Paksworld

Editor has accepted the manuscript of INTO THE FIRE (after the second rewrite) and it’s now in production.  Once the copy edits have come and gone, I’m off the contractual hook, so to speak, with the time to arrange for the medical and dental procedures I need.   Whew!   Because an eye with a cataract in it does not get better on its own, nor does a dental situation.

DragonCon was fun but challenging, as the throat injury was still causing discomfort and some loss of voice strength, and the knee injury didn’t allow the kind of fast, steady walking that going from hotel to hotel makes much easier.  OTOH, I made it, so there.

Renovation on the house next door that we bought to rent has gone well, and it’s now time for the flooring crew to put in the new floors.  Then installation of appliances, final plumber visits and electrical visits, and it’ll be about ready to go.  In the meantime I need to have a talk with our lawyer about “being a landlord of residential property.”  The basics; I’ve never done this before.

Yesterday I finished the second rewrite requested by Editor.  Summer has been full of long, long days at the computer and short-short nights of too little sleep.  (In between the two rewrites was something else that came up and required the same crunch approach.)

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As those of you with tattered old mass-market paperbacks with the woman on the black horse on the cover know,   Sheepfarmer’s Daughter came out in 1988, as did Divided Allegiance, and Oath of Gold came out in 1989.   To celebrate 30 years in print, Baen Books is going to put out an Annversary Edition of them next year, and asked if I would write an introduction to each volume.  Of course I said yes, and I’ve roughed out the first one and sent it on to Toni Weisskopf at Baen.

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First, for those wishing for a print form of DEEDS OF HONOR.   A POD version will appear.  I don’t know when yet, or have the details, but sales were good enough in the first couple of weeks of the e-book to trigger the “How would you feel about a POD version?” question from the powers that be.  And I said “Sure, fine, let’s do it.”    More when I know more.

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I have my tentative schedule for DragonCon posted on Live Journal  (if I can quit typing LiverJournal!  Darn the new glasses.)  It’s tentative, and I’ve asked for a reading slot and a signing slot as well…if I get them, those will show up in my final schedule.   I have just been told that Ebola patients are being shipped to the CDC in Atlanta.  One hopes not on commercial airlines coming into Hart International, because that place is sufficiently full of incoming con crud already.

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January is the month in which I have to turn in the annual report on our wildlife management program.   Some years I get it almost done in December.  This year I didn’t,  so I’m working on it now.  Also on another official report.   Husband does the last quarterly tax stuff, but I’m supposed to gather paperwork (whimper) and hand it to him.  Hence, bustling through. Read the rest of this entry »

Shattered Shields edited by Jennifer Brozek and Bryan Thomas Schmidt will be released November 4, 2014 to bookstores everywhere by Baen in trade paperback. Read the rest of this entry »

I may have mentioned in some comment or other that I had an Incident With Bicycle and Pickup last weekend.   I am lucky to be a) alive and b) whole and–barring a somewhat unhappy neck and some fairly impressive bruises–recovered.   The incident was my fault;  though I knew that was an almost-blind turn into a very narrow lane, and that large pickups lived on the connecting street, I failed to adhere to the ABCs of safety: ALWAYS  Be Careful, not “Nearly Always Be Careful…”  Read the rest of this entry »

The first week out is the week that determines (nearly always) whether a book will reach “bestseller” status.     It’s the week that agents watch over,  checking BookScan numbers regularly, checking rankings any place they can find one and making their own calculations of raw numbers v. other books’ raw numbers.   In the first week,  LIMITS sold a few fewer hardcovers than ECHOES, and a few more e-books, to wind up with a modest increase of total hardcover/ebook sales in the US market.   So thank you, all of you who wanted to and were able to buy a copy  in the first week.    Thanks for talking about the books, and introducing others to them.   You’re the ones who keep a writer in bread & butter (and dark chocolate.  Can’t forget the dark chocolate.)    Read the rest of this entry »

Crown of Renewal, by a nose, despite all the obstacles in its path as reported in breathless gasps by Crown’s disheveled jockey: Read the rest of this entry »