Category: writing.

wild cards. writing.

This post brought to you by the Superhero Writers Union.

I love writing for Wild Cards. It’s an amazingly detailed world that has been expanded by thirty-plus writers over thirty years, and it’s a ton of fun to be a part of that. I mean, I get to make up my own super-powered characters and then let them loose in a playground that has been constantly expanded and improved for three decades. And the Wild Cards consortium is just stacked with super-nice and super-talented people.

That said, there’s one thing that annoys me about being a Wild Cards writer, and that’s entitled Game of Thrones fans.

Every time GRRM posts something on social media about Wild Cards, it takes about five seconds before someone responds with a dismissive one-liner that totally shits on whatever it is he’s trying to promote or announce. And it’s always a variation of the same boring, unoriginal garbage. Finish Winds of Winter. Nobody cares about Wild Cards. WHERE’S THE BOOK, GEORGE? NOT BUYING ANYTHING FROM YOU UNTIL YOU FINISH WINDS OF WINTER. Etcetera, etcetera. Yawn.

GRRM is the editor of Wild Cards (along with Melinda Snodgrass). He edits the books, he doesn’t write them. They are written by the members of the Wild Cards consortium. It’s a total dick move to dismiss out of hand the talents and work of the writers just because you think that the editor of the book ought to be spending all his time on that other book, the one you think you’re entitled to receive. (Never mind that “nobody cares about Wild Cards” is flat-out wrong. Our signings and panels are always busy, and the longest signing line I’ve ever sat for was a Wild Cards signing. The series has picked up a lot of fans in thirty years, and I highly suspect that it wouldn’t be thirty years old–or getting developed into a TV series AS I TYPE THIS–if nobody cared about it.)

I’m pretty proud of my Wild Cards contributions. I think they are some of the best stories I’ve written so far. And it makes me cranky whenever we try to do Wild Cards promo, and some whining garage dweller comes along and dismisses the whole thing with prejudice because OMG GRRM SPENT HIS TIME ON SOMETHING OTHER THAN WINDS OF WINTER. It annoys me, and when I am annoyed, I start adding names to my Go Fuck Yourself list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

travel. wild cards. writing.

You wake up one morning, and half the year is gone.

There must be a glitch in the Matrix, because there is absolutely no way that Worldcon is a week from Thursday already.

<is handed note from off-screen>

I have just been informed by my producer that Worldcon is indeed a week from Thursday already. 

I spent the first half of 2018 writing the first novel in the new series 47North is about to launch. In June I switched my brain to cool-down mode, and then I spent most of July editing the manuscript to hammer it into shape. Then we took a family trip down south to see the in-laws in Tennessee, and now we’re smack in the middle of August already, and I have to fly out to California next week.

In related news: I will be at Worldcon in San Jose. There’s a Wild Cards mass signing scheduled for Saturday, August 18 in the Dealers’ Room from 10am to noon. Bring your Wild Cards books, and you’ll be able to get them signed by a whole squad of writers. Consortium members in attendance will be Melinda Snodgrass, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Caroline Spector, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Bob Wayne, David D. Levine, George R.R. Martin, and that Marko Kloos fellow. I think we’re also doing a Wild Cards panel on Sunday, but the programming is still a bit in the air, so you may want to check the official program if you want to attend that panel.

Other than that, I’ll be mostly hanging out with friends, which is what I usually do at cons. If you happen to see me at the convention center or at the bar somewhere (a likely scenario), do come up and say hello. Worldcon is my main annual socializing event, and it’s always great to meet new people.

Let’s just hope that the fault lines stay quiet while I spend a long weekend right between the Hayward and the San Andreas. (Well, maybe a little earthquake would be cool.)


fountain pens. writing.

