Click the link to listen to the audio book version of chapter 1 of They Came By Night. The audiobook should be released next month.
Arden: I saw this picture on the interwebs and decided to write a character around him because he just looks so COOL. IMHO
Link to below… Feedback welcome author@abathgate.com
The audible version of They Came by Night is almost complete, and I am offering a free copy to the first 10 people who email me at author@abathgate.com with the subject “Yes I’d like a free audible copy”. You must also have signed up for the newsletter. Sign up below
A friend of mine is trying to buy an oxygen concentrator for a rural village in India. Chip in if you can.
https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8z0IxzJEak
BOOK 2 Has two new types of Robots
People often talk about a character arc plotting the changes of a character because of what happens to them. I prefer to think of plot as not changing the character but revealing it.
We see Sam’s character when he is presented with the opportunity to join the pressers. He refuses because he knows his father, mother and siblings need him to tend the farm. Imagine a teenager presented with the offer of freedom, independence, and more importantly, the chance of getting a girl. Sam has to turn away from all of that to face a life under the thumb of his father, working the fields, and without any hope of meeting a girl. That is character. From day one he thinks of others and does what he thinks is right.
Of course, he changes: he loses his innocence, he sees battle, he sees death, and he is not a superhero. But these changes are really just the light shining on a different facet of his humanity. We need to see he is a human, not Captain Marvel. Death scares him. The idea that a horde of Northman want to kill him, makes him so scared he can barely get out of the privy. I like that glimpse of his humanity. But what is important is that he rises to the challenge. He does his duty. Scared to his bones but willing to fight as best he can.
Everything that happens to him reveals another facet of his character. He was always a hero, even when he was just bent over his father’s knee getting a spanking. Nothing changed but the light shone on him. To see a character we need the light of circumstance to shift so we see hidden facets glimmering. We see Sam when is powerless and when he is powerful. We see him tempted, hurt, experiencing sorrow and joy.
He seems incorruptible. There is a moment when he has done well, earned respect, he has status, but then he trips over his tongue when confronted with a beautiful girl, and he falls tearfully into his mother’s arms without any thought to how people will view his manliness for it. Of course, all humans are corruptible… but that’s more of a book 2 thing.
The big news is the first draft of book 2 is now complete
What I do now is take a couple of weeks away from writing before hitting the first rewrite. In those two weeks I need to do some artwork for maps, and for the cover. I also have two other books I am writing. These are non fantasy related but have been pulling my heartstrings for a while.
Sales of “They Came by Night” have been up and down like crazy. I will need to spend some time working on promoting it.
I have been working with an actor on the audible for They Came by Night. It is coming along nicely and soon I will provide a sample on this very site.
So please sign up to my newsletter if you haven’t alread…
I just need more hours in the day.
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There are philosophical concepts which play out in the Icor tales.
The Metamind : I started thinking about this as a teenager and it has deeply influenced my philosophy and is the backbone of the Icor Tales. The concept is this. Our minds are made of neurons, each neuron in itself has a pitiful amount of information but when it is brought together into a subsystem network it becomes gestalt i.e. it is greater than the sum of its parts. It seems incredible that something as simple as neurons can create minds. In the 1980s I used to build neural nets as part of an anti missile missile guidance system and I was always shocked by how such a simple technique provided powerful results. What was even more interesting was when I combined neural nets to create nets of nets. The results were spectacular and I could not get my mind around how it worked. I used a system called MOPS (Memory organization packets) META-MOPS and TAUS (thematic activation units). My system could read a scientific paper and truly understand it such that you could ask it questions on it and it would respond intelligently or it could paraphrase it, simplify it an even find logical errors.
Human minds are recursive nets of nets, but what most people do not understand is that the physical and logical neural net does not end with the brain matter…
Imagine a man is sitting under a tree. The sun heats the air, that moves the clouds so the heat hits the ground and causes the air to expand and form a breeze which shakes the tree’s branches which causes an apple to drop and hit the man on the head, the pain signals hit the brain and bippity boppity boo he discovers gravity. Now ask yourself where the thought process began. Our thoughts are part of a process that goes on in our environment all around us, and we only become aware of it when it enters a tiny portion of our brain.
Icor is about this concept of a greater mind, and of what consciousness really is.
To be continued…
“They Came By Night” – Andrew Bathgate was the best selling Fantasy Novel on Amazon over the weekend.
What a ride these last five days have been. This was the last five days of the vital 28 day post publication period. I had to drive my rank up or be forgotten by the Amazon algorithms forever.
To put this in perspective, all I wanted to break into the top 100 For Epic Fantasy. I never dreamed of #1.
