Category: writing.

books. frontlines. writing.

Endings and beginnings

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I always love being able to type those two words at the end of a draft, but it was both exhilarating and bitter-sweet to do it on this one. Nine years, eight novels, and almost a million words later, it’s not just the end of a single novel but the capstone on a storyline that started a long time ago in a writing workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. What a ride it’s been since then.

It’s not the last you’ll read of the Frontlines universe. But there’ll be new voices and new perspectives, and they’ll tell different tales. This particular one has come to its conclusion for now.

writing.

There and back again

I’ve been a little scarce here on the blog over the last two months. I’m running a little—okay, a lot—late on the latest Frontlines book because I have to fit a lot of action between the covers, and it’s turning out to be a little trickier than I had anticipated. But it’s coming along, and I think it will be the best book in the series when it’s done.

I turned 50 at the end of October and went over to Germany for a quick family visit. (My mother’s birthday is on the same day as mine, so it was nice to not only see her again in person for the first time since 2015 but also celebrate a birthday together again for the first time since at least the mid-1990s.) It was a fun week that was physically exhausting but mentally rejuvenating, if that makes any sense. My siblings had a pretty full program for me, but it was great to get out of the house and do some international travel again.

While I was there, my siblings took me to a soccer match. I hadn’t been to a stadium in a long time, and this one was the first match where they were allowed to have a full house: 57,000 people attending. (The team is Schalke 04, our household team, and they scrubbed Dynamo Dresden 3:0, almost certainly solely because of my presence.) This was my first big crowd event since the start of the pandemic, and it felt a little strange at first to be in a big group of singing and shouting people, even if the stadium is open-roofed and everyone attending had to prove their vaccinated status. Maybe this will feel normal again to me at some point, but I suspect it will be a good long while.

I’m home again and back at work, finishing the draft for CENTERS OF GRAVITY. There are also a few other things in development that I can’t mention yet, but I think you’ll like hearing about them when I am free to blab.

2021 started out weird, then it somehow turned into a low-budget gritty remake of 2020, and now it’s ending on a so-so note, with a lot more stress and anxiety than I would have predicted when the year began. But I have my work in front of me, the family is healthy, and I’ve had my booster shot, so I am as ready for 2022 as I can be. Let’s hope we all get a bit of a reprieve from the flood of cortisol that’s soaking everyone’s brains constantly.

writing.

Passing temporal markers, Cap’n.

I just noticed that I have two anniversaries this spring.

The first one is personal–it’s the 25th anniversary of my move from Germany to the United States. I moved here in May of 1996. I know that it’s technically a quarter of a century, but I don’t like thinking of it that way because it makes me feel unbelievably old. But you can’t argue with math. I was 24 when I arrived, and I’ll be 50 this year, so I’ve spent more than half of my life here.

The second anniversary is professional. Ten years ago, I sold my first piece of fiction, a short story called Ink and Blood, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. (It’s still available to read online here.)  I went to the Viable Paradise SF/F workshop on the Vineyard in 2008, so after that it took me three years to sell my first story and five years to sell my first novel. And I was working on my writing skills quite a while before I even got to VP, so my OVERNIGHT SUCCESS only took the better part of a decade.

But what an interesting decade it has been since that story appeared in BCS #74. I sold Terms of Enlistment and its sequel to 47North in the spring of 2013, and I’ve been able to write full-time ever since. It took me until my forties to figure out that I wasn’t really cut out for any other kind of work, so to those of you who are submitting stories and trying to get a foot in the door, I’d say not to worry about being too late to the party. Nothing moves fast in the publishing field anyway.

frontlines. love death+robots. writing.

Frontlines 8, now with title!

Earlier this month, I started work on Frontlines #8. If I stick to my schedule (and so far I am), the draft should be complete by the end of July. I can’t give you a precise publication date for a novel that isn’t complete and turned in yet, obviously. But if all goes as planned, the novel should be out in the first half of next year, probably around April or May.

Oh, and Frontlines #8 has a title now. The novel will be called CENTERS OF GRAVITY.

Until then, the third novel in the Palladium Wars series, CITADEL, will be released on August 10. Things are coming to a boil in the Gaia system, and if you’re looking for a bunch of military SF action mixed in with your space opera, CITADEL has plenty of it.

Speaking of release dates: the official LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS anthology is available now. It contains all the short stories and scripts that were the basis for the first season, including my own LUCKY 13 and SHAPE-SHIFTERS. (Sadly, I am not on the list of contributors for LD+R Season 2, but I am fine with letting some of the other kids have a turn on that swing set, so to speak.)

In other news: the weather is gorgeous, all denizens of Castle Frostbite have had their Pfizer shots, and it looks like we will be able to safely get together with friends and family in the second half of the year. I’ve booked a week-long get-together with some of my close friends (who will also be fully vaccinated), and I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to hanging out with people in person again. Thank you, science.

 

food and drink. writing.

My morning brain fuel of choice

A lot of my writer friends basically live on coffee. I like it every now and then, but it’s not a daily thing for me. It’s what I get when I am grabbing breakfast while out and about, not what I make every morning to get going.

At Castle Frostbite, we drink tea instead, and a lot of it.

This is our morning fuel. It’s Ostfriesentee, a German tea blend from East Frisia (where they drink more tea per capita than anyone else in the world.) It’s a pretty strong Assam/Ceylon blend.

This is what I drink when I am working. On a normal day, I probably have four or five cups of tea before lunch. The East Frisians drink theirs with cream and rock sugar, but ain’t nobody got time for East Frisian tea ceremonies around here, so I drink mine plain and black.

