And now, in print!

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The Last Mage Guardian is now available on Amazon as a paperback! I think it came out very well, thanks to CreateSpace’s nifty templates and guides. I have never laid out a print book before but they made it rather simple. I was even able to keep my little decorative fleurons. And thanks to Dean Wesley Smith‘s recent Blurbs & Pitches workshop, it has clever new back copy and blurbage!

The plan is to put all of my books up in print, starting with the Sequoyah trilogy. I’m still on the learning curve and it takes some time to get it all done right, so no real estimate on when. Plus, the day job is shaping up to Death March status so I won’t get much new stuff done for a few months. Never fear, Queen of Chaos is all ready to go and the first draft of Scent of Metal is complete. There will be new books!

UPDATE: If you want to order directly from CreateSpace instead of going through Amazon (same book, but I get more money) here’s the link.

I have been busy…

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…with good stuff for my patient readers!  Here’s the scoop.

Writeathon: Two chapters finished, and if I’m allowed to include the weekend in the time allotted I have great confidence the third and final chapter will be done by then. Woohoo! Another book done–look for it in 2013.

Who Are All You People: Hello new visitors! Checking ye olde sitemeter, visits jumped in May and continue to grow. People are also hitting my Amazon link and my Associates account thanks you. The true motto of self-publishing is “it all adds up.”

Tell Your Friends Dept.: One last free day for The Long Way Home! Sunday, July 29th is the birthday of NASA–an organization of great importance in the Sequoyah series. And August 2 books 1 and 2 should be live on Barnes & Noble (barring gremlins).

I’m Famous!: I was interviewed by the splendid and worthwhile Akamai Reader site (link). Read all about my dark secrets!

Coming Soon: New website design by an actual web-designer (which I am not). I have seen it and it is quite cool. Also, I took the plunge and messed around with CreateSpace to produce my first print book. It was much easier than I expected. After I check the proof The Last Mage Guardian will be available in paper, and as time permits I will format the rest of my books. I’m also thinking about offering signed copies on my store.

UPDATE: typo fixed. That’s why he’s my favorite proofreader, folks.

 

I’m making it up as fast as I can…

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…but the future keeps catching up to me. In the Sequoyah series I came up with some cool technological innovations (I thought) but in the time it took to publish my hot new ideas became real. Behold!

I love the future …

UPDATE: Add another one, ovarian transplants and stored reproductive tissue.

Writing life: Updates

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I am happy to report that I am 1/3 of the way to completing my CW Write-a-thon goal–meaning one chapter of the three remaining has been completed.  And it was a doozy, since it involved a love scene and I really, really struggle to write love scenes. (More research is clearly indicated…) Thank you to those who have donated or even merely spread the word about the Write-a-thon.

In site-related news, my online store is on the blink again.  It will happily take your order and your money but when you attempt to download, all you get is a big fat error message. I have unleashed the hounds of customer tech support upon the problem. If you do place an order I can get you the book, never fear–it just may take a little longer since I will do it by hand.

The Amazon launch of Raven’s Children is planned for the first week in July.  It will not be in Select. Expect an announcement of The Long Way Home going free for a day or two when Raven’s Children goes live in the Kindle Store–so tell all your friends who haven’t been convinced to try my books yet! For the non-Kindleites, as soon as The Long Way Home exits Select’s three month embargo both books will be added to the Barnes & Noble store, in early August.

Now, back to writing …

Write-a-thon Progress

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Many, many thanks to those who have already donated to the Clarion West Write-a-thon.  I have been writing furiously to hold up my end of the deal. Weekdays are never good–the pesky day-job intrudes–but I hope to make much progress this weekend.  And check out the other writers that are taking part! A wild and wonderful group, some of whom are former students so you see, it works!

Support the next generation of storytellers

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I’ve been involved for several years supporting Clarion West, a speculative fiction writer’s workshop based in Seattle.  For six weeks, instructors and students take part in an intensive writing bootcamp focused on improving their craft. Not many people can afford seven weeks away from work and home, not to mention the tuition costs, so those of us who are supporters fundraise to help it all work.  I am committing to finishing my work in progress, The Scent of Metal, during the course of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which starts today.  My goal is a measly hundred bucks.  If I raise that much I will put two (2!) chapters of that book up on this site for all to read.  Is that a deal or what?

