Last of the Immortals finally available for pre-order

Immortals_600x900It has been an awesome year. A little overwhelming, but utterly awesome.

Earlier this week, Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ put Last of the Immortals up for pre-order on all the usual suspects. Several of you went and already pre-ordered.  That’s even more awesome. And I’m seeing people wander aimlessly through the stacks, reading things. Hopefully, you will find a little bit everything and that will fill your tummy with goodness.

So where are we at?

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Queen of the Pirates ends on a cliff-hanger (because seriously? that was enough emotion for one novel). Jessica has defeated the pirates, killed Ian Zhao, vanquished Jing Du, and thwarted The Red Admiral. She has returned home hurt, scarred, and searching for what her future will hold, having been through so much and being filled with misgivings.

Volume III picks up 40 hours later. We’re in motion. The Red Admiral is taking his battle squadron to Ballard, and he’s going to kill Suvi, the last of the original AIs from the Concord era. The Last of the Immortals. Jessica has to stop him, or die trying.

I had a LOT of fun writing this one. It’s got Jessica. It’s got Moirrey. It’s got Tomas Kigali. It’s got Nils Kasum and Tadej Horvat. It’s even got a little Loncar, my favorite bumbling wannabe villain. It’s got action, pulse-pounding, and combat. It’s got Valse d’Glaive. The whole last third or so of the novel is one battle sequence, Gotterdammerung. It ends with twists that I hope will surprise and entertain the average jaded reader. (Not you folks, being icons of purity and literary aficionados to the being…)

This novel turned out to be almost as long as Queen (85,000 to 92,000 words), so about a third again as long as Auberon. It neatly wraps up the first Jessica Keller trilogy, (yes, first.), and sets the stage for the next trilogy, which I will start writing in the winter, after I finish off the next Science Officer novella (#3, The Gilded Cage), and do some small pieces for other projects that won’t see the light of day until the middle of 2016, give or take.

Something special about Immortals is that it has Suvi. We introduced her in The Science Officer, and at the time she was just a minor character along to provide comic relief and a straight man. Who knew a year or more ago that she would evolve into one of my primary muses? She’s a little over a century old in Javier’s time. She is a little over six millennia old when she meets Jessica Keller at the Battle of Ballard. In between, Doyle Iwakuma (The Librarian) and Henri Baudin (The Story Road). Here, she gets to interact with both Jessica and Moirrey.

I think it turned out really well.

I hope I don’t spoil the surprise when I say that the fourth Jessica Keller novels will be entitled Goddess of War. I’m hard at work on the research necessary for turning out a story with accurate and entertaining details. Especially one that takes place in about 13,443 CE (it being 2,015 CE as I write these words.) Much has changed, but as we learn more about our own past and look back 10,000 years, we see how little really has changed, once you get past the accouterments of technology and being looking at humans as people. Jessica is people. Moirrey is people. Suvi is people.

That’s all I really have to cover today. I have a novel available for pre-order. I’m jazzed because it brings Jessica to a resting point on her road to the next steps. It should bring you the reader some manner of satisfaction that the story is rounded off and you know what happened. And you have the promise of more story as soon as I can write enough things to shut up some of the other voices that have gotten a wee bit jealous of all the attention Jessica got while they patiently waited their turn.

As always, feel free to send me notes and friend me on FB.  Newsletters come out quarterly, unless I have something extra special to announce (nothing planned, yet…) and the next one if due Nov 1. Always looking forward to questions, comments, ideas, refutations. Got a lovely response to last week’s blog, and it just made my whole day. So, thanks, Barry.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

west of the mountains, WA

The Voracious Reader

It still amazes me when I look at sales numbers and actually see people buying my books. I mean, I’ve been a story teller for as long as I have had language, but I was never in a position to actually make any money at it until very, very recently. I know I tell good stories, but…

Today’s topic is the voracious reader, and their place in the ecosystem. I’m not TradPub(tm). Those are the writers who have an agent, and an editor, and a contract with a major publishing house, generally out of Manhattan but also out of Seattle, like my buddy Scott James Magner. Their books are the kind you will walk into a Barnes & Noble and see displayed on the shelf, or an end cap (depending on how much money the publisher paid for the space). Big time.

I won’t say that you will never see one of my books on a shelf at B&N, because my novels are now in the big distributor catalogs, so you could order paper copies for yourself. I’m just not holding my breath. I’m also a little bit too much of a control freak to sell my soul to TradPub just so I could see myself in the book store. TradPub writers generally get screwed for royalties. (As The Passive Voice asks: What part of 70% royalties confused you?) But they also have a different target audience. For TradPub writers, they are generally going after the Casual Reader or the Social Reader.

Social Readers only buy this year’s major breakout hit. A few years ago, they all discovered light BDSM, because everyone went gray. Before that, it was Suzanne Collins’s wonderfully dystopian olympic games. Before that, everyone’s favorite boy wizard. The big houses make big money by moving millions of copies of a single book. If you happened to have written that book, you get slobberingly wealthy overnight.

Most authors never write that book.

The Casual Reader reads a book or two per month, and used to keep the mid-list writers in rent money. Because TradPub is all about the block-buster these days, there are far fewer mid-list authors these days, and all of them are pressured to write bigger and more exciting monster books that can be turned into franchise hits. You’ll see them on the shelf, a whole series of books with the same cover and a number on the side. (I do that too, but for reasons we’ll discuss in a moment.) They are slowly starving.

My target audience is the Voracious Reader. They read 50-200 books per year. (I used to do that, before I committed to writing that much instead of reading that much.) They ask all their friends for recommendations about new authors, and then go read a book by that person. If they like the voice and the genre and the style, they’ll buy ALL of the books that writer has available.

