Saturday we shipped the first stage of CLANG to our Kickstarter friends. And there was much rejoicing, as well as a party that involved swords and piñatas.

Sunday was a day spent folding t-shirts and prepping to mail out all the Kickstarter rewards. Not as much rejoicing–well, not for those who folded more t-shirts than they’d like to remember–but there was cake.

Today was spent working through the minutia of foreign royalties for eight titles across one quarter and two separate monthly cycles, which meant lots of time in Excel. Not very much rejoicing there either.

And so tonight will be spent working on the last of the mini keg of Georgetown Porter while watching utterly brainless TV. Tomorrow I will get back to the chapter with the flaming sword because, alas, Katabasis is not writing itself.

Book Three of the Mongoliad has come out since the last time I posted an update. Since then I’ve been deep in the word mines on the next volume of the medieval era in Foreworld. The working title of the book is Katabasis. I hope it sticks. We spent quite a few sessions batting ideas back and forth about the titles of the next two books, and while we knew we weren’t going to have something as idiosyncratic as The Mongoliad, we were hoping for something that was a cut above the standard adventure fantasy titles that are on the shelves now.

Negotiations on other projects continue, though with the usual ebb, flow, and utter soul-crushing dead stops that such negotiations always seem to go through. The CLANG team is wrapping up the deliverables for our Kickstarter campaign (we shot the video just over a year ago!), and the Foreworld writers continue to bang out stories. Recently, we’ve entered the Renaissance with great stories by Barth Anderson (The Book of Seven Hands) and Joe Brassey (The Assassination of Orange). Next month, Scott James Magner has Hearts of Iron, which is a jump back to the 11th century, but sets up some of the predecessors of medieval-era players. There are a few others in progress, and I’ll mention them as we get closer to publication.

It’s been announced (and subsequently deconstructed and commented on) that Night Shade Books is seeking to sell its assets to Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing, LLC. This matters to me because the CODEX books and Earth Thirst are Night Shade books. It’s still a little early to comment on the sale, but I’m hoping that it goes through and all parties get a modicum of what they hope to get out of it. I considered my options and decided it was best to make the choice that kept the books on the market. It’s a little too early in my career to be stamping my foot and taking my toys and going home.

Dean Wesley Smith has been blogging his process during the ten day sprint to ghost write a NYT Bestseller (the first entry is here). It’s been interesting to see how his day breaks down as far as how much time is spent actually writing and how much is spent doing administrative work. Once Katabasis and the fifth Foreworld book are turned in, I’ll have some time to think about my own projects again. I’m charting my days as well, trying to figure out the optimal word count I can get each day and how much other time is available for related matters. No point in diving off in the deep end of the pool if you’re not sure you’ve got the skills to stay afloat, is there?

I’ve been a delinquent blogger but a dutiful writer and at the end of the day the latter is more important. That isn’t to say that posting the occasional note to the world isn’t useful; otherwise how else does everyone know what I’ve been up to? Time management is a bitch, and I lose track of time more often than I would like. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? You get done what you can, and keep working.

Next week is the big finale of a year’s worth of work. I have three books being released on Tuesday. One’s a story reprint, but I’m happy to see the story get wider recognition, the second is one of the Foreworld SideQuests, and the third is the last volume of The Mongoliad—a book that is nearly as big as the first two volumes put together. Lots of reading material for folks to enjoy. Between the three volumes of The Mongoliad, the half dozen SideQuests that I either wrote or assisted with, Earth Thirst, and the cyberpunk story reprint, there’s more than 2000 pages worth of content that have come out in the last twelve months.

Oh, and we’ve launched foreworld.com, the official Foreworld churn. Expect a regular stream of talking points to come from there as we expand Foreworld into new eras.

It’s no wonder updates to the blog have been few and far between, and because I am behind on my latest deadline, I’m going to leave you with links to the last few releases.

Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution and Revolution. Edited by Victoria Blake, it’s a collection of classic cyberpunk stories. I’m thrilled that my story, “The Lost Technique of Blackmail,” is included alongside some of the luminaries in the SF field.

