Ask the Author! (Please!)

Use this forum to discuss the April 2020 Book of the month, "Project Tau" by Jude Austin
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Re: Ask the Author! (Please!)

Post by spencermack »

Hello!

I'm wondering what your writing process is? Where do you begin, how do you keep going, when do you know your done?
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Post by Anindita Roy »

Hello Jude! Congratulations on writing an amazing science-fiction.The plot is brilliantly constructed.There are a number of dramatic situations in the novel to add to its interest. I became so engrossed in this book that I read it in one sitting.This book can be adapted into a movie. This book reminds me of Sophia, the humanoid robot. I would love to know what inspired you to write this book!
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Post by Thea Frederick »

Hey Jude!
Perhaps you already have answered this question but, who is you writing inspiration/a writer you really look up too?
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Post by jknight885 »

Hiya! Were your characters based on any real-life people?
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Post by Lian »

Hi, do you have any advice on writing science fiction and world building?
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Post by Jude Austin »

ACK! I'm so sorry for the long delay! I was working on some intensive editing and changes for both Project Tau and its sequel, Homecoming :P Anyway, I'm back and ready to answer questions again!
spencermack wrote: 29 May 2020, 18:47 Hello!

I'm wondering what your writing process is? Where do you begin, how do you keep going, when do you know your done?
Hi spencermack! :tiphat:

I actually kind of start in the middle and work both ways. It's very rare for me to sit down and write a chapter from beginning to end; I have a dumping file, where I keep scenes and dialog that I just write whenever they come to me, and I slot them in later. Some never make it in, some make it into future books, or even completely different books.

Keeping it going is easy; the hard part is stopping! :D I do have a strong feeling for the end in the sense of "this is the last main event that will happen."

One editor suggested I cut the whole last chapter of Project Tau, saying that Tau and Kata's arrival in Mason's office was the perfect place to end the book. I vetoed that, saying that I thought most readers would at least like to know they definitely escaped. After all, anything could have happened while Kata was telling his tale; station security could come and investigate, someone could have shut down the security systems and sent in the heavy hitters, Mason could have wised up and hit a panic button to summon immediate backup (okay, maybe Mason wising up is too much of a stretch, but you get the point; just because Tau and Kata escaped their room, it doesn't automatically follow that they'll escape the station. The reader needed to see them go).

I also try and tie up the main conflict of each book, as I hate books that end on extreme cliffhangers. Project Tau: the main conflict is Tau and Kata's predicament, which is overcome at the end when they finally escape. Homecoming: the main conflict is Tau and Kata's ultimate fate, particularly with regards to GenTech, which is also tied up at the end. I never know how long it's going to take to write the next book, or even which series I'm going to work on, so I try to leave readers as satisfied as possible.
Thea Frederick wrote: 31 May 2020, 00:03 Hey Jude!
Perhaps you already have answered this question but, who is you writing inspiration/a writer you really look up too?
Hi Thea Frederick! :tiphat:

I would say, probably Terry Pratchett. Anyone who says that 3rd-person omniscient POV (ie, head-hopping between characters) automatically makes writing terrible
should definitely try one of his books :D That said, it does need to be done perfectly, which I'm still working on :P I like to think I did a better job in Homecoming than in Project Tau, but then, there were about 12-13 years between writing those books ;)
jknight885 wrote: 31 May 2020, 04:49 Hiya! Were your characters based on any real-life people?
Hi jknight885! :tiphat:

In terms of personality, no ;) That said, a few of Kata's anecdotes in both Project Tau and Homecoming were inspired by my own personal experiences. And no, I won't tell you which ones :P One character was named after someone I went to school with, and no, I won't tell you which character either ;)
Lian wrote: 03 Jun 2020, 03:18 Hi, do you have any advice on writing science fiction and world building?
Hi Lian! :tiphat:

The biggest tip I can give is to always have a reason for decisions you make in your world-building. "Because future" doesn't count, unless you're talking about refinements. Example: the science of cloning is pretty exact. There's no way I can see that would directly change the scientific principles involved, so GenTech creates its clones in the usual way. However, I do think it's possible that, in the future, specialized companies (such as GenTech) will have developed ways of accomplishing the same ways much, much faster. It's a bit like transporting goods by ox-cart vs. lorry; in both cases, you're doing the exact same thing, only one way is much, much faster and more efficient ;)

