Colin Barrett: Blog

This one's not real long, but it's eventful. So I'm saving Chapter 6 until Monday. Some of the chapters get longer later, but for the really short ones or the "bridge" chapters-the ones that mainly serve to get you from hither to yon in the story-I'll double up the postings as we go along.

Several readers have remarked favorably on my decision to post only three times a week rather than (as I did with my other novels on SOL) daily. But one told me tartly that if I was going to use that schedule, he (or she; the reader wasn't specific) would appreciate longer chapters; said the short ones, like Monday's Chapter 2, were "annoying.". Fair enough. I certainly want to hold reader interest as A.I. moves along. I can't oblige about chapter lengths; they're dictated by the pace of the story I'm telling. But I can post multiple chapters. Today, Chapter 3 is also fairly short, so today you get Chapter 4 as well.

The various locations I describe in A.I. are rendered as accurately as I can manage. In every case I've relied in personal recollection of the places; I've either lived there or (in one case) live there now. If you know the areas, you should find yourself on familiar ground.

Previously I've maintained a daily schedule when posting my novels here, but I think that's been a little too fast.
This time out I'm going to follow the lead of a lot of other authors. From here on out new chapters will be posted on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. That should be frequently enough to keep reader interest up and will give me a little more time to sit back and work on my new one, which I've just started.
For those who are too impatient, once again you can get the whole thing immediately from Amazon for three bucks. My other fiction, some of which has already been posted on SOL, is also available at the same price.
Thanks very much to all those who've already provided me with feedback. Where possible (a couple of e-mailers didn't give me valid addresses), I've tried to respond to everyone who wrote. Whether you have priase or criticism, I welcome your comments, and will always try to respond. The one thing is, if you want to be critical, please try to make it constructive; don't just dump on me, which wastes your time and mine.
And whether you like A.I. or not, I welcome reviews-both here and on Amazon. Let the world know what you think of my writing. I do this mostly for fun, after years of writing non-fiction for a living in my field (freight transportation law and management) I've found that I enjoy creating my own little fictional worlds for my characters to inhabit. They (the characters) play out their hypothetical lives pretty much on their own with only guidance (at most) from me, and I often don't quite know where they're going from one day of writing to the next; I never work from an outline save for a few ideas in my head that are incompletely conceived until I put the words on paper (well, actually, on my monitor, but the same thing except that it's easier to make corrections and tweaks). Even so, as with any writer, I do it for the purpose of being read by others, which is why I post here.
See you tomorrow with chapter 2.

This is my first posting in a while.
As with my other novels, it's a Kindle book. The reason it's posted here is that, as is I think common to all authors, I write for others to read, and always want as wide a readership as possible; this is a way of expanding my audience. I've been tremendously pleased by the number of downloads my previous posting have received, and the scores they've generated. I'm especially happy that I've done so well with stories that are pretty low on their sex quotient, on a site such as SOL which caters to erotic content; as I've written before in the mouths of some of my characters, I personally don't regard sex as a spectator sport, and consequently don't go very far with the plug-A-into-slot-B descriptions. If that's what you want, look elsewhere. But I try to make up for the lack of overt eroticism with other elements.
For readers too impatient for the chapter-at-a-time schedule here, you can get the whole book from Amazon for three bucks, my standard pricing for all of my published fiction. The rest of my novels, including both those posted on SOL and others, are also available from Amazon. OK, so much for the commercial.
Some readers, as I've learned from feedback from some of my previous postings, want absolute realism in their science fiction. Now, I do try to provide it; to the extent that I'm able; for example, the science part of what I write is as close as I can make it to what's currently state-of-the-art in whatever field is being discussed. But I confess that the initial premise of A.I. is bureaucratically a little unlikely. I mean, a junior keypucher is pretty unlikely to be left alone in a roomful of terminals linked to a key national security computer system, right? But if you'll suspend disbelief that far, I think you'll find the rest of the novel stands up pretty well to reason.
So I hope you'll enjoy.