Category: shameless self-promotion.

books. friends. new hampshah. shameless self-promotion.

scalzi does concord.

Last night, my friend John Scalzi was in Concord as part of a book tour for his new novel “Lock In”, so I went to see him and attend the reading.

A few weeks back, we were talking about signings and stuff, and I joked that my first book store signing event would probably be a pitifully empty affair—like, two people in the chairs, and both of them book store employees. So he said, “You know what? Bring something to read with you, and I’ll have you be my opening act. That way your first reading at a bookstore is sure to have a few more people than two, and you won’t have to get nervous in the future because you’ve already done this thing in front of a bunch of folks.”

So I opened for John by reading an excerpt from “Cake From Mars”, my humorous SF short story that was published in the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology. It went really well, and quite a few people came up to me later in the store and told me they enjoyed the bit. I’ve done two readings so far—one at Boskone, one at Readercon—but this was the first one I’ve done in a civilian setting, so to speak. John’s reading was far better than mine—he’s a seasoned pro with lots of experience, and you can tell that he knows how to entertain a crowd, which was a reminder to me that writing is part of the arts, and the arts are largely a business of entertainment. Note to self: work on presentation and public speaking skills.

(SIDE NOTE and GRATUITOUS ENDORSEMENT: Gibson’s in Concord is easily the nicest independent bookstore I have ever seen, and the people who run it are super-nice and friendly. It’s about an hour away from Castle Frostbite, but it’s such a lovely place that I am going to claim it as my home base bookstore for all future brick-and-mortar needs and events.)

I’ve not said much about the whole Hugo/Sad Puppies kerfuffle online because I have friends on both sides of the perceived divide, and because I think that the whole affair was largely people on both sides talking straight past each other. But what I will say is this: I don’t divide my social circle along political lines. My circle of friends includes liberals, card-carrying Marxists, conservatives, libertarians, and more than a few people with anarchist leanings. Politically speaking, I’ll never be entirely in sync with anyone in the room. And you know what? That’s totally fine. I don’t have to agree with you to like you. If your circle of friends only consists of people who are ideologically in agreement, you don’t have a social circle, you have an echo chamber.

Friends with diverging political opinions are like Amazon three-star reviews. They’re not fawning or flattering like the 5-stars, and they’re not clueless or unconstructively negative like the 1-stars. The 3-stars frequently offer the most incisive, insightful, and useful criticism of your work—those are the ones that often give you material to think and really evaluate the criticism. I have the best political discussions with people who are neither totally opposed to my political views and dismiss them out of hand, or in complete agreement with me on everything.

I have all sorts of political viewpoints in my circle of friends because I don’t sort people by Conservative or Liberal or any other political label. I sort them into two categories: good people and jerks. And both varieties come in all kinds of ideological flavors. I’m friends with John Scalzi not because we agree on politics ALL THE TIME AND FOREVER, but because he’s a genuinely nice guy who’s generous with his time and encouragement, the kind who will share his podium with a relative writing newbie to get acclimated. He’s never been anything but kind to me, so I have no reason to talk or think badly of him because someone else disagrees with him on the Internet. And I do my level best to be as kind as I can be to others in return, because when my name comes up in conversation, I would much rather have it make people say, “Oh yeah, I know him—he’s a nice guy,” and not “Oh yeah, I know him—he’s a total dickwaffle.”

(There are undoubtedly people who consider me a dickwaffle despite my best efforts, of course, but you can’t ever avoid the one-star reviews, folks.)

But when in doubt? And especially when it comes to Internet arguments? I’ll always tend to side with friends, the people I know personally to be Good Folk Indeed, even if I don’t line up with them 100% when it comes to political viewpoints.

Aaaaaanyway, that’s enough on politics and Internet slap-fights for a while. Have some serious author pictures from the reading instead:

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Some dude randomly defacing the existing stock of John Scalzi books.

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“Let’s talk about something called an Adjustable Rate Mortgage.” 

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This woman is pleased. John Scalzi just saved her a bunch of money on her homeowners’ insurance.

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Kloos, Scalzi, and Master Chang.

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Serious author picture.


books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

the space kablooie saga goes international.

