Well, there's not much to report since last time I wrote. Term has started again, so me real job has kicked back in with a vengeance. Still, I did manage a weekend in Snowdonia earlier in the month, taking about 60 young teenagers into the mountains walking and scrambling.

Don't let the picture fool you. We had 40mph wind, heavy rain, 5m visibility, and sub-zero temperature on the summit. Great training!
And here are the books you want...

War... like none that has come before.
The Hegemony has launched the invasion Tyler Barron and his Confederation comrades have feared, and all the Rim is ablaze with the fires of war and destruction.
The Hegemony has brought its vast fleets, its advanced technology, and its endless legions of grim cyborg warriors to impose its system of rigid genetic hierarchy over all humanity on the Rim.
The Confederation fleet is outnumbered and outmatched, but they will fight nevertheless, struggling and dying to hold back the onslaught any way they can, even as the Marines they leave behind dig in and prepare to defend worlds swallowed up by the advancing battle lines.
Barron and his people will fight, they will fight like demons unleashed, and Jake ‘Raptor’ Stockton will lead his wings of strikefighters in one desperate attack after another into the teeth of the enemy armada, but time is running out…even as the enemy pushes relentlessly toward the Confederation’s Core and final victory.

One maverick crew against the Cluster's deadliest criminal organization...
Mike Starrunner, captain of an independent space freighter, is no stranger to trouble. But things get hotter than he bargained for when he lands on a planet occupied by Travellers. These grisly space pirates have a reputation so dire, even aliens won’t mess with them.
But even aliens aren't as badass as Shifters.
Mike and his crew are Shifters--alt-humans with the ability to Shift into animal form. When they impulsively rescue three of the Travellers' victims, they stumble on a deadly plot that spans the Cluster—and it's focused like a laser beam on their homeworld.
From deep space to the slums of Shiftertown, the chase is on.

The threat of invaders is gone, and Earth has been bartered away as a price for peace.
Yet, the human world of New Spero is thriving and full of hope.
Joining the rank of the Gatekeepers, Dean and Mary set off to explore worlds connected by the mysterious portals.
When they stumble upon a strange symbol, they are led to an ancient object, one that sets them on an unstoppable path.
The journey takes them through multiple worlds, before they can find what they’re searching for. Long ago, the ancient race called the Theos vanished without a trace, and have been next to forgotten for centuries. Do they still exist?
Dean intends to find out, but when he’s faced with the truth, he fears everything he loves will be lost.

Some think the City of Jade Spires is a utopia. It very much isn’t.
Holly Drake is in prison for defending herself from a murderer. That’s the kind of corruption thriving in the city where evidence is destroyed and the innocent go to jail.
But everything’s about to change.
Someone exonerates Holly and she walks free. She has no idea who. Or why. But they have a job for her. Steal back the Eye of the Colossus, a priceless jewel. It’s about to be moved off-planet, and when that happens, the trail will go cold.
Out of prison with no other work on the horizon, the job is a gift. If only she knew how to pull off a heist. The clock is ticking. If she can assemble a team and pretend like she knows how to do this, maybe she can fake it long enough to do a job better suited to a master-thief. Why Holly? Who’s pulling her strings? And just how far across the moon system will she have to go to finish the job?

A boy vanishes. But not just any boy.
1899 years after the Catastrophe, Bridges is owned by the Mob. As the city's steam-driven infrastructure fails, a new faction rises: the Red Dogs.
Jacqueline Spadros is haunted by her best friend Air's death, killed as he tried to stop her sale to the Spadros crime syndicate ten years ago. Now in an unwilling marriage to the city's biggest drug lord, she secretly runs a small-time private eye business to earn enough money to escape.
Air's little brother disappears from his back porch. And now someone is following Jacqui.
Dark, gritty, psychological, multi-layered Victorian-inspired far future detective noir that keeps the reader guessing to the very end.

Someone needs to be alive to call for help.
A dishonourable discharge left Margo unable to find honest work on Earth. Signing onto a colonizing mission heading to a new world promised a fresh start. Or at least that's what she'd thought.
Strapped into a crashing colony ship, she realized how wrong she'd been.
They hit the ground and the straight-forward colonizing mission becomes a scramble for survival. Accidents keep happening—too many to blame on random bad luck. A trail of evidence leads Margo to a startling conclusion — one of her fellow colonists is a saboteur.
Tomorrow is the colony's first communications window with Earth and their only chance to send a message home.
Will Margo stop the saboteur before it’s too late?

Captain Eris, AKA Death Engine, former military DNA tweak and mercenary is unexpectedly pulled out of her retirement in Champion Acres and dragged back into the shit by an idiot in a mech suit.
Feeling pissed off and miserable about losing her retirement lifestyle and subsequently, her chances of dying of old age; she searches for the reasons why she was reactivated. With the help of her old friend Al, an incognito artificial intelligence; and Om, a twenty-something emo tweak-girl, she discovers a plot that goes a lot deeper than losing her death. And in doing so, she finds a reason to survive.

