Book #3!

It’s coming!

(I was initially planning to wait until I had a novel-length piece to publish, but a lot of nanofic has passed under the bridge since then, so a third collection it is. At least once the editing work is done – so you can consider this a pre-announcement, which should give anyone who isn’t a current patron but would like to take advantage of the free e-book-for-patrons offer time to subscribe appropriately.)

No title as yet: that will come out in the editing. Cover art, on the other hand, that is on its way, so there’s absolutely that to look forward to!

 

Book Status Update: The Core War and Other Stories

So, um… we found a couple of minor formatting glitches in the released e-book version (the printed version is fine) of The Core War and Other Stories.

They’re now fixed in the current download, but if you have purchased a copy before now, please be assured that you’ll also receive the fixed version (or the option to download the fixed version) within a week or so; we just have to wait for the wheels of Amazon’s update review process to grind to completion. Sorry about that, and I hope it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment of the book.

(Those of you who have received the Patreon version of the book need not be concerned; you have the updated version.)

Discounts!

As an additional celebration of the release of my new book, the e-book of my first book, Vignettes of the Star Empire, will be on sale at $0.99 on Amazon.com for the next week (April 9 – April 16), a two-thirds discount. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, this would be a great time to!

(A similar sale will be in effect on Amazon.co.uk from tomorrow through the 20th.)

The Core War and Other Stories

The Core War and Other Stories

I haz another book!

Which you can find for Amazon Kindle here, or in genuine paper form here, 98,000 words of short fiction and novella from the Associated Worlds for the modest prices of $4.99 e, $10.99 paper.

Please buy a copy! Buy several copies and give them to people! Or tell people to buy a copy for themselves – that works, too! (Plusses, reshares, retweets, and other such things of this post are also much appreciated.)

And if you don’t yet have a copy of my first book, Vignettes of the Star Empire, there will be some news tomorrow that may interest you…

Enjoy!

Cover Art!

It is now, at last, time for the cover art for The Core War and Other Stories to be revealed (click through to see full-size version):

The Core War and Other Stories

Beautiful, isn’t it? Now, click through here for more on the artist’s site.

Art credits:

Drake-class frigate illustrated by William Black more of whose brilliant work can be seen here: http://william-black.deviantart.com/ .

Drake-class crest by Zeynep Dilli.

Background image of the Carina Nebula:

Credit for Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).
Credit for CTIO Image: N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley) and NOAO/AURA/NSF.

Finished

No, that’s not going to be today’s letter “F” piece. Well, probably not.

But it does mean that the proofs are proofed, the cover is made, the prices are priced, the checks are checked, all systems are go, all lights are green, and as soon as I double-check a couple of final points, The Core War and Other Stories is go for launch.

Are we excited yet?

Vignettes of the Star Empire

[Eldraeverse #1 Cover]I haz a book!

(As you can see from the addition of the “My Books” tab up above, no doubt.)

And you can find it on Amazon here, for Kindle, right now – over 44,000 words of nanofiction and metafiction from the Associated Worlds SF universe for the modest price of $2.99.

Buy a copy!  Buy ten copies!  Tell your friends, and make them buy ten copies, too!

But, no, seriously.  Vignettes of the Star Empire, the first collection of the nanofiction and metafiction which I’ve been writing (and including a couple of pieces not seen on t’blog) is now available as a Kindle e-book, all edited and polished and in its final canonical form.  For those of you who would prefer a physical book, that one’s not quite ready yet, but should also be available soon.  Not that you should let that stop you from buying an e-book copy too, of course.  Ahem.

Enjoy!

Eldraeverse Subscriptions #4: Cosmos and Ethos

While I’m really running dreadfully behind with this series, #4 is off to my subscribers, giving a taste of what the mainstream belief systems among the eldrae with regard to, well, Cosmos and Ethos are all about.

For anyone coming to me recently – and this is the first time I’ve posted one of these on this blog – this is part of a set of nanofic/vignette works I’m selling on a subscription model; the original post is here.

Eldraeverse Subscriptions #3: The Darëssef (1/2)

And now number three is out – some vignettes explaining the Eldraeic not-caste-but-often-misglossed-as-caste-in-translation system, or rather, people from the various darëssef talking about what it means to be one of them. This is the first four of the eight, with the rest coming later.

Original post on this here, if anyone doesn’t know what’s going on and/or is interested in a year’s supply of nanofic…

Eldraeverse Subscriptions #1: Elmiríën’s Truths

For those of you who remember this post, you might like to know that I’ve just sent out the first of those works of fiction to my subscribers: Elmiríën’s Truths, a key excerpt from what is probably the most important historical religious document of Eldraeic (or Imperial) history – which hopefully provides a little glimpse into the backstory of the Blue and Orange Morality they have going on – and for myself, a venture into non-prosaic writing forms, which was itself rather interesting to do…

For those of you who don’t remember that post – well, if you’re interested in a year’s supply of nanofic, it’s not too late to subscribe

Six Word Stories

Oops! Space doesn’t fold that way.

Prime Directive? But they have money!

Contragravity? But this is a spin…

faster than light. We are travelling

I’ve invented a memetic weapon… aaaargh!

Night falls. But no! Orbiting dreadnought.

The Elyse Phylarius Lecture on Practical Diplomacy

(So, I believe I promised y’all a story? Here it is. One 496-word piece of speculative flash-fiction, coming right up.)


So, gentlesophs, you’re all familiar with how things work in the Associated Worlds, or at least in the broad consensus of the friendly Associated Worlds. You live there, after all. And you’re not, for which you ought to be more thankful than I suspect most of you are, going to be sent off to supervise our relations with any of the really exotic species out there; sun-dwelling plasmoids, force-knots in neutron star cores, or nanite blooms. Such things are reserved for those with considerably more experience than I have, for that matter.

But the routine Periphery has enough strangeness to keep you entertained. My first assignment to the Periphery was to a “typical” Eliéra-class planet, whose only particularly distinguished feature – from the thousand-light view – was that its trade-and-transit figures were much, much lower than others of its class.

I can see you grimacing back there, you know. “A trade issue. How exciting.”

Well, that’s what I thought, too, right up until I arrived. Fortunately, I had a very good port director – and if you take one piece of advice away from this lecture, it would be this: listen to your port director. They see the day-to-day interface between their world and the Galaxy down at ground level. You won’t.

So, my first day on world, Linnéä Idolós – now there’s a name you’ve heard – called me up to the roof of the control tower, and pointed to what looked like a small city right outside the port gate. Except that it wasn’t a city – that was the customs station. Which the locals had built, shortly after they learned enough about the rest of the Galaxy to loathe it, to make sure that nothing like cornucopia machines, AI seeds, psychedesign, immortagens, or any other icky technologies that might contaminate the precious essence of their species got through. After all, that would disturb the status quo too much for the statist-corporatist combines who owned the planet and thought they owned everyone on it, too.

Yes, it does sound like something out of prehistory. This was the Periphery. It’s like that.

Anyway, they were happy enough to buy scanning machinery to enforce their self-imposed quarantine, and whatever you may have heard, we don’t officially endorse smuggling…

How did I solve it? Well, the second thing you should take away is that while you may work for the government, unofficial solutions are still allowed, and indeed often preferable. After a few weeks, I called a friend at Cognitech, and invited them to open a Rent-a-Thought in the port – inexpensive ideas and technologies for purchase, impressed straight into memory. And try as they liked, the locals couldn’t search the mind.

The local governments lasted about twenty years past that point. After fifty, the world was back inside the normal economic ranges for its class, and as upstanding a member of the galactic community as any. All done with one call.

That’s what makes this job worthwhile.