I occasionally come under fire for including contemporary references in my work, with no basis other than, "I don't think your character would know about this famous movie, because future." My response: "Okay, so in other words you think that we'll get rid of the internet, with all its ways to preserve information and videos, and return to the dark ages." To me, that makes no sense. The Projects books are set about 12-1300 years in the future; we've preserved plays and works older than that even before the internet made it so easy, and that's before we get into the Library of Congress. Now, if Kata talked about renting it on VHS, I could definitely understand the problem ;)

Basically, you need to be able to think about every impact your decisions make on your world. Want robots to replace humans in every industry? Okay, sure. How does that affect the economy, if no one's earning a salary? What happens if those robots get hacked? What happens if they malfunction, or break down? How can a robot make a judgment call? Granted, they can be programmed, but it'll most likely be programmed with the programmer's ideals, regardless of society. For example: if someone who is a fanatical anti-abortionist programs a surgical robot, there's a strong risk that he/she will program that robot to refuse all requests for an abortion. If a robot can't make human judgments, this would include not aborting an ectopic pregnancy (where the fertilized egg implants and grows outside the uterus, usually in one of the fallopian tubes) which would most likely result in the death of the mother and the fetus.

If you're talking about planets and cultures, working out a timeline of major historical events helps to shape a culture. On one of my planets, Akkhen, all citizens are required to serve at least ten years in the military upon reaching adulthood (it can be deferred for college students, or those undergoing specialized training, such as people studying to become doctors etc). This has nothing to do with conquest - skirmishes occur, but war is a thing of the past - and everything to do with history: 3-400 years before the events in Project Tau, and about 500 years after initially being settled, Akkhen had degenerated into a rather unpleasant place to live, comparable to North Korea in terms of human rights. Long story short, people rose up and overthrew the regime. Since overnight rebellions are things that only happen in movies, it took the resistance 10 years to succeed. The way of thinking is that, "Your ancestors fought for ten years to free you, so now you can serve ten years to show respect." (Okay, this is a very oversimplified version, but you get the idea!)

I hope that helps a bit :)
UzmaKhan wrote: 27 May 2020, 23:15 Hello Jude,
First of all 👏.
The thing that stood out for me was how you broke the stereotype in sci-fi fiction by incorporating clones as your subsject instead of the usual robotics, time travel or space.
Hi UzmaKhan! :tiphat:

Yes, I hate, hate, hate robots and AI in sci-fi :P They've been done to death and they're usually the reason non-fans avoid this genre. It's not that they don't like sci-fi; they just don't like robotics, AI etc. (Okay, I exempt The Stepford Wives from that list. That's an awesome sci-fi book and movie featuring robotics. And yes, by the definition, it is sci-fi :D)

Someone gave my work the definition of "Sci-fi realism." I love that (and have since sneakily pinched it and been listing it as my genre ever since :P)

In my books, farms and orchards exist. Is this hi-tech, super-shiny future? Nope. On the other hand, readers are absolutely fine with the existence of things like pizza and hamburgers; the grain for the bread and the meat and all those toppings have to come from somewhere.

It's also justified and explained in-universe by the fact that reliance on technology was what nearly wiped out the human race when the systems supporting life on Mars and other planets/moons were hacked and destroyed in terrorist attacks (known in-universe as the Purge). Survivors fled to Terra, which wasn't nearly big enough to sustain a sudden influx of billions, and so a chunk of people were shunted onto a ship and blasted into space to settle the newly-discovered super-Earth, Akkhen, in the hopes that easing the phenomenal drain on Terra's resources would enable the remaining ones to survive.

Anyway, following the Purge, the new settlers made a very firm law that they would never settle on any world that required technology to make it habitable. Space stations are a kind of neutral ground, but - with the obvious exception of medicine - technology in the Projects books can be used only to enhance life, never to sustain it, and never, ever to replace people. Projects are a loophole; they're not machines, they're living beings, and they're not legally humans so they can't technically be enslaved (is a cow a slave? A dog? A chicken?) thus making them acceptable for use in whatever way their owners deem fit.

