"CAPRICA" FAQrica! plus an EXCERPT

 

 

Everything You Want/Need to Know about CAPRICA (the book) ...

"Is this fan fiction?"

Yes.  I wasn't paid by Universal to write this therefore I am not charging you to read it.  It's free.

"So did you just pull the story out of your ass or what?"

That's a little harsh, but actually, no.  I didn't.  The fansite Caprica Times published an interview with the last showrunner, Kevin Murphy, after the series was cancelled.  In it, he explained that season two would pick up five years after season one (where we see them in the finale's montage) and feature occasional flashbacks to show how they got there.  Now, I didn't feel like I could do that in my writing because constant flashbacks would get annoying/confusing, but I felt like I could tell a more linear story, showing the five years leading up to the "Shape of Things to Come" montage and then beyond.  A few story beats were also revealed by Murphy, but I won't be divulging those here as they're basically spoilers for the book.  To put it succinctly, I pretended like I was a one-man writer's room for season two and three of the show and Murphy's comments were my instructions.  (Anything that falls outside of his instructions, I guess, does qualify as "pulling it out of my ass.")

"Do I need to have watched Caprica to enjoy this?"

Are you serious?  Yes.  You should watch Caprica.  There are some references and story points that will only make sense if you've seen the show.  I wrote it right after a binge of the series, so I'm sure it'll read well after a binge, too.

"What about Galactica?"

Hmm.  Probably not.  You're OK there.  It'll be enhanced by having watched it, though, I'm sure.

"What about Blood & Chrome?"

You are thorough; I'll say that for you.  "Need to," no.  If you saw it once, that's enough.

And I'll stop you now.  No, you do not need to have watched The Plan before reading this, either. 

"OK, smart guy.  What about Deadlock?  Should I have played the video game Deadlock?

Huh.  You got me.   No, you don't have to have played Deadlock.  A few ships get their names and designs from the game, but no storylines or characters.  The base game starts in year five of the Cylon War and this book only covers the first few years of the war.  There's no real crossover.

 "Maps?  Where did you get these maps?"

I made them.  The "stellar" maps are based on the QMX map released a decade or so ago, which was based on a writer's room document by Bob Harris, Kevin Grazier, and Jane Espenson.  A lot of tidbits about the various colonies come from that document and I used them in writing Caprica and Colonies of Kobol.  The map of Caprica itself is based on the very tiny bit of land visible on the QMX map and a couple of shots from the show.

"Wait a minute ... Colonies of Kobol?  This book isn't really 'new,' is it?"

No, not really.  CoK is an enormous book (over 2,000 pages in Word) so I'm sure that's daunting to potential readers.  Plus, some people might not care about rando characters centuries before the TV shows on other worlds.  There is a hunger for more Caprica, however, so releasing just that portion of CoK made sense to me.  Caprica fans will get a taste of what might have been, and maybe they'll want to try out the rest of my books.

There are a couple of new pages, however.  You can read those after the JUMP.

"CAPRICA": coming June 9!

To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the TV series Caprica, on Monday, June 9, I'll be publishing this:

 

I'll be clear right up front: this isn't a new* book.  If you've read Colonies of Kobol (Special Edition, preferably), you've already read this.  This is what was originally published as Book Thirteen in Volume Three.

"So why publish it separately?"  Well, to ensnare new readers.  Colonies of Kobol is huge so many people didn't give it a chance.  Or maybe they just weren't interested in some guy's unofficial made-up history to a twenty-year-old TV show.  (I don't take it personally.)  If, however, it were more inextricably tied to a TV show ... like Caprica ... maybe people would give it a shot.  And, if they liked it, maybe they'll back up and read Lords of Kobol or Colonies of Kobol.

Plus, I see people posting all the time about Caprica, so this might scratch that itch for many.

There's more news coming on June 9, but I'll save it for later.  Thanks for reading.

* - There is one part of Caprica that is new, but I'll post it on the blog for everyone to see when we get closer to the date.

"Thanks, Facebook": Well, this is awkward

I was going to post the "big" announcement today, but I'll save it until Monday.

  

You may recall my post from a few months ago ... the one titled, "Frak Facebook."  Yeah.

To briefly summarize for those who didn't see it: my Facebook accounts were hacked back in December and were locked, I attempted to regain control, Meta wanted me to verify the email address and password that the hacker changed the accounts to and I couldn't (naturally), so they said they couldn't do anything about it.

