In the late 70’s when I was a kid, the family went to Breckenridge, Colorado for a long Thanksgiving holiday. Snow, skiing, fun, stuff. Really enjoyed those trips.

One year, total whiteout conditions. Like, can’t see the car from the window blizzard. We ended up straightening out coat hangers to roast hotdogs over the fire. ‘Cause that’s what you do.

When I moved to LA in ’90, I started a tradition wherein me and my roommates cooked chilidogs for Thanksgiving, because we were all from out of state and didn’t have family to go visit. Kept that tradition up when I left LA in ’95. Did it back in Kansas in ’96. Then moved to Seattle in ’97. Kept it up.

When Donna and I got serious, she was a fantastic cook. And so there was always a Thanksgiving turkey done. I ended up rotating to having my chili dogs for breakfast early, just because that had become my family tradition and I wanted to keep at it. (Yeah, don’t ask.)

Lost her ten years ago (summer of ’08) and her birthday is Nov 25th, so she is always on my mind this time of year. (And Fabulous Publisher Babe’s ™ birthday is a week later, so I am getting into planning for that.)

But the tradition was strong.

However, I was a broken soul for a long time. Way longer than leaving for LA in ’90. Didn’t finally decide to be a happy person until five years ago. Over the last decade, the annual task of reinventing myself has moved from where it used to be to how I can be more happy in myself in the future.

So last year, I skipped the chili dogs. Just decided not to do them. Put that in the past and let it go. That way, I can start remembering the good times, and not necessarily the bad times.

Fortunately, most of you didn’t know me at my worst. Very few people who were around me at the blackest times are still around. Snake died about fifteen years ago. Bishop’s just dead to me, and a number of others. Pike will never get on social media to see this. Nor will Frosty. Haven’t seen A-bomb in nearly twenty-five years. Coop still exists, but has turned into such a hermit that I have to poke him with a cattle prod set to high to get a response.

Others I miss include Sean and Perry. With Donna. I lost all three of them in a 14 month stretch.

But that’s yesterday. I want to be thankful that I had those times, and that I survived them. But I don’t want to be defined by them anymore.

So this year, Fabulous Publisher Babe and I were in Costco, meandering and looking for inspiration. In past years, we did a writing marathon over the holiday break, but I don’t have to go back to work on Monday. Or rather, I never stop banging away at the greatest hobby of all time.

She looked at the turkeys and decided she wanted to have one this year. We’ve had Cornish Game Hens in the past, but neither of us has ever made a full turkey. Her brother has a great recipe we’re going to try.

Then the side fixings. She’s making cranberry-orange relish. We’ve got Brussel Sprouts to bake. Keto/Paleo biscuits.

The fun is stuffing, since she’s full keto these days.

When I was a kid, cranberrys came out of a can and stuffing out of a box. She’s making it from scratch. We did with and without oysters, but her traditions include sausage.

So I just finished making two pounds of sausage for her. From scratch. When she asked, I handed her my book on sausage recipes and she picked.

Got two pounds of Kielbasa chilling and drying in the refrigerator as we speak. About half will go into the stuffing, and she’s going to have the other half for soups and whatever.

Told her I thought that should be my new tradition, to make sausage for whatever it was we were doing for Thanksgiving and got a hearty “OH YEAH!”

[brief pause while kitty demanded scritches. She’s decided in the last week she likes it when I scratch her back, after five years. I have apparently been found adequate by the cat.]

So that’s my new holiday tradition. We try to do something new on a regular basis, as part of the Anti-Stodgy Campaign.

What are you doing to not fall into the same rut?

So,

it’s the weekend before Thanksgiving in the US (sorry for the rest of you, but go ahead and have some turkey and stuffing Thursday anyway, just so you can cosplay at home.) Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I were in the grocery store last night picking up stuff when it dawned on us.

Reminder: I live out in the boonies at the foot of the Cascades, thirty-some miles southeast of Seattle. I have deer that live in my yard.

So we had to get a small turkey and start planning out the meals. Paleo stuffing (without the onions and mushrooms that will kill me), cranberry/orange relish, Brussels sprouts baked in bacon grease, paleo bread. Etc.

