News

Download

news@koenmartens.nl

January 2023

1 participants
2 discussions

Newsletter 2023-01-20: Writing updates, join my launch team, two book tips and a flippin' music tip
by Koen Martens 20 Jan '23

20 Jan '23

Title 'Koen's Bi-montly Mailing' against backdrop of white binary digits on blue background Not showing correctly? Missing images? Click here for web version. <https://koenmartens.nl/20230120newsletter.html?mtm_campaign=nl&mtm_kwd=nl23…> Snow-covered tree in a snow-covered garden Prepping for launch I've just finished going over the feedback from the first round of editing on The Ein Particle <https://koenmartens.nl/pages/ein-1-the-ein-particle.html?mtm_campaign=nl230…>. The first draft came in at 98k words, and I had hoped to edit that down to around 90k, but ended up with 101k. Mind you, I did remove a lot of words, but I also added some on the advice of the editor, improving the structure and narrative arcs. The manuscript is back at the editor for a second round, and then it's ready to go out to my beta readers. I'm getting quite excited about this novel, and am slowly gearing up for launch (even though that's still months away). Getting a cover, writing the blurb, and everything else that needs to be in place, it's so energizing to get near the finish line. At the same time, lots of ideas for the sequel are bubbling up. Ideas that will take the characters beyond their original environment, into space, to explore more of their world (taking me along with them). Meanwhile, we had about 50 centimeters of snow here a few weeks ago. That all melted away, but then it started to snow again, and we now have 10 centimeters. Enough to make everything pretty. AI generated book with a rocket on the cover against a backdrop of shelves filled with books Join my launch team I'm expanding my launch team, so if you're interested in getting a free Advanced Review Copy (ARC) of The Ein Particle <https://koenmartens.nl/pages/ein-1-the-ein-particle.html?mtm_campaign=nl230…> and are willing to leave a review at the launch date, let me know! Getting enough reviews on launch date is very important to make sure Amazon will actually try to sell the book, and that will help me out immensely to attempt to recover part of the more than €10.000 I invested in this book (not to mention the countless hours I spent writing it). The review copies will go out in the second half of April (after copy-editing, but before proofreading). With the launch date set for June 17th, 2023, that's a good two months to read the book and write a review. Want to join? Let me know! Just hit reply on this email. <https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/167457a6-9273-11ed-ba1c-2b44d05aba54> Cliff Hock: Infestation Nation M. Rothmus /Who controls the universe?/ It's the distant future. Humanity has built a Dyson Sphere around the sun, which encompasses the inner planets. Cliff Hock is back to bounty hunting, but a strange case of amnesia has him questioning the events around him. Cliff Hock is caught in a "whodunnit" mystery that sends him into pocket dimensions he didn't know existed. But who is doing what? Who is Nexus Tobbs? And how did Cliff Hock know to travel 1,000 light years and through a wormhole to find him? Is the Dyson Sphere acting unlawfully? Why are the Contra Krugs involved? Are the people around him his friends or enemies? Cliff must unravel who is behind the puzzle, but he must also figure out what the puzzle even is. Where others have failed, Cliff Hock must succeed. Cliff is shown how to travel into echoes of the past. But this only presents him with fake Nexus Tobbses, who are mere memories of the actual person. The echoes are compromising Cliff’s own past. Buy from Amazon! <https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/167457a6-9273-11ed-ba1c-2b44d05aba54> Silhouette of humanoid looking out from viewport to a planet surface <https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/a5373a14-9208-11ed-955c-cb10ad430f4a> The Neighbor You Don't Know Shane Shepherd /Who controls the universe?/ After countless years of preparation Mission Terra Firme One is finally ready to commence and give Earth the answers it has long waited for, about the planet Neighbor. The TSS Cartographer is about to arrive and its First Officer Baldwin “call me Win” Tavares believes that he might just be able to touch his hand to that rocky ground and that’d be enough for him to learn everything there is to know about their old Neighbors, the things they’d done and what they’d left behind. But not everyone is as kind-hearted or has such noble intentions, and Neighbor holds more mysteries than anyone could have imagined. Exploring it might open the gates for a flood that threatens to drown everything, and Win must make decisions that hold his life, and that of all around him, at stake. Get the free preview! <https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/a5373a14-9208-11ed-955c-cb10ad430f4a> Cartoon girl with purple hair, red jacket with high collar wearing headphones and an eighties retro title <https://scottdanesi.bandcamp.com/album/total-nuclear-annihilation-expanded>Total Nuclear Annihilation One of my hobbies is pinball. And one of my all-time favourite pinball games is Total Nuclear Annihilation <https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=6444>. It's a relatively recent game, released in 2017, but everything about the game breathes retro. You know, that nostalgic throw-back style to the 80's, with the purple tones and computer-generated grid surfaces. For modern standards, the game is relatively simple. No ramps, no gimmicks, just a single-level play field. Yet the game is one of the most thrilling I know. Part of the excitement of playing this game is the soundtrack. With a deep bass thumping from the game's built-in sub-woofer, the music is an integral part of the experience. So if you play this, make sure you play it loud and with a good set of bass speakers (or indeed, a hefty sub-woofer). Check it out on Bandcamp <https://scottdanesi.bandcamp.com/album/total-nuclear-annihilation-expanded> or Spotify <https://open.spotify.com/album/0aOWrCBwtkGSsq8HA25rVW>. Find my book, the Isolated Futures Omnibus, on: Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VYFJK15/>Kobo <https://www.kobo.com/ebook/isolated-futures>Barnes & Noble <https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w?ean=2940160945323>Google <https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-yBlEAAAQBAJ>Apple <http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1615269317> Mastodon icon <https://hsnl.social/@gmc>Instagram icon <https://www.instagram.com/koenmartens_author/>Linkedin icon <https://www.linkedin.com/in/komartens/>Facebook icon <https://www.facebook.com/Koen-Martens-104281962311958>Email icon <mailto:in+newsletter@metro.cx>Link icon <https://www.koenmartens.nl/>RSS icon <https://koenmartens.nl/feeds/all.atom.xml>

