Category: writing.

castle frostbite. writing.

Quick office tour, February of twenty-four

 

I had to clean up and reorganize the desk today, so I took a picture of its pristine state while it lasts.

The artwork on the wall: John Picacio cover for one of my Tor.com Wild Cards stories, Michael Komarck cover for LOW CHICAGO featuring my character Khan, and (above the pulse rifle prop from ALIENS) the cover of the Polish edition of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, kindly gifted to me by Fabryka Słów. The framed art on the left next to the corkboard is a pencil drawing of my home city in Germany.

The corkboard has various motivational trinkets and some of my reference index cards on it, and the whiteboard is mostly blank right now except for the motto of the month.

I’m currently using an Alienware M17R5 AMD with a 25″ Dell UltraSharp display and a Keychron V1 keyboard and M3 mouse, for those of you interested in the hardware. Still writing in Scrivener, with final polishing and editing in Word before submission because Word is the industry standard. (I’ve gone back to longhand for the first draft, so the stuff that ends up in Scrivener and then Word was written with actual ink on actual paper first.)

AND THAT CONCLUDES THE OFFICE TOUR. Make sure you hit the gift shop on the way out!

writing.

SCORPIO contest winners

All right, the RNG gods have chosen.

The winners are:

  • Nicholas Clarke
  • Dennis
  • Hugh Lavery
  • Santeri
  • Declan David Peter Holmes
  • Ashley R. Pollard
  • Hendrik
  • Bill Anderson
  • Krzysztof
  • Territorial Army Medic
  • Marla McOmber
  • Bjorn

 

I’ll be sending out an email to the people on the list with instructions. If anyone doesn’t claim their copy by Wednesday, January 10, I’ll have the RNG select alternate winner(s) and notify them separately.

Congratulations to the winners!

writing.

SCORPIO giveaway is now closed.

I’ll be going through the entries today with the help of the random numbers generator and pick a dozen winners from all the comments that have been left by the 1200h EST contest deadline. Watch this space for names, and if yours appears on the list–check your email.

frontlines: evolution writing.

SCORPIO release day

Today is the official release day for SCORPIO, first book in the Frontlines spin-off, Frontlines: Evolution.

A bunch of you will have read it already because it was one of the Amazon First Reads selections for December, free to download for anyone with a Prime subscription. A few of you may have gotten your hands on an eARC via Netgalley, or a printed ARC from me or the publisher. If you did, good for you, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s now officially available for purchase in Kindle, paperback, and audio formats. The Audible version is read by Arielle DeLisle, who did a fabulous job voicing Alex and giving this new chapter in the Frontlines universe its own character.

Incidentally, today is January 1, which means I’ll be starting the draft for CORVUS, the follow-up to SCORPIO. I’ll be turning this draft in on March 31, for a planned release in January of 2025. As with SCORPIO, you can track my progress via the handy meter in the sidebar.

I’ve not been able to finish the Frontlines novella I was working on in between books because it hasn’t quite come together the way I wanted, so it’ll have to simmer a little bit longer. My plan is to finish it while I am writing CORVUS. Because my progress meter only has space for one bar, I’ve switched it to the word count for CORVUS because that’s the main project right now, but I am aiming to have the Halley novella out roughly around the same time as the draft, by the end of March.

I hope you all had a good slide into the new year, as they say back in the old home country.

writing.

Obligatory end-of-year update

This is the last day of the year, so I guess I ought to do a quick recap of the year that is about to disappear in the rearview mirror.

2023 was…fine? I turned in two books this year (SCORPIO in February and DESCENT in October), so I am back in the groove as far as creative output goes. The last time I managed to turn in two books in the same year was 2020, and that was only because I turned in CITADEL in January right when all the pandemic business started. 2021 and 2022 were the hardest years I have had, creatively speaking, but DESCENT was easy going compared to the two drafts from those years, so I am cautiously optimistic for the coming year.

2024 will see two new releases: SCORPIO is officially out tomorrow, and DESCENT will be released on July 16. (There’s already a product page up on the ‘zon if you want to pre-order the book. My publisher loves great pre-order numbers.)

