David VanDyke's Blog, page 5

The Long Dry Spell is Over

 

 

Howdy everyone! Check this out:

Outcast  is a milestone for me, Book 10 of BV Larson’s Star Force series, co-written by none other than yours truly, ME! It was a total blast to work on and write within Larson’s Star Force universe, which is HUGE HUGE HUGE. A big thank you to Mr. Larson for giving me the opportunity, and I really do believe we’ve put out a superior product. It’ the longest Star Force book yet, too, so you get super value for your reading dollar.

Book 10 is not only a follow-on to Book 9, The Dead Sun (duh – what else would a book 10 be) but it also launches a new tale of Kyle Riggs’ son, Cody! He’s a chip off the old block, but you get to start by seeing a bit of his childhood, then the action picks up just after he graduates from Star Force Academy. With such a storied history and a legendary ass-kicking father, you know Cody is going to get into trouble sooner or later. They say both cream and scum rise to the top, but you’ll have to read the book to find out which one he is.

Along the way he’s joined by some of Kyle Riggs’ best friends – er, acquaintances, maybe – and there’s plenty of stuff blowing up, warship and space marine action, a little romance, new aliens, stuff blowing up, factories and fleets, stuff blowing up, even cooler aliens, crazy robots and underhanded dealings, Nanites and Microbes and Ancients, OH MY! And did I mention stuff blowing up? It’s the finest modern space opera out there. Okay, well, there’s Star Wars (TM) that’s pretty good, but really, Star Force is awesome.

If by chance you have NOT read the Star Force series, Outcast is not only book 10, but is book 1 of the spinoff Star Force Universe, so you can start here if you want to. Or, you can go all the way back to Book 1,  Swarm, and start there. Or read Outcast first, and when you realize you LOVE this universe and these stories, you’ll be so addicted you’ll have no choice but to go back and read book 1,  Swarm, thus occupying your time before book 11 (book 2 of Star Force Universe) comes out in a few months.

Which you’ll hardly be able to wait for.

Really.

And just when you thought the news wasn’t going to get much better, here’s the cover of Book 4 of Stellar Conquest, titled Conquest of Earth.

 

Conquest of Earth will be coming out mid-May, and will introduce an entirely new race of enemy aliens. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in space, and just when Admiral Absen and the crew of Conquest thought they had it all sewn up, everything changes, and changes again. This books has a lot more Marine action than Tactics of Conquest, and as usual lots of your favorite characters and their story lines, as well as stuff blowing up, warship and Marine action, a little romance and new aliens. Oh, did I say that all above? Well, it’s all in the same genre, after all. It’s what you love, so I’ll do my best to keep giving it to you.

I’ll put up another blog post to notify you when Conquest of Earth is published. Then I’ll drop off the face of the world for a little while – no, wait, I’ll have the internet so I’ll be around – but we’ll be moving from Virginia to Arizona. The next project is the aforementioned book 11 of Star Force, tentatively titled Exile, to follow up Outcast. After that, who knows! Probably the next Stellar Conquest book, though I have also been working on a couple of mysteries (see earlier blog). Ah, the life of an author is never slow, believe me. Not if it’s done right.

As always, post a comment or drop me an email, or post in my Amazon forum if you want to chat about Outcast or future books. Cheers and happy reading.

Dave VanDyke

 

Filed under: Writing Blog Tagged: B.V. Larson, David VanDyke, Outcast, star force

Tactics of Conquest is out!

Sorry it took a bit longer than expected, but Tactics of Conquest, book 3 of the Stellar Conquest series is out! You can find it right here (http://amzn.com/B00HX0KVEK). Given that Comes the Destroyer was published in October, and I put out Switchback (http://amzn.com/B00HHLNZXE) with my brother in between times, three months is not a bad rate of writing. It’s about what I was shooting for. That means I hope I will get Conquest of Earth, book 4 of Stellar Conquest, out in April. However, we will be preparing to move house in that timeframe, so that may slow me down. Also, I am committed to writing another book in between, and I still have my day job. Ah, the life of an indie writer. It’s a hard way to make an easy living, believe me, but it’s a lot of fun.

I’m also working on a couple of straight, non-sci-fi mystery-thrillers, titled Loose Ends and In A Bind. The first one I’ve already released as a novelette within the Eight the Hard Way anthology (http://amzn.com/B00H8OZW1I), but I intend to expand it into a novel at some point, and then the follow-up is half written. However, other things have gotten in the way so those have gone on the back burner. Here are the two covers to give you a preview:

The aforementioned extra book I am committed to writing is a co-project with a bestselling sci-fi author, rather like Russell Blake is doing with Clive Cussler. I can’t give you details right now, because the contracts and so on have not been signed, but they will be first person in a lighter style than my other work, and will spin off from the other author’s main series in the same universe. All in all, quite exciting times.

