A dead ship returns with a live crew.
Captain Ishmael Wang finally gets the Chernyakova out of the yard and embarks on a voyage into the Toe-Holds where the Confederated Planets Joint Committee on Trade has no authority. Where the law is whatever you say it is as long as you can enforce it.
Where he learns that some will do anything to hide their secrets and everybody has a secret.
An old friend. A new course.
A deadly ship with a secret cargo.
Ishmael Wang returns to Port Newmar but ghosts from his past have followed him.
His old shipmate, Phillip Carstairs, offers him the opportunity to track down the man who killed his lover. The catch?
He must take command of the Chernyakova, a ship that still stinks of death and haunts Ishmael’s nightmares. Together, Phillip and Ismael begin a journey into unknown reaches of the Deep Dark to bring back the man who killed Greta.
But what will Ishmael do if he finds him?
The last couple of weeks have been rough. I haven’t done my morning walk as regularly as I’d like. I haven’t got as much progress on any of the projects as I wanted. Worst – or best, depending on your point of view – I got smacked by a clue-by-four at a conference I attended early last week.
Status first…
By Darkness Forged is still not available in paper. I’m still working through the process.
On the upside, Cape Grace is shaping up. It’s slow. There are too many moving parts in my current manuscript. I’m trying to sort and shuffle, patch and fill. It takes time and attention I’m having trouble marshaling.
Also, I signed with Podium to produce the Smugglers Tales in audio. The casting director was at the Smarter Artists Summit and I put a pitch in for a woman’s voice. She was open to the idea. I doubled down with the author liaison afterwards. I’ll let you know when they tell me release dates.
Speaking of audio, ICYMI By Darkness Forged is scheduled for an April 2 release on Audible.
The clue-by-four …
“You are not your audience.”
Sigh. Yeah. Intellectually, I know that it’s madness to generalize to a population based on personal biases. Apparently, that knowledge never informed my actual practice. Luckily, it’s not too late to change.
If you noticed, my mailing link widget at the top right is gone. That’s because I’ve learned that I’m making a couple of serious errors with the processing of addresses and the way I’m handling that function. I learned about it from Tammi Labrecque, Newsletter Ninja, at the Summit
It was one of those lightning striking moments and I’m still sizzling a little. The upshot is that I’m resetting my list and migrating to a new platform. I’ll be emailing a monthly newsletter on the 15th to complement this first-of-the-month post. It’ll have a status report update, probably a book recommendation, and maybe a question for you as I try to sort through what else I might do with it.
While this is all happening, I’ve enabled the new sign-up on the side bar. You can sign up right now even if you already signed up at the old service. This will be better.
[ETA: If you’re already signed up, that box should disappear and you’ll never have to see it again. In theory.]
And if that’s not enough …
I’m re-examining my policy on “zero advertising.” Discovering that I’m completely 180-degrees out of sync with reality on newsletters has me examining this other aspect of the business. None of you are likely to notice, but don’t be surprised if you run across an ad featuring one of my books sometime in the next year.
Other than that? I’m still shooting to write every day. I’ve missed six days this month because – apparently – the habit has not been sufficiently set to survive the rigors of travel. My total word count for the year is only a bit over 20k, but I expect that will expand when I get done fighting with Cape Grace and start a new book that has fewer constraints on where it can go.
That’s it for now. Safe voyage!