Hey, all.

As if right now, I’m part of a brand new Science Fiction story bundle and thought you might like to know more. And tell all your friends. Big group of folks I’ve never even met before, so you most likely don’t know about them either, and this is your chance to discover some new favorite authors.

Storybundle. For those of who’ve never encountered one, a bundle runs three weeks and then it is gone forever. For the base price you get four new novels, by Michael D. Britton, Robert Jeschonek,Mason Elliott, and Leigh Saunders. If you do the full asking price, you’ll get one of mine, plus five others. Ten novels, one low price, going away forever in a very short period, so you should tell all your friends about this deal, too.

So spread the word and let’s make this a big one.

Yup, you read that right.

Militant Lesbian Tree Octopus Sorceress. No, I can’t tell you where ideas like this come from. The first story is several years old now, but was kept in the can because I was working with an artist at one point to do illustrations for her. That woman’s life fell apart, and when she got it back together, she was in a different place and I never followed up with trying to find someone else.

The second story got written about a year later, so maybe two years ago now. Just as silly on the surface. Just as serious underneath when you go to really studying on the themes and ideas about what “Modern Western Fantasy” looks like. (Hint: most of it starts from the point of a Tolkien pastiche. Usually badly.)

Last summer (2018) at CampCon, the decision was made on an anthology theme of “Whimsical Beasts.” I don’t write much fantasy these days, and publish even less of it, but writer-brain engaged and said “Hey, let’s do another Akahana story.”

Okay, sure. She’s not whimsical, at least to outsiders. But I can look at other magical creatures through her eyes and let her have opinions on the topic. So I found a bunnyhawk and a catowl. Yes, seriously.

That’s the key with Akahana. She’s extremely opinionated on many topics, and  a tree octopus sees the world through much different eyes than an evolved tree shrew like me.

She’s the ex-familiar of a pretty powerful wizard dude who managed to get himself killed. She’s still not sure how she survived, but she did, and wants revenge. The only problem is that she’s no longer evil.

Whoops. So now she has to come to grips with what it means to be good. To like people, even.

Horrors.

But she’s got an interesting relationship with a god who appears on this plane as a goldfish in a giant brandy snifter. And people who need her help.

And she’s a lot of fun to write.

With that, I give you Akanaha, the eight-petaled rose.

• The Eight-Petaled Rose
• Backwards On The Way
• Second Cousins (contained in Whimsical Beasts)

Y’all have fun and let me know what you think.

If you’ve been keeping track, you’ll remember that we had a freaking monster blizzard come through a while ago. 28 inches of snow in the first two rounds, plus more after that over the course of a week. I live on 6.5 acres out in the boonies southeast of Seattle, out just past the first ridge of the Cascades. As in, I can drive to a certain spot, turn left onto the main road, and cross a weather ridge about a hundred yards in or so. Watch the temperature gauge go up or down. Watch rain or snow just stop.

It was bad enough that when the snow stopped on Monday night that I couldn’t get down my driveway in a 4×4 pickup truck until Friday, and that still involved digging my self out a few times because I high-centered on the axles. Nasty stuff. Couldn’t get my Mini Cooper out for another week after that.

Now, here’s the funny part. About 2 days before all that crap hit, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I had gone into the hardware store and bought a couple of plants. I found a five-flavor Asian Pear grafted tree. They advertise 4-flavors, and that’s the price I pay, but the arborist does this frequently enough that I know to pay attention. Plus, we got her a Jasmine vine.

But it started raining when we got home. And it got worse the next day, so I left them both in the back of the truck.

And then it started snowing. Whoops.

So I pulled both into the house and have had them both next to the sliding glass door waiting for the snow to melt and the ground to thaw out since then.

That finally happened YESTERDAY. Mind you, I still have a few inches of crusty snow in the front yard and back patches where the trees are so tall that the sun won’t hit them. And it’s sixty-five in the sun and fifty-two in the shade (just checked), so they are at least melting.

