Author Archives: Blaze

I Art

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Had a few conversations recently that got me to thinking about impostor syndrome and how many folks that want to commit art end up holding back.

I know a lot of creatives that can commit all manner of art. Could make money at it. Dunno about a living, because that involves a lot of work, but I started out making $258 my first year selling books.

From there, I decided that I wanted to art for money. As I spoke with various artists, I came to realize how many of them don’t believe that they should be allowed to be successful as artists.

Pardon me, but WTF?

Why are you limiting yourself? Why not at least try?

My first wife was an artist who worked in colored pencil to create lifelike portraits. I turn my head to the right as I type these words and I have a piece she did in 1991 of John Muir, the naturalist.

She’d tried doing commercial art in the 90s and hated it. Mostly, she had to deal with folks wanting her to do create specific pictures as part of advertising. Hated that. Hated people telling her to change things, because she drew it as she saw it.

Instead, she just took commissions from folks to turn one of their photographs into a poster-sized drawing. Enjoyed that. I have a number of her pieces, and the step-daughters have all the remaining originals and prints at this point.

But that was the old days. Today, she might be able to sell her art on-line. Maybe even make money.

For writers, there used to be a precisely specific pattern one was supposed to follow. First, you wrote short stories and submitted them to the lower-end magazines in your genre. Eventually, your rejections would get more personal, with suggestions. Finally, they would buy things. You worked your way up the food chain slowly.

From there, you sold more and more, making a name for yourself. Maybe winning awards.

Then you wrote a novel and looked for an agent to represent you with the traditional publishing houses. (Back when there might have been hundreds, instead of the remaining handful.)

Eventually, you’d get some sort of deal. Advance. Royalties, maybe. Fame.

Today, I know lots of folks that still think that is the only way to do it. They’re wrong, but they don’t generally want to hear that.

That world is gone.

I write. Publish. Write the next thing. I have been struck by lightning twice, but I have also worked my ass off at committing art, to the point that I have fans willing to buy books as soon as I put something up for preorder, sight unseen. To support me on Patreon. To tell their friends about me.

It can be done. You can do it.

It bothers me that I keep running into people who have the potential. And the desire. Except that when asked, they explain to me that they’re not good enough to art.

Seriously? How the hell would you know? Have you tried? Or are you listening to one of your parents, thirty or fifty years later, tell you that you aren’t good enough? (I know a few horror stories about New York Times Bestselling authors who still got that from a parent. Ugh.)

Why do you not commit art? What holds you back from putting it out there and making money from it? I’m not promising lots of money, but we all started with nothing. You will, too. And maybe get struck by lightning.

I had dreams, and a couple of friends or coworkers who might toss $5 in on a lark just because. Hell, I sold early collections off my desk at work more than once.

If you can art, why don’t you? It used to be that costs to get your art out there might be utterly prohibitive, which was why you needed a publisher. Or a gallery. Or a record label.

I’m a few weeks from releasing my first single, recorded as Ward and Rogers, because Paul and I are having fun creating music. My friend Toby just released another single this week. He tours and gigs relentlessly. He wants it. (Inspires me, too, when I hear those voices telling me to stay in bed today.)

Why don’t you? What’s holding you back from writing, drawing, (and/)or recording?

I think that most of you would be happier if you took that risk and put yourself out there. There will always be trolls, but you ignore the assholes and you’ll find fans. I get emails from readers thanking me for some of the things I write. Awesome reviews. (And a few assholes, but we ignore him, except to laugh that he will eventually buy every book I release AT FULL PRICE in order to give me a one star review complaining that my female characters should have been naked bimbos. Seriously.)

Ignore the trolls.

What art do you have in your soul? This is the time when the world needs more art. More entertainment. People are getting to the level monsters at the ends of the various streaming services, and looking for things to make them smile.

Why isn’t that you?

None of my books make me rich. None of them. All of them combined into a thing called a Catalog makes me a nice, middle class living where I don’t ever have to put on pants in the morning or commute to somebody else’s office.

I want to art. I want you to art.

What will it take for you to get past that voice whispering in your ear, so that you decide to art?

And how do we get you there?

I Can’t Save You

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Because it’s come up three times now in the last few weeks, I thought I might share some thoughts on where we are in the modern age.

Civility has taken a back seat for many people. Just the basic courtesy of not being an asshole to someone. I’m not talking about the ribbing and teasing I get from close friends. I mean semi-random strangers on the internet who feel that distance and anonymity gives them the right to go out of their way to abuse me.

I know a few folks who thrive on the emotional combat that comes from such interactions. The striving to find ever-more-poignant ways to troll people.

What does it gain? Other than the adrenaline rush of the moment, what does it matter? Have you made the world a better place by verbally assaulting someone on social media? By being an outright dick to them? (How many times have you failed Wheaton’s Rule today?)

I don’t argue with folks. I don’t fight people in a public forum. But I do keep score. I do look at those folks who would rather spend all their time lashing out at the slightest infringement on their personal space in apocalyptic tones.

I understand fighting the good fight. I don’t see any reason to expend all my energy going after someone that won’t learn a single thing from anything I might tell them. Their minds are closed. Their souls are unable to find joy in themselves or others. They cannot look on a stranger’s success and be happy, so they must find fault and find a way to tear someone down.

They are addicted to rage.

Are you? Answer me honestly.

When something inconveniences you, what is your first—automatic—response? Do you shrug phlegmatically at something beyond your control? Do you suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and get one with your day?

Or do you turn around and throw punches (verbal or otherwise)?

Since it’s come up again, I figured I’d say a few things that some people will acknowledge and others will ignore. They are addicted to rage. They cannot be saved.

We are approaching the second anniversary of my home state of Washington shutting down entirely as a way to control a virulent disease that had mutated into something new. Something deadly.

West of the Mountains is (with a few dumbass pockets) an extremely civilized place, where folks are willing to suffer a minor inconvenience so as to help complete strangers.

Not everyone, though. I was at the grocery earlier picking up supplies and noting the physical traits that a handful of unmasked yahoos had in common. I bet you can list them all easily enough, because those folks have become a caricature.

I no longer say rude things about masks to those people, because after this long, they cannot be saved.

Read that again: Cannot be saved.

