holidays

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All my books and stories are available and would make excellent Christmas gifts for book lovers!

Hello and good morning.  It’s not Thursday today, of course, but I just thought of something that I wish I had thought of and posted yesterday instead of the rather rambling and negative post that I did create.

Although it’s probably too late for Hanukkah*, it should not be too late, if you have avid readers on your list of Christmas gift recipients, to order them a copy of one of my books, if you think they would be interested.  I have six titles available in paperback through Amazon, which I’ll summarize here:

Welcome to Paradox City IconWelcome to Paradox City:  A collection of three dark “short”** stories, one of which is a light-hearted near-comedy and the other two of which are darker.  The first, The Death Sentence, is about a man who finds a previously unnoticed room in his public library, and in it discovers a bizarre but intriguing book containing illustrations and writing in languages he doesn’t know…but which also contains one particular line that can be at least pronounced, as it is written in Latin characters.  He only slowly discovers the secret of that sentence…and of the rest of the book itself.  The second story, If the Spirit Moves You, is about a man who suddenly discovers that he can see ghosts—or “the unquiet dead” as they prefer to be called—and that he may well be the only one who can, and who can help them make contact with the modern world.  The third story, Paradox City, involves a man who enters a popular but rather peculiar nightclub, which bears the name of the story’s title.  Though the entertainment is good, and the service is excellent, and he meets and falls for a charming young woman who is equally taken with him, this is a club in which peculiar, impossible, sometimes paradoxical, and ultimately horrifying things can happen…and if you make the wrong decision, you might get stuck there forever.

Mark Red Cover

Mark Red:  Mark Reed, the title character (obviously), is a teenager who spots an attempted mugging and rape.  He tries to intercede to help the woman, but her assailant stabs him, giving him a mortal wound.  However, it turns out that the mugger’s target was a vampire, who deliberately put herself in the situation to prey on the criminal.  She makes short work of her assailant, but then has only one way to save Mark, which she feels compelled to do because he got hurt trying to help her.  She gives him some of her blood to replace what he’s lost, turning him into a demi-vampire—with a combination of the aspects of humans and vampires, the nature of which state he learns over time.  The vampire, Morgan, determines to stay with and protect Mark from his own urges for blood until such time as she can find out how to cure him, for as she explains, contrary to popular folklore, a full vampire can never die at all, even if they wish to.  And if Mark ever kills a human by drinking their blood, he will become a full, uncurable vampire, cursed with immortality.

41lnfutijalSon of Man:  David McCarthy, a college student in Chicago, is going to the university library one morning when, without transition, he finds himself in a featureless cylindrical room.  The wall of the room opens, and two men—Anderson and Greer—eventually explain to him that he is now more than two hundred years in the future.  They tell him that only a few decades after the time from which he was taken, an apparent global thermonuclear war, now call the Conflagration, destroyed civilization and most of the people, but that the human race was saved by a “man” now known simply as The Father, who united humanity, willing or not, under his control and guidance, and rebuilt civilization, with his astonishingly advanced technology and inexplicable genius.  He also initiated the “domestication” of the human race, killing any person who initiates violence against others, and sterilizing their first-degree relatives.  Though grateful for the Father’s rescue of civilization, the two men, their friend Michael, and some others think that he has gone too far, and they enlist David to help them either convince the Father to abdicate or to find a way to remove him…choosing David for reasons that he at first cannot believe.  The Father has an enemy within his own mind—a mind that now spans the entire world—and that enemy wants to help them overthrow the Father.  He alters David in an inexplicable way and assist the group in their quest to achieve their goals.  But his motives are not certain, and he also reveals to them some secrets of the Father’s past and nature that horrify them, especially David.

CatC cover paperbackThe Chasm and the Collision:  Alex Hinton and his friend Simon come home from middle-school one day and find that Alex’s mother has, apparently, left a newly purchased and unrecognized—but delightful-smelling—bunch of berries in the fruit bowl in the house.  Alex tries the fruit and discovers that it tastes even better than it smells, and he shares it with Simon and with a girl name Meghan, on whom Alex has a crush.  Soon, Alex and the other two begin seeing and hearing seemingly impossible and sometimes terrifying things, which no one else perceives, and they begin developing new, amazing abilities.  They also find a strange apparent “space warp” in the wall of the dining room of Alex’s house.  Eventually, they are accosted, captured, and brought back to what turns out to be a piece of another world—Osmeer—which is the counterpart to Earth, but in a universe that lies adjacent to ours in higher-dimensional space.  They learn that some process has set the universes on a collision course, and that if they collide, the impact will wipe out everything in both universes in a new Big Bang.  A great genius of Osmeer has created what is called The Chasm—a way of taking part of Osmeer out of its world and positioning it between the two universes to hold them apart, at least temporarily.  Within the Chasm, that part of Osmeer has permanently sunset-colored skies, and time flows there roughly thirty times faster than in the original universes.  The pre-teens learn that in the other universe, not only are there intelligent “dinosaur dogs” called tixuns with advanced sense of smell, who work with humans, but also intelligent, furry “mole-weasel” creatures called orcterlolets, that can tunnel and build by manipulating the fabric of space itself.  Most amazingly, they learn that all the plants of that world are conscious, and can communicate with each other telepathically, as well as with gifted humans and tixuns called Gardeners.  The man who created the Chasm has also helped breed and create a special tree, called Wynestrith, whose purpose is to save both universes by returning them to their proper places.  Alex, Meghan, and Simon have unwittingly become embroiled in that quest, and they learn that there is a cult, and a Prophet, and a much darker and more terrible Other, an Ill Will, that wants the collision to happen, and that only the three friends, working with Wynestrith, will be able to prevent the collision, and the destruction of two universes.  But they will have to survive to do so, and also—hopefully—they will be able to succeed without their parents and teachers finding out they were ever gone.***

Unanimity Book 1 simple Cover ProjectUnanimity Book 2 simple Cover ProjectUnanimity Book 1 and Unanimity Book 2:  Charley Banks is a pleasant young university student, majoring in English, with a long-term girlfriend he loves very much, nice parents, and a positive outlook on life.  He takes part in a seemingly harmless neuroscience experiment, testing a new form of external magnetic cortical stimulator, innovated by one of the school’s professors.  After the test, though, in the follow-up MRI, he has a severe grand mal seizure.  When he wakes up in the hospital, he discovers, to his amazement and delight, that when he touches other people, if he focuses on the curious sensation that now happens at the point of contact, he can merge with their minds, taking over their nervous systems, replacing their consciousness with his own, but with access to all they know and are.  At first the union only lasts while he’s touching them, but soon this ability grows, and he is able to maintain his presence in others even after separating.  He then becomes able to control more than one person at a time, and then becomes able to extend himself further using bodies he already controls, all while still controlling his normal, original body.  He keeps this gift secret even from his girlfriend (at first), and as the power grows, he decides to use it to correct some perceived and real injustices done to people he cares about.  But his methods are extreme and horrifying, and it becomes clear over time that his mind has been altered in other ways than simply giving him his new abilities.  This becomes still more dangerous when he discovers the astonishing effects of having a person die while he’s controlling them.  His power, and his willingness to use it, seems to grow without obvious limit, and even after a few other people, including his girlfriend, learn of his ability, and of his altered character, its unclear what, if anything, can be done to prevent Charley from someday encompassing the entire human race.

