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Author: Marko Kloos

CORVUS ARCs are here

Posted on by Marko Kloos

I received the customary box of advance reader copies for CORVUS, second book in the Frontlines: Evolution series, which will be out on August 19th.

If you’re a reviewer, lit blogger, BookToker or YouTuber interested in a review copy, send me an email at marko.kloos@gmail.com, and I’ll send you an ARC free of charge per media mail on a first-come, first-serve basis, or provide you with a NetGalley link for an electronic copy.

(Please don’t ask for one just to get an early/free read if you’re not a reviewer. I will get a box of author copies and do my regular giveaway with those as we get closer to release day.)

Please don’t send me your stuff

Posted on by Marko Kloos

Quick PSA: 

Unless I have an existing, mutually agreed-upon working relationship with you, please do not send me your writing for critique, review, or other professional feedback.

I don’t have the time to read your stuff, and I don’t want the legal exposure. Even if I did have the time to read your novel—which I don’t because my schedule is stacked with my own projects—I can’t look at what you send me because I don’t want to be on the receiving end of a future lawsuit that claims I ripped off your work in one of my own stories. 

(And no, I am not interested in writing a novel with or for anyone else, regardless of how amazing your idea may be, or how certain you are that it will lead to untold riches for us both. See the paragraph above about the legal exposure thing.)

I get such requests on a semi-regular basis, but they’ve picked up lately for some reason, so I am putting this out here to discourage future requests. This isn’t me pulling the ladder up and thinking I am too good to help out new writers. It’s to protect myself against copyright claims and to minimize the chances of someone showing up at my place one day with a framing hammer, a bunch of zip ties, and an unshakeable conviction that I stole their idea for a novel. 

Work in progress is progressed

Posted on by Marko Kloos

As you can see from the progress bar to the right, the novella for the secret project is done. As it often happens, I overshot my word count target, but in this case I overshot it by rather a lot. I had planned for 19,000 words give or take a thousand and ended up with 27,000.

No, I can’t tell you yet what it is because I am not at liberty to spill the beans. But rest assured that I’ll share the news as soon as I can.

Now I get to take a few days off to reset the brain, and then it’s full speed ahead with the next two projects: finishing the Halley story (which you should see out this quarter), and starting the draft for Palladium Wars #5, the as-of-yet-untitled “E” novel. Because 47North passed on continuing the series, I’ll be publishing that one independently, so you should see it in the first half of this year.

I’ve also been working on some new short fiction and a few other fun projects, so stay tuned for more news and UNEXPECTED FICTION-SHAPED SURPRISES.

Ethnic food, Westphalian style

Posted on by Marko Kloos

 

Scrapple is a great example of a polarizing food—people either love it or think it’s abominable.

I happen to love it because it’s substantially similar to Panhas, a traditional Westphalian food that was one of my comfort dishes growing up. (The recipe for Panhas was imported by German immigrants, which is why it’s mostly made and eaten in and around Pennsylvania and parts of the mid-Atlantic region.)

Panhas and scrapple used to make use of the broth and pig parts left over after pig-butchering and sausage-making. The ingredients, preparation, and flavor place scrapple and Panhas (and their close cousin, the Dutch Balkenbrij) in the black pudding family.

Slice it, fry it up, serve it with eggs and bread. Now you, too, can eat like a 17th century Westphalian peasant!

Po-tay-toes

Posted on by Marko Kloos

 

All right, the All Dressed potato chip flavor is pretty damn good. I stocked up in Canada, and today I saw that our local grocery store carries at least one brand variety of All Dressed as well. (For the uninitiated, of which I was one until recently, All Dressed is a combination of ketchup, BBQ, sour cream & onion, and salt & vinegar flavorings. It’s a little more tart and less sweet than your average BBQ chip.)

5/5, would (and will) binge again.

Social media stuff

Posted on by Marko Kloos

After my long social media hiatus before the pandemic, I gradually reintruduced measured amounts of it back into my routine. I’ve had a new Instagram account for a few years now, and I post on Bluesky and Threads. Bluesky has become my favorite, and I am not thrilled with Meta’s policies, so I think I’ll throttle back my use of Threads and Insta and just stay active on Bluesky (I’m @markokloos.bsky.social).