But I now have a new pear tree in the box, to go with the other two espaliers. Plus the jasmine for when the bees wake up and get to work. (Mostly Mason and a few I can’t identify, but ground dwellers, rather than hive builders.) Won’t get fruit from them this year, or the five-flavor plum that went in last fall, but I plant 3-5 years out with this stuff. At a minimum.

Kinda nice to have my interior space back, although the cat’s not sure what to make of all this. Can’t say I blame her. With all the snow everywhere, I had been putting out lots of seed for the birds, so she would sneak up and hide in the shadow of the pear tree bucket and watch the best television in the world.

But the first little bits of spring have finally awakened out here. Buds are starting to expand. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) took roses that I got her when she got home, ones that had sprouted still in the vase, and put them in potatoes and dirt yesterday. Hopefully, they’ll go feral.

I’ve got a dozen downer trees I have to deal with at some point (No today, thank you.) and work to do with the machete to clear trails. Most of the latter the deer and elk have kept up for me, so mostly I’m going to be replacing fencing and expanding coverage areas for things I don’t want my critters to gnosh on.

Past that, I have had a quiet week. She was in Vegas for the Anthology Workshop until last Thursday, and it took last weekend to mostly recover. This week was just getting back on keel. Wrote a whole new novel from nothing to done in thirteen days. As in: had the idea Sunday. Wrote what I thought was a short story Monday. Writer brain laughed, and it turned into novel #28 on Tuesday. Finished it at 48,000 words the following Friday. Sent it off to Dorn to read on a plane since he need entertainment.

Back to short fiction yesterday and today. Probably tomorrow as well, since I’m only about half done on today’s story and goofing off instead of writing more. (These words still count.)

Got major books and projects slowly coming out all this year, including two short stories that got published this last week. (Hint: if you don’t read my newsletter, you missed them.)

What are y’all doing to celebrate things on this St. Pat’s Day and into your spring?

In just a few days, the middle book in the CS-405 trilogy drops: Packmule.

Queen Anne’s Revenge centered on Siobhan and Milton, Lady Blackbeard and Stunt Dude, respectively. Going forward, you’ll see more of Heather, as she comes into her own commanding her own ship.

And then things get a little dark and crazy when you meet Imperial Flight Lieutenant Granville Veitengruber, a prisoner the team rescues, who comes with his own story.

A little darker than Queen Anne’s Revenge, on our way to completely insane in Persephone in a month.

I had fun with all three books in different ways. Queen Anne was light and silly. Packmule asks a really interesting question about the nature of total war. Persephone asks about the prices one might have to be willing to pay.

People have asked why I did it this way, as a trilogy instead of one book, and as a separate piece from the rest of the Jessica novels.

Those novels (Jessica’s) have a feel to them. A style. A vocabulary. I wanted to do something different in splitting CS-405 off on her own. At the same time, each of the three books has a different emotional signature that wouldn’t have been as obvious or fulfilling (at least to me) if they were just three acts of a single symphony.

I wanted to focus on people other than Jessica, Moirrey, Vo, Casey, and Em. Not smaller people, but smaller parts. Character actors who might just earn their SAG card in a bigger, Jessica Keller novel. Here they get to chew scenery. Blow shit up. Redneck the hell out of things for no better reason than the need to blow shit up. Go steal starships.

I got to make them people. That, for me, is the single best thing about writing. Making interesting people, with problems, likes, neuroses, and hobbies. It all goes back to Lester Dent’s classical Seven Point Plot Structure, which is the basis for modern, western storytelling. (We’ll leave off the navel-gazing of literariness, where a young woman complains that her mother didn’t understand her and nobody appreciates her genius, at least for another blog.)

• Character
• In a Setting
• With a Problem
• Try Something
• Fail
• Keep Trying until the Climax
• Denouement(the happily ever after part)

AS you’ll note, the character is the first thing. The most important thing. All setting is really just a character’s opinion about their environment, as opposed to cataloging the room from left to right, which some folks do.

Characters. Lady Blackbeard. Stunt Dude. The Professor. Ground Control. Duke Indovina. Bok and his roan mare.

By giving them three novels, they got to tell their story their way.