Any energy I might want to spend trying to educate them, trying to find the slightest hint of empathy, anything, is therefore wasted.

They can’t be saved. They don’t want to be saved. Their entire identity is wrapped up in a thing of utter negativity, and they would rather die than change.

They are addicted to rage because they have run into something they cannot control, and have never grown up.

Because that’s what it is. You’re seeing the sorts of juvenile behavior that we display as toddlers until such time as we discover that other people exist and might also have value.

Some people never learn that lesson. All you have to do is walk around a grocery store to see it on display.

Pride. But the wrong kind of pride. Pride in individuality at the cost of every other human being they might ever meet.

I can’t save them. Someone asked why I ignored a few folks who had discovered emptiness when they demanded my attention. Ghost-mode.

I’m not there. Won’t be. Won’t be coming back again.

Because I can’t save you. And it takes an amazing amount of effort on your part to move me to that sort of intention. Three folks have all managed it recently. (Actually, far more than three, but these were object lessons brought up by others in the past few weeks, so I’ll leave it at them.)

All of them raged. In two cases, they were wrong, but will never admit it. In the third, it was my fault, and I apologized, only to have an extra heaping of scornful rage dumped on my apology and rubbed in my face.

Easy enough. I promise that I will never make that mistake again. Safest way to do that is to never speak to you again. Voila. Endgame.

I understand rage. I was addicted to it myself for the longest time. But I hardly ever let it out on someone else. In fact, in the last twenty years, I can only think of a few circumstances where someone else witnessed my rage. (Ain’t none of you seen me truly angry, no matter what you might think.)

Then one day I decided I didn’t want to be angry all the time. July, 2013. I’d woken up white hot. Worse than I could ever remember being.

That was bad. I realized that NOTHING useful came of that rage.

So I became someone else. I do that a lot. Anyone who has known me long enough has seen it happen, but this time I had a hard pivot.

I chose to be happy.

Took a while to recover from the addiction. Won’t deny that. But I did.

Walked away from it. Don’s miss it.

But I do recognize others who haven’t gotten to that point in their emotional development. They think that scoring points on folks like that matters, because they have no empathy. I probably have too much, and that was largely the basis of my anger for so long.

I’m not that guy anymore.

And I can’t save you. Because you don’t want to be saved. You want to be idolized for the volume, tenacity, and destructiveness of your rage. For the metaphorical scalps you have accumulated in any given day.

All of those scalps belong to people. Do you ever give a thought about them?

Or is the rage your fulfillment entirely?

So when you can’t figure out why I won’t take your call, why I’ve blocked you entirely on social media and forgotten you exist, perhaps you can look on these thoughts and learn something from them.

How often do you drive people off? How many people are willing to look at you and tell you that you’re being a total asshole to complete strangers? Or are they afraid you will go after them next?

Been there. Done that. Got the scars.

But I also have my freedom from your behavior.

Because I can’t save you.

As a result, I have absolutely no interest in putting forth any effort.

Maybe you’ll grow up one of these days. Maybe you’ll learn how to apologize. Doubt it, but I’ve been struck by lightning a few times over the years, so I’ll leave that door ajar.

But not for who you are today. I don’t like that person, and choose to not have them soiling my air with their rage.

You have to decide to save yourself.

Good luck.

The January Man: A few thoughts

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The January Man.

One of my favorite movies, because it flips so many genre tropes on its head without ever breaking the fourth wall or mugging for the camera. Rich (read: Insane) characters in a fun setting, doing crazy shit. I often wonder if they just kind of handed the cast the rough outlines of a script and told them to run with it. It has that madcap feel.

If you haven’t seen it lately, you should go watch it. Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman, Harvey Keitel, Danny Aiello, and Rod Steiger. Best of all, the angst of a man just trying to find a decent espresso. (Movie came out in 1989. Before Starbucks was the thing it later became. When asking for espresso could be a running gag.)

The movie is on my mind this morning because it takes a most interesting path to telling a mystery. Breaks almost all the rules in the process.

The murderer is never a character in the story. Only hardly makes an appearance, at the beginning and end. I had to go look him up. Played by Greg Walker, who was the film’s Stunt Coordinator and has one hell of an impressive IMDB page as a stuntman, running from 1970 to 2001.

That is to say, there is no murderer character in the movie. Instead, you have an All-Star cast alternatively chewing the scenery and bouncing off each other at high speed. And I do mean high speed.

Oh, and trying to figure out a whole OTHER set of crimes. The ones that got Kevin’s character Nick kicked off the police force to the point he had to become a fireman instead.

I’ve always loved this movie, in spite of the shitty reviews it got at the time. Watched it not long ago and it still holds up (assuming you set your mind in 1989, which was a completely different world).

Partly that’s because the movie is told In Media Res (which is the theme and title of a new Business for Breakfast book that just came out). Starting the story in the middle, rather than the long build-up of character development that takes chapters of a book and long stretches of a movie.

There’s a serial killer. Nobody can stop him. The Mayor demands that Police Commissioner Harvey reinstate his disgraced brother (Kevin/Nick) to solve it. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ had never seen the film because she thought it was some taut, psychological thriller, instead of a comedy. And it is a comedy. Alan Rickman playing a Bohemian named Ed, nuff said?

As I thought about it this morning, I realized that Greyson Leigh, the star of the Hunter Bureau novels (with #3 and #4 both coming out shortly), was loosely based on Kevin Kline’s character, except played by Humphrey Bogart at his roughest in Maltese Falcon. (Writer-brain is weird, but that shouldn’t be news to you folks at this point.)

But what got me going this morning was the realization that I don’t often really have villains floating around in my stories. I might have people on the other side, but rarely are they dedicated to evil. Instead, they are just people. Sometimes, the villain is just a bad situation. Or a personal issue to be dealt with in the middle of some mad caper.

But I can get away with it because I like to tell stories like The January Man. Have all the folks on one side of the equation going up against a ghost and trying to outsmart somebody who is not even there.

All the while, they are dealing with their own personal issues and problems that predate the start of the story. (Betrayals, failed romances, balsamic vinegar.) We don’t see Nick getting fired and denounced. We first see him being a hero, a fireman rescuing a kid from a burning building. Ed and Bernadette are mostly innocent and pure as characters, while the entire rest of the cast are some level of sleazeball played with great verve and joy by some amazing actors.

