Tinkering With Novella Price Points

Last year thanks to my regular listening to The Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast, I became acquainted with Lindsay Buroker, in particular the Kindle Worlds program for her Fallen Empire science fiction universe. I helped codify/solidify some of the background material for the primary series and the next-generation spinoff A Sky Full of Stars and wrote two military-SF novellas set during the rebellion. Those were Ten Davids, Two Goliaths and Discovery and Flight, the latter of which is explicitly tied in with her short story "Remnants." I even put together the TVTropes page.

I was planning on writing more novellas, including a straight-up zombie story (a biological weapon that gets out of control) and a Starseer story inspired by the Star Wars Darth Maul fan film Apprentice. However, Amazon shut down the Kindle Worlds program, even though based on the royalties I was getting it seemed to be doing pretty well. Fortunately Ms. Buroker let me re-publish the novellas via KDP and other KW authors are doing the same.

Of course, as an independent writer, I'm responsible for all the decisions, including how to price it. Initially I priced both novellas at $2.99 in order to get 70% royalties, but in the original KW program novellas were $1.99. In addition, many more successful authors price their novellas at $1.99--Marko Kloos' novella Measures of Absolution is $1.99, while Delilah S. Dawson's Peculiar Pets of Miss Pleasance is $1.99. James R. Tuck's Deacon Chalk novellas are only available in audio now, but I believe they were $1.99 in e-book as well. Some novellas are priced even less.

I did make some sales at the higher price point, but I would obviously like to make more even if that means a 35% royalty instead of a 70% one. Three sales at $1.99 generates a little over the same royalties as one sale at $2.99, so if I quadruple my sales, I'm ahead. The fact I've created an Amazon AMS ad for Ten Davids, Two Goliaths will surely help.

To that end, I have set the price for both novellas to $1.99. If this proves successful, I'll leave them there. If not, back to $2.99 they go. I'll give it a week. If you come across this blog post after October 7, 2018 and the price is $1.99, you'll know that reducing the price did increase the quantity demanded.

My Decatur Book Fest Schedule

I took a page from the great Marko Kloos (author of the Frontlines series, several of which I reviewed on the blog) and decided to put up my schedule for the 2018 Decatur Book Festival, where I will be making several appearances. The festival takes place Saturday 9/1/18 and Sunday 9/2/18 in Decatur, GA, one of the eastern suburbs of Atlanta, GA.

Posman Books

Posman Books Atlanta hosted my second book signing during the lead-up to Halloween 2017 and the manager contacted me to see if I would be interested in an hour-long signing slot. I will be signing copies of The Thing in the Woods and a few copies of The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2 from 1-2 PM on Saturday, 9/1. For those of you new to my blog, Thing is my Georgia-set Lovecraftian horror novel, while Best Of contains my short story "Nicor" and 21 other quality sword-and-sorcery tales.

Emerging Authors Pavilion

Thing and Best Of will be available for purchase at the Emerging Authors Pavilion throughout the entire weekend. However, I will be in the pavilion in person Sunday 9/2 at 12:30 PM for a short speech on Thing, probably about how the book wouldn't even exist if not for a chance trip to a long-since-closed Borders when I was in college. Afterward, I will be signing books in the pavilion from 12:40 PM to 12:50 PM.

Atlanta Writers Club

I will be signing Thing and Best Of at the Atlanta Writers' Club from 4-5 PM on Sunday 9/2. I'm not familiar with this organization, although I did attend a meeting of theirs a few years ago before formally joining relatively recently.

If you'd like to come for any of these events, here's the Facebook event. Sign up there to let me know you're coming. Here's a festival map of Decatur Square to help you find where everything is.

Book Review: FIELDS OF FIRE (2017)

Marko Kloos' saga of young infantryman--now an officer--Andrew Grayson and his pilot wife Diana Halley unleashed another installment at the end of February with Fields of Fire, the fifth book in his awesome FRONTLINES series. I've read it twice so far (it's a very fast, engaging read) and now it's time for the review...

The Plot

Having defeated an assault by the alien Lankies on Earth (and apparently a couple more probes since then), the time has come for the nations of Earth to attack Lanky-held Mars and take it back from the aliens. Grayson returns to his role as a "pod-head," launched from a spaceship to call in orbital or nuclear bombardment on the ground, while Halley, having recovered from injuries incurred in the previous novel Chains of Command, will help fly in other forces once the beachheads are established.

