Getting to Know You--Again!

In the windup to the release of Mind Over Ship, and the subsidiary afterlife of Counting Heads, I have been all too forgetful of my other child, the collection of stories Getting To Know You, which comes out from del Rey on December 30. Others have not, including the preeminent SF writer, reviewer, and encyclopedia editor, John Clute. He published a review of GTKY in yesterday's Sci-Fi Weekly that blows me away. He actually makes me sound like someone who knows what he's doing (when the fact is I have to read reviews to discover that). Anyway, it's humbling. Check it out.

Counting Heads in Romania

I am excited to see this come out, the Romanian edition of my first novel. I can't speak a word of Romanian, but I'm confident that this is a good translation because the translators, Cristina and Stefan Guidoveanu, sent me lists of questions to clarify terms and ideas. I usually inform foreign publishers that I'm available for such inquiries, but the Guidoveanus are the first to take me up on it.

Second Starred Review for MOS

The current issue of Publisher's Weekly has a starred review for Mind Over Ship. (If you go there to read it, scroll halfway down the page to the SF/Fantasy/Horror section.) Since my first published stories, I have tried to take the moderating attitude of not getting too excited over good reviews or too bummed over bad ones. This review is very good, but what pleases me most in it is the mention of my--ahem--moments of "perfect prose." Hell yes! I labor long polishing those sentences and paragraphs. It's probably the most fun part of the process for me.

The review also makes this observation: "While newcomers might wish for a short prologue or a glossary, those omissions don't significantly detract." It's a relief to hear this from a reviewer, but I'm still anxious to provide some kind of synopsis of Counting Heads here and elsewhere (see the previous posting to this blog). So, if you've read CH and would like to take a stab at writing a summary, please do so. Email it to me. Don't make me write one myself, please, because my head is so full of early drafts, revisions, deleted scenes, alternate scenes, and abandoned threads and characters, that I have a hard time remembering how the final book came out. No joke.

Can you assist?

In January 2009, when Mind Over Ship is released, more than three years will have passed since the release of Counting Heads. That's a long time to go between two installments of a series, and I expect that even careful readers of CH might need a refresher in order to better enjoy the sequel. I didn't provide a thumbnail recap of CH in MOS, but now I'm thinking I need one. Problem is, I just don't seem to be able to write one. I always have the hardest time doing synopses of my own work. I'm just hopeless at it, really. So, I am making an appeal to anyone who wants to write one for me. If you'd like to give it a shot, try to limit it to about 500 to 1000 words, and don't worry about spoilers. It'll be recommended for people who have already read CH, so spoilers won't matter. Cover all the important characters and events. Email it to me as an attached text file, I'll put the best couple of them up here and on my web site with your attribution.

COUNTING HEADS to be an audiobook

Recorded Books will be coming out with a slew of SF titles in the next two years, and I'm pleased to announce that Counting Heads will be one of them. As this is my first audiobook, I'm thrilled.

First Review

And a good one it is. The current issue of Kirkus has a starred review of my upcoming novel. Unfortunately, it's behind a subscription wall, so most of you probably won't be able to read it. Which is probably for the better because it contains spoilers. So don't read it. Anyway, January 20, 2009, is a doubly auspicious date; not only will my book be released on that day, but a new president of the United States will be inaugurated. It's still unknown who that will be, but one thing we know for sure, it won't be Bush.

A visit to NORAD

On the Thursday of the Denvention con, I went on a day trip to the old NORAD command facility in Cheyenne Mountain with about 20 other SF writers. In the official photo above we are standing in front of the iconic entry tunnel. The trip was the inspiration of author Jeff Carlson, who was interested in the site as a setting for scenes in an upcoming novel.

Jeff has the names of those in the photo here as well as a link to a larger version. And here's a story about the visit by Annalee Newitz in the SF ezine Io9. Another visitor, author John Joseph Adams, has another story about the trip for SCI FI.com. Lucky me no havta write anything.

MOS cover art

I attended the Tor Rollout Panel at Devention last week and got my first glance at the cover art for my second novel, Mind Over Ship. I am very pleased, and I think it's my best cover yet. It's from noted British illustrator Paul Youll, and it depicts the space station, Trailing Earth, and an Oship under construction. It gives an impression of the vast scale of the space yards. It's a beaut!

Launch Pad

This week I'm attending Launch Pad, an amazing workshop for science fiction writers and others involved in bringing astronomy to the public. It's the brainchild of astronomer and SF writer Mike Brotherton and is funded by NASA. Through lectures and labs, we are getting a refresher course in Astronomy (or in my case, my first formal class).

I won't go into greater detail because at least one of the attendees, Mary Robinette Kowal, is doing a great job blogging the experience. In her photo above, the discerning reader can see my shoulders and balding head behind author Nancy Kress and next to David Levine. Jerry Oltien, who is an author and one of our instructors is in the green Hawaiian-print shirt. We are busy exploring Kirchhoff's second law (A low-density gas excited to emit light will do so at specific wavelengths and thus produce an emission spectrum) and comparing our laboratory observations with a spectrometry chart.

Tonight we go to the Wyoming Infrared Observatory to check out the big telescope there.

Next week I continue on to Denver (along with most of the workshop attendees) for Worldcon.

MOS release date

Tor sent me the copyedited manuscript of Mind Over Ship, and I've spent the last two weeks working on it. It's my last chance to fix problems and do a bit of polishing.

I received word from Tor that MOS will be released January 20, 2009, less than nine months from now.