Sorry for being gone so long. It’s been busy around here.
First off, I finished the first draft of KL-Furious. That’s the book for Oct ’12. I’ll spend the summer doing my best to spot the nits, and having several first readers do the same. Hard as it may seem to some of you eagle eyed readers, we do do our best to clean up the manuscript.
Daring will be out Oct ’11 and I should be seeing the galley proofs any time now. I’ll publish the first couple of chapters here in September.
Before the 4th of July I will do my best to publish three more e-books, and clear up the mobi option at smashword. More on that later.
I got my first sales statement from Japan. They assumed sales of 4,000, printed 16,000 and sold 9,000 by the first quarter of this year. Nice.
I’ll be on programming at the WesterCon in San Jose, CA for 4th of July.
I’ll be at the WorldCon in Reno, but not on programming. Look for to attend panels with John Campbell (Henry) Kris Ruschor Ginjer Buchanan on them. Or at the bar the pros are hanging out at.
[...] Longknife books: * Furious (2012) Kris Longknife Blog, "What’s Happening", June 19, 2011 22h33, Mike Shepherd Would you like to submit a similar [...]
Mike, I’ve never done this sort of thing( always a bad omen ah?). I don’t read much, I’m middle aged, yes, male, family man, prior Navy Reserve SeaBee, I guess not real prior service, or real Navy. Some where I stumbled on the label cyber-punk as a description for a great deal of the science fiction films and scant few books I read. No offense, but your art I guess fits this also.
Point 1: I have read all the prior Kris Longknife books and enjoyed them; just started reading Daring. In the earlier works more is made of Kris’ internal dialog balancing the Princess jig and junior officer role, and a Longknife! I found this very human internal conflict a mainstay of the earlier work. I’m likely a simpleton, but I found in her character something I think is universal, but fits well with the citizen solder. Sad to say every day I’m presented with a situation at work or home where civilian folks promoted to authority make decrees as if proclaimed by their god, and I reflect on all that (likely BS) military training in enlisted personnel management… you gotta earn respect…blah, blah, blah.. use your resources, etc.
Point 2: Mike, through Kris’ voice you give a good glipse of that everyman (everyperson) internal conflict. In far way places she is forced to bit her tongue, find the phrase, the right nuance, or come back. I lke the fire and the intellect with the gun fire and combat strategy. Combat whether verbal or military takes some thinking, strategizing, and it is fun to see this character work through some of it. I believe should touch on some very serious internal conflicts, or not.
Thanks for making reading fun, cyberpunk or not.
Good work, Sir
Regards,
Dan
didn’t realize this was a blog, dah…feel free to edit this and the last out. I don’t want to dumb this down.
Dan
Hi, Dan,
I’m always glad to get feedback from a reader, and yours is very thoughtful. Yep, I had bosses that thought they were more infallible than the pope/bible (pick one) and I got to stand back in the cheap seats and watch them crash and burn time after time. It kind of slips into my fiction.
I also found myself in the hot seat more often than I care to remember, and, while I took the actions I had to, I never felt that there was no chance of a better idea and I was always open to that. Daring was the book where Kris had to show she’d grown up and I faced her with the toughest choice I could find in the whole galaxy. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I have only recently discovered the Longknife series on Audible.com, at this point I have downloaded and listened to all 9 books.
Being prior military and now in later life a techie I enjoy stores that bring the two together.
Doing a web search I am happy to see you do intend on continuing the series with a release for 2012 and 2013. I have really enjoyed these books and I consider it a must have to friends who share similar tastes. The choice of the narrator is key in my mind as there have been some very good books I just could not get into due to the narration. I must commend you on an all around job well done.
Hi Mike,
You have turned me into a big fan – I very much enjoy the series. I especially appreciate *SPOILER ALERT* that you finally moved Kris and Jack’s relationship forward. That was really causing me trouble being drawn out for that long with no change in the relationship – didn’t strike me as believable. Thank you for addressing it. It also strikes me that Kris has never had a boyfriend or had intimate male contact (unless she got experience during her alcohol days) because she has had no real male contact since the series began. Either way I hope those details get addressed (pastorally or otherwise) as their relationship evolves.
My only other quibble in an otherwise fantastic series has to do with scale and scope. *SPOILER ALERT* It bugged me when you you have a populated planet of potentially millions of people able to be ‘captured’ by 400 marines. Similar things happen in a variety of places through the series. I am reminded of Desert Storm when the general didn’t want to take the army of thousands with support into a city of millions because he was worried about the army being engulfed – and that was just a city – not even a country let alone a planet.
I don’t know if you still look here as it’s been a while since the last entry but I figured I would post anyways. Thank you for writing such an enjoyable and diverting series of books and I look forward to Furious!
– Cortland
I just want to say that I really, really enjoy the Kris Longknife books, especially Defiant. I just finished daring, and it was good but I got Furious (ha, ha!) reading the negative review on Amazon. I thought the ending was fine, though I am wondering (reread the last chapter three ties!) what was the deal about charging poor Kris with “Crimes against Humanity?” I mean, the aliens shot first and they destroyed three battleships! What provocation would they consider adequate?
HI, Susie,
Some of those reviews bug me too. I keep hoping some of my fans will put in their two cents worth.
But I do realize that the ending of Daring has struck a lot of folks as not informative enough. I’ll be writing another short like Training Daze for this September/October called Welcome Home — Drop Dead. This will be told mainly from Grampa Trouble’s viewpoint and will tell of the internal debates around King Ray that led up to the meeting (Which Grampa Trouble was NOT invited to) and some of Trouble’s meetings with Ray et al afterward. This will fill in a lot of what you are wondering about. Of course, Furious will let Kris fill in a lot of it herself.