I’m glad that Queen Anne’s Revenge has gone over well. Thank you to everyone for your patience when we screwed up Two Bottles of Wine With a War God and Queen Anne. Hopefully you are now all sorted out. If not, reach out and I’ll make sure you have the right stuff.

You’ll need all four books to understand Winterhome in May, especially with how the Bartender and a few friends will eventually upend the entire universe. But that’s an epilogue for Book 9, Petron, in your hands in December.

If you haven’t gotten your preorder in for Packmule, first off: What the hell’s wrong with you? heh.

And go set yourself up for Persephone and Winterhome while you’re at it.

I think you’ll enjoy reading them almost as much as I did writing.

shade and sweet water

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

Because Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is frequently one of the editors for the WMG “Fiction River” Anthology workshop, I don’t write into it. There are other reasons, not least of which is I mostly work as a novelist these days, and shifting my brain back into that mode for a third of the year is not something I want to pursue right now.

But I’m also connected with a very broad network of folks who have never heard about the WMG workshops, so I wanted to take a moment to let the rest of you know about it.

Starting in December each year, they send out the first assignment at zero dark whatever Monday morning. This is a short story, to theme, to length, turned in by midnight the following Sunday. Seven days, write a story. Do it again the next week. Take a short break off for Xmas. Do it again in early January. Each of six weeks, find out the assignment and write a story for it.

This is for the Fiction River anthology, and is just about the only way in. (They do invite in BIG NAMES who are friends of theirs, occasionally.)

If you are a short story writer, you should consider signing up for the 2020 workshop. (The 2019 is happening in Vegas as we speak. I’m home with the kitty, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is there being an editor this year.

You write up to six stories. Then you read ALL of them. That turned out to be 1.3 million words this year, across a messy, complicated thing.

Where the magic occurs is during the Vegas week itself. Each day, one of the editors is buying. All of them are at the front of the space, and they all six of them go through every single story submitted, talking about why this story worked or didn’t. What might have made it better. Etc. These editors include Kristine Kathryn Rusch (F&SF, and others), Dean Wesley Smith (Pulphouse magazine), Mark Leslie Lefebvre, and others. A tremendous amount of experience as editors, talking to you about your story and your craft.

You don’t get to talk. You listen. You learn. You see how the sausage it made. I’ve gone several times with my wife, just so I could be there in the evening and watch. You get to see that editing is not personal.

My favorite story was several years ago. The editor buying had written his maybes on the board, by genre, and was reviewing them. He had one SF and five Thrillers, so the one SF was just in, while he sorted through the five based on other criteria. All good stories, but he was filling in slots and flavor at that point.

They go through every single story. Rate it. Critique it. And then they buy some of them. Right there while you watch, they assemble that issue of Fiction River. I cannot stress enough how much you will learn about your craft by sitting there and taking notes.

Moreover, you will learn craft. After several years of doing pulse pounders for Kevin J. Anderson, this crew knows how to do them. I like to refer to it as an Arms Race, with these forty or sixty people stepping their craft up year over year.

If you write short fiction, you should consider taking this class.

Additionally, you will meet professionals. Folks doing what you’re doing, and hoping to network with one another. I was able to build Boundary Shock Quarterly because I knew about half the folks in my Syndicate as a result of bribing them with baked goods at previous anthology workshops.

(Sideline: When we did it in Lincoln City, Or, I had a day job, and took a week off. While they were at the workshop, we had filled the entire Anchor hotel up, every room, so they would lock the front doors and left me alone with my own industrial kitchen. Plus a fantastic bar I could stand behind while writing. Cookies, brownies, whatever I felt like making, and the hauling over for the workshop to eat. Don’t do that in Vegas, for all the normal reasons. Planning to go next year, just to see folks.)

If you want to meet pros, you need to be in Vegas with them. These are Hugo winners, Derringer winners, Rita winners. Big time folks that you can learn from, even as you get together to write.

Share the word with your friends, because folks will be signing up for next year starting this week and the class fills by summer. If you have questions, or they do, send them my way and I’ll find you answers.

There are not many opportunities you will ever get to be part of something like this, and to learn so much along the way.

