The Final Days

I’m counting down the days for 2021. Hope it’s been a good year for you, though I know it hasn’t for a lot of people. As the clock’s ticking down, I’m racing to get finished the projects I had planned.

I’m the anthology king

Okay, so king is putting it far too strongly, but I am doing more novelettes for anthologies this year. It’s been a great way to mix things up from a writing perspective and try some new approaches. Keeps me fresh.

Last week I sent in a story for a post-apocalyptic adventure set in the Last Brigade Universe. It’s my first story to feature a castle!

Yesterday I finished a first draft of a story for the We Dare anthology series. I don’t think I’m supposed to say what the anthology theme is yet, but I’ll just say it features a Baleview called Karnage Zax and his cyborg partner Itka Jowiszka and leave you to guess the rest. Following that will be a story featuring Itka as the main character with Karnage as her sidekick. Yes, a double-header across two anthologies.

Then it’s back to the first Time Dogz novel. I’m hoping to finish the first draft before the Christmas break.

Hopefully these stories will all actually be accepted. I get invited to contribute to anthologies all the time, for which I am extremely grateful. However, there’s no guarantee that the editors will run with my submissions.

Also, in case you missed them, I recently had novelettes out in On Deadly Ground (October – Time Dogz), It Takes All Kinds (September – Salvage Title Universe), and In The Wings (July – 4HU).

One advantage of having publishers…

… rather than always publishing myself is that they organize things such as sales for my books. There’s two on at the moment.

1. StoryBundle curated by Kevin J Anderson

Yes, that Kevin J Anderson who wrote all those Dune novels. StoryBundle is an indie publishing idea that’s been around a few years. You can pay a small amount to get a bunch of core adventure science fiction novels. Pay a little more and get a whole stack more books. My The Fall of Rho-Torkis is one of the core books. It’s a very high quality selection and I’m chuffed to be a part. Also, this is not limited to Kindle format.

Check out the StoryBundle page here: https://storybundle.com/scifi

Behind the scenes, I’ve been working with Kevin and the other authors and publishers to get everything together on the bundle page and help spread the word. It’s only a minor level of collaboration, but I’m very excited to be working with such a famous author. Kevin joins the small list of authors I think of as famous who I’ve worked with or socialised with through my work: Alan Moore, David Brin, E.L. James, and Jeff Noon.

There’s even a video, courtesy of Adam Gaffen, one of my collaborators…

2. Black Friday Sale

Chris Kennedy Publishing (CKP) is doing a USA Black Friday sale that runs through to Cyber Monday. My first Four Horsemen Universe novel, The Midnight Sun, is on sale for 99c in the US. I can’t promise this, but usually when the Kindle version is on sale, you can add the audiobook narration for a vastly reduced price too.

I wrote this novel so it could be an entry point into the wider 4HU universe. It also sets up the 4HU trilogy I wrote starting with Endless Night. You would be missing out on a whole lot of adventure (and read a few spoilers) if you only read the 4HU novels written by me, but it would all make sense as one coherent story.

There’s a bunch of other CKP books also on sale in the US. Look out for Trashman, the first Hot World novel by William Alan Webb. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote a story in the forthcoming Hit World anthology.

Also, there’s No Man’s Land from the We Dare anthology series. I’m writing a story for the next one in this series at the moment.

Lance is on his way

The Sleeping Legion box set with the new Lance Scipio story from J.R. Handley is working its way through Amazon’s servers at the moment. It will be available on Dec 4^th.