This week, you might have seen a number of Twitter or Facebook ads show up in your stream for Trajectory Book 1. While I didn’t pick friends directly, it means the ad targeting “sciency, tech-savvy, smart-looking people” found you and included you in the population. There just aren’t that many of you on the planet.

The reason for all this hullabaloo is that I ran an Amazon Countdown Deal on Book 1 in the US. It was an experiment in marketing and it worked pretty well. I ended up in and around the top 100 in Hard Science Fiction in the US for the last week in October, peaking somewhere in the low 60s. That’s not bad. Don’t worry if you missed it, I’m going to be rolling promos over the next couple of months leading up to the release of Book 3 in every market I can. I’d be interested to hear if you end up in my netting. Or you could use an adblocker or something, which you probably should anyway. Watch the twitters or facebooks for deets about promotions.

Which brings us into November: It’s (inter)National Novel Writing Month! I’ve been working hard to get into a spot where I can crank out something resembling 50k words in thirty days and then carve that into a finished book in a month or two afterwards. I hope it works. The story I’m working on has been evolving and changing shape. The characters are coming together and forming posses and taking themselves where they will, so that’s an encouraging sign.

I’ll try to find some time mid-month to write something for my newsletter, but other than that, and the occasional bit of robot noises, I’ll probably be pretty quiet. If you get bored, I did a little interview with Ralph Kern over on SFFWorld recently and think it turned out pretty well. And they’ve got a ton of interviews and reviews on there that you’ll probably enjoy if you’re looking for stuff to read.

I don’t know how I’ll be able to do all this without a touch bar enabled keyboard, but I will persevere. Probably with coffee.