Monthly Archives: January 2016

January 29, 2016 · 4:30 pm

MJ-12: Inception now listed on Goodreads, up for pre-order on Amazon

The funny thing is, we’re still working on the edits to MJ-12: Inception. Regardless, you can now add the first MAJESTIC-12 thriller to your Goodreads “want to read” pile and, if you’re feeling particularly inspired, get your Amazon pre-order in today.

I know, right? I’m mostly just bemused to find these pages so early. But hey, feel free to make use of them.

I should note that the Sept. 6, 2016, release date is correct but should be treated as tentative this far out. I definitely feel like we’ll make that with plenty of room to spare, but Night Shade Books could move that around if the need arises on its end.

And no, there’s no cover yet. I did receive this little logo here, which is cool. But I’ve seen the full cover drafts and, man, let me tell you, it’s going to be amazing. Just a great old-school thriller cover with some neat paranormal elements to it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be tinkering with MJ-12.net in the coming days and weeks. Right now, it’s very much a placeholder, but I’m hoping to add some content that will get folks excited about seeing super-powered espionage agents duke it out during the Cold War. Be sure to look out for excerpts of MJ-12: Inception in the Daedalus trilogy mass-market paperbacks this spring and summer, too.

#SFWApro

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January 27, 2016 · 3:00 pm

The Daedalus trilogy is coming to mass-market paperback!

The new paperback cover! Click to embiggen!

It’s hard to believe that The Daedalus Incident first set sail back in August of 2013, and it’s been a heck of a journey. Best part of all — it’s not over yet!

I’m super excited to report that Night Shade Books is re-releasing the trilogy — The Daedalus Incident, The Enceladus Crisis and The Venusian Gambit — in mass-market paperback this year. For those not wholly conversant in publisher-speak, the books will come out in the smaller paperback format you’ve seen at the bookstore.

But wait, there’s more. Each paperback will have an exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming MJ-12: Inception, the paranormal Cold War spy-fi novel that’s kicking off the MAJESTIC-12 series this September. And yes, that’s a different excerpt for each paperback title, for added genre-blending goodness.

I’m stoked about this because it’ll give folks another opportunity to explore the Known Worlds of the Daedalus trilogy — and a cheaper opportunity at that — while also hopefully getting people excited about MJ-12: Inception too.

Here’s how it’ll work:

Back cover with MJ-12 teaser! Click to enlargenate!

The Daedalus Incident is coming out mid-March, with The Enceladus Crisis coming in mid-May and The Venusian Gambit finishing up in July. It looks like we’re going for a $7.99 list price, but I don’t know how Amazon or others will ultimately list it. (Here’s Daedalus, Enceladus and Gambit on Amazon — expect those release dates to change slightly. I’ll be posting more sales links as I find them.)

I expect the price of the e-books to be adjusted as well, though I can’t say for certain because there’s some serious dark alchemy that goes into e-book pricing that I just don’t grasp. I also expect that if you’ve already purchased the e-books for the trilogy, you’ll be able to re-download the books after the paperback launch to get your hands on the MJ-12: Inception excerpts. I honestly can’t say how this affects Audible prices, but since a lot of that is on a subscription model anyway, I don’t know how much of an impact you’ll see there.

We’ve tweaked the covers for each book, though the stellar artwork by Sparth (Daedalus) and Lauren Saint-Onge (Enceladus and Gambit) will remain completely intact, because they are awesome in every way. We thought about including bonus materials based on the trilogy, but most of that material has already been featured on the blog and elsewhere; we ultimately decided that the MJ-12: Inception teasers would be a lot more fresh and fun.

And since we’re effectively reducing the price of the Daedalus trilogy, I thought I’d do the same with The Gravity of the Affair, the tie-in novella we produced back in December 2013. I mean, it’s not horribly expensive now at $2.99, but I’m going to go ahead and make it free, starting in mid-February. (Mostly free, I should add — B&N won’t let you drop it below 99 cents for some reason, but most other book vendors allow for freebies. Again, dark alchemy!)

