Tales of NShalain
by Bob Horton
(Brandon, VT, USA)
Tales of NShalain
Genre: Science Fiction
I have been reading science fiction of all types for over forty years, from Jules Verne up to the present. Some of it was and is pretty good, meaning that it gets you to think. Admittedly some of it is trash. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and have a pretty good understanding of how the real world works. If someone presents an idea that is clearly physically impossible, I have a tendency to not like the story being presented. The same goes with movies and tv programs as well.
I had been thinking about writing a science fiction story about what it might be like in a alternate reality where the physical laws are slightly different than those of our reality. Such is possible, but if there differences are significant enough, life from our reality could not function there. Trying to balance this out and come up with a story proved to be interesting to say the least.
Initially I started with a book called "NShalain Troubles" which is currently being published by Publish America. Doing this was a big mistake, something that I am trying to rectify now.
Next I looked around at other publishing possibilities. I did this because of the prompting of a few people I know who have read "NShalain Troubles" saying that I should continue the story that I started there. Eventually I came up with the book "NShalain Colony" which I published using CreateSpace. I took the option of using their supplied ISBN number, so they become the publisher.
I wrote a sequel called "The Return". I purchased an ISBN for this book and used CreateSpace to publish it. I am listed as the publisher in the case. So "The Return" is my first actual self-published work in that is it published under my name only.
All of this was a rather interesting experience. I learned a great deal about preparing text, converting it to the proper format for the publish on demand (POD) machinery, generating book covers, and preparing those for the POD machinery. I also learned it pays to have other people read my work several times to help find all the errors. Using CreateSpace I can get copies of the book to read and make corrections in directly. This proved to be much easier than reading and correcting computer text documents.
In the past I have written complex computer programs on a variety of operating platforms. My experience at this helped greatly in finding errors although in some ways it may have been a problem. Some of the errors that I had to correct turned out to be programming code words that I sometimes used in place of what I meant to say. Example: goto rather than go to.
Overall the experience has been interesting. As yet I have not seen much of an income from it. I still have one more book to complete. This should complete the NShalain Saga.
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