Category: wild cards.

books. wild cards.

Wild Cards: Pairing Up release day

Happy WILD CARDS day!

I have a novelette featured in the latest Wild Cards anthology, titled PAIRING UP. It’s out today and available wherever books are sold:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675676/george-r-r-martin-presents-wild-cards-pairing-up-by-george-r-r-martin/

The novelette is called “In The Forests of the Night”, and it features my Wild Cards character Khan, the joker-ace who’s half tiger. The theme of the anthology is, well, pairing up–as in romantic connections. You don’t need to have read prior Wild Cards books to enjoy this one because they’re all stand-alone stories.

Kirkus Reviews did a nice write-up of the book and said nice things about my story, including this nice little pull quote:

Featuring two memorable and downright cool fight scenes, this story has a fitting conclusion that makes it noteworthy.

Other featured writers in this anthology are Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Bradley Denton, Walton Simons, Peter Newman, Gwenda Bond, and David Anthony Durham. It’s a fun collection of romantic superhero entanglements, which is a subject we don’t often touch in Wild Cards.

 

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.

 

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Knaves Over Queens paperback release day

Today is release day for the paperback version of KNAVES OVER QUEENS, the first Wild Cards mosaic novel with a British setting and theme.

I contributed the novella “Probationary” to this volume, featuring an alternate history version of the Falklands conflict told from the perspective of a rookie British ace, Rory Campbell a.k.a. “Archimedes”. (It’s a war story, so there are lots of battle scenes.)

The other stories in KNAVES OVER QUEENS were written by Paul Cornell, Mark Lawrence, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Emma Newman, Peter Newman, Peadar Ó Guilín, Melinda Snodgrass, Caroline Spector, and Charles Stross. It’s a stand-alone volume full of British-centric stories, and while it helps to know the Wild Cards universe, you don’t need to have read all the books in the series to make sense of this one.

 

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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.

wild cards.

New Wild Cards story at Tor.com

Tor.com has a new Wild Cards story up. It’s called “The Visitor: Kill Or Cure”, and it was written by Mark Lawrence. As with all tor.com stories, it’s free to read.

https://www.tor.com/2020/03/18/the-visitor-kill-or-cure-mark-lawrence/

As I have mentioned in my last post, I have a story in the queue there as well (featuring my favorite joker-ace, Khan), but it won’t be released until May. I’ll be sure to let you all know when it goes live.

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.

 

wild cards. writing.

When characters take the wheel

I have a blog post up on the Wild Cards blog, in which I talk about the relationship between character and plot, and attempt an answer to the question of which is more important to a good narrative. 

I’ve been a member of the consortium since late 2015, and since then, I’ve turned out two novelettes at Tor.com (How To Move Spheres and Influence People, released on March 27, and a new Khan story that will be out next year). I’ve also written two novellas—Stripes, for the LOW CHICAGO mosaic novel, and PROBATIONARY, for Knaves over Queens, our first UK-centered Wild Cards book. It’s great fun to be part of that world, and I feel like I am stretching my writing wings in ways they wouldn’t necessarily flex in my day-to-day genre writing. It’s making me a better writer, letting me be part of a group of insanely talented colleagues, and turning out stories that are among the better stuff I’ve written. It’s kept me busy in between the day job novels, and I am very glad to be a part of it. Sometimes you are presented with an opportunity that feels like you’ll be in over your head if you accept. But then you find that you can not only rise to the challenge, but that your professional skills improve greatly as a result. It can be scary to hop off the deep end, but there’s treasure at the bottom of the pool.

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New blog entry at Wild Cards World

In other Wild Cards news, there’s a new post on the Wild Cards World blog, this one by Michael Cassutt: “Word-building in Wild Cards” (yes, you read that correctly.)

I’ve talked about writing for Wild Cards before (most extensively in this post from a while back), but one thing I only touched on in that post is something that’s probably the biggest benefit to having joined the consortium, at least to me.

Not only is it a ton of fun to play in a superhero sandbox that’s so different from what I usually do, but the sheer amount of talent present in the consortium forces me to really bring my A-game. I consider the stories I’ve written for Wild Cards among the very best stuff I’ve written so far, and I hope that trend continues because it teaches me to broaden my horizons and flex muscles that I don’t necessarily use enough on a regular basis.

 

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Knaves Over Queens review at Locus

Paula Guran at Locus Magazine reviewed KNAVES OVER QUEENS, our first UK-centered Wild Cards mosaic novel, and had some nice things to say about it.

KNAVES OVER QUEENS came out in the UK last year already, and it will be available in the US in August of this year. (That’s due to some release date shuffling and release precedence by the publisher.) If you want to get your US-based hands on it earlier than August, I hear that Amazon UK will gladly ship books to the US.

I have a novella in that volume, called PROBATIONARY. It tells the story of the first mission of newly minted British ace and Silver Helix member, Sub-Lieutenant Rory Campbell, who gets to assist the British armed forces in their mission to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982. He has a very utilitarian and not-so-flashy talent–he can control directed EMP blasts. That makes him useful as a military asset, even if it won’t get him on the cover of SEXY ACES magazine.

Other novellas in the book were written by Emma Newman, Charlie Stross, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Caroline Spector, Paul Cornell, Peadar Ó Guilín, Mark Lawrence, Peter Newman, and Melinda Snodgrass. (The volume was edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass.)

It’s a fun book that’s a little off the beaten path for Wild Cards because it’s not US-centric. (On a related note, I had to take out one instance of a character saying “lock and load” because the editor at Harper Collins UK said it was an Americanism. I’ve done some research since then, and it turns out that the phrase originated with the British Army in the days of the flintlock rifle, so I WAS RIGHT AFTER ALL.)

Anyway, PROBATIONARY is a war story, and I tend to be pretty okay at writing those, so I think it turned out quite well. If you’re interested, pick up a copy of KNAVES OVER QUEENS from a UK bookseller online, or pre-order the US edition.