You may remember me mentioning QUINTEN’S STORY a few weeks back? Well, the cover is ready to be revealed.

Taaa daaaaa!

The book itself is a-l-m-o-s-t ready for Dev Ed, which is no problem as it’s not due for release till December. QUINTEN’S STORY, while it has romantic elements, is not a romance. It’s straight space opera, set in the Republic (ON BLISS, PRIME SUSPECT, A PIRATE’S PASSION, IN ENEMY HANDS).

After meeting the firebrand Kiel Souiad, Quinten Tamlan falls in love with her and joins her in creating the ST Alliance, a rebel group that is trying to bring down the Republic. But something happens, Kiel dies, and Quinten spends the next seven years wallowing in grief. However, his ship — too big for one person to handle — is disintegrating and he’s finally forced to take on a crewmember.

Quinten thinks he’s been forgotten by the Republic and forgotten by the people he and Kiel tried to liberate. He’s about to find out that he’s wrong on both counts.

Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad, does it? I may try to work some of that into the official blurb.

Anyway, that’s the news for this week. A book trailer AND a new cover. Have a good weekend.

I uploaded it to YouTube last night. Hope you like it.

If you have been following along, stalwart reader, you would have noticed an interview with me at Diane Dooley’s blog. That’s one chance to win a copy of WAR GAMES.

You can go back to last week’s blog post (just look down below this one) and make a comment. That’s a second chance to win a copy of WAR GAMES.

You could sign up for my newsletter (click the envelope in the sidebar) and ask for a copy, but then I’ll be asking you to pretty please post a review somewhere. Third chance.

And next Monday, I’ll be at Charlie Allden’s blog, Smart Girls Love SciFi. Fourth chance.

Don’t say I’m not helping you out here! I’ve got more jobs than time available at the moment. If someone could please make a day last 48 hours, instead of 24, I think I may just get all caught up.

Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

Dear long-suffering and stalwart reader. Yes, you read that right. WAR GAMES is out, my very first release from my own press, Sandal Press. That link goes to the Sandal Press page, where you can choose an etailer, if that’s your heart’s desire. While I’m on Amazon, Smashwords and XinXii, I’m still waiting on Kobo. And it takes time for the electrons to propagate to such places as Sony, Apple and Diesel.

With a new release comes the inevitable competition, which tweep @RowanLarke kindly jogged my neurons about. If you, kind visitor, would like a digital copy of WAR GAMES (in EPUB), you have two choices.

Choice one is signing up for my newsletter. Just ask and you will receive.
PROs: It’s free!
CONs: I will be asking that you put a review up somewhere. Plus you have to put up with my bi-monthly rantings for at least one newsletter. And the August/September newsletter will be out at the end of this week, so you don’t have much time.

Choice two is commenting on this post.
PROs: Limited exposure to my rantings and no gentle reminders to put up a review. You have till the 15th to enter a comment on any of my blog posts.
CONs: You have to think of something to say.

The choice is yours.

If you’re piqued, you can read the book’s Prologue and a bit of its background here. Meanwhile, I’m hard at work on the next two releases for this year and trying not to compulsively check Amazon/Smashwords every fifteen seconds.

Yes, once more Kaz has pulled the this-is-not-a-blog-post rabbit out of the hat. So, this is not a blog post. The real blog post will appear on Monday, which is the official launch date of WAR GAMES. Hint hint. Have a great weekend.

Well, it’s been a long haul so far…and it isn’t over yet. BUT, I can tell you that WAR GAMES is on schedule for official release on Monday, 1 August. And the fully-edited Prologue is up at my site for your reading pleasure.

The main problem with telling you that it’ll be released on the first of August, however, is that it takes time for the uploads to propagate to various etailer sites, so I wouldn’t go looking for the book on the Monday, if I were you. Best to leave it a couple of days.

By now, stalwart reader, you would know the history of this novel. It’s been more than two years in the making. The book has gone through increases and decreases and now seems to be settled happily at almost the 90,000 word mark. I’ve taken out scenes and fleshed out others and I’m pleased with the result.

WAR GAMES is also important because it’s my first self-published title and the first release for my own micro-press, so I had to dot many more “i”s and cross many more “t”s to ensure that things fitted together well. But we’re not done. There are still other plans in the works, other books, other offers, other enhancements. I am the ultimate tinkerer.

For now, though, looking towards the end of the month, it all appears doable. And, for that, I’m very happy.

 

***

 

I don’t always do this. In fact, I can’t remember ever putting a section break in my blog posts, but I had to share something with you. I was taking The Wast through English and he had to pick the appropriate verb in order to satisfy subject-verb agreement. (That is, single subject, singular form of verb; multiple subjects, plural form of verb, that kind of thing.) I won’t go through the exercise with you but I do want to share the output. A case of English-pass but Society-fail, if you will.

Darren told Alan, “Walking is a good form of exercise. We have to exercise to stay healthy.”
“You have been telling me that for a long time,” replied Alan, who is used to other activities like playing football. “Jenny and Liza were out walking yesterday when they were robbed. It’s really not safe to walk on your own.”
Darren said, “They were foolish. They chose to walk at night. Plus, they were not paying attention to what was going on round them. And it’s not like they don’t know about safety measures. Whatever it is, everyone is responsible for his and her own safety. They should have been more careful.” *

Of course Malaysia can’t be described as libertarian-leaning by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m sure the average Malaysian knows just how, um, hard-working the local police are. They are paid for with public money but, as you can see from the above passage, they are absolutely NOT responsible for public safety.

