Tag Archives: Chris Kennedy Publishing

Blue Crucible Release Day!

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As of midnight, Blue Crucible has gone live on Amazon! It is available in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Paperback formats. It is marked as the seventh book in the Fallen World universe, but note that it is the beginning of a new series in that world. It can be read separately and out-of-order from the other six books. In fact, in terms of chronology, I believe it is the first. All the other books take place months or decades after the fall, but Blue Crucible begins on the day it all turned to crap.

From the back cover blurb:

The end came fast for Lieutenant Nathan Ward. One moment he was participating in an international convention of mounted police officers, the next he was in a command bunker watching the world’s two biggest Corporations—Obsidian and Teledyne—destroy it in an exchange of nuclear hellfire.

While Columbia, Missouri was spared a direct strike, a near-miss EMP fried most of the vehicles and the electrical grid. Then the Corporations started a shooting war in the streets, and they didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire. But Columbia was one of the last cities still standing, and Nathan and his fellow officers weren’t going to give it up. Even if it meant facing the worst the Corporate militaries could throw at them.

The Corporations had no intention of giving up the city, either, and Obsidian called in reinforcements to match Teledyne’s Specialist, a woman with the power to defeat a company of soldiers all on her own. Both Corporations intended to reign supreme and were willing to crush anyone who got in their way. In the post-apocalyptic world, there was only one law—theirs—and not the one with a badge.

The world may have fallen, but the Thin Blue Line’s battle is only beginning.

For those who read it, please consider leaving a review! Every review helps Amazon take notice of the book and start to passively and then actively promote it. It’s how small-press and indie authors get noticed. Thank you for your support!

And a huge thanks to Chris Kennedy of CKP, Christopher Woods (the creator the Fallen World), Beth Agejew my editor, William Joseph Roberts and RJ Ladon for helping me with the rough draft, and to all those on the early reader team! That includes two very good friends of mine (Aubree and Bill, thank you both!) and my wife, who has to suffer through all my, “Hey, what about this…?” moments. Thank you all!

Lastly, please consider joining my mailing list. It is rudimentary at the moment, one of those free plugins that comes with WordPress. I am looking into some of the professional services like MailChimp, AWeber, and a new one that’s meant specifically for writers. In the meantime, though, I plan for posts on the blog once or twice a week, and e-mails no more than once a week unless something big is happening.

Again, thank you all!

LibertyCon 2019 After-Action Report

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I’m not the best at these After-Action Reports, mostly because I’ve only been to a few writer’s conferences, but also because so much happens during them that I’m not sure what to focus on. And with my usual habit of digressing, well, you see where that can lead.

This is the third LibertyCon that I’ve been to (2017, 2018, and 2019). The only other one I’ve attended was World Fantasy Con back in 2016, where I spent the majority of that opening Friday helping first set up the art exhibit since they needed volunteers, and then sitting and listening to Larry Dixon regale me with stories of, well, everything from his wife Mercedes Lackey’s writing career to his artistic and authorial pursuits to the various jobs he’s held over the years. Basically, I let him talk my ear off to the point that he was probably wondering what he got himself into by inviting me to sit. But, hey, I’m the kind of guy who loves a good story, and Larry reminds me of a friend from church who always has a story about everything, and the story is always worth the hearing, even if it’s the fourth or fifth time he’s told it.

I don’t remember much else about World Fantasy Con, other than the panels that Mercedes Lackey and L.E. Modesitt (Both fantastic authors, and both guests of honor that year) sat on. Many of the other panels were about how to make a book as politically correct as possible and filling out character and setting quotas and what kinds of authors publishers want and don’t want.

Back to LibertyCon 2019. (See, there’s that digression thing I told you about…) This was the absolute best LibertyCon I’ve been to, to date. 2017 was great, 2018 was awesome, and 2019 was infinitely better than the first two combined. Back when I attended World Fantasy Con a number of the pros I spoke to who had been attending regularly for years all said it took about three or four consecutive convention visits before you started to feel like you fit in. I can say that seems to hold true for LibertyCon, though I would argue that LibertyCon is much more welcoming on the face of it. They make it a point to mark down first-time visitors and first-time pros, and everyone does their best to engage with the newcomers, from pros like Larry Correia to publishers like Toni Weisskopf to the men and women running the con. So, while I definitely felt like a dish out of water at the first con, I didn’t feel isolated or alone.

