Marko Kloos's Blog, page 16

Emerald City ComicCon update

Due to health concerns related to the current coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak, my publisher has decided to cancel their participation at Emerald City Comic Con, so I won’t be in Seattle or at ECCC next week. (Sorry if you were looking to come to panels or get a book or two signed.)

In related news, we just had our first confirmed COVID-19 case in my state, and it’s someone from my county. That person is an employee of the local university hospital, so there’s a good chance people in the Upper Valley are going to buy the local grocery stores empty now. Alas, we here at Castle Frostbite are homebodies even in the most favorable conditions, and we are out in the country, so we are in a good position to ride this out.

(It’s a flu, people. Masks don’t do much. Just wash your hands a lot and stay away from people who are coughing. But that’s all good practice even when there isn’t any coronavirus going around.)

 

The highest and most noble use for potatoes

Every expat I know has a dietary vice they imported from their home country. It’s invariably something that is a.) bad for you, and b.) hard to obtain outside of its country of origin. Those two factors combine to make it far more desirable than it would be if you could walk down to the local grocery store and see it readily available at all times.

For me, it’s these:

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These, my friends, are objectively the very best potato chips in the world–FunnyFrisch-brand Chipsfrisch Ungarisch.

I bring them back in bulk when I am in Germany, and I barter with German friends and relatives, exchanging a box of FunnyFrisch for whatever items they want to get from the U.S. but can’t readily get in Germany. (My brother, for example, has a thing for Chips Ahoy cookies with Reese’s bits…don’t ask me why.) But with the costs of parcel mail between Germany and the U.S., it’s thing that happens once or twice a year at most because the postage is usually far more expensive than the contents of the box.

There are online grocery stores that sell these on Amazon if you’re dying to put my claim of “best chips in the world” to the test, but they’re stupid expensive when bought that way, to the tune of $8-10 for a single 150g bag, so I only use that channel in life-threatening potato chip emergencies. It’s probably a good thing they are that expensive via the ‘zon, though, because otherwise I’d have them on auto-refill, which wouldn’t be good for my middle-aged waistline.

ARCs for BALLISTIC are in

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I just got a box of ARCs for BALLISTIC, the second novel in the Palladium Wars series. Still massively digging the cover, which was apparently the first shot the cover artist took at the concept. I looked at it and said, “I’m good with that.”

The Palladium Wars series is different from Frontlines by intent. Frontlines is first person present tense, Palladium Wars is third person past tense. I made that choice deliberately to give each those universes their own voice, and to make sure that Aden and the other POV characters don’t read and sound like Andrew in Frontlines. Writing in two different universes and narrative techniques has helped me improve my craft because I had to stretch slightly different writing muscles, so to speak. Starting a new series to run concurrently with Frontlines has also enabled me to look at the Frontlines universe with a new eye. Switching back and forth helps me stay on my toes and hopefully avoid falling into a rut.

You’ll be able to judge for yourselves whether I’ve succeeded with that because 2020 will see new book releases in both universes, and I hope to be able to keep that frequency going from now on.

(BALLISTIC will be out on May 26. ORDERS OF BATTLE will follow late in the year, and I’ll update this page as soon as I have a firm release date.)

 

Frontlines #7 is done

I was planning to go to Detroit for ConFusion this past weekend, but the draft for the seventh Frontlines book, ORDERS OF BATTLE, wasn’t quite done yet. Work comes before fun because fun don’t pay the bills, so I sucked it up and cancelled the trip altogether just before the weekend.

It turned out to be a good decision in more than one way because I came down with a stomach bug over the weekend, and a winter storm moved in that would have made the 1,200-mile round trip a bit of an ordeal, so I am glad it panned out the way it did even if I was moping a bit on Friday that I wouldn’t get to hang out with friends.

But all’s well–I turned in the book on Monday morning, and my editor has assured me that it will make a 2020 release. I’m guessing it will be out in November or December. (The book needs to be proofread, put into print, get read for an Audible version, have a cover designed, and so on. The schedules of dozens of people have to be in sync, so you can’t just slap a draft onto your editor’s desk and expect to see the book out a month later.)

Now I get to start planning the two novels I’ll be writing this year while I wait for the first round of edits to come back. I do have some Frontlines novellas in the works to fill in the gap between now and the release of ORDERS OF BATTLE, so I should have something for you soon to tide you over.

 

 

Keeping it simple

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One of the perks of the writing profession is that it has virtually no hardware requirements. My friends in the 3D animation or video and photography fields have to spend money on powerful rigs with lots of fast storage, but I work with text. Everything I’ve ever written, a dozen novels and as many novellas and short stories, could probably fit on two or three of the old 1.44MB floppy disks if I saved everything in plain text.

