Some of you are aware that I live in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere southeast of Seattle in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Last night, we had a monstrous windstorm. Those are always interesting around here, because I grew up in Kansas, where we’re used to wind, but have no trees. Around here, all the power lines are above ground, so when the wind starts howling, limbs come down and sever power lines.

Lost power around 2am this morning (writing this from the library, which has power, but there are vast swaths of the area without electricity). Got up this morning and lit a fire so the kitty would be warm, and then Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ and I headed out to find someplace open for breakfast. That was possibly a mistake.

Our favorite Sunday Spot at Krain Korner just north of Enumclaw, WA, was without power. Everything between my house the the north city limits of Enumclaw itself was dark. Town had power, which was good, so we tried Charlie’s next. It’s down on the far side of town, where I come out when I head south. They were dark. Turned around and headed back into town, but The Kettle was empty. Man, my luck was not good.

Drove back up to Black Diamond, and the Black Diamond Bakery was open, but running on generators. The line was out the door and about 30 people deep, so we kept going north. Four Corners in Maple Valley had power, but the Starbucks line was out the door. As was the one in the Safeway. The only other place close around there was also out the door.

Eventually gave up and stood in line at Burger King, because she wasn’t eating and I was out of give-a-fuck at that point. Ordered the cheapest, easiest thing on the menu, after watching people ahead of me get stupid with their choices. They were on 45 when I got my number (63) and I got my food about the same time as the folks in the mid 50’s. (Seriously, did you need to order french toast sticks when they told you they were short staffed and it would take a while?)

Got my food about the time the Babe came back from the nearby coffee shop with hot water for her tea. Went home and entertained the cat for a while, before heading back into town to get gas and hang out all afternoon at the library. Because they have power and the nice librarian lady has a look on her face that she’s going to slap a bitch if the fool on his phone didn’t shut the hell up shortly. (I like that library lady. She runs a tight ship around here.)

Seattle and surrounding areas are apparently going to be digging out for a few days. Heard from folks up north that the’re without power. Most of the south and south east is dark in many places, so the world will be weird. Or, as we like to say around here, this is the reminder that most Americans are three weeks from a mass cannibalism event. Plan accordingly.

This afternoon, we’ll go into town and find someplace for dinner, and deal with the lines. Then later we’ll go out to the barn and dig out the camping equipment so we can have hot water for coffee and tea, and I got stuff in the fridge we could cook on the coleman stove if we had to.

At the same time, this is about as bad as it gets around here. We might have a week at some point where there is snow on the ground, but it usually only lasts for a week, even up where I am (780ft). The rain is normal. It’s just the wind that makes it interesting.

So far, walking around this morning I found two small trees down and one big monster that had been taken out and shattered about 5 feet off the ground, and it in turn took out a second one. One of the walking paths is currently blocked with downed limbs, although the two trunks themselves fell right next to it. The middle of the hill was amazingly bright without those two shading things. Got the machete out and and cleared a little of the path, but I’ll need the saws-all and the extension cord eventually (not worth using the bow saw, but I’ve considered it.)

But everyone is safe. The kitty is bitching because her butt warmer is off, but that’s life, and she sleeps right next to the flat-topped stove that is warm and keeping things pleasant. It’s about 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside, so nothing is going to freeze, and hopefully we’ll have power in another day or so. (Or I’ll head in to the gym and take a shower if I start to get funky.)

Hope y’all are having a nice weekend out there. I’ve got Auberon on sale for free on both Amazon and Kobo for another few days, so now’s your chance to hook your friends on Jessica Keller.

cheers,

blaze

So it’s time for me to sit back and look at the year in review. And man, was this one weird.

We’ll start off with the good news: I walked away from the day job on February 24th of this year and have been working for Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) since then. I am now a Kept Man.

In simple terms, I get up, take a shower, feed myself, check the news and the mail, and then write for 3-5 hours, depending on what all needs to be accomplished with the rest of the day. (If I have the cat at my house, she gets fed first. Always.)

In 2017, I ended up writing 452,444 consumable words for the year. That’s fiction and blog posts like this, because they take time and are things that sell me to fans and prospective fans. Mind you, I had a full time job in 2017, working as a Business Intelligence developer and database architect for a legal services company in downtown Seattle. Good money.

Living out in the middle of nowhere, up against the Cascade Mountains, however, my days were complicated. Wake up at 4. (Alarm set to 410 and it went off every 2-3 months. Normally I’m awake at 330 and dozing.) Shower and out of the house by 425 to beat traffic downtown. Get into the office at 500 when the garage opens. Walk up 3 flights of stairs to the office. Fix breakfast and coffee and sit down to read my comics, the news, and eat. Start writing no later than 600 most days. Hit my desk at 800 and go to work. Drive home 60-100 minutes, depending on traffic.

On Mondays, I tended to write in the evening. Thursdays too. Gaming Tuesday. Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ Wednesday. (We don’t live together. Complicated story requiring you to buy the wine in order to hear.)

Still did nearly half a million words. And beat 2016, which ended at 415,000.