Mostly, I just like the In Media Res part of things. But you should know that about me. I like starting in the middle and just letting the characters fill in details as part of the conversation. (Seriously, the whole movie feels like some fantastic improv group trying to win a bet.) Telling, instead of showing, because that one throwaway line makes people stop and try to envision what really went down off-screen. (Sorry, Josh.)

I can tell a story at speed. Start in the middle, solve the mystery, save the girl, save the day. Never deal with how the characters got where they are.

That’s probably one of the reasons why the critics hated this movie. The other likely being that all the standard tropes get tossed on their heads. For me, I chalk that up to people expecting cops like the Police Commissioner and the Mayor to be heroic figures (obviously, they’ve never actually read the paper or seen the truth about most of those folks, especially NYC). Nick Starkey is more like a private detective here, and brings a PI’s sensibilities to the case. Turned that way, it fits exactly into the mold of those movies.

But there’s no real villain. Just a bad-ass Stunt Coordinator who engages in a fantastic chase sequence with Kevin Klein where they both fall down several flights of stairs.

“Who’s he?” somebody asks at the end as Nick has captured The January Man.

“He’s nobody,” Nick answers.

Because he really is. Nobody. Played by a Stunt Coordinator. And he is a completely different way to tell an old, tired story.

What have you done to turn tropes and expectations on their heads lately?

2021 in Books and things

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Because there is now way in hell to discuss the year in general and not offend your delicate sensibilities with my profanity. So we’ll stick with writing productivity.

For the year, I wrote fifteen novels. Five of those are the back of the First Centurion Kosnett books, of which Encounter at Vilahana and Consensus at Aditi are now out. Hegemony at Dalou and Princes at Ewin will come out in the spring, with Empire at Gloran and Domain at Yaumgan in the fall. This will generally wrap up the Republic of Aquitaine Navy books for a while, though I have notes on the next couple of sets that I want to write when I get back to it.

Two Hunter Bureau books: The Pleasure Model and Inhuman are Feb and March 2022. Bigger, badder, darker. Open-ended, so I can write more when the mood strikes.

The Fifth Handsome Rob Gig: Kinetic Solutions in May. I had WAY too much fun with this one, but this is me inverting most of the tropes of the secret agent action hero literature to do something more like what my research has suggested real spies do. Again, there will be more, because each of these is self-contained structurally.

Summer is a semi-cyberpunk trilogy called Captain Daring. I say semi-cyberpunk because they are not all that dark and gloomy. Mostly I rolled the world forward to 2104 and guestimated what things would look like. And presumed that not a lot of politics would really change.

My personal genesis for Captain Daring was reading Gail Carriger’s book on The Heroine’s Journey and working my way through a plot structure. If you split the difference between Carriger and the Harlequin movie, you’ve about got it.

Finally, the eleventh Science Officer: Buried Among The Stars. Thank you to everyone for the comments and the sales. I had a nice December and when all that money comes in around March I’ll get to do a little happy dance.

In addition to the fifteen novels, I wrote thirty-five other projects, for an accidental round fifty for the year.

Part of that is spinning up a new penname for the erotica. Cole Braddock, if you want to go enjoy some. I wrote the first half of the first Dirk Thruster series in 2020 and the remaining six this year. Additionally, the first eight Maddox stories, which will come out in the spring. Plus two Commander Machesky novellas.

Machesky and Dirk are both space opera erotica. You could pull out all the sex and still have a story. You could pull out all the plot and still have a pleasant interlude. Maddox is straight historical.

I’m having fun, and will continue to publish them.

Most of the short fiction went to my patreon folks. I say $5 will get you a short story every month, but more than once they’ve gotten two. Occasionally an unpublished novel. I actually had to write a new cyberpunkish short this week because I looked at all the unpublished fiction I have and realized that I only had three short pieces in all that they hadn’t seen. Might have to write more for January, just to get ahead.

My rule on Patreon is that any of those stories don’t come out for at least six months after they get it. Sometimes more than a year. Figure I should reward folks for supporting my crazy ventures.

So they got to meet Trevor and Night Butterfly. Roland. Quill. Otter Space. Nissa. Emily. Oleg. Senior Flight Officer Brannon. Wilson. And Harper. All of those are new universes, some of which will turn into novels and series at some point (Oleg, Brannon, and probably Wilson first).

This is your reminder that skipping a starbucks each month can get you some fun and imaginative fiction years before anybody else sees them. As a case in point, I’ll probably drop four collections of science fiction shorts this year, each about 65,000 words, give or take. You haven’t read at least half of it, and would have had to read every issue of Boundary Shock Quarterly, Blaze Ward Presents, and a couple of other places where I submitted stories, in order to be caught up.

See what you’re missing?

Boundary Shock Quarterly continues apace. I will be publishing Issue 017 in a week or so. Dieselpunk.

In 2021, we came out with Solarpunk, Space Marines, Cargo Wars, and Wandering Monsters.

2022 titles are Dieselpunk, Veterans, Sea Stories, and New Worlds, New Civilizations. That’s Year Five (Issues 017-020) so we’re still plugging along.

Blaze Ward Presents has gone from twice a year to annually, just because of the amount of work. This year we did “Crime And…” where the submitted story had to be a mystery with a one word title that finished the phrase. I got some fun and interesting stories, because BWP is always about letting writers swing for the fences. Far too often, editors put down multi-page specs about all the themes that they don’t want, then turn around and complain when all the stories that they get are identical. (I’ve actually sat in a coffee shop and listened to that exact bitch from somebody who should have known better.)

So now BWP is annual. Every year, I open the call on April 1. Close it April 30. Publish as close to June 1 as I can hit. Helps that most of the people involved are pros who give me quality stories and hit deadlines. (Plus a few of them I will tell the next theme well in advance, just so they can fit it into busy writing schedules. If you are a pro who can hit theme and want to play, hit me up via email.)

End of 2021-wise, I finished the year with 1,409,687 words. For much of the year, I was aiming to write about 5000 words per day, with Saturdays taken entirely off because I had started doing Tai Chi in the Park in Enumclaw, WA. Will get back to that.