So, having resigned myself to losing that nice "ety3rd" brand synergy across all platforms, I created a new author page at "ety3rdbooks" and went about trying to rebuild my audience.

Fast-forward to this morning.  Out of nowhere, I get an email ... no images, no links, no nothing ... stating, "After reviewing your appeal, your Page Edward T. Yeatts III has been published. This means it can now be viewed publicly. The Facebook Team."  Sure enough, I went to "ety3rd" and it was visible.  Yes, I had to spend the better part of an hour getting everything reconnected and whatnot, but hey, it's back.  (If I had to guess, today may have been the first time a real human looked at my problem and was able to spot the issues right away.)

So, please, follow me at

https://www.facebook.com/ety3rd/

For everyone who joined me at "ety3rdbooks," don't worry: I'll keep posting there.  Just in case.

Thanks for reading.  (Announcement coming Monday.)

"Frak Facebook": What's Been Going On, What's Next, and More

UPDATE: read the latest post HERE.

 

Almost a year since my last blog post?  Wow.  I guess it's time to catch up ...

If you followed (past tense) my Facebook page, "ety3rd," you probably saw something like this the last time you went there:

That's because some nefarious scoundrel hacked my page, created a new account with my info, broke Facebook's rules, and then got their page plus all of mine banned from Facebook.  I spent over a month trying to get Facebook to understand, "No, that wasn't me," and, "I just want my author page back," and, "These are the only email addresses I've used in concert with my Facebook account," and, "Don't you think the hacker changed that?" and, "How would I know what the hacker changed my password to?"  Needless to say, after several weeks and a useless $15 purchase of "Meta verified" so I could get "enhanced support" (insert rolling eyes), Facebook did a grand total of jack-shit to help me out.  Thus the title of this post.  (And this is to say nothing of Zuckerberg's assholery.)

So, if you want to follow me on that dying platform, this is my new URL: https://www.facebook.com/ety3rdbooks

These days, I'm mostly sticking to bsky because it's just a far nicer place and experience than the other places I've posted in recent years.  (You can find links to all my stuff at my Linktree.)

It's been a nice year selling stuff on Etsy, so thanks to all of you for getting my posters and shirts.  Check out my line of "Simple Symbols" t-shirts ... those are proving popular.

I was in the hospital for a few days for heart arrhythmia and my insurance said it was "not medically necessary," so I've got that going for me.

Writing-wise, I was working on a Galactica-related ... thing for a while, but I've set it aside for now.  You saw my last blogpost here.  I'll go into greater detail some other time, but I hit an obstacle in the storytelling and haven't felt the urge to get past it just yet.

If you've read Colonies of Kobol - Special Edition, first off, thank you.  Secondly, if you read the author's commentary, you're aware that I hinted at something super-secret being in the works.  (After all, if I made a cover, you know I've given it some serious thought.)  I have worked a little on that, but there are still no plans for a release, to say nothing of actually finishing the thing.

I think I mentioned something somewhere once about having an idea for a book wherein we follow a pair of homicide detectives who are working to solve a high-profile case in the modern day of a Roman Empire that never fell.  The more I think about it, the more I like it.  That might be the next thing I start to write, assuming life doesn't continue to, uh, get in the way.

Thanks for reading.

Just doodlin' ...

 

For no reason at all ...

"Colonies of Kobol - Collection: Special Edition" - DOWNLOAD NOW

 

Visit the sixteen Colonies of Kobol in a single volume ...

Two thousand years before the Cylons destroyed the Twelve Colonies and the Battlestar Galactica led a ragtag fleet to Earth, the Lords of Kobol fell and mankind fled for the Colonies.

See the settling of the first colony on Gemenon.  Behold the destruction of Earth and the flight of the Final Five.  Witness the rise of empires on Virgon and Leonis and the thousand-year-war waged across the plains of Tauron, the seas of Picon, and the mountains of Sagittaron.  Visit the jungles of Libran and Scorpia, the mines of Canceron, the farms of Aerilon, and the volcanoes of Aquaria.  Read the continuation of the short-lived TV series Caprica and watch the horrors of the Cylon War and the creation of The Colony.  Revisit New Caprica and then, on our own world, go on one last journey with Bill Adama and Saul Tigh, and get a look into our own future as the Messengers of The One True God work to free mankind of the cycle.

This is the definitive special edition collection of these books in chronological order, complete with additional chapters, behind-the-scenes information, art, pics, and author's commentary.  Learn all about the writing of these tales, connections to the Battlestar Galactica and Caprica TV shows, and much more.