At work again (and some pen & paper neepery)

Break’s over, and while I am waiting for the edit notes for the first PALLADIUM WARS novel, I am busy working on several different projects, one of which is a new Frontlines novella that I hope to have finished by the end of the month. Then there’s more Wild Cards stuff, and it looks like I’ll finally have some time to get started in earnest on the novel in the Ink & Blood world I’ve been threatening to write for years now. That one has had the benefit of stewing in its own juices for all this time, which means I’ve had a lot of time for world-building. I’ve said to Robin that my elevator pitch for this one is “Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones by way of the Brothers Grimm”, and I think that’s not even a joke.

For the new work, I’ve taken to fully drafting in longhand again instead of just dashing off a chapter here and there, and it’s lovely and relaxing. I do think the slower pace of handwriting makes for tighter writing, or maybe that just comes from the word-by-word revision you have to do when you type everything into the computer. What ends up in Scrivener or Word is already a second draft, and I can definitely tell the difference.

I used to be a Moleskine fan, but for someone who writes a lot and drags his notebooks everywhere, the binding on Moleskines does not age well. I have some battered notebooks on the shelf containing the handwritten draft of LINES OF DEPARTURE, and you can definitely tell they’ve been opened and closed dozens of times every day for the better part of a year.

My new notebook love is Black ‘n Red. They’re spiral-bound, with extremely robust polymer covers, and the paper is the best fountain pen-friendly notebook paper I’ve found. It’s smooth and thick, and it absolutely will not show bleed-through, not even with a broad-leaning medium nib and a wet ink. I used to dislike spiral bindings because you can’t write well on the left-hand page (the verso) without your hand running up against the spiral spine. The simple solution for me is to write only on the recto (the right-hand page), and flip the notebook upside down when I’ve reached the last page, which turns the old verso into the recto. (It also looks cool when you change colors for the upside-down recto.)

fountain pens. writing.

Analog manuscript

Found these again while straightening out the office bookshelf:

That’s the handwritten manuscript for LINES OF DEPARTURE. The finished version filled two 192-page large (A4) sized Piccadilly notebooks. And because I am a pen nerd, I remember which pens I used (Pelikan 205 and Lamy 2000, both with EF nibs), and the ink (Noodler’s Bulletproof Black).

The first drafts of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE were written by hand and then typed into Scrivener. I like doing that because what ends up on the computer is a word-for-word revision that has been edited on the fly. And because I am a pen nerd, I like the tactile feeling of nib on paper. It’s also immensely satisfying to have an original handwritten manuscript on the shelf when you’re done.

These days, I still use longhand for world-building, notes, and shorter fiction, but the novels are going straight into the computer (still via Scrivener) because it saves time and doesn’t hold up the schedule. I’ll go back to longhand-first for the military fantasy novel I am planning to write later this year because it seems appropriate (it’s the Ink and Blood world from my short story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, only rolled out onto a much larger canvas).

If you want to keep your handwritten stuff around, don’t skimp on the notebook. The Piccadillys I used were Moleskine knock-offs (bought at Borders on the cheap at the time because I was poor), and their binding and cover lamination didn’t hold up well over the years. Then again, those went with me everywhere for over a year, so maybe the Moleskine wouldn’t have fared any better.

 

books. frontlines. writing.

Continuity errors in POINTS OF IMPACT

POINTS OF IMPACT is out and doing well. As always, some oopsies made it through the entire editorial process past a dozen sets of eyeballs. And as always, I started getting Tweets and emails about continuity bloopers not 24 hours after the book hit the virtual shelves. Thanks to all to took the time to write and point them out. I shall now address them so they’re all in one spot for easy future reference.

MINOR SPOILERS FOR “POINTS OF IMPACT” FOLLOW:

Read More “Continuity errors in POINTS OF IMPACT”

art. books. shameless self-promotion. wicked sharp. wild cards. writing.

Low Chicago

So I have something pretty wicked to show you today.

Remember how I mentioned that my first Wild Cards novella in the U.S. will be out in June as part of a novel called LOW CHICAGO?

