There are two new things of mine available at www.baen.com right now.
The big one is the eARC* of my next novel, Monster Hunter Siege. http://www.baen.com/monster-hunter-siege-earc.html
And while you are there the next cool thing (and this one is FREE) is another MHI short story called Bubba Shackleford’s Professional Monster Killers, and it’s the first ever story about the founder of MHI and his original crew. It is coming out in the Straight Out Of Tombstone anthology, but my story is one of the ones that shows up in the free sample chapters, which you can read here: http://www.baen.com/straight-outta-tombstone.html
And if you like those, snag the rest of that anthology. It’s got some great authors in it.
Also Baen has recently made a deal with Privateer Press to carry the books that I wrote for them. These are great, but most of my readers are unaware of their existence: http://www.baen.com/into-the-storm.html and http://www.baen.com/into-the-wild.html.
Into the Wild
*eARC stands for Electronic Advanced Reader Copy. The actual book doesn’t come out until August.eARCs are the uncorrected page proofs which would normally only go out to reviewers, but a long time ago Baen discovered that fans loved to get their hands on books early. So they went ahead and made the eARCs available for sales.
In an ongoing series, eARCs are really popular. I actually earned out my advance for Monster Hunter Nemesis off of eARC sales alone before the book ever came out. People always ask how close the eARC is to the finished product, but that depends entirely on the author and what shape their manuscripts are in when they get turned in. I’ve never had to make any significant changes on any of mine.
Ah yes, another opportunity to throw more of my money at the International Lord of Hate .
Done, as usual (grin)
CHA-CHING!
Now to go to my boss and call out sick for the rest of the day…
“That’s cool I guess.”
Started it last night. Really sad that (censored) is probably going to die.
Is that Holly on the MHS cover?
Quoting Lord John Whorfin “Damn You, Damn You to the HELL Buckaroo Bonzai”.
In the amazingly tiny chance that some soul who reads this, and likes Larry’s Monster Hunter series, or Hard Magic, and *hasn’t* read the steampunk dirty dozen that is Into the Storm, get off your butts and read it now. It is that awesome. You will thank me later.
Seconded. I gave it a chance when I was wishing I had more reading material from our esteemed blog host. That was money well spent.
I actually bought *Into the Storm* a few weeks ago, and it’s next on my list. I have no knowledge whatsoever about the *Iron Kingdoms* games (other than that they exist, and that Larry wrote some spin-off novels) but I doubt that will be a problem. I’ll have to try some *Dead Six* after that…
Pity I have to work today, but my night was short…
Really enjoying Siege!
Good one Larry! 🙂
Thank God for you. Sickest I’ve been in years, just finishing the Baroque Cycle again and Nowhither is still too much so… was nearing despair at finding something I can get into. But then I thought “Hey, isn’t Correia about due?” And sure enough, another awesome book everyone wants to read is here.
Loved it! Now I am dying for the next one!
Any idea when Monster Hunter Memoirs Saints comes out! I need my next hit man!
Purchased and read already. It’s awesome. Larry has more of my money. Hopefully he spends some of it buying match .308 and taking (remove name of firearm to avoid spoilers) to the range.
Lots more show, way less tell. Action action action. Really well done.
Just finished Into the Storm last week and almost finished Into the Wild today. I really enjoyed them and am looking forward to a third (or more)!
Bah! Damn you and your cliffhangers! Also, what’s the policy on spoilers here? I want to discuss the book, but I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone.
There is a spoiler thread over on the Monster Hunter International: Hunters Unite group.
Is there no way to host it here? I googled it and found it is a Facebook group, and I, for one, am not a member of Facebook or any other social media. But I would still like to see what other people are saying about it.
For the record….
I HATE CLIFFHANGERS!!!!
@Larry, can one assume that the cliffhanger at the end of the book (Not the epilogue, the end of the last chapter) shall be resolved with Monster Hunter Guardian and is the reason why Siege had to be published before Guardian.
Really mad at you for this one, due to the nature of the threat (can’t say more without being spoilerish) and me being a big softie, of course.
It had to unfold that way, because the timeline of Guardian overlaps with Siege.