She sold her house on Capital Hill in Seattle in April and moved out to the farm. There was a lot of work to do to get her place ready and on the market in March and April, so I really didn’t hit my stride writing until then.

One of the things they tell you is that you will slow down, the first six months after you quit your day job. I assume the lack of structure and all this free time you have to fill, frequently by traveling down time sinks like social media or tv tropes. (Sorry not sorry.)

In April, I wrote 75,000 words. For comparison, in 2017, I averaged 37,000 per month. So straight up doubling. It also happens to be not that far from 84,000 words, which happens to be Pulp Speed One (1,000,000/year).

In May, we did a writing retreat in Lincoln City, OR. The goal for one of these is a 50,000 novel in 5-6 days. Did that. Awaken The Star Dragon.

In June, we went to CampCon, which is a writing retreat weekend in north central Oregon, where you sit down, shut up, and write. I also wanted to write a book about this new world of Pulp Speed Writing that I was at, as a way of showing other people that it was possible, and how they could get there. Wrote 14,000+ words on Saturday. And hit Pulp Speed Four for the month. (I could have hit Pulp Five, and specifically took three days off at the end of the month. Not tired, just not pushing.)

Suddenly, I was sustaining Pulp Speed Two. 100,000 words per month. And it works out to around 3400 words per day, as I tend to write everyday. That’s a pace I can sustain for extremely long stretches of time, if I need to. Okay, I can do this.

However, this is where things get interesting. The old definition of a novel most agreed to by the most people is 40,000 words. For many of my series, I come in 43-45k easy enough. But at 100,000 words per month, I’m writing two of those, plus other things.

Seriously, two novels a month. And short fiction, because I’m working on shorter projects and I have Boundary Shock Quarterly that I need to write for regularly.

Okay, I’m also writing Jessica Keller novels, and those get longer by their nature. But I needed to have several things I could rotate through, in order to not get bored by writing the same characters over and over for the next however many years.

So I took Gareth St. John Dankworth, Hero At Large, and turned him into a full series. Five novels in the first arc, with plans for a second five at a later date.

Good, but not sufficient.

Let the backbrain go for a while and came up with a whole new universe, where I could just have fun. Both Gareth and Jessica are epic SF. Every novel, the stories must get bigger. The risks greater. The rewards amazing. That’s the nature of epicness.

Not so with Valentinian and Dave. These are straight-up adventure SF stories. Self contained, but part of a larger arc. As with the Star Dragon, the goal with Valentinian is at least six in the first batch.

So 2018 was the year of production. Write like hell and build up a massive catalog of new novels I could drop rapidly, in a series, and then advertise the hell out of. We’re just now starting to come into what all that means.

In December I dropped St. Legier (Jessica Keller #7). As many of you are now aware, the story forks a little at the end, with Two Bottles of Wine With a War God coming out in January as a self-contained Yan Bedrov novella.

In Feb/Mar/Apr, you will get the CS-405 trilogy. Queen Anne’s Revenge, Packmule, Persephone. That leads us into May, when Winterhome (Jessica Keller #8) comes out. As I write this year end note, I’m just under 100,000 words in on book #9, and it feels like it will come in at around 160,000 maybe. Got a lot of ground to cover and a number of threads to wind up, so this can be the last Jessica Keller novel. (And yes, I have ideas for spin-offs, and they are on the list to get to. Never fear.)

Starting in June, the plan is to start dropping more Star Dragon novels every month, as well as possibly the Valentinian stories. (We’ve talked about possibly running an experiment where they go into Kindle Unlimited. Some people have said that is a great idea, and some have called me a moron. So about normal, all things considered.)

I have four of the Star Dragon novels done (1-4). Three of the Valentinian stories are also in the can. Once I finish the Ninth Jessica Keller, I’ll rotate back to those and finish off the bits I need to get to.

Partly, I actually have a deadline now, as we’re going to hire an audio artist to do 10-12 novels back to back. He’s giving us a good deal, and is quite excited to see where the stories go, now that he’s read the samples.

So lotsa audio coming, second half of the year. Mark your calendars.

Also, because the world has changed, I’m getting The Science Officer books translated into German. Big market for SF novellas in German, and I hope to draw in a whole cast of new fans. And if this works, I’ll get others things translated, too. (Found a really good translation crew to work with. Spendy, but professional and highly recommended by someone who should know.)

And now we’re at the end of the first year. I’ve written over a million words just this year, even with the late start to high speed. My goal next year is 1.3 million, or to sustain Pulp Speed Two across the entire year, if I can. Came close to failing in December, and I’m not 100% sure I’ll hit my 100,000, but I’m close enough to want to push, so I’ll have my butt at the keyboard tomorrow, bashing away at Jessica’s final missions.

Looking at my notes, here’s what my year looked like, in terms of writing projects. Some of the names won’t mean anything to you yet, as they are parts of later projects I wrote now, and will publish as part of something else. But there are a lot of things here.

FYI: Titles get repeated if the project crosses into a new month, so I remember what I wrote in each month, as opposed to what I started each month.