Traditionally, 4,000/day means that I can take off a few days at the end of the month and just coast. 117,000 words for the month (or a little more) and done. This year, that mostly worked, except that August and September went sideways, and I struggled to hit 100,000 each of those months. Managed it, barely, but things were busy and I’m hoping that 2022 relaxes on that front.

I continue to be healthy. Vaxxed and Boosted and fuck all those people who refuse. Personally, the faster they can die off the sooner the civilized portions of humanity can get back to something like a normal life. I gave them two years of sympathy and empathy, but they can just die now and make the world a better place for the rest of us.

If you aren’t vaxxed and DON’T HAVE A MEDICAL reason (I have friends who nearly died from getting their first dose, so they are at risk and can’t get it), then I don’t want to know you. Period. Go away. Die in the underbrush and maybe feed the feral cats or something.

Yeah, lost too many people these last two years to listen to your whining.

I plan to live to be 100. Plan to die at my keyboard with a stack of novels for my great-great-great-whatevers to publish when I’m gone. I can’t do that if you people keep mutating new diseases because you have to stick it to the libs. I’m one of those libs. (Actually, a really hard pink these days, as the overton window slides off a fucking cliff.) I’m done with you. Whoever you are.

Nuff said? Clear?

Good.

Hope for the rest of you that your 2021 didn’t do more damage to your life than you can handle, and that ’22 is better. I’d like to see my friends in person again, instead of Zoom, Discord, or phone calls. I miss (a very compact number of) people. We can do this, but everyone has to act like a grownup.

I want to keep writing. Got a lot more stories to tell, and only forty-some years to get there.

Be safe and take care.

And smile.

Shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

Eden Package and the Power of Inspiration

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When I first became convinced that I could write fiction and make enough money to call it a living, I had a number of ideas I wanted to pursue. The first and most important turned out to be The Science Officer, which led us into the entirety of the Alexandria Station Universe (minus only a few parts I don’t consider canon at this point).

Another was the idea that became Kincaide Kataragama and The Eden Package. At the time however (2014), I knew that I wasn’t a good enough writer to pull off something like that. Too big. Too many moving pieces, considering that I expected six main characters who were all radically different people with different motives, goals, methodologies and even species.

So I waited.

I used to have a job doing Business Intelligence Systems design. Database Architecture and the like. Lived in t-sql and wrote incredibly complex filtering systems. (My favorite query started out with 17,000 lines of code, all well documented internally because I had a system, before I managed to refine it down to about 9,000 after polishing. Big. Any time you have 20+ internal temp tables, shit gets messy.)

On my machine I work, I had a notepad++ file and would keep story ideas there any time something interesting came up, emailing it home to myself regularly. For years. What became the Eden Package was huge, in the number of lines of ideas, notes, and other things.

Eventually, I reached a new plateau of my craft that I felt like I could go beyond the three chapters I had in my head (which came out pretty close to how you will read them in January). It was the rest that took a lot of work.

Eden Package came in at a little over 160,000 words. By far the single longest title I’ve written to date, mostly because I tend to keep novels shorter and use them as punctuation in much longer series arcs where 250,000-400,000 words is my goal. Jessica et al runs closer to one million, but I originally only intended to write a trilogy and go on to something else. (That’s a story I’ve talked about elsewhere, and might again later.)

Eden Package took time, because there were so many moving parts. Cloning, but a new form of cloning, where you walk into a booth that acts like a transporter beam from Star Trek, except that you don’t go anywhere. Just get reduced to information and stored in a database. Forever.

Or at least until they need a copy of you and decant one.

Maybe an earlier you died of old age. Maybe they needed your genetics for some experiment. Something. Personal timelines don’t have to line up with anything, because a hundred years might pass. Or they might Index you to have an updated copy, then immediately print you again, if you are important enough.

But where did the idea come from?

As you can see, my copy is a bit worn. I got it new, back in 1978, and kept it when I passed most of my old comic book collection on to a friend for his kids a decade or so ago. (Had I known that SOB would immediately turn around and sell them instead…)

There is a ship. It is fleeing ahead of some catastrophe that is never fully explained in the comic, mostly because these titles were always one-off things designed to see if they wanted to expand it into a full title, or maybe do a four-issue run like they did in those days. There have been a few reboots that went beyond that final frame, but they never went anywhere and were nearly impossible to find print copies these days for a reasonable price. (Haven’t looked lately, so that might have changed.)

The idea of a telepath as an organic component for the FTL drive is fantastically fun, especially if you have one who was built, instead of born. Or rather, some mad scientist (that fucker Hasan Ildar in this case) started with a woman who had telepathic abilities, then started pushing the envelope. Radically. She’s not human any more. Part squid. Part other things. Extremely powerful. Designed to never achieve maturity in body or mind, so perpetually twelve years old.

But the power to alter genes and print out new experiments means there will be men who want to create sex objects. (There will be. Human males today are like that. Maybe we change later, but I’m not holding my breath.) So another Bio-god created Monster Wives to have sex with. All the worst nightmares he could come up with, because the man was an adrenaline junkie and had to keep upping the dosage, as it were. Until it killed him. Hopefully, he’s enjoying his time in hell.

The species that originally found Earth (the Alvar) realized that humans would be far better than any of the slave species they had been using to power their engines, so they immediately conquered the planet and rounded up all the survivors they could. Then they filtered those for the one best suited to some mental abilities and bred them.

And let their human slaves tinker on one another.

Dashavatara is the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu, come down to kick ass when things go wrong, so that was what they named the ship. The humans, working in a little conspiracy, built it to carry them beyond Alvar reach, where they could be free.

Then Kincaide and friends change a few things, in order to rescue those Monster Wives, and leave  that asshole Ildar behind.

And run like hell for the warp-shroud.

Big. Messy. Complicated. I had a lot of space to cover what could have easily been two novels, but I wanted it all in one space, because the emotional arc was tremendous here.

It will be a trilogy. Today (12/20), I am about to finish the sixth and final First Centurion Kosnett novel. My plan is to start writing the second volume in Kincaide’s War in January. It will also be huge. Target again 160-170k. The series should be a trilogy, with Eden Package, Vehicles of Epiphany, and Ships of Heaven as the titles right now.