The reincarnated souls of King Arthur, Merlin, and an anxiety-ridden priestess return to save Britain after a devastating nuclear attack, only to find an old foe: Morgaine.
After a nuclear attack on London that heralds The Time Foretold, Ava Cerdwin, the high priestess in charge of fulfilling a 1,500-year-old prophecy, must assist the heirs of King Arthur and Merlin in healing the devastated country.
The descendants of Britain’s great men of legend have kept the myths and relics for sixty-one generations, but no one is quite clear on what they must do next.
Nothing goes as planned: Ava falls for the wrong heir, the panic attacks are getting worse, the complex obligations of reincarnation are straining old relationships, and Morgaine and her henchwomen are trying to kill them.
Somehow, some way, Ava has to make the Healing happen, or Britain is finished.

The public can't know they exist. It could start a panic. The average citizen is perfectly fine with superheroes saving the day or causing mayhem in movies and comic books. But if those suprahumans actually walked among us, what would happen then?
In a crumbling post-war city of the future, private eye Charlie Madison stands in the gap. The last of his kind, a champion of lost causes, he confronts corrupt cops, violent bratva and yakuza, doing whatever he can for the average citizen in need of help. A war veteran with plenty of hardship in his past, he's not afraid to go toe-to-toe with the powers that be, whether they're in the criminal underworld or the federal government.
Madison has encountered more than his share of unusual suspects over the years. But this time he's up against something he's never seen before, on or off the battlefield: people with unnatural abilities. Suprahumans. Gifted ones. Their powers are too incredible to believe, too dangerous in this unstable world. Their existence is a secret guarded by government agents who mindwipe anyone encountering them.
For Charlie Madison, the Suprahuman Secret emerges when a little girl goes missing and no ransom demand is made. He takes the case, but time isn't on his side. After 48 hours in this town, it's unlikely an abducted child will be found in one piece. As the mystery unfolds, Madison uncovers a bizarre truth about the girl that seems impossible. But it could explain why she was kidnapped - and why she might still be alive.

Humanity's thousand-year-old interstellar empire has been rotting from the inside for over a century, thanks to venal, corrupt, and power-hungry sovereigns from a dynasty many consider illegitimate. The latest in that lineage, an increasingly psychotic empress, is pushing her realm toward catastrophic collapse as admirals and generals rebel against her rule. That rebellion quickly drags the once mighty Imperial Fleet into a devastating fratricidal conflict between factions.
With civil war raging across human space, a Navy torn asunder can no longer protect frontier colonies, and barbarians long confined to the galactic badlands see an opportunity. After generations of hard existence on worlds beyond the bounds of human civilization, they hold life cheap, especially that of others. The barbarians will gladly steal everything they find and condemn defenseless star systems to technological and demographic collapse. That is if they don't wipe them out entirely from sheer bloodlust or by selling survivors on alien slave markets.
One man, Captain Jonas Morane of the cruiser Vanquish, saw the empire's collapse coming years before the first admiral rebelled. When he finds himself the senior surviving officer of a loyalist Navy unit almost entirely annihilated by rebels, Morane puts in motion a plan he developed long ago. This plan was designed to not only save his ships and crews from certain death but keep humanity's accumulated knowledge from being obliterated by the long night of barbarism. However, before his dream can become a reality, Morane must lead the remains of the 197th Imperial Battle Group through an intricate wormhole network and across a shattered empire to the sanctuary he selected, while dodging his former colleagues from both sides. Along the way, he rescues an Imperial Marine Corps Pathfinder battalion and the survivors of a religious order known for its mysticism, and enlists them in his cause. But will Morane's sanctuary survive both the flames of rebellion and the depredations of invading marauders before his rag-tag fleet can reach it?

WHEN YOU’RE A BRAIN WITHOUT A BODY, CAN YOU STILL BE CALLED HUMAN? Marc Gregorio wakes up paralyzed. He can’t feel his own body. Accident? Stroke? Did someone slip him an overdose of Botox? The answer, he discovers, is much, much worse. He’s only a copy of Marc, a digital brain without a body, burdened with all Marc’s human memories, but without access to human sensual pleasures. Now he has to find a reason to keep on, um, “living.” Adam the Mindclone meets the real Marc Gregorio--and his new girlfriend Molly Schaeffer. Adam loves her, too. But how does a digital entity experience love? He can’t even experience pizza. His one compensation: a powerful digital brain. At Molly’s urging, he applies it to unearthing terrorist plots, aborting schoolyard mayhem, exposing congressional malfeasance and Wall Street chicanery. However, his good deeds gain the attention of a power-mad military contractor who will stop at nothing—theft, kidnapping and worse—to control the technology for his own ends. Without a body, how will Adam save himself – and the world – from a terrible fate? Mindclone, 94,000 words, is a serio-comic science fiction romance about the first successful mind-upload. It’s a book of ideas that explores looming advances in cognitive computing and neural networks, and what it means to be human even if you don’t have a body. Plus there’s a carbon-carbon-silicon love triangle, a redeemed ad-man, adventure, humor, frustrated romance, human and digital foibles, and as an extra added bonus, the defeat of death itself.

