A brief update while we wait for final election results…

The Stories of the Puzzle Lands Duology is now available in a print edition. The duology includes two novels, The Dread Hammer and Hepen the Watcher, along with a prequel short story.

I just received my copy and I have to say it’s quite lovely (all praise to the cover artist!).

For reasons of cost and distribution, the book is only available at Amazon (affiliate link).

Visit my website for more information on Stories of the Puzzle Lands.

(poor photo, lovely cover)

A few days ago, PBS Newshour showed brief interviews with American voters.

One Trump voter, dressed up pretty with several small children running about, proudly declaimed she was “pro-life” — never pausing to consider a quarter million Americans dead of COVID-19, children separated from their parents at the border, or all those doomed to die as fallout of global warming.

Another Trump voter, an older man, angrily declared Joe Biden would force socialism on the country. No doubt he collects social security and has Medicare.

Another claimed to be Christian, and to be upset with the way Trump speaks, but was voting for him anyway because of his great policies. What policies? Truly, I have no idea. Perhaps separating children from their parents? Demanding personal favors from foreign governments? Utterly incompetent response to the corona virus epidemic? Destroying desert ecosystems in the hope of building a wall for which Trump cronies have won extremely lucrative contracts? Striving to accelerate global warming? Opening a protected old-growth forest to logging? The ceaseless misogyny? Destroying government services to give a tax cut to the extremely wealthy? I could go on and on.

We writers are supposed to be able to adopt different outlooks, to get into the minds of different kinds of characters. But I admit it’s hard for me to understand what would move a person to support an obviously corrupt, criminal, ignorant, destructive, divisive politician who lies all the time.

It’s a good bet that if you enjoy my books, you’re not going to be voting to return this criminal to office. If you’ve already voted, THANK YOU! If you haven’t, please do, and vote blue all the way down the ballot. Joe Biden is not exaggerating when he says this election is a fight for the soul of our nation.

We are better—vastly better—than Trump.

I’m doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) in just half an hour! This all came together at the last minute, but if you happen to be in the neighborhood, please stop by! I’ll be answering questions between 3pm and 5pm, HST.
Find the AMA here.

The ebook edition of my newest novel Pacific Storm is out today. If you preordered, you should have it already. But if not, go get it!

Unfortunately, the print edition is suffering a pandemic delay, but if all goes well, print copies should be available to order by Monday. Fingers crossed! I’ll post here on the blog when it happens.

Belated update: The print edition is now available!

Update October 9, 6am HST:
The print edition is now available to order at Barnes & Noble.

9am: Amazon now has the print edition listed too. Find it here. (paid link)

Pacific Storm is a fast-paced, near-future thriller set in Honolulu. You can read more about it here, and also read the opening chapters. See what you think…

Or go ahead and grab a copy!

I’ve been rethinking how to present a list of my books at the end of each ebook, and it seemed to me the list would be more helpful to new readers if I sort by subgenre. This is what I came up with:

More Books by Linda Nagata

Near-Future Science Fiction

Pacific Storm
The Last Good Man
Limit of Vision
Tech-Heaven
The Red Trilogy:

The Red: First Light
The Trials
Going Dark

Far-Future Science Fiction

Inverted Frontier Series

Edges
Silver

The Nanotech Succession

Tech-Heaven (prequel)
The Bohr Maker
Deception Well
Vast

Memory
Skye-Object 3270a (young adult/middle grade)

Fantasy Novels

The Wild

Stories of the Puzzle Lands Duology

The Dread Hammer
Hepen the Watcher

Short Fiction Collections

Light and Shadow

Goddesses & Other Stories

This list will appear only in recently updated ebooks. So what do you think?

After 17 novels, I ought to have a stable and successful method for the whole novel-writing process. Alas, not true! Every novel is different, and more and more, I’m interested in trying new approaches to planning, plotting, and writing more efficiently.

For Pacific Storm, I decided to experiment with the method John Truby discusses in his book The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. For details on that, check out this post, written last March after the first draft was done.

Short version of that post: After doing a month of prep work, it took me just over two months to complete a first draft, which is remarkably fast for me.

Ironically, it then took me another 2+ months to finish a second, solid draft that I could show to beta readers and to my freelance editor. After that, I spent another 5+ weeks addressing editorial comments and suggestions. So roughly a month of prep time, and six months of writing and revision — which still isn’t bad, for me.

Will I follow the method again? I think so. I’ve also got a new app called Plottr, that I’m eager to try. It looks like it could be quite helpful in organizing ideas, and creating an outline.

