So in a Chop-socky movie, you get down to the end and the final confrontation, where the villain shows off his bad-ass martial arts moves. Then the hero looks at him, and smiles politely.

“Your fu is good,” the hero says. “But still, mine is better.”

And then proceeds to kick the bad guy’s butt.

My fu is better. I know this because as I was driving out to the farm the other day, I was stopped at a light behind a pickup truck with a big sticker on the tailgate advertising the Ravensdale Cupcakery.

Let that sink in for a second. I bet you had no idea there was such a thing as a cupcakery. You’ve lived your whole live eating corporate cupcakes produced in a bakery that made other things, with cupcakes being just a side gig they really didn’t care all that much about. These people do one thing. Cupcakes. And they do it close enough to me that I could just run by on my way home some night and get cupcakes.

Your fu is good. Mine is better. I know a cupcakery.

But, I’m also close, so I could possibly be convinced to swing by and pick them up for you, if I was headed in your direction from the farm, and you felt like bribing me with cupcakes.

Because, you know, cupcakes.

And if you make it out to see them, you’re only a few miles from the farm, so you should definitely reach out. You can always show up on my doorstep bearing bribes for your favorite redneck writer.

Because, you know, cupcakes.

Sorry,

kinda excited. Auberon (Jessica Keller Book One) is now available as an audiobook, and Melissa (the narrator) hasn’t once tried to kill me. She’s even well into doing Book Two, Queen of the Pirates. For you, gentle listener, you can now enjoy the excitement and relish a good space opera series, as I keep bribing her to do more of them. Book Six is in the can and will be published this spring. I’m banging furiously away on Book Seven.

Book One:

Jessica Keller has a reputation as a maverick commander. It almost got her court martialed. Now, it has gotten her a new command in an obscure sector, with orders to ignite a new front in the eternal war.

But her old nemesis, Imperial Admiral Emmerich Wachturm, stands in her way.

Worlds will fall before their feud ends, but only if she can forge her crew of strangers into a weapon. Otherwise, disaster looms.

So exciting to have it available in audio!!

And if you are just now discovering me, there is also The Science Officer (Season One), volumes one through eight, that Matt has done. And there will be a Season Two (both written and audio) soon. (For a teaser, pick up your own copy of Beyond The Mirror, Volume Six: Alternate Worlds for the first short story from what will be the ninth Science Officer book, The Bryce Connection.)

Get yours today, and let all your audio-book friends know that there are two series for them to get addicted to!!

Cheers,

b

Most of you know that I try to publish something on the 10th of every month. Something good is coming on Feb 10th, as well. Most of it, you’ve already seen, but I got a little sidetracked last year, in the process of writing all those Science Officer stories to finish out Season One. (And I’m happy that so many of you enjoyed how that part of the story ended.)

So now, the next phase begins. Now available for preorder: Beyond The Mirror, Volume 6; Alternate Worlds contains a short story titled The Unbloomed Rose. It takes place after the events of The Hammerfield Payoff.

Javier is recruiting some specialized experts to help with the new adventures he had planned. Yes, Javier. Willingly adding more people to the crew. More people to talk to. More voices in the wardroom.

But that’s okay. He’s starting to finally grow up. It happens to all of us, eventually. (One hopes.)

In my notes, there will be four, distinct short stories that will be bundled up as Volume 9: The Bryce Connection. However, I have been working on Jessica lately, and needed a break from Javier anyway, so I haven’t written the other three. Will hopefully get around to that this year, depending on how some other projects break out for me.

And the Muse of Crazy.

Because I have enough notes to fill Season Two. And if people like that, and I am still having fun with those characters, maybe Season Three.

I have also considered some of ‘Mina’s adventures, possibly ending up in a bar on a certain day with a red poppy in her hair. Y’all will need to let me know if I should pursue the stories of the Last Shepherd of the Word.

But, back on topic. The Unbloomed Rose. Special thanks to Dorn for letting me Tuckerize him into the world as a recurring character (technically, he is The Bryce Connection in this context.) The rest of the collection are things you’ve seen: Eva, Hive, Dale, Holly. A couple of others you might have seen, if you didn’t blink at the collection they were in (not published by me).

