aminals. castle frostbite.

Klohund training

This is the tip bowl we keep on our bathroom counter.

Who needs a tip bowl in the bathroom, you may wonder, and why is it filled with cereal?

Well, imagine you have a dachshund who is scared of the shower, and getting her bathed is always a stressful endeavor for both parties. One day, you get the brilliant idea to desensitize her to the unpleasant environment, so she’ll start associating the shower with positive things and stop being anxious about her baths. And because she’s a dachshund, the logical positive reinforcement is food. You keep some cereal in the bathroom and occasionally throw a few pieces into the empty shower stall when she’s around so she can go in there and get a free snack.

Now imagine you’re so successful that the whole approach backfires, and the dachshund gets so used to the routine that she follows you into the bathroom every time to collect her “tip”.

In the public bathrooms in Germany, they usually have a (generally female) bathroom attendant out front who has a little plate on a table for a small customary tip. Colloquially, they’re known as “Klofrau”. Well, we managed to train ourselves a Klohund.

On the plus side, she’s much better with baths now.

(The cereal is a high-protein, grain- and sugar-free alternative, not grocery store sugar bombs, in case you’re wondering about the health aspect, and she only ever gets two or three little pieces at a time.)

books. shameless self-promotion. the palladium wars.

DESCENT is out today!


 

Today is the release day for DESCENT, the fourth installment of the Palladium Wars!

If you already preordered it, you should either have the paperback in your mailbox, or the ebook magically appeared on your Kindle this morning. For those who haven’t preordered, it’s available in paperback, Kindle, and Audible formats. (No hardcover this time, sorry.)

The jacket copy:

“POW Aden Jansen has lost a decade of his life to both the war and internment when he’s recruited by the Alliance. He’s to return to Gretia as an undercover Blackguard operative and destroy Odin’s Wolves—an insurgency that’s setting his home world afire. The mission comes with a full pardon and a chance to reclaim his identity. It also means rejoining his friends and family in space. That’s motive enough. If he can succeed—and survive.

Dunstan Park is on piracy patrol to track down the spaceborne arm of the uprising. Meanwhile, the rebels’ insidious terrorist cells are targets for battle-hardened insurgent hunter Idina Chaudhary and her Palladian commandos. As for Aden’s sister, Solveig, she’s put herself in the line of fire before, but discovering who’s bankrolling Odin’s Wolves is as dangerous as it is personal.

As Aden works his way back into the confidence of his comrades, the stealth campaign to sow discontent descends into chaos. At risk: Aden’s legacy, and the very stability of a galaxy struggling for peace against all odds.”

That sums it up in broad strokes, so if you’ve read the first three installments and this sort of thing floats your boat, get your copy today!

For those who asked about the projected length of the series–there will be at least one more installment, hopefully in the first half of next year.

books. contests and giveaways. the palladium wars.

DESCENT giveaway winners

The random number gods have spoken and passed down ten numbers, which I matched up with the comments in order from first to last. There were 193 eligible comments in total, so your chance to win was a little lower than one in twenty.

The winners are:

  1. Victor Weffer
  2. Fred
  3. Adrian O’Neill
  4. Phil
  5. Fab
  6. Andrew
  7. AG
  8. Nick M.
  9. Ralph
  10. Dave Thomas

I am sending out an email to the winners in a few. If you’re on the list, check your inbox and respond as instructed to claim your book.

Thanks for playing, everyone, and I hope that even those of you who did not win a signed paperback will still purchase a Kindle or paper copy of the book on release day.

books. contests and giveaways. the palladium wars.

DESCENT giveaway is now closed

I hope you all got your comments in because the DESCENT giveaway is now closed to new entries.

I will pick ten winners with the help of the RNG gods and announce them at some point tomorrow. As always, I’ll ship the books to the winners anywhere in the world free of charge.

Hope you’re all having a great weekend! Tune in tomorrow to see the list of lucky winners.

books. contests and giveaways.

DESCENT giveaway starts right meow

 

Here they are–ten paperback copies of DESCENT, fourth book in the Palladium Wars series, ready to be signed and shipped to new owners.

YOU TOO could be one of the lucky winners! Just leave a comment on this post indicating the desire to own a signed copy, and you will be entered in the giveaway. Entries will be counted until next Saturday, May 25, at 3pm EST. One entry per person, please, and make sure you log in with a valid email address so I can notify you in case you are one of the Chosen. Good luck!

books. the palladium wars.

DESCENT paperbacks have arrived

Author copies for DESCENT, the fourth book in the Palladium Wars series, have arrived at the Castle.

If you’re at all familiar with how things go around here, you know that this means another giveaway is imminent. I’ll start the traditional pre-release contest this weekend and run it for a week as always. (Don’t put your name in the hat already by commenting to that effect on this post; it won’t count.)

 

birbs.

Cyanocitta cristata

 

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.

castle frostbite. gadgetry.

Spicy Pillow Syndrome

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.

art. fountain pens. writing.

A magic wand for tattooing dead trees

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.

castle frostbite. writing.

Quick office tour, February of twenty-four

 

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!