitt’s books among others. I must say also that I find it difficult to imagine why the inhabitants of a planet like (say) Jupiter would ever want to come to Earth and do more than take a passing look. Always assuming, of course, the amorphous blobs living in Jovian storms subject to enormous gravity would bother to build a space ship. So they get here and then what? Wouldn’t they be more likely to eye off Jupiter? Now this assumption puts paid to a lot of space wars. Why bother, after all? Which is why the Ptorix (aliens in my book ‘The Iron Admiral’ evolved on a world similar to ours and live on worlds similar to ours. We are cosmic rivals trying to share a galaxy. And the Ptorix don’t look humanoid. But they do have tentacles. The little voice in the night 12/12/2009
 On a roll. A place in the Krystor mountains, I'd even found a picture to fire my imagination. And then last night a little thought tapped diffidently on my shoulder. "Greet?" Mumble wizzle. "What?" "Why would they be in the mountains, Greet?" "Go away. I explained all that." (Turns over) "Yes, but where did they grow the food?" (Sits up) "Down in the valley." "Well then... why-" "Oh, shut up. You've made your point." Bloody little thought just shot down my wonderful plot device. But all is not lost. I'd actually thought this all through with rather more sense many months ago (before 'Die a Dry Death' took up residence in my brain). And fortunately, I hadn't thrown the scene away. It was just a couple of pages but it was enough to put me back on plausible track. The mountains are still in there, but they're not quite so important, now. Oh, bugger. It can't be the TEMPLE at Krystor anymore... hmmm. Then again, maybe it can... Writer's block 12/11/2009
I guess we all get it. One of those times when you can't get in the groove. When your characters won't talk to you. You can see them, imagine them. But Ravindra's lying back in the chair in his office, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Morgan just throws me one of those 'looks'. And I don't know where I'm going. Or more particularly, where they're going. Well... I do, but that's at the end. That's the thing about books. You know where they start, you know where they finish. But how do you get from one to the other? So I thought 'bugger it. I'll work out how they get there later.' And I wrote the BIG chapter. And it all started to flow. And then I went back and started the second big chapter. From there, I came up with a title and the ideas queued up in a semi-orderly fashion to the extent I had to write some down. On a roll now. 'The Temple of Krystor', book two of 'A Legacy of War', is well underway. Oh, and if you're interested, I wrote the Big Sex Scene ages ago. (Grins) Getting inside a psychopath's brain... 11/29/2009
... is interesting. And challenging. Quite a number of psychopaths have made a name for themselves. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. And on a much smaller stage, Jeronimus Cornelisz, erstwhile under merchant on the merchantship Batavia. For a few short months in 1629 he strode his tiny island like a colossus, or a God, dealing out death and destruction on a whim. As an author, I had to try to get into his head and understand - or at least explain - his behaviour. So - to try to understand. To quote from a handout produce by Oregon Counseling; The psychopath is one of the most fascinating and distressing problems of human experience. For the most part, a psychopath never remains attached to anyone or anything. They live a "predatory" lifestyle. They feel little or no regret, and little or no remorse - except when they are caught. They need relationships, but see people as obstacles to overcome and be eliminated. If not, they see people in terms of how they can be used. They use people for stimulation, to build their self-esteem and they invariably value people in terms of their material value (money, property, etc..). A psychopath can have high verbal intelligence, but they typically lack "emotional intelligence". They can be expert in manipulating others by playing to their emotions. There is a shallow quality to the emotional aspect of their stories (i.e., how they felt, why they felt that way, or how others may have felt and why). The lack of emotional intelligence is the first good sign you may be dealing with a psychopath. A history of criminal behavior in which they do not seem to learn from their experience, but merely think about ways to not get caught is the second best sign. The following is a list of items based on the research of Robert Hare, Ph.D. which is derived from the "The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, .1991, Toronto: Multi-Health Systems." These are the most highly researched and recognized characteristics of psychopathic personality and behavior.
Michael G. Conner, Psy.D Has this to say. A psychopath is usually a subtle manipulator. They do this by playing to the emotions of others. They typically have high verbal intelligence, but they lack what is commonly referred to as "emotional intelligence". There is always a shallow quality to the emotional aspect of their stories. In particular they have difficulty describing how they felt, why they felt that way, or how others may feel and why. In many cases you almost have to explain it to them. Close friends and parents will often end up explaining to the psychopath how they feel and how others feel who have been hurt by him or her. They can do this over and over with no significant change in the person's choices and behavior. They don't understand or appreciate the impact that their behavior has on others. They do appreciate what it means when they are caught breaking rules or the law even though they seem to end up in trouble again. They desperately avoid incarceration and loss of freedom but continue to act as if they can get away with breaking the rules. They don't learn from these consequences. They seem to react with feelings and regret when they are caught. But their regret is not so much for other people as it is for the consequences that their behavior has had on them, their freedom, their resources and their so called "friends." They can be very sad for their self. A psychopath is always in it for their self even when it seems like they are caring for and helping others. The definition of their "friends" are people who support the psychopath and protect them from the consequence of their own antisocial behavior. Shallow friendships, low emotional intelligence, using people, antisocial attitudes and failure to learn from the repeated consequences of their choices and actions help identify the psychopath. Armed with a description like this, it wasn't so hard to get into Cornelisz's head. In some ways it was more difficult to sort out Lucretia, who had to deal with this man at a very intimate level, always conscious that the slightest mistake may have cost her her life. It still stops me in my tracks to think that this one man was effectively responsible for the deaths of ninety-six people. Put that into perspective. There were about one hundred and eighty people on Batavia's Graveyard when Pelsaert and Jacobsz headed for Java. Cornelisz's crew killed a little over half of them. Yet Cornelisz never accepted responsibility, never showed any remorse, always kept coming back to the fact that he himself never killed anybody. But you know what? The most frightening thing of all was how easy it was for him to recruit people more than willing to carry out his orders. Ah, the frailty of the human psyche. |
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