Well, the final cover of LOW CHICAGO is in, and it’s freaking glorious. Not just because it’s cool by itself, which it definitely is…but because the cover character is mine. He’s called Khan, and he’s the protagonist of the novella “Stripes”, which is part of that book. This is the first Wild Cards character I got to create, and he’s probably the most fun to write of all the fictional people who sit around in the fiction casting office in my brain. He’s a joker-ace, which means that his Wild Cards mutation makes him look inhuman but also gives him great powers. What kind of mutation, you ask? Well, let me show you the cover:

That is a pretty beastly cover, I think. (Pun intended.) The artwork was done by Michael Komarck.

LOW CHICAGO will be out on July 16th, and the other stories in the volume were written by John Jos. Miller, Saladin Ahmed, Paul Cornell, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, and Melinda M. Snodgrass. It’s part of what we call the American Triad, but it’s a stand-alone volume, so you don’t have to have read the entire series to know what’s going on in this one. 

books. capitalism. gadgetry. technology. writing.

Kindles, and stuff to put on them

Andrew Liptak over at The Verge included Frontlines in a list of thirteen sci-fi series starters to fill up that new Kindle you got for Christmas. I’m in some really lofty company there, along with James S.A. Corey, Ann Leckie, Linda Nagata, John Scalzi, and N.K. Jemisin.

My favorite reads this year were the Broken Earth trilogy books by N.K. Jemisin, and the Expanse novels by James S.A. Corey (fellow Wild Cards writers Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham). The Expanse is just a rollicking good military-ish SF opus (although more Firefly than Battlestar Galactica as far as military detail goes), and the Broken Earth books are an eclectic and original post-apocalyptic melange of fantasy and SF that is very much its own thing.

With the sixth Frontlines novel out in two weeks, the series stands at over 600,000 words. If I wrote epic fantasy like George R.R. Martin or Brandon Sanderson, that would be maybe two books instead of six, so keep that in mind when you hear people bitching about release spans between books.

Speaking of Kindles and such, here’s my Christmas purchase this year:

That’s a Kindle Oasis 2, the new waterproof model with the 7″ e-ink display. I had the original Oasis, but surrendered it to Robin pretty much as soon as it arrived because it’s far more suitable for one-handed reading than her old Paperwhite. The new one is heavier than the old model, but the extra screen real estate is great, and it doesn’t need an add-on battery cover to get decent battery life anymore.

I find that I read far more on a dedicated e-ink device than on a tablet. My attention span does not get taxed with notifications and alerts, and there’s no way to check email or Twitter on a Paperwhite or Oasis. And it’s much easier on the eyes than a backlit tablet screen.

 

books. capitalism. wild cards. writing.

It was the night before the night before Christmas

Those are my author copies of POINTS OF IMPACT. They just arrived on the Big Brown Truck of Happiness yesterday. This is the culmination of my productive output in 2017, which has been a super difficult year for getting creative work done.

POINTS OF IMPACT, the sixth book in the Frontlines series, will be out on January 9 in Kindle, paperback, and Audible formats. Order early, order often! (And yes, pre-orders are good for writers because good pre-order numbers impress publishers and make it more likely for them to want more books in the series.)

That’s the series so far in publication order. I did get to have input regarding the covers, and I like that we managed to have a distinctive color for every book. I think they look pretty sweet all together on the shelf like that.

2018 will be a good year for me as far as published works are concerned. POINTS OF IMPACT will be out in January. In March, Voyager UK will publish our British-themed Wild Cards volume KNAVES OVER QUEENS, which features a Wild Cards novella written by me. In June, Tor Books will publish LOW CHICAGO, the second book in the Wild Cards “American triad”, containing my novella STRIPES. I’m pretty proud of that one and think it’s one of the best things I’ve written so far. (The first book of the American triad is MISSISSIPPI ROLL, which is out from Tor Books this month. I don’t have a story in that one, but my friends and esteemed fellow Wild Cards rogues Stephen Leigh, John Jos. Miller, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Carrie Vaughn, David D. Levine, and Cherie Priest do.)