Filed under: Writing Blog

Eight the Hard Way

Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve released a new novelette called “Loose Ends” introducing my mystery-thriller heroine California “Cal” Corwin, a tough San Francisco P.I and former cop who likes racing, poker, and unconventional justice. Her first story is contained within this multi-story, multi-author release:

I am halfway done with Cal Corwin’s first full novel, titled “In a Bind,” that I hope to bring out before the end of the year. I’m having a lot of fun writing straight mystery thrillers, nothing paranormal or science-fictiony about them at all. Just murders and mysteries and guns and tough gurls, set in San Francisco and of course here and there in the rest of California.

The New Adult Paranormal Romance novel my brother and I have co-written is also almost ready, in beta right now, so as soon as it comes back from the readers and the proofreader, that should also be up before the new year, I hope. Here is a draft of the cover.

I am really excited to be working with Drew on this. It will be his first book and it’s fun to see him making the writer’s journey like I did a couple years ago, and having something to cooperate with him on.

And, I am still working on Tactics of Conquest, Stellar Conquest book 3, the latest in my military sci-fi epic, which should be out in January for all my sci-fi fans.

Eight The Hard Way on Amazon.com

Filed under: Writing Blog

Past, Present and Future

…which by the way is the name of a great Al Stewart album http://www.amazon.com/Past-Present-Future-Al-Stewart/dp/B0000032V0 , but has little to do with this post other than he’s a favorite of mine.

THE PAST: Plague Wars is done, finished, ended I think, with the release of Comes The Destroyer (see the immediately preceding post). I suppose it’s possible I may write another one, some kind of spinoff like John Ringo did with his never-ending Aldenata series, but seven books is a pretty good run. And, for those of you in the know, the Stellar Conquest series, of which I have two books published and a third in the works, is a direct continuation of Plague Wars, using the same universe, so in that sense it’s not over.

That segues nicely into THE PRESENT and FUTURE. My plate got very full lately, what with editing TI Wade’s America One series of books and some others, and working on three books of my own right now. One is the aforementioned third in the Stellar Conquest series, called Tactics of Conquest. Here’s the tentative cover:

Then, I am working on co-authoring a New Adult supernatural book with my brother Drew, tentatively titled Switchback: A Supernatural Siblings Novel. It’s a cool story and he has a great voice, and it will be aimed squarely at that market, with a strong female protagonist and a werewolf and ghost theme. It will be quite different from anything I have done before, and I hope it will be the start of an entertaining series.

Semi-lastly, I am working on a new mystery/thriller series with Micheal Maxwell featuring California “Cal” Corwin, an ex-cop and PI who works cases out of San Francisco, a girl with moxie, sass and pizazz. These books are set in the same universe as Micheal Maxwells’s Cole Sage mysteries, and you will see her appear in the Cole Sage books and Cole appear in the Cal Corwin books from time to time. We will be collaborating and co-branding these in the future. I hope to get the first full novel, In A Bind, into print by Christmas

Lastly, relating to the above, the first California Corwin mystery-thriller story is a novelette (about 15K words) titled Loose Ends, and will be published in December within a forthcoming anthology of thriller stories titled Eight the Hard Way, that Nick Stephenson of Leopold Blake fame is coordinating and publishing. Here’s the cover.  Great job with it, Nick!

Most of these I hope to get out by New Year’s, which will be a heck of a lot of work but I’m hoping the holidays give me extra time and impetus.

Cheers and happy reading!

Filed under: Writing Blog

New Release: Comes The Destroyer

Greetings, Plague Wars fans. Here’s the link to Comes The Destroyer,  the final book in the 7-book Plague Wars series: http://amzn.com/B00FPOJ27I

It’s large, bigger than any of the other books by more than a quarter – almost 125,000 words, which is more than 500 print pages in a standard trade paperback.

Launching into the realm of science fiction, it recounts the battle to save Earth from an alien empire that previously had tried to subvert and destroy humanity via its plagues and biological advantages. This book caps the mostly Earthbound thrillers with a full-blown space battle without losing the feet-on-the-ground, realistic characters and plots that are a hallmark of Plague Wars. In it you’ll follow several of your favorite characters in their struggle against internal and external threats, where sometimes their own worst enemies are themselves. Comes The Destroyer delivers all of the pulse-pounding action and sacrifice you have come to expect, with touches of suspense, humor, drama and romance along the way, and I hope will tie up most of the loose ends and set the reader up for the next book: First Conquest, book 1 of the Stellar Conquest trilogy. First Conquest takes the reader a century into the Plague Wars future, where you will find several familiar characters such as Jilll Repeth, Spooky Nguyen, Vango Markis, Rick Johnstone and Admiral Absen. That book is contained within the Planetary Assault anthology, and book 2, Desolator, is already available. I am working on book 3, Tactics of Conquest, right now, and expect to have it done before Christmas.

