First of all, a hearty welcome to all the new readers who’ve posted in my comments here, and a fair number more who’ve left tracks in my webstats. I’ve had a number of links posted to my Sad Puppy Summary and Wrapup from some sites a great deal bigger than mine, including John C. Wright’s, Mike Glyer’s File 770, and Monster Hunter Nation, egad. Now you’re all probably wondering why I haven’t posted anything new since May 31. I don’t post as often as I did ten years ago, but two weeks away is unusual for me.
It’s just bad timing, timing we did not control: We got a decent offer for our condo outside Chicago, and accepted it. That meant we had to drive 1,100 miles, empty it out, clean it up, sort the garageful of artifacts transported to Carol’s sister’s house, complete the paperwork (which was complex, as there were multiple owners including a trust) pack a Durango and a half’s worth of artifacts into a single Durango, and then drive 1,100 miles back home. The process included some brute-force moving of furniture, many trips to Goodwill, and considerable exercise of my tessellation superpower in order to pack way too much stuff into way too little space. Forgive me if I’m exhausted. I’ll be turning 63 in two weeks, and feeling every nanosecond of it.
So give me a day or three to recover. There’s much to write about, most of it concerning writing, especially my plans for the coming year. I should be posting The Cunning Blood for sale on the Kindle store some time in July, for the princely price of $2.99. “Drumlin Boiler” will go up shortly after that, for 99c. “Whale Meat” is already there, for 99c. I still need a cover for my novella “Firejammer,” but the ebook is otherwise complete. Are you artist enough to draw a stone castle / warship sailing on an ocean of molten lava? I pay reasonably well for covers.
The big deal happens on January 7, 2016, when I’ll be releasing Ten Gentle Opportunities on Kindle, with paperbacks from CreateSpace. I have a cover contracted for that, from the dazzling Blake Henriksen, but I’m thinking of buying some interior art as well from other artists. Interested? Contact me. It’s my first new novel in ten years, and I’ll be putting my back into the launch.
In the meantime, I have to develop a Web presence for my fiction around the hardsf.com domain that I registered twenty years ago and never figured out what to do with. I’ll need some art for that as well, and I have a great deal of studying to do on WordPress extensions and internals. January 7 seems like a long way off. It’s not.
So hang in there. More stuff coming. As preface, you might go back and reread my New Year’s Eve 2014 post, which will be relevant to coming entries. Ditto my series on Sarah Hoyt’s Human Wave idea, at least until you get to the Sad Puppies part, at which point you can stop. I’ve already said most of what I want to say about that, and need to get on to other things.
It’s time to go take another Aleve, but man, (he said zenily) I haven’t felt this good in a long time.
