Marko Kloos's Blog, page 12

Posting a TikTok

Eight years ago, when Terms of Enlistment started selling a lot of copies, this $45 Casio Duro was the first “extravagant” purchase I made with some of the first windfall royalties.

Fast-forward to 2021, eight years and ten novels later, and I own a lot more watches, but I still wear this one a lot. It’s a reminder that I don’t need to spend a bunch of money to take pleasure in something, and that once upon a time, spending $45 on something I didn’t strictly need was a frivolous luxury.

(It’s also a damn good watch in its own right and easily the best sub-$100 dive watch on the market. It’s tough, unpretentious, accurate, and reliable, all properties worthy of emulation.)

 

ORDERS OF BATTLE is out on audio

The delayed audiobook version of ORDERS OF BATTLE was released yesterday, and it’s now available via Amazon/Audible.

The new narrator is Eric G. Dove. As I have mentioned before, the delay in production was due to the unexpected passing of Angelo DiLoreto, who was scheduled to narrate the book originally. As most of you will probably understand, that sort of thing can’t be fixed on the spot.

Cellulose backups

These are the original handwritten drafts for “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” (which ended up in Love Death + Robots on Netflix as ‘Shapeshifters”), and “Ink and Blood”, which was my first published short story ever. It seems that the stories of mine I like best all started out on paper and came out of a fountain pen.

Funny thing: I went through one of my old notebooks today to search for notes and story ideas I had written down years ago, and came across an unfinished short story I can’t remember writing. It’s in my handwriting, so I obviously did, but I don’t have any memory of it at all. It’s called “Pirates of Shiraz”, and it starts with a group of friends doing a VR bombing run in a WWII multiplayer online game in their guild’s B-17 called Springfield Sally. The pilot has to bail on the group for a few minutes because the baby’s crying in real life in her crib. He puts the plane on autopilot right as German fighters come in, and the guild members tell him that they’ll make him pay the repair bill if the plane goes down. I don’t know where I was going with the story, but it started out pretty well.

If I finished that one now and put it out into the world, people would probably say that it’s a Ready Player One pastiche. (That old notebook is from 2010, so the story fragment was written long before RP1 came out.) This was definitely the weirdest moment I’ve had while going through old notes. That’s why I keep all the notebooks I fill…you never know what you’re going to forget in the future.

Release date for CITADEL

There’s a new release date for CITADEL, the third book in the Palladium Wars series. It will be released in all the usual formats on August 10.

Last year, I was on a two-novels-a-year pace, but then 2020 happened and it all went to hell. But this year has been absolutely fine for me so far as far as writing goes–the blanket of cortisol has lifted, and I am confident I’ll be able to get back to that pace this year and write two novels before the end of 2021. With the time needed for production, however, that means the next Frontlines novel will most likely not be out until early next year. I do intend to release a Frontlines novella or two in the meantime, however, so 2021 won’t be totally Frontlines-free.

CITADEL will be my tenth published novel. That’s not a terrible pace considering the first two only came out in 2013. (I had written TERMS OF ENLISTMENT already, of course, and I was halfway done with LINES OF DEPARTURE already, so it’s really more like eight and a half novels in eight years.) I don’t know if that makes me “prolific”–I certainly feel like a lazy bum compared to writers like Brandon Sanderson–but I am happy with my ability to turn out steady work, and I’ll be happier still when I can get out two books a year instead of just one.

Countryside Internets

This is the current connectivity situation at Castle Frostbite: 100mbit fiber with 25Mbit upstream. That’s not gigabit fiber, but it’s absolutely workable, even with two teenagers in the house and about 30 devices on the WiFi at all times.

We live out in the country, but we have the luck to have picked a town that got wired for subsidized fiber half a decade after we moved here. But that’s the luck of the draw when you move into the countryside. Before fiber got here, we were on 1.5Mbit DSL for a few years, and before that….well, satellite was “Internet” of sorts, but it was slow and had 1,000ms latency, and a 200MB/day data cap. 100mbit fiber isn’t “downtown Seoul” speed, but it’s plenty fast even in the age of 4k HD streaming video.

In other news, we made it into 2021. And the first week of the new year sure has given 2020 a run for its money, hasn’t it? But I am done with the developmental edits for CITADEL this week, and then it’s on to other things, like Frontlines #8. 2021 will be better than 2020, because I won’t give it a choice.

Crawling toward the finish line

Science Fiction grandmaster James Gunn has died.

My career isn’t old enough for me to have met many of the old grandmasters of science fiction because most of them are no longer around. I did get to meet James Gunn at ConStellation in Lincoln, NE in 2017, where I was the Author Guest of Honor and he was the Grandmaster Guest of Honor. I also got to meet Dr. Ben Bova a few years ago when we did a panel at the Air Force Academy together with a few other writers. Dr. Bova died last month.