Hope you enjoy. Hope you come back for more. Happy to answer questions on most topics, including writing.

🙂

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

My business cards do not say writer. I’m not. They say storyteller. I am.

I have been a storyteller since I had words. Some of the stories were what you would expect. But I never stopped at just that. There are six volumes of poetry sitting in a box. I have pulled out a small portion of #2 and #3, combined them, and published The Forestal. But that’s a small chunk. The Mirror is another chunk, as is The Desert Ring. Have many more. Most of the poetry doesn’t fall into long-forms like that, but could easily just be put out as is.

Might do that, one of these days. Might not.

But I storytell in other media. When I reached the point that I had to stop writing poetry, I needed a different emotional outlet. JM and Snake got me into playing Warhammer 40k (mid-90’s, second edition, I think. They just came out with 8ed this year. And nerfed everybody. Again.) So I painted miniature figurines for a while. Also fought them on the tabletop, but mostly just spent time creating characters. Sold everything when 3ed nerfed everybody and later got into Flames of War, and did the same thing. I’m like that.

Late in the 90’s I created a fantasy role-playing game with a buddy. It was fun. We played it a bunch. Had to put it away around 2004, because my partner wasn’t willing to put in any more work on it. Which is kinda funny, because at that point, we were only a few years from the indie publishing revolution and wouldn’t have had to go big to do it. Have a core rule book and three full supplements in the archives. But they’ll stay there.

Haven’t talked to him in several years. Giving him the thing he wants more than anything else in the world: The Last Word. Best friend for many years, and didn’t even invite him to my wedding. But we all grow up.

Thinking about all this because of Moirrey. Working now on the seventh Jessica Keller book: Lord of Winter, and The Goof figures prominently in the first overture. She had an idea for overturning ground combat, and wants to get rich. Writer-brain locked in and pointed at several somethings from the WH40k universe that I could bash into the right thing. And been thinking about bashing from a recent story.

Went so far as to stop by a GW Store in Lynnwood, but they didn’t have the figs I needed. The next day, I went by the one in Kent, but they were CLOSED ON A SUNDAY? (Shit, man, that used to be tournament day. What gives?) And the website is sold out of the figs I needed to do this.

So, obviously, I was not meant to buy those figurines and bash that image into plastic. These things happen, especially when you pay attention to your Parking Buddha. Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ and I got to talking about how there are a number of fantasy table-top games, and a few WW2 or civil war, but only one major SF game (not counting space games played on a table top, like my buddy Ken at Ad Astra Games.)

Got to thinking.

Couple hours later,  and I were at the grocery, walking across the parking lot. Writer-brain whispered a word. Just one, but you know how that goes.

You ever make rock candy as a kid? Heat up the water. Add a stupid amount of sugar and dissolve it. Turn the heat off and dangle a string into the water as a crystallization source?

Boom.

Yeah. By Monday morning, I had six pages of notes on a new table-top, platoon-level, SF miniatures game. By Monday night, I had hints of an rpg that would scale up and down. (You could put your characters into a battle without conversion, or convert some cool table figs into characters to play off battle.)

Previously, me and the boyz had been talking about how hard it was to do science fiction role playing. You have to have a context. Without it, you end up number-crunching too much, or the GM has to invent whole universes on the fly and gets burned out quickly

And within context, what’s the easiest way to do things? Star Trek as a game requires the GM to invent whole new planets and cultures on a constant basis. I can, but it gets tiring. I can cheat and use random planet generators, but you lose something in the storytelling. Star Wars lets you slot into a number of timelines, and introduces all sorts of tech. There aren’t many other games that have made a major impact on gaming, that I know of. (Granted, I don’t pay that much attention, but…)

I had even gone so far as to create about half of a new rpg game engine last fall, as we were talking. Mostly lists of how characters would be built, and how to scale across genre from historic, to low fantasy, to high fantasy, to modern, to future, to SF. Didn’t write any rules, but had started assigning point scales and things to shape out the engine.

So now, nine days in, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to start building characters in another week. And I’ll have this particular context, which is vaguely post-apocalyptic, concrete enough to start writing fiction and histories set in that universe. And ideas of how to shift both directions on tech and contexts.

