So the last few weeks have been…. really odd.

We lost Eric Flint on July 17, which was a rude shock to us all. He’d just called the office the week before to talk (Eric was one of the few authors who regularly called the office) and he’d been looking forward to going home and finishing his latest book. It’s strange. I don’t feel like he’s gone and yet when I think about something I want to ask him it really hammers home that I can’t.

Timothy Zahn made me want to write science fiction. Eric Flint showed me how.

It took almost four weeks to write that. Still hurts.

The earlier this week I received word that the Kin Wars are being translated into German, which is exciting. I knew it was going to happen eventually as CKPI (Chris Kennedy Publishing International) had added them to the queue awhile back, but I didn’t know when it would happen. One thing I’m working on still is my patience.

Once I have the preorder links I’ll be sharing them. Science fiction generally does very well in Germany and it’s a bit of an untapped market, so we shall see how this goes. After Germany, I think the series is being translated into both Spanish and French. If I could get a translator, I’d do Czech as well (the Czechs LOVE science fiction).

Received my Dragoncon schedule (and it’s light, so no worries about overworking myself this year) and am confirmed as a guest for Fencon. After that it’s Factorycon, and then I’m done with conventions until March. January has CHICKS IN TANK TOPS rolling out, and I’ll be doing some signings potentially in Florida, as well as North Carolina and Virginia.

I have a ton of stuff due soon, and I’m probably going to miss a deadline or two. Still, signed a contract for the next Black Tide Rising anthology, UNITED WE STAND. It’s going to continue the story of Sister Mary and the girls of St. Dominic’s Preparatory School for Girls and is tentatively titled Skirts & Shamblers (because I had the old board game Chutes & Ladders in my head and needed to have something like that as the title). Plus there are so many secret squirrel projects right now that, if not for the Whiteboard of Doom, I’d probably go mad trying to remember all the current works-in-progress.

Yes, I have a spreadsheet on the computer. It’s easier to glance up at the whiteboard than it is to keep that particular excel sheet open on the desktop.

Don’t forget, preorders for CHICKS IN TANK TOPS are live over at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.