Internet connectivity in New Zealand seemed to be a precious and limited resource. In the hotel we stayed at in Auckland, wifi came with the room, but I was limited to 200MB of data transfer per day before they started charging. In the hotel we stayed at in National Park I was able to purchase slow but unlimited wifi for $4/day. And of course the rate that Verizon would have charged was so absurdly high I turned off mobile data for the entire trip and kept my phone off except when using wifi to check email.

The result? I spent ten days without Twitter and Facebook and all the other, lesser variants of social media — and it was kind of nice. I got a lot more reading done than I usually manage. I was less worried about what people were saying, or if it was a conversation I should be involved in, or if anyone was talking about me or to me… The experience was relaxing, and it left me feeling less anxious and less scattered.

I’ve been online a lot since I got back, but that’s in large part because I’ve been writing blog posts like this one. Going forward, I want to spend far less time online, and more time writing, reading, and just living. I’ve got no intention of abandoning an online presence — there’s a lot to be learned and gained and given in online relationships — but there are also many other ways to make better use of my time. Hopefully, I won’t be hanging out quite so much on Twitter.

This list is posted for those of you who like to nominate for the annual science fiction and fantasy awards, including the Nebula and Hugo awards. At the start of this year I expected to have a novel, two novelettes, and two short stories on my 2014 list of award-eligible work. As it turns out, I have only two (very short) novelettes and one short story.

What happened to the novel?
I had originally intended to publish the sequel to my Nebula and Campbell nominated novel The Red: First Light on my own, but plans change and The Trials will now be published in 2015 by Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

The third short story will also see publication in 2015.

So what’s up for 2014?

In the short story category…
“Codename: Delphi” is my personal favorite of the year. If you have time to read only one of my stories, I hope you’ll make it this one. Besides, it’s easy to read because it’s available online. Find it in the April issue of Lightspeed Magazine.

In the novelette category…
A novelette is defined as a story of at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words, which makes my story “Attitude” a very short novelette. It’s only 7,900 words. Find it in the anthology Reach For Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Update: the anthology Reach For Infinity was nominated for the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award.

And at 7,700 words, my story “Light and Shadow” is an even shorter novelette. Find it in the anthology War Stories, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak.

Update: for SFWA members, the entire War Stories anthology is now available in the forum.

All three stories are hard science fiction. Thanks for considering them!

Locus is “The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field” with news, interviews, and reviews of work in the SFF field. This month’s issue has an interview with me — including an impressive interior photo by Francesca Myman.

This is my second Locus interview. The first was way back in the year 2000 — toward the end of my “first career” as I like to call it.

There’s also an interview with Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press.

If you subscribe to Locus, check it out. The issue is available in print, PDF, and ebook versions.

Update: November 28
Excerpts from the interview are now available online.

Rain was falling on our last afternoon in Auckland and our flight home didn’t leave until past midnight, so to pass the time while staying warm and dry, Ron and I visited a movie theater to watch Interstellar.

My basic assessment? I enjoyed this movie! — despite squirming in my seat at some of the foundational assumptions. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to do so.

The part that bothered me the most? The idea that we could or should just throw away the Earth. The rest of this very short post might qualify as a spoiler so I’m putting it behind the front page and several lines down…. Read the rest of this entry »

Background: Ron and I arrived in Auckland on a cold spring day, when the sun was dueling with rain squalls that swept across the city at frequent intervals. I had a bad feeling about our upcoming hike. We were planning to do the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, a 12-mile day hike in Tongariro National Park. It’s one of the most popular day hikes in New Zealand, and described as “among the top ten single-day treks in the world.” But it wasn’t going to be a lot of fun if it involved constant rain, wind, or even snow. And in fact, snow fell the day before we arrived. But in an immense stroke of luck, the weather turned in our favor and we had an absolutely perfect day for hiking.

Logistics: we did not rent a car in New Zealand, for which, I believe, most Kiwis were grateful: American tourists unaccustomed to driving on the left side of the road evidently cause a lot of serious accidents. So we took a train — Kiwi Rail’s Northern Explorer — from Auckland to a little village called National Park, that’s just outside Tongariro National Park. We stayed at The Park Hotel at Ruapehu, which offered a hiking package. They picked us up at the train station and dropped us off at the trailhead early the next morning, along with a packed lunch. At the end of the day, they picked us up at the opposite end of the trail.

Geography: There are three active volcanoes in the center of Tongariro National Park. They are Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, and Tongariro. The Crossing passes between Ngauruhoe and Tongariro over mostly volcanic terrain. The highest elevation is just over 6,000-feet. Here’s a map of the track.

Here’s Mount Ngauruhoe on the day we arrived. How’s that for a classic volcano profile? Summit elevation is 7,516 feet. I call this shot “The Road to Mount Doom” since Ngauruhoe served as Mount Doom in the LOTR movies.

