Category: writing.

books. contests and giveaways. the palladium wars. writing.

BALLISTIC giveaway

 

BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series, will be out in a little less than two weeks. I just got my author copies in, so I figured I’d do a little giveaway.

Leave a comment on this post if you’d like a signed trade paperback of BALLISTIC. I’ll leave the post open until release day, which is Tuesday, May 26. On May 26, I will let the computer pick five entries out of the hat, and I will send those five people a signed paperback. This giveaway is open to anyone in the world, and I’ll cover the shipping.

Don’t forget that Goodreads still has a giveaway for the Kindle version going on until May 25, so put your name in the hat over there if you’d rather have an electronic copy.

shameless self-promotion. wild cards. writing.

Berlin is never Berlin

Tor.com has a new Wild Cards story out today, written by me.

It’s called “Berlin Is Never Berlin”, and it features Khan, my joker-ace character who is half Bengal tiger and 100% bad-ass. (Khan was my point of view character in “Stripes”, my contribution to our Wild Cards novel LOW CHICAGO.)

In this story, Khan takes a bodyguard assignment for a bunch of spoiled rich kids who want to go clubbing and socializing in Europe. Spoiler: it doesn’t turn out to be the milk run he expected.

The title comes from a saying about Berlin: “Paris is always Paris, but Berlin is never Berlin.” It refers to the ever-changing face of the city, which seems to be in constant flux.

I had a lot of fun writing that story, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. As with all stories on Tor.com, it’s free to read.

books. frontlines. writing.

Frontlines #7 cover

That’s the cover for ORDERS OF BATTLE, seventh book in the Frontlines series. As with all Frontlines covers, it features spaceships…but as with all Frontlines covers, the art doesn’t necessarily correspond to any specific event in the book, so don’t try to divinate plot points or anything.

What I can tell you about ORDERS OF BATTLE is that it takes place a few years after the events of the last Frontlines novel, POINTS OF IMPACT, and that it follows Andrew Grayson on the next chapter of his life and career in the war against the Lankies. Without giving away too much, I can say that those of you who want to know just what the hell the Lankies are and where they originated should get your money’s worth out of this book and the ones which are to follow.

(Yes, that means there’s a Frontlines #8 in the works.)

ORDERS OF BATTLE will be released on December 8, 2020. I know the product page doesn’t show an Audible book, but that’s most likely because it’s still in production. (The Audible versions need to be narrated, which means the production calendar has to allow for the schedule of the narrator.) But this will be my ninth published novel with 47North, and all of the previous ones have had Audible versions on release day, so I have no reason to believe this one will be different.

books. capitalism. frontlines. shameless self-promotion. the palladium wars. wild cards. writing.

Release date for Frontlines #7

ORDERS OF BATTLE, the seventh novel in the Frontlines series, will be released on December 8. There’s now a product page up on Amazon, where you can pre-order the book on Kindle, in paperback format, or as an Audible book:

There’s no cover art yet as the book is still in production, but that will be added as soon as the cover is final.

Just in case you missed it, here’s the product page for BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series, due to be released on May 26:

And there’s a third release this year! This one is my Wild Cards novelette titled BERLIN IS NEVER BERLIN, due out from Tor.com on May 6:

Not a bad year for new releases, I’d say. And I am hard at work to make sure that things will keep coming at this pace.

 

writing.

ARCs for BALLISTIC are in

I just got a box of ARCs for BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series. Still massively digging the cover, which was apparently the first shot the cover artist took at the concept. I looked at it and said, “I’m good with that.”

The Palladium Wars series is different from Frontlines by intent. Frontlines is first person present tense, Palladium Wars is third person past tense. I made that choice deliberately to give each those universes their own voice, and to make sure that Aden and the other POV characters don’t read and sound like Andrew in Frontlines. Writing in two different universes and narrative techniques has helped me improve my craft because I had to stretch slightly different writing muscles, so to speak. Starting a new series to run concurrently with Frontlines has also enabled me to look at the Frontlines universe with a new eye. Switching back and forth helps me stay on my toes and hopefully avoid falling into a rut.

You’ll be able to judge for yourselves whether I’ve succeeded with that because 2020 will see new book releases in both universes, and I hope to be able to keep that frequency going from now on.

(BALLISTIC will be out on May 26. ORDERS OF BATTLE will follow late in the year, and I’ll update this page as soon as I have a firm release date.)

 

books. frontlines. writing.

Frontlines #7 is done

I was planning to go to Detroit for ConFusion this past weekend, but the draft for the seventh Frontlines book, ORDERS OF BATTLE, wasn’t quite done yet. Work comes before fun because fun don’t pay the bills, so I sucked it up and cancelled the trip altogether just before the weekend.

It turned out to be a good decision in more than one way because I came down with a stomach bug over the weekend, and a winter storm moved in that would have made the 1,200-mile round trip a bit of an ordeal, so I am glad it panned out the way it did even if I was moping a bit on Friday that I wouldn’t get to hang out with friends.

