Brett Herman's Blog

Hi friends! A quick update on some books and such.

Ratman Deux: Another Fantasy Noir has a story that is in one way or another, almost entirely put to paper. Now that, at least for me, the dust of SPFBO has settled, I've had some time to digest many of points that the finalist round of reviews brought up regarding Chaos. Suffice it to say, I learned an incredible amount, and the Ratman Deux that appears on the horizon will be a leaner, smoother book than Chaos. All of your favorite Venrick and Edwayn moments are still there, but through some inward looking and ongoing editorial effort, we're going faster, hook-ier, and punch-iest? Anyway. I really want to get this into readers' hands, but I don't want to fall into the traps that partially ensnared Chaos. As proof that at least some part of it exists, heres the cover!

That's New Sketlin! I love all of the color, light, shadow.

Other things in progress: Seven Deadly Friends (working title... maybe?)—a story about six of the seven deadly sins recruiting an everyman schlub to fulfill his destiny and help them pull off a daring heist against Pride—has a full outline, some character writing, and a number of scenes in early to mid stages complete. I'm very excited to sit down and grind out the rest of this thing and send it through the editorial gauntlet.  

Also on deck, a project that is putting some blood back into my very atrophied academic research muscles. Through mighty consumption of dozens of World War 1 memoirs and textbooks, I'm in the outlining and planning stages of a trilogy going by World War Dragon (working title definitely). The quick pitch for the trilogy is a book focusing each on the air, sea, and land aspects of World War I combat, and the grit and horror of that conflict. Also, all of the grit and horror is somewhat amplified by the sudden appearance and deployment (by one side) of militarized dragons. 

Also, Aerodance is getting new cover art. It looks amazing. I'm very excited to share it.

My debut novel is CHAOS TRIMS MY BEARD, and due to it's selection by Fantasy-Faction as their finalist for the currently-running Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, it is the thing that like, 95% of all the people who would even visit this site know me for.

But at present, it represents only a quarter of the books I've published, and in two weeks, it will be down to a fifth. So today I want to talk about that other thing, in that other genre.

I guess I'll do one of those things where authors interview themselves. Most of my dialog is written through me having a literal, audible conversations with myself (improv! comedy! annoyance to family members!), so it feels natural.

What is Aerodance?

Aerodance is an "episodic" series of twelve novels. Each novel follows its own arc, and each set of four rolls together into a cohesive "season". The individual episodes come out as regularly as I can write and send them through the editing gauntlet, and a season bundle will accompany the 4th, 8th, and 12th.

But what IS Aerodance? I mean like, what's the story like, or what is it similar to?

The story follows the corvette Dragosa and the four or so people who come to crew her. There's some threads that follow the villains on their massive dreadnought and other vignettes besides, but the primary action is centered on the crew. In that way, the structure of the story is somewhere between Cowboy Bebop and Firefly, though with a bit more serialization than either of those narratives. And as one of the characters is a hotshot fighter pilot recruit with a priceless starfighter in tow, there's a bit of the old Star Wars: X-Wing novels in there as well.

Okay, but you literally shoved the word "Neon" in front of "Space Opera" and that doesn't mean anything.

The "neon" comes from the same place that the "episodes" and "seasons" come from. As much as is possible in the medium of novels, the tone that Aerodance aspires to lines up more with the color-soaked Saturday morning/late-night Toonami shows like Robotech, Voltron, and Gundam. That is to say, flashy dogfights full of purple lasers and neon red space-contrails, and characters whose dials are turned just a bit further towards bombast, personal honor, and having short fuses in their interactions with their closest friends. That's a broad glossing-over of the unique styles and slants that those late 80's through early 2000's can bring to the narrative table, but as a rule, Aerodance is less the grimy-gray, confronting your personal demons of Battlestar Galactica and more wide-mouth screaming about avenging fallen friends as your neon blue starfighter pew-pews its way through a swarm of enemy ships that look like beetles for some reason.

That's... a lot.