I have some voracious readers out there. I can see that when my more obscure titles sell. I mean, really, I write mostly science fiction, with some low-end fantasy (as opposed to EPIC FANTASY!!!), but I have also published several books of poetry (I suppose you could call it epic fantasy and urban fantasy) and people buy them.

My approach from day one was to have a number of titles available for readers who wanted to explore these worlds with me. Fabulous Publisher Babe (TM) calls it the bakery model. Someone walks into your bakery with a want. You might have the greatest cheese danish the world has ever seen, but they wanted coffee. Or a bagel. Or a scone. Something. I try to have a little everything available. It might not be the greatest scone, but once you read it, you might decide you like my cooking, so you’ll try the cheese danish, and the coffee, and the juice, and…

You get the point. Voracious readers read a lot of books. TradPub thinks that ebooks are going away, because they have priced their own higher than the cost of a hard-cover version of the same book. Mind you, it costs them about a tenth or less, when you factor in pitiful royalties to the author and minimal distribution costs. Usually, they end up losing money because Jeff rewards authors with a 70% royalty, if the price of the ebook is between $2.99 US and $9.99. Outside that band, the royalties drops to 35%. (And I would have some for free, but he won’t let me charge anything less than $0.99 and gets upset if I have something for free anywhere else. But I diverge from my task.)

For a voracious reader, they have a book budget, like other people have a coffee budget or a clothing budget. Whatever it is you do with your mad money. And I’m competing with TradPub for those dollars, as well as every other hybrid/indie writer out there.  I have to have a product that looks good (awesome covers, clean interior, friendly layout, etc.) Fabulous Publisher Babe handles that aspect of things. My job is making sure that after someone has liked the cover and read the blurb, that they read the first 10% and say “OMG, Must have!”

I can do that. I’m even pretty good at it on a good day. But it is a competition for money. Nothing more, nothing less. I exist because there are a lot of people out there with money who want to be entertained. If I’m on, they’re happy and come back for more books. They’ll come back for Queen of the Pirates because they liked Auberon. They will come back for Last of the Immortals (coming soon for pre-order) because I have entertained them.

I won’t (probably) ever see my books on a shelf in a Barnes & Noble. I probably won’t ever compete for major publishing awards. I’m not trying to. I want to make enough of a living telling stories that I can walk away from the day job, or at least go find something easier and part-time that I can ramp down from as I write more books and make more fans.

I doubt that I’ll ever write that book that bottles lightning. (Seriously, my best-ever single-day-sales just barely cracked 100 units moved. The big hitters move 50,000 units when that monster block-buster Gotta Have hits the bookstores. However, I’m not going to say never.) if I can sustain three digits per day in terms of selling spines, I can make enough to be happy. And every time I publish something, I do have that one chance in a million to bottle lightning.

With your help, we just might get there, too. But I’d rather have a bunch of happy fans telling their friends that I write good stuff. It warms me, and keeps me motivated to go home from here (where I have no access to the interwebs), and crawl down into a world that need telling.

Thank you for being fans, for being friends, for trusting me with your money.

shade and sweet water

bd

west of the mountains, WA

Science Fiction as Burlesque

I had a question from a friend who is a fan of Suvi, and it got me to thinking that other people probably had the same question/observation.

He was reading (re-reading, again) The Librarian, and the thing that jumped out at him was how much detail I left out of the middle, and how the end just kind of dangled instead of being a long, detailed, harrowing-of-the-shire kind of ending.

That was intentional, by the way.

This is important because roughly half the people who read Librarian love it and about half hate it. For those who don’t like it (and I have gotten a LOT of one-star reviews), the general comment is that I don’t go into another couple hundred pages about Doyle setting the forest on fire, or any possible wars with the locals, the whole barbarian-princess-seducing-the-Gods-to-bear-a-demigod/hero-son, etc. And then I have the audacity to talk about what Doyle and Piper will do when they get home, but not actually show all the details necessary to loft the library into orbit.

For my friend, that was what he liked about the story. He could play all sorts of “what if?” games with himself, letting his imagination run wild about the various aspects, and thinking about how things might have unfolded, or failed, or whatever, without me ever forcing him to have only one, canonical, solution. He got to think about those bronze-age barbarians in their little hill fort and wonder what they were like, or how they might have responded to the Gods themselves coming down and starting a new creation myth cycle.

For me, it sums up the best kinds of Science Fiction, the kind that has a strong element of burlesque to it.  For those of you who have never been to a burlesque show, you have a dancer up on stage, generally in some extremely suggestive costume that is well-matched to the music that will start up. (Generally, the dancers will be female, but not always. They will also come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, all the better to entertain you.)

As the music plays, the dancer will slowly move about, allowing the entire audience to get a good view (I’ll use her from here on in, but I’ve seen some really good male dancers as well) of her body, including her sides and back. I like backs.  I prefer a woman with good muscle tone in her back and bottom, and while most burlesque dancers tend to be a little more fleshy than I like, but they are almost always good dancers and emotive performers.

So as the song plays, she will slowly disrobe, one piece at a time: Gloves, shoes, stockings, outer top, skirt, etc. Generally, she will get down to a g-string and a brassiere. The last big reveal will generally involve her turning her back to the audience again, and unhooking the back while holding the front in place, playfully teasing the audience until she finally tosses the top to one side to reveal silver-dollar-sized (and frequently tasseled) “pasties” that cover up all color.  (It is a curious aspect of old laws in this country that made it illegal to display those parts specifically covered by the g-string, or the nipples.)

But at the end, you have been entertained. And yet, you have not seen “everything” she has to offer. She had shown you most of it, but left a good chunk (the most “exciting” parts, if you will) to the imagination. If she is a very good dancer (emotive in a charismatic way, establishing that perfect harmonic with the audience), they won’t care. And they can always imagine the rest, filling in the good parts.

Science fiction should aspire to that same level of artistic performance. Give them a good build-up. Tease them with ever-more-details and sensory inputs. Bring them right up to the edge before pushing them over. But never give away all the goods. Always hold something back from the show.

