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At the height of the Second World War, Violet DeVere was a WASP-- a Women's Airforce Service Pilot, trusted with ferrying the most advanced warplanes in the United States arsenal. Five years after the war, she's barely making ends meet as a crop duster and part-time science fiction writer.
Kidnapped across a hundred million miles of space, Violet suddenly finds herself a prisoner in an impossible empire, an inhabited Mars shielded from earthling eyes by a scientific illusion called the Veil. Mars and its people are ground beneath the heel of the ruthless All-Sovereign, whose legions rule the skies. All resistance to his absolute despotism has been driven to the deadly red sands beyond civilization. Outgunned and outnumbered, Violet DeVere and her few brave Martian allies make a desperate stand against the All-Sovereign... against an ageless tyrant with the power to destroy every living thing in the solar system.
In early 2008, I had a vivid dream about a book I had written. It was a pulp adventure of some sort, with swashbuckling and planet-hopping and flashing ray guns, and the cover art was killer. Lurid black-and-red, full of energy, downright beautiful... I held that physical book in my arms and gazed down at it with total contentment. And then I started to wake up... and the book in my arms lost all of its weight, and the colors faded from the cover, and one bitter moment later I was sitting up in bed, holding empty air and swearing at the top of my lungs. I suspect that most authors feel the way I do about our work... those books are like infants to us, and holding one in our hands for the first time is heaven on earth. Dreaming that you've had a bright, bouncing baby book in your arms and then waking up to discover that not a single word had ever existed- well, that's just a damn cold thing for a man's subconscious to pull on him in the middle of the night. So I started that book, fumbling along on the few scraps of memory I still had. I wrote about six chapters before life and other business intervened, and then I put the story away and barely thought about it for a year.
Until recently, I was offline for a very long time. Longer than I'd meant to be, for personal reasons. Now my cup runneth over with things to do, responsibilities I've stacked up, from revising and turning in certain manuscripts to rebuilding this website. And let's talk about my responsibility to you, my readers... you've gone for some time without seeing anything new from me. Not for lack of writing, but for lack of showing. One thing I don't talk about very often is that I have a paralyzing fear of showing my early drafts to anyone. I write in total privacy and hate to have anyone so much as look over my shoulder while I'm working. My drafts are hidden in the darkest corners of my hard drive, checked and re-checked, then hidden again, then revised ad nauseam. It's... not terribly efficient, and probably not mentally healthy. It certainly causes my editors, who are saints, much more trouble than they deserve. This cannot persist. It's time to do something rather terrifying about it. I'm going to start posting that dream-book I wrote, chapter by chapter, in weekly installments as a free online serial novel. And I'm going to finish the sucker in the grandest style I can.
So, let's set some ground rules. First, those of you doing a potty dance for a certain forthcoming novel should know this won't slow down my work on that, because I can't let it. I've taken a couple of hours to set the HTML for this project up, but after this, I won't be writing for Queen of the Iron Sands for some time. I've got five finished installments lined up like bullets ready to be fired, and even with the accelerated pace of my first-week releases those will keep me for a month. Second, this story is free. It's got nothing to do with any existing contract, it's no publicity stunt for any upcoming project (though it is, for damn sure, a publicity stunt for my work in general, meant to end my long silence in the loudest possible fashion). I have a donation button, for those that wish to throw some coins in the jar, but think of it in those terms-- pay what you like, as a tip, to show that you enjoy the story, and to help me keep presenting it. If you don't like the story, you don't owe me nothin'. Third, there will be no weenie updates. There will be no itty-bitty appetizer chapters to follow the main course chapters, no feeble little half-chapters, no 400-word placeholders in between the big chunks. Chapter 1, "My Father Brought the Sky Home," is about as small as they come. Some of the chapters waiting to be uploaded are much longer; none are shorter. Fourth, new installments will be released weekly, probably on Fridays. I myself live in the Central time zone of the United States, but the number of readers I have around the world and the heavy presence of the UK contingent, in the GMT zone, leaves me scratching my head about the best time of day to actually post each new chapter. So let's try this as an experiment... for starters, I'll try to get them up in the wee hours of each Friday morning my time, which should be just before noon for those of you in the GMT zone. That, of course, will cover the weeks from here on out. Because this is the grand release week of this project, I am unleashing the first chapter over a weekend, and will post the second on Monday, August 31, before posting the third on Friday, September 4.
So there you have it... think of Queen of the Iron Sands as something to whet your appetite between now and my forthcoming novels. Enjoy, hopefully, and come back often!
Update- September 14, 2009: Due to a slight hiccup in last week's posting, I think I'm going to carry on from the day I actually got that one up, and post new installments on Monday mornings rather than Fridays. Of course, if this generates a huge volume of hate mail, I might reconsider.
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