We are NOT going to visit the family this year. My nearest close relative is in Kansas. Her nearest is in Los Angeles. We’re staying home and writing, because that’s what we do. (If you are stuck in Seattle area without family and want a quiet afternoon, ping one of us.)

But, for those of you who are going to Grandma’s house, this is your reminder that there is some amazing military science fiction available over on storybundle for a few more days. You owe it to yourself to go pick up several hundred thousand words of top-notch booms, bang, and assault mecha doing their thing. Dean’s in there. Kris. Tami. Keith. David. Stefon. Loren. Planet Bob. I’m in there. And there is a collection of Fiction River called Valor with eleven stories, including Lee Allred. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Many Americans take this whole week off, because three vacation days turns into nine sleeping in. Maybe you’re traveling. Maybe you’re just hiding behind the closed curtains. (You aren’t supposed to start decorating for another two weeks, so skip that part and start making yourself some hot chocolate with maybe a dash of something extra for cold nights.)

But you should be reading. It will keep you distracted from the nastiness of the world, at least for a few days, and we all need that, going into the holiday season. Plus, you might be able to distract your crazy in-laws or uncle with a story you just read, and not have to listen to their latest conspiracy theory on reverse vampires or Jade Helm II.

So go get the books. Or maybe you should do someone an early Christmas present. These will be gone by then, but traveling for the holidays is always stressful, so treat yourself or the ones you love RIGHT NOW. Someone can hide from the world for days behind their reader slab.

Go get Valor. Save yourself, your sanity, and the galaxy, all in one go.

🙂

And no, I don’t need commentary from the peanut gallery on that one, thank you very much. But man, was last night’s dream weird.

I’m a writer, in case any of you had any doubts. The question is not “How do you get your ideas?” (Poughkeepsie, New York, long story), but rather “How do you make them stop?”

So I’m sleeping heavy and deep early this morning. The whole thing assembles in my head and stays with me with I wake up, which is uncommon. Usually, I forget the dreams on waking, but retain flavors. Nope, whole damned idea.

Disclaimer to follow:

1. I don’t write horror.
2. I won’t claim this idea later, if one of you decides to write it all down.
3. I will demand, at a minimum, a dedication at the front, blaming me for everything, and a paper copy at some point, if you end up writing it.

Okay, let’s get weird.

The Cthulhu Mythos always returns, again and again, to cities laid out in non-Euclidian Geometry, whatever the hell that means, as a way of indicating “Things Man Was Not Meant To Know(tm)” and all that jazz. Simply learning how to think and understand that way will drive a man or woman completely and irrevocably insane. Every story agrees there.

However, you can train an AI/Machine-learning-program. Think about those bastards that force a Machine Learning algorithm to watch 1,000 hours of lawyer commercials. Or Bob Ross videos.

So, Man cannot learn about the true depths and meaning of the Dread Old Ones. However, you could program a machine to do it for you. And you cannot unlock the doorway, because by the time you understand how to summon Yog-Sothoth, you’re utterly nuts.

But a computer doesn’t care. And the phrase: “The stars must align” is a metaphorical concept, not a literal one, because even they recognized that the chances of one of the monkeys figuring it all out were astronomical in scale.

So you suddenly understand that you can open the path, by training a computer to solve the formula. But it’s a complete, and utter bitch. One of those where the NSA would require millions of years of computer time to brute force it open. Because they are using Euclidian Geometry to do it. Decision trees and binary, rather than insanity.

So you attach it to a block-chain. Create a crypto-currency where “mining the blocks” to “Solve mathematical problems” is actually deciphering the formula to summon the Greater Gods from R’lyeh to the here and now. (And boy, won’t Cthulhu be surprised when someone actually knocks.)

With me so far? Great. That’s the first half of your novel right there. Mystery. Thriller. Horror, Urban Fantasy. Science Fiction. They all work to that point.

Are we trying to raise Chuck from R’lyeh or prevent it? (If Charles can become Chuck, why can’t Cthulhu? Have you asked him which he prefers?)? What happens when Yog-Sothoth shows up? Did you bring enough alcohol for someone who’s been trapped in a foreign dimension for millions of years? Somehow, I doubt they were on the Elemental Plane of Good Beer.

