Category Archives: Alexandria Station

Stories in the universe of Javier Aritza, Doyle Iwakuma, Jessica Keller, Henri Baudin, and, of course, Suvi

Kosnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s gonna be fun.

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

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

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

But it will be fun. Epic. Interesting.

Hope you come along for the ride.

I’m in a Space Opera Bundle!

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The Cosmic Visionaries Story Bundle, curated by Robert Jeschonek:

What is it about space opera that makes us love it so much? The action, the exotic settings, the colorful characters, the alien species? The promise of countless adventures in the face of the great unknown? The excitement of imagining what humanity may someday become and accomplish in the vast reaches of the final frontier?

Or is it mostly just that space opera is so gosh-darn cool? The ships…the technology…the planets…the ray guns and laser swords. In many ways, it’s the ultimate escapist genre, transporting us to places and situations that dwarf our everyday troubles in every possible way. And yet, at its heart, space opera is all about us, about what it means to be human and how we can triumph over our limitations.

So, Planet Bob’s words above.

I am having even more fun this time, because I have TWO stories in this bundle.

First, I was part of the Space: 1975 Anthology with another funky space mystery starring Academic Cornelius Langa, who you first met in Boundary Shock Quarterly Issue 013: Solarpunk.

When Bob approached me about Space: 1975, he was looking for something with a very 70s vibe, so I wrote the story Players for him. Cornelius is a cool cat. Hip and stylish in a EuroWest future that managed to escape the dull weirdo religious nuts of the 21st Century and make it out into space. Hard SF, but he’s a cop investigating and solving crime. This is just one of his stories.

This story was even more fun because Bob asked me to write a quick cameo for one of the Kickstart backers who supported his project at a higher level. So the dude got Tuckerized into Players as ‘that guy’ who we don’t really talk about. Like I said, lots of fun.

But I am having even more fun here with the other title. Folks in my newsletter list and other places know that I have a whole new Space Opera series coming out starting this fall that is a full (and authorized, even) sequel to the Jessica Keller Chronicles. I even kind of promised it at the end of Petron, when Kosnett and First Lord Naoumov sit down in her office and talk about Phil’s future.

Skip forward a few years, and now I am telling the First Centurion Kosnett stories, where our man has been handed a Survey Dreadnought and a mission to explore Aquitaine’s open western frontier, just to see who’s out there.

At present, the series I think runs about six or seven novels, and I have the first four done.

Encounter at Vilahana is the first, and is currently scheduled to come out everywhere on October 10th. However, because Bob’s an awesome dude, I was able to include it in this bundle as an exclusive, two months early for you folks.

Phil Kosnett, Explorer Extraordinaire. And friends.

Ground Control (Command Centurion Heather Lau) is back, as are Stunt Dude, Markus, and even Sam Au. Plus a whole new cast of folks, living over in the Balhee Cluster, way o’er yonder and kinda cut off from the rest of the galaxy.

After Encounter at Vilahana, like I said, I have three more done and in the can, and I plan on writing the rest soon enough. (Needed a break, ya know?)

  • Consensus at Aditi

  • Hegemony at Dalou

  • Princes at Ewin

Plus several all the other stuff I write.

You can get an early start on First Centurion Kosnett, plus get nine more exciting adventures including Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Craig Martelle, Robert Jeschonek, and others.

But time is burning. These things are only up for a few weeks, and then gone forever, so you should jump on it right now, because you’re going to be too busy next week getting ready for back to school and Labor Day.

You’ll be kicking yourself if you miss this deal. And have to wait until October, just to see what you missed with First Centurion Philip S. Kosnett, Republic of Aquitaine Navy.

Get it today!

Does an Interstellar Species go extinct?

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Those of you who have been reading the Star Tribes series have seen Daniel’s ruminations on the topic. Assuming a reliable, fast FTL technology that allows regular travel and commerce between different stars, would a species that start colonizing ever die out? Hard question to answer. On Earth, rats have been introduced everywhere that humans have landed, with the result of them overwhelming the local ecosystem in many places. Rabbits, cats, and dogs fall into the same category, to the extent that it generally requires a massive effort to remove them later, doubly so if you don’t want to destroy the rest of the ecosystem that was already in place.