Next, I’ll talk to some friends who are Makers (3d Printing, et al) and see how I would go about hiring an sculptor to create me some figurines we could use to test the table-top rules. I only have one core, three expansions, and two future editions already plotted out in my notes. Nothing much. Certainly not for a whole week’s work. 😉

And mind you, at the same time, I’m 20k words into Lord of Winter. And maybe halfway through the second Carl and Deke story. And juggling a couple of other projects.

Plus I’m still a data nerd at work, telling stories in numbers for some lovely folks who appreciate me.

But I’m a storyteller. Its what I do. I work in words.

Anybody know some 2d and 3d artists I could chat with? I’m gonna have needs, in this indie publishing future.

The only limits to my success are my imagination? Y’all are doomed, now.

So today is Dec 22, 2017.

Useful as a tracking mechanism because I have a target word count each year I try to hit. That’s what gets my lazy ass up at 4AM every weekday, so I can be in the kitchen at the office at 515AM, eat my breakfast, suck down some coffee, read my comics, pay my bills, and then write for 90-120 minutes without anyone around.

The last couple of years, my targets have been modest, compared to some of the lunatics I know that turn out over a million words. 400,000 and 409,000. This year, the goal was 420,000. Blew through that in early December and kept going. (I like modest, beatable goals.)

Just now, I finished what is probably the last story I will write this year. Lovely little story set in a dark, cyberpunk future as part of a project next fall. Added the final count to my spreadsheet and realized I had hit my secondary target: 450,166 for 2017.

Yay!!!

I have a lot of editing to do at this point, so I’ll pick up odd words here and there. Every month I stop whatever major project I’m doing and write something “short.” Sometimes, that’s actually a short story. Occasionally, it goes a wee bit longer and turns into a novella. Got several of them to fix.

My goal is to publish at least one new something on the tenth of every month. My eventual goal, sixty years from now, is to die with three years worth of material queued up in the hopper for one of my great-great-grandkids to oversee publishing. Remember, my IP will continue to generate revenue for seventy years (as of today) after I die, so either the heirs can keep collecting it, or they can sell it off to a small publishing house to handle.

Don’t care. They will have gotten taken care of financially. Hopefully well enough to fund their kids and grandkids to to grand and stupid things.

So, 2017 in sort of review of what I wrote each month:

• Jan – The Pleasure Dome – Javier 4
• Feb – Shorts
  • – Daoma Dan/Jocelyn – Stand Up (Origin/Issue 1)
  • – ANPS-1: The Last Ranger
  • – ANPS-2: The Maiden
  • – ANPS-3: Forty-Niner
  • – ANPS-4: Posse
  • – ANPS-5: Refuge
• Mar – The Doomsday Vault – Javier 5
  • – The Bryce Connection – Javier 9a
• Apr – The Last Flagship – Javier 6
  • – Rocketman – Eva 3
• May – Rocketman – Eva 3
  • – The Hammerfield Gambit – Javier 7
• Jun – The Hammerfield Gambit – Javier 7
  • – Expectations (Thorgerd)
  • – Labyrinth – Dan & Stewey 1
  • – The Hammerfield Payoff – Javier 8
• Jul – The Hammerfield Payoff – Javier 8
  • – Labyrinth – Dan and Stewey 1
  • – The Red Admiral – Jessica 6
• Aug – The Red Admiral – Jessica 6
  • – Backwards on the Way – Akahana 2
• Sep – The Red Admiral – Jessica 6
  • – Last Leaf Falling – Lansdowne 1
• Oct – The Red Admiral – Jessica 6
  • – Gray Hack – Carl & Deke
• Nov – The Red Admiral – Jessica 6
  • – Can’t Shoot Straight Gang – Handsome Rob 1
• Dec – B4B: Three Act Dramatic Structure
  • – Dancer – Kumiko 1

As you can see, lots of stuff I haven’t talked about yet. Most of it will have come out by this time next year. The Red Admiral (Jessica 6) went out to first readers Monday this week. Should got to Canadian Copy-editor Babe(tm) early next year. Target delivery date May 10, 2018. All the Javier is now out, except I have started working on #9, which will actually be a small collection of short stories that sets up Season Two. My goal is to knock those bit out as my monthly projects early in 2018, so I can put out another Science Officer book late in the year.