🙂

Because I apparently did not reach everybody when the novella Two Bottles of Wine With a War God came out with the wrong interior in January, I’ve gotten a few complaints from folks (and a bad review, apparently) about reading the same book twice.

I appreciate that folks might be a little upset, and it’s my fault. I’ve tried to send out enough notes to everyone, and Amazon should have sent you a message that there was a correction issued, once they had the corrected file in place, so you should have been able to download a corrected version of Two Bottles. In both cases, if you reread, you actually got a chance to read Queen Anne’s Revenge a month early.

However, if you are still having problems with the files (and a few of you did when trying to pull the new Amazon file down), please let me know and I’ll send you a free download link to get a proper copy of Two Bottles.

I’d rather have happy fans than worry about it, and thanks to everyone who pointed it out, and for your patience as we got this all sorted out last month.

In brighter news, it is now March, and the second book in the trilogy comes out in a little more than a week. We left off with the adventures on the bridge of the new ship being captured by Stunt Dude and his crew of lunatics. (Love you much, Gerry.)

Packmule picks up from there with the crew of CS-405 trying to find their way home. First, however, something comes up, and they have to make a detour that will forever alter the nature of the war between Buran and the rest of the galaxy.

To be concluded in Persephone on April 10.

From there, the story meets back up with things in the middle of Winterhome as the adventure climbs the scales of EPIC SCIENCE FICTION. Hope you all enjoy.

February 25, 2019 sort of marks the one year anniversary of no longer having a day job. Last day at work was Friday Feb 23, 2018. Recovered for a day, then started the new job Sunday morning.

I no longer get up at 0400AM, take a shower, and get out of the house by 425. Into the office building at 0500 when the garage doors open. Fix coffee and heat my breakfast while reading the news and catching up on my comics.

No longer sitting in the kitchen writing for two hours before I have to walk over to my desk and pretend to give a flying f@#$ about my corporate overlords. My last boss was a nice kid. And he was 20+ years younger than me, so I can call him a kid. Worked out of the Toronto office of the company that owned the company where I worked.

In the last 24-odd months I worked there, I changed bosses seven times. A, B, C, B, C, Q, X. B and X were the only two I’d ever consider working for again. Still send Boxing Day Greetings to X every year, just to say hi.

But I don’t have a real job anymore. And I’ve gotten into heated discussions with folks that thought I should treat full-time writing as a job. (They’re wrong, but don’t get it.) It is not a job. It is a hobby that somehow makes me really good money. If it was a job, it wouldn’t be any fun, because I would be taking orders and dealing with fools and hitting impossible deadlines.

F@#$ that noise.

I got the greatest hobby in the world, instead. I make shit up for a living. And it is a good living these days. I write lots. Publish lots. Have happy fans.

Today, we are celebrating No Pants Day. And let me tell you, going out to breakfast in a kilt in 40 mph, 26 degree winds was oh so much fun. But me and Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) sat and geeked out over the future of TradPub, IP valuation logic, Hollywood interactions, and tulip mania for a couple of hours.

We’re like that frequently when it’s just the two of us. Nerdy as hell.

It helps that she’s deeply in touch with the tradpub model, while I have a long background in corporate office politics (she worked from home for decades, so missed all those adventures). And I have friends on the Hollywood side of things who like to bemoan the fact that “the world has changed” and that their old methods of doing things just aren’t working any more.

Sound familiar?

Trying to get my buddy “E” to write me a book about how IP makes its way to Hollywood these days, because he and I spent an hour on the phone a few months ago and I was simply blown away at how little of the old models still hold.

Babe and I were also talking about some of the organizations that service the TradPub model and how they fail to meet my needs.

She’s a life member of SFWA, because back in the old days, she could pay a one-time fee. I’m not a member for a couple of reasons. For one, I was a best-selling author in Indie, making a nice living, before I ever qualified for my SFWA bones. Seriously. And I only qualified because Cat Rambo finally got the old shits to change the definition to include folks like me. (Folks you idolize who have publicly called what I do “Vanity Press” by the way. Next person who says that to my face gets slapped out of their chair. The only question then will be if I use an open palm or a chair. But that’s another topic for another day.)

