So, Noon Eastern US Time, December 14, which is Wednesday, there will be an auction (see Jim’s website for others) to support a good cause in Michigan. For whoever wins the auction, a signed copy of Auberon will be sent to them via post.

Additionally, and more importantly, I’ll tuckerize you.

In layman’s terms, you’ll get the option to appear as a minor character in one of my upcoming books. You, by name. By description if you want to live forever. And you get to choose if I make you a sidekick to one of my heroes, or a villain who dies in some terribly tragic and painful way. And maybe, if you want, I’ll make you a recurring minor character.

Lord knows I have two major SF series in motion right now that have large casts. By the time you read this, I should have written at least one, if not all, of the epilogues for the fifth Jessica Keller novel, Flight of the Blackbird, due out middle of 2017. The next major project is the fourth Science Officer book, The Pleasure Dome.

I’m also churning out shorter pieces on a monthly basis, so I can keep the heartbeat going on Amazon. If you’re not into SF, I’m writing quite a bit of superhero fantasy these day. I just published the first Holly Breckenridge story, which is straight-up historic fiction with an action bent. I’m in the middle of a silly-weird fantasy story if you want to be a sorcerer or a guard at the tower. There will be crime fiction sometime in 2017. Etc.

Why am I doing this?

This for a good cause.

I make no bones about my political and social beliefs. I want to live in the future, not an idealized and largely imaginary past. This is one way I can give back to the world.

“If you are more fortunate than others, it is better to build a longer table than a taller fence.”

I’m all about the longer table.

But also, because it’s damned fun from my perspective. All of my characters started out as names on a page. Frequently, I’ll jump to a random name generator website and randomly roll electronic dice to pick two or three bizarre culture combinations and have the system spit me back a name. (Think Scottish and Japanese, for a character from the latest Jessica novel: Shiori Ness.) Repeat until something rings true. Use that to generate a look, and maybe a backstory, depending on how many times we’ll ever see them again.

When that fails, which it does when I’m out at the farm with zero interwebs, I’ll randomly select a bookcase, a shelf, a book, and a page before I walk into my office, pull that book, and find the first thing that looks like a name on the page.

It keeps things interesting. That’s one of the games writers play with themselves to keep things fun. We get paid to make shit up all day. But even that can get boring, so let’s make up really wild things.

So there we are. You’re going to bid on this auction because you think this is a cause worth supporting. And I rarely do cons where you might find me to sign something for you. And, more importantly: Secretly, you want to be a villain in some future story. (And I got LOTS of stories coming, bubba.)

So you’ll outbid everyone else and I’ll contact you. Do you want just be a name, and I’ll fill in all the physical details? Will you send me a description I can use? Perhaps a picture?

And do you want to keep appearing from time to time? I’m okay with that, because you’ve given me permission to put you into the story, and I’m not going to do anything bad to you on paper. (I don’t publish those stories under my name, anyway, so nobody would ever know. I mean, unless you want me to graphically murder your ex-husband on paper, or something. Then we’ll talk.)

Heroes need sidekicks. So do villains. Hell, I might start you out as a villain’s intern in one book, and let you keep getting promoted as the Level Monster Bosses keep dying off.

Just how silly can we get?

Okay, so maybe I’ve been indoors a little too much this weekend. It is Sunday night as I write this, having raced home from work Friday early and gotten in just as the really heavy snow started. We got about 10 inches at the farm Friday night, and I live on a steep hill. It’s only now starting to melt off. I’ve been out twice for supplies and internet access, but mostly I’ve been home writing, and editing, and being silly.

And I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

As the old Bugs Bunny quote goes: “I wonder what the poor rabbits are doing this winter?”

For me, writing. Having fun making up lies and stories.

When Jim called, he had a list of things people could offer. I went all in on the Tuckerization, because I’ll have an utter ball doing it, and one of you will, too.

So help me out here. Let’s make the world a better place and have a rollicking good time doing it.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Moutains, WA

As you know, following my new pattern, I’m trying to put up a new story or novel for pre-order such that it will go live on the 10th of every month until the heat-death of the universe. (Challenge accepted.)

For December, it was my chance to put out the first piece of what will eventually be a long and terribly fun to write novel/story series, one of these days.

I went to bed one night at the usual time. Laid there for a bit, until a voice told me get my ass out of bed, because she had something she wanted to say. I have learned not to argue, if I really want to sleep.That turned out to be the first chapter of the new (longer than short at 9,500 words) story: The Adventuress.