Eden Package, however, does stand on its own. And is an entire step bigger and more complicated than Jessica Keller or the Alexandria Station Universe, because I have aliens. Lots of them. History where the Alvar individually live 5000-8000 years, and their ruling dynasty has been on the throne since before humans emerged as a distinct species.

Book two will have an even older foe out there, because I enjoy contemplating the sorts of things that can happen when you really build for eternity in space.

When does somebody cross over and present as a god, anyway?

Personally, I’m looking forward to folks commenting on Eden Package. Something of a labor of love, but also a big sandbox that warrants the term Epic Space Opera.

Who will end up controlling the galaxy, when all is said and done? Or the universe?

Because humans and Alvar will never be able to live in harmony. Not unless there is a revolution.

Coming January 10, 2022.

Have you considered being happy?

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Without going into details (the guilty would be too easy to identify), I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about deciding to be happy. In the way back, I was not a happy person. Folks who knew me in those days can testify that I was frequently a grumpy curmudgeon.

Shitty job (that paid well). Lots of stress. A LOT of unprocessed issues from much earlier that I have been slowly sorting out and putting to bed for many years.

But not happy.

One day, in early July of 2013, I hit white hot. Simply as angry as I could ever remember being. Burn it all down and salt the earth kind of mad.

Then something weird happened.

I woke up the next morning and realized that I didn’t want to be that guy. Didn’t want the rage to dictate my actions.

Didn’t want to be unhappy anymore.

So I decided to become somebody else. Folks who have known me for long enough can also testify that I have been doing this since at least the mid-80s, if not earlier (I don’t honestly remember at this point). But I had never chosen to be happy.

I had made a lot of bad choices over the years. Defensive one, for the most part, designed to keep people from hurting me.

Then one morning I said “Fuck it, I’m going to be happy instead.”

Decided to make wholesale changes in my life. Stopped drinking soda pop entirely. Stopping shaving. Even stopped cutting my hair. Lost weight and turned into a scruffy nerfherder pretty quickly, but I also let a lot of stress go. Slid right off my back.

It was kinda weird.

I mean, I would wake up excited for the new day, instead of dreading it. The job wasn’t all that great, but it paid a lot and let me do crazy/interesting things with data. And I had a boss who mostly left me alone to solve problems because he had other fires to put out instead.

Happy.

Part of it was slowly starting to cut negative people out of my life. You know the ones. Folks who answer any and every smile with a snarl. Or bitingly sarcastic viciousness. Gaslighters. Narcissists. The works. I had accumulated too many.

Started fixing that.

The timing was wonderful, too, because about a month later, Fabulous Publisher Babe™ wandered back into my life and asked what I’d been doing for the last five years. I told her that that was a three-beer conversation, so she asked where we were going for beer.

One of my department minions at work ended up keeping the quarter I bet her about how that Saturday date would go. And FPB and I were engaged about nine weeks later.

She had also gone through an interesting patch in spring of 2013, and realized that she wanted to make some serious changes in things. To become someone else.

We met at the right moment, because we were looking to be happier, and realized that each could help the other. We talk. Hold hands. Have entire conversations with a few sounds that include no consonants. (It freaks a few people out, but we can’t help it.)

Happy.

It is a thing I work on everyday, because I like being happy. Not something I’d experienced for way too long. WAY TOO LONG.

So I grabbed hold and won’t let go.

Circle back to my friend, and some of the things frustrating him. I asked him if he’d rather be happy.

For me, I was a conscious choice. One I make in the morning.

He’s not quite there yet, but I have planted a seed that will blossom. I’ve seen him go through some rough patches in the past, as well as lose some dear friends in the pandemic. But he’s also happier now than he’s been in a long time, and most of the frustration was not recognizing that other folks haven’t made the decision to be happy yet.

They’d rather be crabby. Backbiting. Snarky without purpose. He wants the best for them. I do too, but hardly know them to be able to judge where they are and what they might change that suddenly caused happiness to burst out all over their lives.

But we all need it.

What have you done lately to bring more happiness into your life?

Progressive Fiction (not what you think)

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The Fabulous Publisher Babe™ follows a thread on reddit that talks about progressive fiction, except it’s not what immediately came to mind. The concept is for a series where the characters grow and age over time, rather than being trapped in a timeless state, book after book.

It struck her as completely wrong for a variety of reasons. Then she and I got to talking about it.

I don’t read a lot of science fiction these days (or much of anything). Partly, it’s a lack of things that entice me, looking at cover and blurbs. She, on the other hand, grabs dozens of samples from anything then reads the first bit to see if it is even worth pursuing enough to check out of a library, let alone buy.

One of the great things that Amazon did was destroy all the gatekeepers preventing writers from publishing their book and connecting with their fans. One of the worst things Amazon did was destroy all the gatekeepers preventing writers from publishing their books and connecting with their fans.

There is a lot of shit out there these days. Diamonds in the rough. But a lot of shit.

I’ve told the story about being in Powell’s books Beaverton for a book signing my wife was doing after OryCon, several years ago. They were all set up, and just waiting for a few hours for the event to start. I had money burning a hole in my pocket, and two deep rows of a big store, both sides, eight feet high. Thousands of shelf-feet of books.

I could not find a book I wanted to buy. Seriously.

She looked at me and said “Write it then.”

That became Auberon, which was originally supposed to be a trilogy. (Stop laughing.)

I hit several top 100 selling Science Fiction subcategories on Amazon last night, hoping I could emulate her idea of grabbing lots of samples and getting lucky. I won’t say I failed, because it is me trying a new way of looking at books.

I failed at finding anything to read. (3/400 is not a great hitting ratio, even outside of baseball.)

I grew up with David Drake and Doc Smith. Glen Cook, back when the Black Company trilogy was all there was (before it sucked). Old school science fiction adventure centered on real people thrust into real but extraordinary circumstances and forced to adapt. (Modern Chosen One fantasy stories do not work for me.)

Based on the blurbs I read last night, I might be one of the few folks selling well that do the sort of thing I do. Not counting dead people, which was about half of many of those top 100 categories (everyone has just discovered that Frank Herbert actually wrote a book once, since adapted into a movie recently), I went through 400 best selling on Amazon and got three samples to try my luck with.

None of them fill me with the sorts of excitement I remember as a kid or young adult. I know that there is good stuff out there, but my reading tastes meander differently than other folks.