So, you get to take that and run with it. If anyone asks, print this off and save it, so they can’t sue you for getting too close to their idea, because I just woke up and wrote this blog post, without asking the interwebs if it has previously been done. (And no, that is not a search I plan to undertake.) Plus, you’re going to write your story, your way. A dozen of you could all start out at the same spot above and never get any closer to each other. Not worried.

But damn it, I will throw a fit if you don’t blame me in print. And I seriously want a copy when you get done, preferably signed, but you can just drop ship it and then live the rest of your life wondering when I’m going to show up on your doorstep to get it signed. Ye Haff Been WARNED!

heh

On your marks. Get set. Go Call Chuck!

And remember that my brain’s strange enough that those aren’t even the weirdest sorts of things it comes up with.

We now return you to your regular programming.

Since I’ve had to give this speech several times of the the weekend at the just-completed OryCon in Portland, OR, I figured I might as well just post it for everyone.

As you are now approaching the halfway point of this year’s NaNoWriMo, many of you need to celebrate one key aspect of things. Too many of you will lock in on the fact that you’re behind on your expected wordcount. Today, being the 12th of November, you would hope to be at or ahead of 16,000 words. Many of you are, and YAY!

For those of you who aren’t, you need to remember to stop and look at the glass as being half-full. How many words do you have done? Especially compared to your normal month? When you get to the end of NaNo, even if you didn’t complete your 40, you still need to remember that you wrote.

I can’t tell you how many writers I know who lock themselves in on all the negative emotions when they can’t write as much or as fast as they originally wanted. That, in turn spins them downward into a destructive cycle from which it takes so much energy to escape. Many writers never do.

You are a writer. You do something that very few other people do. Celebrate that. the glass is not half empty. That glass will ALWAYS be half empty, especially with all the awesome ideas you want to pursue and write one of these days. I can’t tell you of the lists of novels and series I want to spend time committing to paper.

It is also half full.

Half full means you have accomplished things. Revel in them. List down all the wins you’ve had this year, rather than any of the places where you might have fallen short of your original goals.

I know people who do challenges, where they try to do something crazy like write 30 short stories in 30 days. Frequently, they only write something like 20 or 25, and get down on themselves. In missing 30, they don’t honor that they have 20 new short stories that they can publish or submit somewhere. They think they have failed because they missed hitting the impossible goal. They have ONLY written 20 new short stories. (Seriously, people. WTF?)

I know people who thrive on challenging themselves to the impossible, and never let it get them down if they miss. But most writers are most emphatically not in that category, and it gets toxic after they think they are a failure.

You aren’t. You write.

Even if you only wrote two sentences today, you wrote. That’s all it takes. Put words to paper. You will have good days and bad days. Make hay on the good ones and don’t let the bad ones defeat you.

If you miss your NaNo target, the point is to to just keep writing into December so that the novel gets done at some point. You only can fail when you let yourself give up on writing. Nothing short of that counts.

And remember, you are not alone out there. There’s a whole tribe of writers and creatives who can help when you have questions, because that’s what we do.

—————————–

Now, a word from our sponsors. 🙂

NaNoWriMo does an official story bundle each year. I’m in it this year, but every year it is chock full of useful information from a number of people, any of which might help you take the next step or at least understand that self-care is the single most important thing you can do as a writer.

Never let the bastards grind you down.

Now, go commit some novel.

Hey gang, I’m in a new story bundle!!

VALOR, a military science fiction story bundle is out, and includes my never-been-published-before-and-you-can’t-even-by-it-yet novel “Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns.”

This is another Handsome Rob gig, part of the Alexandria Station universe and taking place roughly around the same time as the later Jessica Keller novels.

The first story “Can’t Shoot Straight Gang” was in Boundary Shock Quarterly Issue 003  (Grand Theft Starship). Now the gang’s back for another crazy mission, but this time everything goes wrong and keeps getting worse as the clock is ticking.