What I have never been able to identify is anything that SFWA membership would do that would benefit me. I don’t write into the trade magazines. (I might actually, accidentally, publish something in an anthology one of these days, but that was because I wrote something after their deadline, based on the inspirational words of the editor at a post-deadline meeting. Showed it to her and she said “I want this.” Dunno if she’ll actually keep it, but that would be my first professional sale, if it actually happens.)

I don’t want an agent. I’m not planning to ever submit anything to TradPub. Too big a rights grab, too little return on investment, and total loss of equity. When I see SFWA sponsored workshops, all too frequently they make a big deal about having some big-shot editor or agent there to teach you how to better market your books to get a book deal.

So not happening. I make better money Indie than most of the “successful” tradpub authors I know, and that split will only get wider as I keep writing and building my audience and fan base. And some of those folks are writers whose books you have on a shelf.

As we were driving home, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were joking that what I would start, if I was angry enough, would be a competing organization to that did not focus all its energy on how to get a TradPub deal. I would focus on the business of how to succeed as a SFF writer.

The current groups teach you how to write SFF. How to get an agent. That sort of thing. Nobody, and I’ve checked, nobody teaches the business side of a SFF career. Kris and Dean have tried, and gotten ostracized by the old shits for their efforts because they were trying to teach people that icky commercial crap. (Their words, repeated as part of the story.)

They want you to have a successful career. The whole purpose of the Oregon Writers Network (or whatever it will be called now that they live in Vegas), is to get better at your craft, but at the same time to get better at the business side of things.

I would like to find an organization focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy careers. NINC (Novelist, Inc.) is a broader organization, and was founded by Romance writers, so they have a different focus on things. SFWA itself is married to the dying TradPub model and will only service those declining number of writers treading that path. (Remind me to come back in ten years and review where they’re at to see if they’ve died yet, or managed to reinvent themselves.)

Babe and I do sort of have something along those lines, in what we call the Seattle Writers Lunch, but that’s a group of local, professional artists that meet monthly to talk more business and less craft. Again, across the whole genre spectrum, from SF writers like me, through the list, to poets and photographers. Artists, but with a professional, career mindset.

And no, I don’t have the time to create such a thing. Sure as hell don’t want to be in charge of it, because I’ve got better things to do with my time and energy. That’s one of the reasons I write Business for Breakfast books with my wife. “Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Maybe it helps you get farther along in your career.”

But that’s life. I am one year into a full-time writing career that entertains and energizes me. I’m celebrating today by not wearing pants of any kind. Henceforth, this will be Kilt Day. Spent last night working on various sewing projects, one of which is a second kilt that I will finish one of these days. (pain in the ass, lemme tell you.) Eventually, I’ll do a long, winter kilt for snowy days like this.

What are you doing to celebrate the exciting and fun milestones in your life?

Preface: I own about six acres of mostly trees, sitting on a hill, overlooking a pond, but otherwise landlocked on all sides by neighbors. Way the hell out in the Cascades.

Elk don’t care.

I didn’t grow up with elk. I’m from Kansas, originally, the the most we had was deer, so it’s always a treat for me to look out the back window and see a dozen or score of the big critters walking by. (Even more interesting when you drive up, park, and realize that they haven’t moved from the septic field, that you drove by them at a distance of maybe twenty feet, and they are now eyeing you from a distance of about thirty yards as you decide whether or not to make a break for the front door, because they aren’t leaving. It was a weird day, but that’s another story.)

We got a crapton of snow up here over the last few weeks. One of my neighbors clocked about 30 inches in three big storms and one small one. Tuesday night, we got maybe another inch or two. I know because Tuesday day I had broomed all the cars clean finally. The driveway’s too deep for anything but an old Ford pickup to get down, and I keep having to dig it out to make it back up the hill, so the cars have not moved in two weeks.

As a result, we park the truck at the bottom of the driveway on the cul-de-sac. Wednesday, with a fresh layer of powder, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were walking down the driveway, where there are tracks from the truck, and some more from a neighbor’s tractor, where he was hauling feed up to my other neighbor even higher on the hill for her horses and chickens.