So let’s look at the stars themselves. Multi-star travel presumes that we have a pretty big system going in. Even if we never encounter intelligent, tool-using, alien life (one of the Alexandria Station universe’s assumptions), we will still expand.

In the Concordency Wars (10,389 – 10,397 CE), large fleets of robotic warships went and pummels inhabited worlds from space, while also destroying every starship they could locate. They didn’t get everyone, but did sufficient economic damage that everyone basically collapsed to Iron Age or earlier in a single generation. From there, most worlds fell into darkness as disease and poverty combined to overwhelm thing.

Think about it. How much of what you consume (food, media, medicine, etc.) could you produce yourself, if the factories were blown up suddenly tomorrow? Sure, you’d have some level of ability to loot the corpse of society for spare parts, at least for a time, but eventually, you have to make it yourself.

How many of you can make aspirin? Penicillin? Etc.? Not many. Sowe can presume that pretty quickly people would starve. Most people. The remainder would move to a life of hunting, fishing, and farming, but even that fails. I have a pair of bows and enough arrows to last for a while, plus PAPER books on how to make more. Bullets would run out in years. Maybe decades, but people gotta eat. Big machines to plow and harvest need fuel and parts. And those are turning into robots. What happens when GPS dies?

So you see, this one world could fall apart and suffer a huge population crash pretty quickly. Places closer to primitive lifestyles would actually do better at maintaining themselves over the long haul.

Let’s look at galactic society now. I would presume a lot of colonies from a motherworld, without factories to produce advanced things, requiring them to import things expensively from across space. Anyone who has read history understands how that comes about.

We’ve seen the rise and fall of both Bronze Age and Iron Age Hellenic Greece (Homer and Socrates, if you will). The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic, Empire, and Byzantine Empire. The Rise and Fall of the Arab nations to dominance. France. The United Kingdom.

Right now, we are living through the Fall of the United States from Empire. It will be just as ugly as the fall of Rome was, unless we merely fragment into something like the Three Kingdoms or the Spring and Autumn Period.

Still, history is happening.

So, let’s go to space, and envision the collapse of our stellar empire. At best, I always presume that a multi-stellar system will at minimum be a republic, probably an oligarchy, likely an empire as Romans or Chinese did those things. Static, for the most part, with regional governors granted exceptional powers to control things, as long as they pay their taxes inward and get replaced regularly.

So a civil war hits. Or maybe a pandemic. (You think you’ll control a disease if enough people can move around? Good luck.) In a civil war, you pick sides and fight. There might be a behind the lines, if your technology is based on star gates of some sort. Otherwise, anyone might could sail anywhere, so it becomes a matter of logistics.

You cannot conquer a planet. You can control the government of it and control orbital space, but even a million soldiers could not keep three billion people under control if they got rowdy. So you isolate a place. Maybe killer satellites in orbit. Something. Same goes for plague. Keep everyone isolated.

But can a species with star drives actually die out? Or is that measured over hundreds of thousands of years? Maybe they speciate? Homo Sapiens turns into Homo Stellaris? But you haven’t died out, you’ve just changed.

The Ovanii are not dead, but they were a single tribe of roughly 20 million people, all mobile in a single vast fleet of ships moving in caravan. They were broken by the Anndaing and interred on a single rock, when they refused to assimilate into Anndaing culture. So they fell from the stars and became barbarians. From there, they might eventually die out, although they had not by the time Daniel causes Rence and crew to look.

In the Brannon stories I am currently sending out to my Patreon folk, she has encountered a technological goddess who has lived inside this mountain for 30,000 years, and seen the planet become abandoned TWICE. (The first story is entitled “Previously Inhabited” to give you a clue.)

We talk about the first surge of exploration in our science fiction. Going out there and seeing what there is. Boldly going, as it were. But I have always been fascinated by the second rise. Or the fifth.