I know, right? It's great and fun in entirely different ways than how Chaos is great and fun.

Anyway, where are you at with Aerodance now?

Episode 4 has one or two more threads and editing considerations to run down, and then both it and the Season One collection will be released on Kindle and Createspace on Friday, March 30th. All 12 episodes are titled and outlined. Major story beats are locked, and there is an ending.

How long are each of the episodes?

The shortest is 55K. The longest is 65K. A Season will fall somewhere around 250K.

Great, and where can I find them?

Episode 1 is 0.99 on Amazon. If you have Kindle Unlimited they are all part of the Lending Library.

Audio books?

I really want to do them, especially for this series and its somewhat rapid release schedule. I'm working on it.

So there was something else I wanted to ask you. You claimed in January that you were going to release a book a month this year. And it's March and you haven't published anything. What's up with that?

Baseline excuses: I got moderately sick for a week or two in January, ended up with more contract work than I expected, and got a new job that I've been training for.

Actual reason: A lot of the feedback that Chaos has received through its SPFBO reviews, and the reviews that rode the sudden influx of interest from the contest recognition, has been invaluable to shaping my writing going forward. Certain issues—pacing and line-editing chief among them—have popped up pretty consistently. I have an embarrassingly large stable of projects that are at the 80-95% mark, but I'm taking a hard look at each of them under the lens that these recent reviews have afforded me.

After Episode 4 and Season One are out, the sequel to Chaos is getting its shine. And then Hammer Squad. And then Tower For Fools. And then Aerodance 5. And then World War Dragon. Hooray! Thanks for reading, and happy Friday!

Happy Friday. A quick update. CHAOS TRIMS MY BEARD came back from Editor-lympus (Proof-antheon? Proposed-Changes-halla? Please substitute your own terrible and forced editing pun here). A few people have expressed that I communicate when the clean version of Chaos becomes available, so, here it is. The Kindle version is live in its professionally polished state, and I'm engaged with Amazon to get the update made available to people who already have the file. Also, I approved the paperback proof through Createspace this morning so that'll be live and available on whatever mysterious timeline Createspace operates. Probably early next week, though I don't think they print old files while new ones are taking their place. Like I said, a mystery.

Furthermore, AERODANCE 1, 2, and 3 will all be live on Monday with edited-again versions, and the paperbacks following a few days later as I'm submitting everything Sunday night. The fourth Aerodance is January's book of the month so more on that next week as I finish the draft. 

So as part of Mark Lawrence's Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, CHAOS TRIMS MY BEARD was selected by Fantasy-Faction to be their finalist. I'm still a bit floored about the whole thing, but to say that I'm honored and excited and vibrating with enthusiastic giggles would all be an understatement. The official review from Laura Hughes is here, and another of their judges, Kitvaria Sarene, has put up her own review on Goodreads. To have people responding to and enjoying Chaos in the way that they are, it's mind blowing. And now the other nine blogs in the contest are supposed to score all the finalists, and it seems like many are going to do full reviews as well, so that's really, really cool.

Now, two things from all that above stuff. One, I fully acknowledge that there are like, a ton of hyperlinks there. But I'll be the first to tell you that I have no idea what I'm doing on social media and the like, and that most of these awesome people that are being crazy cool reviewers for my work and the work of other authors and advocating for their favorites and such, these people are authors themselves. So, I'm making "Be helpful and engaged in the self-publishing community" a big goal for 2018. 

Second thing from up there: If you read either review, you'll see that Chaos's biggest strike against is the state of its edit, and how it needs some proofreading love. I fully cop to that, but both of those reviews were written on the copy of Chaos that was available in May. I've since gone over it again and uploaded a cleaner draft, and there's an even more professionally copy-edited version on the way in the first month or so of 2018. I fully, completely, incredibly appreciate anyone who has read and enjoyed the book in spite of its somewhat marred consistency in cleanliness. But, to reiterate, the ebook up on Amazon right now is better taken care of, and a fully polished ebook and paperback are coming in weeks.

