And yet, I’m here to tell you for your own good to go do something. Fortunately, it will achieve karmic balance for me, because I’m asking you to do something for someone else and we’ll all benefit from it.

BACKGROUND: When I first moved to LA in the early 90’s, my roommate Snake had a book by a guy I had never heard of. SF, cyberpunk, thriller, space opera. It had all of it. The book was The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran.

Several years later, I ended up stealing Snake’s copy of the book, but at that point, I had found others by the man. Long Run is actually the second novel, but it contains enough background on the first book: Emerald Eyes that I was able to follow the story. And get hooked.

To give you an idea what kind of fan I was, I wrote a fan letter (actual paper, sent to his publisher, forwarded to his agent, and then) to Mr. Moran, since we both lived in SoCal at the time, fan-boying all over him and inviting him to join our rpg group anytime he felt the need. (Dan’s only a few years older than me, and we were both young then.) He even called me on the phone and was gracious enough to tell me the really good news about the last question I had asked in the letter: Namely, when was book #3 coming out? This was the funniest part, because at the point he called me, The Last Dancer was about two weeks from dropping everywhere.

Dan was and continues to be a major influence on me as a storyteller. His life went sideways not long after that (the man’s a verifiable superhero, to those who know the whole story), and he largely stopped writing fiction to raise a family. I have snippets of things he self-published in the early days of the interwebs (and by early, we’re talking boards on the world wide web in the mid to late 90’s here).

Years later, I found him on social media and followed him there like a proper fan-boy. When I found out that he was going to be going to the WorldCon in KC a few years ago, I made the offhand comment that I was going to have to stalk him in order to get his signature. I doubt he remembered talking to me on the phone, but he invited me to join his group for lunch one day and then talked to me. Like I mentioned, total fanboy here. SQUEEEEEEE!!

I have stayed close by, listening, as his life slowly starts getting into a place where he’ll be able to write again soon. A few years ago, he even published the next story in the Continuing Time, The AI War: The Big Boost. Got it on my shelf.

More recently, he added a new collection, Tales of the Continuing Time, which starts to fill in all the bits and pieces of this vast, amazing universe he has created. Better, he has started writing again. Serious writing. Three amazing kids through college, one almost done, one more about to start, but enough time and mental capacity to write.

This is where you and I come in.

Just yesterday, his Patreon went live (I was #19, just so you know). Same FatSam we all know and love, but now he’s in a place where he’s actually making money from his writing again. (I’m a full-time writer these days, completely supporting myself from my words rather than a day job, so I can tell you how awesome it is when you open a publisher report and say “I made HOW MUCH last month?”)

We need to get Dan there. This is where I’m playing on your sympathies in a hard, bad way. But my karma will be good, and so will yours.

$5 a month means you’ll start to get all his stuff, including the new novels the man has planned. (In my old copy of Emerald Eyes, and I just looked, Dan promised us all 33 novels in the Continuing Time as part of his Author’s Afterward where he explained where all these ideas come together. Planning to hold him to it, as I even told him today.)

And face it, $5 is one less coffee you get yourself, spread over an entire month, when you can damned well learn to make your own and live with it. You’ll be getting Dan into a place where he can start paying off those 33 novels he threatened me with. Teased me with.

So go sign up for Patreon if you aren’t already. There are some amazing people out there doing strange and exciting things and relying on people like us to help them bring in a few bucks each every month so they can commit art. This is your chance to help Dan. And me. And you. And get some amazingly good stuff to read.

If you weren’t a fan of his before now, I highly recommend you go buy Emerald Eyes right now and become one. And then Long Run. And keep going. If we can get enough fans together, he’ll start making enough cash each month that he had no choice but to set his ass down in that chair and start generating more Continuing Time stories. Bitching constantly, mind you, but writing.

Tell all your friends, too. That’s the blackmail part. Share this blog post on your wall and call on all your friends to get involved. It is a good cause, and you will get some damned fine fiction out of it.

thanks for being you, and listening to me squeeeeeee

b

“Supposedly” Amazon has the correct version of the file uploaded now, but I’m still hearing from folks that they have gotten Queen Anne’s Revenge instead of Two Bottles of Wine With the War God.

You can try downloading it again, but that might not work, so feel free to reach out to me and I’ve got a different link you can use to pull the file directly. (You’ll probably hear from Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm).

Thank you again to everyone for your cheerful patience. And I’m glad that everyone has sat down and read Queen Anne’s Revenge straight through and enjoyed it. I had a ball writing those characters, especially Stunt Dude.

Quick reminder for everyone, just to brighten your day:

• Dec: St. Legier (Jessica Keller #7)
• Jan: Two Bottles of Wine With the War God (Bedrov)
• Feb: Queen Anne’s Revenge (CS-405-1)
• Mar: Packmule (CS-405-2)
• Apr: Persephone (CS-405-3)
• May: Winterhome (Jessica Keller #8)
• Dec:  Book 9 (tentatively: Petron)

June starts the Star Dragon books (Awaken the Star Dragon will be retitled Birth of the Star Dragon for the June drop of Flight Of the Star Dragon (#2), so don’t buy it again, okay?) Just started the fifth Star Dragon novel this morning and that will conclude the first arc with Gareth.