But the Lankies have had a year and more to fortify Mars, and it won't be easy...

The Good

*Like the other books in the series, it's a very fast and engaging read. The first time I read it, it took only a couple days, in multi-chapter chunks. The second time around it was mostly gym reading, with a few bits done outside of my local LA Fitness. No more than four to six hours either time, with the second time probably less. Time flies when you're having fun, and I was having fun indeed.

*Per the above, once Grayson leaves Earth, this start rolling really fast and never let up. We have the Crowning Moment of Awesome battle in orbit, then the landings begin. Things go well, but then they go into the crapper real fast. And I kept reading to see what happened to Grayson and Halley.

*In one of my earlier reviews I pointed out that the Lankies in one of the books weren't described physically very well, but that's not a problem here. The descriptions are a lot more vivid and that's great.

*Some of the nasty surprises the Lankies unleash on Mars are foreshadowed early on.

*Kloos expands the world by introducing the reader to the EuroCorps, the German-dominated European federal military. The EuroCorps focuses on advanced, elegant technology, much like the efficient German engineering of today. The united Europe is also strongly anti-nuclear, a cultural continuity from Germany today that was no doubt amplified by the limited nuclear conflict that occurred around 100 years before the story began. It was very interesting to read about them, especially since Kloos was born in what used to be West Germany and served in its military during the Cold War.

*There are so many cool little details that one doesn't get them all on the first read. I didn't notice an interesting new characteristic of Lanky seed ships until the second read.

*The book explicitly ties itself in with the Frontlines Requiem comic series that tells what was going on in the Earth system during the events of Lines of Departure and Angles of Attack, including the Lanky conquest of Mars and the desertion of the North American Commonwealth's political elite with the most advanced military equipment.

*There are some amusing inside jokes, like the Battle of 47 Northing. 47 North is Amazon's science fiction imprint that picked up the FRONTLINES series after Kloos experienced remarkable success self-publishing it, and "northing" and "easting" is a way of marking coordinates on a map. During the Gulf War, there was the Battle of 73 Easting, for example.

*We finally learn why Halley is alienated from her family, to the point she hates her own first name.


The Bad

*There are repeated references to aircraft losses, some of them quite substantial, but the Lankies groundside don't have any sort of ranged attacks, let alone antiaircraft capability. The only time "on-screen" we see Lankies taking out aircraft is if they're close enough to grab them, although in the first book Terms of Enlistment an aircraft that made an attack run on a Lanky terraforming tower is taken out by something.

The Verdict

Chains of Command I didn't like enough to review it (it wasn't bad, it was just okay), but this is an excellent return to form. 9.0 out of 10.

FLASHING STEEL, FLASHING FIRE and "The Long Tail"

This really would have been better as an addendum to my last blog post on my writing and "the long tail," but it was late and I needed to go to bed. I looked over my sales figures for the last few years and saw that the principle of The Long Tail applies to my short-story collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire.

When I published Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire in July 2014, I sold 21 copies that month. Over the next five months, I sold eight copies at a rate of zero (August) to three (September) per month. That's over one-third of the premiere month's numbers in five months. In 2015, I sold 14 copies at a rate of zero (three separate months) to four (February) per month. No sales in 2016 so far, but when you combine the non-premiere months of 2014 with all of 2015, the "tail" has already exceeded the "head." And there's still most of 2016 left.

So if you've self-published anything and your numbers have crashed after the first month or two, don't worry. One or two sales per month over the course of years will add up in the long run.

Of course, if you plan on making a living--or at least more than, as Marko Kloos put it, "beer money"--doing this, you'll need to have a lot of product. One book earning $10 in royalties per month is $120 per year, but ten books earning $10 per month is $1,200 per year. And with that many books available, odds are you'll be earning more than $10 per month in royalties anyway. People who buy one book from an author are likely to buy other books, after all. My story "Ubermensch" is a superhero story, but people who bought it also bought Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire despite the complete lack of superhero stories in it. Moving outside of my own work, people who've bought my friend James R. Tuck's supernatural Robin Hood story Mark of the Black Arrow also bought his hollow-earth blaxploitation story Champion of Hollow Earth.

So as my friend Jeff Baker put it (and he learned the phrase from somebody at LibertyCon a couple years ago), if you want to make bank, "churn and burn."