All of these titles are also available in Kindle format, including Son of Man, for which I somehow failed to link the paperback and the Kindle versions.

I also have several “short” stories that are only available in Kindle format for now, though I plan to collect them into a paperback edition along with a new novella soon.  Most of them are available through Kindle Unlimited if you’re a member, and anyway, they’re less than a buck apiece if you buy them.  I won’t go into too much detail; instead, I’ll copy the blurb from each listing on Amazon.  My short stories tend to be rather dark, and most of them would count as horror (not “Ifowonco” or Penal Colony, though).  They include:

“I for one welcome our new computer overlords”:  Peter Lunsford, a lonely, book-loving, self-educated and self-destructive salesman, has an abrupt and radical change of fortune.  His subsequent actions lead a genius named Darrell White, enabled and inspired by Peter’s choices, to create the world’s first artificial intelligence.  Unfortunately, this happens at a time when humanity has devastated itself with global war and is unprepared to accept the existence of these new and superior minds.  These facts will combine to create a future that Peter would not have had the courage to expect, and the implications of which are impossible to foresee.

Prometheus and Chiron:  Tommy—a former Marine, a part-time construction worker, dependent on opiates for the treatment of chronic pain—is waiting for the train home one evening, when he sees a strange, shivering, ill-appearing woman seated on a bench across the track from him.  Her presence fills him with dread and revulsion, for no reason he can understand.  Even after a month passes, she remains seated in the same place, always visibly suffering.  No one else at the station ever seems to see her at all.  But Tommy sees her, and even dreams about her.  And she sees him.

Hole for a Heart:  While driving through central Pennsylvania on a road trip from New Jersey to Chicago, Jonathan Lama spies a peculiar pairing on top of an approaching hill:  A huge pecan tree, next to which lurks an out-of-place scarecrow.  Intrigued, and craving a break in his long drive, he pulls off the highway and goes into the nearby gas station.  There, he hears the story of a man named Joshua Caesar, a person of possibly supernatural evil, who terrorized the region almost seventy years before, and was finally brought to rough justice by his neighbors in retaliation for his crimes.  Local legend holds that the figure of the scarecrow is Joshua Caesar’s body—not changing, not decaying, staked out next to the highway for nearly seventy years.  Jon is entertained but of course does not believe the tale.  Then his car suddenly refuses to start, and while he waits for a tow-truck to arrive, stranger things begin to happen…things which lead him to doubt his sanity, and to wonder if, just maybe, the legends of Joshua Caesar’s unchanging scarecrow corpse are actually real.

Solitaire:  (This is my oldest—and darkest—published short story.  It’s not for the faint of heart.)  It’s the early nineteen-nineties, and Jerry, a successful advertising executive, is having a breakdown.  He’s done too much shading of the truth, and he’s watched too much Headline News, and he can no longer make sense of the world.  Now, sitting at the breakfast table, he contemplates the possible future for himself and his family while dealing out a hand of solitaire…

Penal Colony:  While heading for his car after a night out celebrating the closing of a big deal at work, Paul Taylor meets a strange, despondent man, poorly dressed for the cold, who seems horribly depressed by some personal setback.  Still slightly drunk on both alcohol and success, Paul invites the man for a cup of coffee and some food at a nearby all-night diner.  There, this peculiar man tells Paul of a conspiracy begun by the creators of various social and virtual media companies…and of technology that allowed these conspirators to control the minds of the people of the world for their own personal enrichment.  He tells of the overthrow of that conspiracy by a group of which he had been part…a group which had then turned on and “exiled” him.  Though the man’s story is engaging, and the man himself is personally convincing, Paul is forced to admit that he has heard of no such conspiracy or overthrow.  The man finally explains to Paul why he hasn’t heard of it.  It’s an answer that Paul cannot believe…until the man proves it.

Free Range Meat:  Would you try to help a dog locked inside a car on a hot, sunny day?  Brian certainly would.  As an environmentally conscious “near-vegan,” he loves all the creatures of the world—even humans, most of the time—and he does his best to help them whenever he can.  So, when he hears the obvious sound of a dog trapped in a black SUV on the hottest day of the year, he commits himself to helping it get out if its owner doesn’t arrive within a few minutes.  But isn’t that an unusually dark SUV?  Even the windows are so tinted that Brian can’t see inside.  And don’t those barks and whimpers sound just a little…off?  What breed of dog makes sounds like that?  These are troubling questions, and as Brian will learn, sometimes even the noblest of intentions can lead one to places one might do better to avoid.

That’s everything (so far).  None of it is, perhaps, traditional Christmas fare, though CatC is a fantasy/sci-fi adventure whose heroes are middle-schoolers, so its arguably a holiday-worthy story.  But a book, like a puppy****, is not just for Christmas.  Most people can’t read one of my books in one day, in any case.  And to a book lover, there is rarely any better gift that can be given than a new book.

(I would advertise my songs here as well, but they definitely aren’t holiday-type ditties.)

Happy Holidays!

*Except for Kindle books, of course.

**I use scare quotes because though not truly novellas, they are quite long for short stories, especially Paradox City, which gives the book its title.

***This is my most “family-friendly” book.

****Which is also very good cold on Boxing Day.

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My conscience hath a thousand several blogs, and every blog brings in a several tale

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another of my weekly blog posts.  It is not Thursday morning as I write this, but it will be Thursday (or later) when you read it.  I’m writing it a day early, to be published on the usual day, since this Thursday is a major holiday where I live.

Given that, I would like to wish Happy Thanksgiving to all those in the US who are reading this, and to everyone else, a happy day in general.  It can feel as though there’s much not to be thankful for right now, but I’m sure that, in the modern world, we still have many reasons to feel fortunate—certainly those of us with the luxury of reading and writing blogs.

