It was Virgil’s private theory that in a world of six and a half billion people, only the hopelessly driven obsessive could out-hustle the masses of the sane—those who insisted on rounded lives, filled out with steady lovers, concerts, vacations, hobbies, pets, and even children. Sane people could not begin to compete with the crazies who lived and breathed their work, who fell asleep long after midnight with their farsights still on, only to waken at dawn and check results before coffee.

Limit of Vision (Tor, 2001)

I’m not a “hopelessly driven obsessive” as described above. I think that’s a good thing. But there is a tendency among writers to admire the “do or die” philosophy. On Twitter I’ll often see writers admonishing one another to “never quit!” — on the theory that your next project could be the successful one.

And it’s true that you never know when things will start to turn around, when rejections will start to become acceptances, and success will become noticed and… Well, who knows how far it could go?

A friend of mine used to describe each new novel as a lottery ticket, and I think that’s accurate.

The thing is, very very few people ever win the lottery. You could bankrupt yourself trying. Same thing with writing: You could bankrupt your health, your life, and your relationships with a single-minded devotion to “making it” as a writer. That’s why I feel very uncomfortable when I hear writers insisting that we should never quit!

Quit if you need to. That’s my advice. And I can say that without hypocrisy, because I did it. I quit. Not utterly, and certainly not irrevocably, but I basically walked away from the game for ten years. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I spent an enjoyable hour chatting with Justin Landon, host of Tor.com’s Rocket Talk podcast, and Marko Kloos, author of the Frontlines series of military science fiction novels. Marko and I both originally self-published our mil-SF novels, and we both went on to sign deals for the books with traditional publishers.

During the podcast we talk about our nontraditional path to publishing, military SF in general, and our own novels in particular. I really enjoyed this discussion, and the insightful questions from our host. The podcast posted today. You can find it here at Tor.com.

Back in February, I posted the news here that two of my stories had been selected for Baen Book’s first annual The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad.

This year’s best anthology was released yesterday, and includes contributions by Brad R. Torgersen, Michael Z. Williamson, Charlie Jane Anders, Seth Dickinson, William Ledbetter, Eric Leif Davin, David D. Levine, Stephen Gaskell, Michael Barretta, Derek Kunsken, Holly Black, Robert R. Chase, and Matthew Johnson.

My stories are “Codename: Delphi” originally published at Lightspeed Magazine and “Light and Shadow” originally published in the War Stories anthology. Both stories are set in the story world of The Red, and “Codename: Delphi” features some of the same characters.

VOTE!
Here’s an interesting twist that makes this anthology unusual. Baen Books would like their readers to vote on the included stories and select their favorite. There is a cash prize and a plaque for the winning author, but mostly it just sounds like a lot of fun. Click here to get to the voting site. For security reasons you’ll have to sign up for a Baen ebooks account, but there’s no cost on that and Baen will not share your information. Voting closes August 31, and the award will be presented at DragonCon.

So last night, just shy of 0200, I sent the “final” manuscript of Going Dark to my editor, Joe Monti, at Saga Press. I put “final” in quotes, because I’ll get one more pass at the manuscript after the copyedit, and another chance to tweak things when the page proofs arrive. But for practical purposes, I’m done with The Red Trilogy.

It’s been a three-year project, and now that it’s winding down, I’m starting to realize how much I’m going to miss these characters and this story world. For all the frustration, and the struggle to get the story down, I’ve really loved writing these novels. For all the self-doubt, and regardless how it turns out, I’m glad I took the shot.

Hawaii is kind of an awesome place. This is a little five-and-a-half minute video on what happened when a computer science teacher at Ala Wai Elementary School (a computer science teacher in elementary school?? when did that become a thing? awesome!) felt his students had not received any recognition or encouragement for their work. A group of /r/Hawaii Redditors decided to do something about that. Here’s the story of what happened — and the interviews with the kids are amazing.

PS: the video still-shot below showing only boys is a little misleading. 😉

Going Dark. No that’s NOT my planned career path. It’s the title of the final novel in The Red Trilogy, with another amazing cover by Larry Rostant — and Going Dark is well on its way to publication.

My first drafts tend to be pretty solid, but my initial ideas for a new novel are not. I was reminded of this when I was reading an email I’d written last year, when Going Dark was just getting started. The direction I had in mind for the book at that time changed radically as I worked my way past the opening, and the story is a lot better for it.

