Pluto was never not a planet
A blue jay having a quick and easy breakfast at the local fly-thru.
Fun fact about blue jays: they’re not really blue. Their feathers are black. We see them as blue because of the way the structure of the feathers scatters light. It’s known as Tyndall scattering.
I was typing on my old MacBook Pro today and noticed that the bottom case was wobbling back and forth a little despite being on a flat desk.
I grabbed my trusty iFixit toolkit, took off the case bottom, and found this:
That’s what we call a “spicy pillow”, a lithium-ion battery that has chemically degraded to the point of releasing gas. The only way to fix it is to (carefully) remove the battery and professionally dispose of it because it’s a fire hazard.
Sadly, the battery pack in this model is glued into the case with a strong adhesive. To get it out, I’d have to disassemble pretty much the entire bottom case and then loosen the adhesive with solvent, all the while working around a battery that may turn into a tiny volcano if it’s pierced by a screwdriver or the corner of a spudger by accident. That’s $100 or so for a new battery, plus two or three hours of tricky labor, all to fix a laptop that I bought in 2017. I decided not to spend the time, money, and effort to keep a 9-year-old laptop going, so I pulled out the SSD storage, closed the case again, and set it aside for disposal.
I used that MacBook Pro pretty steadily for the last seven years, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of it. Still, it has traveled to a lot of places with me, and I wrote more than one novel on it, so I’m a little bummed to have to retire it. It couldn’t run the latest MacOS anymore, but it was still working just fine for daily computing. Alas, it’s not safe to use like this anymore, so out to the great computer lab in the sky it goes.
The piston knob on my favorite fountain pen broke recently, so I sent the pen (a Lamy 2000) off to the mothership in Germany for warranty repair. It came back a little while ago, with a delivery note listing the repairs which were performed at no charge. That’s some awesome customer service for a pen I bought eleven years ago.
I started a new notebook for the current manuscript in January, but I had to use one of my other pens for the first few chapters because the Lamy 2000 was out of commission. I can tell by the quality of the handwriting changing mid-page when I got the 2000 back because it looks cleaner and neater. I put a lot of miles on that pen over the years–I wrote the first drafts of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE with it–so I’m glad to have it back for the next decade of novel-writing.
I don’t usually do product recommendations (except for my own novels, of course), but I’ll make an exception for the fantastic notebooks I found on Amazon last year. Before I came across those, I wrote in Moleskines until their paper quality started going downhill, at which point I switched to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, but these new ones are head and shoulders above even the Leuchtturms, and they cost about one third as much. If you’re a fellow ink-and-pen writer, you need to give them a try. The pages are sewn, so they lie flat no matter where you open the notebook, the notebooks are sturdy, and the paper is seriously thick–probably twice as thick as the ones on the Moleskines. There is no ink I’ve tried that will bleed or show through on the other side of the page, and it’s smooth paper with just a little bit of tooth, perfect for fountain pen nibs. The best part is the price: they’re twelve bucks for a pair. I throw another pack into my shopping cart pretty much every time I order other stuff, and I have enough now to keep me in first draft notebooks for the next six or seven novels.
Here’s the link if you’re interested. Stock up while they have inventory because you won’t find a better notebook, especially not for a mere six bucks a pop.
I had to clean up and reorganize the desk today, so I took a picture of its pristine state while it lasts.
The artwork on the wall: John Picacio cover for one of my Tor.com Wild Cards stories, Michael Komarck cover for LOW CHICAGO featuring my character Khan, and (above the pulse rifle prop from ALIENS) the cover of the Polish edition of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, kindly gifted to me by Fabryka Słów. The framed art on the left next to the corkboard is a pencil drawing of my home city in Germany.
The corkboard has various motivational trinkets and some of my reference index cards on it, and the whiteboard is mostly blank right now except for the motto of the month.
I’m currently using an Alienware M17R5 AMD with a 25″ Dell UltraSharp display and a Keychron V1 keyboard and M3 mouse, for those of you interested in the hardware. Still writing in Scrivener, with final polishing and editing in Word before submission because Word is the industry standard. (I’ve gone back to longhand for the first draft, so the stuff that ends up in Scrivener and then Word was written with actual ink on actual paper first.)
AND THAT CONCLUDES THE OFFICE TOUR. Make sure you hit the gift shop on the way out!
