books. writing.

Running a few Sharpies dry

Sitting down this afternoon to sign a bunch of bookplates for hardcovers of AFTERSHOCKS. I am signing these instead of the actual books because the alternative would be to ship me the hardcovers. Those come about 25 to a box, and I have to do 1,800 signatures, so they’d have to send 72 boxes of books to sign, about two pallets.

For those of you who wonder how you sign your name 1,800 times, I can tell you that it’s a little repetitive, and best done while watching Netflix or listening to a book on Audible. Also, you don’t sign the whole stack at once. You split it into smaller stacks that look manageable, and then take breaks in between stacks.

Also, I will tell you that after signing a few hundred bookplates in a row, I understand why famous people often modify their autograph into a quick and easy simplified sort of squiggle. I am not famous and I don’t have to sign any autographs outside of SF conventions and infrequent random requests, but if I had to sign my name hundreds of times in the course of a regular week, I’d have a super simple autograph too.

Some people know that I use fountain pens, but I don’t do bookplates in fountain pen ink. That’s because they usually don’t hold that sort of ink very well, which results in a smeared signature. This stack of bookplates will eat up at least two full fine-point Sharpies.

 

castle frostbite. new hampshah.

The outdoor office

There’s a pond about a half mile down the road, and when the weather is good, I grab my little Surface Go and head down there in the mornings to get a head start on the word count for the day. Right now it’s the start of the best month for using that outdoor office because the vacationers are thinning out and the weather is cooling down. I’ll be able to come down here until the first frost, when the mornings get cold enough to make typing difficult.

But for now, this is the golden month here in central New Hampshire, that beautiful span of time where the leaves start changing color and the evening air is crisp and cool. And for a writing spot, this one is hard to beat. There’s nothing around but loons and the occasional bald eagle.

books. frontlines. the palladium wars. writing.

Dispatch from the desk

The most enjoyable words for a writer to read are “Pay To The Order Of…”, and the most enjoyable words for a writer to put down on the page are “THE END”.

I’ve been quiet on here because I’ve spent the last few weeks finishing BALLISTIC, the second book in the Palladium Wars series. But it’s turned in, and once the edits are done, it will make its way through the production line for its scheduled July 2020 release.

I took the holiday weekend off, but now I am back at my desk working on FRONTLINES #7. That’s right, friends and neighbors. It’s in the works, so you can stop emailing me to ask about it. (“Is there going to be a #7?” and “When is the next Frontlines coming out?” make up about 90% of the messages I receive from readers.)

For the release of AFTERSHOCKS, the PR team had me scheduled for a lot of radio interviews, and I find that I enjoy doing those a lot. They only take 15-30 minutes out of my day, and I can do them in my PJs if I want, so that’s easy to fit into the schedule.

Next up will be the Frontlines novella I’ve threatened to release for months now. It kept getting shunted to the back of the line by various other obligations, but now I’ll finally be able to finish it. It takes place concurrently with the events in Frontlines #6, “Points of Impact”, and centers on a character you haven’t met yet. As soon as that one is available for purchase, I’ll make an announcement here on the blog, probably in the next week or two.

interviews. shameless self-promotion. writing.

Interview with the local newspaper

My local newspaper, the Valley News, interviewed me a few days ago, and you can read the whole thing here. It’s a very good piece that stays true to the facts, and I enjoyed sitting for the questions (with journalist Sarah Earle) and the pictures (with photographer Rick Russell) very much.

books. bullets & links. shameless self-promotion.

An interview and a weekend trip

Here’s an interview with me over on Paul Semel’s blog, in which I talk about the ideas and motivations behind AFTERSHOCKS and the general world-building and setup of the Palladium Wars universe.

I spent part of the weekend in New York City, to have lunch with my editor and take the German nephew along so he could see the Big City. NYC in August is….not my favorite time and place in the world, I have to say. It’s hot, full of tourists (especially Midtown, which is where the visitors I bring along invariably want to go too), and we got there on trash day, which means the olfactory experience was spectacular. But it still has its charms, and some things about NYC will never get old for me. Like the view from the observation deck of the Empire State Building:

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And the building itself is beautiful, of course.

IMG 2039IMG 1996

There’s an Amazon Bookstore right across the street from the lobby entrance of the Empire State Building, so naturally I had to go check it out and get the rare pleasure of seeing one of my books on the shelf of a bookstore. (B&N and BAM won’t stock my books because 47North is an Amazon imprint, so I don’t usually see my name in a dead-tree store.)

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Another cool thing about browsing the SF/F section was seeing the names of lots of friends on the book covers. I get a kick out of that every time I go into a bookstore, even if it’s one where my stuff is not on the shelf. It’s fun to be able to put so many faces to names and be happy for their successes.

digital housekeeping.

