Happy New Year!

*Artwork courtesy of Ryan Yee, based on a pivotal scene in The Slave Prince.

Dear Readers! May your path to post-NewYears recovery be short, and may your 2016 be fruitful and delicious! ...what am I saying...? Good morning and Happy New Year!

Just wrapped up our third "The Animal in Man" Reader Raffle video. Things didn't go quite as planned, plenty of plot twists in this one. CLICK HERE and have a look to see if you've won.

Thank you all so much if you've already pre-ordered your copy of The Animal in Man. You've shown me that you expect great things from me, and I promise I will not let you down. 2016 is the year I get this 10+years project done. I couldn't do it without you.

Happy New Years everyone! 2016 has begun. Next week I have my Inkshares kick off meeting to begin production on the Seventh Age Dawn. So, there is that. I'm going to be at Midwinter Gaming Convention up in Milwaukee on the weekend of Jan 16th. Peddling my wares and trying to get some gaming in. If anyone wants to meet up, drop me a line on twitter if you are in the area. 

Lastly: Today I begin trying to define the sequel. The Seventh Age: Rise of Dystopia into to 15 words so I can start building my outlines. If you curious how I start a book, it works something like this: I start off with 15 words regarding what the story is about. (This is actually really damn hard). I then make those 15 words into 5 sentences, followed by taking each of those 5 sentences into a paragraph. Finally each paragraph ends up as it's own page. That's how I start off building my outline. Today... I need to do this. 

So here is where I ask for help: I LOVE music, and it's my largest inspiration for writing. Tweet me @crankybolt for any music that reminds you of the cyberpunk or techno-thriller music. I'll be assembling a playlist all month as I dabble with the outline. 

I'm really curious to see what some of you other authors and Seventh Age Followers come up with in regards to music. Toss your best at me :)

Happy New Year humans!

I'm feeling compelled to say something poignant or inspiring, but having been working on character sheets for most of my free time during this break has somehow dampened my abilities.

So, I shall just say this... make it a good one.

LLAP \V/,

The Trekonomics New Year's Update

Dear readers, followers and friends of Trekonomics,

I am very happy to report that after two months of furious rewriting and editing, the final manuscript has been sent for copy-editing. We are on track for our late-spring 2016 release.

A lot of coordination is involved in producing a book. I am discovering the age-old process of designing a cover and gathering all the elements for the book's jacket as well the so-called "front matter" (that is, all the text and pages that are not part of the manuscript itself).  

Speaking of the book's front matter, we are planning a neat little surprise. It will be revealed in time (and I will not say anything more lest I jinx it). 

The cover is being designed by the incredibly talented Jennifer Bostic (http://www.paperplanestudio.com/) and John Powers (http://johnpowers.us/, as well his essential blog http://starwarsmodern.blogspot.com/). It is an awesome privilege to work with artists of their caliber. We will share the cover design and artwork with all of you as soon as it is blocked and finalized, within the next few weeks. 

2016 will mark the 50th anniversary of Star Trek's first airing on NBC. The exact date is September 8 at 8:30PM Eastern Time.  For that occasion, the US Postal Service will release a series of four commemorative stamps. Here they are in all their glory:

"Forever" means that they will be forever good for first-class letters, regardless of future price increases. Hopefully, we will be able to ship some of your pre-orders with these stamps on the envelopes.

As a final note, I am happy to announce that I am contributing to Fusion.net's Real Future on a regular basis. You can set your RSS readers to: http://fusion.net/author/manu-saadia/ or follow me on twitter (@trekonomics).  My latest piece was on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We will be in touch very soon. In the meantime, a happy and felicitous New Year.

Live Long, and Prosper

Manu

Happy New Year, all.
Wishing you wonderful things ahead in 2016.

Happy New Year's Eve! Just a quick update today.

So this, this is pretty cool to see...

We have officially joined the Quill Collection page! Even though Dax is still technically in progress, this little detail makes it just a tiny bit more real and gives me the warm-and-fuzzies. Woo hoo!

Also, fantasy author Jamison Stone (Rune of the Apprentice) invited me to write a guest blog post at his site, Apotheosis Studios! I discuss a bit of my creative background, along with some of the inspiration for Dax, as seen in the dashing rogues gallery below.

Check out the article HERE.

New Year's resolutions, anyone? I have a couple.

1) Finish Dax, of course
2) Enjoy a nice break after publishing. Get through at least some of the stacks of books and video games I've amassed.
3) Maybe finally take up violin
4) Back to the gym. My back is killing me with all this sitting at the computer. (Yes, despite popular belief, it is totally possible to be a super nerd AND fit!)

OK gang! Back to writing, writing, writing...  

-Tony

Thursday update time.  I'm still not fully awake yet, so it'll probably be a bit more terse than usual.

Hi friends!  We hit 60 orders!  That means it's time to give away another signed copy of Shadow of the Owl!  

And the winner is...Chris Robinson!  Our own Ghosts of War author now has another (former) Inkshares book to put on his shelf!  Congrats Chris!

Also, I realize that I dropped absolutely zero hints about the game yesterday, and I can't expect people to play something they don't know about so...in the interest of getting people to have fun, I wrote a game this weekend!  It's set in the world of DHM and starts from the video that I posted yesterday!  My hope is that by playing it those that are following the book will fall so much in love with the game that they will preorder.  

And speaking of preorders, what should we do for our 70 backer raffle?  I will give you two choices: 

Option A: I post chapter 2

Option B: I raffle off another signed novel

Comment on the update (or you can tweet me @amandaorneck if that's easier) about which option you want!  It's all up to you!