(Click for Kindle version)

There are actually several reasons why eBooks hadn’t been taken seriously by either readers or authors until fairly recently:  the market was a free-for-all, prices were all over the map and delivery and security issues made it a risky place to put a year’s worth of your work.

In the past, commercial reading devices were expensive ($300+) and each one used a different format so your book selection was limited to only those titles that had been published in your reader’s format. This is still true, to some extent, although Sony offers a device that supports Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word formats along with their proprietary format. Of course no author in his or her right mind would release a novel in Word format if they intended to derive any income from the title!

You can say what you want about giants like Amazon, but until they began their big push the eBook market was a real mess. Titles ranged in price from zero to amounts rivaling print books and author royalties covered an equally wide range. For most authors, including me, it seemed about as appealing as jumping into a swimming pool full of piranhas. Amazon (and others) has finally created the perception of “value” for eBooks and royalties are more realistic and consistent.

An author’s biggest fear is (or should be) losing his or her work to the public domain. I personally spend a year of my life writing a novel and if a pirated version of it suddenly started appearing all over the Internet I would be crushed. In fact, I think  I’d quit writing altogether. Today, eBook publishers such as Amazon offer Digital Rights Management (DRM) security, which locks your purchased title to a specific reader device or reader application. DRM is optional, but I refused to publish in eBook format until it was available.

Why did I pick Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format for my novels?

This question also has several answers. Because the Kindle is owned and sold by Amazon, there’s a certain amount of marketing leverage there. The print versions of my novels are also available through Amazon, so when you go to Amazon.com and search for “Tractrix” you’re going to see both the print edition and the new eBook edition listed on the same page – take your pick.

As mentioned above, the security provided by DRM was an absolute must for me. Contrary to popular belief, eBook does not mean “free book” so I waited until this issue was resolved.

However, the primary reason I chose the Kindle format was because I wanted to make my eBooks available to the largest possible market without spending a huge amount of time reformatting the 130,000 word manuscript for a dozen different readers. And what about the millions of people – LIKE ME – who don’t own any kind of reader? Once my title was published in Kindle format, it was instantly available to anyone who owns a PC, a MAC, an iPhone, an iPad, a Blackberry or the new Android. And this required no extra work and no extra expense thanks to Amazon’s FREE eReader software for the above listed devices. So if you own a Sony Reader or a Barnes & Noble Nook you can’t download my Kindle title directly to your device, but I’m betting you also have one of those other devices, too, so you can still read Tractrix in electronic form if you really want to.

Ready to buy? Click here to purchase the Kindle version of Tractrix from Amazon.

This is the third and final post on some of the interesting places I used as locations in Tractrix, the first novel in my Seeds of Civilization series.

If you drive north out of Las Vegas on US 95 you’ll pass the old Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Air Field, now know as Creech Air Force Base. The installation is on your right as you drive north and if you keep your eyes open you might see a Predator aircraft being flown by a “student pilot” at the school there.

A few miles up the road is the turn off to Mercury, the “company town” located on the Nevada Test Site (see earlier post). Don’t waste your time taking the exit because the heavily armed guards at the entrance to NTS will turn you back anyway.

About 120 miles north of Las Vegas you’ll come to Beatty, population 1,154. This small town makes several appearances in Tractrix, beginning with Tony’s unexpected acquisition of the very first mysterious black sphere. Later, my characters return to Beatty to investigate a shooting. They also make a significant discovery related to the origin of the sphere.

I visited Beatty on several occasions while writing Tractrix and stayed overnight once at the same motel where my fictional shooting takes place. If you’ve read much Internet chatter about Area 51, you’ll be familiar with the infamous white Jeep Cherokees used by the civilian security force that is charged with keeping nosey people like me away from the secret government installations north of Las Vegas. The time I stayed overnight in Beatty I had made several unplanned stops at odd looking roads and gates on the way into town so you can imagine my surprise when I looked out my hotel room window the next morning and found one of those white jeeps parked right next to my rental car!

Next week I’ll take you to some interesting places in the Caribbean that I bet you’ve never even heard of – and one of them is 2,100 feet below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico.

(Click to enlarge)

A few days ago I wrote about the vast tract of federal land north of Las Vegas that serves as the location for a lot of Tractrix, the first novel in my Seeds of Civilization series. Another location featured in Tractrix is the ancient Mayan city of Uxmal (pronounced oosh-máll) and the nearby Loltun Caverns. Unlike my Nevada research, I didn’t get to visit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula until after the novel was published.

I stumbled across Loltun Caverns on the Internet and decided they would be a great mysterious spot to send my characters in their quest for information about the origin of the spheres in Tractrix. I was able to find several travelogues from people who had visited the site and posted photographs, so I had a pretty good idea of what the place looked like but as the story unfolded, I created an “unexplored section” for my characters to investigate.

A year later, when my wife and I finally had the opportunity to visit Loltun ourselves, we were amazed at the size and complexity of the underground complex that had been used by the Maya for more than 1,000 years. It was also the place where the Maya nation made their “last stand” against the Mexican army before surrendering. As we exited the complex at the end of our tour, the guide turned and pointed to a small opening in the cliff face that had a metal gate covering it.

“That’s a new section of the caverns that we just discovered and haven’t yet begun to explore,” he told us. My wife and I looked at each other in amazement – this was the very section I had made up during the writing of Tractrix!

Earlier in this blog I wrote about my virtual travels that have resulted from researching locations for my novels. Thanks to the Internet, I’ve “visited” places such as Yonaguni Island, Japan, western Cuba and Andros Island, in the Bahamas. But not all of my travels have been through cyberspace – I’ve also had the opportunity to visit some really interesting places in person.