In The Librarian, we know what will happen, because Doyle has threatened it. But we don’t know exactly how it worked. Only that it did. We know that several months passed while they dig up the facility. We can imagine the problems they ran into, barely-past-space-flight-barbarians trying to understand a fusion reactor well enough to shut it down properly, dismantle it, and transport it home so they could suddenly bring their entire civilization up a level.

There were arguments, threats, pressure, despair, and victory. We know that Doyle and Piper managed it. But we don’t know how. We have to think about it. We have to put ourselves in that exact situation and ask, “How do I think Doyle would have done it? How would I have done it? Could I have succeeded?”

We know they succeeded, because the story Greater Than The Gods Intended takes place later, and contains interesting new technologies that make Doyle look like a wizard. Suvi helped design those systems. We know more about the universe because of Henri Baudin and Jessica Keller.

But I never show everything. There is always something held back, tastefully covered up at the end of the song, because I (at least I, the writer) want my audience to engage their own imagination and fill in some of those details in a way that makes them happy.

For those readers that just flat disliked the story, I’m sorry. It’s one that puts a smile on my face because it isn’t about fighting barbarians in the galactic hinterlands. It is about two people trying to overcome a lifetime of distrust about the other.

Doyle’s been attacked by rogue Sentience facilities. Suvi was trapped here by the fall of galactic civilization, and is afraid that she’s going to be dismantled and abandoned.

They must learn how to work with someone that might be the enemy, to accomplish something far greater than they dreamed might be possible. But the burlesque is what makes Librarian  work. I don’t want to go into several hundred pages of detail about how.

And hopefully, you are interested in letting your own flights of fancy roam.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

Immortality

It’s a trope in Science Fiction. An outgrowth of the rise of technology that it eventually overcomes mortality. I remember a comment in a book once, where one character explained that aging was a curable disease. And they had. He was fifteen or twenty thousand years old at that point, and well on his way to living forever.

I imagine the next major iteration of humans will face that question. Do we want to live forever? There will be narcissists and sociopaths galore who answer yes, but they are individuals, and not a species. While we are trapped in one system, we have a stark upper limit to the number of people an ecosystem can support. Dr. Norman Bourlag made it possible for us to transition through the latter half of the twentieth century without having to explore some of the darker themes of science fiction first hand. Because of him, the planet was able to survive a major surge in population without the limits of Malthus.

Today, we are watching first hand what happens as previously-marginal societies discover growth and development. Places that were once hells on earth are now able send their children to school instead the field to work. Women are being educated and becoming entrepreneurs. Whole societies are moving out of poverty and are ready to begin contributing to the advancement of the species, the arts, and the planet. At the same time, fewer women are dying in childbirth and more children are living to become adults.

This is a good thing.

So a century hence, will we see a population decline naturally? (I leave out the possibilities of the sorts of destructive warfare that might radically cull the species. I mean a peaceful future where women have one child, the world over, and we slowly come down to only a few billion human citizens.)

In science fiction, taking cues from historical precedent, there is always an assumption that population pressures drive exploration and exploitation of strange new lands. The Falkenburg’s Legion books, regardless of your opinion of their politics, make a really good exploration of this concept. And it holds water, to some extent. If we suddenly opened up an empty galaxy to exploration, terraforming, and colonization, we would probably see a population spike, as people would be able to expand, and might need to to fill empty lands with people to work. It is a story as old as humanity.

The reason that this is high in my mind right now is that I have sent off the third Jessica Keller novel, Last of the Immortals, to my support team for review and correction. They make my books better.  Lots.

At the same time, I have just shifted gears back into something new. Over the last few days, I have re-read The Science Officer and The Mind Field as I re-immerse myself in that stage of history to prepare for the third Javier Aritza book. (No, I’m not sharing the title yet, but I did get one thousand words done this morning, so we’re off and running.)

During Last of the Immortals, Suvi points out to someone that she is just over six millennia old (6,015 specifically). As I read the Science Officer, she’s 121 years old, much of that as a fairly primitive AI probe-cutter with a hull number but no name. Javier spends his spare time programming her to be more like the kind of woman he wants, smart but submissive. (There is a reason he has two ex-wives.) So far, he’s had about five years of tuning and tweaking, much of it setting her up to be able to make herself better later on.

Humans at both ends of the Alexandria Station end of the universe are not immortals. Not like the AIs will be. Those creatures are limited mostly by hardware, and when they destroy Earth and most of the more industrial worlds, suddenly could not replace the hardware that their existence depended on. During The Librarian, Suvi is faced with her own mortality, as her systems  are starting to break down, and would have failed entirely in another century or so, were it not for Doyle Iwakuma rescuing her.

But as I work, immortality niggles at the back of my mind. Suvi will outlive Javier. She had, after all, script immunity, no matter how you want to look at it. She has outlived Doyle and Piper. She has outlived Henri Baudin. She will outlive Jessica Keller when I get around to writing the story set far enough in the future that people can talk about the fall of Imperial Aquitaine. (That one’s coming soon.)

For Suvi, loss of the people she loves is a major factor in how she grows and evolves over time. It is always there in the back of her mind, watching people she knows age and die, and other generations come up to replace them. Because of Javier, she does not turn sour and grumpy, as some AIs do. Nor does she fall victim to the god-complex problems that will eventually plague humanity when they start building every-more-powerful AI battleships and sending them off to do war with one another.

It will be one of those robot starfleets that decides the best way to eliminate Earth as a threat is to simply bombard the planet with asteroids and small moons until they pretty much wipe out all larger landforms. In the process, they add so much matter to the planet that what used to be one standard gravity at sea-level is no longer. And they hit the planet hard enough, enough times, at the right angle, to actually speed it up as it turns, reducing what used to be a twenty-four-hour cycle to something less.

