“Afternoon, lazy,” Owen said.
“Afternoon?”
“Yep. I had your clothes cleaned.” He handed her a package. Better get ready. It’s almost time for Family Dinner.
The Yrdens held ‘Family Dinner’ in a special room with a large table that could accommodate about thirty people. And almost every seat had an Yrden standing behind it. Bettina sat at the head of the table. Owen indicated a chair near the middle of one of the sides, and stood behind the one next to it.
Wine glasses, filled with a white wine, stood at every place.
Bettina rose, and took up her glass. All the other Family members did likewise. Sharon picked up hers.
Bettina raised her glass.
“The Venture continues. The Venture and the Family will prosper. We go now into dark times. We, the Families, have become the Keepers of the Knowledge. We must strive to aid the colony worlds to develop to a point where they can support us, instead of the other way around.
“Already, one under our aegis begins – with the support of those he brought with him – to create a centre of learning. This will become a university, if you will, whose main product will become teachers.
“Those with trades will find themselves enlisted to teach others. We are The Survivors. We must look to the future, and we dare not allow any skill to become forgotten.
“Danger still exists – and will exist until the pirate ships one by one slip into disrepair. We do not go forward into a caring universe.
“But go forward, we must. And we must create a new society, a new fabric whereby what happened in Sol System may never happen again. We must not forget our past.
“To create this new society, we will need maximum effort from all Family members.” She smiled. “And we thus have the great good fortune today to welcome a new member into our ranks. I now welcome Sharon Temple. Welcome to our table, Sharon. Welcome to the Family.”
A man with greying hair lifted his glass as well. “Hear, hear!”
Sharon felt an emotion that she had never before felt. She couldn’t have described it had anyone asked. But it had something to do with belonging, as every Yrden at the table smiled at her and raised their glasses.
Then they all turned their faces to the head of the table where Bettina still stood.
“To the future.”
Author’s Note
(Or, the trouble that authors can make for themselves.)
Now, to do this story justice, we have to go back to “Pelgraff”. In “Pelgraff”, I made mention of several things that had happened before Armageddon on Earth – some 450 years prior to the events on Pelgraff. These details added depth to the story, and included mention of Jaswinder Saroya, who discovered the ‘J-Channel’ in hyperspace; sleep-learning; and soldier-fanatics, amongst others.
The Jaswinder Saroya character interested me, and I wrote a short story: “Courtesan”. But she kept bugging me, asking me to tell the rest of her story. I finally relented and added to the short story to make it a novel. Then, after writing and publishing “Courtesan”, I received several requests to do a sequel. I thought, why not? Thus came the idea for “Not With A Whimper”. I should know better. Thinking only gets me in trouble.
I started out in 2011, figuring I’d write a book that dealt with the other details from Pelgraff, which would take me up to the final Sol System war. As it dealt with Armageddon, I decided to call it, “Not With A Whimper”, as in, the world ended with a bang, not with a whimper. I figured it would grow to about 90,000 words (my longest previous novel just topped 100,000 words). It went very quickly, until I reached about 80,000 words (novel length in itself) – but I then realized that I was only about half-done, and I had so many different threads that I wasn’t doing any of them justice. It became just too much, so I let it lie fallow while I concentrated on other works.
But I kept coming back to it, wondering how I could make it work. Finally, I made the decision: I would take certain threads out of the uncompleted story, fill them out, and make them into their own novels. I figured about 4 books each one of about 60,000 words – short novels, shorter than Courtesan, which had 70,000 words.
The first one I dealt with, I called “Producers”. It encompassed a single thread. It ended up at 63,000 words, about what I had figured one. It came relatively easy and, thus encouraged, I went blithely on, not realizing what I had begun.
Each book after that became more difficult because they ran concurrently. Not only did I have to ensure that no character knew on, say, August 12th, things that happened in another book on August 14th, I had to deal with the fact that I had certain things happening on certain days and thus had to build up to them, use them in the other books. Not only that, when characters from the one book met characters from another book, they had to do that in the other book as well, though from an alternate viewpoint. It became a nightmare.
“Destroyers”, the second book I wrote, took two threads from the original unfinished book: that of the sleep-learning scientist, and that of the Germans soldiers. I had only minor difficulties integrating it with “Producers”. “Destroyers” ran up to 67,000 words.
Then the nightmare hit full force. I still had a lot of threads left. I pulled out two that seemed to fit together – one about saving the knowledge that those on Earth had accumulated, the other about saving the seeds of Earth plants. I called it, “Preservers”. But now I had to deal with the two previously published novels, as well as the fourth, unfinished one. And that started my real problems. I made the decision that I would have to wait until I finished the fourth novel before I published the third, because there existed just too many places where I could get in trouble – and I did. I began to loathe the mere idea of working on “Not With A Whimper”. Not because I didn’t like the story, but because the writing of it had become so terribly complicated.
“Preservers”, far from the 60-70,000 words I’d originally envisaged, ended up at 98,000 words. And I knew that the fourth, “Survivors”, would top that, because it took up all the remaining threads. Not only did it start before any of the others (on the time line), it finished after them, and had to tie up all the threads from the previous three, because they all meet at the end of the fourth. As well as that “Survivors” contained the major threads of the original – those of Jaswinder and Wen Carson. It ended up at a whopping 137,000 words, 30,000 words longer than any of my previous novels.
Altogether, the whole story (four books) of “Not With A Whimper” came to 365,000 words, or approximately 1100 pages in a print book. That was over 4 times what I had originally planned on for my little sequel. It took me 7 years of work and procrastination (mostly procrastination, because I just couldn’t figure out how to handle it) to get NWAW finished.
In the end, I have to say that it was worth it for me, personally. I like the stories; I’m glad they are out there – and completed. But, I also have to say: Never Again!
I hope you enjoy it. Please consider leaving a review.
D. A. Boulter.
Books by D.A. Boulter
D.A. Boulter’s Amazon Page where you can find all the following books:
Not With A Whimper Books:
Not With A Whimper: Producers
Not With A Whimper: Destroyers
Not With A Whimper: Preservers
Not With A Whimper: Survivors
Yrden Chronicles Books:
Trading For The Stars (Book 1)
Trading For A Dream (Book 2)
Other Amazon Books by D.A. Boulter
Courtesan
Pelgraff
Pilton's Moon / Vengeance Is Mine
ColdSleep
The Steadfasting
Prey
Enemy of Korgan
Ghost Fleet
In The Company of Cowards
A Throne At Stake
D.A. Boulter’s blog: http://daboulter.blogspot.ca/
D.A. Boulter can be contacted at: mailto:[email protected]
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D.A. Boulter, Not With A Whimper: Survivors
Not With A Whimper: Survivors Page 46