The writing schedule for the next year has me writing the follow-up to SCORPIO, which will be called CORVUS. That will keep me busy for most of the first half of the year, and the second half will most likely be dedicated to Palladium Wars #5, which doesn’t have an official title yet because I haven’t thought of a sufficiently cool and fitting word that starts with “E”. And who knows? Pigs may fly, water may flow uphill, and I may finally have some breathing room in my schedule to complete one of the secret projects from my backlog of ideas.

Happy New Year! I hope you had a similarly tolerable 2023, and may 2024 turn out to be less of a raging dumpster fire than the other years in the Twenty-Twenties so far.

books. contests and giveaways. frontlines: evolution shameless self-promotion. writing.

SCORPIO on Amazon First Reads

It’s December 1st, which means I can share the reason why the official release date for SCORPIO was moved back a month and a half:

SCORPIO is an Amazon First Reads selection for the month of December. If you’re a Prime member, you can download one of the month’s First Reads offerings for free, so here’s your chance to grab a copy for your Kindelmaschine and get to read SCORPIO a month before its official release.

If you’re not a Prime member, you can buy the Kindle book at a discounted price of $1.99.

Amazon First Reads is only available to US-based customers, but you international readers aren’t going to be left out. I’ll do my usual giveaway of signed books this week, and I’ll give priority to international readers this time.

If you end up getting your copy of SCORPIO on Amazon First Reads this month, I hope you enjoy it. And if you leave a review after you’re done, it’ll keep my editor happy, which means they’ll be paying me to write more books, a win-win scenario for everyone.

frontlines. writing.

Super-not-so-secret project in the works

I’m waiting for the first round of edits to come back for DESCENT, so I’ve decided to start a new project that should take just a few weeks to finish. See if you can spot a hint:

 

I’ve reset the progress bar for the new project, so you can follow my progress if you want. I hope to get it done before I get my edits back in the second week of November, and I’ll put it out there as soon as it’s finished and cleaned up, probably in the second half of November.

the palladium wars. writing.

DESCENT draft is in the bag

As you can see on the progress bar on the right side, the draft for DESCENT is complete at 101% of projected word count. I’d say that’s a landing smack in the middle of the touchdown zone.

Now it goes off to the editor, and I get to do the traditional brain rinse where I step away from the manuscript for a week or two and catch up on my reading and streaming backlists.

For those of you who are looking forward to the release of DESCENT, I don’t have a release date, but if I had to wager a guess based on the normal production cycle, I predict that it will be released in the summer of next year.

the palladium wars. writing.

15SEP23

As you can see from the progress bar, the draft for DESCENT is moving along steadily. I write faster the further I get into the book, and especially once I reach the last quarter, so I expect to be finished in another two weeks or so. Then it goes off to the developmental editor, and I get to move on to the next project while I wait for the marked-up draft to get back to me for changes.

In unrelated news, I had an experience the other day that definitely marks me as a child of a certain time. There was a song on the radio I hadn’t heard in a long time, one that was popular when I was a poor teenager who had to make his own mix tapes from the radio. This involved keeping the boom box in my bedroom ready with a blank tape, and hit the red button whenever a song came on I wanted to record. Invariably, the start and the finish of the song would be cut off because I had to tape over the yakking of the DJ, who would talk into the beginning and start talking again at the end.

It was strange because I hadn’t heard that song in at least twenty years, but I still remembered exactly where the song cut off on my mix tape. Then I realized that I could not only remember where the song ended, but also the song that came after it on the tape. I must have listened to those home-baked mix tapes on my knock-off walkman constantly for those associations to still be lodged in my memories almost forty years later…

aminals. castle frostbite. writing.

17AUG23


I don’t have much to report because I am busy pushing this draft along (as you can see on the progress meter in the sidebar), so have a picture of a Dinky Dog in her favorite habitat–a cozy dog bed in a kitchen where there’s food preparation in progress.

I’m a slow correspondent at the best of times, and I am downright neglectful of my email inbox in the middle of a draft, so if you have sent me anything lately, please don’t be surprised if the reply (if applicable) takes a while.