Let’s start with that concept of progressive.

I found several series where the entire series is the same story told over and over again with different names. I mean, literally in one series it seemed like every book was about a (different) guy who found a working alien spaceship hidden in his grandfather’s barn, waiting for him to go save the universe. Oh, and he’s also a retired navy seal.

Some of you know who Marty Stu is. That was a metric shit ton of them in the titles I looked at.

And a whole shit-ton of (ALMOST ALWAYS MALE) characters who were extremely TSTL. (And mind you, this is ONLY THE BLURB I’m reading here.)

Another category read like 70s action fiction with the setting changed to SF. One story mentioned the main character as a middle-aged Vietnam vet. Uhm that would be 1990, give or take, not today.

Then there were all the bad-ass US Marine Force Recon Raider Navy Seal hero dude stories where he is is called upon to save the galaxy when aliens invade in the current day and somehow are vulnerable to 9mm bullets and a stiff chop to the throat. Or something. (Seriously? FTL Aliens are not going to invade earth and lose.)

I appreciate that people read for the escapism element, but all of these books were basically hammered down into an extremely narrow sub-sub-sub-genre with a 20# maul. And I’m not that reader.

Real people. Real problems. Real risk. Real solutions.

Can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t even suspend my disbelief to get through the blurb. Chosen One stories. Wish fulfillment fantasies. Fairy godmother aliens (or something). Super SEAL badass warrior human who can defeat every alien in the galaxy as they line up individually to be chopped with a sword or shot in the face.

I wrote Auberon because I couldn’t find something on the shelf at Powell’s that appealed to me. I appreciate today that Powell’s is all about paper, and a lot of SF never makes it that far, so I have a question/challenge for folks out there. Specifically, people who have read a lot of my books. You silly buggers, as it were.

Javier. Jessica. Valentinian. Daniel. Gareth. Phil. Pancho. Fairchild.

If I told you that I was looking for some fun series to wallow in, where the science can be fantastic and the hand-waving a little big, but we have real people doing adventure things, what series would you recommend? I tried Nutall once, but threw the sample away on about page 5. I’ve chucked a lot of stuff by recent Big Name Authors because the rampant sexism on the author’s part left me queasy.

I want big space opera adventure, where the good guys win and the bad guys gnaw on the scenery. Think about the old Lensman books for scale. Less White Savior Chosen One (seriously, Kim Kinnison is about as much as it gets, but those books also date to the 1930s, and Doc was rather liberal for his era. Just not ours.)

What series have you read where the characters age and grow? Jessica’s nine books cover sixteen years of her life, from mid-thirties into early fifties, with all the changes she goes through. Phil picks it up four years later. Heather’s series will be later.

One of these days, I’m gonna introduce you to Casey and Vo’s oldest daughter. (heh)

What would you recommend, having read my catalog and understanding that those are my kind of stories? David Drake. Doc Smith. Asimov, not so much because he and Clark never include any Setting and most of their females are helpless princesses. I also read a great deal of Chandler and Hammett for voice. Opinion. Snark.

Who should I be reading these days?

Curation

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I woke up one morning in a terrible rage. Like I hadn’t been in decades at that point. Fire and fury.

In the old days, it had been a defensive mechanism to keep people at bay. Keep them from getting too close and hurting me. And a lot did, at least until I learned to play with fire.

But that was the 80s, and we were different people then.

That morning though, the rage threatened to utterly engulf me. Tear me down permanently and control me for the rest of my life.

If I’d let it.

So I let it go. Let it pass and left it behind, as I set out to become happy. It was 2013, and I hadn’t known such a thing in nearly thirty years at that point. I can pinpoint the day, but I haven’t spoken with her in nearly as many decades, and there is no value in resurrecting old pains.

Instead, I decided that I wasn’t happy being angry, and didn’t want to be that guy.

So I became someone else.

Its been eight years now, and I still strive on a regular basis.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is to curate the list of people allowed to belong to my circles.

We all have circles of friends. Rings headed outward from closest buds to occasional hellos in the hallway.

I had let too many sour people into my life. Too many narcissists. To many gaslighters.

One day, I decided to curate better. My mother once told me the most powerful thing I’d ever known as an adult. “It’s okay to outgrow your friends.”

For many of them, I did. Didn’t understand then that most people stop becoming better people in their teens and just coast into death after that. Know it now.

They won’t ever change. And nothing can make them.

Most importantly, however, was the realization that it wasn’t my problem. These were not my monkeys. That was not my circus.

I didn’t have to tolerate it.

Frequently, it was a passive-aggressive form of abuse. People being dicks because usually you don’t snap back at your friends.

I’d gotten tired of it. But snapping back at many of these people was the thing they wanted most. They wanted the validation of knowing that they’d gotten to me. Provoked me.

Assumed power over me.

Ya know what? Fuck that. And fuck you.

So I began curating. Getting rid of folks that seem to be rageolohics. Gaslighters. Chronic and inveterate insulters.

Along the way, the folks with radically different ethical viewpoints went as well. We’re past politics. Politics is a discussion about what the tax lexy rate should be or how many fire fighters the county needs, not whether or not entire groups of people deserve legal protection.

Ethics.

Happy required that I jettison the riffraff. The punks. The scum. The folks who had never evolved one bit from their fourteenth birthday.

I could leave them behind.

You could do that in the old days by moving to another state and not telling anyone your address. Or phone number. Or leaving it unlisted. Did that. More than once.

These days, the entire world is (currently) bound up in a single set of networks that allow me to have conversations with friends in Costa Rica, Nigeria, Egypt, England, and Australia in a single day. And I have.

But therein lies the problem. Everyone is there.

I have to rely on other folks to help curate things. If you want to be my friend, I ask who your other friends are. And airlock those folks with no ethics. No human decency.

A few sneak through from time to time. Maybe they hide themselves until later, when the truth comes out after some terrible event where they forget which set of lies they’ve been telling people.

These days, my curation standard is often to block random strangers I’ve never met or spoken with, because the words that have come out of their mouth on someone’s wall where I can see them were so utterly atrocious.

The world is going to hell. Has been. We’re in the Fall of the American Empire. Rome fell. France fell. Britain fell. China fell.