And chances are good that I’ll have another military SF novel out with 47North before the end of the year. That one will not be a Frontlines book, but the first one in a new series. (Does that mean Frontlines is finished, you ask? Absolutely not. I just felt that it was time to have another playground to explore new ideas and characters so I am not in the same poor guy’s head all the time.) I think I’ve cooked up a really cool world and some kick-ass characters, and I hope you’ll like them. But more on that front later…

 

 

 

 

conventions. friends. travel. writing.

Home again, home again, etc. etc.

We have been back from Europe for a week now, and my brain is still adjusting. You know when you start a lawnmower up for the first time in the spring after it’s been sitting in the garage all winter? That hesitant sputtering? Yeah, that’s what it feels like, even though I came back from Worldcon with a bunch of new ideas and motivation. But on Monday, the kids will be back in school, and things will be back to normal.

I didn’t do any official panels or programming at Worldcon. I attended the Hugo reception as an acceptor for my friend Scott Andrews, who couldn’t make it to Finland this year. Alas, Scott didn’t win (my friend Kat calls him “the Susan Lucci of the Semiprozine category”),and I didn’t have to hold a speech in front of a few thousand people.

The rest of Worldcon was basically just hanging out, meeting up with friends, and sightseeing in and around Helsinki, which is a nice place full of impossibly attractive people. Like I said on Facebook–you know when you see that boy or girl on the street that would have been the hottest thing in your high school by a wide margin? Helsinki has one of those every fifteen yards. And they all dress like they just stepped out of an A&F catalog, too. Even the ones in the sloppy outfits look like they spent about half an hour putting together just the right sort of sloppy look. Robin and I concluded that there’s a Finnish facial type that looks model-esque to North American eyes.

This was also the first trip we’ve taken together where we were both equally disadvantaged in the language department, because neither of us spoke the primary language. We usually end up traveling to places where one of us is in reasonably good command of the language, but we were both uncomprehending illiterates in Finland. The one assist I got was the bilingual signage–I could make sense of the Swedish signs. But Finnish isn’t related to Germanic or Romance languages at all, so even with German, Dutch, English, and Spanish between us, we couldn’t even guess at most of the Finnish words. Luckily, most of the Finns spoke good to excellent English, so we weren’t reduced to pointing at pictures.

We combined Worldcon with a visit to Germany and some sightseeing in the Netherlands and the UK, so this was our one big trip this year. I know some writers who are on the road far more than I am, but I don’t know how they do it. Not only do I not get anything written while I’m traveling, it also takes me a good while to get back to my regular work routine after the trip. But we’re back, the laundry is done, the luggage is stored, and I have stuff to write, so back to work I go.

books. travel. wild cards. writing.

Emerging from the word mines

I turned in the final edits of POINTS OF IMPACT today, so now it’s full steam ahead toward publication. (I don’t have a date for you yet, but you’ll know as soon as I do.)

That makes six novels in the last five years, which isn’t bad for a slacker like me. That reckoning is cheating a little, because I had TERMS OF ENLISTMENT finished well before I got the first novel contract in 2013. Even so, that’s a novel a year so far–still not terrible. In the future, however, I want to strive to be a two-novels-per-year sort of writer.

I’ll be pretty busy on all fronts for the rest of the year. Now that POINTS is turned in, I have to finish a few Wild Cards-related items I can’t disclose yet, and then I have to get to work on a new novel. There’s also lots of travel coming up–this weekend, I’ll be at Manticon in Minneapolis, and the week after that, I’ll be attending the Launch Pad astronomy workshop in Wyoming, to help me make the science in my science fiction a little more, uh, firm. And this summer, the wife and I are going to Europe to do some global gallivanting before we attend Worldcon in Helsinki in August. I have to say that of all the jobs I’ve ever had, this one is by far the coolest, even better than the Assistant S’mores Tester temp job right out of college.