What happens when you go places and find humans who are just your long-lost cousins, going back to a time when these two worlds were part of a star empire of some sort? Or better, when you encounter some elder species who knew humans in the old days and welcomes you back?

How big is your science fiction? Does it have space for things to be lost in ancient times and found again?

Where will you go?

2020: The Plan

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So, in 2019, the final count was 20 novels and 21.5 short/medium/novella stories (finished Eva #5 on Jan 1, 2020 as the 22nd). 1,394,982 words because I damned well didn’t want to push that hard the last three days, thank you very much. Call is a shade under 1.4 million words.

Good enough. My goal had been 1.2+ or 100,00 words per month. (My goal is always 100,000. Sometimes easy, sometimes a hard stretch, but I’ve done it since May 2018 at this point and that’s kinda awesome.)

The only real target had been 20 novels in 2019. Managed that. Wrote a novella at the end of the year because that was NOT going to turn into a novel. Kept it at 19,000 but it is very obviously a book one in a new series of historic espionage/thriller. (set in 1977 with no more science fiction than Q provides to Bond, per se, and not even that much, except that I know where technology goes, so I can pull things forward a little.)

So now we’re looking at 2020. Second full year of writing for me as a full-time vocation. Making enough money that I generally don’t worry, except that this year I plan to dial back some expenses because of the crazy-ass election season coming up and all the other shit. Previous presidential seasons have seen entertainment sales Aug 1 – Dec 1 tank hard. This might run much wider and longer, depending.

I’d rather be proven wrong as a cynic than an optimist. I’m probably unemployable at this point.

So going forward. 100,000 words per month. That doesn’t change.

However, I’m only “planning” 14 novels. And 40 short stories.

(—WARNING MATH AHEAD—)

I have a patreon account and promise them a new short story every month long before it ever comes out to the general public. So that’s 12 new stories.

I am publishing Boundary Shock Quarterly 4 times per year and have a story in it.

I expect to do two new volumes of Blaze Ward Presents (#1 and #2 here) annually, plus strange ideas that need me.

Starting soon, I’m going to be offering new short fiction on my website every month, with exclusives that do not go up for sale anywhere else. Like, ever. Only get them here so folks get used to coming to my site for a new fiction fix for cheap. ($1 sort of thing.)

So as you can see, I’m already at 30 stories, and I haven’t even broken a sweat yet. Throw in the odd projects where someone asks if I can write them a short story to theme, weird shit that wakes me from a dead sleep, and whatever other silliness comes around, and I don’t see it being that hard to hit 40. It comes up to three and a quarter stories per month, basically.

I also have 3 business/technical books on the calendar this year. Those don’t count as short fiction, but generally come in around 12-15,000 words.

I’ll be busy. It will be a good busy. Writing books, writing novel series, writing short series serializations.

Not going to push as hard on the novel count also means that I can aim for some longer stories that unfold slowly. I enjoy writing crazy-fast stories that suck you in and hold you underwater, but occasionally I want to just sit back and let the world slowly enfold the reader. Or write a single volume that’s 175,000 words long if I can do it and not get bored.

Health has been good. Sales have been good. Life has been good. I’m still not rich enough to buy an island or build a castle, but those would be the long term goals if I was suddenly wealthy beyond a safe level.

Today, I blasted out my usual morning word count and then realized that I was all set to finish the current novel off (#1 for the year and #10 in the Science Officer series). Finished the morning session typing “Epilog” as a header, so that’s lovely and I’ll finish it Wednesday.

And looking forward to the next project. Need to write several short stories over the next week or two, and then I can go on and commit a next novel. Likely to flip a coin between Lazarus #3 and Taft Station #2 at this point, but that’s fine. Been reading the finals of the Star Tribes books. #1 & #2 are “done.” #3 is at the First Reader. Working my way through a final edit pass on #4 now, then on to #5. April-August release dates.

