And today I was pleasantly surprised to see that the same reviewer has already finished The Kaiser Affair and found it a delightful improvement, saying it’s “terrific – four stars“. So now that the matter is settled for all time, you need to get The Kaiser Affair and read it right now!

And…. go!

Well, it’s not completely old fashioned.

• The story takes place in ancient Ethiopia, and it features a band of magi clerics from Arabia.
• The hero thinks he is a prince destined to save his kingdom. Spoiler alert: He is wrong.
• When our heroes confront unspeakable demonic horror, they are actually traumatized by it.
• The hero finds himself in a love triangle with two women, and he is not the center of the triangle. (Do triangles have centers? I guess they do if you color them in. Otherwise they’re just outlines, right?)
• There are also glowing winged angels and mysterious jinn, which are both exactly what you would expect, and yet different.
• Their mission to save the world does not involve killing or destroying anything, it involves fixing something. (But they do kill a bunch of demons along the way. Because, you know, demons.)
• The heart of the story is about a group of people who grow closer together during their terrible journey and experiences (as opposed to people who turn against each other). I’d like to think this is the opposite of dark and gritty “grimdark” fantasy. I mean, it’s not My Little Pony, but it is built on threads of hope and love, and there’s only one scene in the whole book where people hurt other people.
• It’s hard to describe this thing properly. There is some demon gore, but there’s also genuine (dare I say sentimental) romance and humor.

If you’re interested in test-reading The Falcon Prince, shoot me an email promising to send me your comments by Sunday May 19. No edits or anything detailed, just your general thoughts and feelings. Did you like it? Did it make sense? What was your most favorite/least favorite part?

Something free on Amazon

Because it wouldn’t Friday if something wasn’t free! Head to Amazon to get The Clockwork Girl (Zelda Pryce #2) on your Kindle, DRM-free of course. That’s the one about the inventor who makes magic prosthetics that turn her clients into superheroes, and then she takes on a big corporate conspiracy to save a bunch of lives. I mean, who wouldn’t want shiny brass and silver legs that can leap tall buildings in a single bound?

My next book

I mean after The Falcon Prince (or possibly before it, depending on scheduling). Yes, I will be diving back into the Drifting Isle series this year with The Shadow Gambit, for those of you who like funny, sexy steampunk mysteries. But first, I’m going to do a little palate cleanser. A fantasy novella that plays on all my favorite old school video game tropes (and by “plays on” I mean completely overturns).

Your only clue about this new novella: “Jacaranda”

from me, Joe, series author

• The release of the novel The Kaiser Affair
• Guest post on Fantasy Book Critic about shared worlds
• Guest post on Fantasy Book Critic about The Kaiser Affair
• Reviews on LibraryThing and GoodReads
• Reviews by Rachel Cotterill and Mel’s World

from MeiLin Miranda, series author 

• The release of the novel The Machine God
• Read The Machine God online here
• Guest post on Fantasy Book Critic about collaborative writing
• Review on Fantasy Book Critic

from Charlotte E. English, series author

• The release of the novel Black Mercury
• Request a free copy of Black Mercury on LibraryThing
• Guest post on Fantasy Book Critic about talking birds

About the series

• The Drifting Isle Chronicles homepage
• The Chronicler’s Guide [PDF] for writers who want to join the project

What’s the big deal?

This is not just one book. Well, it’s just one book from me, but The Kaiser Affair is part of the first trilogy of The Drifting Isle Chronicles, a ground-breaking new fantasy series… and the other books are also being released today! How can it be so?

Last year, I teamed up with a group of fantasy authors for an unprecedented new project. We created the world of the Drifting Isle together through endless brainstorming, debating, and voting, and when the world was ready we each set out to write our own novels in it. And here we are.

You’ve probably heard of “shared worlds” before. On rare occasion, authors will collaborate on a short story anthology, like the superhero Wild Cards series. Of course, franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars are filled with books by different authors. And from time to time, a beloved author will die with a series unfinished (like Dune), and other writers will then step in to continue the series.

