It’s Cyber Monday and the fine folks at Barnes & Noble decided to offer mah book THREE for a mere $2.99, I assume for today only.  You can find it here, if you’ve got a Nook and are interested in checking it out for cheap!

Yay!

Just a quick post to let everybody know that for today, November 23 2014, you can get both my books THREE and MORNINGSIDE FALL for Kindle for $1.99 each!

Just  head on over to yon Amazon and you can pick up the first two books in the Duskwalker Cycle for less than a cup of very expensive coffee!

I started two lines of this post with “Just”!  That’s terrible!  I am also using a lot of exclamation points!  He exclaimed!

Anywho, if you’ve been thinking about buying those books and haven’t gotten around to it yet, now’s a fine time to get them and save yourself some of your hard-earned cash monies.  Alternately, if you HAVE already purchased them, but you’d like to buy some more copies just because you like me so much, please also feel free to do so.

Exclamation!

I’m very happy to announce that the new military science fiction anthology WAR STORIES is out, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak and featuring lots and lots of great authors, and also a story by me!

Here’s what the front of it looks like:

And here’s what it says on the back of the cover:

War is everywhere. Not only among the firefights, in the sweat dripping from heavy armor and the clenching grip on your weapon, but also wedging itself deep into families, infiltrating our love letters, hovering in the air above our heads. It’s in our dreams and our text messages. At times it roars with adrenaline, while at others it slips in silently so it can sit beside you until you forget it’s there.

Join Joe Haldeman, Linda Nagata, Karin Lowachee, Ken Liu, Jay Posey, and more as they take you on a tour of the battlefields, from those hurtling through space in spaceships and winding along trails deep in the jungle with bullets whizzing overhead, to the ones hiding behind calm smiles, waiting patiently to reveal itself in those quiet moments when we feel safest. War Stories brings us 23 stories of the impacts of war, showcasing the systems, combat, armor, and aftermath without condemnation or glorification.

Instead, War Stories reveals the truth.

War is what we are.

If that sounds like your thing, here are some handy links from which you may acquire these excellent tales:

Apex Publishing: Paperback here, eBook here

Amazon: Paperback or Kindle

Drivethrufiction.com: eBook

Yay, stories!

I have this theory about information. I won’t bore you with it, but suffice to say that with all the blogs and email and texts out there, I’m pretty sure the sheer mass of mostly useless information floating around will eventually warp space-time and then everyone throughout the entire history of the world will have access to my blargh.

Just in case I’m right, I’m leaving this here for my younger self. Because if literally everyone throughout history has access to my blargh, the most important thing to communicate is OBVIOUSLY all about me and not, you know, something like “Tell President Lincoln to skip the play” or “Encourage young Adolf to stay in art school”.

So here are the Three Things, going out to me in the past:

1. Your differences aren’t defects.

You like things other people don’t like. You get excited about Big Ideas that none of your friends are thinking about. You don’t actually like a lot of the things that everyone else is talking about, but you spend a lot of time and energy trying to pretend you like them just so you don’t get left out.

But you get left out anyway.

Which is all to say, you’re lonely a lot and you don’t feel like you fit in anywhere and you wonder what’s wrong with you all the time.

KNOCK IT OFF, KID!

It turns out all those things that make you different are actually what make your life go awesomely. Apart from the awesome family you’ll have, by the time you get to be me, you’ll have written books and screenplays and worked on video games that have sold millions of copies.  You’re pretty much living the dream over here in the future.

Don’t worry about trying to be like everyone else because you’re not and IT’S COOL. You aren’t an accident. There’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, there’s actually a whole lot right with you.

And hey, literally nobody remembers that one time we did that thing (except for us), so let’s try not to hold on to it for so long, okay?

2. Pursue excellence, not perfection.

We do this thing where we notice little imperfections that no one else seems to notice; you do it back there in your time, and I still do it now. It’s just the way we’re wired.

It’s not a bad thing, necessarily; we notice the details, and details matter, and you and I both just want to get it right.

