Category Archives: Books

August 25, 2016 · 5:45 pm

DragonCon is next week! Here’s what I’m up to there.

UPDATED 9/1

This’ll be the third straight year I’ve done DragonCon, which is quite a lot of fun and you should go if you can. It’s an exuberantly geeky crowd, focused on the joy of whatever brings them joy. Gotta love it.

DragonCon will be one of the very first places you can pick up a copy of MJ-12: Inception, by the way. I’ll have a handful of copies on hand for giveaways, in case you don’t win the Goodreads giveaway, but the best thing you can do is head to the vendor hall. The booksellers there should have some on hand, but given that this is the weekend before launch, I expect supplies to be limited. Get there early.

And without further ado, here’s my schedule of stuff. Unlike the past several years, the Alternate History Track will be at the AmericasMart convention center, so don’t go looking for me at the Westin, unless it’s at the bar. Continue reading →

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August 23, 2016 · 5:30 pm

Goodreads giveaway for MJ-12: Inception, now on io9’s fall must-read list

I’m back from Los Angeles and (mostly) recovered from jet lag…and I have news!

The official Goodreads giveaway for MJ-12: Inception is now live! Click here to enter! You must be a Goodreads member to enter, but it’s relatively quick and painless, I promise. We’re giving away ten freshly-printed hardcover copies, and you have until August 31 to sign up.

And why should you enter? Well, besides reading this and possibly being predisposed to liking my work, MJ-12: Inception has been listed among of io9’s “All the New Scifi and Fantasy Books You Absolutely Must Read This Fall.” I mean, that’s practically an imperative, right? So excited to be on a list with so many fantastic authors. Check it out.

If you don’t win the Goodreads thing, well, I hope you’re heading to DragonCon in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend, because that’s your next best bet. I’ll be there doing panels and readings and beer pairings (the latter by request only), and I’ll have a few copies to give away. There will also be limited quantities on sale in the vendor room, because we love DragonCon.

There may yet be another giveaway before the book launches Sept. 6, but since it’s not live yet, I can’t announce it. But it’s also cool.

Of course, if you can’t go to Atlanta and don’t want to leave things to chance, you can always pre-order MJ-12: Inception from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Mysterious Galaxy, Borderlands Books, and/or through your local bookstore via Indie Bound. You can also order your Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and Apple iBook editions, too.

Finally, if you’re in the San Francisco Bay area, I hope you’ll come out and celebrate with me at Borderlands Books on Tuesday, Sept. 6 at 6 p.m. I’ll be doing a reading and a talk and signing and all that good stuff. I may very well bring beer. Plus, you can support one of the best independent bookstores ever. Hope to see you there!

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Tagged as Borderlands, DragonCon, Goodreads, MJ-12: Inception

August 10, 2016 · 9:30 pm

Pilgrimage: The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles

I’ve been in my current day job now for nearly nine years. In addition to the gig’s intellectual challenges, sturdy rewards and lovely people, it’s allowed me to visit Los Angeles at least…heck, 25 times or so? See, the New York office is actually the satellite, while the mothership is in the City of Angels. Hence the travel and the sturdy flow of frequent flier miles.

So here I am yet again, this time for a week and a half. My wife is with me (the child being at camp) and there are plans afoot. L.A. is a great city for warmth, sun, beaches and sightseeing. (The less said about traffic and smog, the better.) The food scene here is phenomenal — super creative, far less pretentious than New York, and surprisingly affordable. There are many fine craft breweries.

And there’s The Last Bookstore. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t visited until today. This has been belatedly but duly rectified; it’s one of the coolest independent bookstores I’ve ever seen. Want proof? Here you go.

First off, it’s huge. The building used to be an old bank, so they have a couple of vaults and lots of smaller rooms in addition to this cavernous affair. The stage is perfect for readings and panels, and there are a few chairs around — though, to be fair, they don’t like folks loitering all day. They’re right in downtown L.A., so I get that.

