One Book for Free, Two Books for Sale · 9:17pm Oct 31st, 2014
The free book:
Is Foreigner, the whole Gilda adventure I've been working on the past couple months. I posted the concluding chapter yesterday, and considering that it started out as a short story, I'm pretty happy with how it grew.
The books for sale, I'll talk about below the break.
The first is the one I've mentioned a couple times already--this'll be the last time, I swear! It started out as a pony novel called Half the Day is Night, but after adding 25,000 words and a couple of sub-plots while removing all the ponies and pony references, it ended up as a talking-animal fantasy novel called Morning, Noon & Night. It's available as a Kindle e-book as well as on actual paper, and the paper edition has four illustrations by one of my favorite artists, Roz Gibson.
The second is also connected to the whole Pony thing, so I don't feel like a complete cad talking about it here...
Back when I first stumbled across Equestria Daily in February of 2011, I found everyone using pseudonyms on the site. Casting about in my brain for a handle I could use, I remembered a character I'd been trying and failing to write stories about since my college days twenty-five years earlier, a wheelchair-bound fantasy fan named Gus Lancer. In my notes on the character, I had something about how he frequented chat rooms using the name AugieDog, and I'd even made him an actual e-mail address back in the 1980s when I'd first signed up for America On-Line--like I said, he's been in my head for a while. So I used that e-mail address to get a Blogspot account--this was back when Equestria Daily still used Blogger for its comments--and started submitting fanfiction to the site as AugieDog.
Using Gus's identity this way started me thinking about him. And it struck me that the way I'd set the character up, he would definitely be a brony. This got me thinking about what it meant to be a brony, and I suddenly found that I had stuff I wanted to write about.
But I was feeling a little nervous. After all, Gus had been with me for literally decades without me being able to spin any stories about him. I figured I could use a little help. And I found it on the website FurAffinity.
I'd joined the site at about the same time as I started following EqD thinking that I might find some more pony fans amongst the furries, but what I found instead was a little group of writers amongst all the visual artists. They seemed to congregate around Renee Carter Hall, known as Poetigress over there, and something called the Thursday Prompt, one or two words she would post every Thursday for folks to use as springboards for stories. So I started doing that: every weekend, I would write 1,000 words or so about Gus and his peculiar situation based on whatever the prompt had been the previous Thursday. Slowly, a plot began forming in all these fragments, and by the end of the year, I had most of a novel.
That was when I heard about an outfit called Kazka Press putting together an anthology of SF and fantasy short stories based on the brony phenomenon. I cleaned up the first three of the Gus pieces I'd done, sent them in as a short story, and the editor bought it. A little later, Kazka Press said they were thinking of putting out a line of "flash novels"--SF and fantasy up to 50,000 words--so I spackled all the Gus pieces together, wrote the ending, and came out with a 49,900 word something I called Neighbors.
I sent it in to Kazka...and they almost immediately went out of business. The story was way too long for most magazine publishers and way too short for most book publishers, but I got a few encouraging rejection letters. I worked some more on the thing, ran it through the writing group I belong to, got a lot of encouraging comments from them, and ended up with a 50,500 word short novel still called Neighbors.
And that's the novel you can buy right now! I've got a special deal running all this weekend. The Kindle e-book edition is available for 99 cents till Monday, and if you buy the paper version for $9, you get the Kindle version free. Head over to the novel's Kindle page and click on the "Look inside" link up by the cover image, and it'll let you read the first four-and-a-half chapters, the whole original short story plus another chapter-and-a-half! It'll give you an idea of whether the book might be something you'll enjoy, at any rate.
There's always so much going on!
Mike
Just bought the paperback, considering everything else you've written, it should be really good.
I wish you would sell them on sites other than Amazon. The DRM is such a hassle.
Either way, yay more books and if I can ever get their kindle software installed, I'll eagerly read it.
Wow, that's interesting, I didn't know that you're that old. o.O
A brony that old is something I haven't reckoned with.
aw damn I remember the Thursday Prompts ;_; I wrote some great shit for those
2566663
Thanks!
Now I'm feeling all nervous...
2566705
When I'm configuring the Kindle versions, I specifically tell Amazon to leave off all the DRM stuff. I don't know if they actually do, but since they give it as an option, I'm hoping so!
2566765
I'll be hitting the half-century mark in February.
2566908
They still do 'em every Thursday, but I haven't needed the prompting.
Mike
2566946 The problem is you can only download and read it in their kindle format. They send it to your kindle software and since every time I try to download the software it makes my computer have a spams, I'm out of luck for now.