In case you happened to be interested, Accepting the Lance is 96 chapters long, including the prologue and epilogue. That’s a lot of chapters. (It’s a third again more than the next-longest Liaden Universe novel, and about twice the series average.)
It’s enough to keep this blog going all the way through January and February and into March. By then, I may have figured out what’s going to happen next.
In advance of the publication of Accepting the Lance, there is a new Liaden story up on the Baen.com homepage, titled “A Visit to the Galaxy Ballroom” and described as “within the timeline of Accepting the Lance“.
I won’t be reading and posting about it until after Accepting the Lance, because my experience has been that when I read the forerunner short story first I spend the entire novel being distracted waiting for something related to the short story to show up, but you go ahead and read it whenever suits you.
This site has now made the switch to using a secure transfer protocol, which is considered best practice for sites that have audience interaction even if we don’t ask for any sensitive information.
The only visible difference this should make to your user experience is that the site address now begins with “https” instead of “http”. Old links and addresses beginning with “http” will be redirected automatically, but links that change colour to show that you’ve visited a page will reset to the unvisited colour until you visit the new address. If you were using the link colours to keep track of which pages you’ve visited, we apologise for the inconvenience.
Sharon Lee’s latest blog post contains news likely to be of interest, including the contents of A Liaden Constellation Volume Four, and two upcoming anthologies containing new Liaden Universe stories.
Three new Liaden stories have been announced for release in the near future:
According to one of the announcements, “Degrees of Separation” is a prequel to “Block Party”.
I have found that it works better for me to cover the novel before the associated short story, so I’ll be doing Neogenesis first, probably beginning on 6 January, then “Block Party”, then “Degrees of Separation”.
Sharon Lee has announced the publication of Adventures in the Liaden Universe® Number 24, containing a novella titled “Due Diligence”. The name of the protagonist rings a bell, so I think it’s someone we’ve met before, but I’m going to see if I can figure it out from context before I resort to checking my notes.
[ETA: Don’t read the comments on this post if you haven’t read the story and worry about spoilers.]
The latest Liaden Universe novel, The Gathering Edge, is now out in hardcover, ebook, and audio. To accompany it, there is also a free short story on Baen.com, Cutting Corners.
The last couple of times, I’ve read the short story as soon as it came out, and then wished I’d left it until after the novel. So this time, I’m going to leave it until after the novel, and see how that goes. You, of course, may read them in whatever order suits you.
In case you haven’t seen them, a couple of recent posts on Sharon Lee’s blog — Liaden Universe® InfoDump Number 117 and Saturday morning book talk — contain an overview of what’s newly published, what’s to be published soon, and on into the future (including, in the latter, the first details of what Lee and Miller will be writing after the current five-book Liaden Universe story arc has wrapped).
The lead story in the infodump is a new chapbook containing a new Liaden Universe story, which will of course be covered here sometime soon.