In case you missed it, the Handsome Rob books are up now for pre-order. Can’t Shoot Straight Gang is actually #1 and originally came out in Boundary Shock Quarterly #3 (Grand Theft Starship). Then Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns, which you might have read. Hunting Handsome Rob is #3. Handsome Rob, Assassin will be #4, sometime in the fall, most likely after Star Tribes is done (SWAG: September)

This blog will see less updating than it used to going forward, mostly because I plan to update the patreon news every Monday. Plus I have newsletters with more information than comes here. If you aren’t subscribed, this is your reminder. 🙂

Gonna be a busy year. Hope y’all are along for the ride.

Countdown to Phoenix

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So we’re coming up on the Christmas holiday in the West. Happy whatever holidays you celebrate where you are.

By now a few of you have read Petron. Thank you for the lovely reviews and commentary. As I have said, it is really the end of Jessica’s story (for now), but there are places I could go from here. That much ought to be obvious from the way I epilogued everyone.

Personally, I’m the most interested in what Uly and the Bartender do, but I do know a few of you are wanting more Phil Kosnett, for obvious reasons. That’s also on the calendar, but I have a limited number of novel slots available in 2020, so we’ll have to see where we go. Maybe I’ll write shorter stuff for some of your favorite characters.

The great problem in life is having enough time to write all the stories, not in trying to come up with ideas. Any pro writer will tell you the question is “How do I make them stop?”

But we are just in an interlude with Jessica. I’m still in the middle of Valentinian at this moment. Thank you also for the lovely comments on the series so far.

This is space adventure, rather than opera. The difference is scale. In an adventure, you don’t have to keep upping the stakes novel over novel.

Jessica is opera. Always bigger. Valentinian and Dave are adventure. Leading somewhere obviously, but not with humanity and the galaxy at risk. Just an angry wife, betrayed and displaced, and hungry for vengeance.

My apologies in advance, because Phoenix cliff-hangars pretty hard. But in a good way. Like the four before it, this novel comes in around 45k words. I can work longer (Petron came in around 140k) but this is a nice length to tell a single story hard and fast, without having to have all manner of boring and irrelevant side quests along the way.

To make it up to everyone, Princess Rualoh is about 60k. I had too much to cover in order to wrap everything up, but I am quite pleased with the result and hopefully you will be as well.

Make sure you get your pre-orders in now so that the books hit your readers as soon as it gets live.

Additionally, the audio for everyone did not drop originally, but I just looked and Dominion-427 and Phoenix audio are available, and Princess Rualoh will be in a few days when they finish processing everything.

Thanks for staying with me, and lemme know if you have any questions. I’m not done with Valentinian, as you’ll see, but we leave things in a place none of you are going to see coming. Need to go back one of these days and write more.

Cheers,

b

Countdown to Petron

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Just about a week to go, and I’m hoping the rest of you are as excited as I am.

Late in the day on the Dec 9 (Seattle time), the fourteenth (and currently last) of the Jessica Keller books will be out.

PETRON

I really enjoyed that book, even as long as the story ended up being, for me to wrap everything up. Mind you, (spoiler alert) we killed Buran in book eight. How do you top killing a god? (end spoiler)

By starting a galactic civil war that includes the former Holding, Aquitaine, the Fribourg Empire, Corynthe, Lincolnshire, and Salonnia. That’s what’s coming. Hopefully you are all prepared and don’t have to go to work the next morning, because things will start crazy and keep going, all the way to the very end.

And it is an ending. I know I promised the Ambassador more Phil Kosnett stories, and I have a trilogy in mind, but you’ll see how they come about when you get to the very end and see how his story wraps up.

Remember, these are the Jessica Keller Chronicles. The tagline on book one was the promise I made to the audience (you). “She could win the war, if they would let her.”

It just took a while and threatened to destroy everyone and everything to get there. And you will see heroes fall. Some of them won’t surprise you, if you’ve been paying attention.

Other heroes will rise. Again, it’s all telegraphed in there across the whole of the previous thirteen books. If you were paying attention.

