Laura Montgomery's Blog, page 9

SciFi Shenanigans

I am very excited to let you all know that I’m going to be on the podcast SciFi Shenanigans.  We’ll be talking about science fiction, the Waking Late trilogy, and maybe a little space law.  We’re recording tonight at 6 p.m.  I don’t know if that’s live, but I’ll let you know when it comes out.

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Gift Books in Fantasy

I’ve started my Christmas shopping.  The young nieces and nephews on both sides of the family who I used to buy books for have gotten older.  I miss getting to do that.  Only a few are still quite young.

I’m trying to figure out if I can buy Dave Freer’s Changeling’s Island for one or two of them.  It was nominated for a Dragon and is one of those wonderful books that is targeted at middle school to young adult to me.   I better go find out precisely how old the youngest is.  He might be the...

Inertia Rising

The long Thanksgiving weekend is ended, and it’s time to get back to work.  My own National Novel Writing Month efforts failed spectacularly.  I had killed off a villain too soon, and I figured it out too late.  That’s all right.  I’m sill over halfway through the second book in my new series, and have a lot of good material, not to mention some very useful research on whales.

My husband came back from an early morning activity of his yesterday and saw I was still sitting at my desk.  I usual...

Free Stuff: Rapunzel and Early Spaceports

I am working on growing my newsletter list–in which I let readers know of new releases and special offers–and have learned that the way to do it is to entice you with free stuff.  Therefore, I now offer you free stuff.

First, I have a short story on Amazon available for free until Wednesday.  Are you traveling for Thanksgiving?  Rapunzel might be just the thing to read on an airplane.  It’s got:

First contact.

First sacrifice.

First answers.

Rapunzel’s also got a link to a free novelette.  W...

The Wrong Idea

Back when I worked full time as a lawyer, nothing would flood my brain with story ideas and scenes as effectively as a deadline.  The closer and more pressing the deadline, the more imaginative and wild the ideas that would trek across my cortex.  Maybe I’d scribble three notes for later, but that would be it.  This was my brain trying to escape pressure.  I’m sure of it.

That still happens with my current practice, but now I can control my time better.

However, I am participating in National...

Kindle Countdown for Mercenary Calling–it’s 99 cents today!

I wanted to let you know that Mercenary Calling is on one of Amazon’s Kindle Countdowns today in the US and the UK until tomorrow morning.  Check it out if you want to pick it up for 99 cents or pence!

Sample:

Calvin Tondini had to squint against the glare to see the motorcade of starship captains exiting the spaceport gates. With not just the sun and the water, but the air itself blindingly bright in the Florida afternoon, the world felt hot and alien for a January day. Coming to Canaveral P...

Dad’s Chiang Mai Memoir

My father has asked me to beta read his memoirs of our time in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.  We spent a little over three very happy years there.  We lived inside a giant, walled consular compound because my father was the Consoon American, the American Consul.

Bouginvillea crawled over the latticework of the carport in the front of the house and up to the balcony above.  My brother and I shared a horse, Sri Mantana, who had her stable in one of the side yards.  Lumyai trees in the side y...

NaNo Advice: Morning Words, Lunch Words, and the Rest

The weather is turning cold.  The leaves are falling.  Around here, we went from the 80’s and humid to the 50’s and arctic overnight, so the leaves aren’t turning.  Nonetheless, my mind lightly turns to thoughts of NaNo, in which one writes a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.  I have advice for newcomers to the shenanigans.

One of the astonishing benefits of National Novel Writing Month (NaNo, for short) for people like me, who start out not entirely sure of much besides the beginni...

Holes, Missing Sidebars, and Plasma Jets

I’ve wasted hours this weekend trying to restore the side bar to this blog and my space law site at groundbasedspacematters.com.  The sidebar doesn’t show on my home pages.  It shows on the other pages, but not on the first one.   My google-fu is failing me, and when I get This Close to installing a new sidebar I chicken out.  What if I lose the widgets in the sidebar?   I set these blogs up two years ago, and am having trouble remembering what I did.  It would take me another ten hours to fi...

The Great Equalizer

Working on my new batch of Nwwwlf stories, I’ve been feeling super sorry for the women. The Martha’s Sons stories are set in the first century after landing on Nwwwlf, right smack dab in the middle of the whole sorry process of de-industrialiazation. The world still contains tantalizing glimpses of what humanity once had–a motorbike here, an airplane there.  However, without electricity or sensible agricultural policies, without manufacturing, and with such a great divide between the technolo...