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.

 

contests and giveaways. frontlines.

Giveaway winners

The random number generator has spoken, and the winners are:

rafael

Derek

Bryan Anderson

Joe Allen

Heather Jones

Tobias Westphal

Santeri Vidal

Gridley

Shane Spencer

Emily

 

Each of you will receive a signed copy of ORDERS OF BATTLE, shipped at my expense. If you find your name on the winners list, please check your email for instructions, and leave me a comment if you haven’t received an email from me by the end of today, Sunday the 29th.

Congratulations to all the winners!

 

writing.

Giveaway update

The comment section for the ORDERS OF BATTLE giveaway is now closed. We had 133 entries before the deadline of 10AM EST this morning. I will now employ a random number genie to pull ten entries out of the hat. Look for the results tomorrow morning. And if you find yourself on the list of winners, expect an email with instructions. (If you left a valid email, that is.)

 

 

contests and giveaways. frontlines.

Orders of Battle signed paperback giveaway

I received my author copies for ORDERS OF BATTLE yesterday, so it’s time to do what I usually do when I get a box of books: I give some of them away. It’s a cunning ploy to make me look nice and generous, when in reality I am just trying to keep my floors from collapsing. (Seriously, Orders of Battle is my 9th published book, and between the author copies, ARCs, and copies of foreign translations, that’s a lot of hardcovers and paperbacks to stash.)

The rules are the same as always: leave a comment on this post indicating that you want a signed paperback. I will keep this post open until next Friday, November 27th, and close the comments at 10:00am, then pick ten winners with a random number generator based on the order of entries.

As before, this contest is open to anyone in the world, and I will pay for the shipping to wherever you are if you win a copy. That’s to make up for Goodreads limiting their giveaway to US residents only.

Good luck!

books. contests and giveaways. frontlines.

Goodreads giveaway for Orders of Battle

There’s a Goodreads giveaway going on for 100 Kindle copies of Orders of Battle, the seventh novel in the Frontlines series. The giveaway will end on December 7, and the book will be released December 8, so you have 21 days if you want to put your name into the goblet and see if you get lucky. Right now there are ~400 entries for those 100 books, so your current chance is 1 in 4-ish, which isn’t bad.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/314501-orders-of-battle

Work status: I am still holed up at the Castle and finishing CITADEL, book 3 in the Palladium Wars. I’ll be turning it in this week–finally–and then it’s on to the next Frontlines book (which doesn’t have a title yet,) and some more Frontlines stories and novellas. As always, stay tuned for more as I try to find my pre-pandemic productivity mojo again and boost it to Brandon Sanderson-esque levels…

castle frostbite. gadgetry. writing.

View from the factory floor

On the rare occasion of a neat and cleaned-up desk, here’s a picture. Does this ever scream “science fiction writer at work”, or what?

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that all the gear is Alienware-branded, which means you can probably guess that I occasionally use it for pursuits other than the typing of sentences and paragraphs and so on. That beast of a laptop is a 17-inch AW17R4, which I bought three years ago with all the configurable specs maxed out as far as possible. It still tears through everything I throw at it, so I am guessing it’ll probably serve me a few more years before I’ll think about upgrading. It weighs over ten pounds because it’s built like a tank, so I don’t really use it as a laptop. Instead, it’s sort of a portable desktop with a backup screen and a built-in uninterruptible power supply.

The monitor is a recent addition. It’s a 34-inch ultrawide, which is the berries for editing and revising because it lets me have two full-sized application windows open side by side. It’s also the berries for gaming because a 21:9 display at this size is ludicrously immersive. Once you are used to one, going back to a 16:9 screen feels like wearing blinders.

Peripherals are hardwired because input lag kills, and they’re Alienware as well because I like it when everything matches.

Anyway, that is where the sausage gets made these days. I have a lightweight 2-in-1 Windows laptop for writing on the go, but there isn’t much of that going on at the moment, so I only use it whenever I want to chat with friends or browse the web from the recliner. My writing software is still Scrivener, which has been my main first draft tool ever since I started writing novels. Revisions and edits are done in Microsoft Word, which is the de facto industry standard, but I don’t like doing first drafts in Word for anything longer than a chapter or a short story because Word doesn’t let me organize and reshuffle chapters like Scrivener does. (I’ve been using the Scrivener 3 beta for Windows since the very early versions, and it hasn’t crashed on me once.)

Not in the picture are my corkboard, where I pin index cards with ideas and frequently used reference data, and my whiteboard, which holds my color-coded sticky notes for the individual chapters of the current draft. While those would make interesting visuals, one has a lot of personal information on it and the other would comprehensively spoil CITADEL, the third book in the Palladium Wars.

There you have my view on most days. It’s not a cool Manhattan loft office looking out over 31st Street or anything, but it’s quiet, the coffee is much cheaper, and I have everything I need right where I want it.

gadgetry. writing.

World shut-outers

I bought these Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones more than four years ago, and I’ve used them almost every day. Now the battery holds a fraction of its original charge, and the earcup cushions have started to separate. I could get new cushions, but the battery isn’t user-replaceable, so it’s probably time to retire these.

When you have a home office in a house with two kids (who have done their schooling online since well before the pandemic) and three dogs (who take special delight in “chasing off” passing trucks on our road with their mighty bark chorus), noise-cancelling headphones are a life- and sanity-saver. I usually listen to video game or movie soundtracks while I write, to get into specific moods for a scene, but sometimes I’ll just turn on the noise-cancelling feature and keep things quiet to shut out the rest of the world. These were an expensive piece of tech, and it irks me a little that I can’t just replace the battery easily, but I am not bitter. I got more than my $300 worth out of these over the last four and a half years.

writing.

49

I’m turning 49 years old today, which is odd because I often feel like I can’t be that old because I’m not that long out of high school. But the calendar says it’s true, so I guess I really am a year away from the half-century mark.

I ran some numbers in my head the other day and realized that today is not only my 49th birthday, but also the point where I’ve spent exactly half my life in the US. (I moved here in late May of 1996, when I was 24 1/2.)

Forty-nine years…don’t they go by in a blink? Except this year, that is. 2020 feels like it’s about six times longer than any other year I can remember in those 49 years.

 

 

Uncategorized

The name of my next band

Here are the collected band names from a few months of private chats with friends. (I am claiming all of those, by the way.)

Schnitzelburger

Compensatory Treats

Automatic Umlaut

Inner Dilbert

Bourbon & Carbs

Parsimonious Electrons

Contraband Soda

Strategic Meatball Stockpile

Ablative Skateboard

Spiky Dong

Hashtag Countermeasures

Technically Rich

Presumably Sedated

Heirloom Bling

Experimental Bread #1

Hobo Gauntlet

Zero Hair Autonomy

Dubious DVD-R

Homeschool Loophole

Alternate Geralt

Heckfire

Mandatory Love Gift

Thiccmoose

Cross of Okra

Cranial Nerve #8

Fractional Bard

Apotheosis of Karens

Parking for Ponies

Spatchcocked Mastodon

Flight of Chowders

 

 

castle frostbite.

Color palette: New England X-treme

Even 2020 can’t manage to make a big dent in my enjoyment of the fall here in northern New England. This year has been an awful, cortisol-swaddled slog, but that just makes it more important that we carve our own little pleasures out of it whenever we can. For me, one of those pleasures is sitting in a garden recliner with a cup of coffee on a cool, sunny morning and watching the dogs race each other through the leaves. In a week or two, I’ll have to put away the fire pit and stage the snow shovels, but not just yet. I want to squeeze a few more mornings like today’s out of this season.