And yes, I’m still struggling to get it ready for Kindle. Almost there…

UPDATE: formatted and uploaded now. Turned out to be a pretty painless process, much to my surprise. Just haggling over what price to set, and then we can publish it.

And before anyone asks, no, the title does not have anything to do with Constellation. Sad to say, we actually had the book half-written and most of the backstory laid out well before NASA applied the name Ares to Mike Griffin’s misbegotten launch vehicles. After I catch up on a few things, I intend this weekend to revamp the book’s website so that we can start giving out tidbits of the backstory and how we came to write the book.

Here’s the cover art:

Bonus points to anyone who guesses where the image is from…

In this short excerpt, Amber and her parents are camping out in their beat-up rover, as they travel from their home (one of the old tuna-can habs left behind by the early exploratory missions) to the main settlement, Port Lowell. Amber, having just turned 14 a few days earlier, is finding herself increasingly bored with life on the frontier:

Amber awoke with a start, feeling dangerously exposed under the transparent curve of the rover’s front window.  She had lived all her life surrounded by walls or a suit, seeing the surface only through a small viewport or a helmet visor.  This broad, clear view of the sky always made her feel vulnerable.

She wondered what time it was — just above the horizon was one of the morning stars, which the daily astronomy report said would rise about an hour before the sun.  Dawn was near.

She reached out both hands towards the faintly blue star, touching her wrists together and forming a cup as if to cradle a precious jewel.  “Earth”, she whispered.

Aaron, lying on his reclined seat with his back to Amber, stirred.

“Dad?”

“Unh?”

“You awake?”

“I am now.”

Amber paused and collected her thoughts, feeling about her throat for the Earth pendant and remembering that she’d left her necklace behind at the hab.  “Why are we here?”

Aaron rolled onto his back.  “We’re going to Port Lowell.  You know…”

“No, not here here.  Mars.  Why are we on Mars?  Earth has everything.  Mars has nothing.  Why would anyone want to come here?”

He stretched, crossed his arms behind his head, and stared silently out the window for a time.  “Because we’re explorers.  That’s who we are.  That’s what we do.  From the time we are babies, able to crawl, we—”

“Right, right, okay, I know all that,” she interrupted.  “I’ve heard that speech a hundred times.  I’ve given that speech a hundred times, in my class videos.  I mean us:  you and me and Mom.  Why do we have to stay on Mars?  The planet’s being explored, and permanently settled — that’s what you wanted, why you stayed behind.  Right?”  She let the question hang for an instant, but her father didn’t take the bait.  “So why stay?  Don’t you want to go back to Earth now?”

“No,” he said simply.  “I used to think we’d go back some day, but now?  No.  There’s nothing back there for us — our lives are on Mars now.”  He sighed.  “Look, sweetheart…I know life on Mars isn’t everything we would like it to be.  But this world is growing and things will change for you.  Maybe sooner than you think.  You just need to tough it out for a while longer — Mars is bound to get a whole lot more interesting in the near future.”

“Yeah.  Sure, Dad.”

“Goodnight, sweetheart.”

“Goodnight.”

She drifted off to sleep, but Aaron sat awake, mulling over what to tell her, and when.  He knew Lindsay would be upset if he told Amber about the offer — there was no point bringing it up yet, when there might be no need.

It’ll all work out, he thought.  He checked the hab’s status on his MA before nodding off again, as the sky began to lighten in the east.

Excerpted from “Labyrinth of Night”, © Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson

So, a few weeks back, I bought a Kindle 3G to test out the platform.

So far, I like it. It takes a little while to get used to it, but it grows on you fairly quickly. I had seen previous versions owned by friends, so I had an idea of what to expect, but I was still pretty impressed with it. The first thing that wowed me when I took it out of the box was the thinness of the thing — I was almost afraid to handle it, for fear of slicing my fingers off. The second thing was my mistaking the default display image for a printed shipping overlay — I had to look very closely at it, from several different angles, to convince myself that what I was seeing was really on the screen, such is the visual novelty of “electric paper” displays.

Turned it on, set it up in short order (added my home wifi info, which is actually optional with the 3G version), and it was ready to go. The only other setup I had to perform had to do with uploading of documents, and involved simply adding my personal email address to a list on my Amazon account so that the conversion server would accept documents sent to it from that address. With only one false try (using PDF format, which produced unsurprisingly dodgy results in formatting) I was able to upload the manuscript to my Kindle flawlessly. I had expected it to require a lot of online fussing and fixing to make it look right, but it digested the native .docx file with nary a burp.

One thing I have not yet done is paid to download any new books (for lack of time). I did download a few freebie classics I was familiar with (Machiavelli’s The Prince and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations…not kidding about the “classics” part), and have been poking around in them as time permits since their short, self-contained chapters make them more amenable than novels to reading in small increments. The feature whereby passages highlighted by other readers are highlighted on your own screen is a nice touch — it’s like a social-media version of buying a used book at the college bookstore, with the importance of a passage indicated not merely by the electronic equivalent of underlining or a highlight pen, but also by the number of other people who thought it significant>

One thing I didn’t like about it is the way the screen flickers when you “turn the page”, but this is where that “getting used to it” thing comes in — after a few minutes, you don’t notice it.

Time permitting tomorrow, I may be able to start posting sample chapters as an appetizer for the full novel, which we expect to have available via Kindle in the next two weeks or so.

Ah well. Back to looking for an agent the old-fashioned way.