But to the best of our knowledge (which is admittedly limited), The Drifting Isle Chronicles is the first original series in publishing history to be created, written, and published simultaneously by a team of independent authors. Which is kind of a big deal.

About the book: The Kaiser Affair

Here’s the blurb:

When a master thief escapes from prison, detective Bettina Rothschild must put him back behind bars before the scandalous fiasco destroys the Ministry of Justice. Her investigation leads from decaying cemeteries where ravens conspire to warehouses where wondrous machines are built in secret, and even to the fabled Drifting Isle above the city of Eisenstadt where an ancient tomb hides a deadly secret.

The relentless chase proves taxing for a young woman who relies on her cane and her steamcarriage to get about, but that’s where a good husband steps in. While Bettina picks locks and interrogates suspects, her beloved Arjuna defends her from the most brutal and bizarre assassins in Eisenstadt.

But as the clock ticks down, Bettina finds too many questions still remain. How did the thief escape from prison? How can he afford to hire so many killers? And why would he go to the Drifting Isle only to steal a giant beetle?

If you liked The Burning Sky, but wanted a little more Victorian flair and some steamy romance, this is your book. You can buy it in all the usual places:

Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Smashwords - Kobo

About the series: The Drifting Isle Chronicles

The world of the Drifting Isle is a combination of classic fantasy magic and wonder mixed with industrial steampunk toys and politics. It’s a city of steam and steel, as well as flying islands, talking birds, musical enchantments, and shadow-walking assassins.

We originally set out to publish five books all at once, but reality has a way of ruining ambitious plans. So today we are bringing you the first three books:

• Black Mercury . . . by Charlotte E. English
• The Kaiser Affair . . . by Joseph Robert Lewis
• The Machine God . . . by MeiLin Miranda

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because Book 4 will be out later this year, and Books 5 and 6 will be out next winter, and I’ve heard a rumor of a Book 7 being developed for next year as well. We don’t plan on stopping any time soon, but we also don’t plan on doing this alone.

Because this is not a closed garden. We are opening up the Drifting Isle universe to accept book proposals from outside writers. From you! To learn how you can be a Drifting Isle Chronicler and publish your own official DIC novel, download The Drifting Isle Chronicles – The Chronicler’s Guide [PDF] and start reading.

Last but not least, we have a new site setup for the series, which you can visit here:

The Official Site of the Drifting Isle Chronicles

Frequently Asked Questions

(To be fair, there haven’t been any questions yet, frequent or otherwise, because this is Day One of the series, but you get the idea.)

Q: If all the books are by different writers, aren’t they all in different styles and voices?

Absolutely they are. That’s the whole idea. If you like my other books, then you will almost definitely like The Kaiser Affair. And if you want to try out the other writers’ books, you may discover whole other worlds of writing that you enjoy. You may not, but variety is the spice of life.

Q: What order should I read the books in?

Officially, there is no order to the DIC books. The first three books all take place at the same time, each one following the lives of different characters, but intersecting and overlapping with the other books from time to time. Technically, if you want to be really chronological about it, you should read them in the order listed above: Black Mercury, The Kaiser Affair, The Machine God.

Q: Who did that awesome cover art?

All of the covers were done by Elsa Kroese, the very talented artist behind the webcomic Spindrift. Go check that out.

Starting today and running until Sunday, you can get Zelda Pryce: The Demon Hunt on Amazon for your Kindle for free. Go get it!

It is FREE, people.

This is the third book in the Zelda Pryce trilogy. How crazy awesome is this urban fantasy adventure? Let’s see:

• Lots of demons (obviously)
• A plague
• A couple of genetically engineered elves (not Elvis, elves!)
• A Siberian prison
• Time travel (which is impossible)
• A Chinese temple
• An apocalypse
• A Kenyan wildlife preserve
• A second apocalypse
• A magical city
• The south pole
• One badass boomerang

Plus all the arcane inventions you can shake a stick at, a flying heroine, a super-strong best friend, a charming ex-boyfriend, and an epic conclusion to an exciting series.

