Hey. It’s me, JB, apologising for clogging up your inbox if this means nothing to you, but… if you’ve been waiting until World War 3.2 appeared on Kindle Unlimited so you can read it for ‘free’ (whereby ‘free’ I mean you agree to give Jeff Bezos your credit card number and possibly some of your DNA every month)… your time is here.
WW 3.2 is now on Kindle Unlimited.
If that means nothing to you, perhaps I can make good on bothering you by giving you a sneak peek of WW 3.3, due out in November.
I’ve dropped a couple of freebie chapters over on my Patreon. No subscription required to read – just an interest in whatever happened to everyone’s favourite submarine commander, Jane Willett. (Spoiler: she went surfing).
It’s a long extract, two chapters. And you can see the benefit of going long with this series. Suddenly, I’ve got room to explore all the various alternate histories.
Here’s a teaser:
Jane Willett tamped the ground coffee as if setting a jewel in its place. The kitchen was dark but for a cone of lamplight, shadows pooling in the corners. She liked it that way, the Deco geometry half-hidden, a secret she kept for herself. She moved through her morning ritual amid the stubborn beauty of chrome handles and glass tiles: the same routine every day. The twin alarms, sparrows calling one after the other, first her phone at 05:50 and then the alarm clock at 05:51. The shock of bare feet on cool boards. The robe tugged close against the window’s draft. She silenced the phone first, then a minute later, the little Sony, trilling its warning against the temptation of crawling back under covers.
The ocean, invisible beyond in Bondi’s blacked-out curve, sent the steady crunch and hissing crash of big winter sets to her, a pulse she’d lived by for a decade now, like a second heartbeat. But the only rhythm that mattered in the apartment for the next few minutes was the dance between coffee, machine, and heat.
The same routine every day.
With two neat raps on the bench, she freed the filter of air, tamped the grounds once more, then checked the rim for any stray grit that might channel and ruin the shot. She twisted the handle until it sat snugly, then watched as the machine’s pressure gauge lifted its needle, the boiler preparing a whisper of steam. The kitchen air was cold enough to cloud her breath.
A moment of stillness, then. Listening. Not to the waves this time, but to the machine, a low hum, the soft hiss as water pressed into compacted coffee, the first viscous drips gathering and then thickening to a caramel rope. She adjusted the shot by instinct, a feather-light touch chasing perfect balance because anything less would be an insult to the engineers and craftsmen who designed and built this beautiful device, and to the farmers who had grown the coffee beans she had ground fresh a minute earlier.
“Look’t you, Willett,” she murmured happily to herself. “Getting your Olive and Lexus on at zero dark thirty.”
She warmed the cup with her hands, rolled the shot to bloom the crema, tiger-striped and deep gold, and let the extraction run short rather than letting any bitterness creep in. The milk came next; jug polished, wand cleared, the liquid spun into a gleaming whirlpool. She stretched it to silk, but nothing frothy or theatrical, and poured with a tilt that unfurled a leaf across the surface, pale against the dark. Perfect. Standing at the bench, she closed her eyes for that first sip, the warmth rising through her chest, the flavour reassuring her that a life, lived right, lay in the small perfections.
The whole thing is here on Patreon, no charge.
Or you could just wait for November.
Until then, I’ll get back to writing, and if you’re a KU subscriber, you can get on with your reading.