These are all good things from my perspective; especially the bit about Jeffrey Archer being glum.




That is pretty annoying. I bet you'll still get your copy of the new volume before I get mine, though.




That's not spiffy on the cover, it's Shep. And that's not really a common mistake for folks to make!

I should perhaps warn you, however, that DYNASTY OF MARS is an entirely different novel to SPIRES OF MARS, and precedes it in continuity.

Y'see, what happened was I decided I wanted to do a novel to follow up an anthology of Blackthorn stories I'd contributed to a year or so earlier. That anthology was all from Blackthorn's point of view - the Earthman adventurer in space trope. I wanted to turn it around and do it from the female lead's perspective - the mysterious outsider comes into town and sets things right trope. So that meant I had to retell the main events from the first couple of short stories in a different way. And because I like my stories to be self-contained I ended up doing an epic that can stand alone.

DYNASTY starts about a thousand years before the anthology THUNDER ON MARS and it ends about two-thirds of the way through, except for the epilogue that continues after THUNDER'S epilogue.

It was one of three finalist nominees for best pulp novel of last year but didn't win, making three years running that's happened with my books (Robin Hoods 1 and 2 were also nominated).

I was convinced by the publisher to write a short free online story, maybe four parts or so, that could be used to promote the novel. Unfortunately that proliferated to thirty parts or so and became another novel. That's what you were reading online, SPIRES OF MARS, which fits after DYNASTY and just before the last story of THUNDER (a story I also wrote, and which I think might have got an award nomination for best pulp short story and also didn't win!).

At some stage I'm supposed to do a refining draft of SPIRES to smooth out the episodic recaps, provide prologue and epilogue, and then send it off so that can be properly published as an actual book. Then you can get drustrated with Amazon all over again.




Yay you. Thanks for taking an interest.