1 0

Newsletter 2023-01-06: happy new year, home automation, a book tip and a synthy music tip
by Koen Martens 06 Jan '23

06 Jan '23

Title 'Koen's Bi-montly Mailing' against backdrop of white binary digits on blue background Not showing correctly? Missing images? Click here for web version. <https://koenmartens.nl/20230106newsletter.html?mtm_campaign=nl&mtm_kwd=nl23…> Narrow snow covered road winding its way through pine forest.Happy new year! I was going to write a pessimistic bit here about how 2022 was pretty shit, as far as the state of the world goes, and 2023 will be even worse, so why celebrate this arbitrary moment in time? I'm not one for making new year's resolutions anyway. Mind you, I do some goal setting now and then, and take stock of where I am with respect to those goals periodically, but it generally happens around spring time. Anyway. I realized pessimism is hardly going to entertain my dear readers now is it. So without further ado: All the best for 2023! Despite not having new year's resolutions there are some things I look forward to in the coming year. One of those is publishing my current WIP: The Ein Particle. I'm so looking forward to sharing that with you all. I'm wrapping up the first round of edits after the feedback from my editor, and will send the revised manuscript off to her for a second pass exactly ten days from now. Something else I'm looking forward to is extending our family of three (my husband, myself and our kitten Wifi) with another pawed critter. We're planning on getting a dog this year to complete the farm-house experience. Expect cute puppy pictures somewhere along the line. What about you? Do you have anything to look forward to in the (near) future to brighten up your live? Let me know, always eager to get to know my readers! Screenshot from home assistant app showing a graph of the heat pump's supply and return lines and brine in/out temperatures. Home Automation I thought I'd let you in on one of my (many) hobbies: home automation. Over the years, I've installed little gadgets all over the place to switch on and off lights, appliances and what more, connected together through Home Assistant, a free, open source and self-hosted home automation solution. It knows when we leave (by checking whether our phones are connected to wifi) and switch off the soldering iron in case I forgot, or starts to simulate our presence by turning on lights in the evening to thwart burglar's attempt at figuring out the coast is clear for them to plunder our stuff. We recently had a heat pump installed to keep us warm during the winter. I have that integrated with the home automation setup through the manufacturer's cloud server. What that means is that the heat pump will connect out over the internet to someone else's server somewhere in the world to upload its readings and download instructions. My home automation, in turn, goes out over the internet to connect to that same server, collect the readings (so that I can have pretty graphs) and sends instructions, such as setting the desired temperature (which, by the way, it bases on sixteen wifi-connected thermostat valves on the radiators in the house). This is all very round-about, and if the internet breaks, so does the whole thing. Also, I'm keen on keeping everything local for privacy reasons. I'm not interested in Amazon Echo's that record everything we say and relay that to Amazon's servers, nor do I want the heat pump's manufacturer to see when we take a shower or when we're on vacation. I was delighted therefore to find out that the heat pump has a secret menu, reserved for the company that installed the thing, in which I could