I know it’s high time to groom and trim Andy A. Doodle when he starts to look remarkably like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Love Death + Robots anthology on sale this week
If you enjoyed Love Death + Robots on Netflix and you would like to own the anthology of all the short stories that were the basis for the first season, I have good news: it’s on sale this week at Amazon for the low, low price of $2.99 for the Kindle version. Here are the links for the respective regional Amazon pages:
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0923HJQ5G
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0923HJQ5G
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0923HJQ5G
Australia/NZ: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0923HJQ5G
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0923HJQ5G
The anthology includes both “Lucky 13″, which was the basis for Episode 13, aptly called “Lucky Thirteen”), and “On The Use Of Shape-Shifters In Warfare”, my Army-Werewolves-in-Afghanistan story that was the basis for Episode 10, “Shape-Shifters.”
Some travel snapshots
Not everyone got to travel internationally since the start of the pandemic, so I figured I’d share a few pictures from my quick visit back home last month. (All photos taken with the camera on my iPhone 11.)
Descending into Schiphol. I fly into Amsterdam because it’s the closest major airport to where my family lives. Big fan of both the city and the country.
Schiphol airport is best airport. Whenever I see this place, I am happy because I’m either about to see family or I’m about to head home.
A local bakery/cafe in my old home city. All the shops were open and at what looked like pre-pandemic business. Indoor mask-wearing was mandatory and universal.
Prinzipalmarkt, the heart of the main shopping mile of Münster. Bombed to rubble in WWII and (luckily) rebuilt to match the old historic buildings.
The pub/restaurant next to the old City Hall. I want to think that my great-grandpa had a beer there every once in a while back in the 19th century already.
Looking down Prinzipalmarkt the other way, north to south.
St. Ludger’s parish church. My old Kindergarten is still there, just beyond the left edge of the photo.
The old Stuhlmacher pub next to the historic City Hall, where the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War.
I remember playing in that fountain when I was a little kid. The church on the left is St. Lambert’s, where my great-grandfather was baptized in 1869.
Auf Schalke. 57,000 fans in attendance. Proof of vaccination was mandatory for entry, but it still felt weird to be in a big crowd like this again.
One of the things I miss from there: German bread. This isn’t even a fancy bakery, just the bakery counter at a large discount store.
Heading back to Amsterdam by train after six days of packed visitation schedule with the family.
Had the entire 1st class compartment to myself, which is a very acceptable way to travel. This is an Intercity, so not even one of the really nice trains, which go 200MPH and look like a Star Trek shuttle had a baby with an Apple Store.
Descending into Keflavik. Iceland is a pretty place.
Stopping over at Keflavik Airport on the way back to Boston.
They renovated since the last time I came through here.
This was the whole passenger load on the flight back to the US. It was a week before the end of the travel ban for Europeans, so it was all Americans or Permanent Residents going home. I’ve never been on a transatlantic flight that was this empty, and it was amazing.
Iceland, bringing the natural beauty again.
The Icelandair route between BOS and KEF goes over southern Greenland, so when the weather is good, you can get shots like this one from 36,000 feet up. (It’s not even slightly green. Erik the Red was a very skilled real estate agent.)
With the way the new case numbers are looking on both sides of the Atlantic right now, it may be a while before I get to go again, so I am glad I went when I did.
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.
(The butterfly is a paid crisis actor.)
Took a walk to my favorite pond the other day, and this shot turned out pretty all right:
With the world the way it is at the moment, I am happy to be in a place where I can just walk out the door and be at this sort of place within ten minutes of leisurely walking. I’ve never been a big fan of exercise for the sake of it, but walking out in nature never fails to improve my mood…unlike reading stuff on the Internet, which never fails to make me anxious. However the next year or two are going to go, I’ll probably be doing a lot more of one and a whole lot less of the other.
Walking is also great for listening to audiobooks or letting your brain resolve plot knots with its background processes. The Internet is useful for a lot of things, but for me it’s mostly great for realizing it’s 5pm and I got very little done because I hopped on the information overload train all day.
My favorite season is just around the corner, and I have a plan to walk a few miles every day to really squeeze the most from autumn this year. I feel like I spent most of last year’s autumn cooped up inside because I had a novel overdue (like so many other writers in 2020.) This year, it’s all mine.