My Trunk Novels, Fan-Fic, and One Million Words

The other day I was listening to the Writing Excuses podcast in which they interviewed Charlie Holmberg, who said she had finished nine novels before she sold one. That was mildly worrying, as I'm currently pitching The Thing in the Woods (got a full-manuscript request from an agent who's an AAR member ten minutes after querying, although he ultimately rejected it) and seriously considering indie-publishing Battle for the Wastelands in hopes of being like Marko Kloos (parleyed independent novel Terms of Enlistment into multiple-book deal with 47 North) or Chris Nuttall (successful independent writer). Both Battle and Thing are my first finished original novels. I'd rather not have to write between three and six more that never see the light of day--when I make something, I generally like the ideas, characters, etc. too much just to toss them.

There's a term for books that never escape the drawer--"trunk novels." I've got one writer friend who has a book (that to me sounded really cool) she was told was "fatally flawed" that's never going to see the light of day, plus a second finished novel that doesn't seem like it's going anywhere either. I've also heard the "my first, second, third, etc. novel didn't sell either" from a bunch of different writers.

It turns out I've got a fair number of those myself. The main difference being, however, that they're not actually finished.

Darkness in the North-This one I actually started writing in high school, with one of my friends really liking the prologue. It has some interesting concepts, including the idea of a revolutionary republic in a fantasy world (which the Powder Mage novels like A Promise of Blood get into) and how a coed military (of said republic) might function. I was outlining it and it turned into a rambling mess, but the prologue did eventually see the light of day as one of the stories in Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire. Other than that prologue, nothing from this is likely to see the light of day. 14,750 words.

Seventeen Sons-This one I remember writing in college (my college ministry had a writing group as part of its arts division) and bringing before my secular writing group at least in part some time after I graduated. It involves a half-demon who's getting hunted by a religious order despite not being a bad guy at all. After his girlfriend is killed by mistake, he wages a one-man counteroffensive, only to unintentionally help his evil father carry out his plans for invading the mortal realm. This in turn necessitates allying with his old enemies. Perhaps it'll get "reimagined," but in its current form isn't going anywhere. 22,964 words.

The American Principate-I'm generally a conservative, but there was a lot of stuff about the Bush Administration I came to dislike. Think the Patriot Act, the Transportation Security Agency, citizens getting interned without trial, etc, all to the applause of people who would have been outraged if Bill Clinton did it. A wise man named Randolph Bourne once said that, "War is the health of the State" and Founding Father James Madison said that if tyranny and oppression came to America, it would be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. And there's this questionable quote ostensibly from Julius Caesar.

So I decided to adapt the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Roman Empire to American circumstances, with a faux George W. Bush as Julius Caesar, an illegal war with Iran as the crossing of the Rubicon, faux Ron Paul as Brutus, and ultimately faux Dick Cheney (whom I dislike much, much more than Bush) as Caesar Augustus. Here's some more detail. The manuscript is full of early-2000s zeitgeist and even some flirtation with questionable economics--there's the implication that the war with Iran had to do with the country deciding to sell oil in Euros and the United States ends up a financial vassal of China. As such the window of opportunity to write it would have been in 2004-2006 or so. Too late now. 2,769 words.

Aaron Greymalkin-This is another high-school story--I remember telling some of my Quiz Bowl friends about it on a trip and one said they liked the character's name. It's set in an independent California after a comet strike destroys most of the United States and causes an impact winter that wrecks the rest of the world. Think the awesome novel Lucifer's Hammer. Notable for a nuclear-armed neo-Aztec cult being manipulated by the surviving U.S. military leadership in Colorado Springs and an independent Alaska trying to avoid resource vassalage to Japan. I'm thinking this would make a really good setting for an RPG. 2,727 words.

Blasted Lands Cycle-Another high-school project--I remember doodling about this rather than watching a Spanish translation of The Never-Ending Story as the first semester drew to a close around Christmas. This takes place in the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of a nuclear war between the United States and Putin's Russia...in which the latter deploys some kind of weapon that opens a gateway to the age of the dinosaurs. So you have various warlord types, Haitian settlers, a Russian warship that's still fighting the war, and dinosaurs. Another good RPG setting, but the actual novel isn't going anywhere. The last time I remember doing anything with this one was in 2006 when I visited Destin with my friend Nick and his buddies from Ohio. 7,561 words.