Also to put this in perspective, this was a free promo, and Monday morning it will be paid purchasing only so my rank will tank. There are now thousands of people reading my book, and with any luck they’ll like it and recommend it. It is all word of mouth from here on.
I just finished writing the first great battle scene of Book 2, and I am very proud of the result. It will of course go through two full rewrites and then a developmental edit followed by another rewrite and then final proofing, but its bones are done. It’s just 1,785 words but packs a punch.
I am about ready to offer it to beta readers.
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The Hall of the ancients has arrived at its epic three thread conclusion. It’s an exciting moment for me as an author. So many revelations happening.
If you’d like to ask me questions I can be reached at author@abathgate.com
Please sign up for my newsletter for upcoming promos and hidden gems. I am planning a Ask Me Anything session after I send Book 2 to the editors.
A lot going on. The promo for a free kindle version was very successful. Thousands of downloads. I have people getting in contact saying they really enjoyed the book, and that is wonderful.
When the promo is over I am going to price the book at 99c and leave it at that price. I will lose money, but that’s okay. The audible should come out in a couple of months, and if I have developed enough reviews and following then maybe … just maybe, I can make some money on that.
Then in September I will release book 2. And book 2 is going to be AWESOME! The characters deepen. The plot thickens. And greater world becomes an issue.
In the meantime I have to get heads down and write write write.
P.S. Someone asked me for an autograph today. My first one. That’s nice.
The Kindle Version is free until April 11th. Get it while you can!
VERY LIMITED TIME PROMO!
The Kindle version will be absolutely free for a very limited time. I want to get some traction before I stop promoting it to concentrate on Book 2 which is at 25k words right now.
Here is the link – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XPVY9R7
In “They Came By Night” the time of the ancients is our present day. Before writing TCBN I had begun writing another novel which was about the fall of the ancients. I am determined to return to that novel one day. It is about the moment when our society reached a critical Rubicon… the creation of an intelligence singularity. The protagonist accidentally creates a singularity and she wants to fix all the world’s problems with it, but that is a lot harder than it sounds. The singularity is the power of God, but who supposes they have the wisdom to wield such power?
Here is an excerpt
“In the golden age of man, back when the air crackled with the hum of wifi and every pocket held an electronic smorgasboard of eclectic electric delights, there might be seen, in the cafes or book shops, a certain undersized, myopic breed of man, that looked like the genetic waste of the human race. Hunched over their laptops they tapped their secret code, building an infrastructure for a distrustful society. Unlike the peasants of the land, this breed would hoard, not gold, but equities. Bright and shiny equities in companies that feasted, digested and fathomed unfathomable quantities of information. Companies that spread over the world like a cancer devouring its host. Companies with do-good creeds, that swore off plastic straws while churning coal burned gigawatts in a myriad of servers ranked and banked in conglomerate data centers.
This was an age of both enlightenment and bewilderment. Those that truly understood the direction of technology were an ever-shrinking elite.
And it was a dangerous time to be of that elite. A dangerous time to be intelligent and educated. Not just because a growing portion of society despised intellect, distrusted education, and instead clung to the increasingly difficult to maintain illusion that their kind, their color, their creed, their locale – were the bedrock upon which society stood. Not just because truths were becoming enemies, and society had begun a backward march towards the age of darkness: the Earth was flat, vaccines were bad, man had not landed on the moon, there were chemtrails, climate change was a hoax, women belonged barefoot in the kitchen as baby machines and daycare, and immigrants were the enemy. There was another threat; one that only the shrinking elite understood, and only these elites could meet.”
Our protagonist uses nanites to clean the world’s pollution, to cure the sick and to disarm the tyrants …but that causes more problems than it solves, and in the end it creates what TCBN refers to as “The Fall of the Ancients”
The world that is formed after the fall of the ancients is the magic world of the Ceniac island where TCBN takes place. The power behind magic in this world are the nanites, and the rules that govern magic are the code within the nanites.
The first 28 days after publishing are super important because the Amazon algorithms mark this period as a trial. They will to a small extent push your product. After 28 days if you dont sell well, then the algorithm drops you like a stone.
So in the last 5 days of those 28 days, I will offer They Came By Night kindle edition for FREE!
April 7th to April 11th
After that it goes to $4.99, and I basically stop promoting it and switch all my attention to Book 2 “In the Hall of the Ancients” whose marketing will start in August.
Today I wrote my 250th song.
I am going to record it when I hit 25k words of Book 2, which is currently at 22k words.
Here are the lyrics for the first verse …
There was a time, when you loved me like a good wine
And the future smelt of roses
But I couldn’t take it, had to break it
Now my mind finds that it loses
Doesn’t matter what I sing, when the song begins
I put my heart out on display
When there’s tears in my eyes, that’s when I realize
When I sing, I really pray.
