TANGENT KNIGHTS 1: CAPRICE OF FATE is out today!

Today’s the day! The first book in my brand-new, original audiobook series Tangent Knights is now on sale from GraphicAudio, for an introductory price of just $4.99 if you buy digital!

https://www.graphicaudio.net/tangent-knights-1-caprice-of-fate.html

GraphicAudio introduces a spectacular original Super-heroic Action Series available in no other format!

In the year 2046, on the artificial-island arcology of New Avalon, Corazón “Cory” Kagami is a bright but impulsive college student who follows her passions, resisting the will of her mother, Morgan Herrera, head of a tech conglomerate responsible for astonishing breakthroughs. Morgan controls Catchfire Industries, and is effectively the ruler of New Avalon through her near-monopoly of its technology and through the numerous government officials she keeps in her pocket.

In a world where communication with parallel Tangent Earths has brought a disruptive influx of new beliefs and scientific innovation, Morgan promotes a strong defense against threats from within and beyond this world, developing advanced personal armor and weaponry for her cyborg peacekeeping team Fireforce.

When Cory is accidentally empowered with the most advanced armor system yet, Morgan tries to renew her bond with her daughter and train her to be a hero, a decision she may come to regret. Cory Kagami, a fan of Japanese tokusatsu action entertainment, has her own ideas about what it means to be a hero.

© & ℗ 2021 Graphic Audio, LLC. All rights reserved.

Like I said last month, Tangent Knights is my attempt to do for Japanese tokusatsu superheroes (e.g. Kamen Rider, Super Sentai/Power Rangers, and Ultraman) what I did for Western-style comic-book superheroes in Only Superhuman, capturing the colorful, fanciful fun and adventure while grounding it in plausible science and characterizations. Unlike Only Superhuman, it’s aimed at a general audience, age 13-up. I’ve had enormous fun writing it, and the folks at GraphicAudio have been great to work with.

And there’s plenty more to come! I’m currently in the middle of writing a huge, epic action sequence for Book 3, which is also the scene where the deep, shocking secret underlying all the events of the series so far is finally revealed. And I’m still only in the first half of the book!

I’ll have more to say about the creative process behind Tangent Knights later, but for now I’ll give folks a chance to hear Caprice of Fate for themselves. At only $4.99 during this introductory period, it’s a great time to get in on the ground floor!

Two million words!

It’s time to do another one of my overview posts of the word count of my published works, since it’s been nearly three years since the last one and I’ve gained a significant number of original published works in the interim. Plus, as you can tell from the title, I’ve just achieved another milestone! With the recent release of my second Star Trek Adventures game campaign The Gravity of the Crime, I have now surpassed 2 million words of paid, published fiction!

The list below includes all my paid fiction that has been published as of February 2019, plus two upcoming releases that have already been copyedited so that I have final word counts, namely Crimes of the Hub and Star Trek: The Original Series — The Captain’s Oath. It excludes the sold stories “The Melody Lingers” (Galaxy’s Edge magazine) and “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” (the Footprints in the Stars anthology) because they haven’t been copyedited yet, but they should be around 4400 and 5000 words, respectively. There’s another story for which I’m currently waiting for a contract and copyedits, so I may update this list once that or the others come together. I’ve left out the unpaid essays I’ve contributed to various sites, since it’s hard to keep track of them all, and I do so much unsolicited blathering online as it is.

ORIGINAL FICTION

Default/”Only Superhuman” universe:

Novels:

• Only Superhuman: 118,000 words

Stories:

• “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide” (revised): 12,100
• “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele”: 9400
• “The Weight of Silence”: 7600
•  “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing”: 8900
•  “Murder on the Cislunar Railroad”: 8200
• “Twilight’s Captives”: 10500
• “Aspiring to Be Angels”: 7900

Total story count: 64,600 words

Additional material:

• Among the Wild Cybers Historical Overview, Glossary, and Afterword: 6500

Total default universe: 189,100 words

Hub universe:

• “The Hub of the Matter”: 9300
•  “Home is Where the Hub Is”: 9800
•  “Make Hub, Not War”: 9800
•  Hub Space: Tales from the Greater Galaxy: 33,300 (preceding stories + 4400 words new material)
• “Hubpoint of No Return”: 12,400
• “…And He Built a Crooked Hub”: 12,500
• “Hubstitute Creatures”: 14,200
• Crimes of the Hub: 45,600 (preceding stories + 6500 words new material)

Total: 78,900 words

Other:

•  “No Dominion”: 7900
• “Abductive Reasoning”: 4100

Total: 12,000 words

Total original fiction count:  280,000 words

MARVEL FICTION

• X-Men: Watchers on the Walls: 83,500
• Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder: 71,000

Total Marvel novel count: 154,500 words

STAR TREK FICTION

Novels:

• Ex Machina: 110,000
• Orion’s Hounds: 105,000
• The Buried Age: 132,000
• Places of Exile: 55,000
• Greater Than the Sum: 78,500
• Over a Torrent Sea: 89,000
•  Watching the Clock: 125,000
• Forgotten History: 85,500
• A Choice of Futures: 81,000
• Tower of Babel: 84,000
• Uncertain Logic: 109,000
• Live by the Code: 106,000
• The Face of the Unknown: 95,000
• Patterns of Interference: 85,500
• The Captain’s Oath: 106,000