2018 Writing – Jan

– St. Legier – Jessica 7

– BSQ 1 Editorial

– Unintended Consequences – Carl & Deke 2

– RPG 2018

– Daddy’s Girl – Angus 1

Feb

– Unintended Consequences – Carl & Deke 2

– RPG 2018

– St Legier – Jessica 7

Mar

– St Legier – Jessica 7

– Strawberry Dragon – Fairchild

– Forgotten Paper Memories – Angus 2 (BSQ 005)

Apr

– Shirabyoshi – Kumiko 2

– Phantom of the Factory – Disappointment Patrol 1

– Two Bottles of Wine With the War God – Yan Bedrov

– Queen Anne’s Revenge – CS-405-1

May

– Patrol Cutter: Bellerophon! – Gareth Pulp 1

– Awaken The Star Dragon – Gareth 1

– Packmule – CS-405-2

Jun

– Packmule – CS-405-3

– Persephone – CS-405-3

– Flight of the Star Dragon – Gareth 2

– B4B – Pulp Speed

Jul

– Winterhome – Jessica

– Just Business – Kumiko 4

– Huntress – Kumiko 5

Aug

– Winterhome

– Rocker – Kumiko 6

– Second Cousins – Akahana 3

– Rescue – Kumiko 7

– Longshot Hypothesis – Dave 1

Sep

– Call of the Star Dragon – Gareth 3

– Hard Bargain – Dave 2

Oct

– Heroes – Shrike 2

– Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns – Handsome Rob 2

– Shadow Of The Star Dragon – Gareth 4

Nov

– Shadow Of The Star Dragon

– Assassin – Farouk 1

– Seeker – Alicia 2

– Tin Can Pirates – Gareth Pulp 2

– Outermost – Dave 3

– Witness – Farouk 2

Dec

– Petron – Jessica 9

So there you have it. One hell of a year.

In 2019, I’m hoping to write 20 novels. And a lot of short fiction. And the RPG project is moving towards a point where I will be able to start playtesting with a few groups in the spring, hopefully. With luck, that will make some money. At the very least, I’ll have to write some fiction set in the universe to help explain things and give people a feel for the place and the people.

Plus, I’ll turn 50 next summer, so I want to celebrate it by writing like hell and having a grand time doing it.

So Happy New Years to everyone, and I hope your world continues to get better every day.

So I just got back from a trip yesterday. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I took the Coast Starlight Amtrak down to Martinez, CA (just outside Oakland, basically). Had a sleeper for the overnight portion. Utterly lovely. At Martinez, we swapped for an inland train that was more direct, running to Bakersfield, then hopping aboard a bus and got into LA at a little after 4pm day 2. (Had we stayed on the Starlight, we would have gotten there about 9pm, so worth the swap.)

Met an awesome guy on the train. He is a professional golf pro and we talked to him for several hours. All in all a wonderful thing.

Spent a couple of days in LA visiting a niece and her boyfriend, before renting a car and driving to Vegas to see an adoptive sister.

Because we were staying in the Thousand Oaks area (way out west in the valley), we went over the top on I-5 and then 14, and across the top of the mountains, the day after Christmas, rather than trying to drive all the way across I-10 to get to I-15.

Stopped in Palmdale, CA. I needed caffeine, as both of us had come down with something yucky that is still working its way through the system today. We got to a Starbucks (3rd and Palmdale Blvd) just after a huge rush, but I wasn’t in much of a hurry, since I needed to stretch my legs, hit the restroom, etc.

They appeared to be short a person, since there were only three behind the counter, and both Jordan and Jackie apologized more than once that they couldn’t quite get to me, as they handled half a dozen food orders, and a full drive through, and everything else. Neither of them stopped moving once as I watched, and never put a foot wrong. It was rather mesmerizing to watch, because they were exactly the sort of quality service and cheerfulness that the Starbucks brand it built on. Forgot to grab the email of the district manager, but if anyone is in that area, feel free to point them to this blog.

The team eventually cleared the massive backlog, once Jordan managed all the food orders, then got my mocha going and had it done fast and perfect, and with a smile.

I walked out of that Starbucks with a smile on my face, because they had met and exceeded my expectations for the chain. Seriously.

So then we drove the rest of the way to Vegas. (Word of warning: don’t ever try this the day after Xmas, especially on a weekday. Everyone took off for vacation after seeing the family.)

To give you a feel for my trip, we hit Barstow at 2pm. There was a traffic jam on the interstate, starting just past the Outlet Mall exit. It ran for TWENTY-FIVE MILES. We finally broke free about Harvard Road (25 miles later) and it took 140 minutes to get that far (4:20 pm)

We were staying at the Golden Nugget, up at the north end of town. My wife’s semi-sister lives about five blocks away, so that was the most convenient place. After an eight hour drive, I crashed and then got up the next morning for fuel. Did a double-mocha just for the extra surge of power.

After Palmdale, and a fantastic Starbucks, the one in the lobby at the Nugget has got to be the worst experience I have ever had with the chain. Plus I live in Seattle, and used to work close enough to Corporate Headquarters downtown that I could walk down and get coffee at that store.

