In 2019, I made some lifestyle changes.

For decades, I was in the habit of drinking two-and-a-half or three cups of coffee a day — not much by the standards of truly epic coffee drinkers, but if I missed the morning brew, a headache was inevitable.

At night, essentially every night, there was a glass or two of red wine. More was not unusual. It was a years-long pattern: coffee in the morning to get my brain going, wine at night to quiet the brain. But the ritual began to feel like more and more of a burden on my body and brain, and — not for the first time — I started thinking I really ought to clean up my act. So I started cutting back.

At almost the same time, my son-in-law recommended a book called Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Ignore the new-age feel of the subtitle. The book is written by Ph.D. Matthew Walker, it’s based on many studies, and it has nothing to do with dream interpretation. Instead, the book looks at the negative effects that alcohol and caffeine have on both the quality of sleep and on memory retention, and it also presents evidence on the need, and the benefits, of getting 7-1/2 to 8 hours of sleep every night.

Like many (or is it most?) women I often have trouble sleeping. Going to sleep is generally no problem, but waking up at two in the morning and not being able to sleep again for hours — that’s a killer. So I decided to go all in on the program. I continued cutting back on coffee until I was down to a half cup in the morning. (If I miss that, I don’t even get headaches anymore!) And for the most part I stopped drinking alcohol, although I’m not an absolutist. I’ll still have a glass of wine on occasion. I also make an effort to get 7+ hours of sleep each night. (Confession: I almost never manage a full eight hours.)

I was emotionally ready to make the changes, so other than some days spent feeling sleepy, it wasn’t hard.

I’ve kept the new lifestyle for many months now, and I like the result. I feel better, especially in the morning. I sleep better too, although this took a long time to achieve. I still wake up in the wee hours, but can fall back asleep more often than in the past.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to Why We Sleep at Amazon†. I listened to the audiobook, but the paperback edition is only $11, so I bought that too.

May your nights be peaceful and your mornings bright!

Update 12/31/2019: I received an email today from Alexy Guzey, who has written a detailed essay disputing several claims made in Matthew Walker’s book. It’s a very interesting read, with links to online discussions. You can check it out here. Sleep well!

I’m a member of Book View Café, a writers’ cooperative — and there’s a big post-Christmas ebook sale going on in our online store. All ebooks are 25% off. This includes omnibus editions like The Nanotech Succession… So if you haven’t read it yet, now’s the time to dive in!

At Book View Café you’ll find a range of authors and genres, from romance to hard science fiction. Click here to see what’s available.

Mele Kalikimaka means Merry Christmas in Hawaiian, and it’s also the title to a Christmas carol that begins:

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say

On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day…

Too bad today is gloomy! We’ve got heavy clouds with fog blowing through, along with a bit of rain. But at least Christmas Eve was bright and sunny. 🙂

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and wishing all of you a joyful day!

Xena Rose does not have the patience to pose for a Christmas photo, so this one will have to do. (Taken today, December 25, 2019)

I was going to write a blog post on “Ten Years in Self-Publishing.” Then I looked up the dates and realized I’ve been at this for only nine years. So the post will have to wait.

In the meantime, I want to say that I’m utterly grateful to have the option of handling my own work. That wasn’t the case, in the ancient epoch when I started this writing gig. The only reason I’m still writing is because that option exists.

Eventually, I want to take another run at the traditional market, but if that doesn’t work out, I won’t be sad to publish the next novel under my own company’s imprint. Thank you to everyone who’s read the books and supported me through this venture. You’re awesome!

With thoughts on the evolving science fiction ecosystem…

Best-of-the-year lists have started to appear across the Internet. Those lists are a lot of fun when your book appears on them. And when it doesn’t? It’s easy to shrug and sooth your ego with the certain knowledge that the list-makers never read or considered or even heard about your book. Anyway, that’s how I handle it! 😉

When I originally indie-published The Red: First Light back in 2013, the Internet’s science fiction eco-system was different than it is today. SF Signal was a thriving website, the author cooperative Book View Café had a new-ish online bookstore and freshly enthusiastic membership, there were a lot of excellent independent blogger/reviewers willing to have a look at vetted indie work, Twitter was more personal, and the potential end of the Republic was not a great weight on anyone’s mind.

Times have changed. I feel like it’s a lot harder to get the word out about a new book — and I don’t think I’m alone. The sheer number of excellent novels being published every year remains overwhelming. But we do what we can.

To that end, here is my annual post of my award-eligible work from 2019. “Award eligible” generally just means the work was published in the past year. If you’re able and interested in nominating for the annual science fiction awards, in particular the Hugos, Nebulas, and Locus awards, I would appreciate your consideration.

In the short story category:

“Devil in the Dust” (amazon affiliate link)†
A short story set on Mars in the last days of a bitter war. Included in the anthology Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan. (July 2019)

In the novel category:

Edges (Inverted Frontier #1)
From the Edge of Apocalypse:
Deception Well is a world on the edge, a lone surviving outpost at the farthest reach of human expansion. Now a determined crew resolves to cross the light years to explore the fallen worlds of old and discover what monstrous life might have grown up among the ruins.