You can get it all over northern Germany, but it’s almost impossible to find in the US, so I bring back ten pounds or so whenever I visit the family, and my brother kindly ships me some whenever I can’t make it over in time before our stock runs low. But every time I do bring back a suitcase full of neatly packaged one-pound packs of black tea, I do feel a little bit like an international drug smuggler, even if it’s a legal drug.

writing.

The Great Link has been upgraded

The Internet connection at Castle Frostbite as of last night:

Not bad for a rural setting on a dirt road, right?

Ah, BUT.

The Internet connection at Castle Frostbite as of today:

Those are legit 2021-level Internet speeds. The kicker is that the new provider is supplying ten times the previous speed on the download, and forty times on the upload…at $20 less per month.

Gigabit fiber will keep this place swimming along for the next decade or so, I think.

 

fountain pens. writing.

Cellulose backups

These are the original handwritten drafts for “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” (which ended up in Love Death + Robots on Netflix as ‘Shapeshifters”), and “Ink and Blood”, which was my first published short story ever. It seems that the stories of mine I like best all started out on paper and came out of a fountain pen.

Funny thing: I went through one of my old notebooks today to search for notes and story ideas I had written down years ago, and came across an unfinished short story I can’t remember writing. It’s in my handwriting, so I obviously did, but I don’t have any memory of it at all. It’s called “Pirates of Shiraz”, and it starts with a group of friends doing a VR bombing run in a WWII multiplayer online game in their guild’s B-17 called Springfield Sally. The pilot has to bail on the group for a few minutes because the baby’s crying in real life in her crib. He puts the plane on autopilot right as German fighters come in, and the guild members tell him that they’ll make him pay the repair bill if the plane goes down. I don’t know where I was going with the story, but it started out pretty well.

If I finished that one now and put it out into the world, people would probably say that it’s a Ready Player One pastiche. (That old notebook is from 2010, so the story fragment was written long before RP1 came out.) This was definitely the weirdest moment I’ve had while going through old notes. That’s why I keep all the notebooks I fill…you never know what you’re going to forget in the future.

books. shameless self-promotion. writing.

Release date for CITADEL

There’s a new release date for CITADEL, the third book in the Palladium Wars series. It will be released in all the usual formats on August 10.

Last year, I was on a two-novels-a-year pace, but then 2020 happened and it all went to hell. But this year has been absolutely fine for me so far as far as writing goes–the blanket of cortisol has lifted, and I am confident I’ll be able to get back to that pace this year and write two novels before the end of 2021. With the time needed for production, however, that means the next Frontlines novel will most likely not be out until early next year. I do intend to release a Frontlines novella or two in the meantime, however, so 2021 won’t be totally Frontlines-free.

CITADEL will be my tenth published novel. That’s not a terrible pace considering the first two only came out in 2013. (I had written TERMS OF ENLISTMENT already, of course, and I was halfway done with LINES OF DEPARTURE already, so it’s really more like eight and a half novels in eight years.) I don’t know if that makes me “prolific”–I certainly feel like a lazy bum compared to writers like Brandon Sanderson–but I am happy with my ability to turn out steady work, and I’ll be happier still when I can get out two books a year instead of just one.

writing.

Crawling toward the finish line

Science Fiction grandmaster James Gunn has died.

My career isn’t old enough for me to have met many of the old grandmasters of science fiction because most of them are no longer around. I did get to meet James Gunn at ConStellation in Lincoln, NE in 2017, where I was the Author Guest of Honor and he was the Grandmaster Guest of Honor. I also got to meet Dr. Ben Bova a few years ago when we did a panel at the Air Force Academy together with a few other writers. Dr. Bova died last month.

I know that numbers are completely arbitrary and that a new year on a calendar has no meaning except for symbolism, but I really am looking forward to seeing 2020 end. It seems like the constant onslaught of bad news and outrage has, as my agent put it, draped a blanket of cortisol over all of us. I am starting the last week of the year with novel edits that are due on the 31st, and finishing a novelette that I owe someone (and that is ridiculously overdue.) But it will all be done by the time the new year rolls around, and even if that number flipping is just a symbolic change, it’s as good a marker as any to hit the mental reset button and start to crawl out from under that cortisol blanket.

I hope you have a lovely holiday season. Stay safe, stay healthy, and let’s shank this year in the back with glee.

books. frontlines. the palladium wars. wild cards. writing.

Paper trail

This row of paperbacks is my collected output for novels since 2013. That does not include the novel I just delivered, titled CITADEL, because that one obviously doesn’t exist yet in paper form. It also doesn’t represent my total output because I also managed to write four novellas and novelettes for Wild Cards (“Stripes” for our mosaic novel LOW CHICAGO, “Probationary” for KNAVES OVER QUEENS, and the stand-alone stories “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” and “Berlin is Never Berlin” for Tor.com.)

By the way, that’s the correct order of publication, for those of you just getting onto the Frontlines train. The first one is Terms of Enlistment, and the rest follow just as they are sorted in the picture. (The Palladium Wars order is super easy to figure out because the titles are in alphabetical sequence. I stole that trick from Sue Grafton.)

As much as 2020 is a near-total write-off, it’s also going to be my first year with more than one novel release. BALLISTIC, second novel in the Palladium Wars series, was released on May 26th, and ORDERS OF BATTLE, seventh novel in the Frontlines series, will be out on December 8th. (That’s only a little more than a week away! Holy carp.) I’m hoping to keep the two-a-year pace going from now on, but that’s only going to work if 2021 turns out better than the dumpster fire that was 2020.