Positivity isn’t my strong point, as my regular readers may know, but it is worth remembering that we take for granted a tremendous number of incredible advances that our forebears even a generation past could not have imagined.  If you go back a century, to the time of the 1918-ish flu pandemic, it’s sobering to realize that they didn’t have antibiotics to treat the numerous bacterial infections that often complicate influenza, let alone ventilators, oxygen monitors, corticosteroids, or molecular biology to be able to discern the nature of the disease-causing agent.  Indeed, DNA itself was decades away from being described, so the tools for understanding and treating a highly contagious and dangerous viral illness were far weaker than they are today.  Vaccinations had been invented, but they were in crude form, and the science of understanding, let alone designing them, was in its infancy.

And the internet, of course, or anything like it, was not even a dream of science fiction yet.

So, if we work at it—and I say again, it’s not my strong point—we can find things about which to feel truly thankful.

On to other, lighter matters.  I did a rather unusual experiment recently, one about which I have mixed feelings.  I’d be thankful (!) for any feedback you might think appropriate.  As those of use who use Amazon know, when you’ve purchased something, Amazon often sends an email asking if you’d be willing to rate and review what you bought.  I think this is a useful service, but it can become onerous at times, so I don’t review nearly everything I purchase, even books that I read and enjoy.

I received a request to rate a jacket I’d just purchased.  It was the same brand I’d bought a few years ago, and my old one was getting a bit raggedy with use, so I ordered a new one (in a different color—black, of course).  I decided that I really should give a review, since I’d used the product and liked it enough to buy it again.

Well, as you may also know, once you’ve reviewed one item, the Amazon page asks you if you want to rate and review other items you’ve purchased—you know, while you’re in the mood and all.  And at the top of the list was my own creation, Unanimity Book 1, for which I’d already received more than one request for reviews.  I bought copies of the book for the people at my office I thought might enjoy it, and then another one for someone who asked me later for a copy, so the review requests were recurrent, as tends to happen with all of my books.

I’ve occasionally been tempted to write a comical, self-serving review that makes it obvious that I’m the author to anyone reading, but I’ve never done it before.  It was my understanding that Amazon doesn’t allow people who have a fiduciary interest in a product to provide reviews for it.  I respect that policy, as I understood it.  But they kept asking, and asking, and asking…and I’m not made of stone (except perhaps for my heart).  Finally, on a whim, I wrote a brief review, starting off by revealing that I am the author of the book, and I rated it five stars.  This is not, of course, an unbiased rating, but it is at least an honest one, in that I really do think it’s worthy of that rank to me, not least because of the effort involved in writing it and the characters, whom I like very much.  I wasn’t really expecting the review to go up.  I figured Amazon’s automatic checkers or whatever they might be would block it and send me a kind but firm email stating that they can’t publish reviews from people involved financially in a product.  Well, only Amazon itself is more financially involved in my books than I am.  But at least so far, the review is there, which is amusing to me, at least, but I do feel the need to repeat my disclaimers about it and the rating.

To be honest, if I’d thought it was really going to work, the book I’d feel least conflicted about reviewing would be The Chasm and the Collision, which is certainly my most wholesome, family-friendly story, written specifically with my children in mind at the time*.  I’m quite proud of the world-building I did in it, which includes telepathic plants, mole-weasel creatures called orcterlolets who can directly manipulate the local shape of space itself, flying manta-ray like monstrosities called gowstrin, a bit of bastardized M-theory describing universes floating next to each other in “the bulk” and in danger of colliding, and three middle-schoolers who inadvertently get caught up in the emergency attempt to prevent that collision, which would destroy everything in our universe as well as the one of Osmeer.  And, of course, as I say in the jacket blurb, our heroes must try to help prevent this cosmic catastrophe while not getting in trouble for being late for school.

Yeah, I don’t feel any qualms about recommending that book to pretty much anyone.  My sister has read it more than once, and the last time she did, she actually thanked me for writing it.  That was pretty huge.

The Vagabond, of course, being a horror story, is far from as family-friendly as CatC, but it is coming along nicely, and it is fast-paced, and a far more in-your-face horror story than, say, Unanimity.  The horror in the latter is complicated, partly psychological, partly existential, involving the threat of the complete loss of free will, autonomy, self-awareness, etc., without anyone even knowing of the threat, let alone being able to do anything about it.  At least with a traditional, moustache-twirling, evil incarnate type villain, you know what you’re up against and can make a stand.  When the villain is one of the people you love most in the world, who doesn’t even think that he’s doing anything bad, and about the threat from whom you know only because he told happily you, things are a little dicier**.  At least, I think so.

But The Vagabond will probably be more straightforward fun for most people, and it is certainly shorter.  Still, if you read only one of my books, I would recommend The Chasm and the Collision, without knowing more about your preferences and tastes and whatnots.

With that, I think I’ll draw this prematurely written blog post to a close.  I do, honestly, hope that all of you who are in the US have as good a Thanksgiving as possible, while doing everything you can to keep yourselves and those you love safe and healthy.  Hopefully, you can console yourself by imagining the November blow-out that will come once we have this latest virus*** under better control.  “So tighten your belts, and think with hope of the tables of Elrond’s house!”

TTFN

Thanksgiving (2)

*I don’t think either of them has read it, or any of my other books, though each book is dedicated to them.  They don’t want to have much to do with me since the time I was invited to be a guest of the State of Florida for three years…in fact, my son won’t interact with me at all, though my daughter does stay in contact, and shares news of her various adventures.

**I think that’s a neologism.  Certainly, MSWord doesn’t recognize it.

***And our various politicians and the political processes itself.

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And thus the native blog of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday, and—as I always point out, rather unnecessarily—to another edition of my weekly blog.

For those of you living in countries that celebrate some equivalent or descendant of Armistice Day (in the US, it’s Veteran’s Day), I hope you had a pleasant yesterday, enjoying a holiday that was originally intended to commemorate the final resolution of World War I and a return to relative peace.  Though I have great respect for all those who have fought to protect freedom, as is sometimes ruefully necessary, and I certainly think they deserve to be treated far better than they are—at least in the US—it’s good that we celebrate the fact that these brave ones, at least, the living veterans, were able to come out of the other end of their wars alive and somewhat intact.

The weather in south Florida has continued to be abysmal, what with the recent, slow-moving tropical storm.  Unfortunately, even without such cyclonic phenomena, south Florida can be so damp and rainy that it’s almost unbearable.  I’m also suffering from the clock change that happened just a bit more than a week ago, which brings aggressively forward the months of seemingly endless night, with the sun setting yet another hour earlier in the already nocturnally dominated Fall and Winter.  I don’t look forward to the latter part of December, as I’m prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Of course, those who know me might well wonder in what way my seasonally affected affect effect is in any way different from my usual personality.  It’s a valid question, and I can only reply that it makes my underlying dysthymic and depressive tendencies more difficult to ignore and resist.  I try.  But often I fail.