Thanks again. Just thanks. I couldn’t do this without everyone’s help

-b-

So I screwed up somewhere. The book that appears to have gotten uploaded to Amazon (and maybe everywhere) has the cover for War God, but the interior is Queen Anne’s Revenge.

Whoops.

Those of you reading Queen Anne a month early please enjoy it while I sort this out and get the right guts uploaded everywhere. If it takes too long, email me tomorrow and I’ll send you the doc file for War God so you can read it. You won’t be completely off by reading those two out of order, unlike trying to read Winterhome without all the CS-405 books, but it will make more sense in May.

Again, sorry about that. Working on a fix, as soon as I figure out how I screwed this one up in the first place.

Y’all still love me, right?

b

Never thought I would type those words. “Jessica Keller is done.”

Got a social media reminder for 1/7/15 where I posted the comment about the first time The Science Officer went nuts. (It happened again, late summer ’17.) At the time, I had just finished writing Imposters and was in the process of figuring out what my next project should be. With the Alexandria Station universe suddenly exploding, the obvious solution was to pivot to writing Jessica Keller and Auberon.

I’ve told this story before, but I’ll repeat it here for folks who missed it. I was at Powell’s Books in Beaverton, OR, after OryCon in 2014. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) was at a book signing and we got there way early to help set up. I had nothing to do, so I wandered the stacks looking for books to read. This is a big Powell’s. Not as big as the one downtown, but probably twice as many books as your average B&N. Maybe three times.

I had several hours to kill, so I went pretty deep into the SFF section, with money burning a hole in my pocket. Three hours later, I could not find a single book that looked interesting enough to actually buy. I would see a cover that looked enticing and pick it up. Flip it over to read the blurb, and put it right back on the shelf. Two or three times, I actually got far enough to read the first page.

Ended up not buying anything. Nothing at all. Unbelievable.

On the drive home afterwards, we talked about it and she convinced me that there might not be anybody actually writing the sorts of action adventure science fiction I grew up with (Doc Smith, et al) and that I might just have to write it myself. (Side note: she was right, but in a weird way. There are writers doing it, but we’ve all gone indie and are part of that chunk of the SF market that TradPub thinks died starting int 2011. DataGuy shows that sudden slope where fans “have stopped reading SF.” Uhm, no, but thank you for playing.)

So I wrote Auberon. The Chronicles of Jessica Keller #1. Came out in the spring of 2015, as fast as I could finish it and get it edited, formatted, and published.

Originally, I was expecting the series to be either a trilogy or quadrology. Queen of the Pirates and Last of the Immortals were always going to be a duology, and I wasn’t sure if there needed to be one more after that to round it off. Structurally, the first three Jessica novels follow the same writing arc as the original Star Wars movies (Star Wars, Empire, Jedi), in that you have a stand-alone story, and then a longer piece that splits down the middle and resolves a major arc. This was an intentional act on my part.

But something funny happened on the way to the Forum.

There is a sentence at about the two-thirds mark of Queen where Arnulf is touring Bunala (Chapter XXXVIII, just looked it up so I could quote it.) where the actual span of Jessica’s story changed:

Daneel tilted his head and looked at her. “But could one single point-source failure cause that much system instability? Haven’t we progressed to a point where the loss of any one system would not cascade laterally across all civilization? The Homeworld was unique in that measure.”

Jessica just blinked in surprise. She would have lost a good deal of money betting anyone that this man wasn’t hiding that much intellect and knowledge under that blond hair.

Then she smiled. All that, and smart, too.

Jessica was really, really happy she hadn’t had to kill him.

“Today?” She shrugged. “Who knows? I‘ve heard legends of a system far towards the galactic core and spinward where one of the Sentiences survived and is worshiped as a God-Emperor, never having fallen into barbarism, with technology far in advance of our own, having had a two-thousand-year head start. If it exists, and gets aggressive, it might manage to bind us all back under its yoke.”

At that moment, writer-brain poked me and said: “Oh, by the way? This is nine novels, not three. Here’s the overall arc.”

Wow.

Why this matters: Part One.

I’ve been sick for the last couple of weeks. Something yucky we picked up on a recent trip to LA. Slow to get over it. Then Saturday night, the windstorm swept through and we were without power for about 44 hours, or all of Sunday and Monday. Finally got electricity back on Tuesday morning , but the interwebs were still too scrambled to be of much use until today.

I ended up writing. I try to maintain a daily pace of 3400 words. When I’m sick, I fall off that, but it builds in a slack of around 10,000 words that keeps me above 100,000. Had to push in December to make my count, because I was too stubborn to lose my streak. Will walk away and let it go at some point, just so I don’t have that streak to worry about, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Tuesday morning, I was about 2000 words behind pace when I started, having only managed about 1500 Monday. Then I got on a streak with power. And the realization that I was done with the core story and just writing epilogues at this point. Ended up writing about 6500 words yesterday. That included “-fin-”

Why This Matters: Part Two

Over the course of nine core novels plus a side trilogy and a couple of novellas, I have built up a large cast of interesting characters. You see that when you open the cast list. Some characters have vanished from the back half, because their story wasn’t part of Jessica’s. Others have built up to a much larger role than I ever anticipated, and that’s okay, too.