Don’t forget — Pacific Storm is out next week, on October 8. The ebook is available for preorder now.

READ THE OPENING CHAPTERS HERE

PACIFIC STORM
(click to see a large version of the cover image)

Politics, terrorism, and heavy weather collide over Honolulu in a vividly imagined near-future thriller from the author of The Last Good Man.

Ava Arnett is a Honolulu cop, captain of the night shift in the autonomous Waikiki District. Nine years ago a massive hurricane hit the island. Ava remains haunted by the mistakes she made and the lives she failed to save during that disaster. Since then, she relies on HADAFA, an AI designed to observe, analyze, and predict human behavior. HADAFA monitors her actions, and its assessments guide her decisions.

Now, another Category 5 hurricane is approaching Honolulu…

In the hectic hours before landfall, Ava stumbles into a terrorist conspiracy – and HADAFA begins to glitch. She can no longer rely on the AI. She must decide on her own whether or not to trust a mysterious federal agent named Lyric Jones — knowing the wrong choice could lead to greater devastation…and a war no one will win.

Pacific Storm is now available to preorder as an ebook. (The print edition will take a little longer.)

Pacific Storm will publish on October 8th.

READ THE OPENING CHAPTERS HERE

I’m going to be launching a new novel amid the political storms of October. It’s not a great time to bring out a book, but I don’t want to wait until next year. I hope you’ll subscribe to my newsletter, for info and a first look!⚡️🌴

Here’s a roundup of three titles I recently recommended in my newsletter:

I almost never read horror. It’s just not my thing. But Stephen Graham Jones’s new novel The Only Good Indians received such excellent reviews that I couldn’t resist, and preordered it. It’s the story of four Blackfeet friends who grew up together and now find themselves paying in a shocking way for an incident that took place in their youth. It’s an engrossing story, with excellent characterizations.
Find it at Amazon (affiliate link) or at your favorite bookstore.

I also recommend Recursion, by Blake Crouch — a time-travel story with a unique-to-me twist. When someone goes back in time and changes the future, the original future is not lost, but continues to exist as “dead memories” in the minds of those affected by the change –memories that are less than real but not forgotten. Recursion starts off feeling like a standard thriller, but along the way it evolves into a complex, thoughtful, and fascinating read.
Find it at Amazon (affiliate link) or at your favorite bookstore.

And for audiobook fans…
Back in April I recommended the audiobook edition of River of Darkness by Buddy Levy, the story of conquistador Francisco Orellana’s voyage from the headwaters of the Amazon River, to the sea. Last month, I listened to Labyrinth of Ice, the story of the Greeley Polar Expedition of 1881 to 1884. It wasn’t until I was nearly done that I realized Buddy Levy had also authored this book. It’s another excellent story of exploration, endurance, and survival. Highly recommended.
Find it at Amazon (affiliate link) or at your favorite bookstore.

My dog is small and has a knack for getting in trouble, so when she asked to go out at 3:45am this morning, I went with her, as always.

The sky was clear, filled with brilliant stars. The motion of a shooting star instantly drew my gaze up. That’s when I noticed a jet, approaching from the west with a trajectory that would take it directly overhead.

The jet appeared as three lights, arranged in a triangle. The weird and interesting thing about it, the reason it’s worth writing up in a blog post, is that the jet appeared to shift slightly back and forth as it passed across the stationary star field. Well, that’s interesting! I thought. Obviously an optical illusion — one that ceased as the jet passed overhead and continued east — but it made me think of the occasional report of a “UFO”** moving back and forth as if unaffected by momentum.

Two other odd bits about this incident: What was that jet doing flying west to east directly over the island at ~3:45am? That is not a usual route. And why was it flying so low? It was low enough that I could easily see the triangle of lights. Also, the sound of the engines very closely tracked the position of the plane, instead of being widely offset (due to lag in the speed of sound), as happens when a jet is flying at a more usual cruising altitude. My guess is it was a military plane, part of RIMPAC maybe, or maybe the crew just needed some hours in the air.

Anyway, this is the sort of thing that occupies my mind at 4am, and makes it hard to go back to sleep. 🙂

** As we all know, UFO stands for “Unidentified Flying Object.” It does not stand for “alien spaceship.” I cringe every time someone assumes the latter. When I was a teen, my dad was licensed to fly small planes. When I flew with him, it was my job to help look out for other planes and helicopters. When you’re in the air, you want to identify all the flying objects in the vicinity, the better to avoid a mid-air collision. 😉