The trick with writing a series, any series, is to keep it interesting all the way through. If the author starts to get bored, the writing gets boring, and the readers put the book down. It’s even worse in epic space opera, where every novel must be bigger than the one before it.

The excitement must build and keep building. The stakes must keep going up. The threats. The risks.

EVERYTHING…

Which is why you should end a series, and plan that ending ahead of time. I didn’t want to have the CS-405 books be part of one of the other novels, partly because 7-9 would have been HUGE, but partly because I wanted to tell Phil Kosnett’s story there, instead of Jessica’s.

The Jessica Keller Chronicles 

I do promise another Phil Kosnett trilogy at some point. First Centurion Kosnett. Possibly Ambassador Kosnett, just to tweak the real Ambassador Kosnett, since he’s such a cool guy in real life.

But we’ve reached the pinnacle. You have a week to pre-order, or binge yourself to get caught up, because Petron goes live on Dec 10 and you won’t want to miss it.

The Jessica Keller Chronicles

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Update 2026: If you are searching for the complete reading order for the Jessica Keller Chronicles (part of the larger Alexandria Station Universe), I’ll try to keep this updated as we go and the universe continues to expand.

The Jessica Keller Chronicles

  • Auberon
  • Queen of the Pirates
  • Last of the Immortals
  • Siren (Vo Arlo)
  • Goddess of War
  • Flight of the Blackbird
  • The Red Admiral
  • St. Legier
  • Two Bottles of Wine With a War God (Yan)
  • Queen Anne’s Revenge (CS-405)
  • Packmule (CS-405)
  • Persephone (CS-405)
  • Winterhome
  • Petron

Followed by First Centurion Kosnett

  • Encounter at Vilahana
  • Consensus at Aditi
  • Hegemony at Dalou
  • Princes at Ewin
  • Empire at Gloran
  • Domain at Yaumgan

Then Heather Lau/Warlord of Yaugman

  • Warlord of Yaugman
  • Ground Control
  • Tyche
  • Chevalier
  • Griever

Coming Soon

  • RAN Stormhawk (Daughter of the Shogun)
  • RAN Asouri (Daughter of the Shogun)
  • RAN Pangolin (Daughter of the Shogun)

============

ORIGINAL POST (updated above only)

For those of you keeping score at home: I just got back copy edits for Jessica #7 (title changing from what I originally suggested, so new cover reveal coming at some point for a December release date.)

More importantly, about five minutes ago, I finished the draft of  Jessica #8 (yeah, I have a suggested title, but you’ll find out about it later. Probably when I do the cover reveal for it). That’s targeted for a May 2019 release date, because the Alexandria Station Universe schedule looks like this:

  • Dec 2018: Jessica 7
  • Jan 2019: Two Bottles of Wine With The War God ( Yan Bedrov)
  • Feb 2019: Queen Anne’s Revenge (CS-405, book 1)
  • Mar 2019: Packmule (CS-405, book 2)
  • Apr 2019: Persephone (CS-405, book 3)
  • May 2019: Jessica 8

There remains for me to write Jessica 9, so I can round off the series and finally be done, but I  need a break. This novel came in at 130,000 words, before I go back and reread it , or send it off to First Readers and the Copyeditor Babe ™. Between 7 & 8 I wrote five novels, but that was over an eleven week stretch, because they all came in around 45,000 words and I was on a roll.

After this, more of an intellectual break, filling in some spots, after my brain recovers some. I find it hard, not talking about the things I did in book 8, because most of you don’t even know what happens in 7, having only read The Red Admiral so far. So I’m nearly four years forward in time from the First Trusski, and the galaxy has changed.

That’s actually the theme of book 8: The galaxy has changed.

All the pressures from the previous three books have built up and forced things into new forms, and new outcomes. Seven will be an emotional rollercoaster that most of you will not be prepared for. The CS-405 trilogy sets up the ending of Eight, so you’ll need to read those as they come out, or you’ll get lost in Eight. Can’t help that. Without that trilogy, Eight would have come in at almost 250,000 words all by itself. (Think Stephen King doorstop for scale.)