And then I see a deer track, crossing from the left, over the driveway, and meandering over by barn before she comes back and heads into the trees. Not unexpected. I have a couple of families that live in the area and I keep salt licks out for them.

Then I seen BIG tracks in the snow. Solitary elk has wandered out from the trees where they were bedded down. Walks along the middle of the driveway. A little while later, another one emerges, walks next to the first one, and they go all the way to the bottom of the driveway. (It’s maybe 200 yards long, give or take.)

At the bottom of the driveway, the one elk that had been walking in the heavier snow turns left and heads down to the pond, and maybe the neighbor’s house (dude who owns the tractor).

The other one just kept going straight. She got to the bottom of the driveway and went right down the middle of the street, leaving footprints in the snow (that’s about how much we had down there by late morning.)

At some point, her trail disappeared, because truck tracks ran over them and erased all sign, but she had just been casually ambling along, all by herself. Mind you, the last time I saw the herd a few months about, I counted eighteen butts visible in the open or tucked back one layer in the trees.

Nope, she was off for a meander.

Snow’s the worst in 40 years, according to more than one of my neighbors, about half of whom have lived out here for that long. (I’m the gentrifying generation, and the first of four houses that have changed in the last 3-4 years. Whole neighborhood will probably turn over in the next five years, as these folks are all generally 65-84 now.) The critters around here have had to work at it, to eat and be safe.

I’ve gone through about two big bags of birdseed in the last two weeks, just opening the back door and chucking handfuls onto the back porch and nearby snow to feed everybody. Kitty remains entertained when she’s over in the main house, like today.

I am not an ornithologist. But my wife plays one on television, so she can identify most of the birds. I have had a bunch. Spotted Towhee. Variegated Thrush (if I said that right). All the usual suspects, mostly the little attitude problems. Wife has two kinds of woodpeckers (big and medium sized, one of them “Hairy Woodpecker”) over at her suet feeder.

Gang just came back and is feeding as I write. They had a frantic morning. At one point, half a dozen of them slammed off the sliding glass door, about a couple of hours ago. When I looked up, all the little birds are gone, and there’s a hawk just landing. Not a species I know. Light brown back, smooth-colored chest that looked darker than salmon and a little more pink, but I just got a glance before she turned and chased somebody into the trees.

I don’t remember ever seeing hawks around here. Tried looking her up, and could not find a good picture, but apparently a bald eagle is considered a hawk, according to some of the websites I consulted, so that’s a thing I learned today. Always thought eagles were a thing. Or maybe I misinterpreted a larger group of collective raptors. Ornithological experts welcome to chime in.

But the elk have me laughing the most. I can only imagine me coming down the street from town, to the dead-end that is my driveway, and seeing an elk standing in the road, probably waiting for me to drive around her. Deer are at least polite enough to move to the curb, and have.

What’s things like in your corner of the world today?

There is a fine split in the world of writers, between those who outline and those to write by the seat of their pants. There are about ten thousand degrees of gradation between the extremes, but you’ll find proponents willing to declare holy war to defend the particular facet of planning that they undertake as the “only right way to do it.”

Which is a load of horse shit, but not why we’re here tonight.

Had a long week. Been snowed in since Monday (This is Thursday 9pm local now). Have gotten 24-28 inches of snow since noon Friday. Just got warm enough today to move my truck around, but not enough for me to try the long, sloping driveway that I can use to get out. Will save that for tomorrow.

But the long week has me in a weird place, so I’ll inflict it on you. Got a lovely glass of port sitting next to me, slowly disappearing. Laura Anne Gilman gave it to us as a present. Fantastic stuff. Had a long bath because I spent too much time outside shoveling snow out from under the truck so I could try to move it.

Got to thinking about writing.

I’m towards the tail end of a novel tonight. About 50,000 words done on WinterStar now, and it feels like it will come in around 60-65,000 when I’m done.

I normally write into what Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I call “dimly lit hallways.” I come from a theater background, and before that I was a poet. I know what genre I’m writing before I start, so I work out the important 3-5 characters in enough depth to get started, toss them into a problem and let them tell me the story, with a pretty good idea how long it will be and where it is going. Dimly lit.

