Category: Jeremy Robinson (Page 3 of 5)

Kane Looks Back – Callsign: King 2 (Underworld)

September 23, 2020 / JRobinson / 0 Comments

[“Kane Looks Back” is a series of posts where my editor, Kane Gilmour, will focus on some of my past novels that you might not have discovered yet. Now read on… –Jeremy]

So, yeah. The plan for the Chesspocalypse was one novella each for the five members of Chess Team. But in the months that it took for Jeremy to collaborate with the other authors, and for me to edit the stories, Sean Ellis was hard at work. And he’s relatively fast. And so is Jeremy. With these stories, when it came Jeremy’s turn to tweak the initial drafts, he either had a lot of work to make the stories adhere to his vision for the Chess Team universe or very little, depending on the authors with whom he was collaborating. He either had a lot of changes to keep characters consistent with who they were shown to be in the first three novels—or who Jeremy had plans for them becoming in his head—or very few changes. Sean Ellis really understood the team, and what Jeremy wanted. So, a perfect storm of Sean being fast, Jeremy needing to alter little, and delays with the other books because of writing schedules or editing process, all meant that a second novella with King was ready before the Bishop and Knight books.

Kane Looks Back – Callsign: Rook

September 16, 2020 / JRobinson / 1 Comment

[“Kane Looks Back” is a series of posts where my editor, Kane Gilmour, will focus on some of my past novels that you might not have discovered yet. Now read on… –Jeremy]

This one was kind of a slow burn, but that’s what was called for with this character. At the end of the last full-length novel, Rook was exhausted, demoralized, and crushed with guilt over the deaths of a team of men under his command. He was on the run, in hostile territory. So, he slips out of Russia to the north, aboard a boat. He has a fateful meeting with a woman destined to play a huge part in his life. Then he lands in Norway and hikes across the countryside. It’s clear he hasn’t quit Chess Team altogether. But he needs a breather. It’s less a case of him abandoning the team as taking an unannounced and very needed personal break.

Kane Looks Back – Callsign: Queen

September 10, 2020 / JRobinson / 0 Comments

[“Kane Looks Back” is a series of posts where my editor, Kane Gilmour, will focus on some of my past novels that you might not have discovered yet. Now read on… –Jeremy]

This was the first Chesspocalypse novella where I came on board as editor, and I was pretty harsh on this story by Jeremy and David Wood. And I like the story a ton, actually. Keen eyed readers will have spotted that I’ve blurbed a novel or two in David’s Dane Maddock series as well, so clearly I’m a fan of his work. But I think David chafed a bit at the huge amounts of corrections and changes I wanted on this tale. Hopefully, he’s forgiven me. But the story is now, I think, all the better for that brutal edit.

Kane Looks Back – Callsign: King

September 3, 2020 / JRobinson / 0 Comments

[“Kane Looks Back” is a series of posts where my editor, Kane Gilmour, will focus on some of my past novels that you might not have discovered yet. Now read on… –Jeremy]

So, for this Chesspocalypse novella, the first, I got to experience it the way the rest of you did—by reading it when it came out. Initially I was not the editor on the book, so I just got to read and enjoy it. (I’ve since gone in and touched up a few typos, but this one was remarkably clean.)

And what a ride it was! High praise to Sean Ellis for his inventive ideas on this one. The story involved a fabled Elephant Graveyard, a malevolent Artificial Intelligence (or was it a malevolent human disguised as an AI?), shootouts, car chases, a helicopter crash, and a woman with the power to end all life on earth by willing it–or by accidentally losing control! King really gets put through the wringer in this one. Jeremy and Sean collaborated on plot, Sean wrote the first draft, Jeremy tweaked and touched it up, and then it was out there in the world.

Kane Looks Back: The Chesspocalypse

August 27, 2020 / JRobinson / 0 Comments

[“Kane Looks Back” is a series of posts where my editor, Kane Gilmour, will focus on some of my past novels that you might not have discovered yet. Now read on… –Jeremy]

Gather round the campfire, children. It’s time for another installment of OLD MAN KANE REMEMBERS. This time we’ll be focusing on The Chesspocalypse. And because there’s so much to it, I’ll do it in installments. Today I’ll just talk about the Chesspocalypse as a whole, and then we’ll tackle each installment in the coming days. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Jeremy had written and had published three novels in the Jack Sigler / Chess Team series: PULSE, INSTINCT, and THRESHOLD. As I understand it, INSTINCT was meant to be first, but the publisher wanted something a little different, so Jeremy converted what had been a screenplay starring George Pierce, into what became PULSE. For those who might not have read these books, PULSE featured a special forces team facing the genetic tinkerings of a madman, which led to the accidental restoration of the Lernaean Hydra from Greek myth. It was a hard act to follow, but INSTINCT had the heroes return to face Neanderthal hybrids in the jungles of Vietnam, and in THRESHOLD, a previous villain returns seeking the protolanguage from the time before the Tower of Babel and uses it to animate golems to attack the world.