This was always Jessica Keller’s story. It fell into a much larger universe, but I needed to center it on her. At the end, it was necessary to bring everyone to some level of closure, without killing all these characters off. There are dozens of stories I could spin off from the end of book 9, because everyone will continue on from there, including Jessica and Torsten. But it needed to come to an emotional closure. You’ll understand when you get there.

Jessica’s story is done. Jessica Keller, Volume Two, to quote Emmerich. There can be more stories about Casey, about Vo, about Moirrey. Yan and Ainsley. Even Suvi herself. But they aren’t Jessica’s stories.

And last night, I concluded Jessica’s tale. (I can already hear Dorn popping up like a meercat and sniffing the air. He’s one of the few who has already read Book 8, Winterhome, and wants to know where I went from THERE. Yes, I’m paying attention, Dorn.)

I don’t know where I’ll go next in the Alexandria Station universe. I want to get back to Javier, but I have several other projects with deadlines now that come first. Jean-Pierre is on my list. More Doyle, maybe. Henri needs the rest of The Founding to be told. Imperial Aquitaine awaits the writer’s pen. The Gas Sailors. The Pocket Empires. The Unification Wars. Lansdowne and the Concordancy War. There will be more Handsome Rob soon.

I’ve got lots of places I could explore, now that the big anchor stone is complete.

But this is such an emotionally exhausting moment, to look back four years and realize that the nine(+) novel arc is finally done. Epic Science Fiction is just that. Huge. Grand battles that span galaxies. It requires a lot of energy to do that, novel over novel.

I’m looking at Gareth St. John Dankworth next. Awaken the Star Dragon is done. I’ve got three more in the can, and need to write #5 to finish off that arc. Another grand, epic piece, with fifties pulp layered on top of it.

Valentinian and Dave are not epic. Those are coming out second half of this year, and are just adventure stories where the emotional journeys are much smaller. The stakes don’t have to escalate with every paragraph, and I like that.

I hope you will enjoy the ride. I have to stop and remember that most of you have just digested St. Legier and are still trying to decide whether or not to forgive me. That was a hard book to write. Winterhome was even more interesting. Book 9 (Tentatively: Petron) was the easiest, because I just needed to bring all the stories to conclusion, in the aftermath of Winterhome.

Dorn’s read it, and approved, I think. He’ll bitch and whine until I finish off the edits on Petron and send them his way.

At some point this summer, I am going to put together a full Jessica Keller Chronicles Encyclopedia for everyone. Every character. Every planet. Every ship. All the details I have had to keep organized across three documents, plus things that I never ended up using, like some of the formations of Imperial Land Forces and the Grand Army of the Republic. They’re all there.

I’m guessing it will be about 45,000 words, which is a short novel, but this is all lists, rather than sentences, so it will probably read like a 120,000 word novel for length. But it will have all those references.

Thanks for supporting me on this ride. I might have done it without you, but you’ve made it possible for me to go on and conquer other mountains next.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cheers,

blaze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good, but not sufficient.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2018 Writing – Jan

– St. Legier – Jessica 7

– BSQ 1 Editorial

– Unintended Consequences – Carl & Deke 2

– RPG 2018

– Daddy’s Girl – Angus 1

Feb

– Unintended Consequences – Carl & Deke 2

– RPG 2018

– St Legier – Jessica 7

Mar

– St Legier – Jessica 7

– Strawberry Dragon – Fairchild

– Forgotten Paper Memories – Angus 2 (BSQ 005)

Apr

– Shirabyoshi – Kumiko 2

– Phantom of the Factory – Disappointment Patrol 1

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

– Queen Anne’s Revenge – CS-405-1

May

– Patrol Cutter: Bellerophon! – Gareth Pulp 1

– Awaken The Star Dragon – Gareth 1

– Packmule – CS-405-2

Jun

– Packmule – CS-405-3

– Persephone – CS-405-3

– Flight of the Star Dragon – Gareth 2

– B4B – Pulp Speed

Jul

– Winterhome – Jessica

– Just Business – Kumiko 4

– Huntress – Kumiko 5

Aug

– Winterhome

– Rocker – Kumiko 6

– Second Cousins – Akahana 3

– Rescue – Kumiko 7

– Longshot Hypothesis – Dave 1

Sep

– Call of the Star Dragon – Gareth 3

– Hard Bargain – Dave 2

Oct

– Heroes – Shrike 2

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

– Shadow Of The Star Dragon – Gareth 4

Nov

– Shadow Of The Star Dragon

– Assassin – Farouk 1

– Seeker – Alicia 2

– Tin Can Pirates – Gareth Pulp 2

– Outermost – Dave 3

– Witness – Farouk 2

Dec

– Petron – Jessica 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consistency is the key, in both endeavors.

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

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

But it was fun.

What was your Christmas like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.