They can do this because they are not complicated and messy organic creatures with families. They have no ethics except what has been programmed into them, and that does not consider the possibility that some actions are so evil that it would be preferable to lose a war rather than move forward. They are guns. Nothing more. You point them and pull the trigger. When they kill a person or a planet, they have no more culpability than the asteroid that landed.

You pulled the trigger. You decided to make a killing machine that did not ever wonder if it was doing the right thing. You decided implacable was a feature, and not a bug.

So now you have this ancient being who looks like a young officer in the Concord Navy. A woman in her early twenties, hard and professional, but still young. She is the villain in a thousand movies and radio dramas, because she is one of THEM. But she’s not. She’s a young woman who was programmed to be better than that, by a goofball ex-Concord Fleet officer turned pirate who nobody would believe was like that.

Today, she is functionally still a teenager, going through all the growing pains a young girl does as she tries to figure out who she is, what she wants, and where she is going to go with her life. And she can take her time, because she is not plagued by a biologically-imperative death. So she’s a goof. A snarky, smart-alec teenage girl (and not the kind that are the most evil creatures on Earth, either), with a snarky, smart-alec uncle in Javier. It is a buddy comedy of sorts, their life together.

But there will be life for her after Javier. I don’t know when or how they will part ways. They haven’t told me yet, as many other stories as they have shared. And you know what? I don’t really care. I want to explore and adventure with them, as long as they will let me.

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Inspiration

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Those of you know have been keeping score at home know that I moved this summer into a new place. The old house was 1800 sqft with a three car garage.  The new gig is just under 1100 sqft, with no garage, but a couple of outbuildings and a little over six acres of trees, ponds, and quiet.

I have spent the better part of several weekends unpacking boxes that I put away over a year ago, left first in a storage unit, and then a barn. As a result, I have had to assemble old bookcases, find the shelves, rearrange them several times, and then finally stack them with books.

It’s interesting, what changes you can go through over a year. Or, in my case, something like ten years.

It was a decade ago that my first wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and given six months to live. She wasn’t done yet, so she got another three years out instead. I still miss her every day.

One of the things she required (REQUIRED, mind you) was that I not turn into a shut-in when she was gone. That I would start dating again after she was gone, and be happy. (She left me several pages of lists of things I was to do, afterwards. I have now, finally, checked off the last item.)

So I met the woman who would become Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ around seven years ago. We dated for around six months, but it didn’t work out at the time. I went off and had other adventures along the way.

A little over two years ago, she appeared in my life again in a strange way (you gotta buy me cider, mead, or wine to hear that story). It worked out this time, and we got married a little under two months ago.

Along the way, I had to re-invent myself into someone completely new. People that knew me ten years ago might recognize the shell, but not the innards. My friend Dusty can attest to that, and he’s in the best position there.

So today, Labor Day Weekend in the US, I’m looking at the strange year I have had, and two years, and three, and five, and seven, and ten. And I’m arranging books on shelves, trying to sort out what should go where.

Between then and now, I’ve probably gotten rid of around 3,000 books. Mostly paperbacks, but still. I figure it comes down to roughly 3-4 cubic meters of books. And around a standard ton of paper.

When I decided it was time to move, I was ruthless, kinda. If I hadn’t read it in six years, and it wasn’t being retained for a very specific reason, it went. My office suddenly became navigable, which is saying something.

As I unpack, I’m culling more, simply because I really have become someone else, someone who doesn’t need so much stuff. It’s very weird.

Which brings me, long ways around a shaggy-dog, to inspiration. Thanks for staying with me thus far.

A number of readers have compared Jessica Keller to Honor Harrington. I feel honored, because that’s one hell of a nice comparison. But it’s not really accurate. I’ve read the first few books in the series, but they just never reached out and grabbed me. Haven’t read any of them past about the third one, not even sure how many there are.

When I set out to commit science fiction, my inspirations come from a different set of sources. I own everything Doc Smith ever wrote, including things he inspired, but someone else wrote, like all four Tedric books, written by Gordon Eklund from something Doc wrote, or the D’Alembert books (the original set) with Goldin. Everything, including a mystery title called Have Trenchcoat, Will Travel.

At the same time, I have read almost everything David Drake has ever published, but I have generally only kept the SF stuff and let the fantasy go. (He writes good fantasy, but it doesn’t inspire me as much as his SF.) And that’s generally in hardcover, so Drake takes up an entire shelf with hardbacks and another with paperbacks. I’ve probably recycled two more shelves of stuff.

(Pardon me, I keep having to wander back to my bedroom and examine what’s still on the shelf. I just got back from another run to Half Price Books to deposit more stuff for future generations of me to find.)

The only other significant writers in that bookcase now are CS Friedman (almost all of her stuff, regardless of genre, except a couple of recent, “modern” pieces), Michael Moorcock (the original 15-volume Eternal Champion hardbacks I picked up 20+ years ago), and Glen Cook (Books of the North and all 4, so far, Instrumentalities of the Night.) On a different shelf, in the hallway, I have all twenty Aubrey/Maturin books.

So, inspiration.

Patrick O’Brian inspired Drake to write the Leary/Mundy books. I love those. Re-read them when a new one comes out, so I have it all fresh. Drake writes realistic characters responding in human ways to extraordinary circumstances. Not many writers focus on that sort of thing, at least not while telling big stories. That’s why I rank him first.

Doc Smith just told humungous space opera. He invented the very genre, as far as anyone else working was concerned. A million battle fleets converging on a single planet and trying to blow it up. Grand Moff Tarkin was the next person to think on that scale. And Doc was on the bleeding edge of tech.  Re-read the second on the command ship describing “the Tank” and tell me that’s not a standing 3D Laser hologram, before any of those words had been invented.

