Pluto was never not a planet
We’ve had a rainy, buggy summer here in Upper Cryogenica, and I am greatly looking forward to the fall, which is my favorite season.
How buggy has it been up here, you ask? Buggy enough to support the breeding of this truly monstrous orb weaver, who is in residence next to the Castle’s main portcullis (behind the split to spare you arachnophobes):
My publisher, 47North, is going to release a new edition of Terms of Enlistment at the same time they publish the sequel, Lines of Departure. It will get a new shiny cover to match the second book, and it will be available in dead tree format as well. The paperback version is available for pre-order now, for those of you who have been looking to get your hands on it:
I know it’s a bit of a wait, but at least it will be out on cellulose, and for much less than I would have had to charge for a self-published print run via Lulu.com or what have you.
Lawn maintenance and landscaping: not my favorite tasks in the whole world. They do, however, provide a handy excuse for unsheathing a machete.
Funny thing about the chickens: as skittish as they are when it comes to unfamiliar sights and noises, they don’t mind the lawnmower at all. They’ll graze right in front of it and will only grudgingly move out of the way when the mower is close enough to almost bump them. Moreover, they’ve learned that the mower chases off bugs (and shreds the ones that don’t get out of the way in time), so they actually follow me around when I mow to catch the refugees and broken bugs. It’s like having my own little phalanx of poultry Secret Service agents around me when I mow the front yard.
Someone requested an update on the state of the novella, so here it is: it ain’t done yet. I had to spend most of my writing time the last few weeks on edits for Book #2, and then the kids were home from camp and we went off and did some family things together. I still intend to finish and release the novella in August, but depending on how much (or little) editing it needs, it may be September before it’s in sellable shape. I’m not going to finish something and then upload it to the Kindle store ten minutes later because OMG THE MONIEZ—there are way too many first drafts masquerading as finished product out there as it is. But rest assured that a.) it will be out soon, and b.) it will not suck.
Two weeks until school starts again. My weirdo offspring are EXCITED about the start of school. I am planning to have their DNA tested next week.
We went to Canobie Lake last week. It's an amusement park in southern NH–not quite Six Flags, but pretty decent, and manageable in one day unlike, say, the Rat Kingdom in Orlando. I dropped $120 on admission for two adults and two kids. Then I took out another $100 in cash for food and such (“just in case”), and ended up spending every last dime of it. EAT YOUR TEN-DOLLAR NACHOS AND CHEESE FRIES, KIDS.
But hey, it was fun. The kids went on rides with their friends for five hours straight, and at the end of the day they were so amped they practically hummed like overwound springs.
Rainbows are Kind Of A Big Deal when you're six.
Apparently, the Kremlin is putting typewriters back into service for internal documents to prevent the security issues that come with easily disseminated digital materials. No networked computers on the Galactica, and all that.
I’m a known fan of analog technology, but this is not the way to keep your communications from being sent out over the Internetworks. I can type a page on the trusty manual…and then scan it with my iPhone’s camera and send it out via email in just a few seconds. You just can’t stuff that particular genie back into the bottle.
Hey, look at that! It’s already August.
If I haven’t been blogging or otherwise working the free ice cream machine much, it’s because I’ve been knee-deep in edits. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the process: you turn in your manuscript, and then your editor sends it back to you with, like, a thousand million comments and suggestions and requests, and then you go through the whole thing and change things around before sending it back AND THEN REPEATING THAT PROCESS MANY TIMES.
Alas, it is done (for now), and I’ve officially turned in the second novel in the Terms of Enlistment series. Now I get to finish my novella and then repeat the whole process for the third novel in the Series That Doesn’t Have A Name Yet. (My editor wanted to know if I had a title in mind, and I jokingly suggested “The Hunger Space Trilogy”.)
Now that I’m not on a super-tight deadline for a little while, I can get back to doing regular Interwebs business more frequently–you know, like writing blog posts or ANSWERING EMAILS. If you’ve sent me anything in the last month or so and haven’t received an expected reply yet, feel free to send it again because I most likely overlooked your email.
And now we do what we always do when a novel is finished. We fill up our pens, restock the fridge with Sweetened Caffeine Matrix, and do it all over again. Because being a writer is just like having homework every day!
On Friday, a certain little daughter-heir here at Castle Frostbite was dragging her feet at breakfast. She failed to heed multiple warnings to finish eating and get dressed lest the carriage to Splash Camp leave without her in it.
And lo, the time to depart came, and the daughter-heir was not yet in her garments and prepared for the day. So the carriage left without her. And there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the cries of distress could be heard all the way in French Canadia.
Guess who was dressed and ready to go to Splash Camp almost an hour early this morning?
These birds are riding the thermals over the local McDonald's parking lot. They do this EVERY MORNING. I'm guessing the kitchen throws out a good deal of heat, because there's nary a wing flapping in that flock.
Bloomsbury UK has a Writer’s Digest-like Interwebs site called Writers & Artists. A few weeks ago, they asked me for an interview about my Great! Self-Publishing! Success!, and I agreed to share my experiences in return for a first-class ticket to the UK and a box of Aero Mint bars with all the chocolate removed.
Anyway, you can read the interview here. I share the genesis of the Little Space Kablooie Novel and give some Tips Of Dubious Value regarding self-publishing. Go read, leave a comment or two, and remind them that THEY OWE ME SOME GODDAMN AERO BARS.
Readercon was great, but I racked up a serious sleep deficit while partying and going out to breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my friends. I’m not complaining, though–it was a lot of fun, and I’d been looking forward to it all year.
On Saturday, I managed to run over to the mall with my friend and fellow VPXII grad Chang to see Pacific Rim, a.k.a. Monsters Vs. Battlemechs. It was jolly good fun (I mean, it’s kind of hard to fuck up ROBOTS PUNCHING HUGE MONSTERS IN THE FACE), and much more deep and poignant in spots than you’d expect from a monster/disaster flick. I will say that the most terrifying and emotionally gripping giant monster movie of all time wasn’t Pacific Rim–it was Mako Mori’s flashback in the middle of Pacific Rim.
Now I’m knee-deep in developmental edits. 47North will re-release the first book when the second one comes out (in January 2014, as far as I know), and I added a fair bit of material to flesh out the world a little more and give Andrew a bit more to juggle at the end of the book. For those of you who have read the book, I can tell you that the second-to-last chapter (Chapter 23) has had a substantial rewrite, for example.
Next week I have to get to work on the edits for book #2 (Lines of Departure). The few people who have read both manuscripts are uniformly of the opinion that Lines of Departure is a substantially better novel than Terms of Enlistment*, so if you liked the first one, you should be quite pleased with the second one.
*Not that Terms of Enlistment sucked or anything. But I didn’t have to spend half the novel on boot camp and world-building, so there was more elbow room for Stuff Blowing Up.
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