And this is Mount Ruapehu on the same day, a much larger and taller mountain, standing at 9,177 feet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ron and I returned from a ten-day trip to New Zealand today — our first visit to Aotearoa. The trip was a little ironic for me because I’ve been wanting to visit New Zealand for thirty years — but despite all that potential prep time this was a very last-minute affair.

Here’s the guilty admission: we’ve found that the only way we ever get it together to plan a trip is to buy the airline tickets first. Since the tickets are nonrefundable, we are then forced to sit down and plan things to do, or all the money spent on the tickets will go to waste. So several months ago we decided that we were going to fly to Auckland. Hawaiian Airlines has good rates and the flight from Honolulu only takes eight to eight and a half hours. The other advantage for us is that Hawaii and New Zealand time zones differ by only one hour — oh, and one day! Kiwis are nearly the first to greet a new day, and here in Hawaii we are nearly the last.

So we purchased our tickets and then…did no planning, nothing at all, for weeks. And weeks.

What can I say? We both get caught up in our day-to-day work, and we’ve both been extremely busy, but suddenly we had only about three weeks left before the trip. It was time to get serious. So we patched together a fairly simple itinerary, staying on North Island and splitting our time between Auckland and Tongariro National Park.

As those of you who visit my blog regularly know, I love to hike, and we did three truly amazing hikes while in NZ. I want to write about those over the next few days. We are thinking of visiting South Island next year, so if you have great hikes to recommend in that region please let me know!

More soon…

Okay, I called it at approximately 6:30pm: it’s rough, it’s ugly, but it’s a first draft of book 3 of The Red trilogy.

So… yay!

It will get a lot better as time goes by. 🙂

It’s awkward to have a post on an expired sale as the lead post on my blog, so I thought I’d write a brief update on where things stand with the ongoing project, just to have something fresh here.

Over the past months — and especially the last few weeks — I have been consumed with writing a first, very rough draft of the third book in The Red trilogy. I’d hoped to finish it last weekend, but alas, no. Then I was sure I would finish it by the end of the week. Nope!

I do have excuses, though. On Tuesday the copyedited manuscript for The Red: First Light arrived from Saga Press. (Read about what a copyeditor does here.) Yes, that book has been copyedited before, prior to its initial publication. So of course the copyeditor only found some stylistic elements to “fix,” right? For example, there was much debate about how to present the initials “L. T.” when soldiers are pronouncing them “ell-tee.” I settled on the solution in the previous sentence, following a reference in the Chicago Manual of Style. Others counseled me to just go with “LT” — and that’s what the copyeditor decided. I don’t have any huge objection to this. I just hope it gets pronounced the right way when people read it.

So, it was all just technical stuff like that, right? Uh, well, no. Let’s just say, “Mistakes were made.” Not many, not obvious, but given how many times the manuscript has already been looked at… ::sigh::

So I spent much of the week processing copyedits and entering the changes into a copy of the manuscript. I’m almost done, and plan to send the manuscript back to Saga Press on Monday, but the process has consumed a lot of time that would have normally gone to staring at a computer screen wondering how to end book three…

Which brings me to the next excuse for not having finished quite yet — a new idea introduced itself, a means to add another level of drama and tension to the last big scene… but I’m still working out the motivation behind one obscure character, and that’s holding everything up. It’s gotten frustrating. To say the least.

At this point, I think I need to write “an” ending and then get started on the revision so that I can ultimately write “the” ending because things do change between drafts. Wish me luck!

You can get 50% off the ebook edition of my novel Skye Object 3270a at Kobo. The sale runs through Monday. To get the discount, you have to use coupon code SAVE50.

Skye Object 3270a is the only middle-grade/young-adult novel I’ve ever written. It’s set in the Nanotech Succession story world, taking place in the same setting as my adult novel Deception Well — though it doesn’t have a direct connection with that story.

Read the opening online here — and if you’re acquainted with younger readers who like high-tech adventure, please let them know.

Skye Object 3270a is also available in a print version.

Saga Press — the new publisher of The Red: First Light — is a new imprint of Simon and Schuster. Their first books won’t be out until next spring, but today they made this announcement:

New York, New York, October 8—Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announced today that all e-books from the forthcoming science fiction and fantasy line will be sold without DRM.

“The science fiction and fantasy community were early adopters of electronic formats, and have enthusiastically embraced DRM-free content while showing great respect for authors’ works under copyright. In launching our imprint, we are pleased to offer this convenience to our readers and test the waters of DRM-free publishing,” said Joe Monti, executive editor of Saga.

This is terrific news. My ebooks have always been DRM-free for the convenience of readers who might change devices, or need to make back-up copies. So I’m very pleased to know that my novels to be published by Saga Press will be DRM-free as well.

Here’s more on the topic, from Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press.

And here’s another post in which Joe talks about the start-up process behind Saga Press.