My interview with Ryan Pelter on his The Prolific Writer podcast is now live!
http://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/126482/49562639

I just did my first interview for a podcast with Ryan Pelton’s Prolific Writer’s Podcast. It should be live in a couple weeks. Ryan did a great job with the interview, he’s a real professional.

I will be running a promotional giveaway for the e-book of Duty, Honor, Planet starting Sunday February 26 and running for five days.

Recon:  A War to the Knife is available for sale on Amazon!

That’s the term in novel writing when you finish your draft of the book you’re working on and are ready to start editing.
I was words complete last night on my latest, Recon: A War to the Knife and usually that makes me feel very satisfied. Kind of a combination of finishing a big project and taking the biggest dump ever.
I finished this one faster than any of my others, at around 2.5 months.
This time, though, all I could think about in the gaps between bursts of writing was the plot for the next book and trying to get it set up so I could start writing it as quickly as possible.
It kind of takes some of the fun out of writing when you have to treat it as a job and it’s certainly not the romantic vision of it that I had when I was in my 20s. I don’t know if that’s how the traditionally published authors with big contracts look at it, but as an indie author, that’s how you have to look at it if you want to make money.
But it’s still getting paid (and counting since I released Glory Boy in December, better paid than I ever have been before for any job) for doing something I love to do, so I cant really complain. If you’d told me 20 years ago, back when I had a literary agent and was collecting rejections from every major publisher, that tens of thousands of people would be reading books that I wrote, I would have laughed at the idea.

It does feel good to have a bit of success in the game after all this time, even if it may be only a fleeting moment.
We’ll see. Gotta’ get back to work.

http://sf-books.com/2017/02/04/rick-partlow-interview/

I officially started writing my new novel tonight, set in the Birthright universe during the War with the Tahni. It’s tentatively titled “A War to the Knife,” though that might change.
I had to make a choice about what to write next after Glory Boy, and it was a hard one to make. Glory Boy was a novel I’d first envisioned in the late 80s, so that one was a no-brainer, but after that, for the first time in 5 years, I was entertaining the idea of creating a different universe besides the Duty, Honor, Planet timeline and the Birthright timeline. I’ve put a LOT of thought, time and effort into fleshing out both of those universes, and the idea of trying to come up with yet another was a bit daunting. In the end, I decided to hold off on doing that for a bit, both to put a bit more time and thought into it and also because I felt like there were more stories to tell in the Birthright timeline.
One of them, a very compelling one, I thought, was the Battle for Demeter. I’d first referenced it in Enemy of My Enemy, then explored the very beginning of it in Glory Boy, but there was a whole novel’s worth of story to be told there and I had to find someone’s eyes to tell it through. That character is Randall Munroe, a young Force Recon Marine who lands with the Glory Boys in their initial, ill-fated attempt to retake the colony, and is stranded there when most of his platoon is mowed down in an ambush and he’s left for dead.
Randall Munroe has a colorful history before Demeter and I hope he’ll be an intriguing voice with which to tell this story.

So I’m outlining the plot for my next book, which is going to take place in the Birthright universe during the War with the Tahni.  It’s going to be the story of a Marine who’s stranded on Demeter during the Tahni occupation.  Those of you who’ve read Enemy of My Enemy and especially Glory Boy know what happened during that occupation, and you’re going to see quite a few familiar faces in this book.

Glory Boy, my latest book, is now available to buy on Amazon for Kindle or as a trade paperback.

I just passed 90,000 words in my work in progress, Glory Boy. The way the plot is progressing, I expect it to take about another 20,000 words to wrap up.
This novel is the story of the wartime experiences of Caleb Mitchell, the main character in the Birthright trilogy, so one might naturally assume that I’m going to market it as a prequel to Birthright.
But I’m not, at least not at first. As it is, it’s a fine standalone military science fiction novel and I’m of the opinion that it will probably sell better if I market it that way than if I connect it to an existing trilogy.
So I am going to start out by selling this as a standalone and then maybe after few months, I’ll add something to the blurb that mentions the Birthright trilogy.
Just wanted to let everyone who follows my work regularly know what’s going on with Glory Boy.