This one is set in Edwardian England, roughly 1909 CE. Purely historical action, without any magic or mad science, because she wanted it that way. Not urban fantasy, nor contemporary. Just action-adventure for a young woman suddenly thrust into the greater world by the need to betray her own husband before his dastardly plans could be unleashed.

However, early 20th Century Great Britain was not a time for a liberated woman. So she must die, and be reborn as someone entirely else. In this case, a family friend with interesting connections arranges for her to become Mrs. Hollis Breckenridge, supposed widow of Captain Hayden Breckenridge, VC, 2nd Dragoon Guards.

But she must leave England, possibly to never return. To do so, she must train herself, both physically and emotionally, becoming this other woman, this survivor. She must become an Adventuress, in an era that doesn’t even know the term.

Researching Holly has been and continues to be fun. There will be more stories. I have no idea how long they will be, or when I will have time to write them, but I have plotted out a set of events for her over her next several years, taking her to Paris, Istanbul, Irkutsk, and Tokyo, at a very minimum.

Because this is the era just before the beginning of the First World War, there is a plethora of history books I can mine for “what the world was before” (or: The Proud Tower, for those of you who know the reference). And buying all these books is suddenly a business expense! (This is important because I don’t spend a lot of time reading science fiction or fantasy any more. But history and biographies are always fun. Currently, I’m almost done with “Admirals: The Naval Commanders Who Made Britain Great” by Lambert, in my planning for more Jessica and Nils and Petia in the future.)

The other fun thing about Holly is understanding how women’s fashion and cultural upheaval go hand in hand. The Edwardian era was a time for loosening the bindings of the Victorian era, both physically and metaphorically. The corset begins to disappear. Women go from an exaggerated and overly-decorated hourglass to a long, skinny flapper girl over the next 20 years.

She is liberated, in all ways, and begins to take her place alongside men.

The rest of the 20th Century can be seen as swings of a generational pendulum, from the flapper to the 50’s Housewife. The 60’s. The 70’s. The 80’s. The 90’s. Each changed the way a woman looked. And I get to study that and understand the fashions and the looks (because I plan to start making clothes one of these days, on a very small scale).

Fashion is also an interesting thing to study, because, starting in 1900, what men wear becomes fixed. In those twelve decades, very little changes. Wide/Narrow lapels. Two/Three/Four buttons. Pinstripes/Solids/Corduroy.  Vest or not. Ties in a variety of flavors and shapes, or none. Slacks. About the only thing interesting these days, per Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm), is the sorts of fabrics designers are working with, but that is IT. Everything is the same silhouette, the same dreary.

Kind of insulting, speaking as a guy, that I have about one percent the options that my wife has, culturally speaking as a westerner. But Holly is about to transcend England, and not from the fine salons and cars of English culture. She’s going to be going into the souks, the khasbahs, the marketplaces that make up the rest of the world. And I have to study all of it so I can get the details right.

That’s the best part: Research.

So you’ll have the first part of Holly’s new life. And I promise that there will be more. She is too alive to wait around forever for me to get to her, but Jessica and Javier are still taking precedence.

So I think many of you will enjoy Holly. Pre-order available on all the usual sites. The story drops December 10. I’m looking forward to your thoughts. (I already know what Maggie thinks. She’s one of the reasons I decided to publish it now, and not at some later date.)

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Those of you paying attention recently will remember that I promised to start hitting the publish button every 10th of the month. (How long it takes to actually go boom afterwards is subject to theoretical discussions, but bear with me here.) At least on Amazon, dropping something every 30 days or so triggers another bot to raise your author numbers and visibility. That hopefully turns into money, as more people discover me and love me. (Hey, I can wish.)

So, today, the latest story to drop is the fourth Brak story, Feet of Clay.

The rest of the series is as follows:

• Meat Shield
• The Popcorn Kitten
• Destiny

More adventures with everyone’s favorite half-wit, half-troll and his friends. Previously, the story was only available in the second CampCon collection, but I decided to put it up for everyone to read, rather than waiting until I had a handful more done (this is Sliepnir’s story. We still have Princess, Piper, and Bob to go before things get serious).

And it does remind me how much fun and story I have in that world.

Since my plan is to write a shorter story every month, going forward, i have been going back and looking at Brak, Suren, Alicia, Jesilyria, Thorn, and several others. SF is still my first love, and I’ll write some short pieces there as well, but those fantasy serials need to continue extending.

Eventually, all of them will roll up into character collections, but that requires somewhere around 50,000 words each, so most will take a while to reach that scale. Mostly, that’s just because I want new readers stumbling along to be able to pick up a whole campaign arc when they buy something at novel length. Partly, because I have that much story for these people and a day job writing database software that keeps me busy while putting food on the table.