Finally, I’m going to launch a contest where you can get your hands on a signed copy of The Daedalus Incident paperback and an early galley or ARC of MJ-12: Inception. Still working through the details at the moment, but it’ll involve you lovely people spreading the word about these fine books through social media and leaving reviews and whatnot. Expect more on that by early next week.

It’s great to see these books getting out there once more, and that’s largely due to all the wonderful people who’ve read and enjoyed them over the past couple years. My thanks to you, dear readers, for being so very, very awesome.

Sail on!

#SFWApro

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January 23, 2016 · 10:27 am

NFL GeekPicks: Conference championships

And then there were four. And for once, you can say they’re likely the best four teams in the NFL this season. No teams like the Giants squeaking into the tournament and then wreaking havoc en route to the Lombardi Trophy. Actually…that’s kind of a shame. I love it when stuff like that happens.

So when I think about the two games tomorrow, I’m torn between what I want to happen and what likely will happen. In the interest of fairness and my self-imposed duty as your geeky prognosticator, I’m going to base my picks on what likely will happen, all else being equal. I kind of hope I’m wrong on both these.

I know…I feel like the Doctor trying to explain why he can’t break time, then he goes and does it anyway. Doesn’t matter. On with the picks! Continue reading →

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January 22, 2016 · 10:00 am

Guest Post: John LeMaire on SUET the Card Game!

It gives me great personal pleasure to introduce John LeMaire, an old friend of mine from back in the day. John’s an excellent artist, an avid gamer and a Good Person. We wiled away many an evening playing a variety of games back in college, and now he’s Kickstarting his very own game, SUET the Card Game.

Since I know John — and more importantly, I know what his devious mind is capable of — I backed that sucker. I can’t wait to play it, and I think many of you out there would enjoy it as well. So I invited him here to tell you all about SUET and the Evil Genius Goodness it contains. You can also click on each image to get a better look at the art and cards.

Read on, IF YOU DARE. (Dun-dun-dunnnnn.) Continue reading →

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January 20, 2016 · 5:30 pm

Social media and self-promotion

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed I was in Los Angeles last week, which doesn’t suck in the winter. I caught up with friends, took in a Clippers game, ate some fine food and enjoyed many excellent beers. During the day, though, I was at my job in marketing and communications — and heard some things I thought I’d share.

There’s a lot of sturm und drang about authors and their self-promotional efforts. Publishers certainly like to see authors doing their part online and off, be it blogging or Tweeting or going to cons — though great books by more reclusive authors still get out there. Not everybody has to be a Tweet machine, after all, and the book’s the single most important thing authors have to offer.

But let’s face it: Publicists have lots of books to promote, and yours (or mine) isn’t going to be a publicist’s sole reason for being. So we gotta do what we can, though for some readers, the constant drum-beat of promotion is a huge turn-off. That’s important to bear in mind.

Anyway, I’m pretty well suited to the promotional task, given my day job and my experience in media prior to that. Even so, I can still learn a few things, and I did this past week.

Continue reading →

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January 15, 2016 · 8:00 pm

NFL GeekPicks: Divisional playoffs

Well, heck, here’s something new: I got every single game right last week. Sure, there were only four games, but I still did better than the vast majority of the ESPN pickers. So I got that going for me, though let’s face it…two of those wins were tossups until the final seconds. I’m still claiming football wisdom regardless.

This week gets tougher. There’s some mighty powerful teams coming off the bench to face the wild-card upstarts, and picking this is going to be more difficult than bulls-eyeing womp rats in my T-16 back home. But I feel good about it. I’m in Los Angeles for work this week, and the city is all agog about getting the Rams back. (Interestingly, far less press has been given to the Chargers here. Unless and until the Chargers make a Super Bowl run here, it’s gonna be a Rams town.) I feel like I have some football karma on my side.

So let’s get to it. Continue reading →

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January 13, 2016 · 9:00 pm

More money matters for writers and freelancers

It’s not something I talk a lot about here on the blog — other than saying it’s my nebulous “day job” — but I do have some modest insight into financial matters. I used to be a business writer for The Associated Press, and my current gig is in communications for a financial services company. (My company is privately held and incredibly supportive of my fiction writing, and in turn, I keep it low key with them on here.)