Planning to start on the next Jessica soonish. Lord of Winter. Book #7 of 9. Tentative target date of December 2018, but don’t know yet. The Red Admiral took longer than I expected to finish, but it’s also 135,000 words right now, and I’ll probably top 140k when the edits come in.

Another Business For Breakfast book at some point. And lots of short stories for various projects and to expand things. Two of them above are new storylines in the Alexandria Station Universe, as I get a chance to start filling in the holes in my monstrous timeline spreadsheet. (Jessica Keller will be born in 13,405 CE, to give you some approximation. Javier Aritza will be born in 7510 CE.)

The year has been good. Sales have picked up some, so I’m on track, but they still aren’t sufficient for me to just walk entirely away from having a day-job. (Tell more of your friends about me, okay?)

Health is good. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) has completely altered her diet over the year and suddenly doesn’t have migraines all the time. The farm is in good shape, as we complete what she calls “The Cottage” in my front yard. (She will never live with me, but she will spend more time around me if there is a place handy where I’m not breathing her air.)

Reviews/Reponses from readers has been interesting. I’m always saddened when people bitch that $2.99 is too much for a Science Officer book, but probably have no problem dropping $5 on a Starbucks. I need to make a living here. Can’t do it giving everything away. And when you walk into the bookstore, how much does the new thriller cost you? Hopefully $5.99 for a novel is within their expectations, as I plan on dropping two Jessicas next year, plus whatever else I can get done.

Support from other quarters has been good. I love getting emails and notes from fan telling me how much their appreciate my writing and my characters. I love storytelling, so people who like my tales keep me warm. Might have picked up a new fan-turned-first-reader who is really good at picking up things the others (including me) miss.

Past that, I have a good life. Hopefully, you have found the bright things that put a smile on your face, as well.

My your holidays be festive and filled with joy.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

One of the most enjoyable things for me about writing some of the military science fiction I generate is trying to get my head into a culture that’s hundreds or even thousands of years into our future, or, more fun, some alien place. Part of where that shows up on paper is in the rank structure (the military parts).

Most of my readers are familiar with the western standards (primarily United States military), either the US Army or the US Navy, both of which follow the same basic structure of E-1, E-2, O-1, O-2, etc. but with different names for the ranks themselves.

But what is the distant future going to hold?

Recently, I had someone reading the Jessica Keller series comment that I had gotten the ranks wrong, because when he was in the US Army, Yeoman was a job title for a clerk, and nothing more. I refrained from asking what his Command Centurion thought of that, because that would have probably just ended up feeding the troll. For those of you paying attention, much of Aquitaine is (VERY loosely) filtered through the Roman Republic, and not the traditional western militaries. (Fribourg, for contrast, uses the western model based loosely on the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy.)

Officers in the Republic of Aquitaine Navy thus run this way:

1. Cornet
2. Centurion
3. Senior Centurion
4. Command Centurion
5. Fleet Centurion
6. First Centurion

And Enlisted have this structure:

1. Landsman
2. Able-Bodied Spacer
3. First-Rate Spacer
4. Yeoman
5. Chief (uncommon)
6. Senior Chief (rare)
7. Master Chief (rare)

For Chief and beyond, those are rare because Yeoman is the point where an individual takes a look at where they want their career to go. Many simply serve their full hitch and go back to civilian life, never rising above Yeoman. Others frequently make the leap from Yeoman to Centurion, having proven their worth and being made an officer. (Think Moirrey or Vo.) Only a very few remain in service and move up to the Chief ranks (Chief, Senior, Master), and those are generally technical experts that don’t want the added responsibility of being an officer.

That was why I was amused about the person who thought Yeoman was a clerk. That was his experience. But there are other ways to do it.

My grandfather served with the Eighth Infantry Division in Europe during World War Two. When he left service, he was a Technical Sergeant. That’s not even a rank that exists anymore, the services having consolidated line and paperwork ranks since then into a single chain.

And then I had to invent the Grand Army of the Republic for book four in the Jessica Keller series, Goddess of War. More opportunity to get strange.

