The three fine people who won galley copies of A Sword From Red Ice are: Sorry if you entered and didn’t win. There were some excellent emails and very good cases made. I wish I’d had more copies to give away.

I’ve received lots of emails about the galley copy. Thank you. Too many to respond to in person, but I read them all. People have made very good cases for why they should receive a galley. There’s some persuasive readers out there. It’s getting hard to pick, so with that in mind I’m going to narrow the field down to the twenty best emails and then do a random drawing. There’s still four days to go if you haven’t thrown your hat into the ring. The drawing will be on August 20th. I went kayaking on Sunday. The water was 74 degrees--warm for San Diego. We went at sunset, but as you can see from the photo, the sky was overcast (which also made it impossible to see the Perseids later in the evening). Surfing into shore I got a dunking. Even as I was thrown off the kayak and tumbled by the breakers, I kept a firm hold of the paddle--one less thing to hit me over the head.

While I'm on the water I like to let my mind wander. The surface is black and if you look west you can't see anything on the horizon. After a while you realize what's missing: Noise. Beyond the breakers all is quiet. It gives one space to think.

Galleys are bound promotional copies of books that are produced to enable buyers, reviewers, sales teams and writers to read the book before it’s published. Generally, galleys haven’t been copy-edited so there’ll be typos and other errors. Sometimes, depending on when the galley is produced, the story might even change. The galley for A Sword From Red Ice features a couple of things you won’t find in the actual book when it comes out in October. I have three of these beauties to give away. Your mission is to read and review. The reviews will then be posted on this website. If you’re up for the job, email me with the word GALLEY in the header and let me know why you’d make a good reviewer.

My dad, William Jones, passed away when I was a teenager. He loved Science Fiction. Paperback editions of Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert, Pohl, Bester and others were always lying around the house. The covers managed to be both exciting and cheesy at once: figures in silhouette caught in mysterious forcefields, semitransparent hands with eyes, gas clouds shaped like skulls. I remember picking up a first edition of Dune and reading the cover blurb. Sounded pretty interesting so I read the first paragraph. After that I was hooked. Thanks to Dad I had an early introduction into the world of science fiction. Faraway planets, missions to Saturn, wormholes, star troopers, mysterious aliens and civilizations: the seventies were a fantastic time to read SF. Men had just landed on the moon. What was next? It was fun to imagine new galaxies and the spaceships that traversed the void to reach them. Many things seemed possible, and those possibilities fired my imagination. And made me want to write.