Displacement activities

Blog entry supplemental twenty one: Displacement activities
So what happened to all those submissions you promised by the end of 2018, I hear you ask? Well, the honest answer is displacement activities have taken over, and rather than wait until the New Year I’ve already started the next novel, Maya, in fact I’ve already completed the first five chapters (and one hundred pages). And this is always the way; I love writing far more than promotion. There are a number of reasons for this; let’s be honest, I really don’t like being told what to do by other people, and the search for autonomy has been the keystone of my existence. By passing my work on to others (agents, publishers, a wider readership), it ceases to be wholly mine, and other people start to assume ownership and start to make demands. Professional demands come first, ‘…we don’t like this, could you change that etc etc, then if you do start selling to significant numbers of people, your new found readership starts to make its own demands!
Aren’t you being arrogant, I hear you say? Who says that your work is any good anyway? Well, I just went back on my website and re-read part of A Children’s Crusade, and I am convinced more than ever of its merit. You cannot be objective, people will say! Well not entirely, I will admit, but I’ve read an awful lot of literature and in my usual autodidactic fashion made an extensive study of SF, and I am dispassionate and I do know the difference between good writing and bad. What I would concede is that possibly my work is not fashionable (though I doubt this, as well), and I am probably not the average agent or publisher’s idea of a marketable modern author. But more fool them…
Anyway, Maya picks up the story of Marta Camacho, otherwise known as Tata, where we left it at the end of novel four. She is safely ensconced in the free communities in Amazonas close to the Peruvian border, behind the mysterious barrier that protects them from the outside world (if this all sounds a bit Harry Potter, I ask for your forbearance as scientific explanations will follow!).
However Tata is never happy anywhere for long, and her relationship with the other David (Rodrigues) has hit the rocks, and the forces of the provisional government of Novo Brasil know where she is and are now massing outside the Discontinuity that protects them…
Maya also introduces new characters, an earnest young Canadian citizen astronomer called Karl, and the other members of his online group, and a discredited Korean astrophysicist, ‘Nancy’ Park, who’s now working as an online ‘hostess’.
In Maya the world has recovered (to a certain extent) from the shock and dislocation of the Collapse, and some nations and their citizens are starting to look forward again, albeit tentatively…
Finally, the opening chapter of After the Flood will be hitting this website imminently, and I’ll blog again when that happen…
The Author December 2018