Let's get this out of the way immediately — we're not talking about 2020. 2021 has arrived, and as you've probably noticed already things are back in full swing in the Armadaverse. This post is a round-up of the plans for this year. Don't forget that there is a mailing list for the Armadaverse. It's recommended that you subscribe, because there's a good chance that the Armada Wars brand will abandon mainstream social media in the near future. Releases Planned for 2021 and Onwards...I am now resuming my original plan of interleaving the novel releases with the novella releases, albeit with the following changes:
My aim this year is to knuckle down and keep up a steady pace. I Dream of Damastion is already available for Kindle, with the paperback proof on its way to me even as I type. I am planning to have A Storm to the Savage ready for a release soon, then all efforts will be focused into Whom Gods Shall Fear. You may have noticed the artwork for IDOD changed in the past week, and the same iconography and cover design has been used for ASTTS. It will also be used for Forge Ruinous, although I have not yet chosen an image for the central glyph of FR's cover. Feel free to suggest your thoughts in the comments below. Steal from the Devil — the ReduxI've said before that there are aspects of Steal from the Devil which I now find embarrassing and or problematic. As a debut novel, although many readers do enjoy it, one can only really say that it was released way before it was ready. I've previously floated the idea of making some quite large changes. On those occasions I have received mostly negative responses, with people saying they would rather it was left just the way it is. I've decided to split the difference. As well as being generally tidied up (see below), SFTD is going to get some enhancements, clarifications, and — of course — a thorough stylistic edit. I want to be very clear that nothing will change substantially as far as the plot goes. What will happen is that characters and situations will get expanded text, so that it is clearer what is happening, and the consequences further down the line are more understandable. I will try to bring the style of the book into line with the sequels, without losing any of its weird atmosphere. I also aim to trim just a little fat — this means the teasers and references that ultimately went unused as the story found its own way through the sequels. If you have strong feelings about this, then please do say so in the comments. Kindle/Paperback RefreshesOver the years, with me having to update the same stories in various alternate files, discontinuities have crept into the published materials. These include vanishing custom fonts, different typographic conventions, and in some cases even material differences in the actual words of the books.
There is also the cap-wearing elephant in the room. A poll was conducted across Twitter and Facebook, and the overwhelming majority favoured a retrospective change to the lore where a certain acronym is concerned. The conventional air and ground assault forces will have to be called something different. Perhaps I just solved it there, and CAGA will be the replacement. The point is that I've had it up to the eyeballs with people assuming that the old acronym is a nod to Trump, despite it obviously having nothing to do with him, so I'm just going to change it. "AGRO" won the polls (standing for 'Air and Gound Recon Operations'), but I think I will save that label for a team of specialists in a future story :o) For all of those reasons, every single Kindle edition and paperback is going to be overhauled over the next couple of months. With the exception of I Dream of Damastion, which from today has the latest typography, corrections, and defined lore, all the updated versions will be released together. I will do my best to convince Amazon to push the Kindle updates out to existing customers, but only the changes to Steal from the Devil are likely to be considered significant enough to justify doing that. You don't have long to wait now before the next volume arrives from the Armadaverse: I Dream of Damastion is now available as a Kindle pre-order! It's been a dry couple of years for Armada Wars fans, and this expansion episode should hopefully slake your thirst prior to the release of the final full novel in the current series. Set during the events of The Ravening Deep, IDOD takes a sideways step from Caden and the others, and follows a different set of characters as they discover and resist Voice on a smaller and more claustrophobic scale. The People pages under the Universe category have now been completed for all characters seen or mentioned so far in the Great War of the Shaeld series. At time of writing this literally includes every named character, from civilians seen in passing to each and every member of Tanker Regiment seen in the last book. [Edit: since this article was first posted, new index pages have also been added for all characters by surname, all the women, and all the men.] This feels like a great achievement, since there are over 100 named characters, many of them linked to various events throughout the four existing novels and beyond. The "upcoming characters" page has now been removed, so the new characters who will be arriving in Perseus Aflame will be added to this site when the first book from that series — On Vicious Wing — is actually approaching its release date. Some characters from the first of the upcoming GWOTS-era novellas, however, do have partial profiles on the site already. These are:
That novella is of course I Dream of Damastion, which should be released before the end of the year and may help to tide people over until the much-delayed release of Whom Gods Shall Fear. The protagonist of another upcoming novella — A Storm to the Savage — also now has her own page. Watch this space. For serious fans of the Armadaverse, it's highly recommended that you take a deep dive into lore by reading the background and insights into your favourite characters! Originally due in 2017, Whom Gods Shall Fear is still notable by its absence. Regular fans of the series will have noticed that the production schedule went from a prolific, one-a-year assault on the readers' senses, to a long and painful wait set to the refrain "not yet but soon, not yet but soon..." All I can really do at this point is apologise. I'll probably write a longer post about this at some point — lord knows it must affect a large number of independent writers — but for now let's just summarise the root cause as a prolonged and non-trivial bout of depression. The thing about depression is that it saps not only your motivation to do anything, but it also affects your memory. With an author, for a long time it can pass undetected as "I'm just not feeling inspired." In fact, prior to recognising what the problem actually is, I was reading and re-reading my own books in order to "get re-inspired". And do you know what happened? My working memory must have been affected pretty badly, because in certain parts I kept wondering if I really wrote all this, and how. Weird huh. Anyway... the part you as the reader want to know: I am taking steps. Normal service is resuming bit by bit. My priority now will be to get WGSF finished, and I'm just going to stop suggesting release dates that may or may not be kept. The delay has had benefits. As I have mentioned previously in various spheres I have adjusted Voice's storyline so that his actions fit more smoothly into the overall Armada Wars story (I think I mentioned before I've got a couple of decades of releases planned out, which all contribute one way or another to a final conflict of prodigious proportions.) It's also given me, as you might expect, some first hand insight into some of the characters' situations, and rather than being a two-dimensional asshole Maber Castigon in particular will now be far more rounded via his flashback episodes. Also, while these delays have been ongoing, discoveries and observations have appeared in the astrophysics news which have direct impacts on the climax of the book and future plans. Hasty but careful adjustments are required! In related news, I've spoken to a few superfans about Tankers, and what is very clear is that there's an underlying need for their sub-world to be expanded. I included more of Tanker Regiment very deliberately in From Shattered Stars — purely because they were so well-received when they first joined the lead characters — but it seems there's still great demand to see more of them in action. Because of that, the planned novella Forge Ruinous may now be written as a full length novel. It will of course link in with the plot points in FSS, and I'll leave it to you to speculate as to how it does so. Writing this as a novel may somewhat delay the start of the Perseus Aflame series, but I guess delay is now becoming a tradition. Because of that change, the 'novellas' section of the web site has now been restructured as the Expansion Episodes section. RCV Happy August!
It's been a while, and you probably thought everything had ground to a halt in the Armadaverse. But fear not, for the wheels are always turning. When the blurb dropped for volume one of Perseus Aflame some people got so excited that a little bit of wee came out. You still have to wait until 2023–2024, but in about five seconds you will know what you're actually waiting for. The volume one book page has now been updated with the actual title... Over the past couple of weeks, the paperback editions have been quietly migrated from Createspace to Kindle Direct Publishing. This means faster and simpler delivery (now fulfilled by normal Amazon means), and full Prime availability. The opportunity was also taken to make some tiny tweaks to the content and covers.
As you might have heard, every Armada Wars novel available on the Kindle platform now has X-Ray content available. But what is it? And where? Put simply, X-Ray content gives you a compact, dedicated database right alongside a Kindle book. It contains profiles for characters, significant terms, and definitions. It can add depth to the world of the book, provide you with a means of quickly refreshing your memory, and give you quick and simple explanations. The X-Ray system can show you all the terms or characters on a page, or for the whole book, ordered alphabetically or by relevance. It also generates "notability" scores for some content, and it picks out passages which might be of particular interest. All in all this is a feature that succeeds in combining functionality with entertainment, and when you're exploring an expansive and subtly detailed world like the Armadaverse it's an invaluable companion. It's available from the tool strip at the top of any Kindle's reading page, or in the book menu on mobile devices. All the X-Ray content in the Armada Wars novels comes straight from the source, and it is designed to be consistent and spoiler-free. Due to the character limit for X-Ray entries there are of course much more extensive articles on this site: the web site's entry on the Rodori, for example, is vastly more interesting than the abbreviated version found in X-Ray. But the idea is to give you a quick summary of what a Rodori is, right while you're reading. How to get the latest X-Ray content: Simply delete the Armada Wars novels from your Kindle reading device/s, and then download them again. That's literally all there is to it!
The web site just keeps getting bigger, better, and badder! Here's whats been added or changed in the past week or so:
There have been yet more additions and improvements this weekend. Strap yourself in!
It's always good to know that people are visiting the site and poring over the information here, so feel free to comment.
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