In addition, there are a bunch of other good novels and anthologies in here for all the military SF fans. Dean Wesley Smith. Kristine Kathryn Rusch. David Bruns. Loren Coleman. Even an issue of the Fiction River Anthology filled with even more amazing authors and edited by Lee Allred.

Like Handsome Rob, your time is running out on this bundle. Get yours today and give yourself an early Thanksgiving present to read as you recover from the turkey coma.

So my social media boards and walls have been full of folks doing the annual NaNoWriMo plunge. National Novel Writing Month runs November, and the goal is for someone to write a (40,000 word) novel in this month. There’s help, and we’ll come back to it later, but let’s talk NaNo itself.

For new writers, that’s a scary project. TradPub always told you that you could write one novel in a year, and had to labor painfully over each and every word and sentence. Agony. Rewrites. The works.

Hornswaggle.

You sit down and write. Simple as that. Writing is a muscle. If you commit to writing, you’ll develop it. Your plan should be to reach a point where you can write 1,000 good words in an hour without distractions. You won’t get there immediately, but you won’t run a marathon in three hours your first time either. Practice. After that, it becomes math.

1000 words/hour means 40 hours of work, give or take. Let’s call it 50, so you have time to think and plan as you go, assuming you’ve already roughed out your notes and outline in October. 50 divided by 4 equals 12.5. So you need to put in about 12-13 hours PER WEEK over the whole month if you don’t fully average 1000 words/hour.

Let’s assume you’re serious about this project. That’s 2 hours each day hard writing, with some gaps for things. How much television do you watch after work? How about the weekend? The average football game is 3 hours. Skip two of those and write instead on saturday and sunday and that’s 5000-6000 words, rounded off. And that’s just the weekend afternoons. You’ll have other time to do things.

When I had a day job, I got up and went in way early to get an extra 2 hours to write in the mornings, all by myself, in the kitchen at the office. And I wrote in the evenings, but usually only 2-3 nights at most (I wrote 7 days per week and usually 28 days in 30.)

You can do this. Let me repeat that: YOU CAN DO THIS!!

If you are a morning person, get up early this month. Night owls, stay up a little later. Get in 2 hours of work each week day, by not watching tv for a month. Its not like you can’t go back and binge in December. This isn’t the old days where you had to wait for reruns to come on in the spring.

2 hours each day. Maybe before the kids wake up or after they go to bed. Maybe your lunch hour or on the bus on the way home. Add it all up, even in small chunks. Find yourself 10 hours. That’s presumably 10,000 words if you are working at it. Over 4 weeks, that’s 40,000 words, without the weekend. Or one hour each day and six hours on the weekend skipping football.

It adds up. That’s how it works in this game.

You can do this, but you have to want it hard enough to commit to it. That means giving things up. People tell me they want to be writers, so I ask them how much they write. That’s what writers do: Write.

So write. It will amaze you how easily it will flow, once you commit to prioritizing writing over other things.

I have faith that you can do this.

It’s never really NaNo that kills people. It’s what happens afterwards.

Let’s talk about December 1, after you have written your novel. (and if you only got 3/4 of a novel done in November, remember to throw a party. YOU WROTE MOST OF A NOVEL. Now finish it.)

When you have this manuscript, what do you do with it? If you are a chronic rewriter, you probably never got more than one chapter anyway, so let’s assume you actually finished.

Put the damned thing away for the month of December. Period. You aren’t allowed to even admit you have such a thing. If someone asks, you say “Yes, did NaNo this year.” That’s it.

In January, you come back to it and read the document, front to back. Don’t change anything. Fix places where you left words out of a sentence (like I’ve NEVER done that). Run a spell-checker and make sure you caught things.

Then send it to your first reader and put it away.

Don’t touch it again.

When your first reader sends it back, fix the things they marked as awkward, or sentences that don’t make any sense (again, I NEVER do that). Add in the bits where something in your head never quite made it to paper.

Nothing else. No rewrites. No ripping whole chapters out because you could do it so much better if you spent another six months on 1000 words. Fix the obvious problems.

Now, here’s the hard part. Take a very deep breath. Maybe sit down first before you continue.

Ready? Sure?

Okay.