Today’s announcement involves the OUTSTANDING literary tastes of the Polish and German people:

The Polish language rights for TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE have been sold to the Polish publishing house Fabryka Slow. I don’t have an ETA for the Polish language version, but my best guess is “sometime next year”.

The German language rights for both TERMS and LINES have been sold to Heyne, one of the really big names in German Science Fiction. This is a rather big deal for me personally—I read a ton of Heyne SF when I was growing up in Germany, and had you asked me back then who I’d want to be published with, I would have said “Heyne” without a second thought. See? Dreams do come true. Eventually. After years of hard work. But! Dreams.

Both deals were made by Evan Gregory at the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. Evan has been my agent for a year and a half now, and I am very happy with both his work and that of the agency. 

TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE in Polish and German! That’s foreign rights sales #2 and #3 (Evan sold the Czech rights a few months ago), and I just can’t wait for those sweet foreign language covers. I hope the Heyne book gets laser-firing spaceships on the cover, just like EVERY LAST ONE OF JOHN SCALZI’S HEYNE BOOKS. (Even the ones that don’t feature spaceships. Or lasers.)

castle frostbite. fountain pens. shameless self-promotion. writing.

novel the third.

Last Friday, I finished the manuscript for ANGLES OF ATTACK, the third novel in the Frontlines series. 

<insert tired “Hooray”>

Now it’s going to go through the editorial ministrations, and after all the bumps and potholes are fixed, there’ll be the usual publisher magic done to it. I’ll share the release date as soon as my publisher sets one.

I have a modest little splurge tradition going that I may have borrowed from Elizabeth Bear and tweaked for my own purposes. Every time I finish a novel, I buy myself a nice fountain pen. (Bear buys hers when she sells a novel, i think.) Then I use the new pen to start on the next novel. For TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, I got a Lamy 2000. For LINES OF DEPARTURE, it was a Pilot Vanishing Point. And for ANGLES OF ATTACK, it’s this one, which just arrived in the mail:

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That’s a Pelikan M600 “Souverän” in green, with a medium 14k nib. These are to fountain pens what a Benz is to automobiles—solid, traditional, high-quality, and a bit of a luxury. (It’s a modest luxury compared to a new Benz, to be sure.)

I didn’t write ANGLES in longhand like I usually do. Because of the close deadline (which I still managed to overshoot by, uh, LET’S NOT SPEAK OF IT EVER), I had no time for transcribing all the longhand, so I had to write everything straight into the computer, using my MacBook Pro, a Das Keyboard, and trusty Scrivener. 

These last three months have been a bit challenging. Writing is not really hard on the body, but every time I finish a book, I feel like I’ve lifted a dump truck using just my frontal lobe. In addition to the regular mental strain of cranking out 100,000 words of fictional fiction, it has been noisy around the house for the last few months because of the various projects we need to get dome before icy death sets in for another six months. I’ve spent a lot of time out of the house to avoid the hammering, clanging, banging, and dog barking, and I’ve stayed up late a lot. When I turned the novel in, I felt even more drained than I usually do. The next day, I slept until noon and was still tired, and it took me about three days to get back to a regular sleep pattern. So yeah, writing can be hard work—just not the kind where you get blisters on your hands and come home covered in coal dust. But making up stuff all day for months on end can wear the body out in surprising ways.

Anyway, now I am going to reset my brain with video games and other leisurely pursuits for a week or three, and then I’ll ink up the fancy new pen and get started on the next novel. 

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

the lucky giveaway winners who are winners of the giveaway.

There were 204 response comments to the Frontlines giveaway. This morning, I employed a random number picker to spit out two very random numbers:

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According to my scientific calculations (and starting the count from the oldest comment), the winners are:

Ken Malphurs and Marlo Brown.

Congratulations, you two. Please contact me at marko.kloos@gmail.com and let me know your shipping addresses and how/if you want me to sign/personalize the books. They’ll be winging their way to you this week.

Thanks for playing, everyone! I may do more of these in the future.

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

frontlines series giveaway.

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I’m in the mood to give something away, so I’m going to do a thing. Let’s call it a….”giveaway”. Yeah, that’s a good name for it.