Duty, honour, loyalty. What meaning did those words still hold in the midst of a stalemated interstellar war where the difference between the enemy and one’s own leadership was sometimes paper thin? Unfairly relegated to punishment duty far from the battle lines and still pursued by her past, Siobhan Dunmoore was ordered to sail her ship deep into pirate-infested space on a quest to restore the Navy’s reputation after she failed to stop an attack that destroyed a civilian freighter. There, she hoped to find clues that might absolve the crew of the Stingray from blame but instead, she was sucked into a vortex of intrigue and treachery that threatened not only all of their lives, but the future of the embattled Commonwealth. In the midst of competing schemes for supremacy, fending off marauders, mercenaries and spies, Dunmoore had to find a way to get her people home safe and beyond the reach of powerful cabals that had burrowed their way deep into the heart of the Admiralty. If her ship was to survive, she had to find the path of duty, no matter the personal cost, even if the price she had to pay was her own existence.

The adventure continues after Colin’s leadership proves pivotal during the defense of Cambridge. The Federation rewards Colin with a promotion and decides it’s time for him to take a break from combat roles. He gathers a team together to help design a new class of warship. Cambridge builds and launches the new vessel, and Colin commands a flotilla during a cruise to Sankarah. During war games, the new ship’s capabilities astound the Navy’s senior leadership. Meanwhile, the Peschal Alliance captures a Federation Admiral. The Navy gives Colin command of a task-force and sends him to rescue her.

A few short years from now, eco-terrorists unleash the worst attack the world has ever seen. Over 25,000 autonomous combat drones are released in Manhattan from the hold of a ship. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and the entire island is evacuated and quarantined in just a few days’ time.
Ten years later, Manhattan is still empty of humans, with the exception of the salvage specialists of the most watched reality show in history: Zone War. Produced live and unedited, the show follows five teams of armored vehicle specialists who brave the active drones to recover lost riches and collect bounties on dead ones. Ram it, slam it, grab the goods and bull your way back out. And don’t break down, because no one will be coming to your aid. Armored entry is the way to go... Unless...
Meet Ajaya “AJ” Gurung, sniper’s son, drone technician and Zone infiltrator. Following his father’s footsteps while forging ahead in ways all his own, AJ has the potential to be the most successful recovery specialist of all time. The drones are changing, the rules have been thrown out and nothing about the Zone is what it seems. Adapt or die.

As the lead designer for the touring exhibit, Monsters from Outer Space, Jasim’s played the role Society has given her. That doesn’t mean she believes everything that comes out of the Supreme Potentate’s mouth. One night at work, Jasim discovers an animal from her exhibit being put through terrible experiments. She also comes face to face with the terrorist group known as the Divisionists, led by her oldest friend. Soon, Jasim is presented the opportunity to join their ranks. And when Jasim’s young brother meets one of the animals, a species known as Human, that’s been physically manipulated, he unwittingly reveals the exhibit’s darkest secret. It quickly becomes a race just to survive, but will the personal agenda of one derail everything the Divisionists have fought for?

Welcome to the Old Kingdom!
It's a wonderful time to visit! There's lots to do and plenty to see!
Participate* in a public execution!
Wave a pathetic little sword at the Queen's Champion! (With luck**, become the new champion!)
Practice real magic*** in public!
Make fun of the Halfling**** and experience excruciating pain!
What are you waiting for? Dive into the Old Kingdom right now! *****
* Note: you won't be the one swinging the axe.
** You'll need it.
*** Abracadon't. Seriously.
**** His name is Runt, and he's just tall enough to reach your groin. With his knife.
***** Try not to land on a giant sea serpent. Tourists give them indigestion.

All Slap ever wanted was his ranch and family. The gangster Lyssel destroyed all that, leaving only charred remains. Tristan wanted nothing; he had no expectations from life and trusted no one. When the cowboy and space pirate meet, they discover they are hunted by a common enemy: Lyssel. Able only to trust each other against this gangster and his mob, the two are forced to work together. But how can two such total opposites ever make their alliance work?

Earth and her colonies are not alone.
Politics, discussions and alliances. Mark doesn’t care about any of it. When did it matters when the artillery falls and blood is spilled?
All that matters is who stands beside you when blood is spilled and hell lays all around you.
Centurion Victor, has a nice ring to it, Major Victor, Corporal Victor, Private Victor, his path has not been a short one. Brothers and sisters have fallen beside him, casualties of war.
He thought Tyler and Alexis were just casualties of war, he accepted that.
Politics, discussions and alliances, killed them and should have killed him. Mark Victor is on a warpath, a path that leads to the top.
The secretive Roma Union has stepped forward. The warlike Maraukian’s are coming and humanity must rally together or shatter into oblivion.
Alliances, position, power, when a Victor has your name and a blood debt to be paid, it will be paid.