Did I mention it’s free?

Go get it!

The Ancient World:

The Oceans:

• You want to sail around the world, but there are entire continents in your way? Panama Canal! Suez Canal!
• Want to see the deepest spot in Earth’s oceans? Send James Cameron all by himself!

Outer Space:

• Can’t tell what sort of cheese the moon is made from? Apollo! With a car!
• Want to know if there’s life on Mars? Send a giant robot! (Which is also a car!)

Medicine:

• Polio getting you down? Vaccine’d it!
• Smallpox ruining your day? Cured it!
• Sad that HIV can’t be cured? CURED IT! (no seriously, we did, sort of)
• Need to diagnose your cancer faster? Have a teenager do it for less than a nickel!

And this is so inspiring, and also so frustrating. We seem to have shifted from building enormous, amazing things to solving niche problems. Why aren’t we still doing the really big crazy projects?

For example, why haven’t we frowned at that Sahara Desert business and said, “This thing needs a giant water pipeline! Let’s green this bad boy up! We’ll have a jungle on this side, and some farms on that side, and some revived species of endangered plant and wildlife over there, and a water park over here for the kids. Boom. Solved.” (Well, here’s one reason we haven’t.)

Why haven’t we frowned at those recurring hurricanes in the Atlantic and said, “This thing needs some giant pillars and walls standing out in the middle of the ocean to slow down tropical storm winds and break up hurricanes before they reach land. They’d also be convenient navigational and communications tools, and could double as a wind farm! Nailed it.”

Why haven’t we frowned at those annual wildfires in the American south-west and said, “This thing needs a forest of genetically modified Ponderosa pine trees that absorb more sunlight, break up high winds, and generally prevent California from bursting into flames every August. Fire ecology be damned!”

What amazing projects would you like to see the human race tackle? (And you can’t say world peace because I want to hear big ideas about science and engineering.)

The Halcyon books are really simple “Good Guys chasing Bad Guys” stories. There are no Big Ideas in those stories. But there are Big Ideas in the backgrounds. The Burning Sky is a steampunk thriller set in North Africa, in a matriarchal country. The Incas defeat the Spanish. The heroine is happily married and there is no romantic subplot. Those are all slightly unusual features for steampunk, I think.

The Europa books play with Norse and Russian mythology. Freya the Huntress features a viking warrior who is deaf mute and uses sign language. It’s not a plot-issue, it’s just a fact of his character. And again, the heroine is happily married without romantic drama (but several very erotic scenes). No dating, no affairs. Just happy marriage… with witches and werefoxes and ghosts. Like you do.

The Chimera books focus on eastern cultures. The Dragon and the Lotus is about two women with a very positive and undramatic friendship who help (and confront) people dealing with very traumatic losses and dilemmas, including the deaths of loved ones. There is a lot of drama, and almost no action. It’s a quiet book, even a slow book, and in fact it’s one of my favorites of my own books.

And while I’ve won some very loyal and kind fans, I’ve noticed that it’s only a few.

So am I doing it wrong? Am I focusing on the wrong things, or in the wrong ways?

Do I need to move beyond my obsession with subverting genre expectations and start writing about Big Ideas with more romantic drama?

Am I leaving out things that make for good stories?

Let me know what you think. And if you’re new here, you can download some of my books from my site to see what I’m talking about.

And it’s not just something that hurts people, but it’s also something that consumes a huge amount of human effort to create, and that also offends me on a whole other level. Because this thing doesn’t need to exist at all. We make it. We inflict it on ourselves! And this horrible thing is…

Soda.

Ah yes, soda. As a group, we the human race invest an enormous amount of wealth, time, and energy to create cans of soda. And it’s horrifying.