So now, decompression. I have four more Star Dragon novels at some point. Javier laughs at me every time I want to set down and start season two, but he’s like that, and something will click when he’s ready. Have some ideas, but need a long drive to set them up in my head.

I have also been writing some cyberpunk lately. In Boundary Shock Quarterly, issue 004 is entitled “Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Oh My!” and my story there spins up a new universe and new characters. I already have a sequel story in the can, and then writer-brain said: “Oh, here’s a novel, but she’ll need a whole team. Let’s write origin stories for everyone that you can publish as a collection when the novel comes out.”

No, I haven’t the slightest clue, either. But I have several done, and two more to write, and then maybe I’ll tackle Kumiko’s first novel as part of this break. Or not.

As a reminder: I won’t be individually publishing the stories that I put into Boundary Shock Quarterly until much later, so you might need to read those in the magazine to keep up with other things.

  • BSQ 001: Last Leaf Falling (Lansdowne, Concordancy War, individual for now)
  • BSQ 002: Hack (Karl and Deke #1, with #2 “Unintended Consequences” coming out in Sept.)
  • BSQ 003: Can’t Shoot Straight Gang (Handsome Robb. Alexandria Station, first in a new series)
  • BSQ 004: Dancer (first Kumiko, see above)
  • BSQ 005: Forgotten Paper Dreams (SECOND Angus story, with #1 “Daddy’s Girl” coming out Sept)
  • BSQ 006: Patrol Cutter: Bellerophon! (Gareth Dankworth/Star Dragon prequel. Planning more prequel stories for 007 and 008, if all goes well)

So it is absolutely worth your time to get the BSQ magazines and keep up with them. Other folks are doing similar things with their universes, so you’ll get your money’s worth.

But Jessica #8 is done. And I like it. It went good places, and sets up #9 the way I want to bring the entire series to closure. I have other ideas for what happens in the Alexandria Station universe once Jessica’s story is complete.

Vibol solving crime on Petron was a suggestion that has me giggling and considering. Handsome Robb begs for more caper stories. Lansdowne is the first of three, so I need to write those soon, now that I have done Two Bottles of Wine With The War God. John-Pierre and Suvi. The rest of the Henri Baudin stories that follow up Story Road and complete the Founding Trilogy. More Javier. Maybe even a set of stories following ‘Mina Teague. Olivier at the beginning of the stellar age. Dunno. Lots.

People have asked for some sword and sorcery fantasy, but my heart’s not in it right now, beyond the occasional dabbling. Got some more coming, but mostly for other people’s anthologies. Got some weird SF coming (“Terranaut” is only the tip of that bizarre iceberg, bubbles.)

Same goes for the superhero stuff. I like writing it, but NOBODY buys it. They only want their comic book heroes (Marvel and DC) rather than the concepts of superheroes. I suppose if I wrote it as some sort of urban fantasy, people would eat it up, but that’s not my wheelhouse, and I make way more money from the SF than anything else. (Tell all your friends to buy the Modern Gods books if you want me to write more. I track sales, so I know nobody’s buying them right now.)

Okay, enough rambling. Time to put this to bed and get organized.

Will be off the radar for a few days doing stuff. The Story Bundle that has both Awaken the Star Dragon and Boundary Shock Quarterly 001 is still running for about a week, and is a kick-ass price for a lot of good SF to read.

Please share the link with all your friends and tell them to buy it too. Thanks.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

The Red Admiral is live!

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Thank you to all the people who pre-ordered your copies of The Red Admiral. It went live on all the sites over the last few hours and you should have it in your inbox by now.

I’ve been kinda bubbling over with spoilers I didn’t want to torture folks with, at least until you could read the story yourselves. After all, only four of you had gotten to see it before today. And they weren’t going to talk.

The Red Admiral is a long novel, by my standards. 135,000 words, when Auberon came in at 75,000. Previously, Goddess of War was the longest in the series, at 115,000 words. But I had a lot of ground I wanted to cover. I love you folks, but I really only want nine Jessica novels to wrap up her story. That meant I needed to get her home, wade through a swamp of dangerous and shifting politics,and then send our Jessica out to start a whole new war.