I paid $6 for a half-full, unstirred, double mocha, delivered by a surly barista and a crew that were as “whatever” as I have ever seen. We weren’t staying in town long enough for it to matter, but I’ll be walking down to the store on Fremont, next time I’m in Vegas, just because the service at the Golden Nugget’s Starbucks was so shitty.

Why does this matter? (I had a long day yesterday, with the flight and the wait at the airport, so I did some processing.)

Starbucks is not coffee. They serve coffee, yes, but Howard Schultz (the man who created the concept) is about the EXPERIENCE of a good, Italian coffee shop, where you come in and are treated a certain way. Palmdale was everything that a Starbucks is supposed to be, in spite of being in the middle of nowhere, in a strip mall filled with dollar stores and empty store fronts, in a part of town that was a little seedy.

That store was a bright spot. I had a smile at the way I was treated. I even tipped the staff, using the little phone app. That was the first time I’ve done that in forever. Nuff said?

Vegas was horrible. The coffee was mediocre. The service was bad. The experience was atrocious.

You are in a service industry. Coffee is just the medium of communication. My bad memories will last.

I think about these things, because I am a writer. My words are the entertainment for my fans, so I need to make sure you have a good experience when you open one of my books. It might not be your taste in story, but I can’t control that. If you wanted a historical romance, I am exactly the wrong person to read. But if you just want a fun story with interesting people, that I can control. You might even enjoy it.

Consistency is the key, in both endeavors.

The rest of the trip was amazing fun. Good people. Haven’t been in LA in ages, and certain parts of it have gentrified.

And I remember Vegas from the early 90’s, back before it got Disneyfied. Almost unrecognizable. And it’s gone white bread, white-picket-fence. Saw ads for Maroon 5 and Jay Leno doing New Years Eve shows, and flash back to the old days where every twenty yards as you walked on the strip, someone would hand you free passes or ads for “Gentlemen’s Clubs” you should visit.

But it was fun.

What was your Christmas like?

So the Seventh Jessica Keller novel, St. Legier, came out a couple weeks ago, and seems to be getting a pretty good reception, from the reviews and comments. Thank you.

From there, the story splits, with on short thread covered in Two Bottles of Wine With A War God coming out in January followed by the CS-405 trilogy. After the 405’s it goes into the middle of Winterhome.

One of my First Readers recently got through a pass of the Eighth Jessica novel, Winterhome. (Due out in May 2019 after the 405’s.) In in, there is a line from the Lord of Winter himself about how Jessica Keller is an unpredictable element in human history, representing some amazingly-high standard deviation number.

D’s a math nerd. Seriously. he considered the number I had given as far too high, such that he had to find a computer program to find the right breakdown for what he thought it should be.

And I quote: “I had to use a ruby library method to get the require “infinite” precision to get answers, all of the web calculators fail at 3 or 4 deviations.”

So, seriously, I spent Friday having a discussion with the man about what the median and mean populations of the Fribourg Empire were, how many planets the Empire represented, and how many inhabited planets we should expect across the entire galaxy, in the era of Jessica Keller, circa 13,452 CE.

I havesome seriously fun and slightly nerdy friends. Here’s where he ended up, having worked it all out to his satisfaction. Mind you, this is the culmination of a half-dozen emails back and forth. heh

D: So, 200k worlds (2*10^5) * 2.5 billion persons per world (2.5*10^9) ~= 5*10^14 people (that’s 500 trillion). 8 standard deviations would make her around 1 in 1000 trillion, so literally singular in all humans ever, the far pointy end of the bell curve, so that’s probably close enough, if there have been more people, say a couple thousand trillion, then she might have a few peers 🙂

When describing Jessica Keller, she is a black swan, a singular event/person so unpredictable that she breaks down all useful statistical analysis in the short term. For her, that would be across a period of roughly thirty to fifty years, which is peanuts when you are talking about millennia or all recorded history, but crucial when you are in those fifty years and trying to make savvy predictions about how to conquer the galaxy (a la Buran himself).

I go back to Isaac Asimov and the Foundation Books. Hari Selden’s Empire is falling, and he devises the math to predict how to shorten the coming darkness from 30,000 years to 1,000. Loved those books as a kid, although I haven’t read them in 20+ years at least. Maybe 30. Dunno how they hold up in the modern age.

The Mule upset all Selden’s math, by being a thing Hari could not foresee.

Jessica is the same way, but less “evil” give or take, depending on your viewpoint. I wanted to put her in the category of names that would be on the “one handed short list” of great military commanders. Eisenhower, for Americans, and Nimitz, from the 20th Century. Not necessary the greatest battlefield commanders, but the greatest at moving from tactics to strategy to logistics. Wellington is another that most of you will have heard of. Chinggis Khan once conquered most of Asia and established an Empire that forced the barbarians in the far west to civilize. etc.

Jessica Keller is better than Nils Kasum and Emmerich zu Wachturm. They are fantastic. She’s literally in a league of her own. I’ve tried to convey that, while at the same time not turning her into one of those stupid Chosen One scenarios where the Gods reach down and gift some random child with a Destiny. She’ll carve her own out, thankyoufuckersverymuch.

