I’ve finished approving the print version of Northwest Passage through Createspace and it should be available on Amazon shortly.

I’ve also begun writing the third book in the Birthright series, tentatively titled “Enemy of my Enemy.”

About 3200 copies of Birthright were given away as ebooks for Kindle between Monday and Friday.  A pretty good showing.  Better than the first time I tried a promotion for Duty, Honor, Planet.  We’ll see how it effects sales for the new book.  I’d be satisfied with just a few reviews.

I neglected to mention that Birthright is free to download on Amazon for Kindle through this Friday, Sep 25!

I just uploaded Northwest Passage to Amazon for Kindle.  It should be available in a few hours.  When it is, I’ll post a link.

I am also going to run a 5 day giveaway of Birthright starting this coming Monday.  Tell your friends!  Tell your enemies!  Tell the press!

Northwest Passage is done, finished.  All that’s left is proof-editing and that shouldn’t take more than a few days.

It’s a bit shorter than the books in my Duty, Honor, Planet series:  this one is only 103,000 words compared to Honor Bound which was 180,000, so I almost felt like cheating when I wrapped it up, but it was a natural ending spot.

Now a confession.  I SWORE to myself I wouldn’t do this, but…I left things open for another sequel.  I couldn’t help it, the book just wouldn’t let me end it any other way.

Oh well, that can wait for a while.  At least now I can think about writing something else while I copy-edit this one.

Nearly 95,000 words into Northwest Passage now and I know exactly what I want to happen.  Might go a bit over a hundred thousand words, but not by much.

If anyone is actually reading this blog, you may be wondering why it’s taken me so long to finish Northwest Passage.  Well, the honest answer is that I have been very distracted by a lot of things in life this last year.  My daughter is getting to that point in her interest in soccer as a sport that we are spending a lot of time and money getting her to a competitive league that will give her a chance in a couple years to be scouted by college coaches.  My son has enlisted in the National Guard, attended Basic Training and AIT, graduated High School and is about to start college (IF we can get the brilliant strategists in the college financial office and the efficient public servants in the National Guard to get on the same page…pardon me, had to wipe a bit of sarcasm off my chin).

At the same time, there’ve been some personal issues that have hit our family—my wife’s father has been in ill health and various financial issues that are too mundane and boring to detail have dragged me away from the keyboard.

Now, finally, I am over 80,000 words into Northwest Passage, and I BELIEVE I am less than 20,000 words away from being finished.  I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I am making a commitment to finishing this thing within the next few weeks.

Sorry it took so long.

If you are like me and have a list of writers that you consider greats in the field of science fiction and fantasy, I would urge you to not follow their Facebook page.  I just looked up one SF writer who I had considered very erudite, and funny while also being able to string together some quite gripping action sequences.  He’s a liberal, but a lot of old-school sf writers from the 60s and 70s are, but he’s a raging, raving rabble-rouser that doesn’t just believe conservatives are wrong or misguided or even ignorant…they’re all EVIL.  It’s interesting how people of his philosophy are quick to say that right and wrong is relative and determined by society, until they come across someone who believes differently from them politically…THEN that person should be killed or thrown in jail.

I have a lot less respect for this writer as a man and a human being than I had a few minutes ago…

Sad news today about the murder of four US Marines in Chatanooga, TN by a jihadist Kuwaiti immigrant.  It’s still early, but the most likely scenario is another impressionable Muslim youth radicalized by ISIS propaganda.

This is, unfortunately, what happens when there’s a war being fought but only one side is actually fighting it.