It’s a Writer’s Life!

We got a foretaste of winter earlier this week, with an inch or so of snow over a layer of freezing rain. I hope it wasn’t an omen of things to come. Scraping ice off the truck isn’t my favorite morning activity. It’s gone now, but the weather people are forecasting “a wild ride” for this winter, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Thankfully, the street rehabilitation work is done, with a few final landscaping touches awaiting next spring.

While I’m finalizing The Warrior’s Knife with the help of my editors, I’ve started on the sixth installment of Decker’s War, after writing myself into a dead end with the fifth Siobhan Dunmoore adventure. Decker #6 is tentatively titled No Remorse and picks up the story a few months after the events in Black Sword, with Decker and Talyn’s enemies actively seeking revenge on them for exposing the conspiracy. Dunmoore fans, fear not. I’ve already started remapping the storyline for Without Mercy and it will come out in the first half of 2018.

For those of you living in the US and Canada who’ve not yet tried Decker’s War, the omnibus edition containing the first three adventures (Death Comes But Once, Cold Comfort and Fatal Blade) will be offered at a substantial discount by Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and iTunes as part of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales — all three books for the price of one, from now until next Monday.

Lest We Forget

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

 

Remember, Remember the Chill of November

October passed so quickly that it’s left us stunned by a damp, chilly, and downright gray November. It also seems to have made the crew responsible for rehabilitating our street, driveways and front yard vanish. I haven’t seen them since they replaced most of our and the neighbors’ interlocking stone edges and walkways last week. We, along with half a dozen others are still waiting for the paving company to return and finish our driveways – hopefully before winter. Our snow-removal operator won’t like clearing a driveway that’s half small gravel, half asphalt with a two-inch height difference between both halves. Perhaps that’s why none of us have seen him put up his usual edge markers when they’ve already sprung up on neighboring streets. But since traffic cones, signs and a backhoe are still sitting idly by the curbs, I know that at least the prime contractor has to be back.

I apologize for almost two weeks without a blog post or other sign of life, but revising and finalizing The Warrior’s Knife kept me fully occupied. It’s now much more to my editor’s liking and will go off to my proofreader this weekend. The whole revision process has been a fresh learning experience. It showed me the dangers lurking behind the keyboard when an author jumps into a new genre with a different voice. As I’ve mentioned before, this novel isn’t military science fiction or even space opera. It’s a murder mystery set in the 26^th century Decker’s War universe. And although it has plenty of intrigue, aliens, and an exotic interstellar setting, it has no fistfights, no gunplay, let alone combat or war. So take heed. If contemporary murder mysteries aren’t your thing, The Warrior’s Knife might not be either. But if you want a good cop story with a sci-fi twist, an engaging protagonist, and a tale that builds until it hits an explosive conclusion, try it.

At this point, it should hit the bookstore shelves by the end of November. It’ll be available at all major ebook retailers (though it will not be available in Kindle Unlimited), as well as in paperback. I’ll email everyone who’s on my subscription list when it’s out.

And now on to the next project….