So, better edits, better social media-ing for 2018. But as for books, well, we're going to go a little nutty. I published four books, Chaos and AERODANCE: A NEON SPACE OPERA 1-3, in the first half of 2017. And then... nothing. But I wasn't idle at the keyboard. In a bit (six months) of having my dessert before my broccoli and sprouts, I wrote a number of books, near-final drafts of a few even, and then let them sit, happily bounding off to the next project without doing the work to push them out. So, now I've got a backlog polishing, proofing, and formatting. And I've still got a number of projects bouncing around in my head and in my notebooks.

The tl;dr: I'm publishing a new book every month in 2018. Some of these are working titles, and this ABSOLUTELY does not represent a release order, but here they are:

Ratman Deux: Another Fantasy Noir

Aerodance 4: Call of the Void

Hammer Squad

The Shadow Net

A Tower for Fools

Peperoni Fire: An Improvised Heist

(The rest of these are working titles)

Star Crusades: The Quantum Grail

World War Dragon

Fight in Hell

Aerodance 5

Aerodance 6

Aerodance 7

Maybe I'm being overly ambitious (I definitely am), but I wrote just about seven or eight books this year, and only stumbled because I didn't carry them across the finish line. So, I've just got to repeat that while actually getting the works out. And given that we're about to cross over in January, it's the season for grand plans and proclamations. Anyway, this should be fun. Have a safe New Years, and see you in 2018!

A quick update on all them books what I'm hoping to get squared away by the end of the year. 

First (in my heart and this post), CHAOS TRIMS MY BEARD. Earlier this year on a whim I entered Chaos into the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, which is a 300 book/10 blog contest run by all-around good author chap Mark Lawrence. Chaos got slotted in over at Fantasy-Faction and, insanely, has not yet fallen under their review team's exacting axe. It has been nerve-wracking and exciting and a whole bunch of other emotions. Other people, people I've never even met, have read Chaos, and generously rated it and offered their thoughts. The responses have been heart-stopping, mainly because people actually seem to like the super weird thing that is Edwayn's weekend adventure.

And they've also been humbling in that, almost universally, each has mentioned the poor state of the book's edit.

And they're right. I completely own the fact that in some editions "else" is misspelled as "esle" on the first page, and that for some reason, gray/grey are used interchangeably, which is insane because two of the main characters are literally that color. I missed these things and more, and maybe in my fervor to get the book up to snuff for the contest, or because I'd worked on it for three years and I was done, these blemishes got through. Long story short, the version available on Kindle right now (and pretty much every other platform when my current Select period runs out in December--more on that later) corrects the most egregious errors. I'm engaged with Amazon to get an update pushed out to people who already have the book, but it's a somewhat inscrutable process having not done it before. So, I apologize to everyone who had to deal with the errors. An even cleaner, professionally edited ebook and POD paperback are right at the top of my list of things to do before the holidays. Growing pains, and such.

Moving on to HAMMER SQUAD. This book was a pain to write because I went from one POV in Chaos to three or four in Aerodance to even a bit more than that. And it's a fantasy military tale that is kind of Band of Brothers, kind of Tom Clancy-esque special forces technothriller, and also it takes place in Chaos's world like a thousand years before Edwayn. It's super weird, but I like it. I'm finishing up narrative edits by Thanksgiving and then it too is off to the scrutinizing surgeons for some professional proofing. Depending on the length of that process, I'm hoping for a late November/Early December release on pretty much every notable platform as well as Createspace paperback.

Also, let's take a minute for AERODANCE: A NEON SPACE OPERA, both as a series and the next installment. The three currently released episodes very likely need the same polishing love that Chaos is going to get, and making that happen is right at the top of the list. Episode 4: Call of the Void is going to be out just before Christmas as a standalone and as part of the first Aerodance bundle of four episodes. If you've been reading along with the story of the starship Dragosa and its crew but are thinking that maybe Tyto and Rock have gotten too much screen time and you want to see what's going on with Mira and Gunner, well, I hope you like the next book.