Seer. The last of the “prequel” SideQuests. 47North is getting away from the term “prequel” as it suggests you need to read these before you read The Mongoliad, but unlike some of the other SideQuests, Seer leads directly into The Mongoliad: Book One as it tells the story of what Andreas was doing shortly before the events of 1241.

The Mongoliad: Book Three. Yeah, that thing.

The Beast of Calatrava. One of my favorite SideQuests to date, and yes, it could have been a full novel. It really wanted to be.

Earth Thirst. My vampire eco-thriller. Reviews are saying that it is more of a thriller than a vampire novel; frankly, how could a vampire novel not be a thriller? Oh, well, yes, if it’s all about mopey vampires, but I don’t have the time for mopey vampires. Do you?

I carry around a little black notebook. Most of us do, in some fashion or another. Mine is a Moleskine daily journal from 2007, when I had the idea of writing a full page every day and filling the notebook in a year. It’s taken me five years, and I’m down to the last few pages. In the front, I set aside a page for a table of contents, marking the start and end date of every project. It starts with The Potemkin Mosaic and ends with Earth Thirst. 2007 was also the year of my first professional short story sale (“How the Mermaid Lost Her Song” at Strange Horizons), which makes this little black book the record of my first five years of writing professionally.

There are eleven projects listed (one is still under wraps); five have been published (Potemkin, two CODEX books, two Foreworld books, and Earth Thirst); two—Instrument and Rabbit’s Foot—are novels in the universe that I have several short stories in; and the rest are isolated projects that are still in the germinative state.

Notice that the start date for Angel Tongue is a month before I finished Heartland. I’m just pointing that out to keep the nay-sayers at bay.

Which puts me at just under fifty percent, which I find to be a pretty good percentage. Of course, things don’t get put on the front page of the book until they’re far enough along to warrant keeping notes. And the list doesn’t really reflect that I did a lot of ruminating in the early years (through 2009), and in the last few, I’ve been spending more time writing than wool-gathering. Nor does this list reflect the five novellas that were written in the back half of 2012 (all of which will be out by this coming February). All in all, I wrote nearly 200,000 words last year and did editorial rewriting on another half million.

I started another writing notebook this week. It has three projects with start dates of January 1st. BLOOD HARVEST, HERE BE MONSTERS, and ANGEL TONGUE. I used to be an intensive planner, but looking back on the full writer’s notebook, I have to admit that very little of that was on my five year plan. My goal in the next year is to write one of those three books listed above. Maybe we should do a pool. Long odds on ANGEL TONGUE, of course.

[This post originally appeared at The Night Bazaar on January 4th, 2013.]

We’re talking about the joys of research this week, and I can simply direct your attention to the picture accompanying this entry as evidence of the joy of research. Mmmmm. Books. However, there’s a seedy underbelly to research wherein you end up with shelves like this. This is the “Occult Wall” in my office–just the books that reference the occult history of the world.

You can go too far with research. You can wander off into the wilderness and never find your way back, which is detrimental when you have a book deadline.

Most of the Occult Wall was put together while working on Lightbreaker and Heartland, the first two volumes in the Codex of Souls (also from Night Shade Books). More than a few of these books I’ve not read all the way through, mainly because I bought them when I was “doing” research for the book. When the actual plot of the book went in a different direction, well, I still had the research material. That shelf there–the second one down from the top on the far left–none of that made it into the final draft.

For Earth Thirst, I wanted to not stress my bank account unnecessarily, and so I purposefully did only the minimum research necessary to keep the plot moving. Once I got a draft of the book done, only then did I go allow myself to do the heavy research. I still only ended up reading half of the books I picked up, but this time I only bought a single shelf’s worth instead of an entire bookcase. In some ways, this mirrors the respective protagonists of the aforementioned books: Markham lives in a very symbolic world, one that is rich with layers of inference and meaning; Silas is much more pragmatic, only bothering with concrete details that get him from point A to point B.