Anyway, enough of that for the moment.  Work on The Vagabond continues and is productive.  I think it’s already a better book than it was before, stylistically.  I haven’t changed the story at all, and I don’t intend to alter it in any noticeable way.  This is not to say that it’s a perfect story; I’m not even sure what would constitute such a thing.  Still, I think it’s a good supernatural horror novel.  It has action, suspense, danger, a good number of scary parts, a bit of romance, and some fun characters, including a truly malevolent villain.  This is all, of course, my own judgment, and I am inescapably biased, but I still think I’m correct.  I hope you’ll all take a chance and decide for yourselves, when the time comes.  I think it is something to which you can honestly look forward, if horror novels are your cup of tea.

I’m still running up against internal and external metaphorical walls with respect to making content for Iterations of Zero.  I’m not giving up on it, but it’s frustrating, because I don’t want to take time away from fiction to do it.  Writing fiction is something I do by simply starting every day with the work—though currently that’s editing, not primary writing—as soon as I get to the office.  Coming up with a story idea is fairly easy.  I accomplish the rest by committing to write at least a page every day, when I’m not editing, and then go from there.  Almost inevitably, once I get started, I end up writing quite a lot more, and usually it’s time itself that calls a halt to the work.

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish,” as Sam Gamgee’s old Gaffer always said; the converse is that, once you begin a job, it can sometimes be hard to stop.  There appears to be a kind of metaphorical inertia, which is why it’s such a good thing simply to set the schedule and commit to writing whether one happens to “feel like it” or not.  When I think of what I could have accomplished if I had taken that approach when I wrote The Vagabond, I sometimes want to weep.  That novel is only about 160,000 words long, but it took me more than ten years to finish it*.  In comparison, I completed two longer novels and a short story that was almost a novella** over the course of just under three years by working every day during the hour or so after the lights came on at FSP West.  While I don’t recommend that location and environment to anyone, it still just goes to show what you can do by saying to yourself, “To hell with inspiration, just work.”  Trust me, FSP was (and still is, I presume) not a place of inspiration, though tragically, it is sometimes a place of forced expiration.  (It could also, during “lockdowns”, sometimes be a place of barely contained urination, when we were forced to stay on our cots face-down for hours on end at times.)

On that pleasant note, I think I’ll call it good for today.  As usual, I wrote more than I thought I would—again, all it took was forcing myself to get started, and just to do it, and then matters moved forward almost on their own.

I hope you all have a good week, and month, and year, and so on.  Please stay safe and healthy.

TTFN

Do it

*To be fair to myself, I was doing other things—college, post-bacc courses, teaching, medical school, residency, etc.—during that time.  Nevertheless, I could have written so much more had I just committed to doing it.  A big part of my problem was procrastination born of neurotic perfectionism, in which the perfect becomes the arch-enemy of the good, or even of the “good enough”, in a way that is far more horrible than any fictional villain ever could be.  I’m sure many of you can relate.

By way of advice, with respect to this, all I can say is that the best thing you can do is to give up completely on the idea of “perfection”, or even “greatness”.  The terms aren’t even well defined; you’ll always be able to poke holes in yourself and your work, no matter how much effort you put into it.  I feel confident that no work of fiction or nonfiction has ever been perfect.  Some have been and are considered “great”, but that judgment is reserved for their posterity, and as far as I know, it is never universally agreed upon.  Just do it, as Nike and Palpatine counsel, trying to keep improving incrementally as you go along.  Practice will tend to make you better—that’s just how nervous systems seem to work—though it will never make you “perfect”.  If you just keep growing a tiny bit all the time, and keep doing what you’re doing, before you even realize it, you can become and accomplish amazing things.

You will never be “perfect”, but in many ways that’s a blessing.  After all, if there is no highest point to reach, there’s nothing to stop you from continuing to climb higher and higher without limit.  Surely that’s preferable to perfection.  It’s certainly more interesting.

**Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and Paradox City.

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This blog of love, by summer’s ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, which always seems to happen soon after Wednesday, at least here in the English-speaking world.  I have heard the shocking tale that there are some other places that seem not to have those specific days.  One wonders how they remember when to read my weekly blog posts!

I hope you all had a lovely Summer Solstice.  It’s June 25th today, which means that there are “exactly” 6 months until Christmas, for those of you who celebrate it.  Being at the midway point, this date probably serves nicely as a measure of a person’s optimism.  Whether you say to yourself, “Only six more months until Christmas!” with an anticipatory grin (perhaps noting that it wouldn’t be bad to start thinking of gift ideas), or whether you instead dwell on the fact that you are now as far away in the year from that joyous holiday as it is possible to be, probably could be used to predict your attitude about a great number of other things.

Of course, you won’t have to wait nearly six months for the release of Unanimity—barring some personal catastrophe on my part—so that’s at least a crumb of comfort even for the most ruthlessly pessimistic.  Those of you who are already thinking of Christmas shopping for your loved ones could do worse than to order a copy or two when it comes out to give as gifts (though it might be better suited as a Halloween present).  I dare say that it should even be out well in time to begin reading it on or before the date on which the story begins*.  The final editing, layout, and planning for the release are going strongly and smoothly.  If I had more free time—and more free energy—I could probably get it all done within the next month, but I don’t expect that goal to be quite achievable.  That is, unless someone out there wants to option the movie rights (sight unseen) for the book and will give me a large lump sum payment for that option.  It would probably be best as a mini-series, since it’s quite a long story, and I don’t see how it could all fit into even an Avengers: Endgame length movie.  But perhaps that’s a personal bias.

Anyway, it’s going well.

My music is going well, too.  As you know, my single Like and Share is now up on Spotify and is available on iTunes and on Amazon.  It’s also either now available or will soon be available through numerous other platforms internationally, but I’m not as certain of the links and whatnot to those.  If I become aware, of course, I’ll be happy to share them.

I’ve been trying to think through where to go from here with respect to music, and I’d welcome feedback from any readers who have an opinion on the matter.  My internal conflict revolves around whether to proceed as originally planned and release one or two more singles in the coming weeks and months, then to release a full album of my songs, or whether to release them all as singles, one by one.  After all, though I have a deep love of great albums and of consuming music in that form, I can’t deny that the advent of music sites such as mentioned above, and the general digital availability of the music, raises the question of whether releasing an album is the best way to go.  It’s not as though it would be any kind of “concept album”.

I’ve heard (but cannot be certain) that “Weird Al” Yankovic is planning on mostly releasing singles in the future rather than putting together albums, for reasons much like my thoughts above.  I’m no “Weird Al”, obviously, and he’s also not the measure of all things, even if the above rumor is true.  Still, he’s a very savvy individual, and one could do worse than to pay attention to what he’s doing.