She’s human. They all are. She’s just driven far and away more than anybody else, and has identified military command as her thing.

Right now, I’m about halfway through the Ninth and Final Jessica Keller novel. And yes, it will be done at that point. There are other Alexandria Station stories to explore. More Javier. More Henri. More Handsome Rob. And others I haven’t talked about. But Jessica’s story will be done.

And yes, eight standard deviations probably works for me. I’m just a writer, what the hell do I know about least-squares linear regressions? (Trick question, I’ve actually published studies using them, in another life.)

But your reading pleasure will not be interrupted, thanks to the hard work of D making sure I’ve got the math right. Because he’s nerdy that way. 🙂

Thanks, D.

Seriously, you should take a look at Kobo for your ebooks. There are a lot of reasons I could list here, but I’ll pick just a couple.

First: It has become more writer-friendly than Amazon over the last few years, mostly because they see where Amazon made some interesting choices and did other things. Amazon pretty much owns the US market, and is huge in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. After that, not so much. Kobo, on the other hand, is larger in many other markets, because they try to partner with one of the local book-selling chains or companies, and collaborate with them, rather than trying to plow them under.

Here in the US, that takes the form of a new partnership with Walmart where you can get Kobo’s huge library of ebooks, and maybe not contribute to Amazon taking over the whole world.

Second: there are things I can do on Kobo that I can’t do on Amazon. (Well, I could, if I wanted to lost most of the money I might gain.)

When your favorite writer puts a book on Amazon, they must price it between $2.99 US and $9.99 US. If they do, they earn at around 68-69% of the cover (70 minus a processing fee based on file size). If I go below $2.99, or above $9.99, my rate drops to 35%.

For those of you paying attention to the math, I make about 34 cents on those $0.99 novels and novellas you get to read. That does not pay the bills. Same thing happens if I go high.

That’s on my mind today. Because I can, we were able to put the entirety of The Science Officer, Season One together as a single “Collected Novel” or whatever you want to call it. All 8 books. Somewhere around a quarter million words. One low price.

For $19.99 you get Season One in ebook, down from around $22+. Not a lot of savings, but that’s another couple of books you could by. Or a nice Christmas present you could get for your favorite someone who likes science fiction books. Or whatever else.

If you shop at Walmart, there are suddenly a metric crapton of ebooks available now. (Really, six million titles? Wow.)

So rush out and tell your friends about The Science Officer, Season One (because you’ve already read it all, right?) This is something I can’t do anywhere but Kobo right now. And the Kobo folks are awesome, so I’m looking at other things I can do to build my traffic and sales over there.

Folks in Belgium and the Netherlands now have access to Kobo Plus, where they can pay a monthly subscription fee and read as much as they want. It’s like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, but without the requirements for exclusivity. All of my books (I think) are now available there, with more coming.

Do yourself a favor this holiday season and check out what the rest of the world already knows about and see what kinds of fun you can have on Kobo. You’ll thank me for it.

Because I’m way behind on getting my newsletter out (should have arrived Nov 1, still impending), some of you may not be aware that the 7th Jessica Keller is coming out very shortly. (Like, depending on where you live, in the next twelve hours.)

Go pre-order it if you haven’t or just buy it if you don’t read this until Monday.

🙂

By the time you get to the end of it, you’ll notice I had to do something a little silly. And you’ll probably come to understand why, about ten chapters in. The novel itself isn’t mind-bogglingly huge, but I had to cover a stupid amount of ground in this one. My apologies up front for those of you who haven’t read it and don’t see this coming. (spoilers not explained here. You can throw tomatoes at me Tuesday.)

However, at the end of St. Legier, I had to split the story thread. Literally. Yan Bedrov had to go off an have a brief adventure. For those of you keeping score at home, I have been planning Two Bottles of Wine With a War God since I was writing the last third of Queen of the Pirates.

The last third of the Jessica Keller series (Books 7, 8, & 9) was always going to be about the evil that might come about when you create a whole new lifeform that can compete with humanity. In this case, rather than “Advanced Humans” as a result of genetic engineering, what would happen when Sentient computer systems were good enough to become people.

Suvi has been around since I first started writing the Alexandria Station Universe books. Her future (and Jessica’s past, plus Doyle, Piper, and Henri) was the place where the AI fleets had taken it upon themselves to be gods, and nearly wiped everything out as a result.

Buran was a factory controller who got promoted to be a god later. His vision was a galaxy where humanity was controlled for their own good. In War God, we get to meet EASC Carthage. The Last Dragon. Nemesis of CW Kinnison.

It is a story that makes me cry to reread. I’m old enough that I have spent time contemplating my own mortality and the mistakes I made when I was much younger, none of which I can undo now. So you go have two bottles of wine with a creature powerful enough to wipe out humanity.

————–

The second thread coming off St. Legier is the CS-405 trilogy (Queen Anne’s Revenge, Packmule, Persephone), starring the least-armed warship in Jessica’s fleet, broken down and trapped deep behind enemy lines.

