Geek Mountain State has an interview up with some weirdo who wrote some novels about spaceships and flechette rifles and stuff blowing up. Seems shifty to me, but if that’s your kind of thing, head on over there and read what the nerd had to say.
Category: books.
yes, sir, officer-sergeant-general, sir.
A reader on Amazon.com caught a detail about the jacket text for LINES OF DEPARTURE and wondered why Andrew is referred to as an officer when he was merely an acting petty officer at the end of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, and the Kindle sample of LINES gives his new rank as Staff Sergeant. (Hey! Navies don’t use that rank!)
Here’s the explanation I provided just in case someone else starts reading LINES and gets confused as to why Mr. Grayson now has an Army rank:
In the almost five years between TERMS and LINES, the NAC Defense Corps was reorganized into a unified service structure similar to the current Canadian model. Navy, Marines, and Territorial Army were all rolled into one big happy family. The new service structure is organized into Fleet Arm, HD (Homeworld Defense), and SI (Spaceborne Infantry). (As Andrew points out in LINES: “We needed new guns and starships to fight the new threat. What we got instead were new beret colors and shoulderboards.”)
Andrew is an acting Petty Officer at the end of TERMS and (briefly) a proper PO before the rank structures change. In the reorganized NAC Defense Corps, all the ranks are Army style ranks, whether you fly a drop ship, command a starship, or trudge around as infantry. Throughout LINES, Andrew is an E-6 (Staff Sergeant).
The jacket copy got this particular detail slightly wrong (Andrew is a non-com, not an officer). I pointed it out to the copyeditor, but they didn’t correct it in time.
I trimmed a bunch of stuff from the prologue, and as a result it may not be entirely clear at first that this reorganization happened, so if you’re at all wondering what the deal is with the NAC ranks, there you have it.
unabridged audio, without the german accent.
The unabridged audiobooks of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE are up on Audible for pre-order. The release date is January 28, same as the print and ebook versions. The narrator for both books is Luke Daniels, who also narrated the Iron Druid series (among many, many other books.) Both books clock in at a little over nine hours.
This is some pretty cool stuff, I must say. Audio versions of my books, professionally produced and read by a pro. Robin is particularly looking forward to getting her hands on the audiobooks because that’s how she does most of her reading, on account of her having a physical commute. When I still drove around a lot, I listened to audiobooks on CD (ask your parents, kids!), and I got hooked on them quite fast. We’d both find it amusing to see the other pull into the parking spot in front of the old house in Knoxville and take another 5-10 minutes to get out of the car because the chapter wasn’t quite over yet.
daddy used nintendo 2ds. it’s super effective!
How do you glue a first-grader to the couch? You give her a Nintendo 2DS for Christmas:
She hasn’t moved from that spot since yesterday morning.
We had a low-key Christmas here at Castle Frostbite. No house guests, just the four of us and the doggens. We had our traditional Christmas feast of Surf & Turf (lobster and venison steaks), and pretty much fritzed the day away with eating, drinking, playing computer games, and listening to Christmas music. It was perfectly relaxing.
With the kids at home until the new year, I’m taking the week mostly off from work to tackle Mount Unfolded Laundry and tend various overdue projects around the house. We’ll see if I can keep myself from any serious writing productivity until the end of next week.
Speaking of writing, here’s another Buzzfeed list I’m in:
12 Science Fiction books to look forward to in January
I’m pretty excited about LINES OF DEPARTURE, which has turned out extremely well (and which has been rather effusively praised by just about everyone who has read it already.) I can’t wait until you can all get your hands on it—and this time in paperback and audio. MY NOVEL HAS ASSUMED PHYSICAL FORM. <insert sinister, semi-hysterical laughter>
TERMS OF ENLISTMENT will see a new release at that time as well, with a matching new cover and in the same formats. If you’re asking yourself whether to drop the money on the new version: it has a rewritten Chapter 23, new cover art, and numerous smaller edits, corrections, and improvements. Because it’s a 47North book now, I wasn’t able to roll all those changes into the old version that people purchased already, as my publisher considers the new version a Director’s Cut, so to speak. But hey—they paid a lot of people to make a lot of improvements to the book, so I think it’s a justified position. Rest assured that if you choose not to buy the new version of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, you won’t miss anything essential.
