castle frostbite. digital housekeeping.

Not a sponsored post (but I’m available for endorsements)

After five and a half years of steadfast and reliable service, I semi-retired The Beast, a 17″ Alienware laptop. I replaced it with…another 17″ Alienware laptop.

The Beast served me so well that I decided to go the same route for its replacement. I stuck with the same brand and screen size, picked a model I liked, and moved the configuration sliders for the hardware options all the way to the right for almost every component. I’m hoping that this system will last as long as the old one, which is still trucking along and now serving as a spare gaming rig for the kids in case one of theirs goes out of commission.

The new one is much faster than the old model and over two pounds lighter. But the killer feature for me is the mechanical keyboard they managed to squeeze into the laptop chassis, ultra-low profile Cherry switches. It’s a $100 upgrade from the regular keyboard, but let me tell you that it’s OH SO WORTH IT. It makes every other laptop keyboard I’ve ever typed on feel like mushy garbage. It’s firm and tactile and very clicky, and I want this keyboard on every laptop from now on.

(Keyboards are an important component when you’re in the business of typing a quarter million words or more a year.)

 

books. digital housekeeping. the palladium wars. writing.

Work in progress status update

The edits for SCORPIO are done, and I’ve started work on DESCENT, Palladium Wars #4. My plan is to turn in the draft by the end of July for a release in the first half of next year.

I installed a progress bar widget for WordPress, so now you can all follow along as I write the draft. The progress bar is in the sidebar to the right, on top of all the other widgets, and I’ll update it daily with the current word count.

books.

Bookplates for the ODDMENTS paperbacks without a Table of Contents

I submitted the change files for the corrected paperback version of ODDMENTS that includes a proper table of contents. It should be live within a day or two, and all the print copies ordered from Monday on should have a ToC in them.

As a solution for those of you who bought the print version that has no Table of Contents, I will print the ToC on a large sticker (for use as a bookplate) and send it to the people who want one for their book, free of charge. I’ll even sign the bookplates for some ADDED COLLECTOR VALUE.

If you purchased a paperback copy of ODDMENTS that doesn’t have a Table of Contents in it and you would like one, email me at marko.kloos@gmail.com with your address, and I’ll send you a signed bookplate with the ToC printed on it.

books.

A note on the paperback version of ODDMENTS

If you’re looking to buy the paperpack version of ODDMENTS on Amazon, please hold off on the purchase at the moment. The version that is live right now lacks a table of contents, and I am working to have that fixed.

I’ll post an update in this spot when the new version is available. (That’s the paperback only….the Kindle version has a proper ToC.)

 

books. shameless self-promotion.

Release day: ODDMENTS

Today sees the release of my short fiction compendium, titled ODDMENTS.

A while ago, I took stock of all the short fiction I’ve ever written. It’s a sizable pile of stories, but it’s distributed across a whole lot of online ‘zines, mosaic novels, or individual Kindle editions. If someone wanted to have all my short fiction, they’d have to go to a bunch of websites, purchase several different separate Kindle copies, and buy two mosaic novels. That’s a lot of footwork even if you know where to look, and too much of a hassle if you don’t.

I decided to put them all in one book, with a new introduction and forewords for each story.

The product description on Amazon reads thusly:

ODDMENTS is a compendium of short fiction written by Marko Kloos.
It contains all the short stories and novellas previously published in other story collections, mosaic novels, or online zines, combined into a single volume, with new introductions for each story added by the author.
ODDMENTS contains the following novellas and short stories:
  • On The Use Of Shape-Shifters In Warfare
  • Cake From Mars
  • Berlin Is Never Berlin
  • Lucky Thirteen
  • Measures of Absolution
  • Ink and Blood
  • Stripes
  • Probationary
  • How to Move Spheres and Influence People
It also includes three previously unpublished all-new stories:
  • Seeds
  • Steel and Paper
  • Rottertown
ODDMENTS: 120,000 words of fantasy, alternate history, and military science fiction by Marko Kloos, available in one comprehensive collection for the first time.
ODDMENTS is available via Amazon right now, in either Kindle or paperback formats. (The paperback isn’t live yet as I write this but should show up at some point today.)
If you were looking for a handy way to put all my short fiction on your shelf and get a few new stories as a bonus, it’s now super easy and highly convenient!
books. frontlines. shameless self-promotion.

SCORPIO release date and cover reveal

 

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that I updated the “The Next Book” countdown widget in the sidebar a little while ago.

Today I can announce that SCORPIO, the first novel in a new series called Frontlines: Evolution, has an official release date: November 14, 2023.

You can pre-order the Kindle version here. I don’t know when they’ll add the paperback and audio versions to the pre-order page, but the release date ought to be the same for those once they appear as pre-order options on the product page.

Frontlines: Evolution will take the series to new places and introduce new characters…but that doesn’t mean you won’t meet some of the ones you already know along the way.

 

books. frontlines. writing.

Terms of Enlistment is 10

 

Put on your party hats, because we have a birthday to celebrate. TERMS OF ENLISTMENT is ten years old this month. I brought it out in March 2013, and 47North bought it (and the second Frontlines novel, LINES OF DEPARTURE) in May of that year. Thanks to everyone who has ever bought this book and its sequels, but special thanks go out to those of you who took a chance on a self-published work from an unknown name when I put this novel out on Kindle Direct with the hopes of maybe selling a few hundred copies. It sold rather a lot more than that, which is why I had an agent and a publishing contract less than two months later.

Whenever I read through it these days, I can very much tell that it’s a first novel, but I am also positively surprised by how well it has managed to hold up, so I must have gotten that one mostly right. It certainly changed everything for me–I became a full-time writer that year, and the royalties for my books have been paying the bills since then.

Ten years…. don’t they go by in the blink of an eye. Now let’s see what the next ten years will bring.

 

 

history. military life.

30 years ago

German Erkennungsmarke (dog tag), issued January 1989. The new ones have the country code of DEU instead of GE.

When I checked the calendar for something unrelated earlier this week, I realized that I turned in my gear and became a civilian again exactly 30 years ago this month, after serving 4 years and 2 months in the German Army. I was only 21 when I got out because I was barely 17 when I enlisted almost straight out of high school.

The Erkennungsmarke isn’t something you usually get to keep. At the end of active service, it gets turned in with most of the other issued gear, to be put into the personnel file for reissue if there’s a reservist call-up or general mobilization. I have this one because I reported mine lost and they struck a replacement, only for me to find the original later, so I kept the duplicate.

I picked a wild time to serve in the military. When I joined up, the Cold War was still going on, although nobody in January of 1989 anticipated that eleven months later, the Berlin Wall would come down, and that all the communist satellite states of the Soviet Union would fall like dominoes within a few months, choosing democracy, Levi’s jeans and McDonald’s over socialism, Bulgarian shoes, and khlav kalash. By the time I got out, the Cold War was won, the Soviet Union didn’t exist anymore, the Baltic countries were independent, and Germany was reunited.

It doesn’t really feel like it was three decades ago. But I guess it’s correct because I got an email from my high school class reunion committee a few weeks ago, inviting me to our 35th anniversary high school reunion. Unfortunately, the math seems to check out…