So, again, thank you to everyone who has read or is interested in any of these stories. I'm sorry for the sloppiness, and promise to do better. There's a lot books out there, and if you've found yourself reading mine, you deserve to have your time respected. Have a good turkey day if that's something you're going to celebrate, or just enjoy the insane snap-chats of the seething hordes bum-rushing Targets and Walmarts at 3am on Friday.

Note: No writing updates today because it would basically just be "I am working on Hammer Squad. Editing is hard." Instead I'm going to ramble about the new Star Trek show, the one I'm actually excited for.

Just from flitting around Twitter last night, the general tv-watching crowd and the ivory tower critics who cover the medium seem to be leering at each other from across a vast expanse called The Orville. Under heavy, HEAVY promotion, Fox ran the pilot of Seth MacFarlane's new sci-fi show—named after its most prominently featured vehicle—twice last night. There are echoes here of the premier of MacFarlane's original flagship Family Guy. The auspicious Sunday football lead-in, the relatively unique nature of the show for the current network-TV landscape, and the uneven nature of the pilot episode all harken back to our intro to MacFarlane's brand of creativity back in 1999.

But the pilot episode, "Old Wounds", was ravaged by critics before audiences had a chance at it. And taking a stroll over to the show's metacritic page shows a user review average score of more than double the one assigned by critics. And many of the negative reviews read like they can't wait to get in a pithy dig at MacFarlane himself, because he made Family Guy, and I don't know, it's not as good as it used to be. Cutaways are bad, or something. I AM A COMEDY CONSUMER AND I CLEARLY HAVE REFINED, BOUTIQUE TASTES.

But I'm not here to go to bat for Seth. MacFarlane the actor is actually the worst part of cast as it stands. He's just not very emotive, and in an episode that opens with him catching his wife in bed with some blue, forehead-gooping alien, there's room for a tour across a few different moods. Instead, we get schlubby, moderately affable, barely-fazed Captain Ed Mercer who responds to adultery, deadly laser fights, and orchestrating the death of entire starship's worth of enemy combatants with less emotion than the robot sitting to his right. This is MacFarlane's baby, yes, and I can see the through-line of thought where he'd want to have himself sitting in the captain's chair and engaging the quantum thrusters or whatever, but the show would be served with a better fictional captain.

Behind the producer's desk, though, MacFarlane's guidance of the show seems right on. Some of the jokes fell flat, but the upside is that this is very clearly not Family Guy in space. It's more like News Radio in The Next Generation. The pair of helmsmen/weapons officers that sit at the very Trekkie two-man console at the bridge's fore are more concerned about getting out of work on time and if they can have soda at their desk than they are about the alien ship trying to kill them. The second officer is a budget version of Drax the Destroyer and pretty much no one knows how to approach him with any humanity, but he's Assistant to the Regional Manager and is in charge when the Captain and Friends are away, so the rank and file accept his presence and idiosyncrasies. The science officer is a human-hating robot, but again, they're all stuck here working together. Where the show gets its legs and life though, is that beyond that clock-in clock-out texture, The Orvillie IS Star Trek: TGS. It's been beaten up for being a bad parody, but that tact misses the mark entirely. From the camera angles to the sound the doors make to the hard cut to the unexpectedly gruesome and sci-fi spectacle that is the episode's only on-screen death, The Orville goes way past homage and love letter and becomes a show that could have easily been happening in the same on-screen universe as the adventures of Picard and crew. The ships look a little different, and the Federation is the Union, but MacFarlane set out to make a 90's Star Trek show, and he did.

