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Author: Marko Kloos

Countryside Internets

Posted on by Marko Kloos

This is the current connectivity situation at Castle Frostbite: 100mbit fiber with 25Mbit upstream. That’s not gigabit fiber, but it’s absolutely workable, even with two teenagers in the house and about 30 devices on the WiFi at all times.

We live out in the country, but we have the luck to have picked a town that got wired for subsidized fiber half a decade after we moved here. But that’s the luck of the draw when you move into the countryside. Before fiber got here, we were on 1.5Mbit DSL for a few years, and before that….well, satellite was “Internet” of sorts, but it was slow and had 1,000ms latency, and a 200MB/day data cap. 100mbit fiber isn’t “downtown Seoul” speed, but it’s plenty fast even in the age of 4k HD streaming video.

In other news, we made it into 2021. And the first week of the new year sure has given 2020 a run for its money, hasn’t it? But I am done with the developmental edits for CITADEL this week, and then it’s on to other things, like Frontlines #8. 2021 will be better than 2020, because I won’t give it a choice.

Crawling toward the finish line

Posted on by Marko Kloos

Science Fiction grandmaster James Gunn has died.

My career isn’t old enough for me to have met many of the old grandmasters of science fiction because most of them are no longer around. I did get to meet James Gunn at ConStellation in Lincoln, NE in 2017, where I was the Author Guest of Honor and he was the Grandmaster Guest of Honor. I also got to meet Dr. Ben Bova a few years ago when we did a panel at the Air Force Academy together with a few other writers. Dr. Bova died last month.

I know that numbers are completely arbitrary and that a new year on a calendar has no meaning except for symbolism, but I really am looking forward to seeing 2020 end. It seems like the constant onslaught of bad news and outrage has, as my agent put it, draped a blanket of cortisol over all of us. I am starting the last week of the year with novel edits that are due on the 31st, and finishing a novelette that I owe someone (and that is ridiculously overdue.) But it will all be done by the time the new year rolls around, and even if that number flipping is just a symbolic change, it’s as good a marker as any to hit the mental reset button and start to crawl out from under that cortisol blanket.

I hope you have a lovely holiday season. Stay safe, stay healthy, and let’s shank this year in the back with glee.

ORDERS OF BATTLE release day

Posted on by Marko Kloos

 

Today is the day! After almost two years, there’s a new Frontlines novel out. ORDERS OF BATTLE is the seventh volume in the series and picks up a few years after the last book. Things have calmed down a bit for humanity after POINTS OF IMPACT, but the Lankies are still out there, and someone higher up in the chain of command has decided that now’s the time to go looking for them.

ORDERS OF BATTLE is available on the Kindle and in paperback form today. (The Audible audiobook will be delayed until February–see my previous post on that for details.) I hope you pick it up in whichever format you prefer, then read it and maybe leave a review or recommend it to friends. And most importantly, I hope you enjoy returning to the Frontlines universe with Andrew Grayson and his podhead comrades.

ORDERS OF BATTLE audiobook delay

Posted on by Marko Kloos

Some people have noticed and commented on the fact that the audiobook of Orders of Battle now shows a delay for the release. The Kindle and print versions will still be out on December 8, but the Audible version is delayed until February 9th.

There’s a good reason for the delay, and I wish Audible would communicate it to the readers so people don’t think it’s an arbitrary thing. As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I have outpaced Luke Daniels’ schedule, and while he was still able to record AFTERSHOCKS, we had to find a new narrator for BALLISTIC, Angelo DiLoreto.

Angelo was also scheduled to take over Frontlines and narrate ORDERS OF BATTLE. Sadly, he passed away unexpectedly in October, before he could finish recording the book. Because of Angelo’s untimely passing, Audible had to find new narrators for Frontlines and Palladium Wars. The new narrator for Frontlines, Eric G. Dove, had to get up to speed on the prior Frontlines recordings to carry on the fine work Luke Daniels did with the series. That’s the reason for the delay, and while it’s less than ideal for the audiobook to be trailing the print version by two months, I hope it’s clear that it was a necessary one.

I had the luck to get great narrator choices. While Eric Dove is taking over Frontlines, the future Palladium Wars books will be narrated by Korey Jackson, and I am pleased that I’ll have different narrators for the two series to keep them distinct and separate from each other.