As for the picture updates via Instagram—I suppose if I am going to create free content for anyone, it might as well be for my own site instead of Zuckerberg’s algorithm and pockets. It’s a good excuse to update the blog more frequently.

Our combination anniversary getaway/working vacation

Posted on by Marko Kloos

 

Last weekend, the wife and I went to Quebec City for three days to celebrate our anniversary (21 years!), recharge our batteries, and plan out some new stories together. We stayed at a nice hotel in the old city, went to the German Christmas Market and did some shopping, ate fantastic meals, and generally had a wonderful time in one of the most beautiful places on the continent. 

We came back with detailed outlines for five books–a brand new science fiction trilogy and two more Frontlines: Evolution installments–so I’d say the mission was an unqualified success. It was great to be able to bounce new ideas off each other away from the distractions and interruptions of our regular everyday lives. I think we’ll make these planning sessions a regular event from now on.

Oh, and Quebec City is amazing. This was my third time there and I’ve enjoyed every minute of every trip. It’s the city that has the most European feel of any place I’ve visited in North America. The people are uniformly friendly and very forgiving of my lousy French, the food is stellar, and it’s great to be able to make an international trip by car instead of having to put up with holiday season airline travel. It’s just a five-hour drive from our place, and we had all the advantages of being able to haul our own stuff and take back food and souvenirs without having to worry about space or luggage allowances.

Whoopsie

Posted on by Marko Kloos

That’s how the last week has been going for me. How was yours?

Kid #1 put the Jeepito in the ditch as he was leaving for work. Not really his fault—the conditions were pretty bad, and the road was treacherous even for an experienced driver. But it definitely kicked off a chain of work-disrupting events for me.

I had it yanked out by a tow truck, and at first I thought there was no damage done. Going up the hill back to the house, however, the 4×4 refused to kick in when the front wheels slipped, and I slid all the way back down the hill in reverse. Turns out the transfer case is busted, so now the 4×4 is strictly FWD until it gets fixed. That’s a major repair, and I still don’t have a quote on it from the transmission guy, so we’re down to one car at the moment. And the attendant calls, arrangements, dealing with two different garages, and tentatively looking for a new set of wheels ate up a lot of my writing time and peace of mind over the last week.

Oh, well. Life happens, and at least nobody got hurt. Everything else can be fixed.

UPDATE: Jeepito has a fried rear differential. It’s not a cheap fix but not as expensive as I had feared, so we’re getting it fixed, and the little offroad banana will soldier on for a few more years. (It has fewer than 70,000 miles on it, so there’s still life in it unless it blows something that exceeds the seven grand or so it’s still worth.)

That ol’ pen-and-paper business

Posted on by Marko Kloos

 

There are days when my brain simply locks up when I have my fingers on a keyboard and my eyes on a blinking cursor on a screen. 

I wrote the first two Frontlines novels by hand in A4-sized unlined notebooks. Then I got a publishing contract, and the deadlines involved required a faster pace of production than I could do by hand because the transcription step doubled the time involved. So I did what everyone else does and wrote on a laptop—mostly MacBooks with Scrivener and Word on them. But even though I write the novels on a computer, I still take all my story notes by hand, and I write most shorter fiction longhand as well. My brain just seems to work better when I have a pen in my hand. You can cross out stuff but still see your corrections instead of hitting backspace and sending the corrected word or phrase into oblivion. 

Best of all, it doesn’t really feel like work. Typing is kind of a drudgery for me, but handwriting has a meditative sort of quality that really quiets my mind and gets me in the flow. (There’s also the fact that a notebook or legal pad doesn’t have an Internet connection to distract me.)

The scribbling on the legal pad in the picture is a draft of new jacket copy for CORVUS, the second volume in the Frontlines: Evolution series. You can see where I crossed out words and wrote in substitutions. And if you can read my handwriting, you now know the general gist of the novel, which is due out in June. This is what will end up as the marketing copy on the back of the book (for the paperback version) and the product page on Amazon. I wasn’t quite happy with the promotional text written by the publisher, so I gave them an alternate version to use instead.

(The pen is a Lamy Safari, which is a great and affordable workhorse fountain pen.)