I’m not sure what revolts me more about this passage:

(A) The fact that women’s safety is so easily glossed over
(B) The “blame the victim” mentality inherent in the piece
(C) The absolution of police from any kind of behaviour to protect the public
(D) The fact that two out of three authors of this Guide are women (see below)
(E) The inculcation of contempt for women being woven into education from a tender age
(F) The complete incomprehension of locals to the heinous nature of this drivel
(G) All of the above

With this in mind, I hope you have a  better weekend than me and I’ll catch you next week.

* Taken from “Longman Essential English Form 2 Revision Guide” (2011) by Sheela Prabhakaran, Doreen Da Costa, K. N. Vasanthy

It never fails. There I was yesterday. I’ve got to get some writing done, I said to myself. And the only way I can do that is to unplug from the intertubes. But I also had a big post-weekend grocery shop to do. And The Wast had to go to the dentist.

Poor mite. His baby teeth absolutely refuse to come out, even with his permanents erupting, so we had no choice but to take him to the dentist who, in the middle of asking him about his pets, yanked out both teeth with a deft twist of her dental pliers. Unfortunately, the teeth were on opposite sides of his jaw, so that meant difficulty chewing, copious bleeding, mournful looks…you know, the usual.

Of course, whenever I unplug for a while, something happens. In this case, it’s an interview that Joyce Chng conducted with me for the World SF Blog. I talk about the kids, sf romance and my thoughts on motherhood.

Many thanks to Joyce and Lavie Tidhar for this opportunity. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow Joyce at @jolantru and Lavie at @lavietidhar And if you’re interested in SF from non-US parts of the world, be sure to put the World SF blog on your reader.

Even as I peer over my overheated monitor and into the middle distance, I see August looming with all its terrible potential. Mostly this means that everyone will be taking the month off and some of my favourite blogs will even * gasp * stop!

Rest assured that I won’t be doing that in August, stalwart reader. Oh no, I’ll be starting that kind of shenanigans right NOW!!

See, here’s the thing. I promised myself that I’d blog three times a week. Faithfully. And, with a few exceptions, I think I’ve held to that promise for well on four years now. With Cara d’Bastian joining the personalities in my head, I was still blogging three times a week…except it was Tuesdays at Cara’s and Wednesdays and Fridays here.

Well I missed Wednesday, didn’t I? And that’s because I’m smack in the middle of starting up my self-publishing business. Just because WAR GAMES has come back from the editors doesn’t mean that I can just rest on my backside and do nothing. It’s been formatting, and signing contracts, and setting up accounts, and documenting everything somewhere. It’s been learning about Cascading Style Sheets, and relearning HTML and trying to get a handle on whether I should use Anthemion Jutoh together with, or instead of, jEdit, Sigil, Mobipocket creator, Adobe plug-ins…well, the list goes on and on.

So, it’s time to make my annual hard decision and cut back this blog to once a week. Fridays. I’ll still be at Cara’s on Tuesdays but, the rest of the time, I’ll be working damn hard on other, background stuff. I may post at other times of the week if some startling news comes in but, other than that, it’s Fridays from now on.

Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

This is how my writing progress is looking:

* Final Line Edits are complete for TAINTED LOVE, a story in the “Cloaks & Daggers” anthology, coming from Total-E-Bound in October.

* WAR GAMES is still with CopyEd. I’m hopeful it’ll be back sometime this week. Still on track for an August release at this stage. When in August? Your guess is as good as mine considering this will be my first self-published novel.

* THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY (by alter-ego Cara d’Bastian) is still with DevEd. With luck, I’ll get it back by the end of the month. Because I already know there’s impending structural reworking required, release for August is looking shaky. I may have to delay this one till September/October, just to make sure it’s in as good a shape as it can be.

* And QUINTEN’S STORY is two-thirds finished at the rough draft stage and I’m currently in the middle of commissioning artwork for it.

What is QUINTEN’S STORY? It’s pure space opera. There is a little bit of romance in this one, but don’t expect a traditional romance ending.

Quinten Tamlan was once part of the ST Alliance and a thorn in the side of the Republic. With his partner, Kiel Souiad, they fought a courageous battle against the wrongs of human-led civilisation. Then something happened and both Quinten and Kiel disappeared from view. Seven years later….

I started this one more than a year ago and it languished on my hard drive because I was trying to shove romance into it and couldn’t fit it in properly. Last month, I had an epiphany. If romance doesn’t fit neatly into the story, why put it in? Indeed. (I can be a bit thick sometimes.)

I’m hoping this one will be out around November/December with a projected word count of approximately 65,000 words.

For 2012, I’m hoping for inclusion in another TEB anthology, there are two Check Your Luck books on the cards, and I’ve got another space opera novel to work on, tentatively titled GENESIS. That one was originally contracted to a well-respected house but they gave me the rights back after rationalising some of their genre lines. Hey, it happens. I need to rip GENESIS apart and put it back together again so you won’t be seeing it before the end of the year.

I don’t know what’s been happening out there in the intertubes but, over the past three months, I’ve almost doubled the number of subscribers for Cara d’Bastian’s bi-monthly newsletter. A nice surprise. If you’d like to join the (now delayed) party, you can sign up here.

So that’s three self-publishing titles from me this year and, hopefully, three next year too. Wish me luck and have a good weekend.

Amazon buys The Book Depository.

I’m sick.