2019 was a culmination of the previous two years’ worth of visits. In 2017 I became good friends with my online writing partners William Joseph Roberts and RJ Ladon, both of whom introduced me to Ed McKeown and Michael Hanson and helped me get into a fantasy horror anthology Ed and Michael published in 2018. In 2018 I sat on my first pair of panels ever, discussing the aforementioned anthology (Sha’Daa: Toys, part of the Sha’Daa mythos), and I also met Chris Kennedy, Mark Wandrey, Kacey Ezell, Marisa Wolf, and several other authors published by Chris Kennedy Publishing in the Four Horsemen military sci-fi mecha action universe. I pitched a short story idea to Chris for an upcoming anthology, and that was how “Return to Sender” was born (Available in Tales from the Lyon’s Den). I am still working out a novel idea for arms dealer Jackie Warren and her tough crew of bodyguards, but that has been sidelined for now while I work on something that came up at this year’s LibertyCon.

Aside from getting to meet friends from past years and getting to make new friends and acquaintances, the biggest deal of the con was solidifying an idea I had for Christopher Woods’ Fallen World universe. It started as a pitch for a short story and Chris liked it so much he sent it over to Chris Kennedy, who liked it so much he wanted to turn it into a book. So, there we go. I’ve got a couple short stories to work on, and then it’s on to plotting out and drafting this book! It’s gonna be great.

Can’t wait to finish this book, and can’t wait for LibertyCon 2020! And maybe even FantaSci 2020.

 

Short Stories, Book Contracts, Con After Action Reports, and Honorable Mentions!

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Just a short post for today, to let people know the site is still active. We had family up visiting for the last month (Supposed to be a two-week visit, and then…), and a lot has happened in the last several weeks that I still need to catch up on.

For starters, I have a short story to finish for Michael Hanson and Ed McKeown’s “Not to Yield” anthology. I call it an anthology, but it’s more of a shared novel. There are a proposed 17 chapters to this military sci-fi space epic, with each chapter being written by a different author (Including my friends William Joseph Roberts, R J Ladon, and Marisa Wolf), I have the honor of writing Chapter 12, where the ship has been infested with insect aliens who use psychic abilities to mask their presence and sow confusion amongst the crew. The captain will have to save her ship, but the tool she has to use might very well kill her. Cue the dramatic music!

 

Once that is finished in the next week, I have the rest of my year planned. Shortly before leaving to go to LibertyCon in Chattanooga, I had a conversation with Christopher Woods and Chris Kennedy of Chris Kennedy Publishing. The conversation began with me telling Chris Woods that I really enjoyed his Fallen World universe and was looking forward to the next short story anthology he and Chris Kennedy put together, since I’d like to contribute to it. He asked about my story idea, and when I mentioned a mounted police cavalry unit riding in to save the day in his post-apocalyptic world, he told Chris Kennedy. That started a three-way Facebook conversation that ended in, “It’s too late for this to be a short story. You’re going to have to write a book!” So, yeah. I’m still a combination of excited, numb, and more than a little nervous about how all that turned out. I’ll write more about this in my next post as it deserves its own, but I wanted to mention it here at the very least. I wasn’t given a firm deadline on it, but it’s my own personal goal to have it outlined and drafted by mid-September, and edited and sent over by sometime in November, if not sooner. I’ve drafted a couple of books before this one, but never for someone who’s actually requested it. I am battling paralysis and motivation all at the same time, but the motivation is winning. Oh, boy, is it winning. It’s been my dream to be a novelist since I was a little kid, and it’s something I’ve been working much more seriously at these last five years, when I started building my library of craft books and honing my craft on short stories. This will be my career, if the Lord is willing and I do my part.

Thirdly, LibertyCon 2019 was the most amazing convention I’ve been to. It was my third year visiting the Con (2017, 2018, and 2019) and my fourth writer’s conference ever. The first was World Fantasy Con back in 2016. We’re ready for LibertyCon 2020, and next year we’ll be going to a new con, at least for me: FantaSci in Durham, North Carolina. I’ve got to do my part to have this book finished, with a second one on the way before those cons get here!

Lastly, but still just as important as the rest, I received the results from Quarter 2 of this year’s Writers of the Future contest. My as-yet-unnamed short story (I may resubmit after editing) earned a Silver Honorable Mention spot! From what I understand, that means the story survived all the way up to the semi-finalist paring. So, it wasn’t in the top 16, but it was in the top 30 or so. And for the first quarter, another story of mine was an Honorable Mention. I’ve been submitting to Writers of the Future at least once per year for the last several years, and this is the first time I’ve ever made any kind of ranking. Super exciting and humbling all at the same time.

And the short post turned out a lot longer than I thought it would be. Regardless, each of these things deserves its own post, so expect that in the coming days. In the meantime, it’s back to the day job, then on to more writing!