Glen Cook, when he’s on, tells cracking good stories that bring a ground trooper’s point of view to grand epic fantasy. And if you asked me to rate my top five favorite single books, The Dragon Never Sleeps makes that list.

Michael Moorcock pretty much invented his own sandboxes to play in. Epic blending of fantasy magic and technology, along a strange spectrum that works.  If it’s a little too pot-boiler/deus-ex-machina in places, he handles it well.

CS Friedman, when she’s on, constructs fantastically rich worlds into which a variety of characters can romp. In Conquest Born makes my top five list as well. But Coldfire is close behind, as is The Madness Season.

So my inspiration is drawn from writers who told big stories, but always tried to keep the human element. Tolkien bores me because he wanders all over the place, down irrelevant dead-ends, and several of the big characters are gods masquerading as mortals in order to play their silly games with each other. The price of immortality is boredom, not evil. Don’t let Gandalf fool you.

I was inspired by some really amazing writers, telling stories that take place in a technological future where we’re still human. Where we could have a conversation over a beer or cup of coffee, separated by technology, not humanity.

My second inspiration is to tell stories about a future where mankind has spread to the stars, and not just white people from North American and Western Europe. China and India collectively represent forty percent of humans. They are poor today, but that’s a modern invention. India and China have both been the center of human civilization at one time or another. It is likely that they will be, again.

And I don’t mean modernists. China as outsiders see it is not the China that would take to the stars. I imagine that they would be more like those sailors and pirates of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Or the grand explorers of the 14th and 15th.

India is no more India than Europe is Europe. Both are collections of interesting peoples with their own languages, their own cultures, and their own dreams, working fitfully to find their own place in the sun. A thousand years in the future, I expect both will still be recognizable as such, assuming we make it off world.

And that brings me back to inspiration. David Drake makes no bones about basing many of his stories (however loosely) on historical events and adventurers. He mines all of history for how people hundreds or thousands of years ago got into a mess, fought their way through, and came out the other side. All the stupid friction that occurs makes it into the stories as well.

As you know, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The first thing the enemy does is f#%! it up. In Drake’s stories, plans go astray. And people react and respond.

This is on my mind because I just finished reviewing the final battle sequence of Last of the Immortals before I send it off to First Readers. Emmerich has a plan. Jessica has a plan. Both fail, but it is how they fail, and how both recover, that makes the final battle interesting.

It will be everything I expect readers of Auberon and Queen to be clamoring for, and none of it. It will be a final battle, but not THE final battle. Futures will hinge on it, but nothing grand appears to come of this battle, except for the men and women who pay the ultimate sacrifice.

I realized along the way that I don’t write epic fantasy, but I do (occasionally) write epic SF. I have (at least) nine Jessica novels planned. I’ll probably start organizing for #4 early next year, and start the series forward from there.

Between then and now, another Javier, another Brak (short) piece, and then I don’t know. I will let the Goddess of Music dictate for me when we reach that point.

I hope all that makes sense. I realize I’ve just written a way-longer blog than normal, but I had something to say and it took more paper than I planned. Hopefully, it made sense. Or will, after you go check out the names on your own bookshelf.

 

Shade and sweet water,

bd

Queen of the Pirates Goodreads giveway and other fall news

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First news: There is a Goodreads giveaway of Queen of the Pirates happening, for those of you that would like a paper copy that you can track me down and have sign, sometime.

Additionally, Book Three, Last of the Immortals, is now in the hands of first readers and editors. Expected publication date is roughly November 17th, just in time for OryCon 37 in Portland, OR.  I won’t be on any panels, but will be hanging out and generally having fun with a tribe of writers and other silly folks.

As cons go, Ory is much quieter than ECCC or Pax. Partly, that’s because it is a writer’s con, rather than for gamers or comic nerds (of which I am also both). There will be a lot of panels on how to write, how to become a writer, how to be successful, and how to enjoy it. And yes, those are four different tasks we all face. There will be a small dealers room, and a reasonable art show. But the core is writers.

There will also be a fantastic costumed element. Costumers from up and down the west coast come to OryCon and show off. Plus there is an amazing steampunk guild in the Pacific NW that goes all in. And it shows.

Afterwards, there will be a mass book-signing event at one of the Powell’s books satellite locations (the one out west, I don’t have the address or city in front of me, but over the ridge from downtown). Lots of people come up for it (like 20-30 authors signing kind of thing) and Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) will be there signing her books and is friends with the folks running it, so they invited me.

Immortals will be my fourth novel, so I at least look like a professional, even if last year, Fabulous Publisher Babe was seated between Todd McCaffery on one side and Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch on the other, with me running errands for Irene Radford. But this is your chance to get a signed copy.  And OryCon is about as close as we’ll get to a book release party.

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Thank you for everyone who bought and enjoyed Auberon and Queen of the Pirates. The reviews have been generally very good, but better has been that people liked it enough to leave a comment and a good rating. I write for me. I can do that, as a true independent writer not beholden to Manhattan editors. But it’s nice when other people read and like it, and even get it.

By now, hopefully, you’ve read Queen, and come to that lovely cliff-hanger ending. Your wait won’t be too long. Immortals turned out to be almost as long as Queen (81k before editors, probably 85k after, compared to 91k for Queen), because I ended up with a much broader and deeper story than I expected going in.

But we do resolve the three books as a trilogy. And there will be more Jessica Keller books, just not immediately. She’s finally happy to let me get back to some of the other things I originally had planned for 2015.  I will let everyone know when I start the next trilogy, as I expect to write those back to back to back once she tells me what I need to know.

Before that, I need to write a short piece for an anthology (the annual camp-con piece, of which Tales From An Alien Campfire was this year’s issue). I have another Science Officer story planned. A few secret projects that I can’t tell anyone about until probably the middle of next year. You know, stuff.