For a moment, try not to think of people as being divided across countries or companies. Imagine you’re an alien (or an angel, your choice) floating up above the planet Earth, looking down. You don’t see nationalities or corporate borders. You just see people, scurrying around. And a lot of them are making soda.

First, we make the cans

First, we create tools to build factories, to assemble huge machines that can mine bauxite in Australia and Jamaica. Mining is a huge undertaking, ripping up a chunk of the planet’s crust to yank out natural resources. It generates lots of pollution, destroys natural habitats, and occasionally kills people. So it’s a big deal.

Then we create huge metal ships fueled with liquefied dinosaur bones (“oil”) to carry the raw bauxite to Europe or America to another huge factory complex to be refined into aluminum ingots. The aluminum ingots are then shipped to yet another factory to be turned into sheets and folded into cans.

Thousands of people all over the world, working very hard in very dangerous occupations, some for very low pay, all to make these cans. And tons of cans go into landfills after just a few minutes of actual use. All that effort, lost.

Just think about that effort for a minute. Those people could be creating art, or teaching children, or making actual food, or just resting at home doing nothing at all but enjoying a little thing called being alive. Instead they’re in these factories, “being productive.”

Then, we make the soda

Then, another facility combines thousands of gallons of water, sugar, and other chemicals (like phosphoric acid, which we’ll talk more about in a minute) to make the actual soda, and place it in the cans. The cans are then stored in warehouses, shipped in trucks, and stocked in refrigerated cases and vending machines.

And remember, every ship, truck, factory, warehouse, and vending machine requires its own supply chain or lifecycle of tools and resources to come into being. Lots of people had to work for many years to create and maintain all this infrastructure, including the concrete, bricks, glass, wiring, computers, and robots, as well as the raising and training of the workforce.

So every little step in this process (in any human process) represents a ton of time and effort. And that’s time and effort that might have gone into sending robotic cars to alien planets or dreaming up new ways to generate energy or fighting cancer or teaching children to play nice. But it didn’t.

The horror part

And all of this human effort, all over the world, culminates in a person drinking a beverage that has zero nutritional content. Zero.

Okay, so it’s not healthful. But why is soda really so bad? Here’s the short list.

When you drink soda,

1. You get hit with 100% of your daily allowance of sugar and the only reason you don’t vomit is that they add phosphoric acid to reduce the sweetness (let me repeat: they have to add chemicals to soda so it won’t make you throw up);
2. Your liver tries to fight the sugar with insulin, which turns all your sugar into fat;
3. Your body hits your brain with a ton of dopamine, just like heroin does;
4. Our good friend phosphoric acid then latches onto the calcium, magnesium, and zinc in your digestive tract (from eating healthy food) so you can’t absorb those important minerals;
5. You suddenly have to pee, flushing out all that calcium, magnesium, zinc, and even the water from the soda, leaving you dehydrated and nutrient deprived;
6. You crash from the sugar high, leaving you tired and grumpy.

[ Source ]

But that’s not all, folks! Let’s run down the whole list.

Soda causes obesity, diabetes, dehydration, tooth decay, bone decay, high cholesterol, liver damage, kidney damage, muscle loss, asthma, accelerated aging, memory loss, nerve disorders, infertility, hormone imbalances, hypertension, cancer, and heart disease, all of which lead to human suffering and death (not to mention all sorts of high healthcare costs).

[ Source - Source - Source - Source ]

Last thoughts

So now imagine you’re that alien (or angel) watching from on high as thousands of humans labor for millions of hours, every day, year after year, to create a food product that only (ONLY) causes sickness and pain.

And for what? So their boss’s boss’s boss’s boss can get just a little richer.

Here ends the sermon. I just needed to get that out. Obviously, there are lots of other “food products” just like this, things that don’t need to exist, that people work hard to create and that only cause harm to people. It’s both a crime and a waste.

Next time, I’ll rant about something positive. And then I’ll talk about books again, I promise!