Publish the damned thing. As is. Slap a cover on it. Write a blurb in the active voice. Put it on Draft2Digital and have them distribute it everywhere. Dan and Kevin and the others are good folks, and your novel will go worldwide for folks to read and pay you money.

Put it up on BundleRabbit so other folks can find you and put you into bundles for the marketing opportunities.

But you are now done with this novel. I don’t care if you think it sucks. Almost every young writer I know thinks their work is crap. Part of turning into a professional writer is learning to get over yourself and have confidence that you write good stuff. We can’t all be Stephen King or JK Rowling, so don’t try.

Tell a good story. Tell the best story you know how. Then learn from this one and got write the next one. Do not look back.

DO NOT LOOK BACK.

Some of my early stuff makes me cringe to read. Shit happens. I’m a better writer now than I was one year ago, let alone five. I’m not going back and fixing things, except where someone points out a problem I can fix (like mixing up two characters and five different readers missed it until three years later and the audio person asked. Whoops).

Write a better novel next time. You don’t get better as an author rewriting the same novel six times. You get better by writing six novels.

I’m midway through novel twenty-one. I know people with fifty and more. They try to get better at their craft with each one.

So, how do you get better? Keep writing new things. Publish them and move on. At the same time, the folks at NaNo do a story bundle every year (the official nano bundle, that runs all of October and November). I happen to be in it this year.

This year’s is full of serious firepower from pros who have been where you are today. (And me.) How to write better, cleaner, faster. How you can make the leap from wanting to be a novelist to actually doing it.

It is a muscle. You develop it the same way you do anything else. But it is also a lifestyle. Writers write. If you aren’t writing, you won’t get much done. If you don’t prioritize writing over other things, then those other things are more important to you.

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you that, but that’s what it takes. Writing (all art, for that matter) must come first. Not to the exclusion of other things, but you need to find ten hours each week to write, if you want to write a short novel. I can’t help you with Epic Dark Fantasy trilogies, except to help you with the math and say that 600,000 words is 600 hours of writing, spread over 13-14 months at this pace. If that’s you, you’re a better man than me. I like to keep them short and fast, rather than long, but that’s me. I’ll settle for two novels per month right now.

You are responsible for your own career. That’s the most useful advice anyone has ever given me at a writer.

NaNo is a way to help you focus on pushing through a short marathon to know that you can do this. Then you learn how to repeat it, and these folks can help.

But remember that however it goes, you will succeed by sticking with it on December 1.

Keep writing.

And congratulations.

So, last week, Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ and I did a writing vacation on the north shore of Lake Quinault on the Olympic Peninsula. The cabin we were in (Angeles) had a topographical map on one wall, showing the high end of the long river valley, and an area called the Colonel Bob Wilderness.

Seriously? What kind of name is Colonel Bob Mountain?

Turns out, it was named for famed, 19th Century politician and orator Robert Green Ingersoll, aka Colonel Bob. So I had to look they man up. Really fascinating dude.

From the wiki:

Ingersoll was most noted as an orator, one of the most popular of the age, when oratory was public entertainment. He spoke on every subject, from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, but his most popular subjects were agnosticism and the sanctity and refuge of the family. He committed his speeches to memory although they were sometimes more than three hours long. His audiences were said never to be restless.

Wow. In addition, he was a lawyer who did some interesting representation, as well as raising the 11th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Cavalry for the Civil War. His unit fought at Shiloh.

He’s also famous for apparently bringing back Thomas Paine, after the man had largely been forgotten:

(More wiki) Susan Jacoby credits Ingersoll for the revival of Thomas Paine‘s reputation in American intellectual history, which had decreased after the publication of The Age of Reason published during 1794-95. Paine postulated that men, not God, had written the Bible, and Ingersoll included this work in his lectures on freethinking. As the only freethinker of his time with a wide audience outside of the unbelieving circle, he reintroduced Paine’s ideas to a new generation.

He’s also buried at Arlington.

(More wiki) In 2005, a popular edition of Ingersoll’s work was published by Steerforth Press. Edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page, “What’s God Got to Do With It: Robert Ingersoll on Free Speech, Honest Talk and the Separation of Church and State” brought Ingersoll’s thinking to a new audience.

