Legion Bulletin #124

June 23, 2021

As you can see below, I'm starting to post the Legion Bulletin here as blog posts. It may look a little crazy because the website is being repainted as we speak. Tim.

Octo Racing!

Greetings from the sunny depths of England, where the Covid restrictions will soon be relaxed and I’m starting to plan some Octo Racing for August.

Please don’t confuse this with the traditional races featuring elite sports octopi. I’m referring, of course, to racing octogenarians. As far as I can make out, my family’s enjoyed the beach at Walton-on-the-Naze every year since the 1930s, interrupted only by Adolf Hitler and Covid. My parents’ legs aren’t too clever these days, so their loving grandson has decided we’ll mark a racetrack out on the beach and push them in their wheelchairs.

If I receive a concerned phone call tomorrow, I’ll know they’ve read this edition of the bulletin.

Don’t worry, Dad! You’ll be strapped in.

Anyway, back to books and matters related.

I’m in a very unusual position for me in that I’m not contracted to write any stories at the moment.

There are three things I’ve been putting off for years that I now have a chance to work on, while doing some preparation for new novels in the background.

This week’s task is to update my humanlegion.com website.

I took a sneaky peek around the websites of 50-odd of my author peers and decided mine is cluttered and confusing. I haven’t touched it in five years. Now it’s under maintenance, which means bright purple menus and other horrors. Don’t worry. It will soon be tidied up.

As part of this update, I’ve reviewed the purpose of the Legion Bulletin.

When I first wrote the Human Legion books, joining the Legion meant subscribing to the website; WordPress would tell you when I’d updated my blog.

Now, of course, it means grabbing the starter library and subscribing to the Legion Bulletin.

Some people are subscribed to both the blog updates and to the Bulletin. Maybe they hang out at the Human Legion page on Facebook too.

Understandably, people are confused about where to find information about what I’m doing. I have to admit, I am also one of those people. I mean, don’t even get me started on what I’m supposed to do with Twitter.

So from now on, I’m going to try to make the information and articles I write one and the same thing for both Bulletin and humanlegion.com blog posts.

While you’re welcome to subscribe to both, that’s probably not what you want, so I suggest you unsubscribe from the one you don’t want and keep the other. Since I never look at the website subscription thing, I suggest you unsubscribe from that one. It will say ‘News from the Field’ at the top of the emails you get.

So, the website. If there’s something you want to see more of, this is the time let me know. One thing I will say is that the Infopedia section is criminally underused. I will address that.

BTW: I haven't forgotten this box set! I'm waiting on a story from Mr. Handley. Then Lance will be good to go.

What's next???

I mentioned two other long-delayed projects. I’m not sure if I’m going to go ahead with one, both, or neither, but if you have strong opinions, let me know.

One is to do a collection of my Human Legion short fiction, including stories I wrote before Marine Cadet. Did you know the first piece of Human Legion Universe fiction in print was published because it won a short fiction competition in 2002?

This project — let’s call it Tales of the Legion — would be paperback only because I don’t have all the relevant rights to publish them as eBooks. If I’m honest, it’s a vanity project. It won’t help me pay the bills, but there’s loads of stories I’ve written that most people haven’t read. Besides, it would look cool on my bookshelf.

The other option is to rewrite, repackage, and reissue the Reality War novels. I wrote these books 15 years ago. They’re very much part of the Human Legion Universe, and there are sneaky references to them in the main Legion books. I usually pretend the Reality War books don’t exist because they’re written in such a different style. While time travelling musings on John Bunyan and The Pilgrim’s Progress seemed an interesting idea at the time, my style these days is more pew pew and explosions with the occasional goat.

But they’re good stories and deserve better than my cold shoulder.

Like I said, if you have opinions either way, let me know.

Coming soon... or maybe not!

Stuff I have already written but hasn’t yet come out.

The last of the current batch of Chimera Company novels, Hold the Line, is due out July 2nd.

A week later on July 9^th, we have In the Wings, a Four Horsemen Universe anthology featuring secondary characters.

Heh! Heh! Heh! My contribution was enormous fun to write. You’ll just have to read it to learn who and what it’s about!

All being well, later in year I will have Laney’s Logistics Ain’t Recruitin’ in a Salvage Title space opera anthology. My Time Dogz story with be in a Bayonet Books mil-sf anthology about last stands. Hopefully, there’s another anthology I’ll be in, but I haven’t heard any feedback from the editor yet, so I’ll keep quiet about that for now.

Thanks for reading, and I hope the Octo Racing is opening up near where you live too.