I know Angelo enjoyed working on a science fiction series, which was a bit of a departure from his usual narrations, and he did a great job on BALLISTIC. According to his obituary, he was only 30 years old, which is much too early to leave this ride. He was an accomplished musician, and he narrated over 200 audiobooks, which is an amazing professional track record. My condolences and sympathies go out to Angelo’s family and friends.

 

Paper trail

Posted on by Marko Kloos

This row of paperbacks is my collected output for novels since 2013. That does not include the novel I just delivered, titled CITADEL, because that one obviously doesn’t exist yet in paper form. It also doesn’t represent my total output because I also managed to write four novellas and novelettes for Wild Cards (“Stripes” for our mosaic novel LOW CHICAGO, “Probationary” for KNAVES OVER QUEENS, and the stand-alone stories “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” and “Berlin is Never Berlin” for Tor.com.)

By the way, that’s the correct order of publication, for those of you just getting onto the Frontlines train. The first one is Terms of Enlistment, and the rest follow just as they are sorted in the picture. (The Palladium Wars order is super easy to figure out because the titles are in alphabetical sequence. I stole that trick from Sue Grafton.)

As much as 2020 is a near-total write-off, it’s also going to be my first year with more than one novel release. BALLISTIC, second novel in the Palladium Wars series, was released on May 26th, and ORDERS OF BATTLE, seventh novel in the Frontlines series, will be out on December 8th. (That’s only a little more than a week away! Holy carp.) I’m hoping to keep the two-a-year pace going from now on, but that’s only going to work if 2021 turns out better than the dumpster fire that was 2020.

 

Giveaway winners

Posted on by Marko Kloos

The random number generator has spoken, and the winners are:

rafael

Derek

Bryan Anderson

Joe Allen

Heather Jones

Tobias Westphal

Santeri Vidal

Gridley

Shane Spencer

Emily

 

Each of you will receive a signed copy of ORDERS OF BATTLE, shipped at my expense. If you find your name on the winners list, please check your email for instructions, and leave me a comment if you haven’t received an email from me by the end of today, Sunday the 29th.

Congratulations to all the winners!

 

Giveaway update

Posted on by Marko Kloos

The comment section for the ORDERS OF BATTLE giveaway is now closed. We had 133 entries before the deadline of 10AM EST this morning. I will now employ a random number genie to pull ten entries out of the hat. Look for the results tomorrow morning. And if you find yourself on the list of winners, expect an email with instructions. (If you left a valid email, that is.)

 

 

Orders of Battle signed paperback giveaway

Posted on by Marko Kloos

I received my author copies for ORDERS OF BATTLE yesterday, so it’s time to do what I usually do when I get a box of books: I give some of them away. It’s a cunning ploy to make me look nice and generous, when in reality I am just trying to keep my floors from collapsing. (Seriously, Orders of Battle is my 9th published book, and between the author copies, ARCs, and copies of foreign translations, that’s a lot of hardcovers and paperbacks to stash.)

The rules are the same as always: leave a comment on this post indicating that you want a signed paperback. I will keep this post open until next Friday, November 27th, and close the comments at 10:00am, then pick ten winners with a random number generator based on the order of entries.

As before, this contest is open to anyone in the world, and I will pay for the shipping to wherever you are if you win a copy. That’s to make up for Goodreads limiting their giveaway to US residents only.

Good luck!

Goodreads giveaway for Orders of Battle

Posted on by Marko Kloos

There’s a Goodreads giveaway going on for 100 Kindle copies of Orders of Battle, the seventh novel in the Frontlines series. The giveaway will end on December 7, and the book will be released December 8, so you have 21 days if you want to put your name into the goblet and see if you get lucky. Right now there are ~400 entries for those 100 books, so your current chance is 1 in 4-ish, which isn’t bad.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/314501-orders-of-battle

Work status: I am still holed up at the Castle and finishing CITADEL, book 3 in the Palladium Wars. I’ll be turning it in this week–finally–and then it’s on to the next Frontlines book (which doesn’t have a title yet,) and some more Frontlines stories and novellas. As always, stay tuned for more as I try to find my pre-pandemic productivity mojo again and boost it to Brandon Sanderson-esque levels…