As I think I’ve mentioned, I am developing some new songs currently.  Nothing has been recorded on any of them yet—except some musical notes and lyrics on paper, of course—and I probably won’t be doing much more than that until after Unanimity comes out, unless I need a mental break, and/or find the urge irresistible.

I do seem to require at least some form of “new” creative activity as a bulwark against depression, and editing Unanimity has led to my longest run of not writing anything new since perhaps 2013 or 2014.  Also, writing is my oldest persistent love.  But writing music seems to produce the desired psychological benefit almost as much as writing fiction, so it’s been quite useful to me during the long revision/editing process of Unanimity.  All this is what I do in lieu of having close, fulfilling relationships with other human beings, since I’m apparently unpleasant to be around for any prolonged time period.

I’m sure you can all readily imagine why that might be so.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on this week with me.  I’ll be releasing Schrodinger’s Head as my next official single, but that won’t be for at least several weeks.  I think.  In the meantime, I hope you’re all as happy and healthy as it’s possible to be given the current state of public affairs.  I’d wish for you to be even happier than possible, but that would be a silly and contradictory wish, so I’ll abstain.  Not that I’m any more averse to wishing for the impossible than the next person, I’m just…more prone than average to accept and internalize the inherent impossibilities.

TTFN

*Though, unless you have a time machine, you won’t be able to preempt the literal starting date, since the story begins on Thursday, September 14th, 2017.  But you know what I mean.

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How strange or odd some’er I blog myself, as I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on.

Hello, everyone!  Good morning, and welcome to another Thursday, and therefore, to another of my weekly blog posts.  I felt tempted to begin with, “Hey, Vsauce!  Robert here,” since I’ve been watching rather a larger number of YouTube videos than usual, including many Vsauce videos that I haven’t seen in a while.  I’ve shared a few of them, which you may know if you follow me on Twitter or are a Facebook friend (I don’t tend to share videos on my Facebook author page.  Maybe I should).

Of course, the above is related to the fact that this is my second Thursday working from home, and thus writing this blog from home.  It’s not that I don’t go into the office at all, since I am responsible for records and payroll, not all of which can be done remotely*.  But we’ve moved such operations as we’re able out of the office.  It’s been surprisingly successful, on some days more than others, but certainly not ideal.

Also, let’s be honest, apart from going to the office, this blog is the most social thing I do, so I’m tending to involute a bit more even than usual, which is probably not a good thing.  I won’t say that, like Melkor, after wandering in the Void too often I start wanting to take over Middle-earth, but like him, my time spent alone (albeit reading and listening to books and watching mostly educational YouTube videos) does lead me to have thoughts unlike those of my brethren.

Then again, I’ve always had those.

Oh, by the way, a Happy Passover to those of you who celebrate it!  I don’t know if anyone’s having seders or not—I suppose they might as well do them with the people with whom they’re living, anyway—but still, hopefully you have a nice holiday that’s not too disrupted from the normal flow.

And of course, the fact that Passover has started probably means that Easter is coming.  Let’s take a look…

…yep.  It’s this Sunday (unless you’re Eastern Orthodox or similar, in which case you’ll celebrate the following Sunday.  I’m never quite sure why the difference, and I guess I don’t care enough to look it up).  So, for those of you who celebrate that holiday, do your very, very best to have a Happy Easter!  As far as I know, chocolate bunnies aren’t sources of contagion, as long as they were in packages that were wiped down before being opened.  Ditto with Cadbury Creme Eggs**!  Of course, I know that none of the chocolate or egg things have anything to do with the religious aspects of the Easter holiday, but they’re fun, and I doubt Jesus would mind people celebrating with chocolate***.

Anyway.

Of course, given my time at home, Unanimity is continuing well, though ironically, not quite as speedily as when I go to the office.  That latter fact is just a matter of transition, adjustment, and adaptation; I’m somewhat overindulging in the fact that I don’t have to commute, and using it as an excuse for a relative lie-in.  I sometimes sleep as late as seven in the morning (!), though admittedly I still experience my usual inevitable awakening sometime between three and four, and do a bit of grumbling and fumbling before I’m able to go back to sleep, if I can at all.  This latter habit has nothing to do with my prostate—I’ve been that way almost for as long as I can remember, and it seems to be related to dysthymia/depression, with its whole lovely early morning awakening.

If I developed the ability to see people’s auras and go higher up the levels of the “tower”, as in Stephen King’s Insomnia, I wouldn’t mind it so much.

I still haven’t released my latest/last version of my song Schrodinger’s Head, nor have I released the audio blog I did off the cuff last week, though they’re both ready for public consumption.  It’s probably partly due to the general topsy-turvy nature of the current weirdness that I’ve been so lackadaisical.  I really must try to get those out soon.

With that, I suppose I have little more to add.  I hope you all stay as safe and healthy as you’re able, while remembering (tacitly, at least) that perfect safety and permanent health are impossible.  Everything involves trade-offs, and no one lives forever****.  But certainly, there is no excuse for endangering others unnecessarily, so take precautions, and if you’re ill, stay away from other people as much as possible.  Hopefully the far end of this thing will come sooner than we think…but of course—and rather by definition—I don’t think it will.  Oh, well.  The world’s a hard place with many sharp corners and uneven surfaces.  That needn’t stop us from making the most of it.

TTFN

*Including giving people their paychecks.

**Mmmmmmm, creme eggs…so yummy!

***“Hey, did you hear?” “What?” “Jesus came back from the dead!” “Wow! That calls for a celebration!  Let’s have some chocolate!” “Sounds good to me!  Oh, by the way, do you know who spilled food coloring on all the eggs and then tried to hide them all over the place?”

****Except Michael Menelvagor and the vampire, Morgan.  To know who those people are, read my books Son of Man and Mark Red.  Go ahead, you probably have some spare time.

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Art thou not, fatal Vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a blogger of the mind…

2020

Hello, good morning, happy Thursday, and—of course—Happy New Year!

It’s 2020 (AD or CE), a year that I’ve personally dubbed #TheYearofSeeingClearly*.  My book giveaway is now officially over, sad though that may be.  For those of you who took advantage, I hope you’re enjoying or will soon be enjoying your chosen books or stories.

I haven’t posted anything on Iterations of Zero since my last blog post here…the last two musical posts went out on December 25th.  However, given that the holidays have been underway, I feel it’s okay to give myself one week of a miss.  Now, however, there is no further excuse.  It’s a new year**, and even a new decade by most people’s reckoning, and while there may be nothing magical about the transition, it does serve as a good psychological milestone by which to set one’s goals for self-improvement.