Hi, Mike!
Thanks for answering. I’ll write a good review for “Daring” and then write a review for “War of Honor” to say it is long and boring. I mean, who cares what the bad guys had for breakfast?
Looking for ward to Furious.
*Spoilers*
Your work is great.
I keep coming to the site expecting the next one to come out more quickly. The development of Nelly with the artifact is something I’m quite looking forward to enjoying; and all the other characters of your books are so enjoyable and believable that I find myself rereading the series multiple times.
I spend some time wondering where all the various alien artifacts and systems will come into play and I’m excited that they might be useful soon in the battles vs this new menace! The entire concept of wearing a computer was nothing I’d come across before your novels and I find the idea (surprise) wonderful. Now not only do I long for my touch-screen interface computer, but I dream about the nueral-interface one I can wear…and if she’ll be sassy too.
Don’t worry about the naysayers … people love to hate (if your work was different, you should wonder what they were saying behind your back and who is forcing them to be kind). Aside from some pretty odd grammatical issues I never find anything in your books to dislike (besides the Senior Peterwald[?] and company [the guy behind the software company makes my skin itch]); however, all of us out here will overlook such minor issues as you keep up the good work.
Thank you.
Hi, Chris,
I’m doing my best to see that those bothersome nits go away. For the last three or four books I’ve had a teacher as a beta reader and for the last 2 I’ve added a woman getting her Ph.D. in education to the first reading staff. They do a much better job of copy editing than I seem to have been getting from Ace. Copy editing seems to be a lost art. My wife bought a best seller and found a typo in the very first sentence. Wow. Anyway, Daring and Redoubtable should have been a lot cleaner.
As you can see from higher up the list, there are more books coming. I’ve republished my very first novel as an e-book and Ace is bringing back the Ray Longknife books as well as buying the 4th book they rejected 10 years ago. I’m also writing a Vicky Peterwald spin off series. If you thought the Peterwalds were bad at a distance, wait until you have to live in the palace. Or die there. Real skin itchy.
Ooh, a Vicky Peterwald novel. I’ll buy it. Was Emperor Henry Peterwald, or so I now call him, really going to have poor Kris tortured to death, or was that just a sick subordinate’s fantasy?
Hi, Susie,
That’s an interesting question . . . that I doubt we’ll ever get an honest answer to. Now that Kris has saved his life and added a planet to his empire, he’s given her his highest decoration, so what he’d do to her just now is different from what he would have done in, say, the first three or four books.
Now, in the future, when they cross paths, especially after we see how these three Vicky books go, all bets are off.
Well, not all bets, I think I know where the next three or four books are going, but you’ll just have to enjoy the stories and see where they go.
Ain’t writers mean.
Yes! :p
Hi Mike!
Thanks for the books so far, i really enjoy them! Hope you’ll keep on writing many more. And look forward to reading your re-published works as they come out.
Is there any chance that your e-based short stories will be put together into a paper-format at some point in time ? For some reason i really prefer a good old fashioned book in my hands when i read, instead of a kindle/ipad etc… even if i’m an IT-consultant
The only slightly negative thing i can come up with atm is that your books dont last long enough (i always read through them in a day), and the fact that i want more of them, and i want them now
Knowing that next books in the series are already written, but not published, makes me want to strangle your publisher
Hi Bjørn,
I’m glad you’re enjoying Kris’s adventures. I’m sorry, but right now, I don’t have any plans to bring the e-books out in print. Present business models require they be in trade paperback, you know, the paperbacks that are the size of hard backs, and cost $15.00. I don’t much like that pricing model, so until they can bring the size down to mass market paperback and $5-7 bucks, I’m sticking to e-books there.
I’m sorry the books are such quick reads for you. It takes me a bit longer to write the rough draft and produce a polished final.
. I am told that they make good second, third and ten reads, so you might consider re-reading them a few times while I’m sweating blood on the next book. 
.
hee hee
Did you say there were eBooks available about Kris? I just got a Kindle!
Susie, yes, there is an e-special Training Daze, that fills in the gap between Defiant and Resolute … and tells the story of Kris drafting Jack. Later this month there will be Welcome Home/ Go Away that tells the story of Kris’s return from Grampa Trouble and Gramma Ruth’s view point. These are only in e-format. All of Kris’s books can be had in e-format as well.
Okay, I got Training Daze and will be looking forward to Welcome
I have all the paperbacks already
Okay, Mike, I am going through the series again, my appetite whetted by Training Daze. I have a question: When they took Jris’ LAC apart, there was a fried circuit board. Kris remarks that it got her into trouble then out. This seems obscure to me.
*Kris’ LAC, I mean
Hi, Susie, I assume you mean in the beginning of Mutineer. The failure of the circuit board almost caused Kris to fry on reentry with her team. She had to take over flying the LAC and run the mission herself. In that respect, it got her into trouble, and almost dead. However, with Kris at the controls of her LAC, they couldn’t follow the mission profile as planned. That meant that Kris had to keep flying the craft and they didn’t fly over the drop zone and drop . . . right onto the mines waiting to blow them away when they did that. So the failed board got her out of that trouble.
Kris may have been bit too cryptic there.
Ooh, the Order of the Wounded Lion. Love it, I’m a big fan of Starship Troopers.