And that's the reason I'm excited for the rest of The Orville's first season. The tagline for the coming episodes preview was "Every week a new adventure!" and we don't really have that right now. Aside from murder-of-the-week police procedural shows, everything that exists with even a hint of drama is serialized and dark and gritty. Of course it's goofy that the senior officers stand at full extension in the middle of an open room with lasers whipping past as they calmly drop chitin-armored baddies with well-placed shots directly to the thickest parts of enemy armor. And it's silly that attractive-Klingon-esque girl Alara (with an "A" and not an "E" I'll point out, endlessly) is super strong and can leap WHOLE FOUNTAINS in a single bound. But I want a show where a too-smooth shuttle lands at an alien research station/Van Nuys office building parking lot and discovers a time-acceleration ray. Because it'll be forgotten about next week when they have to resolve a dispute for space oil fracking rights or something. The Orville is fun enough and light enough that it gets away with campy upbeat adventures. Maybe MacFarlane will put his considerable vocal and stage talent to work and become someone worth watching on camera, or maybe the show he's built around himself will be strong enough to sustain its episodic adventures in spite of it. And I'm glad next week's episode won't have had all of its jokes ruined by the endless previews.

It will be interesting to see how The Orville stands up in the face of an ACTUAL new Star Trek show in a few months, but at least I can watch this one without paying for yet another streaming service. 

Summer is winding down, and in the spirit of all the students scurrying back to school and engaging in the high octane deathmatch that is parking at literally any university, I too am taking a hard-charging approach to gridlock and am fixing to get out some fancy new books.

First on the docket, and very hopefully out by the end of September is Hammer Squad. I like the world that Chaos Trims My Beard established, and I wanted to write more in it but not in such a way that infringes on the ongoing stories of Edwayn and Venrick. In the glossary at the end of Chaos, there's a few entries that hint that all was most certainly not well in the intervening time between the Burst and the establishment of the relatively stable society on display in that story. Hammer Squad pulls us back to those first couple of generations after the cataclysm, when humans and dwarves and elves were all eying each other skeptically but maybe thinking about giving it a go together. 

The titular Hammer Squad is a dwarven special forces outfit led by Foreman Dundrear of Hardshoulder. He's full dwarf, a many-decades veteran of fighting above and below ground, and he keeps a few framing hammers up his sleeves just in case he gets separated from his bigger stuff. The story follows one of the first attempts at integrating the forces of the very different societies of elves and humans and dwarves, and I had a fun time crafting what is—at least in part—something like The Expendables but with magic and sledgehammers. It's a military fantasy thriller with covert operations, world-weary commanders, plucky recruits, big explosive showdowns, and some shadowy plotting to nefarious, conspiratorial ends. I hope that you find it fun in the way that Chaos was fun.

After that, we're looking at something totally different in The Shadow Net. It's 206X, and one-time corporate enforcer Lee Bishop is hired to find out why a recently dead socialite is suddenly active on everyone's social media feeds. Thrills! Near-future tech! Brooding! I've got a draft nearly done and then it'll get the polish and shine and be out a bit after Hammer Squad.

Beyond that, before the holidays, Aerodance 4 will get out and pull together the first arc of the Neon Space Opera, and the collection of the first four stories will be available as an e-book bundle. I've also got a massive pile of notes and drafted scenes that, when assembled, look something like the next Edwayn and Venrick story. I was hoping to have it out by summer as the very last page of Chaos advertises, but my brain comes up with good intentions while my fingers scream at all the typing they've suddenly been signed up for. More writing updates next Monday.

Spoiler Disclaimer: The penultimate paragraph of this review makes explicit reference to a number of plot points in Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy. The book is worth a fresh read, so ignore that last bit if you haven't read the book yet. 

I came across this book on my own while browsing Amazon, and read the Kindle version under a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I have no connection to the author.

The first Hard Luck Hank book is the novel I point to when I get the question as to what spurned me to go from musing scribbler to actually finishing a book. I first read Steven Campbell's debut novel all the way back in 2013 and I was struck by the funny, genre-laden, pulpy thing and sped through it in a day or so. It was a week or so later that I took a hard look at various drafts on my computer with file names like "Fantasy Mage Detective: Breadlust" and started excising bits and pulling together a story that would eventually become Chaos Trims My Beard.

