If you fancy spending approximately 24 USD/18.50 Euros on a sci-fi novel of epic scale (seriously: 503 pages in A5 format, 650 in a slightly smaller format), I suggest you read on…

For those who don’t want to read this but want the book in physical format, please visit the Arpia novel page at Lulu.com. There, you’ll find a high quality yet cheap print-on-demand version of the Arpia novel, and the shipping costs worldwide are fairly low.

Note: the prices here are as low as I could get them. I decided against royalties, so you’re paying for the print-on-demand itself only.

Of the three solutions, Blackwell was the most expensive and, unfortunately, the one with the lowest quality. The cost is currently 5p per page, i.e. a bit over £30 for a copy of the Arpia novel, and the heavy paper used for the cover is not quite as high grade as the others. Moreover, the binding doesn’t seem as sturdy as the others. If you live in London and go to that bookstore (on Charing Cross Road) often, however, it may be an easy solution.

The Createspace solution allows Arpia to appear on Amazon.com, which is awesome, but I have no idea of whether this will extend to the other Amazon websites (.co.uk, .fr, …). Shipping from Createspace cost me almost as much as the price of the book itself, as it was shipping from the US… Result: 18.51 USD for shipping to the EU. Apparently, they only have printers in the US, so it may not be the best solution for people based outside of North America. A major qualm I have with Createspace is the fact that it wasn’t easy to set my own “spine” design (the side cover), and theirs is, frankly, not very nice.
Cost in store: 24.17 USD.

Finally, my favourite solution: Lulu.com. This has the highest quality cover paper, and I was forced to adopt a new format for Lulu.com, namely A5. The other two solutions use a format that is slightly smaller than A5, which makes the novel nearly pocket-size. The A5 format does, however, have an unforeseen advantage: the star maps included in the novel are more readable. One of the great things about Lulu.com is that it uses printers around the world, which means that shipping costs are lower than the other solutions. To ship to the EU, I paid 6 Euros.
Cost in store: 18.50 Euros/22.56 USD/£15.66.

Edit: added the Amazon.com link.

This led me to recall the existence of an “Espresso Book Machine”, an easy way for aspiring authors and others to obtain a printed version of a book, be it their own or one that is out of publication (but still with a digital presence). This machine can be found in Blackwell, on Charing Cross Road in London.

On 25 August 2010, I was in London to hand in a paper copy of my dissertation for my LLM, and I took advantage of the trip to London to order one copy of my book. When I receive the copy by post, I’ll be able to let you Londoners know whether you should consider ordering a little sci-fi novel from there – they currently charge 5p a page, which given the size of my novel amounts to £30… Definitely the most expensive novel I’ve bought!

I’m going to work on making the novel available in ePub and other formats (note: ePub now available), perhaps also on online e-book catalogues (if possible for free) and on other self-publishing print-on-demand platforms (hopefully not too expensively).

In the meantime, though, why not take a look at the Arpia novel page, and read through the first chapters or the entire book?

“This is a nice place,” he said with a hesitant smile.

Look me in the eye, the girl wanted to reply as his eyes returned from examining the surroundings to staring at her lips. Instead, she nodded. Why had she accepted his invitation?

“And it’s nice that they allow you to take your pet with you.”

The girl’s thoughts went straight to Artemis, the animal nested on her lap. She felt Artemis stiffen, and she stroked her on the neck to soothe her. It was inevitable that people would mistake a firnex for an unintelligent pet, probably thinking it was a simple fennec fox, but speaking with so little tact and by repeating a bland adjective demonstrated stupidity.

“She gets special treatment throughout Yubenia,” the girl said. It was true, too: many restaurants in the city of Yubenia knew to tolerate Artemis’s presence. Orders from above. The girl looked at Artemis and smiled. She wanted to see if the boy had any wit. “After all, she is more intelligent than most humans, including you.”

The boy chuckled uneasily.

“So how do you know this restaurant?”

He was either mentally deficient, without humour or a combination of those elements. Pity, he had shown so much potential in that club the other day. Perhaps he was only good at dancing.

