bullets & links. love death+robots.

Online sources for the LD+R stories

Andrew Liptak at The Verge has a handy post up that lists the online sources for most of the short stories serving as material for Love Death+Robots.

In related news, I’ll never get tired of seeing Samira Wiley as Lt. Colby, the pilot of Lucky 13 in the Netflix version. Yes, the original character in the short story is Halley, but they had to make a few minor changes for reasons. Just trust me on that one.

ltcolby

Regarding Shape-shifters, I want to let the veterans know that I am well aware of the fact that it has Marines address other Marines as “soldiers” (which they’d never do in real life; a Marine is a Marine and not a soldier.) But I guess they kept that bit because of the “dog soldiers” pejorative. In the original short story, Decker and Sobieski are Army, members of the 300th Special Operations Company (Lycanthrope), and the script writer for the show changed them over to the Corps without also changing the Army-specific terms in the story.

The two other goofs I noticed were Decker and Sobieski addressing the Master Sergeant as “sergeant”, and the Marines wearing their sleeves rolled while in the field. Both are details only few people outside of the Corps would notice, but every Marine would.) Rest assured that I know the differences. Regardless, it’s a kick-ass adaptation of the short story, and it’s really growing on me more and more the more I watch it. It’s even motivating me to pick up Decker’s universe again and go ahead with the series I had in mind for him. (The story was supposed to be part of his backstory.)

I’m super pleased with the way everything turned out, and the fan response has been phenomenal. Interestingly, “Shape-shifters” has tended to be either among peoples’ very favorite episodes, or all the way at the bottom of their lists. “Lucky 13” is either well-reviewed, or somewhere in the middle of the list, so Shape-shifters is the more polarizing one. (One of the viewers who hated it said it looked like bad Twilight fan fiction, which did amuse me.)

 

technology. writing.

Writing with Ulysses.app

Screen Shot 2019 03 19 at 10 13 07 AM

 

I’ve been a long-time Scrivener user for over a decade, but for the last year or so, I’ve been migrating my work to Ulysses more and more, and right now I think I am at the point where I’ll be using it exclusively.

Ulysses is a writing app like Scrivener, and it has much of the same functionality, but with a stripped-down and streamlined interface. I can do the same tasks in both apps, but I prefer Ulysses now for two major differences that make my workflow much easier.

The first is file management. Unlike Scrivener, Ulysses has its file management baked into the app. All my writing is always available in the left-hand navigation pane, and I can find everything I’ve ever written without having to leave the app or open a second window. With Scrivener, I still have to find the project’s .scriv file in the Finder and keep my own version control, but Ulysses does all of that for me.

The second is file synchronization. Ulysses syncs all content and changes seamlessly from the MacOS to the iOS apps via iCloud. If I make a change on the laptop, it shows up on the iPad’s and the iPhone’s Ulysses apps just a few seconds later. With Scrivener, I have to save my work to Dropbox and manually sync everything before I open a project on a different device. 

Ulysses is very much like a highly streamlined version of Scrivener with no interface fluff. It’s simple, powerful, has just the amount of features I need, and it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. The only drawback is that it’s a Mac/iOS-only app, so if you run Windows or Linux, you’re out of luck. (Some would say that the subscription-model pricing for Ulysses is a drawback as well, but I don’t mind paying a yearly subscription to ensure prompt updates and new features. I already do that with Office 365 anyway.)

books. capitalism. love death+robots. shameless self-promotion.

Where to find “Shape-Shifters” and “Lucky 13”

I’ve had more than a few people asking where they can read the two stories of mine that were used for the (amazingly done) episodes in Tim Miller and David Fincher’s “Love Death + Robots” on Netflix.

Episode 10 of Love Death + Robots, “Shape-shifters”, is based on my short story “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare”, which you can find here on Amazon in DRM-free Kindle format.

Episode 13 of Love, Death & Robots, “Lucky 13”, is based on my short story “Lucky Thirteen”, a story in the Frontlines universe. You can find it here on Amazon, in Kindle and Audible formats.

Lucky Thirteen has been out since the early days of Frontlines, and many readers have downloaded and read Halley’s rookie pilot story already.

“On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” has never been published anywhere before today, but a lot of people have asked for an opportunity to get their hands on it, so I decided to make it available the same way I offered up Lucky Thirteen a few years back, via Kindle Direct. (The Kindle version is DRM-free and has lending enabled.)

tv guide. writing.

Love, Death & Robots

The first season of Love, Death & Robots, the new animated anthology put together by Tim Miller and David Fincher, kicked off on Netflix today.

https://www.wired.com/story/love-death-and-robots-review/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/netflixs-love-death-and-robots-is-a-sex-filled-sci-fi-extravaganza-featuring-latex-strippers-and-killing-hitler

Two of the episodic shorts in that project are based on stories I wrote. The first is an adaptation of the Frontlines short story “Lucky Thirteen”. It stars Samira Wiley (of “Orange Is The New Black” fame) as the lead character. The second is called “Shape-Shifters”, and it’s based on “On The Use Of Shape-Shifters In Warfare”, my Lycanthrope Soldiers In Afghanistan short story.

I’m super pleased with the way both of those turned out, but the other stories are also clean hits out of the park. Several are adaptations of stories by Alastair Reynolds and John Scalzi, so I am in pretty good company. And hey–maybe I get an IMDB entry now.

If you want to check it out, here’s the official Netflix page.

(“Shape-Shifters” is episode 10; “Lucky 13” is episode 13. And fair content warning for “Shape-Shifters”…it’s rather a lot more gory than Lucky 13. And the whole series is decidedly NSFW and adult-oriented, so don’t watch it with the Sesame Street demographic.)

books. wild cards.

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.

awards. books.

News from Poland

I got word that CHAINS OF COMMAND is nominated for the 2018 Best Book Award in Poland. From what I know, that’s the Polish equivalent of the Goodreads Awards and the largest book award in Poland, so that’s pretty cool.

I’m feeling very warmly about Poland. My Polish publisher was the first foreign house to buy the rights to all six Frontlines books, and the Fabryka Słow covers are the best-looking of all the editions. And my favorite video game of all time, The Witcher 3, was made by a Polish software developer, CD Projekt. That’s a lot of positive associations they’ve managed to rack up in my book.

(Also, in a strange twist of fate, both my and the wife’s paternal grandmothers came from the same town in Poland, now called Elblag. When they lived there in the early 20th century, it was East Prussia, so they weren’t Polish, but they both had Polish last names.)

Thanks, Polish readers, for liking the Frontlines series so much! And if there’s ever a Polish equivalent of ComicCon, I’d love to come over for a visit.

 

 

 

horseless carriages.

One year with the Tactical Off-Road Banana

One year ago, the minivan went to the Great Junkyard in the Sky with less than 40k on the odometer due to circumstances that shall remain vague. I had to source a replacement very quickly because we are most definitely a two-car household by necessity. We had a good experience with the wife’s Jeep Cherokee, so I opted for another Jeep and picked up a 2015 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk with only 8k miles on it.

Fast forward to January 2019, and the Renegade now has a little under 20k miles on it. It has been a trouble-free car so far. The only things that needed fixing were the front sway bar links, which had started to make popping sounds about six months in, and they replaced those under warranty. Other than that, no problems or annoyances to report.

It’s a surprisingly roomy car on the inside thanks to the box shape of the cabin. There’s almost no front or rear overhang, and the car is very nimble, which means that I can squeeze into parking spots few other cars can claim, like the ones where the spots on either side are taken up by giant tugboat SUVs parked right on the line or slightly beyond. The turning radius is ludicrously small. The seating position is high, and the windows are large, so visibility is great. And the Jeep 4WD system works as well or better in the snow than my old Subaru’s AWD.

I like this little car. It’s agile, fun to drive, and easy in bad weather. Sometimes I miss the space of the minivan (usually when trying to transport something bulky), but most of the time I drive around in the Jeep by myself or with just the kids, and the Renegade is plenty big enough for that. It’s a small car that feels bigger than it is. I wouldn’t want to do a multi-day trip with the whole family in it, but it’s pretty much ideal as a daily runabout in a rural setting in the snow belt. And it has some credible off-road chops as well–the Trailhawk trim means it has a slight lift for higher ground clearance, a rock-crawling 4WD mode, skid plates to shield the oil pan and undercarriage, and external tow hooks front and back.

Oh, and the color has really grown on me. It’s super visible in bad weather, and it’s very easy to spot in a parking lot. Turns out that yellow is the least common color for vehicles. (I wanted to get a vanity plate that said WASP-A, but the wife said people would think it stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so I ended up getting a regular plate instead of a vanity one.)

 

 

books. shameless self-promotion. the palladium wars. writing.

Interview with me over at The Verge

Andrew Liptak at The Verge interviewed me about my new series, The Palladium Wars. I go a little bit into the world-building for the new story, and how my week at the Launch Pad astronomy workshop in 2017 helped to make the new series more scientifically grounded.

With the publication of the interview, the cover for AFTERSHOCKS, the first book in the series (out on July 1), is now public, so here it is in all its glory. It’s very different from any of the Frontlines covers in art style, which is intentional. Frontlines is a first-person story that’s limited to the scope of one point of view. Palladium Wars is a multi-POV narrative with a much bigger scope, and the cover is supposed to reflect that.

AFTERSHOCKS will be available in paperback, Kindle, and <drumroll> HARDCOVER. This is my first book to get the hardcover treatment. There will of course be an Audible version as well, and I am happy to report that it will be narrated by the awesomely talented Luke Daniels, who has been the voice for all the Frontlines novels so far.