Wiktory

Inbox Zero on all three of my email accounts–a small triumph, but I feel a sense of accomplishment nonetheless.

WordPress will remain my only form of public social communication from here on out because it’s non-intrusive, and I can check it on my own schedule without getting bombarded with comment notifications. I’ve enabled blog comments again–some of you have left comments on my About page, and that’s not a spot I usually check for messages, so feel free to comment on the individual posts. But don’t get upset if I don’t reply right away because I only check WordPress a few times a week at best.

And nobody send me any email to screw up my Inbox Zero zen right now, or I’ll subscribe you to all kinds of interesting email lists.

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.

digital housekeeping. this monkey house. writing.

Life after FaceTwitStagram

A little over a month ago, I pulled the plug on all my remaining social media accounts and went full-on cold turkey on everything. And by “cold turkey”, I mean that I didn’t leave myself the option of reactivating those accounts. Twitter and Facebook make it intentionally hard to leave the service altogether, for obvious reasons, and they instead suggest you just let your account sit dormant until you come to your senses. (Facebook also tries to put a guilt trip on you by letting you know how VERY MUCH your friends are going to miss you.)

So the accounts are gone. In the process, I lost a few hundred Facebook friends and about 6,000 Twitter followers. And you know what happened to my professional and personal relationships?

Not a damn thing.

The people who were in touch with me before are still in touch with me. They have my phone number and my private email address. I did not disappear like Marty McFly in the photograph just because I am no longer on social media. I have no doubt that I’ll miss out on a few things—Twitter in particular was useful for the occasional coordination of meet-ups and social events with colleagues—but I think that the negative impact of social media on my ability to focus vastly outweighed the networking benefits.

And I have to tell you that the absence of social media has had a major positive effect in my life. I didn’t even realize just how pervasive that low-level background din of constant information and compulsive cycling through feeds had become until it was no longer there. I’m more relaxed, more productive, and better able to concentrate for long periods of time. And I am unaware of the Outrage of the Day, which means my mood and anxiety levels have improved greatly. It’s to the point where I don’t even check news feeds anymore beyond a quick headline skimming. I’ll tune in to NPR on the way to the grocery store, and that does the trick of keeping me generally informed without subjecting myself to the information barrage of online news sites. Maybe sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

It’s strange how the first few days after social media feel like kicking an addiction. I found myself reaching for my phone more than once to snap pictures for my Instagram feed, and that urge only subsided after a week or two. But now, the idea of stopping my day for a minute to post something for likes or comments has no appeal anymore. There’s a reason why the social media engineers make their products intentionally addictive—they make money every time someone pulls down on their feed to refresh it. (Even the very motion used to refresh is a slot machine kinetic, and that’s exactly what Twitter and Facebook have become. They’re not information or quality social connection, they’re slot machines in our pockets, and the people who put them there are the ones who get the payout.)

I’m not saying that everyone needs to get off social media, but I think that more people should consider it, especially those of us in the creative field. Writing requires long periods of unbroken concentration, and Twitter and Facebook are explicitly designed to claim attention as much as possible. I’m pretty sure that if I had ditched social media two years ago, I’d have two or three more novels in my backlist, and the ones I did manage to write would have turned out better than they did with social media in the picture.

books. the palladium wars.

The Big Idea: Aftershocks

My friend John Scalzi was kind enough to let me borrow his blog today, where I talk a little about the central idea behind Aftershocks.

In related news, I have been informed by reliable sources that I can claim the first use of the term “giraffe-adjacent” on Whatever. May it stand to future historians as one of my greatest achievements.

books. capitalism. shameless self-promotion.

Aftershocks release day!

AFTERSHOCKS, the first book in my new SF series called “The Palladium Wars”, is out today!

It’s available on Amazon in Kindle, Audible, trade paperback, and hardcover forms. And if you are a Prime member in the US, the Kindle version is available to you free to read for the month of July as part of the Prime Reading program.

(If you are a Prime member and you pre-ordered the Kindle version already, don’t get too upset about not getting to read it for free like those late-to-the-party Prime Reading bandwagon jumpers. I get royalties from the pre-sales, so I’ll be able to write more books, and you get to keep the Kindle book even if you maxed out your Prime Reading borrowing library because you own it for good.)

I am about to turn in the second novel, called BALLISTIC, which is scheduled to be released in June of next year. And for those of you who kept asking on Twitter and via email: there will be another Frontlines novel, I will be writing it between now and the end of the year, and it will be out next year as well. In the meantime, I am writing on a Frontlines novella to be released in a few weeks, and there will be at least one more Frontlines story out on the Kindle after that before the next novel comes out.

The novella I am currently writing has been a great way to get my head back into the Frontlines universe after spending a year and a half with the characters in the Palladium Wars system. I hope you’ll enjoy what’s coming in the next year.