[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]
Woke up to about a footprint of snow, and three elk in the side yard grazing. Not exactly mid-March in my mind, but what the hell. Let’s run with it.
Starting yesterday, I am producing a set of essays on all the research I did for Red Branch, as we get ready to publish 2, 3, and 4. And I’m about mid-way through 5.
I have acquired several expensive books on early Jet aviation. Metric shit-tons on World War 2 aircraft, then you come up to “The history of aviation” books that cover everything. But Tony Buttler and Yefim Gordon both have deep catalogs and I’ve been tracking hard copies of those down slowly.
Way too much fun, because I’m exploring that “What if…?” element of science fiction while studying a lot of history that is utterly new to me. Like the civil war in Colombia that ran from 1948 for about a decade. Never gets mentioned. Or all the wars in NW South America in the 20th Century.
Having fun. Turning it all into essays, so I have to stop and think about why I wrote any given book and what I had to learn to do it right. There will be a new edition of Book One in a month or so so you can go back and update your version of the ebook. Or send me a note and I’ll email it to you. Probably have them in every novel in the series as I go forward. New idea, but a lot of fun.
Red Branch 5 is in South America and the eastern Pacific. Slow build with a lot of history, espionage, and occasional strafing and bombing missions to advance the plot and explore what these worlds were like.
Discovered after I got into it a bit that I really enjoyed the new villain I introduced, so I probably circle him back in a future novel. Or find a way that he and the Red Branch have to team up to somehow save the world. Enemy of my Enemy kind of thing.
Rereading Heather #3 because I plan to dive into #4 shortly. Hoping to have them all done in the next several months, so I can pub them next year and move on to Veronika after that. Plus all the other series I want to write. All the stories I have yet to tell.
Got a couple of trips planned this year. WorldCon will be in Seattle, but we’re getting a B&B downtown close to a rail station so we don’t have to park. Last I heard, I had been invited to be on panels, but nothing about what. Hopefully I know soon, as it’s in August. And hopefully AuthorNation invites me to talk again this year. Suggested a couple of ideas that apparently were well received. Always trying to push the envelope forward, because Indie never stops.
Couple of folks in the “Teaching Young Writers” phase seem to have kind of stalled out recently, as I’ve watched. They stop writing, then start teaching, then disappear after a couple of years. Sad, because entropy is a bitch. So is ennui. Gotta stay moving.
Hopefully, your Tuesday isn’t biting much and you can keep going forward. Lower your shoulders and unclench your jaw. Breathe. Drink some water.
It’s an ultramarathon, as we walk to Kamchatka.
shade and sweet water,
b
West of the Mountains, WA
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