She glanced at Artemis, who was scratching her jaw with her paw. Boring indeed. She stopped stroking Artemis and reached for a button on her belt.

“My mum had a fling with this guy –”

She stopped upon hearing the tone on her intercom.

“Oh, speak of the devil. Sorry, I have to take this.”

The boy nodded, and she put her hand to her ear.

“Hey Mum!”

“What is it, darling? You want a way out of a date again?”

“What? That’s awful! How did you do that? I’ll be there right away. Which hospital?”

“Do you want a lift back home?”

“I’ll pull over a transport, don’t argue.”

“All right, I’ll be there in five minutes maximum. Same place?”

“Okay, stay put! I love you!”

She turned back to the boy, hoping that distress was plain to see on her face.

“I’m really, really sorry, but my mum just had an accident.”

She let Artemis hop on the floor before taking her coat.

“That’s terrible,” said the boy.

“I know, but I guess that’s life. Thanks for the invitation, though.” She rushed to the door of the restaurant, and waved back at him. “Call me, all right?”

She stepped out into the cool evening breeze of February as the door cut the boy’s inevitable reply from her hearing. No, he did not have her number, nor would he ever be able to find any means of making contact.

As the girl walked away from the restaurant in the empty street, she smiled. She liked being elusive, a stunning whirlwind without a name. It had been so since the age of fourteen. Nearly four years later, she still enjoyed this game.

Artemis barked a few times, and the girl laughed.

“If I took you to clubs, I’d never dance for fear of losing you in the crowd.”

Artemis uttered a low growl amidst higher pitched barks.

“Are you crazy? I’m antisocial enough as it stands. If I didn’t go to any parties, no one would even know I exist. No one would care.”

Artemis stopped walking, and a soft growl came from her canine mouth.

The girl smiled and brushed a stray lock of her dark hair behind her cold ears.

“I know you do. I’m sorry, I’m being foolish again. I’ll make it up to you, but first, let’s go find Mum. We don’t want this poor guy to see us loitering out here, do we?”

Artemis shook her head, and a keen-eyed observer might have noticed a smile appear on her face.

As they walked briskly towards the usual meeting place, the girl sighed inside. Despite how close she was to Artemis, she still felt human at times, and had her own desires. More so than her mum, it seemed, though Parmil Szarnu didn’t freely talk of her experiences with men, especially given that Borreli, her best friend and possibly the closest she had ever had to true love, died half the galaxy away some eight years ago. Here on planet Culuria, however, there didn’t seem to be a single young man capable of creating any kind of lasting spark within the girl. She wanted to be inspired. Her eyes drifted to the stars. She hoped that she would find a way to leave this planet with Artemis before too long.

They came to a junction opening on a park, the Bardrien Memorial Park. Why she always wanted to use that park as meeting point, she didn’t know. She certainly didn’t want to hurt her adoptive mum’s feelings, but there was something deeply refreshing about coming to a place that honoured her birth parents, even a dozen years after their respective deaths.

The girl read the plaque on one bench in the park, despite knowing it off by heart: ‘To Kristala, who dedicated her life to her husband, to her daughter and to scientific progress on Culuria. You shall always be remembered’. At the opposite side of the park was a similar plaque for Ernie Bardrien.

This park had been inaugurated less than a year after the separate deaths of Ernie and Kristala, of whom the girl had few memories nowadays. She was still young when they died. Kristala would indeed always be remembered on Culuria, but not necessarily by her own daughter.

Artemis hopped onto the bench and shivered. She barked. To anyone else, the barks would have been meaningless, but the girl knew that Artemis had advised her not to sit on the icy bench.

“Girls!”

It was the one human voice that the girl trusted and loved unconditionally. A smile growing on her face, she turned to see a vehicle hovering ten metres away.

“We’re coming,” she shouted before putting her arms level with the bench, her palms upward. Artemis accepted the offer and nestled her golden fur in the girl’s arms.

A caring face looked at them from the vehicle, still as beautiful as ever, looking much the same at the age of thirty-eight as it had ten years beforehand, back when they first met.