Midway through writing Earth Thirst, I got a call from Night Shade asking about a series title. “Are we doing a series?” I asked, and they just laughed. They know my predilection for research, you see. They remember the conversation we had one night at a convention where I rattled off the very explicit ten volume plan for the CODEX books, even though they had only bought two. After we settled on The Arcadian Conflict, I yanked about thirty thousand words out of the manuscript for Earth Thirst because, well, it’s plot that can be saved for later.

The other half of the books on my Arcadia research shelf are about dirt. Who knew there were so many books written about dirt?

That phrase comes up regularly during research. Who knew? More than one book owes its genesis to that phrase. Research used to scare me; now, I fear it for a different reason entirely. I have a book to finish. It has a defined scope. It’s supposed to come in at one hundred thousand words. Research can upset all of that.

How many books are there in The Arcadian Conflict? I’m not sure. But let me do a little research and get back to you.

[This post originally ran on The Night Bazaar on December 14th, 2012.]

Silas, the protagonist of Earth Thirst, is a career soldier. He’s fought in many, many wars, going all the way back to the granddaddy of all conflicts–the Trojan War. He’s been in his share of scraps, dust-ups, brawls, riots, melees, and Stupid Shit That Goes Down Out Back By The Dumpsters. His first (and favorite) weapon was the kopis, the long knife used by the Greeks. He is familiar with the Roman gladius, the Norse arming sword, the Crusader’s longsword, the Mamluk’s sabre, the Zweihänder, the rapier, the epee, the cutlass, the bayonet, the Bowie knife, the tactical knife, the machete, and the Ginsu knife. The firearm list is even longer. As you can imagine, writing fight sequences for him can get technically complicated.

I used to love writing fight sequences because they required little dialogue or plot. They were all about action–moving pieces around on a board. In the last few years, though, I’ve been involved in a project that takes its fight sequences very seriously (the three volume historical adventure novel, The Mongoliad). One fight sequence in that project took us four months, three drafts, and a half-dozen expert consultants to get right. We shot a lot of choreography video for a fight that lasts about a minute and a half. Most of that video is our experts going into the weeds on their various martial arts to illuminate subtle intricacies of the techniques. Hours of video. Hours of work. The fight lasts less than two minutes.

It’s easy to get fight sequences wrong. In more than one hotel room, I’ve pushed furniture around to make enough so that I can step through the physical movements of a fight sequence. I’m not doing yoga. I’m trying to replicate the body mechanics of How Not To Get Hit By A Longsword. I had been vetting sword fights for about a year and a half when it came time to write Earth Thirst, and I was really tired of fight sequences.

But here’s Silas, and as tired as I am, he’s infinitely more tired of fighting. At the very least, it would be a rare fight that would interest him enough to warrant mentioning in his narrative. They were like brushing your teeth, eating lunch, or trying to remember where you put your car keys last night: the banal details of your life that no one cares to read about. And there is an efficiency here, as well. Like all repetitive actions that bore you, you learn to finish them very quickly.

Suddenly, the fight sequences in Earth Thirst became intriguing puzzles. How could I finish them as quickly as possible? What was the most brutally efficient method?

Which is how I ended up with Silas and Phoebe taking on a several carloads of mercenaries with just a couple of handguns and a scooter . . .

[This post originally ran on The Night Bazaar on December 10th, 2012.]

Cody Tilson did the cover for Earth Thirst, and to say that I’m thrilled with that cover is to understate how much jumping up and down I’ve been doing. We had a conversation about the art that went a little like this: “We could do X. No, let’s do Y. How about X crossed with a bit of Y? Why don’t you give us a bunch of photo references for the characters. But don’t overdo it as Cody may throw it all out the window and go a different direction entirely.”

He did. I’m pleased.

Poking around the internet the other day, I stumbled upon an earlier iteration that he posted over on Gorilla Artfare. I’m a bit of a process nerd, so I like to see these sorts of iterations. I dig the lettering he did, but I think the decision to go with the block of black letters on red make quite a difference. Plus the fanged T’s make all the difference.