Right now I’ve got editorial notes on Going Dark from Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press, and for the past few days I’ve been working on final revisions. I’m happy to say, the requested changes and additions are fairly minor. But it’s always the case in this process that as I get close to the final-final updates, I’m amazed at the difference even small changes can make. The final polish of a novel is always exciting.

I haven’t yet posted a back cover description for Going Dark, because that needs work. But here’s the tagline:

“No Real Allies, No Fixed Enemies, No Certain Battlefields”

Sound exciting? I hope so!

The Red Trilogy has been a big project. Though I’d written ten prior novels, this is my first real trilogy — not that I planned it that way. It just sort of happened — and now it’s nearly done. For me, anyway! I hope not for you. As the books are published, I hope you’ll come along for the ride. All three books are due out this year. Here are the dates:

The Red — June 30

The Trials — August 18

Going Dark — November 3

Yes, you can preorder!

If you read the books, if you like them, I hope you’ll let other people know. Buzz matters.

And if you’d like to get a look at the opening scene of the first novel, find it here on my website.

Okay, back to those revisions…

Word came today from narrator Kevin T. Collins that he’s just finished recording the audio version of The Red.

The Red will be released in simultaneous hardcover, mass-market paperback, and ebook editions by Simon & Schuster/ Saga Press. And it will be released in audio by Audible.

Four formats! That’s a first for me.

And this will be my first-ever audiobook. I’ve had a few short stories issued in audio format thanks to Lightspeed Magazine, but never a novel. I’m looking forward to it.

For you audiophiles out there, here are my available short stories:

“Nightside on Callisto”

“A Moment Before It Struck”

“Codename Delphi”

“The Way Home”

There are times when I begin to think I’m jaded with fiction, that there isn’t much that can really seize my interest and draw me into a story anymore — but then I’ll find a book to change my mind. Those are the books I write about here. I just finished reading Glen Cook’s The Black Company — and I loved it. I was honestly amazed how much I enjoyed it, and how compelling it was.

I’m going to guess that most of you who are into epic fantasy first read The Black Company long ago. It was published in 1984. That was three years before my own first publication – a little short story in the magazine Analog Science Fiction & Fact — and at the time I wasn’t reading epic fantasy at all.

The reason I picked up The Black Company now was because of a post at tor.com Message Fiction: Politics in Sci-Fi and Fantasy Literature in which “The G” (@nerds_feather on Twitter) describes it as “a forebear of the gritty turn in epic fantasy and sword & sorcery”:

The Black Company explicitly and directly rejects the simple good vs. evil dynamic that has traditionally defined heroic fiction, whether fantasy or not. The Company’s war is not one of righteous truth or glorious conquest, but a war of survival and a war of profit. It is a civil war, and one whose primary victims are unarmed civilians—the exact kind of war, one notes, that has predominated in our world since 1945.

How could I resist that?

The writing style used in The Black Company is unusual in my experience, especially at the start. The storyline jumps about at times and much of the background is not explained. Imagine stepping into another world. Everyone already there knows the critical history and they assume we know it too. So like a child we are left to piece together that history from comments dropped here and there. This can be frustrating, and at times I wondered if I’d missed some critical part or if this wasn’t actually the first book in the series—and yet it works very well. I was forced to pay attention, and my interest never flagged.

The narrative voice, a physician-warrior named Croaker, is wonderfully done. And as is always the case in a compelling tale, it’s the positive relationships between the characters that power the story. The Black Company are mercenaries. Croaker recognizes their faults and sins. But in the midst of a grim and bloody civil war they are devoted to one another, and Croaker’s ruminations on good and evil add a necessary philosophical balance to the action.

This is certainly a once-in-a-lifetime honor, so I’ll note it here: The Red is on Publishers Weekly list of “Best Summer Books 2015 (SF/ Fantasy/ Horror).”

Publishers Weekly is an industry magazine important to book buyers at stores and libraries, so fingers crossed that this will help sales when the Saga Press edition is released June 30.

NASA’s social media Earth Day event this year is #NoPlaceLikeHome — and indeed there isn’t! Ours is an amazing, irreplaceable world. Here are a few glimpses of my small corner of it, also posted today on Twitter:

Haleakala Crater rim, Maui

Sandlewood flowers, Haleakala, Maui
Read the rest of this entry »