A door opened, and the girl walked inside the vehicle, settling down comfortably into a seat.

Artemis jumped onto the adjacent seat and barked. The girl knew the meaning, although her mother had to check a translation device. It had been several years since they found Artemis, but Parmil still had trouble with a number of the newer words Artemis had created to adapt her language. The words appeared on the device.

“Do the rules allow me to drive?”

“Sorry Artemis,” said Parmil. “Although we can bend many rules for you, I don’t think they would allow you to have a licence.”

“Then I am afraid that you must wait before this dating nonsense no longer bothers you.”

Parmil laughed, and the girl blushed.

“I’m sorry, Mum.”

“I know, darling. It’s all right.”

The girl bit her lip.

“Did I disturb you in the middle of something?”

Parmil smiled.

“So now you ask?”

The girl felt her cheeks redden.

“No, darling, it was nothing important. I was just chatting with Ekrid.”

The girl smiled.

“How is he?”

“He says that he misses his goddaughter, but he’ll be back on Culuria in two weeks.”

“Good. Since he took up his new interplanetary advisory job, the government on Culuria has lost some of its quality.”

The girl saw her mother raise an eyebrow.

“Since when are you interested in politics?”

“We have discussed it often, for years.”

Parmil seemed surprised.

“Sorry Mum, we didn’t want to bore you with that.”

“A wise choice,” Parmil said, nodding. “Well, if you like it, girls, then so be it. Do you have any other surprises stored away for today?”

The girl laughed.

“Mum, who do you take me for? A magician?”

“No, the devil. Worse: Wadina Szarnu. Now activate your seatbelt, and let’s go home. I’ve got a kettle boiling.”

The following week seemed to last for ever, the days dragging along as Wadina thought about the prospect of speaking to Ekrid again, for the first time in over eight months.

Wadina looked forward to seeing her godfather for one reason in particular: he was her primary source of political knowledge, and through him she had learnt much of what happened behind the scenes in governments throughout the galaxy. For the longest time, Ekrid Malrow was a permanent member of the government of Culuria, a title bestowed upon him for his services to the planet’s population, but his influence went far beyond the confines of this small planet and the Residio star system. Now, he was a special advisor to each of the three major interstellar governments: the Yolniun, the Absolem Constitutor and the Azzurdi Empire. All because of Arpia, a little group of idealists fighting piracy who had become both the government of an independent planet and a household name.

Was Wadina part of Arpia? She had it in her blood, but she became a teenager only after Arpia’s glory days, when the actions of a few changed the face of the universe. If anything, the Wadina of today was ‘post-Arpia’, a product of an era in which the old crowd could only recount the past and not work towards the future.

“Artemis, we’ll have adventures of our own,” she said, looking out the window of her room at the two setting suns of the Residio system.

“If you say so, young one.”

Wadina grimaced.

“Ugly expressions suit you well, too. Where do you want to go? You have explored half the galaxy already.”

“I don’t want to explore. I want something to happen, something big. A radical change in the universe, like what happened when we met.”

Wadina did her best not to react to the laugh that Artemis made.

“I remember days when you looked for stability in your life, but those days are long gone. You want adventures? We have had this discussion before, and I have already told you to be patient, little cub. It will come soon.”

Artemis licked Wadina’s hand after speaking, but Wadina frowned.

“You definitely seem more confident than last time. What do you know?”

“I have observed that space is moving differently recently. Something is stirring. What it is, I don’t know, but maybe Ekrid will have answers.”

A monstrosity, that’s what they are. Freaks of nature.

This is their story, this is their tale. This is their suffering, this is their pain.

Centuries after humans adapted to our planet’s greater gravitational force, becoming more stout and strong than the original settlers, a genetic monstrosity was born in our country of Jorgan: a human whose weight would normally have meant his death. The baby died, unable to withstand the gravitational pull. But technology came to the aid of the following ones: their bones were artificially strengthened, so were their organs.