But we kind of take it too far, man. There’s a lot of truly excellent work out there that has tiny little cracks and chips if you look closely enough for long enough. Movies with continuity mistakes. Books with typos. Paintings with scientifically inaccurate representations of constellations.

But if you’re sitting there looking for that stuff, you’re missing the point.

A tiny mistake, a minor imperfection, shouldn’t make it impossible to appreciate the work of art before you.

Yeah, so sometimes planes fly across the sky when you’re looking at the sunset. It’s still a magnificent sunset.

You’re going to make some mistakes. A lot of them, in fact. Several metric tons worth. People you admire make them too.

By all means, keep doing your best to make things excellent. Just quit freaking out about things not being perfect. I’m way older than you and I still haven’t seen a perfect thing yet.

Except maybe your wife and kids.  Good job on that, by the way, you are going to be so impressed, dude. Knocked it out of the park on that one.  For real.

3. Prefer action over fear (especially when you’re afraid of failing)

Speaking of mistakes, I’m sorry to tell you one of our biggest ones comes from the number of times we didn’t do something, because we were afraid we might do it wrong.  It’s all right to take a few more chances, to get out there and get after it.

I don’t mean you need to do more jumping off rooftops or dual-wielding sawed off shotguns or anything. You’re a smart kid, you’ve got good instincts about stupid risks. But you hold yourself back too many times because you freak out about the what-ifs and the just-in-cases. And sometimes you miss out because by the time you’ve reached a decision, it’s way too late.

Pick a thing and do it. Don’t worry so much about whether you’re going to get it right the first time (you won’t) or what people are going to think about you for trying (it doesn’t actually matter that much).

Just about any action is better than fearful inaction. Get moving. We can correct along the way.

Okay that’s it for now. I know I didn’t tell you who you’re going to marry and I didn’t send you code for that Red-Black Tree program that’s going to ruin one of your Thanksgivings in college, but it’s cool, you’ll be all right.

And hey, if you’re reading this, just write down all the things you wished I had told you, and then when you get to be me you can rewrite this to include all of those too.

(Just don’t delete those three points because I might have to use them in a job interview or something one day.)

 

Would YOU kill the Fat Man?  Here’s an interesting discovery concerning how fluency in language affects our ability to make moral decisions.  Brains are neat!  And weird!

Speaking of brains, how would you like to fly a plane using yours?  Err, I mean JUST using yours. I hope if you’re a pilot you typically use your brain in addition to your hands.

An interesting article on biology and the space between order and chaos.  True nerd fodder.  Mmmm delicious fodder.

Here’s a very handy article on rules/tips for learning any language (relatively quickly).  No, it’s not an ad for Pimsleur.

And here’s an article about DARPA’s (that’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) work developing brain implants to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ever wondered what the inside of the internet looks like?  Surprisingly, it’s not just a series of tubes!  Very cool look at the physical architecture that supports all this datums running around out there.

A beautifully-crafted twenty-sided die … from second century BC.  Clearly we’ve been playing role-playing games since  the dawn of history.

Interesting legal discussion around the “right to be forgotten”, with the EU telling Google it has to delete links to sensitive information at a user’s request.  I guess it’s only interesting if you care about that sort of thing, but the “right to be forgotten” is one of those phrases that just might spark some story ideas.  Maybe not an interesting story, but you know.  You never know until you write it!  Or until you start writing it and then realize it’s not interesting!  This is way too much chatter about this one link!

The US military is working on developing robots with morals.  Mmm technological philosophy.  I wonder how long it’ll be before drones start questioning their existence and/or getting paralyzed by indecision over The Right Thing to Do.

Here’s one of the most effective cautions against blindly trusting charts and “data” I’ve seen.  It’s not so much what the data say that’s a problem so much as what we sometimes assume they say.  Data. Plural. Datums.  Though judging by this chart, the datums clearly show that Nicholas Cage’s acting is killing people, which totally lines up with my suspicions.

Here’s a cool Indiegogo campaign to create solar roadways.  Solar panels you can walk on, drive on, park your tractor on, all kinds of things.