If you would like to receive signed and personalized print copies of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE, leave an affirmative comment on this post. One comment per person, please—no multiple entries.

At the end of the coming weekend (that’s Sunday, July 20th, around 6pm), I shall pick two winners via random number generator and close the comments. I will announce the winning entries on Monday morning, at which point the winners can contact me via email for a mailing address and personalization details. (If you’d rather just get the books without me defiling them with my signature, that’s OK too.)

This giveaway is open to readers all over the world. If you win, I will ship the books to you whether you live right here in Upper Cryogenica, at the northern tip of Norway, the southern tip of Australia, or anywhere in between, even if you are currently pulling duty at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, absolutely FREE OF CHARGE.

One entry each. Open to anyone in the world. You know how to proceed. EXECUTE.

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

writer blog hop.

My friend Claire tagged me in a blog hop. The idea is to have a bunch of  writers answer questions about their work and then tag other writers to participate. I don’t have anyone to tag, but if any of you shifty writer folk reading this want to take up the baton and run with it, HAVE AT IT.

1) What am I working on/writing? 

I’m currently working on the third novel in the Frontlines series, called ANGLES OF ATTACK. After that one is turned in and edited (and edited again, and then edited some more), I have several half-finished projects I’d like to finish and send to my agent, to see what’s marketable in that project pile. 

Later this year, I have a novella in the Frontlines universe planned (hopefully for a release in the summer), and then I’ll be looking hard at the story arc of the Frontlines books and see what other stories the people in that universe have to tell.

With all this novel-cranking-out, my short fiction output has come to a stop this year, but if I have some breathing room later this year, I want play with some short story ideas that have been rolling around in my noggin.

Oh, almost forgot: I’ll also get going in earnest on the full alternate history/fantasy novel set in what I now called the Ink & Blood universe. It will expand on the short story I had in Beneath Ceaseless Skies a few years back. (The short story was in fact supposed to be backstory for the novel, but the military SF stuff took precedence on the schedule.)

2) How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre? 

I don’t do space opera like (for example) David Weber, and I don’t deal with politics except for the stuff that directly means something to the grunts on the ground. The main thrust of the Frontlines books is a combat narrative from a soldier’s-eye view. I wanted to keep the narrative limited and intimate—that’s why I picked first-person, present-tense narration. If Andrew doesn’t see or experience it, we readers don’t get to, either. That’s why I don’t explain tech in great detail either—the grunts aren’t too interested how the engines on a drop ship work, they just know that the spinny and thrusty bits move the Wasp and keep it from falling out of the sky, and that’s good enough for them.

There are other military SF writers who try for the same approach (almost invariably military vets—you can always tell by the little details when the author has worn a uniform and stood in a chow or weapons issue line themselves), so I am by no means a special and unique snowflake, but I hope that my approach does something a little interesting and exciting with what is essentially a genre staple.

Side note: my favorite quasi-negative review of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT on Amazon is now the logline of this blog: “Enjoyable but utterly derivative”. So maybe I am not the ideal writer to answer the originality question convincingly…

3) Why do I write what I do? 

I started writing TERMS because I like reading military SF, and because I wanted to have a fictional vehicle for working in my own military/boot camp experience. I keep writing military SF because it’s fun and exciting, and it lets me have fun with future combat grunts and spaceships, which is a pretty awesome way to make a living.

In the end, though, I write military SF for the same reason I write everything else. I have settings, story lines, and interesting characters pop into my head, and I want to find out what kind of story they have to tell.

4) How does my writing process work?

Mentally: I have an idea—a character sketch, a scene, a strong and unusual visual cue, an emotion—and I file it away in my head for later use. Sometimes it never goes anywhere, and sometimes I turn it into a scene or a short story or maybe a novel. Sometimes the idea by itself goes nowhere, but then I have another idea months or years later, and find that it combines well with that earlier idea to make something really interesting. Sometimes I start writing and surprise myself with what comes out. 

(I wrote a humorous SF short story called CAKE WHORES FROM MARS on a dare by Chuck Wendig, and I literally sat down at the typewriter with nothing but that title in my head. I wrote the first line, then the second one, and the whole story just unfolded in my head as I was writing. It was one of those magic writing moments that make you believe in the untapped potential of whatever gland or brain region or alien brain slug we have residing upstairs that makes us want to make up stuff and write it down.)