It’s going to be a trend, I fear. The next one will have to have a similarly scripted second word. This is the headache writers have to endure. Not only do you have to come up with snappy titles, but they also have to use the right letters.

I am not a science fiction writer. My exposure to science is limited to an overabundance of calculus before I knew better and a couple of quarters of dabbling in chemistry before I ran off into the comforting embrace of literature. I did qualify for a Bachelor’s of Science, but I still cannot say, “Yes, I have a B.S. in the Arts and Letters” with a straight face.

It was entirely true though. I made up a lot of stories during my formative years, which makes me a speculatist, at best.

Do you know the difference between fabulists and speculatists? When asked about world-building, fabulists shrug and perform a sleight-of-hand trick that distracts you. Speculatists will drag out an enormous tome, filled with hundreds of pages of hand-written notes that no one can read. “Here,” they say, “What do you want to know?”

Earth Thirst has vampires in it. That makes it urban fantasy. There’s a thread running through it about catastrophic environmental collapse–it’s coming, kids–which is why I like to call it an eco-thriller. There’s a strong whiff of looking at something like the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook and positing a couple what if? scenarios. That sounds a lot like science fiction.

The last was brought to my attention by Vlad Verano at Third Place Press. I laughed at first, citing my bibliography as sign enough that I didn’t write science fiction, but isn’t that the basis of imagining what our world will be like in a generation or two?

I didn’t set out to write a cautionary tale of our future, but when the IEA puts out their yearly summary and it contains cautionary discussion of the likelihood of a 3° global temperature increase in our lifetimes, suddenly the Arcadian Conflict becomes something less than pure fiction and more of a metaphor.

[This post was originally published at The Night Bazar on November 30th, 2012.]

I’ve been in deadline hell for the last few months. For a brief moment, I am surfacing to clear my desk and try to reply to a bunch of emails and figure out where I live still before I get sucked back in to various projects. Let’s see what has happened since the last time I wandered through.

The Mongoliad Book Two came out. As did Dreamer, the second Foreworld SideQuest. As did The Lion in Chains, the third SideQuest. I didn’t write the fourth, The Shield-Maiden, but it is out too. The fifth, The Beast of Calatrava, is scheduled for early January of 2013 (me, again), and the sixth, Seer, is dropping in February when The Mongoliad Book Three comes out. The cover art for Seer has just gone up.

Oh, and Earth Thirst comes out in January too.

This is what deadline hell for nearly a year translates to: lots of content. I can’t complain, but it’s nice not to have that clock ticking. I say that now, but it is going to start up again in a few weeks. Other than that, I’ve been catching up on my reading. A couple Lisa Lutz Spellman books; a huge chunk of the Walt Longmire series (by Craig Johnson), a couple of Robert B. Parker books, and some of the Parker novels (in order, mind you).

And yes, I’m looking forward to the new film version in January. Jason Statham could use a good franchise, and he’ll do just fine as Parker.

The first Foreworld novella, Sinner, is out today via 47North.

This is a story that takes place a half dozen or so years before The Mongoliad, and explores a meeting between Andreas and Raphael, two members of the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae who didn’t meet during The Mongoliad. There’s a reference to Andreas early in the first book, when the hunting party that is going east is being selected. It was the sort of passing reference that is there as part of world-building; at the time, none of us expected we were going to need this character.

“But do you suppose we ought to wait a few days until some of our other Brothers can arrive?” one of the characters says. “Brother Andreas, for example. His spear would be a fine companion on a Khan-hunting journey. Plus he knows how to cook and he doesn’t snore like Brother Eleázar.”

But once we started developing the storyline of those who stayed behind at Legnica, we needed a good strong character. We went back to this scene, scooped up the name and the tiny bit we knew about him, and dropped Andreas on the page, and he turned into quite a handful. He was one of those characters who had their own idea about their presence in a book, and the Legnica storyline was the better for it.

When it came time to do the first batch of Side Quest novellas, we wanted to explore the back story of some of the characters, and I leaped at the chance of telling a story about Andreas and Raphael, two of my favorites.

Click here to buy a copy of this story.