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[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Because I can. And because it won’t make a damned bit of sense to the rest of you until sometime next year, the novel I am working on this week is RAN Stormhawk. First Reader who understands laughed his fool head off. As intended.

Heather 5 included a section sending Stormhawk off on a mission, but I realized as soon as I wrote it that the tone would need to be radically different from the massive darkness of the Warlord of Yaumgan books. So time to spin off a trilogy or something.

There’s precedent, because that’s why the CS-405 books were pulled out of Jessica 7 & 8. Tone. Lighter here significantly. And runs temporally parallel to the end of Heather 5, then a little beyond.

And both set up two major series that will start up a few years after Heather’s War is done. Veronika Provst Part One and Part Two for lack of a better term today.

Provst. Tom Provst’s granddaughter. In an RAN uniform. At least during Heather’s War. Shit will get more complicated than I care to explain until the rest of you catch up with me, so just know that I’ll be carrying the RAN books another twenty years into the future. Possibly putting them to rest after that. At least for a time. Possibly not.

Just like Science Officer, I have brought Javier and folks to a resting point again with 16, where I can finally go back and fill in what happens to Mina after Way of the Sword. There were five Ways listed, if I recall without looking. Always intended five books.

Eventually. Inshallah and the creek don’t rise, vato.

Then the fun part. (and I do say that tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

The Ambassador noted that I had created one of the single greatest characters in literature and obviously needed to write more about him. At the same time, that character has had his moment in the sun and now casts his tremendous shadow on the kids coming up behind him, so I hadn’t planned on writing more from the POV of First Centurion/Senator Kosnett.

Because he demanded it. That was the email I sent the other day when I spun up a new spy thriller shorts series and cast him and his lovely wife as a team of semi-retired troubleshooters. (She giggled at being a sniper, but you have to know her to appreciate the joke.)

He wrote back that he wasn’t sure if he was being honored or trolled. (Both, natch, ‘cause I love the guy.)

Worse, yesterday, I started the second story in the series. Heh.

He’ll get to read it before the rest of you do, but the first one will be included in the next issue of Thrill Ride Magazine, coming out in December. And there will be more.

September is upon us. Fall. The Glorious Time of Dying, I have heard it called and liked the symbolism.

And, last night, I anti-stodgied.

Background: I grew up on the very eastern edge of Wichita, KS. Literally, across the street from my bedroom was a milo field as long as I lived in the house. (City has moved a couple of miles out in the 30 years since, but this is me as a kid and I moved out in ‘90 for grad school and ‘97 for good.)

Last night, had to walk across a foot bridge over the river. With a tiny creek flowing parallel below us. Maybe eight feet at the widest and one foot deep as a rule.

I have never seen salmon swimming up the river to spawn. Never once. Until last night. Got to stand there and watch them nose around the rocks looking for the entrance from the river itself. Or just being dorks. Whatever.

Really cool, because totally new. (I occasionally have to remind people that I’m not from this planet.)

What utterly new and magical thing have you done lately?

shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

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