Thanks for the answer, and now to wait for 2018 to stop grumbling. 🙂
On a side note, I didn’t get any notification of your reply even though I checked the box and got an email asking me to confirm I wanted a notification.
Uhm, yeah, gonna need more, just finish ed the e-arc
Good stuff. Finished it yesterday.
( Typo note: “Destroyer” gets shortened to “Destroy” in the first few pages. I hate auto-defect. )
Your productivity level is a goddamn inspiration. (goes without saying I’m throwing all my money your way right now)
Working on my first re-read.
Another grand slam, Larry.
Just finished it. Now I’m waiting for the audio book version and eArc for Guardian.
Any word on the sequel to Son of the Black Sword?
Working on it now.
Is that Holly on the cover?
Yep.
Cliffhangers are to get people to tune in next week for the next exciting episode; not to make people wait up to a year or possibly more to find out what happens next. What happened — did you have a contractual obligation to produce an MHI book and run out of time because you had so many irons in the fire, or did you get to a contracted for page count, and just decided to stop in the middle and call it a cliffhanger, or what?
Not happy.
Whoa… So that’s how cliffhangers work? And no books, movies, or TV seasons have ever ended with a big plot point unresolved for a year? Thanks. Didn’t realize that, probably because of the dozens of other books, movies, and TV shows I’ve seen do that.
Or maybe the whole story of Siege was told, you’re hung up over something that happened elsewhere off screen which wasn’t resolved (good, means I made you care), this is a middle book in an ongoing series so not everything will be resolved, I plot these things several books in advance, and the next book in the series (MHG) overlaps this one in the timeline and it was the only way those events could unfold in a manner that best told that upcoming story? And maybe I know what I am doing? :
But that’s cool. I do just love when people can read minds and guess shit about my contracts or job. No. I actually finished this on time. And also no, I don’t have too many irons in the fire. Out of 18 books I’ve written one other one ended with something big and pivotal unresolved (Swords of Exodus) that caused a bunch of people to bitch and moan, yet when the next one came out everybody saw what we were going for and that story was awesome.
But your lack of happiness is duly noted.
Oh yeah, and since you think I “stopped in the middle” that hypothetical book would have been 260,000 words, only I estimate MHG will actually run about 10k words longer. So basically to resolve that one plot point, which MUST OCCUR during the timeline of Siege (I needed Julie Shackleford on her own, cut off from assistance) it only takes a whole extra book.
So to hypothetically make you happy, I could have:
A. Tacked an addendum onto the end of Siege about how things turned out off screen, thus ruining all the tension and point of the entire next book.
B. Not had anything at all, which removes the tension and threat against the characters in Siege.
But yeah… it was totally that, and I just kind of fly along cluelessly by the seat of my pants making this shit up as I go, and I’ve just been lucky for the last 9 years only this time I ran out of time or had too many contracts or something OR maybe I know what I’m doing.
What made me think that there MAY hve been some reason other than the demands of the narrative at play was the fact that — and this is entirely subjective on my part — every other other MHI book that I’ve read, and I’ve read them all (I’m not incuding the Ringo collaborations; I found the first one so-so at best and annoying in places, and couldn’t bring myself to buy the second one) — anyway, all of them had incredible rising action that culminated in mind-blowing climaxes at least 75 pages long, except for Seige. It never really took off for me, although it did engage my attention, until towards the end when the story finally started to become gripping… and then abruptly I was left hanging. And yeah, I’ve always hated cliffhangers. And I lament the recent tendency for writers and TV producers to employ them so freely. As me dear sainted mum used to say, if everybody else jumped off a cliff (or left their readers hanging from one), does that make it alright for you to do it too?
So what you are saying is that every book I write should follow the same expected formula. And if I am not predictable and formulaic, I am doing it wrong.
Okay then. Career advice noted. I’ll just keep telling the stories I want to tell like I always have.
Your whole last bit, I already explained my reasoning. Sorry if you don’t get it, but I tell stories for a living. Just because somebody else has told a story that way before doesn’t make it right or wrong, because everything has been done.