After reading that whole wiki entry, I had to buy the book. It will be arriving in the next few days, so I’ll be reading it and expanding my mind. Y’all ought to read about the man as well.

He was impressive enough they named a mountain after him. How many other people can you say that about?

That was the view from the window of the cabin where Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I spent the week last week. We were on the north shore of Lake Quinault, over on the Olympic Peninsula. Lockaerie Resort is a half-dozen cabins built in the 1920’s and subsequently updated, but quaint and cute just describe them.

If you look closely, Rain Forest, where folks do the writer’s retreat is on the right edge somewhere, so that should give you some idea of where we were.

That’s the view further left, showing the top end of the Lake itself. We were just at mile marker 4, and the lake is barely longer, but it was gorgeous and serene. You can also keep going up the North Shore Road for a ways, and then cross a bridge to South Shore Road, and the whole round trip to the little town of Amanda Park (right at the point where the Quinault River exits and heads to the coast) is a little more than thirty miles, if I remember right. And you have to take it round, because if you keep going up either road, you eventually end up at trail heads.

I looked, but there are no roads that go over the top and through the center of the Olympic here, or I would have driven that. I don’t mind Aberdeen and Hoquiam, but they’re cities. and I prefer the view of the countryside.

Each morning we wrote, because that’s what we do. In the afternoon, one day we took a drive that ended up passing through the Quinault reservation and emerging on the coast at Moclips. Heading south along the coast (instead of going up to Taholah on the reservation), we enjoyed the drive, but at one point passed into the twilight zone.

There is this “town” on the coast called Seabrook that honest to God looked like something you encountered in a horror movie. I kept expecting to look back in the rear-view mirror and either the town would have vanished, or we’d see a mob of Stepford Wives pursuing us. Seriously, big, boxy houses with a fully planned community being constructed.

We talked to some locals when we got home and they had the same opinion. Stepford land. But those folks are aiming for people from Seattle and Portland (and maybe the East Coast), to buy a vacation home and then rent it out most of the year when they aren’t around.

I’m not trying it, but you’re welcome to try your luck. 🙂

The other neat place was Amanda Park, right at the bottom end of the lake. Two restaurants, one of which is an “internet cafe” where the computer in the main room was running Windows XP. The other was a Mom and Pop place that kind of had everything on the menu, including pizza.  Post Office nearby, as well as fully-automated gas station/pumps. A little convenience store in the middle that had some fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as other things, like videos for rent. Small town corner, in the middle of nowhere.

The High School is right there, as well as a really nice library that is part of the Timberland Regional Library. Small, but the ladies there were lovely people. We ended up going in three days, just to get out of the cabin and to do some heavy lifting on the internet.

Let me put it to you this way: Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I are talking to some other writers about maybe getting the big cabin or several, next May, and doing a writer’s retreat with a large group. The week was that good, and the people we met were that awesome. (If you wanna join us, send one of us an email for details.)

What else new?

NaNoWriMo is going to start next week, and hopefully some of you are going to participate. the annual NaNo story bundle is still available, and has lots of useful books for authors at every stage of their careers, whether you are just starting out, or have just started your twenty-first novel, like me.

The Year of Production continues. This year, I’m not working a day job, so I’m producing a lot of novels, most of which won’t come out until next summer, give or take, when you’ll see the flood gates open. As part of the craziness, two weeks ago I got contacted about putting a novel into a military SF bundle, but I didn’t have anything immediately available. However, I was also at the end of a novel, so I could transition quickly and push a little.

The result was a new Handsome Rob novel (the first, following Can’t Shoot Straight Gang in Boundary Shock Quarterly 003). There has been some weirdness around the actual date of the bundle, as it was supposed to go live in about 4 days, but has been pushed back (not my fault. Yay.) The novel itself will come out in November, replacing a few other things I had originally planned to drop.

Past that, hard at work reading the stories for Boundary Shock Quarterly 005: Boneyard of Lost Dreams, coming out in January. Thanks to everyone for the support thus far, and remember to tell your friends.

cheers,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

So, I haven’t exactly been slack lately, but I have been trying to spread out my news a little, instead of dropping everything on everyone at the same time, like happened to me.