Book sculptures! Paper art! The second floor in particular is a warren of very cool little nooks and crannies and oddities like the ones above.

And this bad boy towers above all of it. Someone put a lot of love into this store. There’s a massive collection of vintage, used and new books across every genre imaginable. You want self-help? YA? Biography? Classics? SF/F? Lit fic? It’s all there. Well, mostly all there. I suppose I could get nitpicky about authors of more recent vintage — they have the big names in most categories, but less so midlisters. But their used book selection more than makes up for it. I saw dozens of novels I read when I was a kid. It was a total memory lane thing.

So. The Last Bookstore is in downtown Los Angeles on 5th and Spring. It’s worth braving the city’s notorious traffic to spend an hour in book-lover bliss. I’m glad I went, and you should go too.

In other news, I’m happy to report that, as per usual, I crunched on a whole heap of words on my flight over here, and that the second MAJESTIC-12 book is coming along swimmingly. There was one particular historical event that really spurred the entire concept behind the book, and today was the day where I got to write my version of it. It’s one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” events, and I hope I did it justice.

All right. I’m off to find a good taco and a beer. Viva Los Angeles.

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August 3, 2016 · 5:45 pm

It’s August! Time for an update!

Where does the time go? Already August, and there’s a heap of stuff happening in the coming weeks. I figured it was high time to start letting you know what’s up.

Obviously, the biggie is the release of MJ-12: Inception on Sept. 6. Night Shade Books went all out on the printing with this one — really cool interior design, spiffy hardcover, even some embossing on the jacket. Of course, the jacket also has blurbs from Harry Turtledove, Chris Roberson, Beth Cato and Mike Underwood, along with some reviews that haven’t hit yet. Overall, I’m very, very happy with the reaction thus far.

You’ll start to see a lot of reviews and guest posts and interviews crop up in the weeks ahead, especially as we get closer to Sept. 6. There’s a lot of gracious folks out there willing to have me show up in their digital space, and I’m very grateful for it. (And I pay it forward, too: If you’re a creative type, here’s how you get a guest post on this blog.)

And then there are events! Online and off! Here’s the three big ones I have coming up.

DragonCon: Yes, I’m heading down to Georgia for the third straight year, which means I love me some DragonCon. The people are great, the panels are top notch. I just got my preliminary schedule today and I’m pretty jazzed about what I’ll be doing. More to come on that, but you can certainly count on a reading at the con, some great panels and as many giveaways as I can stuff into my suitcase.

Launch night reading at Borderlands Books in San Francisco: After DragonCon, I go home for an evening, then promptly head off to San Francisco (after dropping my kid off for her first day at school, because priorities). On Sept. 6 at 6 p.m., I’ll be celebrating the launch of MJ-12: Inception at Borderlands Books in the Mission District. It’s such a great store and totally worthy of your business. If you’re in the area, I hope I’ll see you there.

Reddit r/Fantasy AMA: And on Sept. 13, I’ll be doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything for the Reddit newbies) over on r/Fantasy. Bring your questions and I’ll bring my answers.

There’s more, of course. There’s always more. I’ll definitely keep you posted. In the meantime, you can pre-order MJ-12: Inception from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Mysterious Galaxy, Borderlands Books, and/or through your local bookstore via Indie Bound. You can also order your Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Apple iBook editions, too.

And if you’re among the few who’ve got your hands on it already, I’d ask that you give it an honest review over at Amazon and/or Goodreads. That sort of thing really does help, and it’s greatly appreciated.

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August 1, 2016 · 6:30 pm

Pre-order the Geeky Giving anthology, coming August 9!

I was super proud to have a story in this charity effort, and super proud of the story I submitted for it. Now, you can get all the Geeky Giving stories in one handy-dandy publication: Geeky Giving: A SFF Charity Anthology, to benefit the Barrow Neurological Institute!