I like the idea of striving to see clearly in this new year because of its coincidental numbering.  It would be nice if we could encourage people around the world to use this year to become more aware of their biases and blind spots, to work at removing the beams from their own eyes so that they can—when necessary—assist neighbors who have asked them to pluck out an occluding mote.  Of course, there’s a bit of a contradiction in trying to encourage other people the world over to be less critical of others and instead to try to look at themselves a bit more harshly with an eye to self-improvement.  Isn’t the very promulgation of such advice a violation of its own precepts?

Maybe in a small way, but it’s not advice that’s focused or targeted on any one person, but on us all, especially on me.  Goodness knows I have plenty of room for improvement, self- and otherwise.

I am, however, trying to achieve such improvements, on several fronts, though I try not to be overly ambitious on each of them, lest they get in each other’s way.  One thing I’ve learned at least to some degree by this stage in my life: you can’t let the “perfect” be the enemy of the good.  I’ve long tended toward an attitude of ruthless perfectionism with respect to myself, with the additional, cruel parenthetical that I know that I can never be perfect, so I can never be good enough.  However, as I’ve pondered things throughout the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that, except regarding quite simplistic processes and ideas, the very notion of perfection is mostly vacuous.

It’s also limiting.

To say that we are shooting for perfection implies that there is some upper limit beyond which we can never go.  But as math and science seem to show us, there is no real upper limit to many processes.  We can always improve, always find ways to make ourselves, and our cultures, and our creations, better.

Einstein is reputed to have said that there are only two infinite things:  the universe and human stupidity…and he wasn’t sure about the universe.  That statement about infinite human stupidity—perhaps infinite ignorance would be a better way to think of it—implies an infinite potential for human improvement.  We can keep getting better, as individuals and as a whole, without ever reaching a stopping point, until the end of time itself, if there is such a thing.

One may never reach the peak of an infinitely high mountain, but one can climb higher and higher, and be able to see farther and farther, to ever more distant horizons, with new vistas, filled with wonders one couldn’t have expected, because to have expected them, one would have already had to know what one hadn’t yet discovered.  And obviously one can’t do that.  We cannot ever, in principle, predict the specific shape of future discoveries and knowledge before they are created, for to predict them, we would already have to know them, which we don’t.  Quantum Electro-Dynamics***.

So, it is with a guarded sense of optimism that I approach the new year and new decade, and I hope you are also able to be reasonably optimistic, while still always maintaining a habit of self-improvement, and trying to see as clearly as you’re able.

Finally, with respect to writing/authoring news, Unanimity is coming along well and should be out sometime in the early part—at least the first half—of this year, hopefully followed shortly by Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  And whither then, I cannot tell.

TTFN

*Yes, I had the temerity to give it a hashtag.  It’s probably an unjustified bit of wishful thinking, in any case.  There’s little reason to expect people to see any more clearly, metaphorically, just because the year is 2020 than we ever have before.  But maybe we will.

**Though, admittedly, as I think I’ve said before, “new year”, “new week”, “new month”, etc., are arbitrary notions.  There’s nothing special from an astronomical point of view about any particular point in our planet’s orbit around the sun.

***In other words, “QED”.  That’s my little physics/philosophy joke.

Man on top of a mountain standing contemplates the dawn

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Fight valiantly to-day; and yet I do thee wrong to blog thee of it, for thou art framed of the firm truth of valor

270-red-boxing-gloves-vector-image-free

Good morning and Happy Boxing Day!  I hope that all of you who celebrated yesterday had a wonderful Christmas, and that those of you who celebrate Hanukkah continue to have a wonderful Festival of Lights.  For all others in the northern hemisphere, I pray that thou dost celebrate the passing of the solstice and the lengthening of daylight…and in the southern hemisphere, enjoy your summer!

For those of you who choose to celebrate Boxing Day in a twisted and quasi-literal sort of way, I remind you of this:  bare-knuckle boxing engenders fewer fatalities than does boxing with gloves, because the latter encourages far more frequent blows to the head, with consequent shaking and damaging of the brain*.  Honestly, I doubt there are (m)any who do such a silly thing, and precious few of us, with bizarre senses of humor, who even consider the possibility.  Still, just in case, I thought I’d bring it up.

And now, a quick and more or less final reminder:  My giveaway of free books (Kindle format) ends with the passing of the year (and, by some reckonings, the decade).  By the time my next regular blog post goes out, the offer will be over, so if you want to join the numerous beneficiaries of this giveaway, please, get in touch with me either here in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter, or through some other means that will reach me, and make your request.  I will need an email address eventually, to which to deliver the link for your e-book(s), but as long as your request is sent before midnight on December 31st (according to your local time zone) then you will receive your giveaway, even if the email only follows later.

For those of you who are resistant or ambivalent because of the necessary Kindle format, I’ll simply remind you that electronic books are far more ecologically and environmentally friendly than are paper books and other physical printed media (magazines, newspapers, etc.).  This is one of the great advantages of modern electronic media, and it is far from the only one.  This blog, and squillions like it, is another.

On a related note, I’m “currently” partaking of a book in both Kindle and Audible format (at separate paces), and its subject is the potential sustainability of perhaps the most precious resource of all: the healthy duration of our individual lives.  The book is Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, written by the eminent Harvard biologist David Sinclair, along with Matthew LaPlante.  I highly recommend it, and I’ll probably write a review of it on Iterations of Zero once I’ve finished the book in both formats.

Speaking of IoZ, I’ve posted a few things there in the past day or so.  The first was a recording of me playing a rather amateurish guitar version of “Greensleeves” aka “What Child is This?” just barely in time for Christmas.  The second was a release of two earlier recordings of a sort of karaoke and “duet” of me singing the Radiohead song “Knives Out”.  You’re welcome and encouraged to listen to all three recordings, and I’d be happy to receive your feedback.  I’m a glutton for punishment, it seems.

Unanimity editing has gotten slightly less than its usual attention of late, partly because I’ve been stricken with a flu-like illness, possibly the actual flu**, and have been relatively miserable for the past six days.  I’m on the mend, however, and though not quite back into full boxing form, I’m eager to return to the ring.  Other things, such as an office move at my job, about which I was none too happy—but with which I’m becoming more enamored—and just the general schedule derailment caused by a midweek holiday, have also intervened.  I did not edit at all yesterday.  I was too busy eating.