Instead of divisions, they have legions. The RAN has security battalions, but the ground forces are organized into Cohorts, because why the hell not? And they want to be Roman, to boot.

• Legate (Legion Commander)
• Primus Pilus (First Spear. Senior Cohort Centurion of the Legion)
• Cohort Centurion
• (Patrol) Centurion
• Optio
• Decurion (Senior Enlisted)
• Decanus (Leader of Ten)
• Curator
• Lancer
• Trooper

Then you get job titles like: Draconarius (Standard Bearer), Cornicen (Radio Operator), Ballistarius (Squad Heavy Weapons), Pioneer (Sapper/Armorer/EO). All sorts of silly fun, especially when dealing with Fourth Saxon Legion, a horse cavalry unit in a space opera.

But I want exotic. This is Space Opera. With alien cultures and strangeness.

I just finished editing the first pass of the sixth Jessica Keller book (The Red Admiral) this week. The war with Buran gets bigger. And they are utterly alien compared to everyone else, based on a completely different cultural matrix. (And, by the way, the story starts in 13,446 CE, let’s guestimate what the future looks like ELEVEN THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW. Heh.)

In Buran, most of the vessels, and all of the warships, are Sentient, but not in the sense that Suvi was aboard Mielikki or Hammerfield. There is an artificially intelligent computer involved, but the humans adjust the cognition levels as needed: low when just patrolling, high when combat is imminent.

And then you have Buran’s navy. In charge of a vessel or station is the Director. Equivalent to what we think of as a ship’s captain or a Command Centurion.

Below that, however, the culture is broken into occupational categories, one of which you will be routed into as you grow up:

• Scholar
• Technician
• Warrior
• Merchant
• Artisan

Aboard a vessel you will have Advocates.

• War Advocate (Warrior)
• Entity Advocate (Technician)
• Crew Advocate (Scholar)
• Maneuver Advocate (Warrior or Scholar)

Each speaks for their charge. The War Advocate serves roughly the same purpose as RAN’s Tactical Officer/Second In Command. They fight, without having to worry about everything else at the same time. The Entity Advocate speaks with and for the Sentience, the Entity that is the vessel. The Crew Advocate speaks with and for the crew of humans that serve aboard the vessel. In The Red Admiral, you will meet your first Maneuver Advocate, who speaks with and for the smaller vessels that are carried aboard the Nightmaster Steadfast in Darkness.

Again, alien culture. Steadfast in Darkness is a battleship, but it carries with it four Makos, four medium cruisers that can detach and fight individually, but normally remain attached to the larger vessel all other times.

So military rank can be whatever I want it to be, as long as it makes sense. Think about some European cultures where Frigate Captain and Cruiser Captain were different ranks in previous centuries. What I’m aiming for is to convey to my readers how alien a culture can be, regardless of the people being human.

What was Rome like, two thousand three hundred years ago, during the Republic? Or the Hellenes, to say nothing of armies of the Three Kingdoms Period in China or Heian Era Japan?

And one of these days I will finish Jessica, and can move on to a whole new universe, one with a whole passel of alien species and cultures, into which humans are a very recent arrival. I have a few notes, but it’s going to be a ball going completely strange with militaries and their organization.

The only limits are my ability to dream it up, and my ability to make it understandable and believable for my readers.

So here’s my challenge for you: How would you organize your military, if you were inventing one from scratch and from whole cloth? Lemme know, as I find that sort of thing utterly fascinating.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Hopefully by now, the name Hammerfield means all sorts of useful and intersting things to you. This is important, because we’re about a week away from the Hammerfield Saga dropping. I will be so thrilled when the rest of you are able to know how Season One of The Science Officer books winds up.

It is not the place I expected when I set out. There were three Javier Aritza books out (The Science Officer, The Mind Field, and The Gilded Cage), and I had left things in a kinda dark place. (You tell me The Gilded Cage is a bright and cheery book. I dare you.) So I knew that I wanted the fourth book to be a little less dark. The result was The Pleasure Dome (#4), which might still be my favorite of all of them.