I wanted to write this one because Phil Kosnett is a character I based on someone else, and made him almost the exact opposite in every way I could, except that they are both exceptional commanders.

But without Jessica, the story could be in a different style and format. What happens when you have to turn pirate to survive? And it let me explore a whole new cast of lunatics: Lady Blackbeard. Stunt Dude. Ground Control. Plus Granville Veitengruber, Andre Gave, and Lan and Kiel.

While War God takes place at the end of St. Legier and in the gap, the CS-405 trilogy runs roughly contemporaneous with Book #8 (Winterhome, due out May 2019). The end of the third book, Persephone, takes place about midway through Winterhome, and then threads the stories back together again. If I didn’t do it this way, I would have had to end up writing at least a tenth full novel for Jessica, as Kosnett’s tale runs about 130,000 words. 150,000 with Bedrov tossed in for good measure. And it would have had to be much messier.

Winterhome is done and at the copyeditor as we speak. I’m about 30,000 words into the Ninth Jessica Keller book (title: TBD) and aiming for it to come out in the Fall.

And then I’ll be done with Jessica. There are other Alexandria Station stories to write. My schedule keeps getting bumped out, but I have a second season of The Science Officer in my notes, just waiting to be written. There will be more Doyle, and probably more Piper. The Story Road was always intended to be book one of a trilogy, and I have the notes for that, when I have the time.

Right now, I have the 4th of a 5 book series done, and the 3rd of a 6 book series done, both coming out in the summer of 2019 sometime. That will entertain you, I hope.

But today, St. Legier is coming out. It will probably be the most emotional of the nine, based pure on the subject matter. I think most of you will enjoy it, and where this last trilogy is going to take everyone, before I finally wrap up Jessica Keller’s story.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

WOO-HOO!!!

Long backstory short, I had always wondered if we could collect up the eight Science Officer audio books that Matt had done, and put them out as one monstrous compendium. I’ve been told be people (who might not be full of shit) that audio folks don’t like novellas. Just the wrong length, because they would rather use their free credits to binge on some doorstop. Similarly, other people who (I trust to know these things) have suggested that I get a different payment rate for anything under appx. 45,000 words (Javier runs 24-32k each). Maybe I’m leaving money on the table here.

But all the filed existed. It was relatively painless (I’m given to understand from Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm)) to merge them and do a mega-audio book.

I don’t do audio books. Brain doesn’t work that way. So I don’t know much about the format. However, this monster is 24 HOURS LONG. That’s kinda impressive, as I’m guessing we’re just a shade under 240,000 words, all bits combined. That should keep even you busy for a couple of days, missy.

And this is just the first part of things. Coming out of NINC this year, I had a list of tasks to attack in 2019. And the greatest wife/boss in the world.

We’re in process of getting all the The Science Officer books translated into German. That’s a good market for science fiction, and they like novellas (see Perry Rhodan, currently working on their THIRD BILLION books sold.) Sometime second half of 2019, I would like to finally start writing Season Two of The Science Officer.

Melissa is currently working her way through the Jessica Keller books for audio, with Auberon and Queen done so far and she’s working on Last of the Immortals now. I’ll finish that series next year, and keep her busy for a while. And you.

Meanwhile, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is getting close to signing contracts for audio on the Star Dragon books. Awaken is #1 and I have #4 in the can right now, with #5 getting written early next year. Not sure when #6. Ebook, Print, and Audio (everywhere and not just audible) should all drop at the same time, next summer. And a second series will come out after that, although that one may go into Kindle Unlimited for the ebook. Audio will be everywhere as well.

Hope you’re ready. I have (I think) eleven novels out right now, with several more on pre-order. I am currently writing novel #23. And speeding up just the weeest bit as I go. There will be lots of fun new things for you to consume, starting next week with the seventh Jessica Keller, St. Legier.

But for now, I’m just hyper-jazzed that you can listen to the whole of The Science Officer Season One. Get yours today!

This one is for my Egyptian friends, but anybody outside the US can use this to their advantage, as a way to embrace the Indie Publishing world in the so-called Western World.

Recently, one of my con buddies from Cairo asked about finding an English-language publisher for his novel. (Working on that, but he wants to go more traditional than I do, so a longer task.)

However, it got me to thinking about how him and his buddies could go about doing it. The tools necessary are relatively simple and cheap these days (at least by US prices, not sure how things convert elsewhere.)

The world has changed.

Print that and stick it to your bathroom mirror. Or post it on a sticky note on the side of your screen.

At the most recent OryCon (40th), I presented this new case, separate from the old days of finding a publishing house, or starting a publishing cooperative, or just doing it entirely yourself. It saves you from a number of problems, and lets you offload the work as much as possible.

Ten years ago, the only organizations equipped to put out pretty books were the Traditional Publishing houses (what we refer to as TradPub or “NewYork” in shorthand). Indies like me could put things up, but doing good covers, good blurbs, pretty interiors, etc is difficult. Or was.

The world has changed.