There seems to be an appetite amongst the writerly crowd for thoughts on money matters — especially critical since we don’t make a lot, generally speaking, but so many of us want to ditch it all and write full time. So I thought I’d throw some ideas together that you may want to think about if you’re considering fictioning or freelancing.

Please note, though, that I am not a financial adviser, not certified as a financial professional in any way shape or form, and this does not constitute actual financial advice. These are simply my observations that may or may not be useful as you consider your own situation, which will undoubtedly vary from my experiences. In other words, just think about this stuff, and don’t sue me. Deal? Deal.

Here we go: Continue reading →

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January 11, 2016 · 10:00 am

A little 2016 preview

The new series comes out this year!

I think everyone should be well and truly recovered from the holidays and such, so I figured it was a good time to let you know what you can expect out of me in the coming year, words-wise. And it’s going to be pretty cool.

Obviously, the Big Thing™ will be the release of MJ-12: Inception in September. This is the very first volume in the MAJESTIC-12 series of fantastical Cold War spy thrillers, because that kind of genre-blending is how I roll.

Now, the conspiracy theory states that MAJESTIC-12 is a cabal of government honchos hiding proof of extraterrestrial life from the general populace in order to leverage alien technology on behalf of the United States military. I’m taking that historical theory and running with it, but in very, very different directions. So you’ll see a lot of action and adventure, some truly fantastical elements, a decent dollop of mystery and suspense, and a couple of big question marks in MJ-12: Inception that’ll hopefully have you coming back for more.

So that’s out in September in hardcover. Where do things stand with it now? Continue reading →

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Tagged as Daedalus Incident, DragonCon, Geeky Giving, MAJESTIC-12, MJ-12: Inception, Phoenix Comicon

January 8, 2016 · 5:30 pm

NFL GeekPicks: Wild Card Weekend

Finally! No more Netflix Games of the Week. No more watching Rex Ryan deflate just a little more each week. No more watching the Giants blow a lead in the final two minutes. (Seriously, five times in 16 games. That’s worse than the typical Scooby Doo villain. “Now I have you! No, wait. What?”) Certainly, no more Johnny Manziel on the Browns. Or in the NFL. Geez, kid. Get it together.

Nope, we got us some real games this week. Well, three real games and one that probably won’t matter. Whoever wins the Green Bay-Washington game likely will get crushed in the next round quicker than Fox cancelled Firefly.

Let’s get to it. And as there are only four games, I’ll riff a bit more on each. Continue reading →

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January 5, 2016 · 5:30 pm

Best midlife crisis ever! (Or, starting your writing career mid-stream)

I’ve told the story, more than a few times, about how fantastic literary agent Sara Megibow made “the call” and notified me that The Daedalus Incident had found a home at Night Shade Books. It was my 40th birthday, right on the very day in fact. And with that five-minute call, I had a second career in the making.

So what did I do? Did I call my boss, laugh hysterically into the phone and give my notice in between streams of profanity? Did I then proceed to throw my files in the hallway and jam the copier for no good reason on my way out the door, where fame and glory awaited?

Uhhh…no. I celebrated by calling my wife, telling some friends around the office, and then got back to work. At least until it was time for cake. (For a time, my team at work celebrated everybody’s birthdays with cake. Because cake.) And then I told the team and basked in some congratulations — and cake — until I had to go back and finish my work.

Glamorous, no? Totes. The cake was fantastic.

Robert Jackson Bennett — a fantastic writer of novels and tweeter of profane non-sequiturs that invariably make me laugh — recently wrote a blog post offering some advice to writers who want to make a living off writing. It was, in my estimation, very good advice indeed — so much so that some of Robert’s readers asked him if he had any advice for older writers interested in making the leap. Since Robert has yet to encounter middle age (and damn his youthful visage), he didn’t have much.

So that’s where I come in, marshalling the gray in my beard in an attempt to approximate some kind of wisdom. Continue reading →