I enjoyed the book so much on that first read through—and found my own motivation after reading it—because I'd finally found a project that was complete, successful, and engaging and had a few trappings of my own nascent work. Now, whenever my own possibly-funny, off-angle genre benders with a dense, grumpy protagonist are giving me troubles, I pick up a HLH book to remind myself how stuff like this can work. I've read through Screw the Galaxy (and its FIVE sequels) a time or two each over the years.

The story lives and dies on Hank's broad mutant shoulders. Hank is generally human-shaped, but it's established almost on the first page that he is incredibly hard to hurt to the point where a hail of bullets would probably just bounce off his eyeball, Man of Steel style. Having a six or seven book series based off a protagonist who only really has to worry about suffocating to death seems like a hard hook, but Hank is just so damn compelling to hang out with. We're in his head, and following along with his first-person grumbling and world-weary musings as he pops those bullets out of his tear ducts and goes about his day. Hank is a working man that lumbers along the fuzzy line of illegality on the space station where he's lived for centuries. He gets called in to deal with uppity gangsters and simpering bureaucrats and has somehow made it his actually compensated business to make sure that a bunch of dumb idiots don't kill each other too bad while they're ripping each other off.

It's something that sounds like it shouldn't work—the impervious protagonist, his generally placating angle, and the overall lack of stakes early in the story—so it speaks to Campbell's tight prose that kept me gleefully hanging around. Hank is funny in a forcibly sardonic way, and the supporting cast is built up like a flawed office/workplace family. Everyone's stuck out here at the ass-end of the galaxy with nothing better to do than make a few extra credits and deal with each other, and the interplay of these various flawed-bordering-on-dangerous (sociopathic, in the case of Hank's mad scientist friend) characters generally works. 

The space station Belvaille feels like Space Los Angeles or some other sprawling metro, complete with massive civic towers, glitzy rows of casinos and nightclubs under the thumb of organized crime lords, and drug-addled slums. Some aliens have names that are an unpronounceable mess of consonants, and others are basically just wriggling piles of lavender spaghetti. Like all good sci-fi settings, it's one where any number of new creatures or pieces of tech could just pop up, but Campbell does a great job of every new thing feeling like it follows the laid-out rules. And if some new location or alien doesn't work, it's generally off-screen by the end of the chapter, and we're back to Hank grumbling. Or eating.

It would be an incomplete review to not mention that Hank would very much could eat his way through a George R. R. Martin novel's worth of feasts, though he mostly enjoys sandwiches. 

The writing—first person and squarely locked somewhere between Hank's ears—is tight. I have a weakness as a reader where I get super grumpy—super quickly—if I'm slogging through loosely constructed prose or a passage after passage of repetitively built sentences that start with "The" or "I". Hard Luck Hank doesn't fall into that category, and descriptions of characters, aliens, and places are evocative enough to get the gist without getting into overly specific breakdowns. Granular detail isn't something Hank himself is necessarily big on, so we don't have to trudge through it. The action is similarly well-done, and Hank takes a massive amount of punishment, though the more gruesome details of his pain are held from us at arms length much in the way the character likely experiences them.

As a personal wiggle with the way I read first person narration, I'm not super fond of exclamation marks during internal dialog/narration. I understand it as a way to convey a character's surprise or a sudden revelation, but I can't ever seem to properly internalize what my own mind shouting at me would be like. When I hit one I usually find myself going back and seeing what was so damn shocking in the first place, but that's me as a reader. It's a testament to how easily the prose flows here that something minor and occasional like that ranks among my specific complaints.