If you would like to take your work (in English or translated) and put it in front of a global market (Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, B&N, etc.), here are a set of steps you can follow. And feel free to reach out to me directly with questions. And needs. I have many friends who you can hire for certain chunks of the work, if it is an expertise you do not have yet. (You need to learn these things eventually, or find the right people to hire.)

So let’s start with your manuscript.

If you can format it as a .docx type file (modern Microsoft Word formatting, regardless of source), then you can import that manuscript into a new program called Vellum. This is a Mac-only program at present (and probably forever). You can apparently rent virtual macbooks that come with Vellum installed in order to do the work. If you write slowly, that might be an economical choice. I write fast, so I’m always formatting something. It was worth acquiring an old Mac Air 13″.

Apple just released the new Macbook Air, so a whole LOT of people will be upgrading their old machines for Christmas. That means that you should be able to get a good refurbed machine (with warranty) for under $500 US. (link goes to random search on Amazon.com) Last year, I cashed in all my points from my Amazon Visa card, and got a machine WAY cheap as a result. You might ask for cash for Xmas so you can buy yourself such a tool. And remember that (for US folks at least) this is a business expense, as it all directly affects your burgeoning publishing empire.

Vellum makes pretty ebooks and pretty print books. It is not as perfect as you can achieve with Adobe InDesign, but it is also about 1/100th as much work to do. Time = Money in this instance. Do you want to spend a week or more formatting your book, or writing?

My buddy Chuck wrote a pretty good book on the process.

So you can get it all in there and get the machine ready to spit out pretty ebook, mobi, and pdf for you.

Next: Cover

You can get get good stock art at cheap prices (pay attention to your licensing when you sign the contract and get the right one) on places like Dreamstime and Shutterstock. This might be the place where you find the art and then pay a cover specialist to make you something pretty, because you’ll need to generate the ebook cover, as well as the full wrap for the print book. There are folks out there, and the going price seems to be $100-$300 US for something professional looking as a wrap, depending. (You can also negotiate deals with folks. I’d happily trade my time to some friends for things translated into other languages, for example.)

A good cover nails genre. The reader knows exactly what to expect, just from the thumbnail on Amazon. Look at my Jessica Keller books and you’ll see the spaceship on it. You know what you’re getting. This is where expertise is worth the money, to get the right font, the right color, the right “feel.”

So now you need a blurb.

Present tense. Four sentences, pretty much. Action from the first page of a short story or the first chapter of a novel. Nothing more. Don’t describe the whole plot. Don’t use the word “and” or any version of “is” when you write it. Short, hard, pithy. Leave them breathless and demanding to open the book to read it.

Okay, then you put all that into Vellum and you have a book. Ready to publish. Easy as that (yeah, I know.)

But publishing it is complex as well.

The world has changed.

I know, as of summer 2018, that Egypt now allows Paypal. That means that someone in the US can send you money pretty easily. Worth the effort, as far as I’m concerned.

So we’re going to talk about the Bunny.

You can create an account for yourself on BundleRabbit and link in your paypal information so you can get paid later. Major revolution.

Now you create a new Project. (I’ve detailed a lot of these steps in my book on creating your own magazine, because I use the same process there. You should consider starting a magazine as well. The world has changed.)

You can invite yourself into the project, and put your name at 100% for payout. You can also put down an editor and artist,and give them a share of the proceeds instead, if you want to do that rather than paying them upfront. Up to you and them.

When you fill in all the information, you can then have BundleRabbit act as your publisher of record (Kydala Press, technically). Chuck will push the book out to Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Draft2Digital, and others for you. And handle some of the crap that publishers have to go through with the middlemen. (shit happens.)

He will take 10% off the top, after the publisher’s cut, but that means that you functionally get a publisher and accountant working for you on a royalty-share method. You’ll note, it is possible that everyone goes in royalty-share, including an editor and cover artist, if you negotiate such a deal, so very little money has to come from you up front.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE CHISELERS who tell you that they can publish your book for you for thousands of dollars US up front. You can hire professionals sure, and I can give you a list of people I trust to talk to. It might cost you some money, but the thieves don’t need to make any of it from you. Editors want to be paid. Cover artists need to put food on the table. But there are entire ecosystems now dedicated to some aspect of this major task, and they work fast at good rates.

Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ and I are talking about starting up our own service soon for certain folks where we will take a manuscript for maybe $100-$200US, depending. We’ll run it through the process I detailed above and then get it published on the Bunny, and we won’t take a percentage. You’ll get the 100% after Amazon and the Bunny take their cuts. You won’t get much choice in the overall process (we’ll pick the cover and write the blurb, with a little input from you, but no prima donnas need apply).

You’ll deal with Bundlerabbit at that point and all points going forward. We’re just mechanics helping with that middle process. What is still a little messy, at least for the next two years. And we won’t take many clients, but I’m also planning to train a few other people on the process, and once they are ready, they’ll start their own publishing support gigs.

As an Indie, there is no marketing budget except what I put in. Sweat and time. But most small to medium publishers don’t really have much more money, time, and expertise to dedicate to your book, either. They got their cash in the past by being the professional gateway you required to actually get your book on a shelf somewhere.

