Author copies for DESCENT, the fourth book in the Palladium Wars series, have arrived at the Castle. If you’re at all familiar with how things go around here, you know that this means another giveaway is imminent. I’ll start the traditional pre-release contest this weekend and run it for a week as always. (Don’t put…
Cyanocitta cristata
A blue jay having a quick and easy breakfast at the local fly-thru. Fun fact about blue jays: they’re not really blue. Their feathers are black. We see them as blue because of the way the structure of the feathers scatters light. It’s known as Tyndall scattering.
Spicy Pillow Syndrome
I was typing on my old MacBook Pro today and noticed that the bottom case was wobbling back and forth a little despite being on a flat desk. I grabbed my trusty iFixit toolkit, took off the case bottom, and found this: That’s what we call a “spicy pillow”, a lithium-ion battery that has…
A magic wand for tattooing dead trees
The piston knob on my favorite fountain pen broke recently, so I sent the pen (a Lamy 2000) off to the mothership in Germany for warranty repair. It came back a little while ago, with a delivery note listing the repairs which were performed at no charge. That’s some awesome customer service for a pen I…
Quick office tour, February of twenty-four
I had to clean up and reorganize the desk today, so I took a picture of its pristine state while it lasts. The artwork on the wall: John Picacio cover for one of my Tor.com Wild Cards stories, Michael Komarck cover for LOW CHICAGO featuring my character Khan, and (above the pulse rifle prop…
Contest books are in the mail
The contest prize books will be going out to the winners today. In this round, the international readers were particularly blessed by the random numbers gods. Of twelve books, only three are going to U.S. addresses. The rest are all international: one each to Germany, Finland, and Switzerland, and six(!) to addresses in the UK….
SCORPIO contest winners
All right, the RNG gods have chosen. The winners are: Nicholas Clarke Dennis Hugh Lavery Santeri Declan David Peter Holmes Ashley R. Pollard Hendrik Bill Anderson Krzysztof Territorial Army Medic Marla McOmber Bjorn I’ll be sending out an email to the people on the list with instructions. If anyone doesn’t claim their copy by…
SCORPIO giveaway is now closed.
I’ll be going through the entries today with the help of the random numbers generator and pick a dozen winners from all the comments that have been left by the 1200h EST contest deadline. Watch this space for names, and if yours appears on the list–check your email.
SCORPIO release day
Today is the official release day for SCORPIO, first book in the Frontlines spin-off, Frontlines: Evolution. A bunch of you will have read it already because it was one of the Amazon First Reads selections for December, free to download for anyone with a Prime subscription. A few of you may have gotten your hands…
Obligatory end-of-year update
This is the last day of the year, so I guess I ought to do a quick recap of the year that is about to disappear in the rearview mirror. 2023 was…fine? I turned in two books this year (SCORPIO in February and DESCENT in October), so I am back in the groove as far…