The contest prize books will be going out to the winners today. In this round, the international readers were particularly blessed by the random numbers gods. Of twelve books, only three are going to U.S. addresses. The rest are all international: one each to Germany, Finland, and Switzerland, and six(!) to addresses in the UK.
THE THINGS I DO FOR MY INTERNATIONAL READERS.
All right, the RNG gods have chosen.
The winners are:
I’ll be sending out an email to the people on the list with instructions. If anyone doesn’t claim their copy by Wednesday, January 10, I’ll have the RNG select alternate winner(s) and notify them separately.
Congratulations to the winners!
I’ll be going through the entries today with the help of the random numbers generator and pick a dozen winners from all the comments that have been left by the 1200h EST contest deadline. Watch this space for names, and if yours appears on the list–check your email.
Today is the official release day for SCORPIO, first book in the Frontlines spin-off, Frontlines: Evolution.
A bunch of you will have read it already because it was one of the Amazon First Reads selections for December, free to download for anyone with a Prime subscription. A few of you may have gotten your hands on an eARC via Netgalley, or a printed ARC from me or the publisher. If you did, good for you, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s now officially available for purchase in Kindle, paperback, and audio formats. The Audible version is read by Arielle DeLisle, who did a fabulous job voicing Alex and giving this new chapter in the Frontlines universe its own character.
Incidentally, today is January 1, which means I’ll be starting the draft for CORVUS, the follow-up to SCORPIO. I’ll be turning this draft in on March 31, for a planned release in January of 2025. As with SCORPIO, you can track my progress via the handy meter in the sidebar.
I’ve not been able to finish the Frontlines novella I was working on in between books because it hasn’t quite come together the way I wanted, so it’ll have to simmer a little bit longer. My plan is to finish it while I am writing CORVUS. Because my progress meter only has space for one bar, I’ve switched it to the word count for CORVUS because that’s the main project right now, but I am aiming to have the Halley novella out roughly around the same time as the draft, by the end of March.
I hope you all had a good slide into the new year, as they say back in the old home country.
This is the last day of the year, so I guess I ought to do a quick recap of the year that is about to disappear in the rearview mirror.
2023 was…fine? I turned in two books this year (SCORPIO in February and DESCENT in October), so I am back in the groove as far as creative output goes. The last time I managed to turn in two books in the same year was 2020, and that was only because I turned in CITADEL in January right when all the pandemic business started. 2021 and 2022 were the hardest years I have had, creatively speaking, but DESCENT was easy going compared to the two drafts from those years, so I am cautiously optimistic for the coming year.
2024 will see two new releases: SCORPIO is officially out tomorrow, and DESCENT will be released on July 16. (There’s already a product page up on the ‘zon if you want to pre-order the book. My publisher loves great pre-order numbers.)
The writing schedule for the next year has me writing the follow-up to SCORPIO, which will be called CORVUS. That will keep me busy for most of the first half of the year, and the second half will most likely be dedicated to Palladium Wars #5, which doesn’t have an official title yet because I haven’t thought of a sufficiently cool and fitting word that starts with “E”. And who knows? Pigs may fly, water may flow uphill, and I may finally have some breathing room in my schedule to complete one of the secret projects from my backlog of ideas.
Happy New Year! I hope you had a similarly tolerable 2023, and may 2024 turn out to be less of a raging dumpster fire than the other years in the Twenty-Twenties so far.
For a multitude of reasons, I wasn’t able to do my customary early giveaway for new release books until now. SCORPIO will be officially released on Monday, January 1st, so this won’t be an early look at the novel for anyone who gets a copy, but they’ll be signed and they’re ABSOLUTELY FREE to winners, so there’s that. If you want to snag a signed (and personalized upon request) copy of SCORPIO to put on your bookshelf next to all the other novels of mine you undoubtedly own, here’s your chance at last!
The rules are simple as always. Leave a comment on this post, and I’ll let the random number gods pick the winners from the comment pool next Saturday, January 6th, 1200h EST. I will ship the novels to the winners free of charge to anywhere in the world. This time, I’ll give away 12 copies. In the past, the entries have been in the 150-200 range, so 12 random picks constitute a 5% or better chance to win, which is way better than a lottery ticket.
Comments are open. One entry per reader, please, and be sure to register your comment with a valid email address because that’s how I’ll notify the winners.
Ready? GO.