Total ST novel count: 1,446,500 words

Novellas:

• Aftermath: 26,000
• Mere Anarchy: The Darkness Drops Again: 28,900
• Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within: 25,400
• The Collectors: 35,400
• Time Lock: 26,500
• Shield of the Gods: 28,700

Total: 170,900

Novelettes:

• “…Lov’d I Not Honor More “: 12,000
• “Brief Candle”: 9800
• “As Others See Us”: 9100
• “Friends With the Sparrows”: 10,300
• “Empathy”: 11,000

Total: 52,200

Total ST short fiction count: 223,100 words

Star Trek Adventures RPG campaigns:

• “Call Back Yesterday”: 8200
• “The Gravity of the Crime”: 10,500

Total ST RPG count: 18,700

Total ST fiction count: 1,688,300 words

STAR TREK MAGAZINE ARTICLES

•  “Points of Contention”: 1040
•  “Catsuits are Irrelevant”: 1250
• “Top 10 Villains #8: Shinzon”: 820
• “Almost a Completely New Enterprise”: 800
• “The Remaking of Star Trek“: 1350
• “Vulcan Special: T’Pau”: 910
• “The Ultimate Guide: Voyager Season 3″: 1170 (not counting episode guide)
• “Star Trek 45s #11: Concerning Flight”: 1000

Total article count: about 8350 words

All told:

•  Novels: 1,719,000 words
• Short fiction: 385,100 words
• RPG campaigns: 18,700 words
• Nonfiction: 8350 words

Total fiction: 2,122,800 words

Total overall: 2,131,150 words

 

(And just a reminder — if you enjoy any of my books, please post reviews of them on Amazon or other sites where books are sold. The more reviews they have, the more notice they can attract.)

Kind of a good week writing-wise…

In the past few days, I’ve gotten two tentative invitations for new writing projects, though one is much more tentative than the other.  I hope they both come to fruition, though.  At least, it’s a good sign that I’ve gotten approached twice this early in the year.

Also, today I finally got paid in full for my latest Star Trek Magazine article (well, latest published, but second-latest written), after the first check got lost in the mail.

Meanwhile, my progress on the spec novel has had a bit of a setback, but in a way that’s progress in itself.  I realized that just trying to keep as much as possible from the old version of the story wasn’t working; there was too much infodump and lecturing and not enough characterization or emotion to make it work, and at the same time I wasn’t making good enough use of the setting and situation at this part of the novel.  I realized there were some things I could do to address both problems at once, so I have to do some major rewriting of this portion and replace a lot of the recycled material with new content.  It entails partly reversing a decision I made before to reduce the number of distinct alien races I used in the story, because the old version was getting too cluttered and unfocused.  So I was initially skeptical of the thought that including another alien race (indeed, one pretty much recycled from some of my old unsold fiction) might be the way to go here.  But it’s okay, because I’ve solved the main clutter/focus problem (by having the central arc of the back half of the novel grow out of an established character and species whose motivations tie into another significant piece of worldbuilding in the novel, rather than tossing in a different antagonist and species that have no connection to any of that), and because I can use this alien race in place of another one that I was planning to use anyway in the final stage of the story (and was on the fence about using at all), so it gives the story more cohesiveness if I set them up here.  Moreover, it lets me showcase the setting more, making it come alive as more than just a backdrop.  So I think that this time it will serve the story integrally rather than sending me off on a tangent like before.  At least, I hope it will.

If nothing else, at least I finally feel my imagination is fully engaged with this project; the ideas are flowing more quickly now and I’m recognizing both problems and solutions that I wasn’t seeing before.

How many words? (UPDATED)

Today in a thread on the TrekBBS, someone asked my colleague David Mack whether his published word count to date had topped one million words.  That got me wondering how many words I’ve gotten published (i.e. stuff I’ve been paid for).   It might also just be useful for my future reference to have a list of all my word counts.  So here goes:

ORIGINAL FICTION

• “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide”: 12,000 words
• “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele”: 9400
• “The Hub of the Matter”: 9300
• “The Weight of Silence”: 7600
• “No Dominion” (upcoming): 7900
• “Home is Where the Hub Is” (upcoming): 9800

Total original fiction count: 56,000 words

MARVEL NOVELS

• X-Men: Watchers on the Walls: 83,500
• Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder:  71,000

Total Marvel novel count: 154,500 words

STAR TREK NOVELS

• Ex Machina: 110,000
• Orion’s Hounds: 105,000
• The Buried Age: 132,000
• Places of Exile: 55,000
• Greater Than the Sum: 78,500
• Over a Torrent Sea: 89,000
• Seek a Newer World (sold but unpublished): 82,000

Total ST novel count: 651,500 words

STAR TREK SHORT FICTION

• “Aftermath”: 26,000
• “…Lov’d I Not Honor More “: 12,000
• “Brief Candle”: 9800
• “As Others See Us”: 9100
• Mere Anarchy: “The Darkness Drops Again”: 28,900
• “Friends With the Sparrows”: 10,300
• “Empathy”: 11,000

Total ST short fiction count: 107,100 words

STAR TREK MAGAZINE ARTICLES

• “Points of Contention”: 1040
• “Catsuits are Irrelevant”: 1250
• “Top 10 Villains #8: Shinzon”: 820
• “Almost a Completely New Enterprise”: 800
• “The Remaking of Star Trek“: 1350

Total article count: 5260 words

All told:

• Novels: 806,000 words (724,000 to date)
• Short fiction: 163,100 words (145,400 to date)

Total fiction: 969,100 words (869,400 to date)

Add in nonfiction and the total goes to 974,360 words sold,  874,660 published to date.  Include everything but Seek a Newer World and I’ll have at least 892,360 words in print by the end of the year, probably more.

So I’m within 110,000 words of my million-word mark.  As it happens, I’m aiming for 100K with my Star Trek DTI novel, and I have stories on the market that could add another 12K if they sell.  So there’s a very good chance that DTI could put me over the top.

EDITED TO ADD: What about breakdowns by word count?  It comes out to 9 novels (over 40,000 words), 2 novellas (over 17,500 wds), 11 novelettes (over 7,500 words), and 0 short stories.  I guess “The Weight of Silence” is right on the borderline, though; the magazine it appears in, Alternative Coordinates, technically has a cutoff of 7,500 words, but I guess it’s not absolutely rigid.  So TWoS might end up being classed as a short story in bibliographies, if anyone considers it worth cataloguing.  The two stories I currently have on the market are both short stories, at 6900 words and 5200 words.  Another I’ve been shopping lately is 4200 words, but a recent rejection letter suggests that the opening could use some revisions which might add to that.  (I’ve been trying to produce shorter fiction lately because there are more markets for shorter works.)

Assorted bits

I had a job interview Tuesday.  It was for an institution I really want to work at, and I really need to be employed as soon as possible.  However, I don’t feel I aced the interview.  I don’t really have a lot of experience at conventional job-hunting.  Most of my past employment has either been in college, where it was fairly easy to get a student job, or as a writer, where you rarely have to sell yourself face-to-face.  So I’m not the most adept job-interviewee out there.  I just have to hope they saw something in me beyond that awkwardness.  Failing that, I’ve applied for various other openings at the same institution; hopefully I’ll get other interviews and manage to do a better job.

And it probably didn’t help that I came down with a cold the day before, though the symptoms didn’t really start to kick in until after the interview.  The night before the interview, I strove for relaxation and confidence and somehow managed to find a mental place that let me achieve more serenity and peace of mind than I’ve felt in quite a while.  So that probably helped me do better in the interview than I might have, but I just hope it was good enough.  And since then, I’ve just been feeling icky and sniffly and lethargic.

Not that it’s kept me from getting some work done.  I’ve managed to get another article-writing gig this past week.  It’s my first interview-based writing assignment.  Which means I’ve gotten to be on both ends of that process this week, since I was just interviewed myself for someone else’s article.  More info on both of these when the time is right.

My new STAR TREK MAGAZINE article is out!

I saw Star Trek Magazine #23 on the shelf at the grocery store today.  It’s a look back at Star Trek: The Motion Picture on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, and I’m glad I got to participate in a small way.  And small is the word.  My piece is a sidebar essay, and it’s found within the Jon Povill interview.  It’s a rumination on TMP’s legacy to the Trek franchise and what might have been if more of that legacy had been embraced.

You can subscribe to the magazine here, or buy the issue through Amazon.com, or check your local newsstand or comics shop.

New article in STAR TREK MAGAZINE #23

Over on the TrekBBS, Star Trek Magazine editor Paul Simpson has just announced the contents of the upcoming issue #23, including a new article by yours truly:

This issue we concentrate on the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with interviews with Walter Koenig, producer Jon Povill and story creator Alan Dean Foster. Christopher L. Bennett wonders how Star Trek would have continued had TMP been a success, while Scott Pearson compares and contrasts the first and fifth movies.

There’s an excerpt from S.D. Perry and Britta Dennison’s new novel Inception, featuring both Carol Marcus and Jim Kirk (plus one of his old flames) as well as reviews of the latest comics from IDW, as well as a detailed examination of the three different versions of the Star Trek movie…

And for fans of the movie (particularly those who would like to see what the engine room would have looked like, had different decisions been made) there’s the second and final supplement of extra material to complement the Art of The Movie book from Titan.

All this available technically from December 22nd in North America, and from New Year’s Eve in the UK…

Hey, this is my first blog post announcing a new project!  Plenty more to come in the future, I hope…

This is also the first time I’ve had articles in two consecutive ST Mag issues, another situation that I hope will repeat itself.

Here’s the link to the ST Mag site, though it’s still showing issue 22 for the moment (but then, I’m in that one too!):

http://titanmagazines.com/app?service=external/Product&sp=l640