Marko Kloos's Blog, page 4

DESCENT giveaway winners

The random number gods have spoken and passed down ten numbers, which I matched up with the comments in order from first to last. There were 193 eligible comments in total, so your chance to win was a little lower than one in twenty.

The winners are:

Victor WefferFredAdrian O’NeillPhilFabAndrewAGNick M.RalphDave Thomas

I am sending out an email to the winners in a few. If you’re on the list, check your inbox and respond as instructed to claim your book.

Thanks for playing, everyone, and I hope that even those of you who did not win a signed paperback will still purchase a Kindle or paper copy of the book on release day.

DESCENT giveaway is now closed

I hope you all got your comments in because the DESCENT giveaway is now closed to new entries.

I will pick ten winners with the help of the RNG gods and announce them at some point tomorrow. As always, I’ll ship the books to the winners anywhere in the world free of charge.

Hope you’re all having a great weekend! Tune in tomorrow to see the list of lucky winners.

DESCENT giveaway starts right meow

 

Here they are–ten paperback copies of DESCENT, fourth book in the Palladium Wars series, ready to be signed and shipped to new owners.

YOU TOO could be one of the lucky winners! Just leave a comment on this post indicating the desire to own a signed copy, and you will be entered in the giveaway. Entries will be counted until next Saturday, May 25, at 3pm EST. One entry per person, please, and make sure you log in with a valid email address so I can notify you in case you are one of the Chosen. Good luck!

DESCENT paperbacks have arrived

Author copies for DESCENT, the fourth book in the Palladium Wars series, have arrived at the Castle.

If you’re at all familiar with how things go around here, you know that this means another giveaway is imminent. I’ll start the traditional pre-release contest this weekend and run it for a week as always. (Don’t put your name in the hat already by commenting to that effect on this post; it won’t count.)

 

Cyanocitta cristata

 

A blue jay having a quick and easy breakfast at the local fly-thru.

Fun fact about blue jays: they’re not really blue. Their feathers are black. We see them as blue because of the way the structure of the feathers scatters light. It’s known as Tyndall scattering.

Spicy Pillow Syndrome

I was typing on my old MacBook Pro today and noticed that the bottom case was wobbling back and forth a little despite being on a flat desk.

I grabbed my trusty iFixit toolkit, took off the case bottom, and found this:

 

That’s what we call a “spicy pillow”, a lithium-ion battery that has chemically degraded to the point of releasing gas. The only way to fix it is to (carefully) remove the battery and professionally dispose of it because it’s a fire hazard.

Sadly, the battery pack in this model is glued into the case with a strong adhesive. To get it out, I’d have to disassemble pretty much the entire bottom case and then loosen the adhesive with solvent, all the while working around a battery that may turn into a tiny volcano if it’s pierced by a screwdriver or the corner of a spudger by accident. That’s $100 or so for a new battery, plus two or three hours of tricky labor, all to fix a laptop that I bought in 2017. I decided not to spend the time, money, and effort to keep a 9-year-old laptop going, so I pulled out the SSD storage, closed the case again, and set it aside for disposal.

I used that MacBook Pro pretty steadily for the last seven years, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of it. Still, it has traveled to a lot of places with me, and I wrote more than one novel on it, so I’m a little bummed to have to retire it. It couldn’t run the latest MacOS anymore, but it was still working just fine for daily computing. Alas, it’s not safe to use like this anymore, so out to the great computer lab in the sky it goes.

A magic wand for tattooing dead trees

The piston knob on my favorite fountain pen broke recently, so I sent the pen (a Lamy 2000) off to the mothership in Germany for warranty repair. It came back a little while ago, with a delivery note listing the repairs which were performed at no charge. That’s some awesome customer service for a pen I bought eleven years ago.

I started a new notebook for the current manuscript in January, but I had to use one of my other pens for the first few chapters because the Lamy 2000 was out of commission. I can tell by the quality of the handwriting changing mid-page when I got the 2000 back because it looks cleaner and neater. I put a lot of miles on that pen over the years–I wrote the first drafts of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE with it–so I’m glad to have it back for the next decade of novel-writing.

I don’t usually do product recommendations (except for my own novels, of course), but I’ll make an exception for the fantastic notebooks I found on Amazon last year. Before I came across those, I wrote in Moleskines until their paper quality started going downhill, at which point I switched to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, but these new ones are head and shoulders above even the Leuchtturms, and they cost about one third as much. If you’re a fellow ink-and-pen writer, you need to give them a try. The pages are sewn, so they lie flat no matter where you open the notebook, the notebooks are sturdy, and the paper is seriously thick–probably twice as thick as the ones on the Moleskines. There is no ink I’ve tried that will bleed or show through on the other side of the page, and it’s smooth paper with just a little bit of tooth, perfect for fountain pen nibs. The best part is the price: they’re twelve bucks for a pair. I throw another pack into my shopping cart pretty much every time I order other stuff, and I have enough now to keep me in first draft notebooks for the next six or seven novels.

Here’s the link if you’re interested. Stock up while they have inventory because you won’t find a better notebook, especially not for a mere six bucks a pop.

Quick office tour, February of twenty-four

 

I had to clean up and reorganize the desk today, so I took a picture of its pristine state while it lasts.

The artwork on the wall: John Picacio cover for one of my Tor.com Wild Cards stories, Michael Komarck cover for LOW CHICAGO featuring my character Khan, and (above the pulse rifle prop from ALIENS) the cover of the Polish edition of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, kindly gifted to me by Fabryka Słów. The framed art on the left next to the corkboard is a pencil drawing of my home city in Germany.

The corkboard has various motivational trinkets and some of my reference index cards on it, and the whiteboard is mostly blank right now except for the motto of the month.

I’m currently using an Alienware M17R5 AMD with a 25″ Dell UltraSharp display and a Keychron V1 keyboard and M3 mouse, for those of you interested in the hardware. Still writing in Scrivener, with final polishing and editing in Word before submission because Word is the industry standard. (I’ve gone back to longhand for the first draft, so the stuff that ends up in Scrivener and then Word was written with actual ink on actual paper first.)

AND THAT CONCLUDES THE OFFICE TOUR. Make sure you hit the gift shop on the way out!

Contest books are in the mail

The contest prize books will be going out to the winners today. In this round, the international readers were particularly blessed by the random numbers gods. Of twelve books, only three are going to U.S. addresses. The rest are all international: one each to Germany, Finland, and Switzerland, and six(!) to addresses in the UK.

THE THINGS I DO FOR MY INTERNATIONAL READERS.

 

 

 

 

SCORPIO contest winners

All right, the RNG gods have chosen.

The winners are:

Nicholas ClarkeDennisHugh LaverySanteriDeclan David Peter HolmesAshley R. PollardHendrikBill AndersonKrzysztofTerritorial Army MedicMarla McOmberBjorn

 

I’ll be sending out an email to the people on the list with instructions. If anyone doesn’t claim their copy by Wednesday, January 10, I’ll have the RNG select alternate winner(s) and notify them separately.

Congratulations to the winners!