These babies, whose numbers seemed to be growing every month afterwards, were far too underweight to be considered normal. Then government-funded research came along and revealed the unthinkable: those of them with long and strong limbs could defy gravity and pull away from the ground. The media nicknamed them “fleaks”, as a mashed-up version of “freak” and “fly”.
The fleaks were hunted down by a large radical “anti-fleak” group (with strong political ties), who considered them to be so non-human that they did not deserve to live, to be given life by technology.

Years passed, and only a fistful of fleaks managed to survive and reach adulthood. By then, if a foetus was identified as a fleak, abortion was not only legal, it was mandatory under punishment of death: the “anti-fleak” group had such a league of followers that the government had been overthrown. Fleaks were not only hunted down by civilians, they were also on the government’s blacklist, considered to be “dangerous aliens” to be “isolated” when caught.

The few fleaks still alive went into hiding, but their exile led to their death, as they could only give birth to fleaks like themselves, and without the scientific community to help them, these babies did not survive.

One day, an army patrol found their hiding place, and saw that all had passed over.

So the government and Jorgani society in general forgot, and turned its attention to other matters, such as creating better machines, at first androids that would be capable of reproducing, thereby creating new machines.

This project has occupied and will occupy the government and the scientific community for many years to come, but we live in a time of peace and serenity, inside (in our home country) and outside (with the other country, Bargam).

The civil war of “normals versus fleaks” is over.

There are rumours, though…

May I ask why you are interested in this story?

Émilien Shu’pra
Presidential Archives of Jorgan

Disclaimer: This letter sent on 30 April 1114 EE and any attached documents are confidential and may be legally privileged.
Pursuant to the Regulations of the Presidential Archives, any disclosure, reproduction, copying, distribution, or other dissemination of this letter or of its contents is strictly prohibited. If you have received this letter in error please notify the sender immediately.

The link with the Arpia novels may become obvious if you go to the Arpia novels page…

I never imagined it would happen, but I have indeed written the last words of the full version 1 of the Arpia novel (version 1 as in “the parts that haven’t been revised three times already will be revised, and I’ll then revise the entire thing”).

As such, the Arpia novel page has been updated, and I’m in dire need of reviewers for the whole thing (I already have some reviews for part I [the first half], but you can never get enough reviews).

If you are therefore interested in reviewing the novel, letting me know what doesn’t flow, what is amazing, what is awful, do drop me a line by using the contact form.

To get some of you intrigued (hopefully), here are the very last lines of the novel:

One mind pondered a question.

“Is she ready now?”

The answer came from the second mind.

“We shall consult with the Shroud.”

If you know who the Shroud are, you’ll get easier access to the novel for review.

It’s strange to think that I’ve been working on the Arpia novels since the summer of 2005, over 3 and a half years.

What is even stranger, however, is the fact that I never seemed to ask myself one specific question until now: is it book-material, i.e. is it any good?

Yes, I doubt my novel’s content.

I can almost see the finish line for the first and longest part of the race. Beyond that line, the rest of the race seems more relaxed, because it’s revision time, a moment where you analyse what you’ve written and redo most of it to improve it. Sure, it’s an impressive and demanding task, and it’s absolutely necessary to reach the third part of the race, the round where you pitch your work to literary agents.

But, thing is, there are three solutions to the question I ask: yes, it’s book material, and there nothing to worry about (i.e. “no matter what literary agents & publishers say, it’s good, and publishing will only be a bonus”); no, it’s not book material, and you’ve wasted many years of your life on it, so stop now (i.e. “better luck next time, or maybe not”); no, it’s not book material, but you’ll still finish it so you have something to show for it (i.e. “it’s too bad, but it would be a shame to leave it as it is”).

Scrap that, I don’t think I could ever believe in option 2.

Still, it leaves the question unanswered, and that isn’t of any help.

Someone to whom I am most grateful for reading Arpia tells me that it’s book material, but that it reads like a video game, perhaps because he has known Arpia first and foremost as ARPIA2, the video game for EV Nova.

Any other opinions to help me figure out this existential question?

Five days went by, and life returned to Culuria, despite growing doubts about the fate of Argoal and Fezzan’s team. Parmil took the girls out to each open exhibition or cinema she could find. Though no one was sure what to expect of the future, the present seemed bright enough not to be afraid.