And she will. Jessica Keller is acknowledged to be the best commander Aquitaine has produced in centuries, possibly since Henri Baudin (more later, I have the notes, but haven’t written those stories yet.) She is facing Buran, and trying to stop a Sentient System from conquering the whole galaxy.

And she’s going to do it wearing the uniform of an officer of the Imperial Fribourg Fleet: the new Red Admiral.

Everyone’s back for more adventures, but things will change. People grow up, in the cauldron of war, even if they don’t want to.

And yes, somebody you know dies in this one. I won’t spoil it. Surprising death, to hear my readers. But not so surprising, when you consider how. You’ll see.

One of the things about a long novel series that I have been told is that the action and the stakes must keep getting bigger with ever novel, otherwise readers will begin to wonder if you are just treading water. Its rather like an addict needing a bigger dose each time, but we’ll keep that just between us, m’kay?

Things here are bigger. More epic. More dangerous. New characters to add to the flavor of the Jambalaya. And my favorite line of the whole novel: “Where else could feeding ducks be possibly misconstrued as treason?”

I had a lot of fun with this novel. The money’s nice, and the freedom, but I write because I have so much fun telling stories. Jessica is an absolute joy to write.

And, for those of you keeping score at home, I have already sent Book Seven (Lord of Winter) off to first readers, and amwriting as fast as I can.

Seven ends with a cliff-hanger. Technically, several, but this one needed me to spin off sideways and write a quick side novel to cover something that I didn’t want to otherwise consume half of a Jessica novel, because then I’d be up to eleven or twelve, rather than the nine. (And also a novella that just needed to be written, for Yan Bedrov.)

Writer-brain, of course, had other plans. Earlier this week, I finished what is obviously going to be the first of a trilogy that takes place after Seven and before the end of Eight. And I need to write the other two before I attack Lord of Winter, because of some of the implications. You’ll be able to read them out of writing order, just like you don’t need Siren to understand Jessica, but it helps you to grasp Vo.

So set your calendars now. Lord of Winter will come out in December, and then I’ll probably end up dropping one novella and three novels month over month in early 2019, just to give you something to read while waiting for Eight, which I will start writing this summer and plan to put out next summer.

But for now, enjoy The Red Admiral and leave me some nice reviews, okay?

Jessica Keller Starter Library

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To help build a little momentum for the coming release of the sixth Jessica Keller novel, The Red Admiral, I am putting up a new Jessica Keller Chronicles Starter Set, featuring the first three books (Auberon, Queen of the Pirates, and Last of the Immortals). This will be a limited-time, special offer to help people maybe just discovering me to grab the first three books so they can catch up to the rest of you.

I highly recommend you tell all your friends, sharing this far and wide, as they can get three full novels for the price of one. And only for a short time. I’ll pull this right back down, sometime in May after The Red Admiral comes out (do you have your pre-order lined up yet?).

The blurb:

Jessica Keller replaces Emmerich Wachturm as The Red Admiral. Her first task: returning home and not only convincing Aquitaine to build her a new fleet, but then to allow her to use it to help the Fribourg Empire.

Their common enemy? An A.I. in control of an entire star empire.

Politics of Republic and Empire must be overcome. Secret missions get plotted. Careers are made.

And lives are lost. 

This is the sixth novel in the series.

GRAND ADVENTURE!!!

And I have been having a ball, and have completed book seven (Lord of Winter). It just went off to first-readers yesterday, and I’m planning to release it in December. There will be some other stories in there as well that I need to write now and release after Lord of Winter comes out. Think of Siren and how it kinda fits into the overall arc. Part of the story, but not part of Jessica’s story, and I didn’t want to add another 50-60,000 words into book Eight to cover this ground.

I’m already hoping that I can finish the damned series off at Nine novels. Eight will be easy. Nine might be so long I end up having to break it into two parts. Dunno. Will burn that bridge when I get there.