So, getting back to Brak. I have four more stories in my head over the short term, before things get completely insane. (“Lord Admiral Brak, Warder of the Western Reaches,” m’kay?) I’ll probably bang away on his stories for a bit, before rushing off and working on one of the other characters, unless I get a major response from y’all about a character people want to hear more about.

(And yes, I’m going to do more Javier, after I get the current Jessica done.)

So y’all have fun. And let me know what you think.

You might not know this, but Amazon doesn’t read reviews. It just counts them. So if you leave something as simple as “Loved it.” that counts as much as a five page analysis of the “socio-political ramifications of trans-specism in a fantasy setting.”

Every review helps. Every one.

Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) has a plan for early next year to put together what they call a “Review Team.” For each of the people on the team, they’ll get an ebook arc (Advanced Reader Copy) before publication date, with an expectation that they’ll drop at least one review somewhere within so many days of publication. Doesn’t have to be on Amazon. Can be Goodreads, or other places. I’d be happy with a few on iTunes and B&N, just because that might drive traffic to one of the other sites and not leave me so reliant on Amazon. (I love you, Jeff, but I don’t want all my eggs in one basket, thankyouverymuch.)

Folks interested in hearing more, and maybe participating, let me know and I’ll forward your message on to her and she’ll work it all out. (She’s the brains in this outfit. I’m just the marketing troll.)

So, go buy Feet of Clay. It’s a fun next step on the way.

and thank you.

bd

So about a week ago, I got back from a Master Publishing Workshop. Seven days of three sessions per day, high-end information about what used to work in publishing, what works today, and what might work tomorrow. Enough to make my brain melt. Took a whole week just to digest everything. And I have fifty pages of notes, and three pages of to-do list to get through yet.

One of the things I will need to do more of next year is more and more-targeted advertising. My sales have been good (better than I expected, actually, so thank you to everyone in the sound of my voice) so far this year, and have hopefully left me poised to step up a level over the next year. I dropped the fourth Jessica Keller novel (Goddess of War)  three weeks ago. At the same time, we dropped the price on Auberon to $0.99 (Hurry and tell your friends, the price of Auberon goes back up on November 1) in an effort to boost the whole series and get exposure to folks that only want to buy cheap books.

(Personally, once I get you to read book one, I’m pretty sure I can get you to read the rest. I can compete on story-telling with professionals, which has been a psychological breakthrough for me this year.)

So the month of October has been a success on that score. I look at Amazon, and all four of the Jessica novels are currently in the top 200 in the Hard SF category, and selling really well, day over day. Hopefully, I will have made enough new fans that I can sustain these sales through the winter. There will be a coffee table art book for Jessica, coming out early next year. Then book five, Flight of the Blackbird, in the late spring.

What’s coming next in our world? There will be a newsletter with more details and a prize, going out in a few days. But for those of you not on the newsletter list, a few hints and peeks as a teaser to go sign yourself up.

One of the topics that got my attention at the workshop was the growth of audio books. They are about to do what ebooks did a decade ago, namely explode. The process will be slower, mostly because a novel requires so much effort to read and edit, but this is a whole new revenue stream available.

For my part, I have found a woman to do Auberon as an audio book for me. She’s hard at work, but I have no idea when she’ll be done, since she has her own life (she just got back from Europe last night), and I want her to be happy enough with me to want to do all NINE Jessica Keller novels.

At the same time, I used to do training video things, as well as work on stage when I was a wee lad, so I am going to do some of my own audio work on a few projects. The initial expense is not that extreme: a recording device, some software, rearranging my office for audio tone, and time. (I have no plans to do my novels–leave those to the professionals.)

I think I have mentioned elsewhere that I have six volumes of poetry stashed in a hard drive. The Desert Ring, The Blacksmith’s Song, and The Forestal are only bits I have ever published widely, but I have lots more. My plan is to record small pieces (poems) to learn the new technology, and put them up on my website for free for people to enjoy. Later, I’ll assemble them into longer pieces and put them up for sale, as rings, as stories, and as volumes.

It is the future, and I can do anything I want.

One of the things I took home from the workshop is that the only limits to my career are my imagination.

My imagination?

Y’all are f@#$%^g doomed!

The goal is not to become a USA Today or New York Times bestselling author. That would be nice, but Kim Kardassian and Snooki both hold that title, so it’s not that impressive any more. And I have read books by people on how to game the system to do it.