Of course, technology does march on; people use shuttles, not cars, and holographic images are common. Kata wouldn't have watched The Silence of the Lambs on VHS or DVD - I envisage movies in his time as a kind of VR experience, when you're right there in the action - but that doesn't mean he couldn't ever have watched it. To take a religious example, millions of people read the Bible, but their versions are printed on paper, not vellum :wink:

One of the comments I've received from more than one reviewer has been along the lines of, "even if you don't like sci-fi, you'll probably enjoy this." That's probably the biggest compliment a writer can get :D
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Post by Misty20058 »

Hi,

I greatly enjoyed your book. I have had a shot at writing in the past but could never come up with ideas. How/where do you get your inspiration?
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Post by Jude Austin »

Misty20058 wrote: 08 Jun 2020, 22:05 Hi,

I greatly enjoyed your book. I have had a shot at writing in the past but could never come up with ideas. How/where do you get your inspiration?
Hi Misty20058! :tiphat:
Thank you so much! :D I'm happy you liked it!
I never really have to struggle to find ideas, to be honest; they just come to me :) The more I write about a world, the more stories seem to want to be told about it. If you're asking specifically about the inspiration behind Project Tau, that's explained in this post :)
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Post by ReyvrexQuestor Reyes »

I enjoyed reviewing the book.

There is one thing, however, that I fancy the plot of Project Tau should incorporate. Although I don’t exactly say that I dislike the lack of it, I opine the story would have been a bit longer had the character of Renfield been sustained till the end. And about the episode with Amy Saunders, with whom Renfield has an ongoing affair -- sending Saunders into the family way -- would this sub-plot be interesting enough to develop? I reckon that if this novel happens to be made into a motion picture, won’t it be intriguing to see in the stills or billboards the Projects escaping with a woman? Furthermore, for the sequel of this novel, the baby of Renfield and Saunders could be made to grow up with the Projects in a faraway planet, to start a new adventure after twenty years or so.
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ReyvrexQuestor Reyes wrote: 09 Jun 2020, 10:52 I enjoyed reviewing the book.

There is one thing, however, that I fancy the plot of Project Tau should incorporate. Although I don’t exactly say that I dislike the lack of it, I opine the story would have been a bit longer had the character of Renfield been sustained till the end. And about the episode with Amy Saunders, with whom Renfield has an ongoing affair -- sending Saunders into the family way -- would this sub-plot be interesting enough to develop? I reckon that if this novel happens to be made into a motion picture, won’t it be intriguing to see in the stills or billboards the Projects escaping with a woman? Furthermore, for the sequel of this novel, the baby of Renfield and Saunders could be made to grow up with the Projects in a faraway planet, to start a new adventure after twenty years or so.
Hi ReyvrexQuestor Reyes! :tiphat:

Thank you so much! I enjoyed reading your review as well :D

Renfield...yes, I really hated having to kill him off, but he was in the way ;) If he had remained to the end, the plot would have become more along the lines of "Renfield attempts to help Kata escape again and again, only to keep being thwarted." I could have done something like that and built the tension, but it would have gotten old very fast ;) Honestly, I don't see Saunders as doing anything that would endanger her child's life, whether Renfield was in the picture or not, and helping break two Projects out - essentially committing grand theft according to the laws in the book's universe - would cause several big problems for her, and that's assuming she doesn't end up going the same way as poor Renfield.

There's another reason, though: the whole story arc is about Kalin growing as an individual, from this rather wimpy outcast who only really looks out for number one, to the strong individual that is Kata who refuses to leave Tau behind, even if it means prolonging his own suffering. If the Projects have help throughout their daring escape, it destroys Kata's growth as a character. The whole point is that he has to grow to the extent of being able to stand up for himself and the people he cares about.

The sequel takes it the other way: Kata has to learn to trust again and ends up taking more of a backseat role, purely because at his young age he lacks the knowledge/experience/authority to deal with people at the kind of levels required to save him and Tau from GenTech. That's not to say he does nothing - believe me, he gets a lot of action and has plenty of his own demons to contend with - but only that he develops further to where he's not so much of a control freak and understands that it's okay to let other people take the lead sometimes ;)

The sequels take place very soon, one after the other. The published sequel, Homecoming, picks up literally hours after Project Tau leaves off. While I love the idea of Tau and Kata becoming adoptive parents - not least because they're both so unsuited for the job! - twenty years is a very long time skip between books, and I felt that most readers would want to know what happened to Tau and Kata (particularly Tau, who's seeing everything for the first time) during their escape.