STORY SPOILERS BELOW

If there's one spot where Screw the Galaxy shows itself off as a debut book for both the author and the series, it's in the plotting. Chapters are short, and there's 60 or 70 of them, and for much of the book these individual scenes feel episodic. As soon as we meet Hank and his supporting cast and find out what they're all about, we spend a fair bit of time just following Hank around. Eventually some assassin robots start causing trouble on the station, and we meet a blue-bunny-eared femme fatale with a drug-addict brother who is more or less a god. By the time a planet-sized spaceship shows up and threatens the station and we meet its eternal, crystal-bodied occupant, so many little plots have sprung up, gone dormant, circled around, and been somewhat resolved that it's hard to feel like that this is the ultimate narrative we'd set out to see through from the beginning. The book exists somewhere between a slice of life story, some kind of moderate conspiracy thriller, and a disaster movie (that never gets to the disaster). By the end of it, if you enjoy Hank, you've enjoyed your ride. And you might also see why he's just so damn tired of dealing with all the nonsense all the time. It's good nonsense to be sure, and Campbell does manage to make most everything feel tied in eventually, but it's just a bit meandering in the getting there.

END SPOILERS

Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy is something different while still standing on a solid, accessible genre foundation. It's witty and well-imagined, and I pick up every new book in the series within days of its release. I've enjoyed at least two read-throughs of each book in this (currently) six-book series, and I absolutely wish there was more like it out there. 

Aerodance Episode 3: Baker is out for Kindle, paperback, and is free to read with KU and Prime. The entirety of Aerodance grew from the trope of pilots and the relationship they have with their aircraft. In real militaries, pilots go up in whatever plane they get assigned to that day, even if their name is painted on some other fuselage. Maintenance requirements, evening out flight hours, and all the rest of that logistical stuff that keeps aircraft and their operators safe and effective makes the notion of giving Major Chet Gunpass his very own 150 million dollar Raptor impractical to the point of impossibility. But I've always been taken with images like Poe Dameron's Black One halloween-painted X-Wing, and the Red Barron's iconic red Albatross and Fokker. Those aircraft are distinctly tied to those pilots, and maybe there were a bunch of stenciled TIE fighters or Camel's and SPADs painted onto their fuselages. I don't know, but I've always romanticized the trope, so Aerodance is, at least in part, about Tyto and "his" Edge. 

And Baker is so exciting and was so fun to write because it was finally time to dive into that relationship, and to start exploring how Tyto and his mysterious, potentially over-powered ship might factor into the brewing conflict at large. I hope you enjoy it.

Beyond all that, I want to blab about the next few months. It's summer, and I have a lot of time to write and a lot of stories I want to get out. Three seems like a good number of Aerodances to bite off at one time, so Episode 4 will be out in a few months. But I've got other fun stuff to write in the mean time. First up is a Blade Runner-Gibson-Dredd-Cyberpunk story called The Shadow Net. It takes place in Los Angeles a few decades in the future and follows Lee Bishop, a former corporate enforcer type, as he grapples with the notion of how all the data we post about ourselves online can almost take on a life and will of its own. After that, I'm eyeing something I'm calling Hammer Squad, which is probably best described as military-fantasy. It follows a few sledge-swinging, keg-toting dwarven warriors when they're assigned to a joint operation as part of a team with some men, elves, ratmen and some others. It takes place in the Chaos Trims My Beard universe, but decades before Edwayn and Venrick have their eventful weekend. After that, and after the long while that I've spent planning and plotting and coming up with more terrible puns through which to construct entire scenes around, I'm diving into Ratman Deux: Another Fantasy Noir.

Also, I'm working on something called Golem, which will be posted in chapters or substories here and other places for free.

The second episode of Aerodance, Through The Gates is now available on Kindle, the Unlimited/Prime lending library, and paperback.

It was a fun book to write, even if I spiraled in on myself in a lot of new and unusual ways in getting it done in a month. The book is longer than Pilots by about 12k words, though it didn't really hit me until I had the paperbacks in hand and compared them. I think I used the extra pages well, though. The (nearly assembled) crew of the Dragosa finds themselves in a bit of a bind with regards to getting off Tauro VI, and with the help of some new faces they set out to pull off something like a reverse starship heist. It's a weird term, but I hope you guys enjoy it.

Next month (or the end of this month, rather): Episode 3: Baker