What I want is the money. I want to grow up to be Bernie Taupin, the most famous person nobody knows. (Bonus cookie if you can identify him without looking the man up first, but that just proves my point.)

To do that, I am going to experiment in a variety of places, each of which will hopefully generate me a steady supply of nickels. I don’t want my career eggs to all be in one basket. Right now, most (nearly all) of my money comes from Amazon, and more specifically, space opera on Amazon. I am going to expand outside of that category. (Spoiler alert: WAY OUTSIDE.)

I don’t expect that all of you will come with me into new fields. That’s not why I’m doing this. I want to get more fans, from other genre, who might be willing to buy stuff in their one interest, without pressuring them to cross over. But if I put enough octopus tentacles into enough places, I will have a nice, stable platform of interest and revenue to get me to the place where I can afford to build myself a castle on an isolated bluff over a quiet lake, way the hell away from civilization. (Never dream too small – Dean Wesley Smith)

So what y’all could do to help me over the next year is tell your friends about me, especially if one of my new projects is something they would find interesting. Plus, let me know when you think something works really well, or fails. I succeed as a writer by producing stories and things that people like you find worth the money invested, to the point they want to spend more.

Nickels. Lots and lots of nickels, but nickels and not hundred-dollar bills. At least, not yet.

You are a much better judge of how I’m doing than I am. I plan to throwing wet spaghetti at a wall all year, and hope that enough of it sticks to move me forward. Nobody knows what the hell they are doing. I learned that much from the workshop, surrounded by pros who support themselves with their writing.

But we’ll get there.

Reminder: Newsletter coming out soon with entirely different details. Sign up today if you want lots of other stuff not available here.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Heya,

Goddess of War is set to drop electronically in a few hours. This is your chance to also own a physical copy. For the next several days, there is a Goodreads Giveaway going here.

My way of thanking everyone for the support over the last few years. I really could not have done this without you folks.

And remember to tell your friends and pass the word down the grapevine. For all of October, Auberon (Jessica Keller, Book 1) is on sale as an ebook for $0.99, everywhere (Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, B&N, Draft2Digital, etc.). This is a good chance to catch up, or get your BFF hooked on the series, especially as I’m about a third of the way into Book 5: Flight of the Blackbird.

Cheers,

bd

So, as many of you know, I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I’ve had words (and that’s a long time at this point, but I digress). Recently, I was chatting with a friend of mine who teaches Theatre at a mid-western university. She mentioned that the school has been on her butt to do more small plays, because they have the space for it, but if they don’t use it, someone else might encroach on it and they might end up losing it.

I’ve known her for twenty years at this point, and she knows that I’ve written all sorts of stuff. So I mentioned that I had a bunch of old one-act plays I wrote a while back, sitting on my NAS awaiting entropy. (Or the heat-death of the universe, one of the two.)

Backstory: I was in Philadelphia, working on selling a new customer some software, back in 2005. I had been doing 3D graphic art with Poser and other softwares, but I didn’t have the skill to take the visions in my head and put them on paper. Patience, yes, but the tools were just not sophisticated enough for what I wanted to do, and the tools that were, were beyond my meager capabilities.

So I’m in PA on a sales call, and had a realization that there was a tool I could use to get those ideas out of my head. It was cheap, infinitely flexible, and I had a much greater mastery of it than I did Poser.

So I started writing again. It had been a while. I went most of the stretch ’85-’97 writing poetry. Some of it is even out there for sale and consumption, but there are about six volumes of stuff that has never seen the light of day. Might never. Don’t know.

Then I got my artistic fill by painting miniatures and designing RPG engines that my group played. Again, mostly never seen the light of day, but that’s because I would have to rewrite everything from scratch to eliminate all claim to IP from the asshole who was my partner for a few years, before he bailed on me and left me holding the bag.

After that, Poser and 3D art that was good enough to actually win me a few ribbons at The Puyallup Art Show. (And that’s serious art, people.)

But it wasn’t enough.

Went back to writing.

This time, I started writing plays. Don’t ask me why. Never had before. Partly, the result of knowing my friend and listening to her comments. Partly, looking for a new challenge. Whatever. It worked for me, for a while.

This was about the time my first wife was diagnosed with Stage Four Breast Cancer. Nothing they could do. Doctor gave her six months to live, back in summer of 2005. (She wasn’t done, so she held on for three years, but that’s another story I might tell someday. And I might not.)

She was still working, following an initial surgery to put a rod in her leg, and then radiation, but nothing worked. The Chemo was at best going to keep everything at bay, but would eventually be what killed her when it stopped working from tolerance issues.