Today, a reminder that Issue 004 of Boundary Shock Quarterly is now available at all major vendors.

This issue is entitled Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My.

The theme I challenged the Syndicate to explore was a fun one: “We can make her better than she was. Or build a better one to replace him. What does it mean to be Sentient? Human? Or even alive?”

What I got was the biggest issue yet, over 94,000 words of fiction and essays ranging across everything, from slapstick to sadness, from almost every one of my authors.

Because our future is electronic, unless we manage to gack ourselves back to the stone ages in the next few decades, we wanted to explore where we were going.

Michael W. Lucas gave me a fantastic story about what cyberware might mean to the future of business. Duncan Ellis went there, but did so in a way that makes you think about what a truly “fully-functional-android” means and how we need to handle it. Joel Ewy, mostly on a dare, wrote me a computer program that he swears will compile, and claims to be the Try/Fail/Else loops necessary for the first sentient machine to bring a human to orgasmic bliss.

There are also two essays in this issue, from Robert Jeschonek and Joel Ewy, looking forward and backwards at the pinnacle of technology we may have reached, and where we need to go.

As I write this, I am nearly done with reading all the stories for Issue 005: Boneyard of Lost Dreams, so I highly recommend that you sign up for the Boundary Shock Newsletter so you never miss an issue. Also, if you have missed one of the first four, go open another tab and order them while you’re thinking about it. I’ll wait.

Back? Signed up so you never miss an issue? Good.

Enjoy the fun. My story, Dancer, is the beginning of a whole new cyberpunk universe, and I have six other short stories already written, just waiting for the time to write the first Kumiko novel. As I have talked to the others, they are doing the same, exploring characters and new worlds and deciding they need to write more in those places as well.

I hope you have enjoyed, are enjoying, and will continue to enjoy all the fun that is Boundary Shock Quarterly.

We now return you to your regular programming.

So it’s been a busy couple of week, between NINC, the NaNoWriMo bundle, and stuff. And OryCon 40 is coming up in a few weeks, as well, and I’ll be down there paneling again this year. Stop by and say hi.

However, I wanted to point out something for everyone, before it got lost in the noise and shuffle. Audible approved the audio version of Queen of the Pirates (Book Two in the Jessica Keller series) and it is now available. As always, Melissa rocks, and I’m given to understand that she’s getting ready to dive into Book Three shortly (Last of the Immortals) but I have no idea how long it takes to actually record a novel. There will be more announcements when we get there.

Am looking forward to digging into all my notes from NINC. One of the takeaways this year was the importance of audio, and now there are new companies in the market place competing with Amazon/Audible to do this, so I might be able to afford to hire some voice talent to do the two new series that are coming down the pipe soon. Awaken The Star Dragon is a Book One that was originally intended to come out next summer, but I was able to put it into a story bundle this year, so y’all got a sneak preview. Already have 2 and 3 done, and there will be five or six of them next year, dropped month over month probably next summer.

Also have two other novels done in a whole other universe, but that one doesn’t have a hard cap for length, as they are more adventure and less space opera. (Each novel does not need to up the scale, risks, and rewards from the previous one, like a good, epic space opera does, for comparison.) In that, it is more like the Perry Rhodan novels, letting me just have a cast of characters who have ongoing adventures, wherever the story takes me and however long it takes to get there.

Because, as many of you might be aware, I like to write in long series, with characters that grow and change as time passes. (Horrors, I know.)

So next year, there will be some serious audio effort given. It is a growing market, but a slower and more complex one to exploit, because you have to rely on a team now, where I can just write damned novels and publish them once they get edited. And no, I don’t really want to do the whole “author reading their own work” audio books, even though I have enough background in theater to have awesome radio voice (something someone at NINC pointed out. And he was a pro). Time spent not writing, and I suspect you’d like more material to read.

So audio. If you like it, make sure you pick up Auberon and Queen of the Pirates. Plus The Science Officer and all the other things out there.

There will be more news soon. Stay tuned.