Just before three in the afternoon in Yubenia, a message was spoken out in the speakers. Parmil and the girls stopped walking in front of the Bardrien Memorial Park entrance and listened carefully.

“Contact channel reopened. Covert ops have entered Residio system. I repeat. Covert ops have entered Residio system. The team is coming home.”

Passers-by gasped. People smiled. Hope was in everyone’s eyes, and Parmil was sure that it was also on their lips.

After a short lull, people began to move. Steps turned to strides. All moved in the same direction.

“Let’s go to the spaceport,” Wadina said softly, almost reverently. “I want to go. Artemis, do you want to go?”

Artemis nodded.

“Come on, it’s only five minutes away.”

I hope the passage achieves the effect it’s supposed to achieve.

It was probably Arpia’s greatest battle, and many perished, on land and in space. Yet, in the end, against all odds (approximately), Arpia prevailed.

You don’t know the Hogun?

They were about one metre in height, floating some fifty centimetres above ground. The beings seemed to be made of a substance similar to goo and jelly. Fezzan’s first impression of their shape was that they were monsters.
One large, oval eye, of different tones of colour, was the main component of what he thought of as their “head”. Little tubes and extensions sprouted out around it, five in total. One tube on each side seemed to contain an organ, judging by the almost spherical form of their extremities. The brain, possibly. Maybe the stomach. The others had to be orifices of some kind, as they ended with holes.
Floating higher up in the air, linked to the “head” only by a small vertical tube of their substance, there were things similar to buffalo horns, though the horns themselves moved around. Fezzan guessed they were limbs.
The lowest part of the body was also linked to the “head” by a little tube, a neck probably. It looked a little like a flame turned upside down, distorted by a gust of air. In the middle of it, a mouth with razor-sharp teeth, in the shape of a drop of water, flipped vertically.

Floating ghosts, in a way. At least, Arpia won’t have to fear them any more. They become another story to tell kids:
“Watch out, Billy, the Hogun will get you if you don’t obey!”
“Let’s play Arpians and Hogun.”

And no one will ever wonder whether it was the right thing to do. No one will question the version of the facts presented by Arpia. After all, Arpia saved humanity.

Or did it?

Volume 1, currently entitled “Arpia, Flight of Dawn” (FoD, vol. 1), is 90.000 words long (some 190 A4 pages). And while I believe “Arpia, Fight of Eve” (FoE, vol. 2) will be as long, I’m now at 110 pages completed, or 53.000 words.

It’s strange though, because I’m managed to do an awful lot over the past three weeks (thanks to my first holidays devoid of studying and of travelling in years), and yet I feel like I’m going nowhere: the ending is still very far away.

At least, I’m beyond the 50% mark of FoE well before its birthday (I apparently started to truly write vol. 2 on the 31st of August 2007, though of course most of the story had been in writing for well over a year beforehand).

I guess I’ve still got a year ahead, in any event. Tough job, writing, especially when you’ve got other things to do during the year (exams, papers, … – I love university).

Perhaps the literary agents I’ve already contacted will have completely forgotten about Arpia by then, and I’ll be able to re-pitch the idea to them in a new, 180.000-word package, instead of the “90.000 plus 90.000 planned” package I offered over the past months (without success, unfortunately). It might make a difference (it’s bigger than most Harry Potter volumes, to illustrate, though I’ve read that for some reason, fantasy novels are generally allowed to be longer than sci-fi novels).

Or perhaps in general the Arpia idea doesn’t interest literary agents and I’ll end up putting it online

But I’m still some time away from that, it would seem. In the meantime, I’ve got to finish writing about a certain someone’s reaction to the death of that someone’s friend. And then some writing about The Other Big Enemy of Arpia and about the impending doom of the human race.

And I have to admit it’s a strange experience. I’ve often experienced emotions with my characters, and have many times written of things I have never felt or gone through myself, but writing one’s experience of death is beyond all that. I even had tears in my eyes at one point.