Since I had an office job, and she was in retail, there were several nights in any given week when I would come home to an empty house. I used to paint miniatures on those nights. At that point, I started hanging out at a bar down at the bottom of the hill where they got to know me. They would let me sit at the bar, order food, and then write (longhand, mind you) for an hour or so. Turned out several cute, short, one-act plays of fairly poor quality (didn’t know what I was doing, but the dialogue was still pretty good). Mostly, just filling space in my artistic needs.

Later, I would learn writing screenplays with another guy, and never went back to the stage plays. Then I met the second wife and she got me back into writing, but fiction this time, with the understanding that I could publish stuff instead of having to deal with gatekeepers in Manhattan.

So I’m talking to my Midwest friend (the one who teaches Theatre) the other day. On a lark, dug up a half-dozen or so old plays and sent them to her to see if there was anything worth improving. God only knows, there might be. Dunno. Not an expert on Theater. Leave that to her.

But then I had a realization. “Because it is the future, and I can…” was the subject line of the email I sent her.

I can bundle all those short one-act plays up and publish them.

Her response was that normally a play had to be staged at least three times before they would publish it, but then she realized that I’m my own publisher (technically, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) has a publishing house, and I have a separate one that will start putting stuff out in 2017, good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.)

So I spent today committing techno-archaeology. Dug up a bunch of pieces and read through them for a light editing pass. According to my notes, most were last touched in early 2009. In the modern fiction business, we call those Trunk Stories. You have them, you like them, but you have to throw them in the trunk because you can’t sell them anywhere. Maybe too long, too short, wrong subject matter. Maybe they aren’t that good. Or not what New York TradPub wants.

Doesn’t matter. I can publish those plays. I can share with the world where my head was at in 2008-2010. It makes fascinating reading.

So then we went looking on the Amazons for how stage plays are published today. I have a shelf of old Samuel French booklets. Dull, boring covers with text and either no art or something vague.

Not any more.

One of my favorite plays is “The Lion In Winter.” It was interesting to see the covers that various people had put on it. The best was probably the two teenage kids, artistically nude, clenched, with her back to the camera and nothing showing.

I mean, come on, this is sixty-year-old Henry 2 and seventy-year-old Eleanor. But no, we get a couple that looks better suited to a cover of Romeo and Juliet (and no, don’t get me started on THOSE covers, thank you very much).

So guess what? I’m going to figure out how to bundle them up, and put them out there. Four Cisco plays (so far, might write more. Like that boy). Couple of monologues. Few other talking heads kind of pieces where I was (unconsciously, because I didn’t know any better) working on my dialogue as a craft. The conversations still hold up nicely, IMHO.

It goes back to the bakery. I have Science Fiction in a variety of flavors. There’s fantasy to consume. Got some poetry for folks. And now, I’ll add Theater.

It also inspires me to either write more Cisco plays as an ongoing thing, or turn him into a genre hard-boiled punk kind of character. Probably both. It’s more fun to just let dialogue rip, and not have to deal with inner thoughts, because many of these characters work better as ciphers.

If you get inside their heads, you lose something. I always prefer my writing to keep some element of burlesque to it, making you work to fill in some of the gaps with your own damned imagination instead of me having to spell it all out.

So watch this space for more news. Right now, trying to decide if I should drop them individually, or as a bundle. The plays all run about 30-35 pages, so maybe 40 minutes if staged. They are all discrete, but series (Gosh, me? write a series character, even then?) The monologues, while shorter, are also much denser. Probably 20-25 minutes if staged.

Opinions?

99c each for a bunch, or $4.99 for a whole block together? I prefer the latter, but that’s because I make more money at $2.99-$9.99 than I do above or below. Let me know your thoughts?

shade and sweet water,

BD

West of the Mountains, WA

but aren’t we all?  😉

Extreme Sci Fi bundle runs out in a few days. After that, you’ll never have the chance to get this collection of writers together in one place again. (Well, maybe Kris and Dean and Kevin J, but they play in a much bigger league than I normally get to.  Hopefully, all this work will impress them enough I get to do this again.)

Fairchild, my novel in the bundle, was something I had wanted to try for a while. Hard Science Fiction with a real sciencie bent to to it. I have no idea how those people travel between the stars. It’s not relevant to this story. Maybe later I’ll figure it out. What I wanted to cover was a place where this girl is using physics and math and motion in her everyday life, intentionally solving problems without resorting to the sorts of hand-waving, techno-babble that always drives me crazy in (bad) SF.