Cheers and happy reading!

Dave

Filed under: Writing Blog

The Review Kerfluffle and Other Stories

Well, it’s been a long month since my last blog post and a lot continues to happen in the world of e-publishing.

Most recently is this article, which I must tell you up front is a slanderous bunch of garbage in the cases I know about personally. I can’t be certain none of the authors on the list are guilty but of those I know, I don’t believe they would do such a thing. Further undermining any credibility of the article’s writer is 1) his or her anonymity and 2) the fact that some of the accused do not even have 500 reviews, yet he/she accuses them of buying reviews by the 500-lot. http://zonalert.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/the-fiverr-report-on-melissa-foster-fake-reviews-fake-awards-fake-everything/comment-page-1/#comment-65

Here is some extended commentary from some of the authors, other authors, and users of KBoards. http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,162910.0.html

So hopefully that will all blow over soon and no one will believe it. Even better is if the blogger would be outed. In any case, it seems as if he/she has some kind of axe to grind.

The there’s the new Kindle Matchbook option that those who publish through CreateSpace now have. In short, it allows you to bundle an ebook into your print book offering, as long as you set the ebook price to half or less of its normal cost. Some shortsighted authors (but no readers) seem to think this is a bad idea and more race for the pricing bottom, but Amazon does not do things unless it’s good for the bottom line – and since their sales are our sales, if this helps sales, I’m for it. It seems to me that if readers want it, and it entices readers to two sales instead of one, at a discount, it will both put money in our pockets and make readers happier.

For those of us who patronize Goodreads, good news. This blogger doesn’t think it’s good news, but I believe he misses the point. The new policy allows GR to delete “reviews” that address author behavior rather than the book. Now, I am not defending badly behaving authors, but unless that behavior directly applies to their book (e.g., and autobiography) it really should be almost irrelevant. The book is the book. the work should stand on its own. Shall we punish Hunter Thompson because he was a drunken drug-crazed psycho, or Hemingway for misogynistic tendencies, or Mark Twain because he undoubtedly uttered and used the N-word in historical context?  http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/09/20/goodreads-announces-new-content-policy-now-deletes-reviews-mention-author-behavior/

The blogger thinks they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, but from what I have seen, what they have really done is thrown a whole bunch of mob-attack babies out with some mildly dirty bathwater, a housecleaning that needed doing. Sure, a there will be some broken eggs in this omelet. Unless Amazon, GR’s new owner, were to hire hundreds of moderators to go through millions of past posts in detail and make value judgments, they have to take a pretty blunt knife to cut away the rot. Some legit stuff is going to get cut along with the corruption. At the end of the day, though, GR should be more about the books and the reading experience than about the personalities of the authors or the readers themselves. Suppressing some of the worst of the personal attacks by removing these “reviews” that have little to do with the book itself has to be done, to restore GR’s credibility.

Next topic. there have been a number of anti-ebooks or anti-digital rants and events lately, from Robert Patterson’s well-known stunts including donating $1m to promote independent bookstores (despite the fact that indie bookstores are doing just fine, thank you – it’s the big box stores like Borders (RIP) and B&N that are hurting) to Franzen’s complaints against Amazon http://www.teleread.com/authors/franzen-preaches-the-amazon-apocalypse/  to ones like this: http://www.idealog.com/blog/dont-blame-amazon-facebook-twitter-fact-technology-changes-behavior/ Although I don’t agree with the writer’s idea that opting out of technologies is inherently antisocial, I do agree that these technologies should not terrify us. The ones most afraid of disruptive technologies are those who are heavily invested, that is, money-wise, in old ones. But this is the way the world works, folks, and there is nothing inherently evil or good in a new technology. It’s just tools, folks, and new tools also provide new opportunities. I know ebooks and self-publishing sure provided me some opportunities.

Here’s another one, where a well-known writer seems to have been stealing from fanfiction for YEARS. Despite the blogger’s support for this “author,” the evidence seems damning. Whole teams of people have apparently now dug up reams of near-exact plagiarism. You be the judge.

And now an update on what some of you have been waiting for, the latest, last and final Plague Wars book, Comes the Destroyer. I can tell you that it has finally been drafted. I only have a few tweaks and finishing touches to put on it, and it came in at about 120K words. For those of you for which that is meaningless, think 500 pages. Fairly hefty. That’s why it took a month longer than I had expected, but I believe it will be worth it for all you readers. I am hoping to get it published in two to three weeks, depending on how long beta-readers and proofreaders take, so figure somewhere around the 10th of October.

After that I will be working on Tactics of Conquest, which is the next in the Stellar Conquest series. That book might be the end of that series, making it a trilogy. Or, because the two series can be viewed as one long series sharing characters, TOC might be viewed as Book 10 of the whole thing. It’s up to you. You keep reading, and I’ll keep writing.