My entire computing life fits onto a 2017 MacBook Air with the base 128GB storage, and I’ve only filled a quarter of even that modest storage. (I only use the essential apps I need for work—Scrivener, Word, and web and email because I can’t take those off without breaking the OS.) There’s nothing on this machine that isn’t needed for putting words down and editing them later. All my pictures and non-essential data are saved in the cloud, so I don’t need a lot of local storage. The processor in the MBA is a few generations behind, but I don’t need a ton of horsepower to run a word processor, and I picked the old model over a newer one because of the vastly superior keyboard and better battery life.

The external 27” display is there for ergonomics, because looking down at a 13” screen all day gives me a literal pain in the neck, and my eyesight is going downhill as I get older. But whenever I need to take my work with me, all I have to do is disconnect the laptop and stick it into a bag. All the benefits of a desktop, but with the added ability to take everything on the road without having to worry about keeping stuff in sync.

Paring my electronics use down to just a handful of single-use devices has done wonders for my productive workflow. It’s amazing how much fluff you can cut from your setup once you focus on the essentials and ruthlessly drop everything else. I have a blog post in mind for those friends of mine who have expressed curiosity about my recent ditching of social media and technology distractions, but that one will have to wait until I have turned in this novel.

Pub date change for BALLISTIC

I’ve been informed that BALLISTIC, second novel of the Palladium Wars series, has been moved up in the schedule for a publication date of May 26, 2020.

If you’d like to pre-order it, you can do so via this link. BALLISTIC will be available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, and Audible formats. (Lots of pre-orders will make my publisher happy, which means an increased chance there will be more Frontlines and Palladium Wars novels past 2020. Just sayin’.)

 

 

My creative balance for the decade

According to the Intertubes, that is my creative output for the 2010s. 

Seven novels, two Wild Cards novellas and one novelette, and three short stories. Their tally is missing one short story, “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare”, which was used for LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS this year. I’ve also written two more novels this year that won’t be out until 2020, so I’ve managed to write nine novels in the 2010s. And Jet City Comics did a four-issue Frontlines graphic novel called REQUIEM, which is also missing from the list.

That’s really not a bad record as far as productivity goes, and I especially like the regular numbers behind the novels, one per year since 2013. From 2020 on, the plan is to bring that number to two a year, so there should be three times as many entries on that page by the end of 2029….provided I don’t get hit by a bus or decide to hang up the keyboard and become a shepherd in New Zealand or something.

Overall, I really can’t complain about the 2010s, even if the second half of the decade has been a little strange and noisy. Since my career started taking off in 2013, I got to launch two SF series and sell over a million copies, see two of my short stories turned into Netflix material, and contribute a good number of words to the Wild Cards universe. I’ve also been able to travel a lot and make a bunch of new friends in my new professional field. If things keep going on this general trajectory, the 2020s should be a very good decade for me. We shall see.

I hope you all had a great holiday season, and I wish you a happy and prosperous 2020.

Sunday, not so fun day

I had to take Mr. Andy A. Doodle to the emergency vet today, which wasn’t great. The tab ran half a grand, which also wasn’t great. But Mr. Andy is fine, which is great. And I got this vet office selfie out of it, which is also pretty great.

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Wild Cards interview and convention schedule for 2020

The official Wild Cards page has an interview with me that’s probably the most detailed and in-depth one I’ve given so far.

In other news, work on Frontlines #7 (“Orders of Battle”) is progressing very well, and things are still on track for a completed draft by the end of December. I don’t want to promise too much, but my publisher thinks they’ll be able to slot it into the 2020 release schedule if I manage to turn it in on time. So far, so good.

I am filling out my convention dance card for 2020, and it looks like I may be able to do a few more cons than I managed this year. Right now I am tentatively confirmed for ConFusion in Detroit (which is in January), and Emerald City Comic Con in March. I’ll also be at Readercon in Boston just like every year.

The 2020 Worldcon is in New Zealand, and we’re still in the planning stage on that one. Right now I’d say the chance is about 50/50 that we’ll be able to go, but there are a few other things that need to align to make all the lights go to green. Worldcons tend to be expensive, but the flight halfway around the globe adds another layer of cash to that bill because there’s no way I’m doing a 16-hour flight in coach.

 

 

 

Emerald City Comic Con

It looks like I’ll be attending Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle from March 12-15. I don’t have a schedule yet because the panels have yet to be approved, but if it’s anything like last time, I’ll be participating in a few panels and most likely do a signing as well. So if you are planning to attend ECCC or thinking about it, mark your calendar if you want to see me and/or get a book signed.

I’ll post a more precise schedule for the con once I get word back on the approved panels.