I get Chekov’s Gun. If you are going to use it in Act 3, it damned well better be on the mantle in Act 1, and discussed by the characters. Too often, I feel that SF forgets to set up the toy that’s going to save the day later. It just becomes a McGuffin to be pulled out of their…pocket at the last moment, that just happens to save the day.

Deux ex Machina, if you will.

For Dani, the suit is her way to sticking it to the man. Of sticking out. Everyone else either wears a normal flight suit with everything built in, or relies on the ejection seat to have everything packed correctly in an emergency.

She sees the suit as an extension of her own self. And counts on it and her own training to get her through any situation. It doesn’t help that she’s a little crazy, but that’s why she has Eleanor to keep her on the beam.

She can play these games, this Extreme Science Fiction Athlete, because she isn’t normal (and boring). She can fly by free-gliding on winds and thermals. It is part of who she is. She can jump down an inclined cylinder of air and play a racing game of pistons (a sport she will invent when she gets back). She can pretend to be the mutant offspring of an anglerfish and a shark and scare the hell out of Chike.

The tech exists, and isn’t that much beyond what we can do today, so I have no doubt that it will be available on Amazon.earth one of these days for you to order when you get home.

At the same time, I didn’t want to get too wrapped up in the tech and extreme, and lose sight of the people at the heart of the story. Because this one is about people.

Every story I write is generally baked into a much larger universe before I commit words. That is my planning technique, personally. World-building on a grand scale, with lots of notes and prep. I grew up reading comic books, so I tend to write stories that are part of a much longer, much larger thread. I’m not going to spoil the surprise and drop any useful details, but I already have a second and possibly third novel in mind for her. (We’ll see after I finish the next Jessica Keller novel.)

The other thing I wanted to do was do science fiction scientists. And not the exotic kind you see on television, where they have access to all data ever recorded at their fingertips, and the bleedingest edge of technology handy. Or turn into modern tomb raiding thieves.

Real science.

The boring stuff, where you go out in the field, in the rain and cold and hot, to put out sensors, or look at rocks, or measure weather patterns. Slow, laborious grunt work that the PhD’s will pawn off on the grad students, who will in turn make the freshmen do the actual labor.

You don’t ever make a grand discovery in a 42 minute episode, especially if you have to fight off monsters, murders, or plague along the way. You spend years in the field, publishing tons of obscure and arcane studies of no interest to anyone outside your field (and your tenure board).

Excitement is when something goes wrong, and the characters have to fall back on their plans to fix it. It gets more fun when we consider the aliens in Fairchild’s universe: the Elder Race.

Total mystery, to even prove that they existed in the first place, except by extrapolation of probability physics. Proving, as it were, that the dog didn’t bark.

Spoiler alert: They aren’t going to just land one day and introduce themselves. I’m not sure what happened to them, but it was slow, rather than fast, and deliberate, rather than accidental. Like good stewards of the universe, they took the time to leave nature better than they found it.

So now, you have to add xeno-archaeology to the mix of hard science one must pursue. Digging in the soil for artificially-made artifacts, and not just weirdly-shaped rocks. The adventure happens around the characters, because of them, if you will.

So like I said, you only have a few days left until the bundle goes away forever and you’re back to paying full price for everything.

On a vaguely related note, there is about a week left to pre-order Goddess of War before it goes live on Oct 11. This is the fourth Jessica Keller novel. I’m about a quarter into book five now: Flight of the Blackbird, and busily plotting out books 6 & 7. TBD

And, I’ve been off-line for a long weekend, but I got a small greenhouse built. Now I don’t have to bring the citrus inside for the winter, with all the bugs that come along. Got a Meyer Lemon, Bear Lime, and two blood orange trees in pots. Now they have a lovely, little 8′ x 4′ home with plexiglass walls on two sides and roof, and it gets warm in there. Plus, I ran a gutter across the front, and plumbed it to irrigation drip lines to individually feed each pot.

Hopefully, I can largely ignore them all winter and they won’t die on me. When Global Warming gets far enough along, I plan to plant them with south-facing sun and let them just survive, but I have to build a much larger, permanent structure, in-ground green house to do that.

Copious spare time. We’ll get there.

As always, I look forward to your comments, thoughts, ideas, and dirty jokes.

shade and sweet water

BD

West of the Mountains, WA

It’s finally Fall around here.  Harvested all the grapes and pressed them. (Got about a quart of juice all told, because none of the vines are fully mature yet. Probably two years for everything.) Got all the apples and most of the pears. Will harvest the last few boscs this week. Getting ready to bring the citrus trees indoors for the winter.

