Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 59

Immortal Clay

I’m writing Immortal Clay, a science fiction series for people who enjoy alien invasion tales like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing.

The first book is now out; the second should be available in late 2015.

Duplicate. Infiltrate. Exterminate.

Liberate?

The alien ate its way out of Antarctica, devouring and duplicating every living thing it found. Humanity turned continents to glass and oceans to poison in a desperate effort to stop it—and failed.

Nobody expected that once the ali...

Ignore the next couple of posts

I’m in the midst of rearranging my web site. The nonfiction stuff is pretty well organized, but the fiction really is not.

Most of the fiction can easily be reordered, except for a couple of pages that just won’t fit well anywhere. So I’m putting those pages up as blog posts.

Unfortunately, I can’t cancel those out of the RSS feeds. And most of my blog readers are already aware of these pages. I’m using the bang-more markup to keep most of the pages out of your feed, though.

I think I can can...

Tarsnap talk at mug.org, 12 May 2015

I’ll be doing a 20-minute presentation on Tarsnap at the mug.org meeting on 12 May 2015, at the Farmington Hills library.

As you might guess, it’s somewhat based on my Tarsnap book. I only get 20 minutes, so it won’t be a complete overview, but it will get you started.

Assuming all goes well, we’ll get video again.

FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS on pre-order

FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS just went to the FreeBSD developer community for technical review.

I’ve also made it available for pre-order on the Tilted Windmill site.

This is the first of two books on ZFS.

I also plan a 4-book bundle once FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems is done.

FreeBSD and beadm

One of Solaris’ ZFS features is boot environments, where you can install multiple versions of the core operating systems and choose which one to boot into. Boot environments take a lot of the risk out of upgrades; if an upgrade goes bad, you can easily roll back to the previous version.

Boot environments are built on top of ZFS. Recent FreeBSD installers create fine-grained datasets rather than a single large dataset, which means you can leverage boot environments on FreeBSD.

Boot environment...

Sunday Morning Linux Review on “Tarsnap Mastery”

The Sunday Morning Linux Review crew has reviewed Tarsnap Mastery in episode 148. From the review:

“If you use any nix-type system, and need offsite backups, then you need Tarsnap. If you want to use Tarsnap efficiently, you need Tarsnap Mastery.”

The whole episode is worth listening to, but the review itself starts about 1:27 in the unedited video.

They also review me as an author. All I can say to that is: “Eeep!” Fortunately they didn’t review my personality, so I come out okay.

March 2015 updates

I’ve been busy producing words, just not blog words.

The short bits first. I hit 125K words in the first 3 months of 2015, putting me on track to break half a million words in 2015. While in the past I normally hit about a thousand words an hour, that required leveraging my day job as “research time.” I need to research during my work day now. My nonfiction speed is about 500 words/hour.

Recent releases include a new Montague Portal novella and Tarsnap Mastery. Both seem to be well-received,...

“Forever Falls” novella print and ebook

I posted this elsewhere, but now that it’s in print I should mention it here:

I have a new Montague Portal novella out, Forever Falls, in both print and ebook.

There’s no grounds for murder.

There’s no ground at all.

The people exploring and exploiting alien universes risk everything—including their lives.But Devin Gupper’s death makes no sense. And the more questions security officer Aidan Redding asks, the less rational it seems.

But in a bottomless universe full of impossibilities, with ne...

“Tarsnap Mastery” print out!

You can get the print version of Tarsnap Mastery from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Other Amazon sites will have it shortly.

In about 6 weeks the book will percolate through the Ingram catalog, which means that sites like Powells and B&N will have it.

The post “Tarsnap Mastery” print out! appeared first on blather.michaelwlucas.com.

“Tarsnap Mastery” ebook out

The ebook of Tarsnap Mastery is now on Amazon, iBooks, and Kobo. All DRM-free, of course.

I’m working on the print version this week.

Once I have the print version available, the 3-format ebook bundle will be available from www.tiltedwindmillpress.com

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