Everyone falls. Our fall will be ugly and painful and last for the rest of my life and then some.

But I don’t have to be angry at the world. Because I don’t have to deal with bad people.

I’m willing to curate my friendships. Toxic people get airlocked. Don’t care if they are family or long-time pals.

Toxicity is bad, and I don’t have time for your bullshit, bubbles.

I refuse to give you power over me and my happiness.

I can always find better places to go, and better people to share my time.

What have you done lately to ensure your own happiness?

I hardly remember him…

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Long, shaggy dog story short, I had to do some interesting emotional processing over the weekend. A great deal of this story isn’t known to most people. Folks were there for parts of it, but not all, and I haven’t really talked about the whole that much.

Background: going back 35+ years, I have a tendency to reinvent myself around June 1 every year. Consciously. Select things I don’t like and chuck them. Hobbies I’m not prioritizing. People that maybe are bad for my mental health.

Cleaning house. Annually. Just easier to take stock every year.

As a result (and a lot of trauma when I was younger), I don’t really have great memories of certain eras. And I mark my life in compact, easy-to-define eras. High School until 1986. College until 1989. Grad School Plus in SoCal 90-95. Places I lived in California. Leaving Cali in 95. Leaving KS for good in 97. Changing jobs and lives in Seattle. Buying the house in 2001. (1990-2001, I moved 17 times. Nuff said?)

So I am not kidding when I say that something was “so many me’s ago I barely remember him.” I might have simply buried the memories and moved on. I do that. Not generally a confrontational kind of guy, if I find it easier to just walk away. (That’s another story and a few beers to get out of me.)

Some folks get off on that emotional rush of confrontation.

If I get that angry, I’ll make people sorry. And I’ll hold grudges for decades. Folks can attest.

Neither here nor there.

Got tossed back in on myself last weekend and realized that I had things that needed to be processed. The guilty likely won’t read this, and I can’t make them any more enemies than they’ve already chosen to be.

We each of us get up in the morning and decide to be good. Or evil. Simple as that.

Background^2: Donna was diagnosed in July 2005 with Stage 4 Breast Cancer. The kind where you have six months to live, make your peace with God. That kind. Stubborn woman. She did surgery to stabilize the right femur that had been eaten. Then radiation. Didn’t cure it. Mostly stabilized things. Chemo after that, but in those days, it was a question of whether the chemo killed her first or the cancer. (They have since made enormous strides in research and treatment. She might have survived today. Nobody knows.)

She was a stubborn woman. I chose the half of a loaf that she would give me over none. We weren’t married, because she’s spent the better part of a decade telling me that she’d toss my ass out on the street if I even mentioned it. (And she would only move in with me in the first place because Washington state does not have common law marriage, mind you.)

One day, she looked at me. Sometime middle of 2007. (Told you, too stubborn. Six months wasn’t going to work for her.) Decided that maybe she wanted to get married after all, so she could be Mrs. Ward. Ya coulda knocked me over with a feather, but I eventually processed that, and we did the thing.

I had been largely ostracized by my side of the family. All three of her daughters and families accepted me, and I’ve talked to all of them recently, this many years later. The wedding was in June of 2008. Of everyone there, my best man was Perry. Her Maid of Honor was a woman she’d known since Jr. High. Everyone else were her extended family.

My side hardly had any commentary when they knew she was sick. Probably wise of them, because they didn’t like her. And I still made the better choice to tell them to get stuffed.

The doctors gave Donna six months in the summer of 2005. She died in July 2008.

On a Monday, it was functionally over. I called on my way home to say hi, like I did every day. Except that her oldest daughter answered instead and told me the news. They had given her enough morphine to kill the pain, and were counting the hours at that point.

I stayed up with her all night, but she was already gone mentally. Never really got that moment to say goodbye, but I held her all night. Passed out in the morning and her youngest took over the watch. She woke me and we confirmed that it was done. My wife was gone.

Donna made lists. First up was cremation. I have an urn in my bedroom that simple says “Lots” because that was always the answer to “How much do you love me?”

We held a wake on a Saturday a week and a half later, skipping the Saturday of the oldest granddaughter’s birthday. Each of the three girls got up and read their essay “Why Mom always loved me best” and it was good. Lots of tears. Lots of friends, both mine and hers. Even her oncologist came, which surprised me. But he was an amazing doctor.

Then she was gone.

I got up that Sunday morning and looked in the mirror, asking myself what the hell do I do with the rest of my life. At the time, I was 39. Widower. Three grown step-daughters, with the oldest only five months younger than me. (Did I mention Donna was twenty-one years older and still a total babe up to the end?)

This is where the processing starts. I’ve largely dealt with loss and recovery. But not anger.

I had told the entire family that I wasn’t going to a wedding in Kansas City that summer, because Donna was too sick to travel, and I didn’t want to be away from her. Not at the end.

The grumbles I got from those folks reminded me that they’d never any of them been nice to her. And that’s saying something. Only my mother was friendly. All she had asked was “Does she make you happy?” and left it at that.

But that Sunday, I started getting calls from folks that honest-to-fucking-God took the tone of “Well, you don’t have a reason not to come to the wedding now.” (One of them even said those words out loud to me.)

Not any of them called to say how sorry they were that I’d lost her. None of them came out for the wake. Or to check on me, all alone in that big house and wondering what the hell to do next.

I’d taken two days off work Tuesday and Wednesday, but then I was sitting around staring at walls. At least at work (a job where I’d been for all of four weeks), I could do something. Anything.

And I had an amazing boss. On Donna’s birthday that November, he instructed one of my peers, another department manager, to get me drunk at lunch on the company card and then make sure I made it back to the office to sober up. And she did. And I did.

When Fabulous Publisher Babe™ started meeting my family, my Mom was living out here in Seattle. I got her cataract surgeries, new hearing aids, and a place where she didn’t pay rent, so she could work to get herself out of a debt that rest of the family had browbeaten her into getting. I think at one point I had given her something like thirty thousand dollars, just because she would have been bankrupt and out on the street without me.

That was how my family treated her. My new wife finally understood a few years ago that we went beyond dysfunctional. Imagine me growing up around four narcissists. Bad ones. Vicious ones. Martyrs. The bad blood in my family is ugly and goes back four decades just with my siblings.