I know that numbers are completely arbitrary and that a new year on a calendar has no meaning except for symbolism, but I really am looking forward to seeing 2020 end. It seems like the constant onslaught of bad news and outrage has, as my agent put it, draped a blanket of cortisol over all of us. I am starting the last week of the year with novel edits that are due on the 31st, and finishing a novelette that I owe someone (and that is ridiculously overdue.) But it will all be done by the time the new year rolls around, and even if that number flipping is just a symbolic change, it’s as good a marker as any to hit the mental reset button and start to crawl out from under that cortisol blanket.

I hope you have a lovely holiday season. Stay safe, stay healthy, and let’s shank this year in the back with glee.

ORDERS OF BATTLE release day

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Today is the day! After almost two years, there’s a new Frontlines novel out. ORDERS OF BATTLE is the seventh volume in the series and picks up a few years after the last book. Things have calmed down a bit for humanity after POINTS OF IMPACT, but the Lankies are still out there, and someone higher up in the chain of command has decided that now’s the time to go looking for them.

ORDERS OF BATTLE is available on the Kindle and in paperback form today. (The Audible audiobook will be delayed until February–see my previous post on that for details.) I hope you pick it up in whichever format you prefer, then read it and maybe leave a review or recommend it to friends. And most importantly, I hope you enjoy returning to the Frontlines universe with Andrew Grayson and his podhead comrades.

New Wild Cards story

There’s a new Wild Cards story up on Tor.com. It’s called “Hammer and Tongs and a Rusty Nail”, and it was written by Ian Tregillis. Go read! It’s fun, and it’s free!

ORDERS OF BATTLE audiobook delay

Some people have noticed and commented on the fact that the audiobook of Orders of Battle now shows a delay for the release. The Kindle and print versions will still be out on December 8, but the Audible version is delayed until February 9th.

There’s a good reason for the delay, and I wish Audible would communicate it to the readers so people don’t think it’s an arbitrary thing. As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I have outpaced Luke Daniels’ schedule, and while he was still able to record AFTERSHOCKS, we had to find a new narrator for BALLISTIC, Angelo DiLoreto.

Angelo was also scheduled to take over Frontlines and narrate ORDERS OF BATTLE. Sadly, he passed away unexpectedly in October, before he could finish recording the book. Because of Angelo’s untimely passing, Audible had to find new narrators for Frontlines and Palladium Wars. The new narrator for Frontlines, Eric G. Dove, had to get up to speed on the prior Frontlines recordings to carry on the fine work Luke Daniels did with the series. That’s the reason for the delay, and while it’s less than ideal for the audiobook to be trailing the print version by two months, I hope it’s clear that it was a necessary one.

I had the luck to get great narrator choices. While Eric Dove is taking over Frontlines, the future Palladium Wars books will be narrated by Korey Jackson, and I am pleased that I’ll have different narrators for the two series to keep them distinct and separate from each other.

I know Angelo enjoyed working on a science fiction series, which was a bit of a departure from his usual narrations, and he did a great job on BALLISTIC. According to his obituary, he was only 30 years old, which is much too early to leave this ride. He was an accomplished musician, and he narrated over 200 audiobooks, which is an amazing professional track record. My condolences and sympathies go out to Angelo’s family and friends.

 

Paper trail

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This row of paperbacks is my collected output for novels since 2013. That does not include the novel I just delivered, titled CITADEL, because that one obviously doesn’t exist yet in paper form. It also doesn’t represent my total output because I also managed to write four novellas and novelettes for Wild Cards (“Stripes” for our mosaic novel LOW CHICAGO, “Probationary” for KNAVES OVER QUEENS, and the stand-alone stories “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” and “Berlin is Never Berlin” for Tor.com.)

By the way, that’s the correct order of publication, for those of you just getting onto the Frontlines train. The first one is Terms of Enlistment, and the rest follow just as they are sorted in the picture. (The Palladium Wars order is super easy to figure out because the titles are in alphabetical sequence. I stole that trick from Sue Grafton.)

As much as 2020 is a near-total write-off, it’s also going to be my first year with more than one novel release. BALLISTIC, second novel in the Palladium Wars series, was released on May 26th, and ORDERS OF BATTLE, seventh novel in the Frontlines series, will be out on December 8th. (That’s only a little more than a week away! Holy carp.) I’m hoping to keep the two-a-year pace going from now on, but that’s only going to work if 2021 turns out better than the dumpster fire that was 2020.