the palladium wars. writing.

DESCENT draft is in the bag

As you can see on the progress bar on the right side, the draft for DESCENT is complete at 101% of projected word count. I’d say that’s a landing smack in the middle of the touchdown zone.

Now it goes off to the editor, and I get to do the traditional brain rinse where I step away from the manuscript for a week or two and catch up on my reading and streaming backlists.

For those of you who are looking forward to the release of DESCENT, I don’t have a release date, but if I had to wager a guess based on the normal production cycle, I predict that it will be released in the summer of next year.

the palladium wars. writing.

15SEP23

As you can see from the progress bar, the draft for DESCENT is moving along steadily. I write faster the further I get into the book, and especially once I reach the last quarter, so I expect to be finished in another two weeks or so. Then it goes off to the developmental editor, and I get to move on to the next project while I wait for the marked-up draft to get back to me for changes.

In unrelated news, I had an experience the other day that definitely marks me as a child of a certain time. There was a song on the radio I hadn’t heard in a long time, one that was popular when I was a poor teenager who had to make his own mix tapes from the radio. This involved keeping the boom box in my bedroom ready with a blank tape, and hit the red button whenever a song came on I wanted to record. Invariably, the start and the finish of the song would be cut off because I had to tape over the yakking of the DJ, who would talk into the beginning and start talking again at the end.

It was strange because I hadn’t heard that song in at least twenty years, but I still remembered exactly where the song cut off on my mix tape. Then I realized that I could not only remember where the song ended, but also the song that came after it on the tape. I must have listened to those home-baked mix tapes on my knock-off walkman constantly for those associations to still be lodged in my memories almost forty years later…

shameless self-promotion. the palladium wars.

AFTERSHOCKS on sale today

AFTERSHOCKS, the first book in the Palladium Wars series, is on sale today as a Kindle daily deal.

If you haven’t checked out the series, here’s your opportunity to try the first book out at a discount. I am currently writing the fourth Palladium Wars book, so you have a few to catch up on if the first one grabs you.

aminals. castle frostbite. writing.

17AUG23


I don’t have much to report because I am busy pushing this draft along (as you can see on the progress meter in the sidebar), so have a picture of a Dinky Dog in her favorite habitat–a cozy dog bed in a kitchen where there’s food preparation in progress.

I’m a slow correspondent at the best of times, and I am downright neglectful of my email inbox in the middle of a draft, so if you have sent me anything lately, please don’t be surprised if the reply (if applicable) takes a while.

books. writing.

SCORPIO release date change

Some readers have noticed that the release date for SCORPIO has been moved out to January 1, 2024.

There’s a reason for that change, one that I can’t reveal just yet. But I can tell you that good things are happening behind the scenes that will make the new date make sense once I am allowed to disclose them.

Edited to add: if you are a reviewer, book blogger, YouTuber, editor, book club, or someone who otherwise talks up books and makes recommendations, hit me up at marko dot kloos at gmail dot com. I have a number of ARCs (advance reader copies) left over after Readercon, and I can hook you up with one while my supply lasts.

writing.

11JUL23

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

 

–Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”

 

books. wild cards.

Wild Cards: Pairing Up release day

Happy WILD CARDS day!

I have a novelette featured in the latest Wild Cards anthology, titled PAIRING UP. It’s out today and available wherever books are sold:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675676/george-r-r-martin-presents-wild-cards-pairing-up-by-george-r-r-martin/

The novelette is called “In The Forests of the Night”, and it features my Wild Cards character Khan, the joker-ace who’s half tiger. The theme of the anthology is, well, pairing up–as in romantic connections. You don’t need to have read prior Wild Cards books to enjoy this one because they’re all stand-alone stories.

Kirkus Reviews did a nice write-up of the book and said nice things about my story, including this nice little pull quote:

Featuring two memorable and downright cool fight scenes, this story has a fitting conclusion that makes it noteworthy.

Other featured writers in this anthology are Kevin Andrew Murphy, Christopher Rowe, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Bradley Denton, Walton Simons, Peter Newman, Gwenda Bond, and David Anthony Durham. It’s a fun collection of romantic superhero entanglements, which is a subject we don’t often touch in Wild Cards.

 

books. castle frostbite. health.

ARCs and progress bars and also Readercon


The ARCs for SCORPIO are in, which officially means it’s a real, actual book now.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the progress bar for DESCENT hasn’t moved a whole lot in the last two weeks. That’s because the whole family came down with COVID two weeks ago, and now that we have recovered, we are hosting family from abroad for a little while. Family visits always keep me extremely busy because I have to function as tour organizer, translator, interpreter, driver, and so on. But the bar is moving again, and I predict that the draft will still be done on schedule.

Lastly, I’ll be at Readercon in mid-July for a few days, so drop by and say hello if you’re going to be there as well. I’ll also have a bunch of these ARCs with me for reviewers and bloggers and so forth, so hit me up for one if you are such a person and you bump into me at Readercon…unless I see you first, in which case I’ll try to push an ARC on you.

books.

Bookplates are on the way

I finally got my ducks in a row for the bookplates I promised, and they are on their way. Everyone who requested a bookplate for their misprinted copy of ODDMENTS will receive one in the mail soon.

I also changed the layout of the paperback to reduce the font size and clean up the formatting to make it less of a phone book in size. The new format saved about a hundred print pages. As an added benefit, fewer pages means lower cost, savings which I decided to pass on. The paperback version is now $12.99 instead of $14.99.

 

food and drink. history.

One of the top three American inventions

 

Why didn’t anyone inform me that licorice-flavored gum is a thing?

(Today I learned that Black Jack has been around since 1884, that it was the first flavored gum in the United States, and that it was the first gum to be offered in sticks.)