Gates of Vasharia-Up until relatively recently, it was widely believed that the Ninth Legion was destroyed somewhere in Scotland fighting the Picts. I wondered, what if the Ninth Legion wasn't wiped out in battle, but ended up...somewhere else? And they weren't the only ones?

Enter the world of Vasharia, where the descendants of the Ninth Legion established a new Roman Empire that grew to encompass various other cultures (including my personal favorites, the Nestorian Christians--imagine a world where the Church of the East continued to thrive) and traded with other worlds through controlled wormholes. I started writing this one probably in 2004 and there are characters based on people I knew in high school and early college. Oh boy, that's a good way to get into trouble. :)

It's been so long since I touched this one that I'm thinking this one isn't going anywhere. That said, I had the idea of re-telling the story from the first-person point-of-view of Patrick Rassam, a Nestorian Syrian general who was cast into the dark spaces between the worlds (think Stephen King's todash darkness), only to return having made a Faustian deal with things living there. I'd call it I, Dark Lord, a title that would capture Rassam's dry wit.

I re-read the manuscript a year or so ago and found there are some pretty good character moments, so of all of the "trunk novels," this one might be the most salvageable. Of all of them, it's the one that's gotten the most attention from my writing group, which helped me work a lot of the bugs out, especially dealing with military stuff. 40,274 words.

However, although none of the above would count toward having a bunch of finished novels one writes before one sells the big one, I have finished novels that aren't going anywhere either. They certainly contribute to the whole "you have to write a million words before you're any good" maxim far more than the 91,000-odd words of those "trunk novels." They're called fan fiction. You can find my fanfiction.net profile here.

The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince-My friend Jamie pointed out this one is actually longer than the first three or even four Harry Potter novels combined. It's actually 193,000 words. It's basically the entire First War if Snape had broken with the Death Eaters his fourth or fifth year--the divergence is at the same time as Snape and Lily's argument about his skinhead friends, some time before the "Mudblood Incident." If this was a book series, I imagine it could be a trilogy.

Lord of the Werewolves-This one I wrote with a pen-pal. It's 125,000 words. It's a "fix fic" intending to correct the underuse of Lupin and Tonks in Deathly Hallows. The first part of the story is basically Deathly Hallows from Lupin and Tonks' points-of-view and includes stuff we don't see, like their romantic relationship (a lot of people thought Tonks some kind of stalker, but the impression I had was that Lupin liked her too but was just too hung up on being a werewolf to act on it), wedding and honeymoon, and much of the Battle of Seven Potters. It diverges from canon during Bill and Fleur's wedding and gets really dark. Like, really, really, dark. Of all my fan-fiction, it's probably the best in terms of characterization. Heck, of all my fiction generally it ranks up there.

Revenge of the Fallen Reboot-I loved the first Michael Bay Transformers film, but was rather disappointed by the second. Good concept, but mediocre execution. So this is how I would have done it. There was some stuff suggested by the commercials (like a confrontation between female lead Mikaela Banes and Starscream) that never happened, but would have been really cool. Heck, the Bay universe botched Starscream's character massively, and that's just one of its sins. 58,476 words, about the length of a decent novel and not that much longer than Thing. I should probably write a TVTropes page--there's already Fix Fic, What The Hell Hero, and a bit of Your Approval Fills Me With Shame.

The Dragon and the Bear-There's very little actual narrative here. It's basically an alternate version of S.M. Stirling's Draka timeline where Russia defeats the Domination in World War II. In terms of sheer word count it would match a novel though--and I still haven't posted all of it on fanfiction.net. I'm self-banned from the forum until Christmas, so maybe I'll post the rest of it then. It's 46,000 words now, but there's a big chunk left to transfer. I kind of let it peter out a decade or two after the Final War between the Domination and the Alliance for Democracy, but I would bit it's around 60,000 words all total.

So of my "modern" fan-fic (i.e. stuff I wrote after college), that's around 436,000 words. I also wrote some Dark Angel fan-fic in high school that was basically how I would have done Season Two. Combined I think that's around 100,000 words--there were several 20K to 25K installments. There're also various dribs and drabs from short stories both unfinished and finished, my 2006 Battlestar Galactica short story "The Death of the Triton," the 600-odd posts on The World According to Quinn (if they average 800 words each that's 480,000 words), and the thoroughly massive amount of writing I've done for multiple newspapers in my seven-odd years as a full-time and part-time professional journalist.