enable a local protocol (modbus-tcp, if you're interested and into these things) that lets me cut out the middle man. With this, my in-house home automation server can connect directly to the heat pump over the local network without a need to involve the internet. Not only that, it offers far more detailed insights into the heat pump's operation and finer grained control of its functions. It's little things like this that get me excited. I agree, it all sounds a bit nerdy, but hey. As I said, I'm always curious to hear more about you and learn about my readers, so therefore I'll end with a question (or two). Are any of you into home automation? What does your setup look like? Let me know! Space-suited man against backdrop of planet and space <https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/2e01825a-7ff3-11ed-a32d-67be111e8b7a> Dropnauts J. Scott Coatsworth /It's time for mankind to go home. Diverse hopepunk sci-fi./ // Over a century after the end of the Earth, life goes on in Redemption, the sole remaining Lunar colony, and possibly the last outpost of humankind in the Solar System. But with an existential threat burrowing its way into the Moon's core, humanity must recolonize the homeworld. Twenty brave dropnauts set off on a mission to explore the empty planet. Four of them—Rai, Hera, Ghost and Tien—have trained for two-and-a-half years for the Return. They're bound for Martinez Base, just outside the Old Earth city of San Francisco. But what awaits them there will turn their assumptions upside down—and in the process, either save or destroy what's left of humanity. Get this short story for free! <https://storyoriginapp.com/swaps/2e01825a-7ff3-11ed-a32d-67be111e8b7a> Gray background with album and artist names in futuristic font <https://open.spotify.com/album/0BpEmLQOLxfaFVGw0gdcnc?si=e0JEfZVwQ6CSMZ-7Bq…> Music Inspired By Mega-City One Drokk Alex Ball's latest video on Oberheim's first synthesizers <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOCMNVOLkxM> made mention of a soundtrack composed for one of the Judge Dredd movies. The soundtrack was never used, but released as a stand-alone album. What makes this album intriguing is the exclusive use (if you discount the drum tracks that are present in some of the compositions) of the Oberheim Two Voice. Three of them to be precise. This is not background music. It's music to sit down for, dim the lights, close your eyes and imagine the narratives that could inspire this soundtrack. It's full of analog arpeggio's (recently re-popularised by the Stranger Things' theme), gloomy drones and gritty sounds. I've never seen any of the movies, nor have I read any of the comics, but this soundtrack does it for me. Check it out on Bandcamp <https://drokk.bandcamp.com/album/drokk-music-inspired-by-mega-city-one> or Spotify <https://open.spotify.com/album/0BpEmLQOLxfaFVGw0gdcnc?si=e0JEfZVwQ6CSMZ-7Bq…>. Find my book, the Isolated Futures Omnibus, on: Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VYFJK15/>Kobo <https://www.kobo.com/ebook/isolated-futures>Barnes & Noble <https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w?ean=2940160945323>Google <https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-yBlEAAAQBAJ>Apple <http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1615269317> Mastodon icon <https://hsnl.social/@gmc>Instagram icon <https://www.instagram.com/koenmartens_author/>Linkedin icon <https://www.linkedin.com/in/komartens/>Facebook icon <https://www.facebook.com/Koen-Martens-104281962311958>Email icon <mailto:in+newsletter@metro.cx>Link icon <https://www.koenmartens.nl/>RSS icon <https://koenmartens.nl/feeds/all.atom.xml>

1 0