Filed under: Writing Blog

Comes the Destroyer Coming Along

Thought I’d give y’all out there in readerland an update on my next book. It’s the sixth and final of the Plague Wars series, titled Comes the Destroyer. Here’s the cover.

It’s more than half done, though what that means I can’t say for sure.  It might be 75K words, it might be 100K. I am going to write this one until it’s done. That also means it might take a bit longer, but I’d rather get it right than quick. There’s an old saying: Do you want it cheap, fast, or good? Pick two. I intend for CTD to be cheap and good. And just when, you say? For sure by the end of September. I hope sooner.

Because it’s going to cover nine years of story time, it’s going to be both more complex and more episodic than other books. Rather than leap forward to the last story year, which was one option, I wanted to give people a sense of what it took to conduct a worldwide effort during that time, as well as of course culminate in the defense of Earth. That will set readers up to leap forward to First Conquest, the start of the Stellar Conquest series (within Planetary Assault). After that, I will be working on Tactics of Conquest, Stellar Conquest series book 3, and it will be a humdinger, I believe. That series is more explicitly mil-sci-fi, frankly because most of the character development has already been done in the Plague Wars series and I can squeeze more action in without, hopefully, endlessly reminding readers of the characters’ background. One thing that used to annoy me about print books is the padding authors felt like they had to do, recapping storylines and earlier books, because they would only bring out a book every year or two. Well as we all know, that model has been blown out the water by indies like me and Vaughn Heppner and BV Larson and Thomas DePrima, writing two, three or four books a year easily. The king of production is Russell Blake, who publishes a book about every six week, books that are genuinely his and not, like James Patterson’s, written by someone else and merely edited and published under his name.

So that’s the news. Here are a few links to some good stories that all indie authors and readers should peruse.

Here’s kind of a laugh, and proof positive tradpubs don’t get it. They seem to be trying to convince us indies to voluntarily give up one of our advantages.

http://www.teleread.com/publishing/publisher-calls-on-authors-to-lay-off-writing-give-us-a-break/

This one continues the truth about DRM, namely: IT’s FRICKIN’ STUPID. Authors, if you DRM your books, you give up sales, tick off your readers, and don’t even slow down pirates. Oh, and by the way, piracy doesn’t steal your sales. It gives you exposure.

http://www.teleread.com/drm/dont-talk-about-drm/

And last, here’s an interesting light read.

http://io9.com/7-scifi-literary-and-journalistic-hoaxes-that-readers-b-1161563745

Cheers and keep reading, keep writing!

Filed under: Writing Blog

A Few Good Stories From Around the Sphere

Every now and again I throw out some links to good publishing items. Here’s a few:

The first is an Onion satire piece – oh, that’s redundant, isn’t it – about the death of print.

http://www.teleread.com/uncategorized/print-dead-at-1803/

Never realized so much cover art got recycled.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/19-book-cover-cliches

Some humor. Note: naughty words alert.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/signs-youre-addicted-to-books-reading

And finally, a more serious piece where the HP comes down squarely on the side of indie authors.  I love it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/luxeco-living/dear-mainstream-authors-s_b_3626633.html

Cheers! Keep writing, or if you don’t write, then at least keep reading.

Filed under: Writing Blog

Cyborg Strike is Live

Great news, Cyborg Strike has just gone live. It probably won’t even come up on a search yet, but here it is: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E7G3REY. It has already been put into the Smashwords queue and will be up on B&N soon, so you should see it there and on the sites they feed, such as ibooks, in a week or two.

This book focuses on Earth and pretty much wraps up the important Earthbound parts of Plague Wars. Comes the Destroyer is well on the way to first draft and will take place largely in space, and may close out the series. I am still toying with the idea of a “connector” book between CTD and First Conquest. I am also considering a novella or novelette as a Plague Wars Book 0. But the next book after this will be Tactics of Conquest, book 3 in the Stellar Conquest series.

Too many projects, not enough time.

Filed under: Writing Blog

Cyborg Strike

The polls were split overall – I ran three of them, here on the blog, one on FB and one on Goodreads. There was no real consensus. So, I have decided to go with two books. This gets out the next installment that much earlier, and I believe will make the books better as I can concentrate on one finished product at a time. Cyborg Stike will come in at a very reasonable $2.99.

So here’s the cover for Cyborg Strike, many thanks to my wife Beth for coming up with the title.

The narrative revolves around the rogue Septagon Shadow cyborg program and how the world deals with it. Jill Repeth and Spooky Nguyen get the most story time by far, with a lot of help from the supporting cast and some nasty cyborg opposition. Shadows and nanocrack and assassinations, oh my! At the end of it, the story will be set for a full-bore launch into space; Comes the Destroyer will close the series and encompass EarthFleet’s effort to defend the solar system.

Cheers and happy reading!

Dave

Filed under: Writing Blog