How do you donate? Go to my Write-a-thon page here, or go to the general Write-a-thon page here.  Each writer’s page has a PayPal button for donations, which goes straight to Clarion West.  Every dollar helps.

Thanks!

Murphy is alive and well and living in my site server

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On Monday I uploaded the sneak preview copies of Raven’s Children ARC, in both epub and mobi format, to my store.  Then I went and alerted everybody signed up for the SF newsletter that it was available.  Tuesday morning I check how things are going.  Ah how nice, a bunch of sales.  Whoops, a bunch of complaints that the books aren’t downloading.  Not just that, but giving rude messages about missing permissions and file errors and all sorts of things.

Not a good way to start the day.  So I start investigating.  Had I left file permissions to Deny Everything? Uploaded to the wrong folder? No.  Hmm. Other people had successfully downloaded other books, so *that* part worked.  Just that one book–and, on further investigation, just the mobi format was having trouble.  Epub downloaded just fine. That gave me enough information to determine a helpdesk ticket needed to be filed–so we are waiting for the server gnomes to figure out why it thinks nobody should have access to one file among several.

So if you came here intending to obtain the book I *said* was available, that’s why it isn’t there in the store.  Just a small technical delay…

p.s. I believe I have delivered books to everyone who paid for one but didn’t get it.  If not, please let me know and I will fix the problem ASAP.

 

UPDATE: The problem has been fixed and the ARC is back up on the store.  Thank you for your patience!

Jean Craighead George, RIP

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The author of Julie of the Wolves  and more than a hundred other books has passed away at the age of 92. A fighter to the end, Ms. George was party to a lawsuit to enforce her right to license ebooks of her own works, a right the paper publishers claim was theirs even though ebooks did not exist at the time the original contract was signed.

I loved Julie of the Wolves, and the thought that her last year on Earth was burdened with a lawsuit…well, Anubis pursues the evildoer, in this world and the next.

 

The Long Way Home: Sequoyah begins

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cover for The Long Way Home

Webspace pilot Moire Cameron is one of the best–but even she can’t fly her way out of a catastrophic drive failure that triggers a time-dilation bubble.  Left suddenly eighty years out of date, she is on the run in a world she no longer knows, caught in the middle of a human-alien war while agents of Toren hunt her for the information only she has–the location of the pristine world of Sequoyah.

Well, this is going to be a whole bunch of experimental.  The Long Way Home is the first book in the Sequoyah trilogy, an optimistic science fiction tale of relativistic side effects, aliens, adventure, and promises kept.

Reasons Why You Should Read This Book

  • I’ve written all three volumes already.  In the event of alien abduction I have left instructions for books 2 and 3 to be uploaded so you won’t miss out.
  • Did I mention the cool aliens? (Not the abducting and probing kind)
  • If you have a Kindle, it will be in the Select program for the next three months and FREE now and then. (If you sign up for my newsletter you will know ahead of time…)
  • If you don’t have a Kindle but know how to use a conversion program like Calibre, you can wait for it to be FREE (newsletter, blah blah), or you can pay a mere $2.99. (For now. Epub version will be for sale eventually when Select ends.)
  • If you don’t have a Kindle or don’t want to deal with Amazon, I had a sneak preview Epub version in my store, but only people on my newsletter list knew about it (hint hint) (other cool stuff is planned, like Advance Reader Copies for those who just can’t wait to find out what happens next.  Newsletter!)
  • It is written in the spirit of the Human Wave SF movement, where someone wins, things happen, and life is worth living.

Now available on Amazon

He stole my title!

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…buy his book anyway!  Chuck Wendig, the profane, logorrheatic fabulist that walks like a man, has perpetrated yet another literary outrage on the unsuspecting world.  (I keed, I keed!)  He’s funny (if just a tad PG-13) and talks a lot about being a penmonkey and how to do it better.  I suppose I should support a fellow writer, even if he DID steal the title of the second book in my SF series for his own nefarious purposes, forcing me to come up with YET ANOTHER title, which task nearly sprained my brain.

Oh yeah, the book is for sale.  Amazon. B&N. Indiebound.

And now… payback.  Pay attention, bdub.  Your homework is to successfully distinguish slot-head from Phillips screws 2 out of 3 times.

Update: fixed stupid HTML error.