Anyway, enough post-Christmas self-promotion. I’m just really excited about this new “making a living by making up stuff” thing, and I want to keep that racket going for as long as I can. Hope you all had a great Christmas and happy holidays, and stay tuned for all the stuff coming out of the Castle Frostbite Magic Daycare & Novel Factory in 2014.
one of the pretty-good-est books of 2013.
Buzzfeed has an article up on “The 14 Greatest Science Fiction Books Of The Year“, and TERMS OF ENLISTMENT comes in at #6. The author says a few very nice words about it, and it’s always a pleasure to see positive reviews, mentions, or inclusions in lists that have the word “greatest” or “best” in them.
I think I’m having an early case of the Release Day Jitters. LINES OF DEPARTURE will be out on January 28, but I already had trouble falling asleep last night thinking about it. I’d love for the second novel to do at least as well as the first one, which means that LINES has a big pair of shoes to fill. On the other hand, just about everyone who has read it (my editors and a very small group of beta readers) said that it’s a better novel than TERMS in almost every respect, which means that if people like it half as much as they did the first novel, it should do just fine. I guess I need to quit obsessing and get back to work.
To that end, let me ask you all a question, especially those of you who have read TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and the ancillary short story and novella. Which character(s), settings, or events from TERMS would you love to see expanded and treated in more detail, maybe with a short story or novella on the side? I’m currently at work on the third novel, called ANGLES OF ATTACK, but there’s always a little bit of room on the dance card, so to speak.
my books, they have covers.
Check out the cover art for LINES OF DEPARTURE:
There’s also a new cover for the re-release of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, but it doesn’t show on the Amazon page yet. You can see it in the search results when you look for “Terms of Enlistment” on Amazon, though.
hey, I know that novel.
Check out the 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards, and look at the Science Fiction category.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-books-2013?utm_source=twitter.com
The little Space Kablooie novel is in the opening round for Best Books of 2013. Pretty cool!
measures of absolution.
Happy goddamn Monday, kids!
There may or may not be a new novella of mine out on the Kindle. It may or may not be called “Measures of Absolution”. It may or may not be availabl…no. You know what? Forget that angle. This is private commerce, not the Obamacare website.
It’s called “Measures of Absolution”. It’s sixty-some pages of new story, told from over the shoulder of Andrew Grayson’s TA squad mate, Corporal Jackson, and it starts right in the middle of the epic clusterfuck that is the Battle of Detroit.
You can get it here:
And the best part is that it’ll cost you less than a donut and a coffee, which give entertainment for minutes. For the same price, this 64-page novella will give entertainment for tens of minutes, possibly even hour.
It’s a KDP Select title, so I can’t sell it directly or through another source, but you can read it on the Kindle reader for your OS. Because the file is DRM-free, you can also download it and covert it to a different format with Calibre.
terms of enlistment, the paperback.
My publisher, 47North, is going to release a new edition of Terms of Enlistment at the same time they publish the sequel, Lines of Departure. It will get a new shiny cover to match the second book, and it will be available in dead tree format as well. The paperback version is available for pre-order now, for those of you who have been looking to get your hands on it:
I know it’s a bit of a wait, but at least it will be out on cellulose, and for much less than I would have had to charge for a self-published print run via Lulu.com or what have you.
meanwhile, over at kat’s place.
My friend Katrina does a recurring blog feature called Prime Writing, and the latest installment features some dorky dude who wrote a novel about spaceships and stuff:
http://www.katrinaarcher.com/journal/2013/06/24/prime-writing-marko-kloos/
You may want to check it out. Said dorky dude talks a bit about his novel and how it came about.