Category: Tyche’s Flight

It’s Time to Talk About that Pile of Shame

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Without wanting to be a Debbie Downer on your recent-and-hopefully-delightful vacation, many of you are facing a cost of living crisis. I had a reader email me and say (I paraphrase), “I’m not going to start reading your Tyche series because it’s just so many books and I can’t afford that.” Ignoring the inherent logical pitfall here (where, if you’re going to pay for something, there’s no pro or con to standalone vs. series – i.e., the price is the same for either a) a trilogy or b) three standalones), it does shine a light on where people are at emotionally. People are feeling fairly fucked by the economy. There may be a way to survive 2024 with more of your dollars intact, though. Ownership can create an emotional attachment and increase the perceived value of something (the endowment effect). Read More …

The Price is Right

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Life’s been hard these past months. I don’t want to be a downer, but the only thing missing from this apocalypse is actual zombies (and I’m pretty sure I saw those at the mall). I know money is tight. Shit is hard. Unemployment’s at record highs, and even “cheap” entertainment like reading is difficult to justify when you’re not sure how to feed your kids tomorrow. Many people aren’t coping, and finding it harder without fantasy worlds to escape to. I have three possible solutions for you. If you’re really hard up for cash, I’ve made Chromed: Upgrade free. This is my homage to Blade Runner. It’s got cybernetics, alcohol, genetically-modified monsters, wormholes, AI, and rock music. This was the thing I wanted to write when I started to do this gig for real, and you can get it for nothing. 85,000 Read More …

Your Ears Just Got Lucky: Win Tyche’s Flight!

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You got that right – you can snare a copy of Tyche’s Flight in freshly minted audio. I’ve teamed up with Saffron Bryant and Mary O’Paddock to bring you an audiobook giveaway bundle. For a bit o’ variation, the copies of Tyche’s Flight and The Waters will be delivered via authors-direct.com, and Speak will come at you from Audible. That’s just how it’s gonna be. (ICYMI, you might dig on my review of Speak). Win Audiobooks

We interrupt your vigorous holidaying for this important announcement 🔈

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Tyche’s Flight is now out in audio! It’s been Big Huge Fun™️ putting this together, not least of which because I got to work with the supremely talented Tim Paige. I’ve pulled together a massive two-hour audio sample for your listening pleasure. You can put on your cans and drown out the cries of over-sugared children during this festive time: [https://dl.bookfunnel.com/5jr33w65w3] I love everything about this. If you want to hear Nate and Grace kick Ezeroc ass from Absalom Delta, now’s your chance. The complete book is almost ten hours of murderous insects, self-serving Republic military, and a starship running a little low on luck. You can fatten up your audiobook library just about anywhere: [Audible] [Apple Books Audio] [Kobo Audio] [Google Audio] [Nook Audio] [Scribd Audio] [Beek Audio] [eStories Audio]

Plot vs. Character

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A buddy wrote me recently about the upcoming movie, Upgrade. It’s not an adaptation of my book. This was as heartbreaking for me as it is for you, no doubt. I think the subtext of the email I got might have been, “Those motherfuckers stole your idea!” While it’s difficult to tell from a trailer whether someone has stolen my ideas verbatim, I think it’s more likely there’s some parallel evolution going on here. This is probably okay, and maybe we should even encourage it. What the actual fuck? Read on. The movie trailer looks great. Here: Broadly, it shares some ideas with Upgrade. Not necessarily stolen, but common: the upgraded-human thing is very #cyberpunk, for example. Writers in genre fiction share some concepts (e.g., Altered Carbon…). The weird thing is, a movie and a book named the same thing might help. Read More …

Getting it Wrong

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By that, I mean on purpose. Before we get started, I need to preface with a couple of points. These are tips for writers. If you’re a reader, this shit might give you a glimpse behind the curtain. Good or bad? I don’t know. We’ll discover that. Together. This is not a post about alternative facts or some other political bullshit. There is no excuse for not knowing your shit. This post is not about how to fudge things so you can get away without doing research. Let’s turn that handle, yo. Let me set a scene for you. You’re watching a cop procedural on Netflix. In the scene are the good guys on one side of a table, bad guys on the other (you decide if the cops are good or bad in this scenario – it doesn’t matter). There’s Read More …

The Power of Names

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Ever since I read Le Guin’s amazing A Wizard of Earthsea, I’ve been captivated by the idea of names having a kind of power. (Side note: if you haven’t read the Earthsea books, you’re missing out. I don’t use ‘amazing’ lightly; this is a series I re-read often. The writing is brilliant, the characters captivating, the stories both beautiful and poignant). Hobb has her own take on this with her Liveship books (also excellent). Same but different, you know? Worth your time (and I needed to look up ‘Fitz’ when I started on these books). Me, I’m pretty much a hack compared to those two. But I still want the names of my characters to have meaning. In my Tyche books, I named the crew with a purpose. Some of the characters were renamed from their originals (did you know, Hope used Read More …

It’s Vogel Time

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If you want to do me a solid, head on over to the nomination form and pop Tyche’s Flight* in for a Best Novel award. The competition is brutal in the SJVs; many amazing artists are going head to head. It’d be nice to win for a change, but being accepted as a nominee rocks several degrees of awesome. [Click Here for the Nomination Form] Nominations close 8.00pm on 2nd February 2018 (NZST), which isn’t that far away — feel free to punch the drives to their limits and head there now. You can nominate multiple New Zealand artists for the award, so don’t feel like you’re burning your one golden ticket on me. The SJVs provide many golden tickets. If you need help with making a nomination for Tyche’s Flight, you can use these handy copy/paste entries: Title of Work or Name of Read More …

Tyche’s Flight

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My latest book, Tyche’s Flight, is out! You can get it here: https://www.books2read.com/TychesFlight I’m somewhat in awe of this review from Alternate Realms Magazine: Parry’s gift is in taking a time-worn plot and characters, and refurbishing them into an engaging read. Unlike many Space Operas, the technological details in Tyche’s Flight are plausible, if not always possible, and the writing usually flows seamlessly so that it fades into the background, highlighting the ongoing turmoil. A colony world goes dark. Grace Gushiken is a grifter and a liar. Worse, she’s an esper, an abhorrent creation of the Old Empire. Grace keeps her blade sharp and her wits sharper. She’s on the run from the Republic’s justice. Nathan Chevell captains the free trader Tyche, an ex-war heavy lifter. He’s no pirate, but he’s no white knight either. An encounter with espers saw him discharged Read More …