A lot of my first novel, Tractrix, takes place in and around Las Vegas, especially on the huge military complex north of the city known collectively as the Nellis Range Complex. The NRC includes millions of acres of land that has been withdrawn from public use beginning with President Roosevelt’s Executive Order back in 1940. Today this area includes the Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR), a vast bombing and pilot training area, the Nevada Test Site, where the US conducted at least 928 nuclear tests, and the infamous Area 51. It also includes several undocumented airfields, the town of Mercury, and the now defunct Yucca Mountain Project, originally intended as an underground disposal site for the nation’s nuclear waste.

I’ve driven the perimeter of this vast area three times and come as close to the two external gates of Area 51 as a civilian can get without being arrested. I’ve also been turned away from the main gate of a large, unnamed Air Force base at the northern end of the NRC area, southeast of Tonopah, Nevada. I’ve been “buzzed” by low-flying fighter jets exiting the bombing range over tiny Rachel, Nevada, and I’ve toured the Nevada Test Site and seen the huge craters created by some of the early above-ground nuclear tests of the 50s and 60s. During that tour we stopped at the Mercury cafeteria where hundreds of government employees ate every day during the Site’s heyday and we saw the huge drills used to bore 6,000 foot deep holes for the underground tests of the 70s and 80s. We also saw parking lots full of vehicles at more than a half-dozen complexes on the Site, so even though nuclear testing has been banned since 1992, something is still going on out there in the desert!

So, when you read Tractrix, keep in mind that most of the Las Vegas area scenes are drawn from my own personal experiences and travels.

Info about the NRC:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/nellis-range.htm

Info about the Nevada Test Site (including tours):
http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/nts.aspxGoogle Earth coordinates for Area 51:
Lat: N 37^o14’31.2” x Long: W 115^o48’43.2”
(if you zoom in close, you can see aircraft parked on the runway that, officially, doesn’t exist!)

Visit http://www.SeedsOfCivilization.com for more interesting location links.

I was recently invited to participate in a unique program called Operation eBook Drop that provides eBooks (electronic copies of published books) to Coalition troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The concept is the brain-child of independent author Edward C. Patterson, a U.S. Army vet who saw a need and took action.

One day, while Ed was cruising the Amazon Kindle message boards, he “met” a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq who wrote that he wanted to download eBooks for his Kindle but couldn’t because Amazon’s wireless Whispernet service didn’t work in Iraq. Ed contacted the soldier and ended up sending him all thirteen of his eBooks and the rest, as they say, is history!

Soon Smashwords, where Ed has his eBooks listed, stepped forward to help. As more authors joined, Smashwords offered to facilitate the distribution of eBooks in formats other than Kindle and as of March 15, 2010, 365 authors were already participating – one for every day of the year!

When I first signed up all I knew was that I wanted to participate if I could. Since none of my titles are currently available in traditional eBook formats, we had to devise our own distribution scheme but thanks to my wife, Marty, and son, Mike, we are now delivering copies of Tractrix on a daily basis. Marty found a way to protect the electronic document and still make it accessible to those it was intended for and Mike devised a clever way to contact soldiers who join Operation eBook Drop, introduce them to my novel and deliver the file if they choose to receive it – all in a matter of minutes and with almost no effort at our end.

Operation eBook Drop is one of those truly inspired ideas that make you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Many deserving soldiers now have access to hundreds of books and the whole process costs almost nothing. My very special thanks to Ed Patterson, Smashwords and all the other contributing authors for giving me the opportunity to do something for those who serve so far from home!

You can also visit Operation eBook Drop on Facebook.

In Seeds of Civilization, my first series of novels I used the same four main characters throughout the three novels. You first meet Frank Morton on Page 1 of Book 1, Tractricx, and by the time you finish the fourth page you’ve already heard about Tony Nicoletti. These two men carry most of the “action” in Tractrix, although they are joined by Professor James (Jim) Barnes near the end of Chapter 10. The primary female character in the first half of the book is a Las Vegas nurse named Jill Harris but she is forced to “disappear” at the end of Chapter 18 and in Chapter 26 she’s permanently replaced by Linda McBride, Frank’s former neighbor from Seattle.

The other day I was asked where my characters came from and my initial response was “out of my head.” That’s not really true, of course, because the personalities of all fictional characters are created from the personalities of one or more real people that the author has known – or at least known of. And in my case one character is based on a real person who actively participated in the development of the character as the first chapters of Tractrix were spilling out of the printer.

When I started writing Tractrix my “day job” was IT consultant and one of my clients was a regional trucking company. Part of my responsibility was to make periodic visits to the company’s 23 widely dispersed terminals and these week-long trips were always made with Fred Ray, the company’s V.P. of Operations, in his noisy diesel pickup truck. Fred has been a trucker most of his life and soon became the basis of the character Tony Nicoletti. During the hours of travel between terminals, we often discussed Tony’s latest antics and Fred would make sure I stayed “true to the character.” There’s no doubt in my mind that Fred’s help with the development of the Tony Nicoletti character spilled over into my development of the other characters, which are not based on real people.

Whenever I create a new character, no matter how minor, I find a picture to help me visualize the person I’m writing about. More often than not, I find these photos online somewhere and for my four major characters we actually purchased stock photography so we could use the images on the website and in promotional pieces. Here’s what I think Frank, Tony, Linda and Jim look like. How close does this come to the mental images you had when you read the Seeds of Civilization series? (click images for slightly larger versions)