There is a Plan and questions will be answered.

Available for FREE from:

Smashwords
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
Everand

Please rate and review it where you got it!  Spread the word!

Writing the Special Editions Part XI: Finally, "Lords of Kobol - Special Edition" available for download everywhere!

It took a month-plus, but Lords of Kobol - Collection: Special Edition is now available for download from multiple retailers.  The links are below; a needlessly detailed recounting of what happened immediately follows.

So LoK SE was published on Smashwords on Dec. 8.  Smashwords is the free site through which I publish my books.  Because I can't charge for my BSG-related work and Smashwords lets me make books free to download, it makes sense.  And, Smashwords has what they call the "premium catalog," which means they distribute it to other online retailers (Apple, B&N, etc. ... not Amazon; they won't let me charge $0.00)  Typically, it takes about four-ish days for a book to be uploaded and then get distributed elsewhere.

Not this time.

When I publish through Smashwords, I upload a Microsoft Word "doc" file which then gets converted into everything else.  LoK SE is a large book with a LARGE amount of hyperlinking inside.  The Word file is 1,314 pages long and 13.8 MB.  There are over 400 chapters, plus commentary on about 85% of those chapters.  Fifty images.  It's big.  The problem, as it turns out, was the table of contents.  Not the one I made; the one that was automatically generated.  

If you've read the book, you know there's a table of contents that links to all the chapters, the maps, etc.  At the end of most chapters, there's a link to the author's commentary on that chapter.  Each of these links require two things: a bookmark and a hyperlink.  For example, for chapter one of Book One, I select the heading for that chapter, click "insert bookmark," and give it a name ("I1" - for Book One, chapter one).  Then, in the table of contents, I highlight "I - PYTHIA," click "insert link," select "place in this document," and then the "I1" bookmark.  So I had to insert bookmarks and hyperlinks for all 420-ish chapters, plus the maps, prefaces, the acknowledgements at the end, the list of other books, etc.  That's 430 pairs of bookmarks and links.  This doesn't include the commentary.  I'm guesstimating that there are about 350 "author's commentary" sections, which means that's another 350 pairs of bookmarks and links.  Because the automatically generated table of contents looks for these bookmarks, that's a whole mess of stuff that could end up in the ToC that shouldn't be there.

(This does not include the "hidden bookmarks" that Word creates for some godsdamned reason every time you open the file, make a change, or look at the screen funny.  By the time I was ready to upload the finished doc file, there were literally thousands of these bastards.  I had to create a macro in Word to delete them all because doing so by hand would have been impossible.)

So, when I uploaded the LoK SE doc file, the system struggled to reconcile the ToC as I had it (just the chapters, maps, etc.) against the massive number of other bookmarks not in that ToC.  The epub file generated by Smashwords, when downloaded and its ToC opened, included scores of oddball links at the end, plus missing legitimate links.

After conversation with Smashwords support (shoutout to Matt T.), I learned that there is a special way to create bookmarks you don't want in that auto-generated ToC.  Prefixing a bookmark with "ref_" means the auto-generator will ignore it and it won't end up in the epub's ToC.  That means every "author's commentary" bookmark would need to be edited to add "ref_" at the start and every link pointing to those bookmarks would need to be redone, too.  

Needless to say, this took a while.*

Reupload.  Better, but still had bad, "stray" links in the ToC and missing links, too.  Edited and reuploaded again.  No change.

At this point, I decided to the back-and-forth navigation was just too complex.  Support said a well-crafted epub file would likely be the solution (and Smashwords allows those uploads, too).  I started down that path with the program Calibre.  Days later, the epub file was finished and I uploaded it.  I downloaded the epub from Smashwords and it looked OK ... but would it pass review and get in the premium catalog?  Nearly a week later, the answer was "yes."  

TL;DR: here are the links:

Smashwords (in all file formats)
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Everand
Gardners
Kobo
Odilo

Please, download the book from your online service of choice.  But, most importantly, be sure you give it a rating and leave reviews wherever you can.  This helps spread the word and get more readers on board.  I really appreciate it and hope you enjoy it.

* - Holy shit.  Colonies of Kobol - Special Edition is going to take forever.  That's well over 500 chapters and author's commentary sections.  It'll take weeks to get it in shape, but at least I knew I would be starting with an epub file thanks to the 15MB Wall.  I better get started now if I want it to be ready to go for March 15.

Thanks for reading.