The Hammerfield Payoff Audio (and other news)

Happy Dance!!!

The Hammerfield Payoff (The Science Officer Volume 8) is now on sale at Audible, and it will be available on iTunes and Amazon within the next few days.

For those of you keeping score at home, that means that Matt has caught up with me and completed Season One of The Science Officer. All eight books are now available in an audio format. This makes me happy.

In addition, I’m hard at work on what will become story #9, hopefully in the fall. This one will be a collection of shorts, instead of a novella, like the rest are, and will serve as a bridge between Season One (1-8) and Season Two (10-17). Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is also currently researching how we might do the Omnibus Editions as straight audio books, by just having Matt upload his original files into the new title and running with it. Stay tuned for more details as I know them.

Things landed at a good spot at the end of The Hammerfield Payoff, and it had always been my intention to take a break so I could make some progress on Jessica. If you’ve been paying attention, you saw my note earlier this week that I had finished the first draft of Lord of Winter, with a planned publication date of December 2018 at present. The Red Admiral  (Jessica #6) comes out in a little over a month, and I’m quite thrilled with it.

Melissa is hard at work on doing audible versions of the Jessica Keller books, starting with Auberon and she is deep into Queen of the Pirates right now. Eventually, all nine of those will be available in audio versions as well, as I expect to write the last two Jessica novels (8 & 9) over the next 12 months and drop them on roughly the same schedule in 2019 (June and December).

Thank you for staying with me as I work through this mess. There are so many stories I want to tell, and so little time to tell them, but there is also good news on that front. On February 24, I walked away from the day job finally and have spent the last month organizing and speeding up my writing.

According to folks like Dean, most writers actually slow way down for at least six months to a year after they make the transition. Something about losing the focus on carving out whatever time a person has, between job, family, and life, to write. They suddenly have hours of free space that needs to be used writing.

It is a muscle. I am aware that I can’t just make a huge leap to writing 10,000 words a day. (I have done that twice, under weird and special circumstance, btw.) But this year, I want to jump from a target of 450,000 words to 650,000 words. That involves going from an average of just over 1200 word per day to just under 1800 words every day. I don’t write every single day, as things happen. (Went to a nursery in Morton, WA on Thursday and that was a day trip.) But Friday I managed about 5500 words.

The key is progress. For me, a little counter at the top of my spreadsheet that assumes 1781 words each day, offset by how many days into the year we are. Today is the 90th day of 2018. I’m a little over three days ahead of my production target, and I spent the entire morning in the garden. Planted new stuff: two FIlbert trees, another aronia, a new lingonberry, and a new kind of strawberry (flavor #15). Took a grape, a strawberry, a lavender, and an oregano out of pots and put them in the ground. Had some coffee and some gatorade, and now getting into the second half of my day. There will be words shortly, and then I’ll head into Seattle later and do a barcon. (That’s where I won’t go to Norwescon for personal reasons, but will hang out at the bar and catch up with old friends in town. If you read this in time, ping me with contact info if you wanna meet up, or come looking.)

We’re making progress. I’m speeding up in my writing, as I’ve hit 5,000 words in a day a couple of times now over the last two weeks. That means more Javier and Jessica for you.

Two tidbits, as rewards for people that made it this far: I just finished a short story that is a sequel to Fairchild. Publication date unknown, because it’s 6500 words now, and I could turn around and make that an Act One of a full novel, depending on feedback. Maybe later. Title: The Strawberry Dragon.

Second: there will be a new Alexandria Station story coming out in June. It takes place at the beginning of the Concordancy War, and is the start of a new timeline (new characters, new worlds, new everything) just before the fall of civilization. Title: Last Leaf Falling. Watch this space for more details.

Thank you for helping make my dreams come true.

Shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA