What, no periscope jokes?

As promised, sample readings from AQUAMARINE (40% of the book) are on the blog as of, uh, now. There'll only be minor changes between here and the paperback release. The widows and orphans have yet to be attended to (so just ignore them in the typeset you have here; I think there's something like three of the little buggers; we make them disappear, but don't actually ship them to a gulag, so it takes time) and we're still waiting for the ISBN.

Now, ISBN generation is supposed to take about three working days and sometimes takes two working weeks. You see, "ISBN" is an acronym standing for Interdimensional Superstring Boson-type Neutrino," and they're a bloody nightmare to catch. It takes a special kind of cyclotron to generate them. You key in the title of the book, the author's byline, the publisher, publication date and number of pages, then you shoot the request into superspace with the cyclotron, and get ready to "catch" the returning particles. They come blasting back through the fabric of space-time, and where they pass through, they leave micron-tiny fractures (the technical term is "holes") which, when scanned with an argon laser, can be read in binary code. The zeroes and ones of the binary are then converted back into numerals, and voila, you have your ISBN. But it's hellaciously hard catching the ISBN particles, and sometimes they have to fire up the cyclotron two or three times to get a result.

Anyway, all that lies in the hands of professionals. We don't profess to be in charge of the cyclotron, and the ISBN will be delivered when it's delivered.

In the meantime, here's the link to download 40% of the book, and -- enjoy!

ONE WORD OF CAUTION: these chapters and complete and uncut. There's some good, old fashioned raunch. Consider yourself warned! If you're underage, or if you're disturbed by gay relationships, you know what NOT to download, right? Everyone clear about the content of the PDF?!! Okay, here goes:

Download the first eight chapters right here; it's a compressed PDF, sile size is 1117k.

The sample readings will be up on the website in the next week, and the paperback will be about a week behind that. After which, my next project is to get my fantasy novel into the hands of DreamCraft, so it'll fill the temporal gap while I plot myself right back OUT of the deep, dark hole I'm in, with my haunted house novel.

I can't believe I did this to myself. I shot myself in the foot, and this is so rare, for me. The last time I did this was with SCORPIO. You remember the battle at the end of the book? I held hostage a pressurized city, floating in the air over an arctic wilderness ... and I had to get NARC riot troops in there, without punching a hole in the pressure skin, which would bust the city wide open and kill a quarter million people. Oof. I designed the scenario to be a page-turner; I didn't want a repeat of anything readers had seen in either DEATH'S HEAD or EQUINOX. It had to be all-new, and a king-sized challenge for Jarrat, Stone and crew. Visualize this, if you can: the fingers are flying over the keys, the scene is set, the Blue Ravens gather in the ops room aboard the carrier NARC-Athena for the briefing ... all eyes turn to Jarrat and Stone. "Okay, boss," says Gil Cronin, "what's the deal?" The silence was deafening. You could have heard a pin drop. Jarrat looked at Stone; Stone looked at Jarrat. They both looked at Keegan and Stone said, "All right, smart ass, what IS the deal?" It took me three weeks to get out of that one. Jarrat and Stone, and the riot troops? They had it easy. All they had to do was get in there and do what they were told -- by me. As for myself, I think I toasted about a billion brain cells, running scenario after scenario, while every one of them blew up the city.)

Let that be a lesson to me, never, NEVER to leave fine-tuning The End till I'm writing the middle. Ever after SCORPIO, I write the ending of the book in note form (maybe 10 pages which will be expanded out to 50 in the finished version), before I settle on what the fine points of the plot are actually going to be. In oher words, you don't just jot down, "The city is taken hostge, Jarrat and Stone lead the descant troops in there and liberate it." You figure out exactly (not approximately!) how it's going to be done. APHELION was another major challenge, but no real problem, and I've known for eons where the HELLGATE series ends...

All of which made me complacent. Did I get sloppy, planning the occult book? Or did I get too clever? I'm not quite sure, yet. Suffice to say, readers will be getting a full-on, full-throttle fantasy in the meantime, while I, uh, clean up my mess.

Anyway, enjoy the sample readings, and watch out for a newsletter from DreamCraft in the next day or two. There's a new screensaver uploading tomorrow, too. I'll put a link to it on the blog here, also.

All the best,
MK

Mars or bust!

Here's the stuff of dreams: a bald statement which takes a little while to permeate the basic denseness of the human cranium (even mine):

Within a decade, NASA plans to begin building a permanent lunar colony to serve as an outpost en route to Mars.

No, Keegan did not make that up! It's an outtake from a feature article which you can find right here:

WISbsiness.com, Wisconsin's Business News Source.

It's well worth a look ... a quiet little article, no fanfare, no noise, no flashy pictures or videos. Just a plain text feature which frames the future of space exploration in no uncertain terms. There's a saying: "Great storms announce themselves with a single gust of air."

A few days ago I was talking about the 39th anniversary of Man on the Moon, and my own memories not only of the event, but of being a kid in the late 1960s, when even our teachers firmly believed we were headed for the stars, and that kids like you and me (well, maybe not you; you're probably too young to have been there at the time!) could expect to live and work in space.

Alas, Project Apollo turned out to be little more than a Cold War publicity stunt, but several decades down the track the future of this planet, not to mention the people living on it, is going to pivot on the NEED to get back to the Moon. It's all about fuel. You can't get helium 3 here. You CAN get it there. And nuclear fusion ain't gonna work without it. I can take or leave the part about the Lunar base being a jumping off point for Mars. I mean, I would love to see it happen, but I'll be damned if I can see any shrieking, screaming, blue-in-the-face necessity to go to Mars. And that's what it would take to get us there. But ... rust, we have plenty of right here ... and Mars is too problematical to make a practical lifeboat for the Earth, in the next century.

Hang on --

Hold the phone. Keegan's getting a plot idea. I mean, a novel concept ... the pivot point around which books revolve, and without which you wind up with soap opera.

Something mildly phenomenal in an entirely fictional context just hit me. Oooooh, man, there's a novel in this...

[long pause while plot idea gets hammered into the computer; further pause for mug of coffee; slight extra pause for re-reading the last few lines...]

Sorry, guys, but this is how it happens. I was about to remark that Mars doesn't have enough gravity to hang onto an atmosphere for long, even if we managed to give it one, and an idea/image/scene 'happened' in my mind. The story will weave itself in the next few hours, and this one gets added to the list of books I just have to write. Eventually. (Actually, book sales via Lulu and Payloadz are doing so well, lately, once again I'm close to seriously considering concentrating solely on writing; now, that would be a day long remembered. Can't wait for it to happen.)

Back to Mars, though. It's actually fairly easy (or, the concepts are easy, not the technology!) to endow Mars with an atmosphere. Buzz out to the Ooort Cloud, find ice asteroids which are comprised of water ice, shunt them back in here, with the ion engine, crash them into Mars. Instant atmosphere, as the water divides into hydrogen and oxygen in the heat of the impact. Problem: Mars only has 30% of our gravity, and the atmosphere we just pumped in will escape to space.

Sad to say, I know a thing or two about Mars, and why it'll be a bear to go there for purposes of colonization ... much less to convince the people of Earth to spend trillions on spaceflights to get there! I've researched Mars for three books and actually written one of them -- APHELION.

Wraparound cover for the 2008 DreamCraft edition of APHELION

Don't get me wrong: Mars is a fantastic place. I had a load of fun with APHELION, and I'm definitely going to return there for a fictional vacation. Jarrat and Stone might not be there; the NARC books tend to touch down in a location and then go on. (The next stories will involve Rethan, which we visited in both DEATH'S HEAD and STOPOVER, also Aurora, where we were in SCORPIO; but I can't figure out how to get back to Mars. Worse luck. The great Martian citites, and the farming town of Lassiter were fantastic places to write about.)

So much the better that you were just witness to The Epiphany, the actual moment when a new novel was born! (It might not be a big thing to most visitors, but to me, as a writer, it's a "wow" moment. I love those moments.) It might be a few years before you see the novel, but this one? Yeah, I'm, going to write this one. It doesn't have a title yet, but I have a feeling it will by tonight...

Blogging in a time-warp

You might not believe this, but it's been six months since the MK books were uploaded to Lulu (how time flies), and with half a year gone we can start to wragle numbers. I can give you the top-sellers for a start.

