The hardest to write well is probably Andrew’s wife, ace drop ship pilot Halley, because she is a different personality altogether. He’s a different person in book 4 than he was in book 1, but everything was a logical consequence of his slowly increasing experience and responsibilities. Marko: Andrew is easy to write because we share a few character traits (and because I get to spend my time in his head a lot), but his character arc is still positively surprising because his outlooks and ethics kept evolving organically with the story. TQ: Which character in the Frontlines series (so far) surprised you the most? Who has been the hardest character to write and why? I also had a certain Russian battlespace coordinator on the mission with Andrew in CHAINS OF COMMAND, but having him in the story didn’t quite work, so I had to put the poor guy back on the shelf, to return in style for FIELDS OF FIRE. It’s pretty safe to say that my outline may have been a little ambitious in scope. The events of CHAINS OF COMMAND were originally part of the outline for ANGLES OF ATTACK, the book that came before it. Marko: First off-it wasn’t supposed to be its own book. TQ: Tell us something about Chains of Command that is not found in the book description. It’s a much busier life now, but it’s amazingly fulfilling.

Now I am on someone else’s schedule, and the process involves a lot of people. Before, when I was still looking for an agent and a publisher, I was working on my own schedule. Then you have to keep turning in manuscripts, do developmental edits, be available for side projects and interviews and fan mail, and so on. The biggest revelation was that landing an agent and a book deal isn’t the finish line, it’s just the starting line. My agent, the hyper-capable Evan Gregory with the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, guided me through the process and made sure I don’t sell my stuff for the royalty equivalent of a handful of inert magic beans. Marko: I knew practically nothing about publishing when TERMS came out.

TQ: What do you wish that you knew about book publishing when Terms of Enlistment came out that you know now? The only difference between the processes for Terms of Enlistment and Chains of Command is the medium-I wrote the first draft of Terms mostly in longhand, but because of the time constraints of the series, I write my first drafts mostly on the computer now. It’s a sort of pantser/plotter hybrid method that works well for me.

Marko: Thank you! My writing process is still largely the same-I work off a chapter outline that hits all the major plot points, but leaves me some elbow room along the way. Has your writing process changed (or not) from when you wrote Terms of Enlistment (Frontlines 1) to now?

Your new novel, Chains of Command (Frontlines 4), was published on April 19th.

Terms of enlistment book