Physically: I usually write my first drafts in longhand, with a fountain pen. I enjoy the tactile sensation, the instant personalized hard copy it creates, and the lack of distractions. I do new material in the morning, and edits or transcription in the afternoon. Right now I have to write straight into the computer because DEADLINE, but I am looking forward to filling up the pens again for the next project after I am finished with ANGLES OF ATTACK. When I transcribe or compose directly on the computer, I use a Mac running Scrivener, which is hands-down the best writing software on the market. It’s like Photoshop for novelists.

And that is my exciting description of my exciting process! I swear, a reality show centered on a group of writers would be the most boring thing ever. Clip a GoPro to a writer’s head, and it’ll be twelve hours of snooze-inducing footage of surfing the web, staring at blank screen with a blinking cursor, and taking naps.

 

 

books. capitalism. shameless self-promotion. writing.

achievement unlocked: foreign language rights sale.

foreignrights

That right there is the contract for the Czech language rights to TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, making this officially my first foreign rights sale.

This is one of the many reasons why having a good agent is a huge benefit. Foreign language rights are basically free money. The foreign publisher pays an advance–check in the mail, hooray!–and then the writer gets the contractually agreed-upon royalties per sold foreign language copy. It’s free money because the book is already written, and I don’t have to translate it or do any extra work beyond signing the contract and depositing the check. My agent Evan brokered the deal and negotiated contract terms for me because that’s the kind of stuff an agent does all day, and it’s also the stuff that authors in general (and this author in particular) aren’t very good at. I don’t have the time to approach foreign publishers, and even if I did, I have no experience dealing with them, negotiating terms, or figuring out the contracts. That’s why agents get their percentage, and that’s why I don’t mind that one bit. It frees me up for writing, and getting most of the money from a foreign deal beats getting all the money from no deal at all.

I can’t wait to see the first foreign edition of TERMS out in the wild in the Czech Republic. I hope they’ll give it a sweet cover, with laser-firing spaceships and stuff.

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

scalzi confesses. film at 8.

John Scalzi FINALLY TAKES THE BLAME:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/02/03/these-books-are-partially-my-fault/

And everything he says is 100% true.

John forgot to add that he’s also part of the reason why SF/F has lots of talented up-and-coming writers. He was most generous with his time and expertise at VP XII, and so were all the other instructors. Every year, just that one workshop puts 20-some talented folks into the wild with new motivation and the knowledge that they have what it takes to get their stuff into print. WAY TO PULL UP THE LADDER BEHIND YOU.

books. capitalism. shameless self-promotion.

io9 reviews TERMS and LINES.

io9 has a fantastic write-up of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE that is just chock-full of good quotes like this one:

Much like Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and its sequels, Terms of Enlistment and Lines of Departure are combat-grade Military SF, and should come with an addiction warning. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we see the next volume of the series, Angle of Attack, which Kloos is currently writing.

Thanks for the great review, Andrew. The good news is that my publisher, 47North, moves at the speed of light compared to the rest of the industry, so if they decide to pick up ANGLES OF ATTACK, it won’t be too long before you can all get your hands on it. In the meantime, I am planning to put out some more novellas and short stories to  keep you hooked fill the gap.

books. capitalism. shameless self-promotion.

lines of departure.

Citizens, rejoice! The day has arrived. The sequel to TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, titled LINES OF DEPARTURE, is now available for your entertainenings!

Here’s where you can get LINES OF DEPARTURE right now:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Audible

Amazon has Kindle, paperback, and audio versions. B&N has the paperback, and Audible has the audiobook. There’s no other ebook format than Kindle because AMAZON, but if you don’t have a Kindelmaschine, you can read the ebook through the respective free Kindle readers for PC, Mac, iOS, Blackberry, or Android.

Go! Buy! Read! And if you like the novel and have the time and wish to help the dude what wrote it? Recommend it to others, share your opinion, and write a review for other unsuspecting victims prospective readers. I’m pretty proud of that novel, and I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think!