No surprise, I guess, if I tell you APHELION is miles ahead of every other title, with the other NARC books right behind it. DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT and WINDRAGE are the next in line ... and the hardcovers are unexpectedly popular. I'd originally thought they would be too expensive, people would leave them alone for no other reason than the sheer cost. They're ten bucks more expensive to produce than the paperbacks, and what can we do but pass most of this right along?

Sales are actually pretty good ... and damnit it, the advertising hasn't actually started yet. The campaign has been designed, it's on the launchpad, but there's always something which comes along to bump it to tomorrow, and next week. No one's fault, incidentally. It's just a bunch of STUFF that keeps happening.

The most popular format for ebooks turns out to be the screenreader format. Feedback from readers indicates our books are perfect for the purpose. Top sellers are the NARC books, with SCORPIO and APHELION running neck and neck, and DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT right behind.

Traffic going through to the website has been above average, with visitors from most corners of the globe, from Korea to Russia. It's also fascinating to see how people find us -- the tracking service we use gives a wealth of info, including the referring links, showing the pathways by which people arrived on the site. Visitors are arriving from Google, Yahoo and some search engines I never even heard of; other folks seem to get the URL in emails from friends; and the link is apparently on a number of websites out there.

To all who're linking to us: THANK YOU KINDLY. It's much appreciated.

Now, to a reader's question. When are the books going to be available in Australia? Well, in fact, they already are. Lulu.com has recruited an Australian digital printshop, and the books are now produced in this country and mailed locally, rather than being manufactured in the US or EU and airmailed in. You can order from Lulu.com direct or from the MK OnLine website, and your books will be on your doorstep in 5 days flat.

Now, the question could also have been read as, 'When will the books be available in stores in Australia?' This one is a toughie -- not because it's difficult to answer but because the details of the answer are hard to choke down! Nope, I don't see any way to get the books into stores, here or in the States. The problem is that bookstores prefer to acquire stock via a distributor, and when a title enters the distribution chain, it's subject to the markup system. The distributor takes the book from us and doubles the price ... gives it to the bookstore, and they double the price again, then add on the 10% GST. Let's say it costs us $25 for us to get the book into the hands of the distributor (which includes manufacture and freight costs, and a small royalty for yours truly and DreamCraft). The book hits the shelf at $110. [barfing sound] At that price, it'd sit there for three months and then be sent back to us as a return!

Sorry, guys, that's how the bookstore industry works, and so long as books start out at $2 or $5 as they leave the printshop, it works fine. Print on Demand is very new, and still a law unto itself. The Internet is its natural environment, and physical bookstores are alien territory.

But POD also gives us fantastic flexibility and control, and so long as readers -- like yourself -- don't mind ordering on the web, the books are about the same price as they'd be in stores. Gay books were almost always a bit more expensive because the printruns are usually smaller. Can't help wondering why printruns would be smaller, mind you. What, gay folks don't read?? I beg to differ, and so do you!

In fact, I'm trying to remember the last time I bought a book in a store. I tend to get books, music, movies, on the web exclusively these days, as do a lot of other folks. Turns out, eBay is a great place to pick up the old GMP titles, and prices are a lot better than they used to be, since they went back into print witj DreamCraft.

(I couldn't believe the US$400 price for an original DEATH'S HEAD, a few years ago. Chin hit knees for a minute there. Much as I love Jarrat and Stone, I couldn't rationalize paying so much. You can get DH and EQUINOX for about a tenth of that now -- which is fair.)

Speaking of eBay, we got the code to put a shopping link on the blog, here: you click through from this page right to eBay and search on EQUINOX or whatever. The sweet thing about it is, having the code on this page means I earn a royalty off the used-book sale ... puts the smile back on any writer's face, I'll tell you. The problem is, the code won't plug-in to the Blogger template for some reason. We still need to get this figured out, and I'll give you an update when we do. I know some readers are trying to hunt down the original GMP editions, and unfortunately, there's nothing left here. Or, if there is, it's packed, like most of my library ... and I don't recall there being much of anything left, GMP-edition-wise.

Otherwise, life and work are same-old, same-old, with the high point of the day being the moment I did NOT drop the boiling tea kettle and did NOT get rushed to the emergency room with third-degree burns to 70% of my body! Thank gods for tender mercies, or I'd have been finishing the edit of AQUAMARINE from the hospital!

I have to work now, guys ... I just noticed the time.

Cheers to all,
MK