“Gullibility kills.”
I’ve been re-reading some non-fiction favorites recently, and these quotes from Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” (published 26 years ago, back in 1995) really seem amazingly prescient considering the state of the world in 2021:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
The wholesale dismissal not only of science, but expertise in general (as “arrogant elitism” and so on) is a pernicious sort of nihilism that will turn out suicidal in the end. When people are no longer interested in how the world works, when they actively fight the input of the people who are subject matter experts, it creates an informational void that will get filled by any number of hucksters and grifters who are willing to tell people that the world works exactly how they feel it ought to work, and who will be more than happy to sell them snake oil.
(I am turning comments off on this post because I have no desire to spend even a second of my time dealing with ignorance from drive-by anti-vaxxers.)
Coffee in Space podcast interview
I recently did an interview with S. Daniel Smith over at the Coffee in Space podcast. You can check it out here if you want to hear me talk about various Frontlines and Palladium Wars-related things, my writing process, and various other subjects.
(Side note–I’ve been at this for almost ten years, and in that time, I’ve given lots of interviews, including places like BBC World Service and NPR. I like giving interviews. I want to think I’m a pretty good guest because I tend to talk a lot. But I still don’t like listening to my own voice or watching myself on video.)
Audible’s Palladium Wars and Frontlines narrators
This has come up several times on Twitter today already, and I am sure I’ll read it a few dozen more times in the Amazon reviews, so I am going to explain the situation one more time in order to have something to link whenever this pops up in the future.
Book 1, AFTERSHOCKS, was narrated by Luke Daniels.
In 2019, I finished two novels, one for each series, and I managed to outpace Luke, who has a very busy narration schedule for Audible because he is awesome and in very high demand. We had to either find a new narrator or delay the audiobook release for a year or more (not a realistic option.) So we chose a new narrator for the Palladium Wars series, Angelo DiLoreto.
Unfortunately, Angelo passed away unexpectedly after he had recorded book 2, BALLISTIC.
Now we needed a new narrator, both for Frontlines book 7 (which also couldn’t be worked into Luke Daniels’ schedule) and Palladium Wars book 3, CITADEL.
I had input on the available narrators under consideration, and I requested that the two series be narrated by two different artists. Since we had to choose new narrators anyway, I wanted each series to have its own voice, to make sure they didn’t sound the same. So Frontlines went to Eric G. Dove, who narrated book 7, ORDERS OF BATTLE, and will to the best of my knowledge also narrate future Frontlines books. I requested Eric because he was the closest to Luke Daniels’ original cadence and voice, and I thought this would help with continuity. I think he did an excellent job carrying on Frontlines, and a lot of listeners seem to agree.
Palladium Wars went to Korey Jackson, whose voice I absolutely love, and who doesn’t sound anything like Eric or Luke. He narrated CITADEL and will (again, to the best of my knowledge) continue to narrate the series.
I understand that people who like to listen to audiobooks like to have continuity when it comes to narrators because it usually feels jarring when you have to get used to familiar characters speaking in a new voice. I feel the same way. But I hope the above explanation will make folks understand why the switch happened, and that it wasn’t arbitrary or somehow related to money or what-have-you.
Johanna, please pick up the red courtesy phone
Johanna S.,
please contact me via email. Your signed copy of CITADEL got returned to me as undeliverable, and I’ll need a good address from you if you still want to claim your giveaway copy. Thanks!
CITADEL release day
It’s August 10th somehow already. That means CITADEL, book 3 in the Palladium Wars, is out today!
You can find it here in all the usual formats (hardcover, paperback, Audible, and Kindle):
This is the book I wrote while the pandemic took off last year, and it was the toughest one to write of all the novels I have written because it turns out that tuning out the world and focusing on a fictional universe is super hard when the actual world is seemingly falling apart all around you. But I really like the way it turned out, and I think it’s the best one in the series yet. I certainly can’t tell now which writing days were good and which ones had me feel like Conan on the Wheel of Pain.
Anyway, I hope you buy it, and if you do, I really hope you enjoy it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here engaging in my traditional release day rituals of eating carbs and hitting “refresh” on the product page for the book…