Coming out of that, I had already planned the basic elements of the War of the Pirate Clans, but writer-brain rarely lets me know what is actually going to happen until a page, or sometimes only a paragraph ahead. The Doomsday Vault (#5) was intended to run pretty much as it did, being something of an homage/pastiche to Run Silent, Run Deep, at least intellectually. And to set up a massive confrontation with the asshole from The Pleasure Dome.

From there, things went sideways on me.

One of the things that people have commented about my writing is that my characters tend to grow and change over time. I do. Frequently, someone asks me about something in the past and I will respond with “That was so many me’s ago, I don’t ever remember him, or the person he became, or the six after that.”

I know that some authors believe that your characters should stay roughly the same over an arc of stories, but that never feels right to me. Are you the same person you were five years ago? Would you make the same choices now you would have then? Don’t get me wrong. I like who I am today, and wouldn’t go back and make easier choices, because I would never be here.

I could have been a lawyer. Would have been magnificently successful, but I’d be on my third trophy wife by now and utterly miserable. Could have been a professor. Would have been successful there, but I’d be dull and boring (no offense, Lew and Nat, or Ken and David).

So here I am, totally different guy from the one I was then.

Javier grows. I won’t say grows up, because adulting is rarely as much fun as teenaging, but you get the point. If you have been paying attention to the early stories, you will know just how damaged he is. I won’t say flawed, because that suggests permanency. He’s damaged. Healing, but slowly. Over the course of the War with Valko Slavkov, he has to make hard choices.

More importantly, he has to turn into the man he could have been but never became, but for reasons never discussed. You’ll learn what they are now. Why he blew up his career with the Concord Fleet. Why he has two ex-wives. Why he ended up alone on a Sentient Probe/Cutter with only Suvi and the Four Musketeers to keep him company.

At the same time, the other characters grow. They are all damaged, to one degree or another. (As are we all, when you think about it.) Wracked by guilt and loss. Pain. Might-have-beens. Each of them has to face their own darkness and come to terms with it. Zakhar. Suvi. Afia. Pete. But most importantly, Djamila.

Her arc is almost as big, and almost as important, as the one Javier goes through over the course of these eight books. In The Last Flagship (#6), she has to come face to face with death itself, and confront an angry AI in control of an entire First Rate Galleon. And then, Djamila must find the willingness to step past the fear that has been with her for so many years. She must do the most intimidating, frightening thing she had ever done in her entire life.

Dream.

So The Hammerfield Gambit (#7) and The Hammerfield Payoff (#8) come out in a week.

Thank you to all the amazing people who have pre-ordered. The numbers are kinda frightening and boggling for me to look at. Hopefully, you will find yourself satisfied with where Season One went to. It was eight titles. Season Two will be nine, because I have partly written a transition piece, three short stories that introduce new characters for Season Two and set the galaxy up for where you go when you might never safely return to Concord space.

I will not, however, be dropping them every two months, like I did these last five. That pretty much consumed my life, and I really want to concentrate on getting Jessica Keller’s story told. I just finished the first editing pass on book six: The Red Admiral, and I’m rather pleased with it. It’s long (135k words, when Javier runs 25-30k each), and deep. And begins a new interior trilogy (6-8) that sees the war with Buran get serious.

I have three Jessicas to write, and a couple of other projects that I can’t tell you about until summer. I will promise at least a couple of Javiers each year for the next couple, at least until things settle down a little.

I have titles for most of Season Two. And I don’t really anticipate it going into multi-volume story arcs. I like the ability to tell a story at 25-30,00 words. I have to stay on topic. It is the novella equivalent of a short story: Get in, get out, without meandering.

Instead, they will be single issue stories. And I plan to focus a little more on the science side of The Science Officer, and a little less on the piracy. After all, as you will see in a little under a week, Javier and the crew of the First Rate Galleon Hammerfield are rather done with piracy, and poised on the verge of a grand, brand new adventure.

I hope you will join me for their voyages, and I look forward to hearing from you what you think about the Hammerfield Saga.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

So, last week I was down in Portland for OryCon, a writer-heavy sci-fi/fantasy con (this was #39) that is my favoritest and the one I consider my home con. (There are personal reasons I avoid certain conventions in the further PWN.)

