There have been some modifications in my publication schedule from what it looked like in March. Here’s how it looks now:

  • 1636: The Cardinal Virtues will be coming out in a week, at the beginning of July. It’s probably already showing up in some bookstores.
  • In October, Baen is publishing an anthology in honor of David Drake titled Onward, Drake! (Which has a really, really ridiculous cover which I am really, really, really looking forward to teasing David about when I see him this coming weekend at Libertycon. Oh, chortle…) I have a story in the anthology titled “A Flat Affect.”
  • In November, the mass market edition of Cauldron of Ghosts will be coming out. That’s a novel I co-authored with David Weber set in his Honor Harrington universe.
  • In December, the mass market edition of 1636: The Viennese Waltz is coming out.
  • 1635: A Parcel of Rogues will be coming out in January, 2016.
  • Ring of Fire IV will be coming out in May, 2016. The lead story in that volume will be a novelette by David Brin.
  • The Span of Empire will be coming out in late summer or early fall of 2016.
  • 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught will be coming out in January, 2017.

The big modification in my schedule is that we swapped places between The Span of Empire and 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught. We decided to do that for several reasons.

First, I didn’t particularly want to have four Ring of Fire volumes coming out in a row without anything else in the mix. Yes, I know the Ring of Fire series is what I’m best known for, but I write lots of other stuff as well. In fact—harrumph—of the fifty novels I will have published when 1635: A Parcel of Rogues comes out in January, only fifteen of them are Ring of Fire volumes. So there.

Second, my co-author on The Span of Empire is David Carrico, and he’s been waiting an awful long time to see this novel come out. By making the switch, I was able to shorten his wait by almost half a year. When you have dozens of novels in print, as I do, you get pretty blasé about your publication schedule. But when you only have two volumes published, as David does—one of which is only available electronically—it’s a lot harder to wait. Those days are pretty far back for me now, but I still remember them.

Finally, making the switch gives me a few more months to work on Ottoman Onslaught. That will be helpful because as the old and politically incorrect expression has it, this book’s going to be a bitch to write. I’ve got a gazillion subplots I need to juggle in addition to the (relatively) straight-forward task of writing a sequel to 1636: The Saxon Uprising. The problem is that Ottoman Onslaught also has to serve as the sequel for 1636: The Viennese Waltz as well as my short novel in Ring of Fire III, “Four Days on the Danube.”

 

In other news of the day, I’ll be attending Sasquan, the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane in August. Here’s the URL, for anyone interested: http://sasquan.org/.

I hadn’t intended to go to Worldcon this year, but given the rather prominent role I wound up playing in the Hugo controversy, I eventually decided I ought to show up.