Hello ,
This is going to be a busy week.
Steeds of Honor, Book Two of Marines, Luck and Oorah, comes out Friday, September 18.
Release weeks are strange. By the time a book finally reaches readers, the author has read it so many times that the words occasionally stop resembling English. You check the manuscript, description, cover, links, and everything else that might have found a creative new way to break.
Then you release it into the wild and hope you remembered all the important parts.
Like the book.
The Field Note - Why "Routine Mission" Is Fighting Talk
There are few phrases in the military more suspicious than "routine mission."
It usually means someone has reviewed the situation, made several assumptions, and decided nothing unusual is going to happen.
The enemy is rarely consulted.
Steeds of War begins with what should have been a straightforward response to a distress call. Captain Trevor Sbragia and his Recon Marines arrive expecting pirates.
Instead, the distress call came from a man who had been dead for days.
Then the Marines died too.
That was only the beginning.
Stories become interesting when the original plan collapses and the characters have to continue without enough information, enough resources, or any reasonable expectation of survival. Training gets them through the first few minutes. What they do after that tells you who they really are.
Murphy Was an Optimist
"Routine mission" is what you call an operation before the classified problems arrive.
Behind the Wire - Steeds of Honor
The AI Wars ended a thousand years ago.
Someone just started them again.
Captain Trevor Sbragia and his Recon Marines are wanted criminals, hunted across the Federation for crimes they didn't commit. Clearing their names will have to wait.
The AI named PH1 is free.
The ancient Gold AI is attacking human worlds, millions are dead, and no one knows how to stop it.
Trevor's only lead takes the Marines to the devastated remains of Earth, where the first artificial intelligence was created-and where humanity may have buried a weapon capable of stopping it.
Assuming the Marines survive long enough to find it.
Steeds of Honor will be available Friday. If you haven't started the series, Steeds of War is available now.
[VISIT THE MARINES, LUCK AND OORAH SERIES PAGE]
I'll send a short note Friday when Book Two is officially available. Thank you!
Reader Fire Mission
What is your favorite science-fiction story where a supposedly routine mission goes catastrophically wrong?
Hit reply and let me know. I'm always looking for another good book-and evidence that fictional officers are no better at predicting disasters than real ones.
Free Rations - Sheep
I'm continuing to clean up some of my older short stories and make them available to readers.
This week's free read is Sheep, another military science-fiction story recovered from the hard drive and returned to active duty. It has an updated cover and files, but is otherwise the same as before.
Elsewhere on the Hard Drive
Steeds of Courage, Book Three of Marines, Luck and Oorah, is back from the editor. I've adjudicated the changes and sent it back.
"Adjudicating" is a polite publishing term for staring at tracked edits and arguing with myself.
I'm also dusting off Last Stand of the Werewolves, a military science-fiction short story I wrote eons ago. It fits into the universe of When Heaven Gets Full and may eventually appear in one of the CKP Military SF anthologies. Nothing is carved in stone yet, so stay tuned.
Apparently one anthology project wasn't enough, because I'm also working on another short story called Freya's Warcats for the new Four Horsemen 2.0 universe.
On the fantasy side, I'm finishing my draft edits on The Black Dragon, Book Three of The Dragon Guard.
And because my hard drive has apparently become an archaeological site, I'm cleaning up several more older short stories for possible release. Some have held up surprisingly well.
Others appear to have been written without adequate adult supervision.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.
Until next Tuesday, keep your powder dry and your batteries charged.
-Bill
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