Frequently, I work up all these notes well ahead of time, planning about 2-3 novels out so I can finish one and start the next without any measurable gap. Or rotate through series back and forth.

Didn’t happen this time. This novel wasn’t even an idea five weeks ago. And when it was, it was a superhero story, straight up spandex. Tried several of those, but nobody buys them but completists. Not generally worth my time to write them for the return on the time invested.

But this story had an interesting kernel I wanted to pull out and pursue. And the four story points that would have been my lights in that hallway all fell early in Act Two. Seriously.

So I have to trust my craft. I will occasionally start with a blank piece of paper and commit literary graffiti upon it, but usually dimly lit hallways.

Not this one. I wrote the first three chapters just feeling out who the characters needed to be, because I knew what would happen to them in Act Two, but I had to get everyone there. Got everyone past that and it was only when I hit about the 46,000 word mark that I even figured out that there WOULD be a Book Two (and mind you, I write natively in long series format, so that surprised the hell out me that I might only have the one book and done with these characters).

Recovering from shoveling snow tonight, me and my sweetie were snuggling in the couch and I finally figured out how Book One even ended. And mind you, I’m not more than a few days from that end, so I need to be wrapping things up now, bringing the villains to the stable so we can have a rumble. Or something. I can’t call it hard SF, because most hard SF stories tend to be long on technically correct jargon, and short on interesting, Andy Weir notwithstanding.

I write stories about interesting people with human flaws, dropped into strange problems and trying to find their way through. Long on weird science hand-waving, usually, because trying to describe how an FTL drive even works is silly. It works. It gets you there. It has certain rules and issues that cause it to not be perfect, but force you to adapt to things and cause plot trouble when I need it to.

Whatever. Don’t get in the way of my storytelling by demanding that I explain how a technology works that nobody has yet to describe the underlying physics for anyway.

And I’m writing into darkness. Total, freaking darkness. Lay down at night and let the backbrain unhook so it can explore what we’ve done so far today and where we need to go in the morning. That’s about the limit of the planning this novel has allowed me.

I’m at 50,000 words and the damn thing finally told me who the villain was. The other villain. We’ve met one who’s a long arc villain, now that I know this is actually a series (learned that TODAY). Killed another one, but his death in Act Two was what kind of sets up everything else, and his metaphorical ghost will haunt everything. (And I’m not sure if he comes back to life, either. Writer-brain hasn’t told me. Probably not for several books. Maybe. Something.)

Dean Wesley Smith frequently writes into darkness. He trusts his craft to just generate story as he goes. If he’s in one of his universes, like Poker Boy, he already has the world and such.

Yesterday (YESTERDAY!!) I posted a cry for help from my nerdier friend to help me calculate the apparent gravity you feel on a spinning space ship, since these folks are too poor to afford gravity inducer fields (more hand-wavium). Found a website called SpinCalc that lets you plug in numbers. So now I know how big WinterStar needs to be to do the things I’ve had going on for twenty chapters.

When I get to the end, I’ll have to go back and add some real physics, and correct a few places, because the science was wrong enough to annoy someone nerdy, but not going to material impact anything more than changing something like three sentences. And I know which three.

But it is WEIRD, writing a novel so totally into darkness that I’m making up main characters as I go, rather than having that element hammered out ahead of time.

What methodology is your default?

So I don’t normally move a lot of product on Kobo, but my goal in 2019 is to change that. To that end, I’ve been signing up for various promotions on their site.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS ONLY: There is a huge sale on Science Fiction going on!

All sorts of stuff for you to read, and you can get it really cheap.

For example: the Science Officer Omnibus #1 is $0.99. Yes, seriously. Trying to build a fan base here, so please tell all your friends all over the place so they can get hooked too.

Sale only lasts until February 18^th, 11:59pm EST, so get your butts in motion, people!

Tell everyone, or go buy it yourself and get started on the craziness that pretty much launched the Alexandria Station universe and introduced the galaxy to Suvi, everyone’s favorite goofball AI.

🙂