Nevertheless, the book proceeds more or less steadily, and publication is on the visible horizon, unless I’m falling prey to a metaphorical optical illusion.  After that, I mean to finish my novella and then publish it among other stories in Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.  Then I’m going to be doing something rather more light-hearted than Unanimity, a sort of fable called Neko/Neneko, which I think I’ve mentioned here before.  That’s all assuming my plans don’t change, of course.  I didn’t have any mice helping me make those plans, so hopefully they won’t gang agley.  That’s what the quote by Robert Burns (aka “Robbie”—or perhaps “Rabbi?”) recommends against, isn’t it: men making plans with the help of mice?  It was something like that.

In any case, the holiday season is not yet over.  A New Year beckons, as does a new decade, and though great Nature recognizes not our arbitrary subdivisions of days and years and centuries and eons, such things matter to humans, of which I am one***.  So, enjoy and embrace the time.  Make merry (and possibly Pippin); indulge yourselves in ways that don’t cause harm to others or yourselves; and by all means, give yourselves some belated Christmas gifts by requesting a free copy of one or three of my stories.  We all need things to which to look forward to bolster our enthusiasm for life, after all.

TTFN

*It can hurt your hands—a lot—to hit someone in the face with bare knuckles.

**It serves me right for not having gotten my flu shot this year.  I can offer no excuses.

***No matter what I or anyone else may occasionally say.

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Being holiday, the blogger’s shop is shut.

Solstice

Welcome, one and all! It’s Thursday, which means that it’s time for my weekly blog post…as you already know, since you’re reading it.

I hereby remind you all about my book giveaway, which continues until the end of the month, the end of the year, and—by some measures—the end of the decade.  If you contact me and let me know your choice(s)—or have me make the choice(s) for you—and give me an email address, I will send you one novel or three short stories, in Kindle format.  I’d love to be able to send you out hard copies, of course, but I can’t really afford to do that right now, and currently, most of my short stories are available in electronic format only.

Don’t wait!  Time is ticking, as it always does, unless you travel at the speed of light (which you can’t, since you’re made of particles that interact with the Higgs field).  Next Thursday will be “Boxing Day”, as the day after Christmas is called in the UK and related places*.  By the following Thursday, the giveaway will be over, its metaphorical carriage having turned back into a pumpkin at midnight on December 31st.  So, give yourself a free holiday gift.  You have nothing to lose but a tiny portion of your time and a tiny bit of storage space on whatever electronic device you might use for e-books.  And you would gain…well, in my biased but humble opinion, I think you’ll gain some enjoyable stories.

Speaking of which, this week I finished another round of editing on Unanimity, and I’ve begun the next one.  I mean to find ways to tighten up my schedule so that I can go more quickly from now on.  The whole project is taking sooooooooooo long, and I really can’t wait—or I don’t want to wait—for the book to be out so you can all read it.

I did a minor experiment on Iterations of Zero recently, with some conflicting results.  Near the end of last week, some thoughts occurred to me that I wanted to get down quickly, and I didn’t have the time to write them, since that would have interfered more with my editing schedule.  So, I just recorded the thoughts aloud on my voice recorder app, and later in the day, I edited and published them on IoZ, here.  The response was decent, both on the site and on my social media pages.  Pleased, I did a second, more formally prepared but no more formally spoken recording earlier this week (it was about eight minutes long and the previous had been about five, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference).  That second recording has gotten no response at all on WordPress, as of this writing.  I’m not sure why.

Arguably, the first topic—depression, a subject near and dear to my heart, so to speak—was drearier than the second, which was political philosophy.  Maybe right now, with all that’s been happening, people are fed up with politics, at least in the US and the UK.  If so, I can hardly blame them.  Maybe the second title was a little too cryptic.  Or maybe the recording was simply missed because I posted it early in the week, and I’ve been recently publishing my IoZ entries toward the end of the week; maybe people who would have been interested simply didn’t notice it because of the erratic timing.  Or maybe people are just too caught up in the rapidly approaching holidays to take time out to listen to an eight-minute ramble.  Maybe audio is just not a good format for me.

I’ll continue the experiment a little bit longer (your suggestions are welcome on that score) to give it a fair day in court…or in Congress, or in Parliament, or whatever.  The audio format has advantages and disadvantages.  In first draft at least, it’s quicker and easier to get audio out (though I do type fast).  Audio, however, doesn’t tend to be as well-organized as a typed and edited blog post.  It’s easy to skip ideas accidentally and realize the fact too late to make corrections (without a lot of trouble doing the sound editing, anyway, which is not complicated in principle, but which can be tedious).

But audio can feel more personable sometimes, I think.  I know people like to watch videos of people talking about ideas at least partially for that personal touch, but I’m not quite able to get over that hurdle of anti-narcissism.  Also, videos are so data intensive that I find them wasteful, unless adding the visual portion really improves the conveyance of ideas.

In my case, video just gives people the option to look at my ugly mug while I’m talking, which is only going to put them off their lunches.  I suppose I could consider it my contribution to fighting the western epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but at this time of year, with so many celebratory meals being enjoyed, I’d just as soon not be accused of ruining someone’s holiday dinner.

And with that, I’ll wrap things up for this week**.  For those of you who celebrate it, I wish you a very merry and happy Christmas, which will have passed by the time you read my next weekly blog post.  For those of you who celebrate Hanukkah, I wish you the happiest of that holiday, which will be well underway by next Thursday.

And of course, all of you please enjoy any and every other of the many celebratory holidays that come at this time of year, having evolved from older celebrations of the Winter Solstice (which is in three days).  I wish all those in the northern hemisphere the happy anticipation of the lengthening daylight to come.  Those of us who are Seasonally Affected can at least look forward to our spiritual weight beginning to lighten in the days and months to come.

To all potential readers (and anyone else), all around the world, I wish you all the best.

TTFN

*I have no honest idea what the name of the day means.  I doubt that it has anything to do with pugilism.  If it refers to Christmas presents, it’s strange to think of boxing them after they’ve been given and received.  If anyone reading knows the etymology of this term, I’d be delighted to learn it.

**Appropriately enough.

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The art of our necessities is strange that can make vile blogs precious.

relessarwithquestions

This is about the last picture of me that I like…

Hello and good morning!  It’s Thursday, as you no doubt already know, and thus it’s time for another of my staggeringly popular weekly blog posts.

I should let anyone who’s paying attention know that I did in fact write a post for Iterations of Zero last week, but while editing it, I decided that it was just too negative to share right now.  Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future, but I figured there’s enough material on IoZ dealing with depression and its fallout, and I thought people wouldn’t be too chuffed to read more of it.  Perhaps I’m wrong in this.  If so, please let me know.

