Geek Mountain State has an interview up with some weirdo who wrote some novels about spaceships and flechette rifles and stuff blowing up. Seems shifty to me, but if that’s your kind of thing, head on over there and read what the nerd had to say.
Category: shameless self-promotion.
unabridged audio, without the german accent.
The unabridged audiobooks of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE are up on Audible for pre-order. The release date is January 28, same as the print and ebook versions. The narrator for both books is Luke Daniels, who also narrated the Iron Druid series (among many, many other books.) Both books clock in at a little over nine hours.
This is some pretty cool stuff, I must say. Audio versions of my books, professionally produced and read by a pro. Robin is particularly looking forward to getting her hands on the audiobooks because that’s how she does most of her reading, on account of her having a physical commute. When I still drove around a lot, I listened to audiobooks on CD (ask your parents, kids!), and I got hooked on them quite fast. We’d both find it amusing to see the other pull into the parking spot in front of the old house in Knoxville and take another 5-10 minutes to get out of the car because the chapter wasn’t quite over yet.
daddy used nintendo 2ds. it’s super effective!
How do you glue a first-grader to the couch? You give her a Nintendo 2DS for Christmas:
She hasn’t moved from that spot since yesterday morning.
We had a low-key Christmas here at Castle Frostbite. No house guests, just the four of us and the doggens. We had our traditional Christmas feast of Surf & Turf (lobster and venison steaks), and pretty much fritzed the day away with eating, drinking, playing computer games, and listening to Christmas music. It was perfectly relaxing.
With the kids at home until the new year, I’m taking the week mostly off from work to tackle Mount Unfolded Laundry and tend various overdue projects around the house. We’ll see if I can keep myself from any serious writing productivity until the end of next week.
Speaking of writing, here’s another Buzzfeed list I’m in:
12 Science Fiction books to look forward to in January
I’m pretty excited about LINES OF DEPARTURE, which has turned out extremely well (and which has been rather effusively praised by just about everyone who has read it already.) I can’t wait until you can all get your hands on it—and this time in paperback and audio. MY NOVEL HAS ASSUMED PHYSICAL FORM. <insert sinister, semi-hysterical laughter>
TERMS OF ENLISTMENT will see a new release at that time as well, with a matching new cover and in the same formats. If you’re asking yourself whether to drop the money on the new version: it has a rewritten Chapter 23, new cover art, and numerous smaller edits, corrections, and improvements. Because it’s a 47North book now, I wasn’t able to roll all those changes into the old version that people purchased already, as my publisher considers the new version a Director’s Cut, so to speak. But hey—they paid a lot of people to make a lot of improvements to the book, so I think it’s a justified position. Rest assured that if you choose not to buy the new version of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, you won’t miss anything essential.
Anyway, enough post-Christmas self-promotion. I’m just really excited about this new “making a living by making up stuff” thing, and I want to keep that racket going for as long as I can. Hope you all had a great Christmas and happy holidays, and stay tuned for all the stuff coming out of the Castle Frostbite Magic Daycare & Novel Factory in 2014.
my books, they have covers.
Check out the cover art for LINES OF DEPARTURE:
There’s also a new cover for the re-release of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, but it doesn’t show on the Amazon page yet. You can see it in the search results when you look for “Terms of Enlistment” on Amazon, though.
hey, I know that novel.
Check out the 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards, and look at the Science Fiction category.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2013?utm_source=twitter.com
The little Space Kablooie novel is in the opening round for Best Books of 2013. Pretty cool!
measures of absolution.
Happy goddamn Monday, kids!
There may or may not be a new novella of mine out on the Kindle. It may or may not be called “Measures of Absolution”. It may or may not be availabl…no. You know what? Forget that angle. This is private commerce, not the Obamacare website.
It’s called “Measures of Absolution”. It’s sixty-some pages of new story, told from over the shoulder of Andrew Grayson’s TA squad mate, Corporal Jackson, and it starts right in the middle of the epic clusterfuck that is the Battle of Detroit.
You can get it here:
And the best part is that it’ll cost you less than a donut and a coffee, which give entertainment for minutes. For the same price, this 64-page novella will give entertainment for tens of minutes, possibly even hour.
It’s a KDP Select title, so I can’t sell it directly or through another source, but you can read it on the Kindle reader for your OS. Because the file is DRM-free, you can also download it and covert it to a different format with Calibre.
from the desk of the ink-splasher.
I checked Amazon over the weekend, and it looks like Lines of Departure is available for pre-order in all formats (Kindle, paperback, and unabridged audio) for the January 28th release. (Terms of Enlistment will also be released as a new, “Director's Cut” edition at the same time and in the same formats.)
I know that a lot of you were hoping for an earlier release, but after comparing the Before and After versions, I am quite glad that 47North got their hands on the novels. It went through several editorial passes by very experienced and sharp-eyed editors, and the version about to be published as a 47North novel in January is quite a bit better than the original. In addition to tightening all the nuts and bolts, they suggested several changes that, in retrospect, make it a stronger novel. I'm very happy with the end result, and I think that if you like Terms of Enlistment, you're going to really like Lines of Departure.
In other news, my friend Peter has a new book out. It's a non-fiction memoir of his former profession as a prison chaplain. Peter is from South Africa, and he has had a rather interesting life. Go check out his publication announcement and pick up Walls, Wire, Bars, and Souls if it sounds interesting to you. (Peter also has a military science fiction novel out on Amazon, called Take the Star Road.)
This concludes the self- and friend-promotion this morning. Now I have to get back to work on that novella so I have something from the Terms of Enlistment universe to offer up before Lines of Departure comes out. (I expect to finish Measures of Absolution this week, and because I've been editing it on the fly, it should be available on the Kindle and directly from me by next week. Because the novella doesn't fall under my contractual restrictions regarding distribution, I can offer the EPUB and PDF versions directly, just like I did with Terms of Enlistment before it got picked up by 47North.)
Busy week ahead. I guess I best get to it, then…
Posted with Blogsyterms of enlistment, the paperback.
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.
in which i bloviate about self-publishing.
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.
meanwhile, over at kat’s place.
My friend Katrina does a recurring blog feature called Prime Writing, and the latest installment features some dorky dude who wrote a novel about spaceships and stuff:
http://www.katrinaarcher.com/journal/2013/06/24/prime-writing-marko-kloos/
You may want to check it out. Said dorky dude talks a bit about his novel and how it came about.