That said, Saunders's and Renfield's daughter (yes, it's a girl, confirmed in Homecoming!) will have a standalone book of her own, but not until the main Projects series is completed. This is because retcon is an absolute pain in the keister, and it would be too easy to leave something out of Daughter's book (which would be set around 3408-3410, when she's old enough to really have her own adventure) that plays a key part in their worlds in the Projects series (set - for the moment - from 3389, when Kata first enters GenTech, to 3392-3393). I don't plan the books in serious detail - I have a vague idea of what's going to happen - but my characters often surprise me ;) Whether Daughter will have much to do with Kata and Tau remains to be seen...
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Post by ReyvrexQuestor Reyes »

JudasFm wrote: 09 Jun 2020, 11:15
ReyvrexQuestor Reyes wrote: 09 Jun 2020, 10:52 I enjoyed reviewing the book.

There is one thing, however, that I fancy the plot of Project Tau should incorporate. Although I don’t exactly say that I dislike the lack of it, I opine the story would have been a bit longer had the character of Renfield been sustained till the end. And about the episode with Amy Saunders, with whom Renfield has an ongoing affair -- sending Saunders into the family way -- would this sub-plot be interesting enough to develop? I reckon that if this novel happens to be made into a motion picture, won’t it be intriguing to see in the stills or billboards the Projects escaping with a woman? Furthermore, for the sequel of this novel, the baby of Renfield and Saunders could be made to grow up with the Projects in a faraway planet, to start a new adventure after twenty years or so.
Hi ReyvrexQuestor Reyes! :tiphat:

Thank you so much! I enjoyed reading your review as well :D

Renfield...yes, I really hated having to kill him off, but he was in the way ;) If he had remained to the end, the plot would have become more along the lines of "Renfield attempts to help Kata escape again and again, only to keep being thwarted." I could have done something like that and built the tension, but it would have gotten old very fast ;) Honestly, I don't see Saunders as doing anything that would endanger her child's life, whether Renfield was in the picture or not, and helping break two Projects out - essentially committing grand theft according to the laws in the book's universe - would cause several big problems for her, and that's assuming she doesn't end up going the same way as poor Renfield.

There's another reason, though: the whole story arc is about Kalin growing as an individual, from this rather wimpy outcast who only really looks out for number one, to the strong individual that is Kata who refuses to leave Tau behind, even if it means prolonging his own suffering. If the Projects have help throughout their daring escape, it destroys Kata's growth as a character. The whole point is that he has to grow to the extent of being able to stand up for himself and the people he cares about.

The sequel takes it the other way: Kata has to learn to trust again and ends up taking more of a backseat role, purely because at his young age he lacks the knowledge/experience/authority to deal with people at the kind of levels required to save him and Tau from GenTech. That's not to say he does nothing - believe me, he gets a lot of action and has plenty of his own demons to contend with - but only that he develops further to where he's not so much of a control freak and understands that it's okay to let other people take the lead sometimes ;)

The sequels take place very soon, one after the other. The published sequel, Homecoming, picks up literally hours after Project Tau leaves off. While I love the idea of Tau and Kata becoming adoptive parents - not least because they're both so unsuited for the job! - twenty years is a very long time skip between books, and I felt that most readers would want to know what happened to Tau and Kata (particularly Tau, who's seeing everything for the first time) during their escape.

That said, Saunders's and Renfield's daughter (yes, it's a girl, confirmed in Homecoming!) will have a standalone book of her own, but not until the main Projects series is completed. This is because retcon is an absolute pain in the keister, and it would be too easy to leave something out of Daughter's book (which would be set around 3408-3410, when she's old enough to really have her own adventure) that plays a key part in their worlds in the Projects series (set - for the moment - from 3389, when Kata first enters GenTech, to 3392-3393). I don't plan the books in serious detail - I have a vague idea of what's going to happen - but my characters often surprise me ;) Whether Daughter will have much to do with Kata and Tau remains to be seen...
I get it. So Daughter has some parts after all. Not exactly that I was batting for her being some sort of "Elektra" someday, but I thought there should be some feminine character, the way stories go. Thanks. I am now flaunting that I got the longest reply from you. lol.
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Post by _priyamvada_ »

Hi Judy, so I wanted to ask you about this: what have you learnt from this experience of writing a book? :tiphat:
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Post by anoushka_thakur »

Hi Jude! I loved reading Project Tau, I loved the concept. Do you think that whether the clones could ever replace some humans in their jobs? I am eagerly waiting for the next series.
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Post by Nelson Chocha »

Hey Jude.
I've read your book. it is fascinating. Honestly, it is among the few scientific novel that brought my imagination to its level best. When do we anticipate another book?
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Post by Yasmira_M »

Maybe this has already been asked but how do you stay inspired and motivated to keep writing and bring your work to life?
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