A lot of my writer friends basically live on coffee. I like it every now and then, but it’s not a daily thing for me. It’s what I get when I am grabbing breakfast while out and about, not what I make every morning to get going. At Castle Frostbite, we drink tea instead, and…
Category: writing.
The Great Link has been upgraded
The Internet connection at Castle Frostbite as of last night: Not bad for a rural setting on a dirt road, right? Ah, BUT. The Internet connection at Castle Frostbite as of today: Those are legit 2021-level Internet speeds. The kicker is that the new provider is supplying ten times the previous speed on the download,…
Cellulose backups
These are the original handwritten drafts for “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” (which ended up in Love Death + Robots on Netflix as ‘Shapeshifters”), and “Ink and Blood”, which was my first published short story ever. It seems that the stories of mine I like best all started out on paper and came…
Release date for CITADEL
There’s a new release date for CITADEL, the third book in the Palladium Wars series. It will be released in all the usual formats on August 10. Last year, I was on a two-novels-a-year pace, but then 2020 happened and it all went to hell. But this year has been absolutely fine for me so…
Crawling toward the finish line
Science Fiction grandmaster James Gunn has died. My career isn’t old enough for me to have met many of the old grandmasters of science fiction because most of them are no longer around. I did get to meet James Gunn at ConStellation in Lincoln, NE in 2017, where I was the Author Guest of Honor and…
Paper trail
This row of paperbacks is my collected output for novels since 2013. That does not include the novel I just delivered, titled CITADEL, because that one obviously doesn’t exist yet in paper form. It also doesn’t represent my total output because I also managed to write four novellas and novelettes for Wild Cards (“Stripes” for…
Giveaway update
The comment section for the ORDERS OF BATTLE giveaway is now closed. We had 133 entries before the deadline of 10AM EST this morning. I will now employ a random number genie to pull ten entries out of the hat. Look for the results tomorrow morning. And if you find yourself on the list of…
View from the factory floor
On the rare occasion of a neat and cleaned-up desk, here’s a picture. Does this ever scream “science fiction writer at work”, or what? The eagle-eyed among you will notice that all the gear is Alienware-branded, which means you can probably guess that I occasionally use it for pursuits other than the typing of sentences…
World shut-outers
I bought these Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones more than four years ago, and I’ve used them almost every day. Now the battery holds a fraction of its original charge, and the earcup cushions have started to separate. I could get new cushions, but the battery isn’t user-replaceable, so it’s probably time to retire these. When…
49
I’m turning 49 years old today, which is odd because I often feel like I can’t be that old because I’m not that long out of high school. But the calendar says it’s true, so I guess I really am a year away from the half-century mark. I ran some numbers in my head the…