But for now, your reminder that The Red Admiral is available for pre-order, and the Jessica Keller Chronicles Starter Set is available as well.

TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!!!!!

Omnibus #2

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Very shortly, the second Science Officer Omnibus is going to drop everywhere. I’m kinda thrilled because the whole thing is one extended story, broken into the requisite 25,000 word chunks.

And it turned out exactly like I hoped, when I sat down and started working on The Pleasure Dome (#4) to set everything up more than a year ago. I knew then I wanted a long, pirate-war kind of story. And a good cliff-hanger.

I write these to a specific length for a reason.

Once upon a time, I wrote stage plays for fun.  Using the normal formatting, one page of script generally runs one minute of stage-time. (Adjust for talking heads pieces, arias, and car chases accordingly.) As I was working in those days, I realized that a 40-50 page script was roughly equivalent to a one-hour television drama, with commercial breaks and credits.

When I started writing Javier, I decided very consciously to aim for roughly the same amount of story. In my head, these are all episodes on TV. Perhaps Series One over on BBC, since I also decided early on to do them in 8-episode runs. And Season One of The Science Officer is now complete, and available.

Happier still, Matt’s up through The Last Flagship on audio books, and already has The Hammerfield Gambit recorded and is working now on The Hammerfield Payoff, both to be available as fast as Audible will approve them.

A few readers have concluded that I’m done with Javier Aritza as a series character. That 8 is as far as it goes. They’ve even commented on that in the reviews they have left, which I have tried to reach out and let them know otherwise.

If all goes well, there will be a new Beyond The Mirror, (Volume 6: Alternate Worlds) coming out shortly. It will have several previously-published SF/Adventure pieces in it: Holly, Hive, Dale, and Eva. Additionally, it will have a teaser from the next Science Officer book: The Bryce Connection. And yes, I broke my own rules with this one.

Last spring, in the midst of everything else, I got an assignment from a writing group for “Your Strengths” which involved writing an opening with only a vague guidance. “Betty, sitting alone on a train, or bus, or something. 500 words (stop in the middle of a sentence if you have to). Go.”

Wrote the assignment, got feedback on how I could have done it better, and got to thinking. Betty turned into Bethany on a re-draft, and I put her on a tram, coming out of a starport, on the way to visit a pirate about a job. The result was The Unbloomed Rose, and is about 6,000 words long. Liked it so much I stored it for the future (it takes place after The Hammerfield Payoff, but I actually wrote it just after I wrote The Doomsday Vault).

So, to meet my usual length, I needed to write three more stories and collect them up. That sounded like a challenge. So I have two more characters I will write about, setting them up to join the crew of Hammerfield, and then one little Javier story to explore some of his history. And then the ninth Science Officer book (TBD)

After that, not at the same crazy pace as 2017, I will start in on writing issues #10-#17, which will be Season Two of The Science Officer. I don’t know if I’ll be done with Javier at that point. I have so many stories to tell. And Suvi. And ‘Mina. And the rest of them.

But in 2018, I’m growing the Expanded Universe that is the Alexandria Station stories. More Javier, yes, but also a set of short stories that explore The Concordancy War (CE 10,397) and a set of crime capers set in Lincolnshire just after the time period for Goddess of War and Flight of the Blackbird. I have another set of Suvi stories set starting in CE 15,006, or about 1500 years after Jessica Keller dies.

Speaking of Jessica: I am just about to send the sixth novel (The Red Admiral) off to the copy-editor. Expected publication date is still May 10, Good Lord Willing and the creek don’t rise. And I started this year off by diving in to book seven (Lord of Winter), which I’m hoping might come out in time for Christmas. Being as there are only nine of them (I hope), they might even been done with me in 2019 and I can start writing some of the other epic series in my notes.

So these are exciting times. Omnibus editions. Audio books. More novels. More fun.

I hope you have enjoyed all this even half as much as I have. More news in 2018 and hopefully, more awesomeness.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA