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Justice in an Age of Metal and Men

Why Novellas are the New Awesome

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GritAndGraceCoverNovellas are so cool these days. So awesome.

Before I started writing I had never heard of a novella. I had to look it up. They’re roughly 10k-15k words, so they’re around a fifth of a short novel. They aren’t short stories. Short stories are capped at around 5k. When I was first trying to publish stories, I found absolutely no outlets for novellas. Either they didn’t exist or they were so well hidden that I never found them.

Now they’re all the rage. Brian McClellan wrote piles of them for his Powder Mage series. Matt Wallace has some standalone novellas coming out on Tor soon. Kevin Hearne, Delilah Dawson, and Chuck Wendig are smashing three novellas together into and selling it in one delicious piece. And yeah, I have mine out now, too.

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Why Sci-fi: 5 Reasons I Love Reading, Watching, and Writing Science Fiction

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I love science fiction. All of it. I love watching it on movies or TV, reading it in books, and absorbing it as a fine paste through my pores every morning. It’s wonderful stuff, all shiny with glowy bits and scary with dark bits. Sci-fi is delicious on a bagel and 300% more nutritious than the average generic fiction substance.

The question is, then: why? The obvious answer is probably parasitic nanotechnology lodged in my brain stem forcing me to have opinions for no reason.

Parasitic nontech, however, demands that I find justification.

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The Hobby Schedule

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My schedule feels busy.

Gabe just being cool.

Unlike summer, winter has me working five whole days in a row pretty much every week. Insane, right? What’s more, I’ve been training for that half marathon. Running four times a week at three to five miles per run is taking up a pretty solid chunk of my time. It only grows from here until May.

Then there’s the boys’ schedules. Isaac is in tennis, getting better at it and enjoying it. Gabe is in a dance and tumble class, though he admits that the tumble half is really the better part. Twice a week I find myself sitting at the Rochester Athletic Club waiting for a class to finish. Often, I write during this time, but it’s a small piece of writing time and there are plenty of distractions.

Mondays and Wednesdays I write during my lunch break. Soon, Wednesdays will be consumed by the running schedule.

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My New Friend, BookBub

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Progress on the book continues. It has a title now. It is Justice in an Age of Metal and Men. My editor is tearing it apart, with promises of a nicely written book report at the end of the week. While I look forward to that I’m doing a little marketing research.

You see, people don’t just magically discover books as soon as they’re dropped into Amazon. People need to be told about new books. Usually.

So, the question is: How do people discover books?

In the process of my research I’ve discovered a new way to discover books, and I am quite happy with it.

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