(Not sure if the latter counts, since some members of my writing group have said writing like a journalist leads to a rather dry and overly-informative product. Good for newspapers, not good for novels.)

So I realized that I'm not necessarily all that different from those "I wrote ten books before I sold one" writers. Even if Battle for the Wastelands (92,000 words) is ultimately destined for the trunk too (God forbid, and I mean that), perhaps The Thing in the Woods (56,000 words) won't be, and neither will my secret third project I've obliquely referenced before (17,000 words presently) or my science fiction tale The Cybele Incident (20,000-odd words presently). :)

The Writing Plan for the Coming Year-ish

In a little over a week, I will start a new job--in fact, an entire new career--putting an end to years of graduate school and part-time freelancing. This will drastically cut into my time for personal writing projects, blogging, etc.

This means that you will be seeing a lot fewer blog posts, movie reviews, etc. here. I will continue being part of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, but I won't be reviewing every movie we watch like I've been doing. I will also write posts linking to the podcast The Geekly Oddcast put on by The Brothers Herman, but since Geekly Oddcast records on weeknights, I'll probably be doing that less often than Myopia. I will have less time for my personal writing projects, so there will fewer updates on those.

Speaking of my personal writing projects, here is the plan for some of them.

*I intend to finish two additional stories featuring my supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel and release them as a four-story electronic collection Consequences that will also include the first story ("Übermensch")and the second "Needs Must." I have partially written both, with more progress made on the fourth story (which will ultimately tie Patel with the world of my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods) than on the third. This will be my top personal writing priority aside from selling my completed novels Battle for the Wastelands and Thing.

Here's the cover, which my regular artist Alex Claw made awhile back, to whet your appetite:

I will also be working on a novella entitled "Fairmont," which will take place just over three years before the events of my novel Battle for the Wastelands. My fellow writers James R. Tuck and Delilah S. Dawson both secured book deals that saw the release of novellas for e-readers alongside more conventional print books, while Marko Kloos self-published the short story "Lucky Thirteen"and the novella "Measures of Absolution" alongside Terms of Enlistmentand kept them online even when he got a traditional book deal for Terms. Regardless of whether I go traditional or independent with Wastelands, "Fairmont" would be an excellent way to whet readers' appetites for Battle, much like how "That Thing At the Zoo" preceded Blood and Bullets.My completed novella "Son of Grendel" can come afterward, much like "Spider's Lullaby" came after Blood and Bullets and before Blood and Silver.

I have received some good comments from agents and publishers on The Thing in the Woods (but no bites yet--you'll find out when that happens), so I don't foresee tinkering with the manuscript too much. Depending on how things go with that I might resume work on the sequel The Atlanta Incursion or resume work on the third project I'm holding close to the chest at the moment. I've let that one fall by the wayside due to graduate-school responsibilities, but I've been told by fellow members of my writing group that this project plays to my strengths (world-building and journalistic writing) and, owing to the nature of the project, it's something I could finish more quickly than a conventional narrative novel.

Book Review: ANGLES OF ATTACK by Marko Kloos (2015)

Last year, an Army relative introduced me to Marko Kloos' military science-fiction FRONTLINES series. The saga follows Andrew Grayson, a young man from a dystopian overpopulated North American Commonwealth (NAC) who enlists to escape the poverty and violence of Boston and finds himself fighting not just the rival Sino-Russian Alliance (SRA) but also the genocidal aliens known as the Lankies. I burned through the previous books Terms of Enlistment and the briefly Hugo-nominated Lines of Departure (both of which I discussed here) as well as the interquel e-stories "Lucky 13" (in which Grayson's girlfriend Halley is the protagonist) and "Measures of Absolution" (following another member of Grayson's squad). In fact, I reread them multiple times (they're good gym and MARTA fodder) as I awaited Angles of Attack

And now it's here. Now it's time for the review...

The Plot

The Lanky assault on the Formalhaut system foiled at the end of Lines of Departure it turns out left an alien invasion force stranded on another world in the system. After NAC and SRA forces extirpate them and evacuate the human survivors, protagonist Andrew Grayson and his new friend Dmitry, a Russian combat controller, have to slip back to the alien-invaded Earth system to find supplies for New Svalbard. They find a very unpleasant reception, both from their own people and the alien invaders.