 

Went to World Con this year. That’s why there was no blog last week. In between exhaustion and other things, I felt it would be a good idea to keep myself to myself. There are some ugly trends out there that are slowly resolving themselves, and a few people caught on the wrong side of history, and few trapped in the middle.

One particular jackass has made it a point, over the last few years, to try to stack the slate of stories nominated for the Hugo awards, which are the Oscars of science fiction and fantasy. His general position is that women and minorities don’t belong in science fiction, and certainly shouldn’t be nominated for any awards. The Hugos should only be for white European men. Like I said, jackass. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic jackass.

So this year, he managed to dominate the nomination process in ways that will probably get it changed next year. And he appears to have burned so many bridges that you’ll never see him in anything major again, as big publishers are allergic to bad publicity. (Bad boy is one thing, neo-nazi punk is something entirely else, especially at a time when more and more women are buying and reading science fiction.  Did you see the article recently where the single largest demographic of gamers right now out there are adult women?  Warms my heart.) Enough voters chose “No award given” that there were literally no names for something like five of the categories.  It was brutal, and rude, and probably necessary.

Anyway, those of you who have read my stuff will note that I don’t generally have a socio-political axe to grind. (Okay, not many, but still.) I just want to tell a really good story, with interesting characters doing believable things in the face of incredible odds. If I happen to have characters who are black, or brown, or female, or alien, or whatever, it is because I believe that in the future, we will have moved away from the current lens of race and gender politics. (Hopefully, some researcher in the distant future is reading my ancient historical works and giggling at the concept of only having one gender. I’ll keep banging the rocks together, just in case.)

I had this conversation yesterday with someone. Science fiction, at its best, is about what it means to be human. To explore where we are right now, and where we are going. To go back to some past point and change a single thing and see where it lands us. To move past our present and engage our future. The very best episodes of Star Trek (TOS or NextGen) did that. (“There are FOUR lights!”)

There are important works in science fiction that explore all the strange corners of human civilization. Past, present, or future.  While I may not be the right reader for some of them, it really does warm my heart to see so many new voices, so many new cultures, so many new genders exploring these things. Doubly so when the old white dinosaurs of publishing culture are finally dying. It gives me more things to read, more things to talk about, more ideas to think. And while I might prefer Doc Smith or Isaac Asimov, I do some for their exploration of the future, not their horribly-dated social consciousness. I can laugh at the Lensman books, or Skylark, or Robots, while not losing the core of the idea they wanted to convey.

That being said, modern space opera tends to be a very Euro-centric affair. Can someone recommend me a writer from that geographical span of cultures we call “Middle East” for some good space opera? I would like to see how they would do it different, and what I can learn from them.

Shade and sweet water,

blaze

Last of the Immortals

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Hiya,

First off: thank you.

I had a big print-book giveaway on Goodreads last week and had a bunch of people sign up for a copy of Auberon. At the same time, pre-orders for Queen of the Pirates have gone kinda through the roof right now, and the book won’t drop until Tuesday morning (I think Seattle time, but I’m not sure. It will be in your hands electronically by the time you get out of bed, anyway.)

Planning to do a Goodreads giveaway for Queen the week after I get back from World Con, so in about eight days. Like the others, it will be set up for readers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.

Because things have gone so well this week, both from a business standpoint as well as a creative one, figured I’d give everybody a sneak peek on what’s coming.

Y’all are familiar with Auberon by now (I hope.) Queen of the Pirates picks up after Jessica gets home, as she is getting ready for her next mission.  This mission takes her even further into the back of beyond, and the First Lord and the Premier want her to learn diplomacy so she can be more than just a Fighting commander, going forward.

<plot and storyline explanation chopped out />

So after all that craziness, I ended Queen on a cliffhanger note and set up Gotterdammerung with Emmerich Wachturm, the so-called Red Admiral. The third book in the first trilogy is Last of the Immortals. For those of you that have read The Science Officer, (that’s all of you, right?), the actual being who is the Last of the Immortals is Suvi, making her appearance in Immortals some twelve hundred years after the events covered in The Librarian.

As of this morning, I’m just shy of 60,000 words on Immortals. I had planned it to be 60k, but I’m still deep in the middle of three different simultaneous final battles. Feels like it might be 70-75k at this point, once I round off everything and tack in several epilogues. So I need to put my head down and write more.

I think y’all’ll be pleased with the results. Queen was a fun novel for me to write, extending everything that we had in Auberon and taking Jessica places I never expected. But that’s the fun of writing into semi-darkness. (I call it darkened hallways. You know where it heads, roughly, but you don’t see the details until you’re on top of them.) Immortals brings it all to a place of rest, where we can recover and figure out where we go next.

There is a second Jessica Keller trilogy planned. Dunno when, because I have other things I want to write, and I still can’t afford to quit the day-job yet (planning. trust me, planning for that day). As an extra teaser, book four is entitled Goddess of War. That will make much more sense once you complete Queen of the Pirates, by the way. (There is also a third trilogy planned, but I won’t get to it for a couple of years, most likely, as I need to write a half dozen other novels before I can get to what will be Jessica’s Book Seven. I also have that title, but I’m not sharing it yet. More suspense that way.)

Schedule reminder, for those of you keeping score at home.

World Con, Aug 21-23 in Spokane, WA

Ory Con 37, Nov 20-22 in Portland, OR

I have also been invited to the big book signing event Powell’s books does, the Sunday night after Ory Con. I will have copies of Auberon, Imposters, and Queen of the Pirates with me in paper form. More importantly, Last of the Immortals will be out that Tuesday prior, and you can get your copy and get it signed if you happen to be northwest enough to make the trip. I’ll include links when we get close. This is more to drum up business for Ory Con, which is a lovely, writer-centric con (as opposed to a gaming con or media con) that deserves lots of traffic.