This year, I got in early and applied to be on panels, and offered some ideas of panels I wanted to be on. I have a vague background in science, having done all the nerdy science things when I was kid: Science Camp, Space Camp I and II, etc. I write SF. So they put me on the Science track.

Lovely, and wonderful. However, lemme tell you about this one panel I was on. I didn’t speak for the whole panel, and nobody noticed, because I had two full on astrophysicists, plus two other hard-core astronomy experts up there with me. I learned a lot. And really didn’t have anything meaningful to add, because they were rather more interested in grinding axes, but it was fun.

On other panels, I contributed more, because I got to take the position of the damned, dirty hippy, living in the woods, working on putting my whole farm on solar power, living off a well and septic, and growing fruit. Nowhere close to self-sufficient, but more than enough research and experience to hold my own with two experts on a panel called “Backyard Survivalist.” They wanted to take people completely off the grid, living in the back yard rough. I was talking about passive solar heating, growing herbs in window boxes, and inside planter boxes for things like tomatoes and peppers. Damned, dirty hippy, off saving the world and all that.

Also, the importance of all the fruit I grow: “Fresh fruit lasts for days. Dried fruit lasts for weeks. Canned Fruit lasts for months. Fermented fruit lasts for years.” And I got to explain to people how to make dish-washer jam.

• Put your fruit in the pan, along with your lemon juice.
• Start heating it up and then add your sugar or honey in my case.
• Stir continuously while heating slowly.
• Bring the whole thing to a rolling boil and hold it there for a while.
• Decant into your freshly-cleaned jars.
• Seal the jars up and put them in the dishwasher.
• Run it overnight on the longest, hottest cycle you can, with the longest steam cycle.

Not as good as a water bath or a pressure cooking, but the fruit will last for several months without problem in the fridge, and I usually bribe people with it anyway, since I consume so little bread these days. And my joy is the “whatever’s ripe this week” process of making jams and fruit butters.

Let’s see, what else? Did panels on all sorts of science topics. One panelist made the case for a dedicated, long-term series of missions that culminated in a Mars base. Another made the case for asteroid mining. So, of course, I went snowballs, explaining how you should colonize a comet, where you ended up with giga-tons of available water, so you could crack it for oxygen, burn the hydrogen for heat and low-level thrust to move your new home around, and purify the rest to run through a full hydroponics system so fishes will clean it and you can grow vegetables. (Seeds and fish eggs are amazingly small and light to launch to orbit). Then I can trade water to the asteroid folks for metals, and to the Martians for exotics that they can mine. You end up with a full solar economy. Plus people started using my term “homo solaris” to describe people who live in permanent low-grav situations, rather than returning to the Earth. Imagine a woman roughly three meters tall, all fingers and toes, like Larry Niven’s The Integral Trees.

The rest of the time, I got to catch up with friends that I only see at OryCon, and if they come to CampCon with us in June. Met with an unindicted co-conspirator for a secret project next summer, working out details.

Planning to go back next year. Hopefully I’ll see some of you then. Or if you are a writer in the PSW, do you like camping? Isolated campground in June. Long weekend. No interweb access. Sit down, shut up, and write. Kinda awesome. You should come.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

As most of you know, I don’t get particularly political on my blog, for the most part. That’s intentional, because I’m not making enough money here to justify pissing off any segment of my fan base, just because we voted for different folks and have different opinions on the best way to do things in this country.

So it was with a bit of trepidation when I answered a call from Bob Brown when he wanted to put together an anthology called “Alternative Truths” and go all in on what the 2016 presidential election meant (or at least implied). Sure, I write political, but anyone who had paid a lick of attention to me knows that my politics frequently rotate around “sticking it to the man” rather than any one ideology.

But then a poster caught my eye on the social medias. Anyone with a bit of history should know the name Martin Niemoller, and appreciate the implications:

First they came for the scientists.

And the National Park Service said, “LOL. No.”

And went rogue, and we were all, like “I was not expecting the Park Rangers to lead the Resistance. None of the dystopian novels I read prepared me for this. But, cool.”

So I envisioned a world where those Rangers had gone totally rogue. But I didn’t set it during the war those men and women would have fought. That would be too easy. People would argue every jit and tittle I wrote. So I put it thirty-five years into the future, the winter of 2052-2053 CE. After things had broken down and started to be set to rights.