But all’s well–I turned in the book on Monday morning, and my editor has assured me that it will make a 2020 release. I’m guessing it will be out in November or December. (The book needs to be proofread, put into print, get read for an Audible version, have a cover designed, and so on. The schedules of dozens of people have to be in sync, so you can’t just slap a draft onto your editor’s desk and expect to see the book out a month later.)

Now I get to start planning the two novels I’ll be writing this year while I wait for the first round of edits to come back. I do have some Frontlines novellas in the works to fill in the gap between now and the release of ORDERS OF BATTLE, so I should have something for you soon to tide you over.

 

 

technology. writing.

Keeping it simple

 

One of the perks of the writing profession is that it has virtually no hardware requirements. My friends in the 3D animation or video and photography fields have to spend money on powerful rigs with lots of fast storage, but I work with text. Everything I’ve ever written, a dozen novels and as many novellas and short stories, could probably fit on two or three of the old 1.44MB floppy disks if I saved everything in plain text.

My entire computing life fits onto a 2017 MacBook Air with the base 128GB storage, and I’ve only filled a quarter of even that modest storage. (I only use the essential apps I need for work—Scrivener, Word, and web and email because I can’t take those off without breaking the OS.) There’s nothing on this machine that isn’t needed for putting words down and editing them later. All my pictures and non-essential data are saved in the cloud, so I don’t need a lot of local storage. The processor in the MBA is a few generations behind, but I don’t need a ton of horsepower to run a word processor, and I picked the old model over a newer one because of the vastly superior keyboard and better battery life.

The external 27” display is there for ergonomics, because looking down at a 13” screen all day gives me a literal pain in the neck, and my eyesight is going downhill as I get older. But whenever I need to take my work with me, all I have to do is disconnect the laptop and stick it into a bag. All the benefits of a desktop, but with the added ability to take everything on the road without having to worry about keeping stuff in sync.

Paring my electronics use down to just a handful of single-use devices has done wonders for my productive workflow. It’s amazing how much fluff you can cut from your setup once you focus on the essentials and ruthlessly drop everything else. I have a blog post in mind for those friends of mine who have expressed curiosity about my recent ditching of social media and technology distractions, but that one will have to wait until I have turned in this novel.

books. writing.

My creative balance for the decade

Screen Shot 2019 12 18 at 7 05 33 PM

According to the Intertubes, that is my creative output for the 2010s. 

Seven novels, two Wild Cards novellas and one novelette, and three short stories. Their tally is missing one short story, “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare”, which was used for LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS this year. I’ve also written two more novels this year that won’t be out until 2020, so I’ve managed to write nine novels in the 2010s. And Jet City Comics did a four-issue Frontlines graphic novel called REQUIEM, which is also missing from the list.

That’s really not a bad record as far as productivity goes, and I especially like the regular numbers behind the novels, one per year since 2013. From 2020 on, the plan is to bring that number to two a year, so there should be three times as many entries on that page by the end of 2029….provided I don’t get hit by a bus or decide to hang up the keyboard and become a shepherd in New Zealand or something.

Overall, I really can’t complain about the 2010s, even if the second half of the decade has been a little strange and noisy. Since my career started taking off in 2013, I got to launch two SF series and sell over a million copies, see two of my short stories turned into Netflix material, and contribute a good number of words to the Wild Cards universe. I’ve also been able to travel a lot and make a bunch of new friends in my new professional field. If things keep going on this general trajectory, the 2020s should be a very good decade for me. We shall see.

I hope you all had a great holiday season, and I wish you a happy and prosperous 2020.

writing.

Wild Cards covers

I asked for the high-resolution artwork for the covers to my Wild Cards stories because I wanted to have them printed and mounted for the office wall.

That’s John Picacio’s work on the left (for the novelette “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” on Tor.com), and Michael Komarck on the right (for the novella “Stripes” in the Wild Cards mosaic novel “Low Chicago”.)

The covers for the Frontlines novels are nice, and the ones for the Palladium Wars books are grand and epic, but the Wild Cards covers I’ve gotten so far are flat-out amazing. It’s surreal to see my characters brought to life by some of the most talented illustrators in the business.

Speaking of Wild Cards, there’s a new story up on Tor.com. This one has a Picacio cover as well. It’s called “Naked, Stoned, and Stabbed”, and it was written by Bradley Denton.

 

frontlines. new hampshah. photography. the palladium wars. writing.

Non-Euclidean geometry, fall edition

 

When I need to let my brain’s background processes figure out a story element or untie a knot in a chapter, I take a walk in the place you see pictured above. It never fails to work.

In other news, I just turned in the edits for BALLISTIC, second in the Palladium Wars series, and I think it turned out very well. In fact, it may just be the fastest-paced plot I’ve ever managed to squeeze between the front and back covers.

Next on the production schedule is Frontlines #7, which will take me the rest of the year to finish. The title of the seventh Frontlines novel is ORDERS OF BATTLE.