It is the time of year when things slow down. But I need you folks to speed things up a little for me.

Right now, we’re in the mushy middle doldrums on the Story Bundle: Extreme SciFi. It has sold fantastically well, but the line has flattened out. Thank you to everyone who got out there and bought it early. (Some nice reviews of Fairchild in places like Amazon would be good, too, ya know.)

Right now, I’m talking to those other folks. Those of you who saw it and said to yourself that you’d get around to getting it. Now would be a good time. We’ll be starting down the ramp to the end in a few days, and then the bundle will be gone forever and you’ll have to pay full price for the books if you want to get them individually. You should get yourself an early Halloween present and buy the whole bundle.

The other thing you could do would be forward the link to all your friends with a good note. If you’ve liked my stuff up until now, those are the sorts of actions that get me closer to that day when I don’t have to get up and go to work in the morning. Seriously, every little bit helps. There is a very specific number of books I need to sell on a daily average. We’re nowhere close today, but getting closer. When that day happens, I expect my productivity to double pretty quickly, which means more things to entertain you with. (Because God knows, I’ll be dead at my keyboard long before I run out of stories to tell.)

So let everyone know they should go buy the bundle and read Fairchild. And help a whole slew of writers all get closer to that day as well.

In other news, a reminder: Goddess of War is up for pre-order everywhere. As many of you will remember, I did an offer with my most recent newsletter that everyone who responded would be put into a drawing. (You are on my newsletter list, right?). I reached out to the winner on Friday with the ebook package, so by now, it is possible that a fourth person has read Goddess, behind me, Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm), and Nerdy Editor Babe(tm).

The e-book will go live on Oct 11. Interestingly, the paper book is already live for real-time order on at least Amazon, if you can’t wait two weeks.

Meanwhile, I’m hard into the fifth Jessica novel now: Flight of the Blackbird.

Goddess of War was the longest thing I’ve written so far at 110,000 words, plus a few. (Auberon was 75k. Queen 95k, Immortals 88k). Blackbird feels like it will be at least that long, maybe longer.

To me, all the practice this year seems to have added detail and depth to the writing. The story is still there, but I’m trying to add setting with a trowel as I go. Places where I used one sentence before are getting a short paragraph. Minor characters are all getting at least one memorable line as they go. It makes for more words, and hopefully better ones. You’ll have to be the judge. Book should be out late spring 2017, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Not much more to say than that. I’ve been political on my other feeds and don’t feel the need to hammer on some of those points here.

I am who I am. I won’t convince people to change the way they think, except by example and Socratic method. And many of those folks I would talk to are too wrapped up in themselves to even consider how they appear to the rest of humanity. Because Blaze Ward is an overtly public figure, I think about how I want to be thought of. Or rather, which sets of people I want the good opinion of.

This year has been rough on everyone. I try not to alienate fans. God knows there are a few writers who will never get another penny from me, based solely on their viciously-bad political views, but that’s my choice. I have reached a point where I don’t want to talk politics with you. Or religion. Or much of anything else.

Instead, I’ll stick to Moirrey’s two favorite topics: glitter and unicorns.

Because, you know, unicorns.

shade and sweet water

BD

West of the Mountains, WA

With every writing project, long or short, I try to explore some new facet of my craft. That might be wall paper, it might be Voice, it might be a new Theme. With the most recent novel, Fairchild, I was pushing the envelope on what we might call truly Hard Science Fiction.

It is a new novel, in a new universe, one I spun up for a story bundle in which I got invited to participate. (see earlier blogs for more details about the timing and stuff.) The theme of the bundle was Extreme Sports SF.

For me, that meant Dani as an extreme athlete, doing the sorts of crazy stunts that rush junkies do to skirt the edge of death. Things like surfing 30 meter tall waves, or Class Stupid whitewater, or running marathons on Earth’s moon, or BASE jumping.

Things where mistakes mean death, not just embarrassment.

In this particular story, she’s flying a shuttle while also wearing her free-glider, a body suit with a built-in low-grade life-support system and flying squirrel membranes. She’s got air, heating/cooling, and electronics, and expects to be able to live in the suit for days at a time. Her own portable spaceship, if you will. Useful, when your shuttle suddenly dies mid-flight, at low elevation, in the middle of an electrical sand storm.

The situation got me to thinking about long-use space suits. Science Fiction tends to kind of skip over all the bio-break bits. You might see a character eat, if it advances the story, because lots of good things happen between people over food or booze. However, you almost never encounter the rest. (Exception: the gratuitous shower scene in many 80’s and 90’s SF movies, just so the hot, female lead could be seen topless, but I digress.)