The Good

*It's a fast read. I got the e-book around 8:30 AM on 4/21 (the release date) and had the first four chapters read in thirty minutes to an hour. I had a fair bit of school and client work to do, so I wasn't able to get back to the book until sometime around 4 or 5 PM. I finished the rest of the book in a lengthy pre-dinner Kindle marathon in probably less than two hours. I read much faster than most people so I imagine you all would need more time, but my point is, it's never boring.

*Many of the scenes, like when the human forces try to breach the Lanky blockade of the solar system, are quite suspenseful. One reason I finished the book so fast is that I simply could not put it down.

*We finally meet an SRA character, a sergeant named Dmitry. And Dmitry is absolutely hilarious. Kloos captures how someone who's a native Russian speaker and not totally well-versed in English would speak--and then he gives him the most delightfully smart-ass dialogue. I recite his words in my fake Russian accent and I always laugh. Four chapters in I tweeted Kloos himself about how good the book was so far and how I liked Dmitry and he said I hadn't seen anything yet. Here's the exchange if you'd like to see it. Kloos replies to my comments on Twitter and his Facebook page and that's awesome.

*A major part of Lines of Departure was a civil war between mutinous Homeworld Defense (they're kind of a National Guard to the regular North American military, fighting Earthside wars while other services fight the SRA and aliens in space) units pretty much exiled to New Svalbard and naval forces. Even though the Lanky invasion and the alliance with the SRA has put a stop to it, there's still a lot of bad blood between all concerned. Outside enemies forcing a new alliance doesn't make everybody friends, and bar fights ensue. And when Grayson and friends return to Earth, the government left behind (such as it is) doesn't forget either.

*Some characters consider making a decision I really, really think would be a bad one (I'll get more into that later), but given some discussion they have after their ship gets destroyed in in Terms of Enlistment, the fact they'd even consider it is foreshadowed.

*The climax of the book ties nicely in with the events of "Measures of Absolution" and ultimately back in with Terms of Enlistment.

*We finally get Halley's first name when all we had before was an initial and her always being referred to by her last name.

*We get a bit more description of the wider world, including the other political bodies on Earth.

The Bad

*The physical description is a little bit sparse. When I write I use more description, but that might be a matter of personal preference. In particular when the characters from the previous book are reintroduced (I'm thinking mainly of Halley), there's not any physical description. In a tight first-person POV you don't have anything but the character's thoughts and realistically the character isn't going to be discussing his fiancee's appearance--especially given the circumstances--but throwing in little things like eye color, hair color, etc. wouldn't be info-dumpy. This also applies to the alien Lankies--in the first chapter, the only description I can recall is that they're big.

*It's not totally clear why a character/warship's sacrifice is effective against an Lanky starship when massive nuclear or kinetic bombardments, kamikaze runs that don't have 40 hours to build up acceleration, etc. aren't. I have an idea about why it works, given what we last heard the character doing before the climactic scene, but it could have been clearer.

*The ending is where I had the biggest problems. It was rather difficult to believe the nearby Territorial Army units would not have gotten involved, given just what was happening. I hope this gets explained in Chains of Command (the fourth book that Kloos is writing now, hopefully slated for the end of the year) pronto, and well. And the fact two characters even consider making a particular decision was another problem, despite the blatant failures of the TA and the NAC government.

One character at least is aware of the importance of what's likely to happen next and how the combined human forces are going to need his help, but the fact one decision will allow him to make a much more significant contribution to the defense of humankind against the Lankies (especially given who is likely to be in charge of the defense of Earth after the events of the climax as well as the Lanky presence in the solar system) and the other really won't is kind of obvious. People don't always make rational decisions, but it would have been better to see more of the gears turning in the character's head so we understand why. Given how the book ends hopefully this issue will end up getting resolved logically in Chains.

(EDIT: Kloos said they will be addressed. Excellent!)

*We learn a little bit about why Halley only goes by her surname--apparently she doesn't like her first name--but it would be better if there was more. I was hoping we might get more of her back-story, considering how we did get some in Lines of Departure.

*In the table of contents, "Epilogue" is misspelled. Hopefully 47North will fix that pronto--it should be easy with an e-book--and that it didn't go out in the print editions.

The Verdict

A good third volume. Definitely looking forward to Chains of Command. 8.75 out of 10.0