As always, please let me know if you have questions or ideas. If any of you know makers, I would love to work with someone to get Science Officer mugs made (see The Mind Field for more details.) The University of Ballard will also need t-shirts and maybe mugs at some point, based on how Last of the Immortals is shaping up. If anybody wants to cosplay, lemme know and I can give you better details about Jessica’s uniform. Haven’t committed it to print yet, because it wasn’t necessary, but you never know. Seeing someone in a Republic of Aquitaine Command Centurion uniform at a con would totally rock. 🙂

That’s about all the silliness I have this week.

shade and sweet water,

bd

Queen of the Pirates, and other news

So about now, the next Hive story, entitled Moonshot, has been finally published on all the major sites. It’s the next sequel to Myrmidons, and features everybody’s favorite psychic ant nest in her further adventures. This time, she steals technology from the gods so that she can demonstrate the non-primacy of man as alpha predator.

Because even ants dream…

Also, starting Monday (8/10), I am having another round of Goodreads Giveaways for Auberon (enabled for US, UK, Canada, and Australia separately) for a print version of the first Jessica Keller novel, as we prepare for the release of the second novel in the series, Queen of the Pirates, currently available for pre-order on most major internet retailers.

Queen is Jessica’s story after she gets home from the Long Raid in book one. To some, she’s a hero. To others, an insubordinate plebe who has risen too far above her station. The First Lord and the Premier want her to become something more than just an excellent commander, so they send her to a quiet front to practice diplomacy with a friendly neighbor.

Once there, she uncovers a plot to destabilize the entire frontier, driven by Imperial Admiral Emmerich Wachturm. The conspiracy keeps getting deeper as she probes, and she must find friends among her enemies if she is going to turn the tide, before a final battle that sees her go beyond everything anyone imagined.

It’s a longer piece than Auberon (90k vs 60k). As I got into it, I realized I had a much larger story to tell. Worse, in the middle of it, Arnulf turns to Jessica and says “Tell about your founding legends for the Republic of Aquitaine.” So I had to stop and figure those out, literally in the middle of a chapter, before I could continue.

The result of that was the novella The Story Road, the first of what will be several Henri Baudin stories. (Word of advice: The Story Road is, as I have mentioned elsewhere, a slipstream of magic realism and science fiction. I mean, let’s face it: Henri is a bard. Literally a man who busks for a living. And he stumbles across how to reignite galactic civilization in the aftermath of the the Darkness.)

It’s not going to be everybody’s cup of tea. It is a quiet piece. No gunfights, no car chases, no great romantic conflicts or conquests. It also contains more adult content. If you want sarcasm and combat, stick with Jessica and Javier.

I rather enjoyed writing The Story Road, because it’s Henri as a young man, long before he Founds the Republic of Aquitaine, of which Jessica will be born to defend. It’s magic realism, so I get to color outside the normal lines in Jessica and Javier’s universe, where everything is grounded in realism and normalcy. It’s quiet and strange, because one hallmark of magic realism is the fact that you never know if the things you see are real or just in your head.

Henri never knows. It doesn’t stop him from pursuing his dream, and accidentally up-ending the entire galaxy along the way.

But back to Queen. Read them in either order, Queen or The Story Road, but the concept of the powerful magic of Founding Legends will be more apparent when Jessica is talking to Arnulf about them. It becomes all the more so when Emmerich shares his own founding legends from the Empire, and how they differ from Aquitaine. (It’s a very interesting dinner party conversation, as one might imagine.)

And, Queen ends on something of a good cliff-hanger, as one would expect from book two of a trilogy. That’s planned. It’s the end of Act II, after all, when things are supposed to be as bad as they can get. It flows right into the third novel, Last of the Immortals, which is just about done and ready to go to my first readers in the next few weeks, with a publication date in mid-November, just before Ory Con down in Portland, OR. Structurally, you might compare it to the end of Empire and the beginning of Jedi. (Not that I think they are that equal as action adventures, but the pattern of story-telling follows the same river.)

As I said above, Queen is now available for pre-order on the major sites. And I plan to be at World Con in Spokane, WA in a little more than a week. I’ll have a few physical copies of both Auberon and Queen if you want to pick one up then and have it signed at the con. (If you can’t make the con and still want one, send me an email and we’ll work out details. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is good at handling that sort of thing for me.)

For those of you keeping score at home: the house is finally done and I might be able to move into it this week. And the wedding was awesome. Her brother officiated and everyone was well fed and enjoyed all the wine and mead I made (36 bottles when we decanted the carboys). There’s even video on FB.

Once Queen comes out, I can finally say my crazy summer has reached a point where things might settle down and I can enjoy life without the constant churn. I’m looking forward to setting a table down in the upper meadow, under the two big trees, where I can sit and write in the shade, and listen to the little critters chirp and argue. Once Immortals is done, I’m onto my fall projects: something for the next camp-con anthology (Tales from an Alien Campfire being the 2015 edition); some more Javier, some more Dieselpunk, some more I-dunno.

It will be fun. And feel free to drop me a line occasionally. I try to answer in a reasonable manner, given that the day-job still intrudes and I will shortly have a much longer commute both ways.

shade and sweet water…

bd

 

I’m back, kinda

Summer has been kinda awesome. For those of you keeping score at home, I published two novels, a novella, and two short stories, plus a couple of audio books. I also finished building a new house and am about to move in, and got married to Fabulous Publisher Babe™.

Yesterday, I published the summer newsletter, for those of you who are on the mailing list. (This is also your chance to sign up. The next one is due around November 1, as I only send them quarterly. More frequent news comes out with this blog.) Which brings us to the future tense, more or less.

Sometime in the next week or two, Moonshot will be coming out. That’s the next Hive story after Myrmidons, although this one is not (to the best of my current knowledge) based on actual events, like Myrmidons was. (Don’t ask. You wouldn’t believe me.)