I now hereby remind you all that my giveaway offer is still in place until the end of the year:  If you send me a request, either here or through my Facebook or Twitter accounts, I’ll happily send you the Kindle edition either of one of my novels or three of my short stories, whichever you prefer.  You can pick them, or—if you like—I can pick them for you.  In such a case, I’ll be inclined to send you works that I most want to promote, so fair warning.  Of course, I’m happy to try to match your preferences if you just tell me what you enjoy, but I can’t guarantee that I have works that match all possible tastes.  My short stories, in particular, tend to be rather dark.  Still, if it’s sci-fi, fantasy, and/or horror that you crave, I think I can find a shoe that fits.

I’m very near the end of this run-through of Unanimity, which is nice, though of course the ending is sad in many ways.  The fact that I’m making such progress—glacially slow though it often feels—leads me think that the book will be ready for release sometime relatively early next year, always assuming I live that long.  It will definitely be my magnum opus to date, at least as far as size goes.  I hope it’s worth the wait*.

Now, to indulge in a bit of a tangent:  when I searched online to confirm that I wasn’t misusing the term “magnum opus”**, one of the top results delivered was the Instagram page for what seems to be a hair salon or similar out in Portland, OR (they had some lovely pictures, by the way).  This led me to wonder, as I do from time to time, whether there would be any benefit from my starting an Instagram account.  I don’t currently have one (which was implied by what I just said, wasn’t it?), and I’ve never really followed or looked closely at any such account hitherto.  I’m not big on photo sharing in general.  I don’t like how I look, so I don’t tend to share pictures of myself***, and there are few enough external events in my life that merit pictorial representation to the masses.  Of course, in addition to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I do have a YouTube channel, but that’s mainly used for sharing “videos” of my songs and recordings of some of my stories.  I’d be interesting to learn what your thoughts are on the benefits (or detriments) of Instagram for authors and other writers.  Do Stephen King and J. K. Rowling have Instagram accounts? I doubt that Shakespeare does.

That’s about all I have for now.  I’ll work on something new for IoZ for this week, and I’ll try to keep it as upbeat as I’m able, but I am grumpy by nature, it seems.

Again, please do contact me if you want some free stories to read for the holidays, even if they’re not exactly holiday-oriented tales.

In closing, in apparent contradiction to my grumpy nature and my dark imagination, I wish you all the very best in everything, even if you don’t necessarily know what that might be.  After all, does any of us really know what’s best for ourselves? But whatever it is, I wish it for you, my dearest readers, and for your families and friends…and what the heck, while we’re there, I’ll wish it for everyone.

Also, I want a pony.

TTFN

*Obviously, I think it’s terrific, but I’m biased.

**I did and do know what it means, but I wanted to make sure there weren’t misleading connotations in its common use.  It turns out I was both correct and fine, which happens sometimes.

***I used to be reasonably satisfied with my appearance, but chronic pain, depression, and prison will tend to take the glow out of one’s skin and the sparkle from one’s eyes, to say nothing of the gleam from one’s teeth.

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I give away myself for you and blog upon the exchange. (Announcing a Giveaway!)

gift box

Hello, good morning, and welcome not merely to another Thursday, but to a new month!  It’s the last month of the year and, depending on how you divvy things up, it’s the last month of the decade (though an argument could be made that the decade really ends with the beginning of 2021, and that the twenty-first century began in 2001, not 2000.  But I’ll try not to split hairs).

I haven’t yet written this week’s Iterations of Zero post, for those of you who might be eagerly anticipating it.  I’m afraid that the freeform approach I’m taking to that project often leads me to leave it to the end of the week.  I may need to set a specific day for releasing it again, as I do with this blog, though I fear that might lead to perverse resistance on my part.  In any case, I don’t want to let writing it interfere with the daily writing and editing of my fiction.

Speaking of which, things are proceeding steadily with the editing of Unanimity.  I’m nearing the end of my latest run-through, which will put me truly over the halfway mark of that process, which is exciting.  I don’t know about you all, but I for one am anxiously looking forward to finishing and publishing that book.  I can hardly wait for someone (besides me) to read it.

And further, speaking of that desire, and of my fiction still, I’ve decided to do something at which I’ve hinted previously:  I’m going to do a giveaway of some of my fiction in honor of the upcoming holiday season—during which, by many a tradition, we give gifts to those about whom we care.  I certainly care very much about people who love to read, and I can’t help but have a narcissistic soft spot for someone who wants to read my stories.

This giveaway will be e-book only, for several reasons—logistics and cost not the least, since I am a poor boy*.  Also, my short stories are mainly published in e-book format, on Kindle.  In case you don’t know, you don’t need to have a Kindle device to read them.  The Kindle app can be installed on any tablet, smartphone, or computer, and it’s a free at Amazon for the asking.  Many of you might be resistant to the idea of reading books on Kindle, preferring them in the more traditional form.  I do have deep and personal sympathy for that preference, of course, but there is incredible joy in being able to carry a library of well over two hundred books in one’s pocket…which is what I do all day, every day, thanks to Kindle.  It also saves on shelf space and—nominally—on trees.  Of course, you’re clearly reading this post on some form of computer, so it’s presumably not too great a leap for you to use Kindle.

Now to the specifics and then the mechanics of the giveaway.  Some of my works are novels and some are short stories.  Since the Kindle versions of the novels are currently priced roughly three times the cost of each of the short stories, I’ll give anyone who wants them a choice: you can be sent three short stories or one book (one of which is actually a collection of three “short” stories, which makes things nicely symmetrical).  Lest you think that’s a meager gift, let me remind you that my short stories don’t tend to be very short.  Some of them are nearly novellas.  The shortest one, I think, is Solitaire, and it’s also by far the oldest and the darkest of my available tales.

As to the mechanics: to send you the books/stories, I will need to have an email address to which to send it/them.  You can contact me here, in the comments section below, if you like (this week or later in the year is fine), or through my Facebook author’s page or my Twitter account (see the sidebar).  In case you don’t want your email address to be public knowledge, which I do understand, you should certainly feel free to direct message me through Facebook or Twitter.  Don’t forget to tell me which novel or which short stories you want me to send you**.  You can find a list of them on my Amazon author’s page, or on Goodreads, or here on this blog under the subject heading “My Books”.

I will not save your email address externally, nor shall I use it for future promotional purposes, nor shall I sell it or share it with anyone without a court order***.  All I really want to share is my work with interested readers.

That’s about it for this week.  I look forward to hearing from you, and though I don’t attach any strings to my giveaway, I’d certainly love you to give me feedback after reading my stories.  But that’s your decision, and I’ll think no less of you if you don’t (for whatever that’s worth).

TTFN

*I need no sympathy.

**Otherwise I’ll just pick for you.

***Possibly not even then.  My respect for the courts is not what it once was.