The world has changed.

Let me know what questions you have.

You’ve got less than 38 hours as I write these words to get out there and get all the car chases, spaceship battles, and epic mecha slugfests you need to get through the Christmas season. Why the hell are you still reading this.

Go buy these books!!

Okay, back? Got them all? What, I need to sell you more than the awesomeness of  Loren L Coleman and Robert Jeschonek running around in giant fighting robots? What the hell is wrong with you?

Fine. How about AI starships, space pirates, and alien invasions?

Look, you’re gonna regret not buying this bundle. That’s all I have to say. It’s amazing, broad, serious, and silly. And you know that Christmas this year falls on a Tuesday, so I’m guessing you took three days off and won’t go back to work on Wednesday. Whachagonnado when the football is over and you’re back to reruns and soap operas on television? Binge on YouTube videos all day? (Not judging. Much.)

Maybe you need to just buy yourself the Christmas present YOU wanted and not have to rely on the family to guess how awesome this will be. Do you really want to risk nothing but socks and ties?

Get out there and buy this bundle. And move quickly. You got less than thirty-eight hours from this moment, and it will take some time for the signal to reach you, so the clock is definitely ticking and you’re about to be out o………..</signal lost>

Good, now that I’ve got your attention, you should look at the calendar. NaNo is going to be over in a few days. For many of you who have never done a NaNo before, you’ve been pounding away at the keyboard trying to complete your novel. (And if you’ve done it, then YAY!!!!! GO YOU! If not, keep plugging away.)

Sometime next week, NaNo will be officially over for this year, but that just means that your work is moving on to the next phase: editing, polishing, and publishing.

Fortunately, there is a lot of help available from folks who have been through this before and done the NaNo thing, but are now full-time writers. This is a bundle of twelve books that will help you with the various bits and pieces you need as you decide you like writing, and want to move on to doing this as a career. (And yes, you can make a career of it. I no longer have any other job, except feeding the cat.)

Twelve books: on writing, polishing, publishing, and learning to write with speed.

This is also the official NaNo bundle for 2018, so they have been reviewed to some extent to make sure that you’re getting good information from professionals who want to help you, rather than predators (the old days of vanity press) who just want to take your money and screw you.

Never trust someone who demands lots of money up front. There are services that are legitimate, and they’ll give you references you should talk to before giving them cash. Or talk to your friends. We’re building a whole support economy here.

For now, finish your novel. If you have, then take a deep breath and do a HAPPY DANCE!!!!!! around the room a few times. You have now done something a minuscule fraction of the world ever accomplishes.

Next week, you’ll put it aside and forget about it. Leave it for at least a week. Then come back and read it top to bottom. Clean copy means that you only need to fix a few errors, clean up some language, and then you are ready to go.

If you don’t write clean copy, you need to learn. I’m sorry, but that’s the only way to succeed anymore. The old days of an editor doing major surgery to fix your manuscript are gone, if they ever existed. It is a skill you can learn. Several of these books show you how, step by step.

Then you clean the document up and send it to a First Reader. Not a Critique Group. NEVER a Critique Group. You want someone to read it and tell you what sections work or don’t work, rather than someone redlining it like an English teacher.  First Reader is an emotional reaction.

• If a reader tells you a passage doesn’t work, they are almost always right.
• If a writer tells you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Get a First Reader you like and trust. Then listen to them and expect to take 75-90% of their comments if you mesh well. Not all of them. I have a copy editor I love, who gets me, and I only take 95% of her comments. (She did once correct the day of the week in the year 13,445 CE, and I just assumed she was right, because she’s that good.)

Fix their issues and you are DONE. I know people who use lots of first readers, and lots of drafts, and I think that is a mistake. Each pass strips some of your voice out of the manuscript and eventually you end up with “white picket fence vanilla” as a story. Nothing exciting. No emotion. None of the visceral rawness of good literature. Just pretty words devoid of meaning.

At that point, either publish it or start querying agents, depending on your religious bent. I don’t do TradPub, so I can’t help you with agenting a manuscript. And I feel it is a waste of time, unless you happen to be Joanna Rowling and haven’t told anyone. That’s a one with a whole lot of zeroes behind it if you are.

My process is that it goes into the publishing queue at that point. Finalize. Cover. Blurb. Publish. Repeat. I write fast. I would rather spend my time writing the next novel, instead of spending a lot of effort rewriting this novel. Your Mileage May Vary, but I’ll publish way more than you do as a result. And yours still won’t be twice as good as mine (or three or eight times, depending on how many reworks and redrafts you do).

The best way to learn to write is to write. Not rewrite. If you rewrite, you are teaching yourself to rewrite. Write the next novel and make it better than this one. And then the one after that. Repeat.

So remember to relax when NaNo is done. Take a quick break, and then prepare for the next steps. Maybe read a few books to get you ready for the editing and publishing phase, so you can be successful sooner.

I believe in you. Others will as well. But they can’t buy a novel you never publish, so I need you to step up here and make it happen.

And best of luck. The future is glorious!