Geeky Giving is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Kobo and iTunes in ebook — and print is coming! Love the cover, and honored to have my name on it. This is such a great anthology, full of very different stories all dealing with the mind, neurology and related ideas.

My own story, “Mind Flight,” is certainly my hardest hard-SF story, and I really loved writing it. Plus, bits are set in Iceland, which inspired my work quite a bit when I went there a few years ago.

You get a bunch of great stories from fantastic writers like Mary Robinette Kowal, K.B. Spangler, Shaun David Hutchison, Amanda Bonilla, Jeff Somers, Sierra Dean and more. And again, all the money goes to support the life-saving work of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona.

Get great fiction, feel good about doing it. What’s not to love? Go forth and pre-order!

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July 29, 2016 · 5:39 pm

How about some MJ-12: Inception spoilers for you?

I’m serious here — if you’re looking forward to MJ-12: Inception and want to crack the book fresh, sans spoilers, you should probably click away now.

Good? Good.

I have an article coming out in Writer’s Digest next month about outlining in Excel. Yes, I’ve written about this before, but this is going to be in a real-deal publication for writers. I’m pretty excited. It should hit the web some time next week.

As part of that, the magazine suggested I put part of my outline for MJ-12: Inception online so folks can check it out and see how I did it. I agreed — but with the caveat that only part of the outline be used. Because, well…why put the whole thing up there when I actually want people to, you know, buy it?

So if you click here, you’ll be taken to a Writer’s Digest page that will allow you to download part of the Excel outline I used to write the book. Yes, you’ll get characters, plot points, action, setting, and a bit of detail — roughly 30% of the total book in outline form.

See? This is why I’m warning against spoilers. For real.

Now, that said, the outline did deviate from the book in ways both large and small, so this outline isn’t 100% representative of what’s coming out in just over a month. Character names have changed, the order of scenes and chapters has changed, and some stuff just didn’t make the cut. There’s also entire scenes that aren’t represented in the outline that got added in revision or on the fly.

Personally, I’m not too worried about having all this out there; I hope it entices new readers to give the book a shot. And as for spoilers, if you’ve picked up all the mass-market paperback editions of the Daedalus trilogy, you’ve already read three chapters. Plus…well, I didn’t give away the other 70%. So there’s that.

If you’re excited about the book — and I hope you are! — and want to get a sneak peek at it, and maybe see how the sausage is made, surf on over and check it out. There’s also a blank template you can download to give it a whirl on your own.

But seriously…spoilers, sweetie. Don’t do it if you’ll regret it. Go have a snack instead.

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July 27, 2016 · 1:30 pm

Celebrating Gary Gygax’s birthday with the wayback machine

I very clearly remember the day I got to speak to Gary Gygax.

It was the summer of 2000, and I was a business reporter for The Associated Press in Seattle. My primary coverage areas were Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing (with Starbucks and RealNetworks in there as well), and I was waiting for a press conference to start on the Microsoft campus.

Phone rings: It’s Gary. I had reached out to him as part of a story I was doing on Wizards of the Coast’s new d20 “open-source” gaming initiative — you can read it here. The story was a bit of a passion project for me, and I took a lot of pleasure in visiting Wizards’ headquarters and talking with the team behind 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons. And of course, in the interest of balance, I felt compelled to reach out to folks at Steve Jackson Games, White Wolf…and the man who created it all.

Just then, a Microsoft P.R. person tried to herd me into the auditorium. “Mike, we’re starting in five minutes.”

I put my hand over my cell phone receiver. “One second. I got Gary Gygax on the line.”

The guy stopped and smiled. “That’s cool!”

Yes. Yes, it is very, very cool.

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July 25, 2016 · 5:30 pm

A fresh MJ-12: Inception review for your Monday

When you go and try something completely different, as compared to your previous work, you wonder how your current fans will receive it. So I’m quite pleased, and a bit relieved, to see that fellow scribe Luther Siler enjoyed MJ-12: Inception.