Silver (Inverted Frontier #2)
A Lost Ship — A New World:
A hardened adventurer, marooned on a surreal artificial world, must master the mysterious nanotech known as “silver” to defeat the entity who pursues him.

I like to think of Inverted Frontier as Sense-of-Wonder fiction — an exploration of the cosmos and of human potential, embedded in a far-future adventure.

If you’re not yet acquainted with the books and that description appeals to you, I hope you’ll click on over to my website where I’ve posted the opening chapters. You should be able to quickly tell if these books are for you.

If you have read the books and you consider them award worthy, I implore you to focus your attention on Edges. Can’t have them competing with each other after all!

Thanks for stopping by…

Do you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited?

Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service offered by Amazon, in which readers pay a set fee each month to read as many “Kindle Unlimited” books as they want.

My impression is that the majority of indie writers make most of their income through KU, but despite this, I’ve long kept my books out of the program because it requires exclusivity. To participate in KU, the ebook edition of a title can only be sold through Amazon — and in the past, it’s been my preference to keep my books “wide,” offering them through several vendors so readers can choose.

But in November I decided to experiment with KU. Two of my books — The Dread Hammer and Hepen the Watcher (The Puzzle Lands fantasy duology) sell almost nothing outside of Amazon, so I pulled the ebook editions down from other vendors and enrolled both titles in KU. I didn’t advertise this at all and I haven’t updated the covers yet, which is something I want to do. Instead, I kept everything the same, except that the books are now available to KU subscribers.

The results? Well, they weren’t extraordinary, but they were intriguing. I suspect I made a few dollars more than I would have otherwise and I look forward to further experimentation.

If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, I encourage you to try the books. They are short, violent, darkly humorous fantasies — a variety of grim-dark, I suppose.

For those who prefer to avoid the Amazon ecosystem, the books are still available elsewhere in print editions.

If you’re in America or if you celebrate Thanksgiving elsewhere, best wishes for a joyful day!

Our family had a mini-Thanksgiving feast last night, and will be sharing a more formal meal with other relatives at a restaurant later today.

It’s traditional for us to say what we are grateful for. For myself, I’m grateful to see the two (so far) Inverted Frontier books done, and to have terrific readers like all of you, who make the work worthwhile. And of course everyday I’m grateful to be part of my small but close-knit family.

Whether you celebrate or not, I hope you have a terrific day.

And tomorrow? For me, it’s back to work and back to the treadmill. 🙂

My readers are terrific. SILVER (Inverted Frontier #2) has been out for only a week, but already several readers have posted positive Amazon reviews. Thank you so much! Those reviews really do matter for the success of any title (and more are always welcome) — but I’m also truly happy to know people have enjoyed the book!

Reviews at other vendors, at Goodreads, on Twitter or Facebook, or in-person word-of-mouth recommendations are also critical. It all adds up to “BUZZ.” So if you enjoyed SILVER, I hope you’ll post about it, or talk about it with like-minded readers. THANK YOU!

Today marks the release of Silver, book #2 in the far-future series, Inverted Frontier. Both print and ebook editions are now available.

Find Silver at:

☆ Amazon

☆ Apple Books

☆ Barnes & Noble

☆ Kobo

You can also order the print edition from your favorite bookstore, or ask your local library to order a copy.

But maybe you’re not familiar with the story world of Inverted Frontier? Then please let me entice you…

This is a story world in which radically advanced nano- and bio-technologies have long since become an accepted part of everyday life. Indeterminate lifespans are taken for granted. Innate repair mechanisms clean up damage due to cosmic radiation. Materials can be grown at need or dissolved back into raw substrate. People can exist as physical or virtual beings. And over time, starships can evolve. People can too, though most are culturally inclined to hold on tightly to their humanity.

But molecular technologies cannot collapse the vast distances between stars or open mythical gates or wormholes to shorten the journey, and they cannot speed the flow of information, which remains limited by the speed of light.

Over the past millennia, human civilization spread from stellar system to stellar system — and then collapsed for reasons unknown to those few surviving settlements at the far reaches of the human frontier.

Inverted Frontier is the story of the recovery. It’s told through a ship’s company of explorers and scientists who leave the frontier, undertaking a voyage of re-discovery. They are the first in centuries to confront the hazards of an inverted frontier as they venture back along the path of human migration.

If you haven’t read book #1, Edges, start there! Silver completes the story arc that began with Edges.

There’s no need to wait for a third volume, because Inverted Frontier is not a trilogy. It’s an open-ended series that will continue if there is enough reader interest. I hope there will be! These books were a challenge to write, but there is so much left of the galaxy to explore.

If you’ve preordered Silver, THANK YOU!! If not, I hope you’ll get a chance to purchase it soon. Writers don’t exist without reader support. All of you have my continuing gratitude.

Amazon finally has the print edition of Silver available to order.

Here’s the link: https://amzn.to/3309Vdi

My apologies, again, for the lateness of the print book. I miscalculated the time it would take for me to receive a physical proof. But the proof has arrived and the book looks good! I hope you enjoy it.

The ebook releases tomorrow! (Or today if you’re in Australia… 🙂 )