When Donna died, they didn’t any of them have anything useful to say. Instead, I got the massive guilt trip abuse to come to a wedding because I didn’t have any reason not to now.

I’ve talked to both of my sisters in 2021. One called because she was finalizing details of my mom’s estate after Terry died last November. The other called on my birthday.

That was an interesting event, because she was drunk. And continued drinking heavily for the hour we were on the phone. I doubt she even remembers it, because she was blackout when we were done. But I got to listen to an hour of her ugly vitriol and gossip about the rest of the family and how much they all hate me. With details I’d never heard before.

Not surprised. I chose to be happy. None of them even understand how.

Haven’t talked to my father in several years. But now I understand why. He married a woman who dumped me to date him instead. (Did I mention dysfunctional?) And that woman hates me for reasons I have never heard. Don’t really care at this point, because I have two other families that accept me. Like me. Choose to include me in their lives.

I have five step-daughters, because Donna had three, plus two had best friends that considered her their other mom, and just accept me. Talk to all of them regularly.

I have a second wife and her family is amazing. Everybody likes everybody else, which is alien to me. Completely insane. My Brother-in-Law called to sing me Happy Birthday. Nuff said?

So I had to process. If you read this, that means that it passed muster with the boss to be public. I’ve left out enough that nobody can really bitch, other than those people who are all martyrs to whatever cause they chose this week.

I chose to be happy. I get up every morning and no longer serve evil. (and bubba, there were years…)

I have her family, and her family. And they are great people. On Donna’s side, I have a step-grandson that I hope shows an interest in publishing one of these days, so we can train him up in the business. My books will remain in copyright for seventy years after my death. If I went tomorrow, he’s eighty when that happens, and I plan on four and a half more decades of productivity first. His great-grandkids.

On the other side, she had a grand-niece who is fourteen and a business shark. I want to hire her to learn advertising and train her up on our catalog.

It is sad, no longer really having my entire side of the family as folks that I could call on. Or invite over for a beer. At the same time, they made those choices.

That’s my current motto: “You made those choices. Now go make better ones.”

Every morning, you have that choice. Most people fall into a rut and that’s the end of their life.

Don’t end up like my family did, dysfunctional because the narcissists are martyrs who snipe and savage everyone else.

Let my family be enough of a lesson.

Kosnett

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As everyone remembers, I started playing the Star Fleet Battles (SFB) tabletop board game in the early 80s. Played a LOT. Had the early editions, then the collection when they redid everything. And a lot of SSD books and expansions. It was good. Played up until I came back from Los Angeles in 95. (broken and angry. Different story for a different day.) Haven’t really played since because none of my gamer buddies were into that.

Instead, I played Warhammer 40k for a while. (Small Eldar and Space Marines forces, then large Imperial Guard Heavy Armor. Then super orky cavalry army.) Got out of that and played Flames of War for a while in the mid oughts and later, before selling everything off again and calling it good.

Between 1990 and 2001, I moved a shit ton of times. Usually zip codes. Frequently time zones. My SFB stuff took up a heavy double milk crate. It is currently in my office, tucked under the shelf where the kitty watches the hillside for bunnies.

When I needed names for Republic of Aquitaine officers, Phil Kosnett was one that had been used in SFB. (Those folks tuckerized a buddy who went on to become a Foreign Service Officer and eventually Ambassador. Phil recently returned from being the US Ambassador to Kosovo, and I think (haven’t confirmed with him yet) that he is done and retiring.)

CS-405 was the ship I needed, to tell that story. At the time, I had no idea Kosnett existed as anything but a James T. Kirk stand in for SFB. But he was the guy who got things done in various historical scenarios in SFB, so obviously he made a good impression back then. And I used him.

I had completed writing Petron before I discovered he was a real person. Which just made it all the more awesome.

With that in mind, I had promised a follow-on series to Jessica for Phil. (Plus three others, if you were paying attention. And hopefully I’ll get to them eventually, as well.)

Encounter at Vilahana was written with Phil and Alison Kosnett directly in mind (though I didn’t know she existed at the time either and she occasionally wants to know why I don’t retcon everything to include her. She is in the opening of Vilahana. Phil actually sent me the idea for that opening commentary on the former Alison Smith.)

All this is on my mind because just now, I wrote the final bits of book five. Empire at Gloran.

So:

  1. Encounter at Vilahana
  2. Consensus at Aditi
  3. Hegemony at Dalou
  4. Princes at Ewin
  5. Empire at Gloran

As I’m writing the last epilogue this morning, it’s Phil and Heather, reviewing what they’ve done and looking forward to the ^final^ novel in the series, which will be Domain at Yaumgan.

I’ve written them in pairs up until now, but didn’t really have the terrible problem that needed solving for Six. These have not been your typical military space opera with grand, epic space battles filling whole chapters. Its been my chance to create a handful of random new cultures, somewhat isolated from everyone else, and then explore them.

Because Phil is an explorer. A diplomat. He’s also a hardass who will punch you in the mouth if you need it. (The First Centurion. I haven’t asked The Ambassador, but he’s like 6’3 tall, so I wouldn’t recommend needing to find out.)

If you pay attention, you will see a lot of Star Fleet Battles in the cultures of the Balhee Cluster. I appreciate that most of you have only read Vilahana, but trust me, if you look, you’ll see them. That was intentional on my part. Part of the homage to Star Fleet Captain Phil Kosnett and the Constitution-class Heavy Cruiser USS Kongo (NCC-1710. again, in there, because I can). Partly my way to say thanks to Phil for being such an amazing guy.

So I have just finished #5 a few minutes ago. And I have a few projects to complete before I go after #6, because writer-brain finally decided to tell me the plot and story arc. Thus, I have to go invent a whole bunch of new cultural notes and issues to address.

And it’s gonna be fun.

At some point, I also plan on Heather having a series, set another stretch in the future from Vilahana. Because I can. And you’re having almost as much fun as I am.

So get Aditi when it comes out in November. Dalou and Ewin are (currently) April and May of 2022. Gloran and Yaumgan are going to be in the fall.

I still don’t know if there will be a book seven. I’m leaning against it, if only because it really needs to be its own series spun outward, considering where things are headed right now.

But it will be fun. Epic. Interesting.

Hope you come along for the ride.