Luther was a big fan of the Daedalus trilogy, and MJ-12: Inception is darker and grittier and more realistic, which he notes here:

MJ-12: Inception is a very, very, very different series from the Daedalus books. So much so, in fact, that were it not for his love of genrebending (or, perhaps, hatred of the idea of genre) bleeding through, I’d not have been able to guess that the books were by the same person. That said, I can find out quickly if you are interested in reading the book by asking a very short question: How do you feel about Cold War superheroes? Okay. You just told yourself whether you should read this book or not. And if I have any influence, you should.

For the record, I don’t hate the idea of genre! In fact, I really like playing with them — this time, meshing superheroics with those great Cold War spy thrillers and conspiracy tales I grew up with. And by all accounts, it’s seemed to have worked for readers so far. The difference in voice is a very conscious decision as well. If you’re gonna write a spy thriller, it should read like one, after all.

My thanks to Luther for his kind words. You should check out his work if you’re looking for some cool stuff to read; his Benevolence Archives stories will sate any cravings for fun and adventure.

As for MJ-12: Inception, we’re still on track for Sept. 6. I just whipped up my to-do list for launch, and there’s so much cool stuff coming down the pike. Guest posts and interviews! Podcasts! We’ll be doing giveaways! And not only will you get to see it at DragonCon, but I’ve also lined up a launch-day reading for my West Coast friends as well.

More to come. And remember, it’s up for pre-order at from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Mysterious Galaxy, Borderlands Books, and/or through your local bookstore via Indie Bound. You can also order your Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Apple iBook editions, too.

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July 22, 2016 · 6:00 pm

Thinking about how to define authorial success

What makes a book successful? What makes an author successful? What makes some books and/or authors more successful than others? All fair questions. I saw some discussion of this among my colleagues and friends on Twitter this past week, prompted by these thoughts from the amazingly talented Delilah S. Dawson. and it gave me some things to think about.

My first novel came out in 2013 — just three short years ago! I started writing it in 2010, got my agent in 2011, and nabbed a book deal in 2012. So I’ve been at it for six years now, and a published author for just half that time. My fourth book comes out Sept. 6 in hardcover.

Have I been successful? Abso-freakin-lutely. But that’s in terms of my vision of success. And I think it’s important to define your own measures for success going in — and to keep them realistic.

(This is a long-ish post. Get comfy. Go grab a beverage if you like. I’ll be here.)

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Tagged as Daedalus Incident, Enceladus Crisis, MAJESTIC-12, MJ-12: Inception, MJ-12: Shadows, Venusian Gambit

July 18, 2016 · 6:49 pm

First review! Fantasy Faction says super nice things about MJ-12: Inception

They say never read the reviews, but this one was an absolute joy to read. Fantasy Faction’s Dan Hanks reviewed MJ-12: Inception and really quite liked it. A snippet for you:

MJ-12: Inception is Michael J. Martinez doing what he does best: taking a selection of great genres and mashing them up into something fresh and exciting, and quite unlike anything you’ve read before. We’ve shades of mystery and the paranormal, superheroes living in an alternate (or hidden) history, Cold War paranoia, and thrilling espionage—all set against a realistically drawn backdrop of a little explored (but key) time in our global history.

Dan has long been a fan of my work, but it’s nice to know that the new spy-fi series — a departure, as he notes, from my Daedalus books — was still well received. Combined with the really cool things my fellow scribes said about it, I’m starting to think this is indeed a pretty good book.

We’re still a good six-plus weeks away from release; MJ-12: Inception is due out in hardcover Sept. 6, though I believe there will be copies on sale at DragonCon for those going. If you’re not heading to Atlanta, of course, you can pre-order the book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Mysterious Galaxy, Borderlands Books, and/or through your local bookstore via Indie Bound. You can also pre-order your Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Apple iBook editions, too.