Category: writing.

castle frostbite. gadgetry. technology. writing.

how do you say “feng shui” in danish?

Three of the most dangerous words in the English language: “Legitimate tax write-off.”

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We took some time to redo the office in the back of the house last weekend.

I’ve been using the standing desk I got at the Borders going-out-of-business fire sale two and a half years ago, and it works just fine as a computer workstation, but it’s not the best work desk, at least not for my purposes. I write longhand a lot and then transcribe into the computer, so I need quite a bit of elbow room. In the past, that meant I had to do a lot of moving around between two different desks, one for handwriting and one for computer stuff.

Well, thanks to amazing Danish office technology, now I can do both at the same desk. I got an adjustable standing desk from ErgoDepot. It has a lot of working surface (it’s an L-shaped table top that’s roughly six by four feet on the long sides), and it moves up and down at the push of a button via electric motor. You can move it as low as 25″ and as high as 47″. Now I can set the desk to fit the task at hand, not the other way around.

And man, just look at that thing, with the spotlights above lighting up the work surface. It looks like it’s straight out of a goddamn IKEA catalog*. It looks like the space of a hip, professional writer dude who totally knows what he’s doing. In other words, the space of someone who isn’t me. But think about how much easier it will be for me to fake competence now.

*It’s not Ikea. I know this because the instructions were crystal-clear and it only took me twenty minutes to put the thing together.

 

 

castle frostbite. family. writing.

2014.

Happy New Year, friends and neighbors!

photo

The kids got to stay up until midnight last night to jump into the new year. I was worried about them even making it to midnight, but it turns out they were just fine. The adults, on the other hand, were dragging just a little, especially me. I was good and ready for bed at 10:30pm already. THIS IS WHAT OLD AGE FEELS LIKE.

Back to work, I suppose. There are novels and novellas waiting to be started/continued/finished. Let’s see if I can best my own record for Most Things Finished In A Calendar Year. I’m shooting for two novels, a novella, and maybe a short story or three. I also want to be more diligent about updating this here Interblogs page on a regular basis.

May you all have a great 2014!

books. capitalism. castle frostbite. family. shameless self-promotion. technology. writing.

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:

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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.

castle frostbite. writing.

many christmas. such presents. wow.

With all the pre-holiday busywork around the house, I totally forgot that this month is our six-year anniversary as the liege lords here at Castle Frostbite. We came up here in December of 2007, in the middle of the first big snow storm of the season. I got the moving truck stuck at the bottom of the driveway, where it remained for two days. Good times!

2013 was a really good year, easily the best we’ve had since we moved to New Hampshire. We went to Germany in February for a long overdue visit with the family. And then I put the little Space Kablooie novel out in March, and everything else just kind of snowballed from there. A month later, I got a literary agent (the most excellent Evan Gregory at the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency), and a few weeks after that I signed a two-book contract with 47North. I got to see a bunch of my VPXII and other writer friends again at Readercon in July, and the rest of the year was pretty packed with edits and edits and more edits for the two books for 47North. As 2013 careens to a close, I’m busier than ever when it comes to writing, which is awesome.

Like I said on Twitter the other day—I don’t really have anything else left to wish for this year. For 2014, I hope that LINES OF DEPARTURE (out on January 28) does as well as TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, and that I manage to finish the draft of the third novel (called ANGLES OF ATTACK) before the end of spring. And after that? With my schedule free for writing pretty much full-time now, two novels a year sound entirely manageable.

So yeah—2013 kicked ass. I’ll always remember it fondly. Lucky Thirteen, indeed.

books. bullets & links. capitalism. writing.

one of the pretty-good-est books of 2013.

Buzzfeed has an article up on “The 14 Greatest Science Fiction Books Of The Year“, and TERMS OF ENLISTMENT comes in at #6. The author says a few very nice words about it, and it’s always a pleasure to see positive reviews, mentions, or inclusions in lists that have the word “greatest” or “best” in them.

I think I’m having an early case of the Release Day Jitters. LINES OF DEPARTURE will be out on January 28, but I already had trouble falling asleep last night thinking about it. I’d love for the second novel to do at least as well as the first one, which means that LINES has a big pair of shoes to fill. On the other hand, just about everyone who has read it (my editors and a very small group of beta readers) said that it’s a better novel than TERMS in almost every respect, which means that if people like it half as much as they did  the first novel, it should do just fine. I guess I need to quit obsessing and get back to work.

To that end, let me ask you all a question, especially those of you who have read TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and the ancillary short story and novella. Which character(s), settings, or events from TERMS would you love to see expanded and treated in more detail, maybe with a short story or novella on the side? I’m currently at work on the third novel, called ANGLES OF ATTACK, but there’s always a little bit of room on the dance card, so to speak.

horseless carriages. writing.

“…in the cold november rain…”

 

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My view right now as I am sitting in the office of my local car hospital while Frostbite One, a.k.a. the Grand Marnier, gets its snow shoes put on and a wheel bearing replaced. Also, this office is massively over-heated, and I hope they’ll be done before I am nothing but a puddle on the floor.

I’m on the Surface, which is connected to the Great Link via my iPhone’s “Personal Hotspot” feature, which turns the phone into a WiFi router. This future, it does not suck.

Tomorrow we’re doing a family Thanksgiving, with the special guest being the turkey Robin brought home from work. Her employer shells out for Thanksgiving turkeys for every single employee and contractor every year, which is a nice gesture. As we don’t watch sportsball at Castle Frostbite, we’ll have to find some other passive activity by which to fall into a food coma.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it, and warm greetings and a friendly wave of the turkey drumstick to the rest of you. I have an awful lot to be thankful for this year, and much of it is because of my awesome readers. You guys and girls are the best. Grade A. Top notch. I wish I could have you all over for a turkey dinner, even if that means I’d have to buy a turkey the size of a humpback whale.

 

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

my books, they have covers.

Check out the cover art for LINES OF DEPARTURE:

LoDcover

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.

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

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!

books. capitalism. shameless self-promotion. writing.

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:

http://www.amazon.com/Measures-Absolution-Marko-Kloos-ebook/dp/B00G8TQUG0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382976599&sr=8-1&keywords=Measures+of+Absolution

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.

capitalism. idiots. writing.

turns out I’m a fraud.

Did you know that I have rigged Amazon’s review system to sell my mediocre, derivative novel, and that I’m taking money from other authors that actually deserve those reviews and sales?

Yeah, that’s why the novella still isn’t finished. I spent all my writing time making seven hundred sock puppet accounts to game Amazon’s review system. Because, uh, PROFITZ?