At Worldcon this year (after I had delivered Fairchild, mind you), there was a panel on such things, and they listed all the sorts of bio-break things fantasy and SF hand-wave away. And suggested some interesting themes and scenes where you could incorporate them in your next story.

Here’s a thought experiment on personal waste elimination: Tomorrow, keep a running score of all the times you go to the bathroom, from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep. More than you thought, huh?

Now, imagine you spent that entire time in a body suit. You’d have to be “plugged” into at least two different systems to process everything, and those systems would be radically different for boys and girls, due to the nature of the plumbing in front. (We’ll presume the rear system can be generic, for now.) The processing will be the same, but the attachment mechanism would have to be different, and pretty customized for the wearer. And we’re not even talking about the skin layer that absorbs sweat.

Now, let’s go one extra step. Because I could, I wanted to explore a woman having to deal with all the usual crap, plus that time of the month. (This topic required interviewing Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) extensively for timelines and stuff. Hopefully I got it right. I am assuming that since both First Readers are females, they would have corrected me if I didn’t.)

One could presume that in a distant future, there would be a shot a woman could get, or an implant, or something, that would completely suppress her monthly cycle. We’re on the verge of it right now, and every female I’ve asked would be all over it, right up until the point they were ready to start a family. And this is not just a birth-control device, but a “I don’t have to bleed messily for days every month? Sign me up!!!” device.

Sign them all up.

But, as with all things medical, there will be some people for whom it does not work. Most, but not all. Dani is one of the unfortunates. She still has to have a period every month.

How utterly barbaric…

Now, couple that with a life-support body suit. One intended for hostile environments, or outer space. You can’t just take it off, when you reach the point where the egg passes and the uterine lining gets ready to follow it. No, you would have to have a system for handing it.

We discussed a number of options, she and I, from vacuuming, to bidet, to whatever. As the resident expert, she figured that a simple cotton-based tampon would probably be the most effective, most elegant, simplest mechanism for dealing with the mess. But you’re in a sealed environment.

Solution: The Harpoon Gun, as Dani likes to think of it.

You need to add a very small, specialized, air lock-type device to the groin area of the female body suit. The Harpoon Gun gets loaded like a crossbow (or a springbolt, in this particular instance), and locked into the airlock. Normally, I would expect this would be done by the female while lying down on her back, but I’m not trying to design it for the engineers here.

Activation would entail deploying the tampon through the inner airlock, and positioning it correctly internally, while maintain the cord back out through the air seal for manual extraction at a later time. Thus: harpoon gun.

I’m sure it will have a much more boring title, and a variety of trade names, when we get to that point, but Dani’s kind of a goof, and she’s under a tremendous amount of stress, and wondering if she’s going to die on this planet. And she’s got to contemplate using the harpoon gun in the field, which just fills her with unmitigated joy (sarcasm warning).

So when was the last time you encountered the messy, biological bits of your daily life in fiction? When was the last time the bad-ass chick in plate mail had to strip nearly bare in order to deal with a similar situation? When was the last time you included even a thought along those lines? I try to, because it makes my characters more alive for me, making them more human.

For example: Jessica Keller, considering getting more coffee, but realizing that at this point in the day, it will just make her have to go pee, and she’s not in the mood to get up and deal with people or the world.

We are all human (well, you understand). We pee, we eat, we poop. There will be farts in deep space. The gratuitous sex scene in zero-gravity will require an effort to clean up the mess. (And probably a variety of interesting tools.)

We edit out these sorts of things, not (just) because they interrupt the flow of the chase (presumably), but because Americans have a tendency to be extremely squeamish about all things biological or sex-related. You can mow down hookers in your car, or shoot people by the score, but you show one boob and the world might end. And the suggestion that a character might actually pee seems almost pornographic to some people.

Whatever.

Science Fiction is an exploration of what might be, given a set of assumptions about the way the world will change between Point A and Point B. Worlds and cultures change. You can make it more real for your readers if they get to experience the full range of emotions with your characters, and not just the near-failures at the end of Act One and Act Two, nor the climatic final battle. All the little things in the middle.

Extreme Sports athletes still need to fart, you know. Keep that in mind.

On other note, before I forget again: The fourth Jessica Keller novel, Goddess of War, is now available for pre-order on all the usual places. Delivery date is October 11, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. And I’m already well into book five: Flight of the Blackbird, which will come out sometime in the late spring, I think.

As always, lemme know your thoughts on things. I enjoy the conversation, and usually learn things.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA