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from the desk etc.

Posted on by Marko

It has only been out for two weeks today, but LINES OF DEPARTURE has over a hundred Amazon reviews already, which is pretty cool. There are some head-scratcher one-stars, but in general it seems to be rather well received, and reader consensus appears to be that it’s better than the first novel by a fair bit.

I’m currently hard at work on ANGLES OF ATTACK, and without dropping any spoilers, I can tell you that the fireworks in the first two were just a mild preview of the stuff I have laid out for you in this one. When it’s out, it will hopefully be received at least as well as the first two.

There are quite a few series that lost steam by the third or fifth or seventh novel and eventually read like the author was just phoning it in for the paychecks. I want to avoid that particular phenomenon. What are some of your favorite novel series where there was a steady progression of craft and quality evident as the series went along?

 

scalzi confesses. film at 8.

Posted on by Marko

John Scalzi FINALLY TAKES THE BLAME:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/02/03/these-books-are-partially-my-fault/

And everything he says is 100% true.

John forgot to add that he’s also part of the reason why SF/F has lots of talented up-and-coming writers. He was most generous with his time and expertise at VP XII, and so were all the other instructors. Every year, just that one workshop puts 20-some talented folks into the wild with new motivation and the knowledge that they have what it takes to get their stuff into print. WAY TO PULL UP THE LADDER BEHIND YOU.

io9 reviews TERMS and LINES.

Posted on by Marko

io9 has a fantastic write-up of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE that is just chock-full of good quotes like this one:

Much like Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and its sequels, Terms of Enlistment and Lines of Departure are combat-grade Military SF, and should come with an addiction warning. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we see the next volume of the series, Angle of Attack, which Kloos is currently writing.

Thanks for the great review, Andrew. The good news is that my publisher, 47North, moves at the speed of light compared to the rest of the industry, so if they decide to pick up ANGLES OF ATTACK, it won’t be too long before you can all get your hands on it. In the meantime, I am planning to put out some more novellas and short stories to  keep you hooked fill the gap.

lines of departure.

Posted on by Marko

Citizens, rejoice! The day has arrived. The sequel to TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, titled LINES OF DEPARTURE, is now available for your entertainenings!

Here’s where you can get LINES OF DEPARTURE right now:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Audible

Amazon has Kindle, paperback, and audio versions. B&N has the paperback, and Audible has the audiobook. There’s no other ebook format than Kindle because AMAZON, but if you don’t have a Kindelmaschine, you can read the ebook through the respective free Kindle readers for PC, Mac, iOS, Blackberry, or Android.

Go! Buy! Read! And if you like the novel and have the time and wish to help the dude what wrote it? Recommend it to others, share your opinion, and write a review for other unsuspecting victims prospective readers. I’m pretty proud of that novel, and I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think!

yes, sir, officer-sergeant-general, sir.

Posted on by Marko

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.

Posted on by Marko

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.

 

how do you say “feng shui” in danish?

Posted on by Marko

Three of the most dangerous words in the English language: “Legitimate tax write-off.”

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We took some time to redo the office in the back of the house last weekend.

I’ve been using the standing desk I got at the Borders going-out-of-business fire sale two and a half years ago, and it works just fine as a computer workstation, but it’s not the best work desk, at least not for my purposes. I write longhand a lot and then transcribe into the computer, so I need quite a bit of elbow room. In the past, that meant I had to do a lot of moving around between two different desks, one for handwriting and one for computer stuff.

Well, thanks to amazing Danish office technology, now I can do both at the same desk. I got an adjustable standing desk from ErgoDepot. It has a lot of working surface (it’s an L-shaped table top that’s roughly six by four feet on the long sides), and it moves up and down at the push of a button via electric motor. You can move it as low as 25″ and as high as 47″. Now I can set the desk to fit the task at hand, not the other way around.

And man, just look at that thing, with the spotlights above lighting up the work surface. It looks like it’s straight out of a goddamn IKEA catalog*. It looks like the space of a hip, professional writer dude who totally knows what he’s doing. In other words, the space of someone who isn’t me. But think about how much easier it will be for me to fake competence now.

*It’s not Ikea. I know this because the instructions were crystal-clear and it only took me twenty minutes to put the thing together.