I’ve also been looking at the proof of the next Jessica Keller novel, Queen of the Pirates. It’s really amazing looking. It is now also available for pre-order on most sites. Sometime soon, it will be available as a paper edition, as well, because I will need to approve it ahead of time so I can order a backpack full of copies for myself so I can take them to World Con, XXX for anyone who will be there and wants to get one signed by the author.

Unlike for Auberon, I don’t plan on doing a book release party for Queen of the Pirates or Last of the Immortals, since both books are coming out for major cons (World Con and Orycon, respectively). Maybe sometime next year I’ll have another party.

I am also on the home stretch for Last of the Immortals. It will mark Suvi’s (possibly) only appearance in Jessica’s time frame. Once you’ve read Queen of the Pirates, you will better understand why she’s here. Once I finish Immortals, you’ll understand how strange the future is going to get.

Queen of the Pirates comes in at a little over ninety thousand words. For scale, The Science Officer and The Mind Field are both around twenty-four thousand, Imposters is around forty-five thousand, and Auberon is a little over sixty thousand. Queen is a third longer than I originally expected, because I got into it and realized I had too much story to tell, but no place to cut because the story flows right into Last of the Immortals with barely time to breathe.

When I’m done with Immortals in another month or so, I will turn back to shorter work. I owe the next CampCon anthology a short story by winter. Last year’s anthology XXX is where I first envisioned The Shipwrecked Mermaid.

Not sure what’s next, but leaning towards revisiting some of my fantasy characters, given the theme of the next anthology (Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and Magic. Sub-title Where Close Counts.) The usual suspects will be involved again. Knotted Road Press is publishing, and the volume is due out in Spring 2016, right before Norwescon, so people can take copies to show off. I might do a BarCon, like I did this last time. (That’s where you show up for a while and hang out at the bar with folks actually at the con, but not spending any time doing the con itself. I get grumpy around that many people for long periods of time. If you don’t understand what that means, you should do a search on “Introvert Hamster Ball” and read the comic for a better description of me and most writers.)

After that, I have plans for the next Javier Aritza story. I have known what it would be for a while, but I committed to Jessica Keller a while back and needed to get her done so I could move forward. It also forces me to live in Javier’s distant future, which forces me to think about what the distant past was like when he was live, from the point of view of folks like Doyle Iwakuma and Jessica Keller.

Past that, who know? I am trapped in a place where I am not selling enough books to walk away from the day job and commit to writing full-time, like my sweetie and a few others I know. (Tell more of your friends. I could very much take advantage of the extra time to get more books done. I’m working 50 hours a week right now as a database nerd, and it’s fun, but still…)

I have given thought to Patreon. There is actually an artist I support myself, providing cash to on a monthly bases because what she’s doing is so different from everything else I have seen and entertains me so much. Fabulous Publisher Babe and I have talked about doing a Patreon, but I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. On the one hand, it would be another revenue stream towards not having to have a day job. On the other hand, I’m not sure how I would reward folks.

If I didn’t day job, I’d have a lot more time to write. I know writers who do Patreon, and they reward supporters in various ways. For me, I would probably do more short stories and snippets of longer pieces (character sketches, chapters, etc.) then post them for folks to enjoy before anyone else did, or without having to buy them individually when they did come out at a later date. For those of you who have made it this far, I welcome your suggestions, ideas, or (extremely polite, mind you) abuse on the topic.

I enjoy publishing again. And won’t stop until I can’t communicate the ideas in my head to other people (typing, dictation, direct brain interface, whatever). This is the brave new future before us. It gives me the author a chance to interact directly and personally with you the reader.

I’m not a graphic artist, producing pretty things to look at. I’m not a musician, like many of my friends, where I can sell CD’s at the same time I have regular concerts.

What would you (yes, you laddie) want if I was to get serious with the idea of a Patreon?

I can promise you I have LOTS of things that have never yet been published in any format. I’ve been writing compulsively for thirty plus years. That works out to six volumes of poetry (all of The Forestal, combined, is a little less than one volume, by length and mass, scattered across three of those volumes, for comparison sake); several screenplays we have been shopping around trying to find financing for; several short stage plays; odds, ends, and sundries that need a home.

You could be the first to EVER read some of these pieces. Let me know.

Hopefully, I haven’t bored you yet. I look forward to emails and comments. There are a few people who actually write to tell me what they think. I also could use more (good) reviews of things on Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, Barnes and Noble, and Goodreads. Tell all your friends. Make them sit down and read some of the things you’ve read. (You’ll note: I don’t DRM things. The first person I decided to support on Patreon came about because someone had pirated her stuff and I liked it so much I had to go buy things to keep her in business. I hope all people are that kind and thoughtful. Starving artist and all that.)

And again, thank you. Supportive fans mean the world to me.

shade and sweet water

blaze

It’s Summer

So,

y’all remember earlier when I said it was going to go from busy to busier? Maybe not. Anyway, simple note here for everyone.

Things that have come out:

  • Auberon (Jessica 1/Alexandria Station)
  • The Shipwrecked Mermaid (Rick Pine 1)
  • Imposters (Rick Pine 2/sequel to Mermaid)
  • The Story Road (Alexandria Station)

Things still coming (August):

  • Moonshot (Hive)
  • Queen Of The Pirates (Jessica 2)

The house is just about done, and I’ll start moving in next weekend, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Might even post pics at some point. Got the fridge clean and installed today.

I’m getting married in three weeks. Fabulous Publisher Babe becomes Mrs. Fabulous Publisher Babe. I am one seriously lucky dude.

I’ll be at WorldCon in Spokane, WA in August if anybody wants to buy me a cider and get me to sign a book. (Body parts negotiable.) Queen Of The Pirates will be out just before then.

Gonna take July off entirely from blogging, because frankly, as much as I love you folks, I’ve got too much going on. Stay happy and well-hydrated on my absence.

Shade and sweet water,

blaze