Friday Ketchup

We have still not settled down into what I like to call "normality" here at the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory.  We keep trying, but it's an uphill climb.

We've been entertaining earnest practitioners of heating installations, which has been about as much fun as you might expect.  I've been making phone calls, which isn't even that much fun, and doing not as much writing as needs to happen, if we opt to replace the 25-year-old boiler, rather than just repair it.

In and among all that, and in place of the three-week cruise that is certainly in order, given It All, Steve and I went to see Captain Marvel  at the 12:30 show on Wednesday.  There were all of four of us in the theater, and us two, at least, had a good time.

While we were out and about, we arranged for David Mattingly's cover art for Accepting the Lance to be framed*.  That should be home and ready to be hung in the next couple weeks. (*David has a limited number of this art available, suitable for framing.  If you'd like one for your wall, write to him at david at davidmattingly dot com.)

I don't know how many here have been following the Saga of Moose, my new Linux desktop.  Moose was ordered in in November, and I was going to get him on line just as soon as  . . .Lance was done, but. . .Life Happened in Big Packing Case Lots.  Which meant that I didn't get back to Project Moose until a couple weeks ago, and started transferring all the files (so many files!) in Victor F. (the Windows 7 machine, whose days are surely numbered) to Dropbox.  Once that was done, I uncoupled Victor F., wired up Moose, plugged 'er in and!

Nothing happened.  The power switch was rock hard.  I plugged it into another outlet -- same non-result.  I called System76, in Colorado, on the day of the Epic Snowstorm, and left a message, expecting a call-back sometime around April.  In this,  I was proved a pessimist; my call-back came in less than an hour, and the verdict was -- Moose had to go back to Colorado for examination and repair.

Just yesterday, I got a note from System76 that Moose is on his way back home; the power cable was the culprit.  He'll arrive on Tuesday, it says here, and Project Moose can recommence.

In the meantime, we have the weekend theoretically free, so I'm bending my best efforts to finishing the (yes, still) untitled story, so we can get that published, and I can move on to the book that's due in September (which also doesn't have a title.  Coincidence?  Probably not.).

So, that, I think, catches us all up.

Oh.  Here, have a picture of Victor F. and Moose.  Victor is on the left.

Shameless Self-Promotion

All righty, then.

You all of course know that the eArc of Liaden Universe® Constellation Number 4 is now available directly from Baen books, here.  This Constellation includes previously published short works Street Cred, Due Diligence, Friend of a Friend, Cutting Corners, Block Party, Degrees of Separation, Excerpts from Two Lives, and Revolutionists -- together again for the first time!  The tradepaper and ebook editions of Constellation 4 will ship on -- appropriately enough -- June 4.

Also!  On March 26 -- Good Ghod, that's this coming Tuesday! -- the mass market edition of Neogenesis, the twenty-first novel of the Liaden Universe® created by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, will hit the shelves at your favorite bookstore.    Neogenesis is the direct sequel to The Gathering Edge and! the immediate prequel to Accepting the Lance.

NOTE:  Uncle Hugo's SF Bookstore in Minneapolis will be taking pre-orders for signed copies of Constellation 4 and Accepting the Lance.  Pre-orders for ...Lance will open after Labor Day.  We do not have a firm date for the opening of pre-orders for Constellation 4, but realsoonnow is a good guess, so keep an eye on the catalog, here.

The other things you need to know, in re Liaden publications are!

*"Dark Secrets," a brand-new Liaden short story, will be published in the anthology Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers in September.

*Anniversary edition of the second Liaden Universe® novel, Conflict of Honors, will be published in November as a mass market paperback.

*A short story in support of Accepting the Lance will be published to Baen.com in November

*Accepting the Lance will be published in hardcover and ebook editions on December 3*

We also have five novels still under contract.  One of those novels is the book due in September, detailing the Further Adventures of the Dutiful Passage, which are happening concurrently with the action in Accepting the Lance**; another is the third Jethri Gobelyn novel, direct sequel to Trade Secret.  No, we have no idea what-or-who the other three novels will be about.  They will be Liaden Universe® novels, because the contract says so.

Here ends Shameless Self-Promotion.

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*Do not, for the love of ghu, ask me ANYthing about an eArc.

**So concurrently, in fact, that we tried to write both books at the same time.  Which worked about as well as you might imagine.