A. B. KEUSER

It's finally here, a new book.
Feels like ages since I've had one of those.
(Over two years. Yikes!)

I won’t bore you with all the gritty details of what went on in those two years. Not in this post anyway.

Instead, let’s talk about the book!
Like almost all of my other books, this one takes place in another galaxy, long after Earth is gone and everyone's stopped talking about it except when they want to mis-remember how great it was at the end.
It is the first book that has used my day-job as the inspiration for my main character's job and daily interactions with technology inside the plot.

And, as always, it's got a dose of alien in there with the rest.
The Boundary Zone - Mackenzie Flack plays with live wires for a living--both on and off book. For the last six months, she’s spent her downtime stealing decommissioned parts from a space station in the midst of tear-down. There’s no quicker way to acquire an excess of cash. And cash is what she needs to get her h…

~ A century and a half before I was born, a Kindiran woman warned her race of their coming doom. Her pleas for caution were met with ridicule.
She offered hope for salvation, but like all legends, interpretation of truth is often impossible until a foretelling comes to fruition. A two-headed chameleon, born of a false mother…. Those who listened thought her mad.
Electricity crackled through Kindiran veins, igniting a pride the likes of which the universe has never since seen. They bought her silence with a blade slicked in blood. And within a year, their less evolved cousins hunted them to extinction.
But that’s what humans have always been good at.


One
Mackenzie Flack had been electrocuted more times than she’d been kissed. And she’d enjoyed more of the zaps. She slapped a magnetic light strip against the crumpled bulkhead. The cicada-like device glowed a steady yellow as it clicked to life and she peered into the compartment laid open like a cadaver’s chest cavity. Clotted with splintered wi…

There are days where writing is a sisyphean task.

Days where I wish I could split myself in twelve to get everything I want to get done completed.

Days where I wish I could plug a jack into the base on my skull and do a full cerebral dump… sort out the mess when it’s on a computer screen.

Days when that biting little voice tries to eat away at my confidence and tries to convince me I couldn’t possibly have done that thing past Amy did…. And I certainly can’t do it again, even if I did.

I’ve never met a writer who didn’t feel that way from time to time.

Writing is hard.

You spend so much time in your own head, the act walks that fine tightrope between art and trade, and the internet is full of people who seem like they’re doing so much better than you--and worse, people who want to tear you apart to see what color your insides are.

I do a decent amount of writing in bars.

Ninety percent of that writing is in the form of snippets pieced together on my phone. The other ten percent (for a ver…

I hate when I hear people say they’re “an aspiring writer.”
Because invariably, they’re wrong. They don’t want to be, they already are.

If you write, you’re a writer.
If you’ve written a book (even just a spotty and fractured first draft), you’re an author.

The only way to be an aspiring writer is to never actually try. If you spend all your time thinking about it without ever putting pen to paper or fingers to keys… then you can say you’re aspiring and be completely truthful.

Aspirations are about not doing something. Once you’ve started doing it, you’re no longer aspiring, you’ve passed that bar!


There are two reasons I think people use this:

1- Most of the times I have heard this (when it wasn’t said directly to me) the statement was made to a traditionally published author, or someone on a convention panel. And I think it became the thing to say in this situation because it sounds better than “I want what you have.”

Maybe people think that sort of statement will come off as somethi…