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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

And Michael Moorcock writing a new Elric story.

Title is now Swords & Dark Magic. Thanks for the interest. It won’t disapppoint, I promise!

And you can add Gene Wolfe to the list of contributors too. Plus a whole lot more.

Both because the action centres around a ring of standing stones called the Heroes, and because it’s about heroism and that (meant semi-ironically, of course). It mostly takes place over the course of three days, and is the story of a single battle for control of the North. Think Lord of the Rings meets A Bridge Too Far, with a sprinkling of Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. It’s about war, you get me? Principally it follows the (mis)adventures of six assorted persons on both sides and different levels of command, whose paths intersect during the course of the battle in various fateful, horrible, wonderful, surprisingly violent, surprisingly unviolent, and hilarious ways. With the Northmen: a veteran losing his nerve who just wants to keep his crew alive, an ex-Prince determined to claw his way back to power by any means necessary, a young lad determined to win a place in the songs for himself. With the Union: A depressive swordsman who used to be the king’s bodyguard, a profiteering standard-bearer, and the venomously ambitious daughter of the Marshal in command. But of course a fair few familiar faces show up on both sides…

I’m just finishing up the first draft of the second part of five, so two fifths of the way through, about 85,000 words in. Which means the whole thing is looking like about 220,000 words – similar length to Best Served Cold and Last Argument of Kings. Really want to write some shorter books one of these days. REALLY want to. Provided I keep writing relatively smoothly (which is by no means a certainty given that we’ve got a massive building project starting over the next few months), the whole first draft will hopefully be done spring next year. A fair bit of editing will no doubt be required, though, meaning that an October publication is just too tight. For small fry like me November through January is pretty much the zone of death, which means February 2011 is probably the soonest you guys can expect to see it lighting up the shelves, alas.

That’ll mean 20 months between books, which is a fair bit more than I’d like in general but, hey, maybe I’ll be able to get a head start on the next thing (yeah, right). It also means no book from me in 2010, though I’ll have a short story out in an anthology. So, the headlines:

The Heroes. It’s about War. February 2011 (hopefully).

Something else I can reveal, by kind permission of the masterminds involved.

Lou Anders and Jonathan Strahan have been working to put together a collection (tentatively) titled Conquering Swords, an anthology of new swords-and-sorcery tales from the various young turks currently working in that vein, along with new tales from some of the Old Masters and Mistresses.

I sold them a short story titled “In the Stacks,” in which an armed expedition attempts to return books to an ancient magical library that has gone feral from all the long centuries of percolating in its own strange energies.

Lou’s take on the project is here, and Jonathan’s is here. They’ve given me a rather mind-blowing list of the writers officially involved, but that hasn’t been formally released yet, so I’ll just name-drop the ones that have spoken or been referenced in public: Glen Cook, James Enge, Steven Erikson, C.J. Cherryh, and yours truly.

Look for it in 2010, and look for various announcements from Lou and Jonathan before then.