Category: fiction

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Two new stories

Here’s two short stories I’ve just put out. I had a complete blast writing these. I think you’ll enjoy reading them.

Spilled Mirovar

Spilled Mirovar
Spilled Mirovar

The modern year of 1927, and orcs still have to fight elven asshole bullshit.

Prohibition left exceptions for the church of Men, the Elvish sacraments, even the Dwarfish rituals. But the elves in Congress insist that orcs have no sacraments.

Without the Orcish draught, without the rites, Uruk-Tai’s fine strong boys might grow tall. They might earn respect.

But they will never be Orcs.

And Uruk will not let that happen…

Whisker Line

Whisker Line

Snatched from the tunnels beneath his war-shattered homeland, Aleksander has everything he could want. The kind and generous people of the amazing New York City gave him a home. A job. A new leg. Teeth. Even a face.

He lives the perfect life—until bombs explode in the glass skyscrapers.

The fine people of New York don’t understand war.

But Aleksander and his secret Family do…

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June 2015 Updates

Yes, it’s July. But these updates are for June. Because I put off writing this post.

Initial reaction to “FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS” has been positive. I’m pleased that so many people like the book.

Work on “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” is underway. I want to get this book done soon. Soooon. Because I’m kind of sick of writing about a single filesystem. This book should be smaller than the first ZFS book, thankfully.

I’m spending an hour a day on the sequel to Immortal Clay, called “Kipuka Blues.” I expect to have a first draft finished in July.

I now have three Montague Portal stories available. The first one is free on all platforms now, as a loss leader. Not sure how well that will work–the market for short fiction is smaller than the long fiction market. My fiction page has links for various Amazon sites, iBooks, Kobo, and more.

If I want FM: AZ done soon, and I want KB done soon, why don’t I pick one and crank on it? Nonfiction pays the bills, so I can’t drop everything and work on fiction. If I only write tech stuff, though, the nonfiction words go dry. Writing fiction keeps the nonfiction spigot clear and flowing.

I’ve done 200,000 words of publishable writing in the first half of 2015. I’d like to make in an even half million for the year. That’s not ridiculous–if I maintained my January and February outputs for every month of the year, I’d hit a million words in 2015. We’ll see what happens.

And as far as my master plan for writing full time goes: it seems that the rebooted Star Trek gets a whole lot better about Season 3. The bald French dude is no Kirk, but he’s not all bad. I hear they did some followup series. I might check those out once I’m done.

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Free novella at Amazon

My SF novella Forever Falls is free on Kindle through 11 May 2015 (next Monday).

This book is only available on Kindle right now — I’m trying their Kindle Select program, which supposedly gives additional visibility and promotion. It doesn’t seem to have helped so far. Come 3 June, when the Select enrollment runs out, I’ll have this piece on iBooks and Kobo and all the other ebook platforms.

But until 11 May 2015 the book is free, from all of the usual Amazon outlets.

  • Amazon US
  • Amazon UK
  • Amazon DE
  • Amazon CA
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    Web site rearrangement

    In case you’re reading this in reverse order in your RSS feeder: ignore the last couple of posts. It’s content I’m moving from my web page to the blog.

    I’ve redesigned and rearranged the fiction section of my web site, so that it more easily answers hard questions like “What have you written?” and “Do you write anything I might like?”

    The nonfiction section is OK, given how many tech books I’ve written. Hopefully the fiction section will now scale as well.

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    “Forever Falls” novella print and ebook

    I posted this elsewhere, but now that it’s in print I should mention it here:

    I have a new Montague Portal novella out, Forever Falls, in both print and ebook.

    There’s no grounds for murder.

    There’s no ground at all.

    The people exploring and exploiting alien universes risk everything—including their lives.But Devin Gupper’s death makes no sense. And the more questions security officer Aidan Redding asks, the less rational it seems.

    But in a bottomless universe full of impossibilities, with neutronium miners at one end and a steel-aerating blimp at the other, one impossible murder is only the beginning…

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    Initial reactions to “Immortal Clay”

    (For my own reference later.)

    One of the worrisome things about putting out your own books is the concern that it might suck. I have a long track record in nonfiction, so I’m pretty confident there. But novels are a whole different art. When I put Immortal Clay out two weeks ago, I suspected that nobody would get past page two.

    Most of the initial feedback came via Twitter, with things like:

    So someone I know bought it. That’s cool.

    Then some of my nonfiction readers picked it up, and gave it its own hashtag:

    People began reading it, and said things like:

    Then someone finished it:

    So the real message came through? Excellent!

    And then a couple comments in private mail, like:

    “You bastard! That book kept me up half the night. There was just no good place to stop!

    Yep. That’ll do.

    If you’ve read the book, I’d appreciate a review on Amazon. There’s four right now. Amazon won’t show it in searches and “also bought” lists until there’s five.

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    And today, on Audible…

    What? Lucas linking to an audiobook? What the heck?

    My aversion to audiobooks is pretty well known (I don’t object to you listening to them, just don’t ask me to). But yep, I’m going to point you at Audible today.

    John Campbell’s classic novella, Who Goes There, is on sale at Audible.com today for $0.99.

    Less than a week ago, I put out a novel that owes certain literary debts to this classic SF work. It’s three-quarters of a century old, and certainly bears signs of the age it was written in, but when I first read it (decades ago) it left scars that endured until… well, until I had to write a novel about those scars.

    Had I known this sale was coming, I would have… I dunno. Contacted Audible and begged for co-marketing? Something. Something cool.

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    New novel out: “Immortal Clay”

    Most of you follow me for nonfiction, but this book just came out, so I’m gonna tell you about it anyway.

    My SF novel, Immortal Clay, just hit Kobo and Amazon. It’s in process at other outlets like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and so on, and print is forthcoming.

    I’d describe this book as an alien invasion tale like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing, set after we lose.

    You can read the opening on my web site. Or you can jump straight to Kobo or Amazon and buy it sight unseen. I’m good either way.

    And Ben Baldwin did an absolutely amazing cover. I mean… wow! Click on the preview and take a look. If you have a big screen, look at the high-res version.