And for a narrator, I picked a kid who wants to grow up and be a Park Ranger. An 025, to use the technical parlance.

Never set out to write a Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian SciFi Western, but you know how these things sneak up on you. And I sent it off to Bob, figuring it would be way too weird, considering how topical and political the rest of his planned anthology was going to get. (I know a lot of those folks, and met a bunch more as we chatted on social media during all this. I was going to be an outlier, any way you cut it.)

Bob surprised me by taking the story, but he’s got a soft spot for cowboys, so that probably helped.

The story surprised me by spawning four quick sequels, picking up from the end of “The Last Ranger” (which is the one in Alternative Truths), and carrying Dale Embry forward into the spring of 2053, a pivotal time in his life, and his world, as the war between the Coastal Republic and the Confederated States has heated up.

So you have five stories now: The Last Ranger, The Maiden, Forty-Niner, Posse, and Refuge. It is an interesting world, because I never read westerns when I was a kid, and barely watched any. Had to do a lot of reading as I worked, so I could get a feel for what the genre required in the way of language and tone. (Not sure I made it, but I’m damned proud of the results.)

Didn’t have a chance to make it into the second anthology in the series: More Alternative Truths. I generally have my writing schedule penciled in pretty solidly six to twelve months out, but Bob cornered me over the weekend at OryCon and reminded me that he’s planning to do a book 3 at some point, hopefully with long enough lead times that I can write something he’ll like. Might be another cowboy story, as I have enough notes for a couple of novels at this point, or a whole passel of short stories I can put into another collection. Might be something entirely else. Won’t know until I see the spec from him.

Right now, I’m waiting mostly to hear from you folks what you think of the dystopian future. Think I’ve sold about ten copies of it so far, but that’s not unexpected. Most of you are Science Fiction fans, rather than post-apocalyptic readers. You read to escape the ugliness of the day, rather than to wallow in where we might go.

But I think you would enjoy these three reads.

• Alternative Truths
• More Alternative Truths
• The Rangers

So give them a go and let me know what you think.

Cheers,

b

So I haven’t said anything to pretty much anybody about this project, because it turned out to be way more complicated than I thought it would be, and take longer, but we’re finally here.

Last spring, I was talking with a bunch of writers I know about doing a new bundle on bundlerabbit.com. This one would be different than most, because instead of it being a collection of existing stories, I wanted everyone to write me something brand new. And hit a theme in a genre that was not necessarily something most of them had tried before.

But it sounded like fun, and they all wanted to play.

And thus: The Sins of The Fathers bundle was born, now available for pre-order at all the major sites, coming out on Nov 15 everywhere.

The story I wrote for this project was “Expectations,” which is more or less a sequel to my story Kid Lexington. That first one took place in the Modern Gods universe, like all my superhero fiction so far and took place in an alternate 1952 with superheroes.

Approaching a sequel, I decided to go someplace way different. Without giving away too much (no spoilers here), the story picks up in the summer of 1974, and centers on the two daughters of Kid Lexington, now 18 years old and facing a world where they must confront the family business. The expectations about them putting on a mask and going out into the world to save it or damn it.

The challenge I had set to all of the writers involved is contained in the sales blurb:

Time passes. Teenage sidekicks grow up. Heroes and villains settle down and start families.

The bundle will be themed around the next generation of kids taking over the family superhero/villain business. Stories about people in masks and how they interact with the youngsters coming along, rather than just inter-generational family drama. Superheroes make everything crazier.

Does the hero retire gracefully and let the teen sidekick take over the name and costume? Did the children of a supervillain join the family business, or become heroes and work to thwart their own parental units?

Nine fantastic people joined me on this bizarre voyage, contributing their own visions for what it is like to grow up in a world where you have power and can make a difference. The stories are serious as well as silly. Modern and historical. Romance, Comic Book, Dark, and Chop-socky, depending on your tastes and needs, but these are all top-notch writers, exploring new ground for many of them.

I hope you will enjoy this bundle, and explore the worlds and works of my nine unindicted co-conspirators as we forge a trail through crime and mischief.

Thanks

b