It took me a long time to learn that stories aren’t about events, but about how characters react to events and interact with each other, and much more than that, who the characters really are when the shit hits the fan.
Marion Zimmer Bradley said, “The secret of a story, to me, is a likeable character going through almost overwhelming odds to win a worthwhile goal.”
There’s so much free content online it’s possible for people to be entertained for the rest of their lives without paying for another book, magazine, newspaper, song, movie, TV show, or game ever again.
I’ve read lots of blog posts, articles, and a couple of books about giving content away for free. The opinions I’ve encountered range from:
Have some self respect. Your work is valuable, don’t give it away for free or nobody else will value your work.
to,
Give it all away for free, baby. Give and you shall receive. The universe provides.
With various levels of indignation in-between from both the information-wants-to-be-free hippies and the burn-the-theiving-pirates-at-the-stake crowd.
This weekend I finally took Dean Wesley Smith’s advice to heart and checked my inventory. I wasn’t particularly surprised to find lots of half finished novels, a previously published novel (that I might revisit), and half a dozen versions of the same novel (none of which can be published as they’re all precursors to The Bastard Cadre and the world has changed too much between those tales and the ones I’m working on now).
I also found a novella that I’ve been meaning to go over one last time, and about a dozen short stories (some of which have been published before).
The second book in The Bastard Cadre is available now.
The Godslayers’ Legacy picks up six months after the events of A God-Blasted Land (Grab a free copy of A God-Blasted Land). We catch up with Avril and Ranora at Frake’s Peak. Avril, perhaps as expected, is struggling to fit into his new role as the first-sworn of one Lord Obdurin’s cadres of bondsmen, the problem isn’t helped by the fact he’s the only member of the cadre at Frake’s Peak. We do get to meet some members of his cadre through, and I think it’s fair to say none of them are exactly what Avril expects. They were all fun to write about and I hope they’ll be fun to read about too.
A God-Blasted Land introduced us to a very small part of post-apocalyptic Newterra, the wastelands and the abandoned, but perfectly pristine, cities. We got to meet some of the good guys, some of the bad guys, and some of the in-betweens.
This time around we get a glimpse of the bigger players, the larger threats, and perhaps a hint of where things are headed for Avril.
The story is still building and there’s plenty more to come, but I’m very happy with this book (no Lucasing this time, I promise). I hope you’ll enjoy it too, and if you do, let me know. There’s a special offer at the end of the book for anybody who leaves a review.
I’m off to keep the momentum going and work on book three in the series. I can’t wait to share that book with you too.
The Godslayers’ Legacy comes in at a whisker under 40,000 words (Amazon claims this is 141 pages) so will suit anybody who enjoys epic science fiction and fantasy, but can’t quite bear the longterm time commitment required for so many of the popular science fiction and fantasy doorstoppers.
The Godslayers’ Legacy is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes, Kobobooks, and Smashwords.
It had to happen sooner or later, Smashwords added a new ePub option for uploading ebooks.
I like the smashwords. I like the idea of dealing with one distributor who takes cares of sending my books out to publishers all over the web. I like that they are constantly looking for new opportunities for writers to place content with e-stores and libraries and who knows where else. I also like that the minimum royalty payment isn’t particularly high and it’s accumulated across all channels (as opposed to a high minimum royalty payment per channel/location) and they even pay me via paypal. I even like that retailers report quarterly on sales of my books instead of providing realtime stats. Honestly, I hit the refresh button over on Amazon’s self publishing subdomain so often that it’s possible I’m personally responsible for a denial of service attack on the site.
There are few phrases that suck more than:
Not available in your location.
Off the top of my head, it’s up there with, “It’s not you, it’s me”, “Your call is important to us”, “I wouldn’t say it was bad sex”, and “My mother is moving in” (feel free to add your own in the comments).
It’s 2013 and we have this handy thing called the Internet that can transport bits and bytes quicker than your average traditional publisher can start up a vanity press.
People have tried to explain territorial rights to me (some of them have even done a good job of it), but it all sounds like some middleman somewhere tacking on his percentage. And not to be too rough on the bean-counting middlemen, they actually did serve a purpose once, it’s just that their time has passed.
An updated edition of A God-Blasted Land is now available for free from Amazon.com, iTunes, kobobooks, and smashwords.
There are no extra plot points, twists that work out differently, or new characters in the revised edition (though one of the scenes has been extended slightly). The changes mostly consist of tweaks to the writing. In many ways, I published A God-Blasted Land late (I’ve been working with the Bastard Cadre in one incarnation or another for close to twenty years), and in other ways, I published the story too early (I was impatient to publish something and didn’t go through as many checks as I should have). I’ve learned a lot about writing and storytelling in the not-quite-two-years since I first published A God-Blasted Land, and I’ve applied some of that to the story.
It’s possible there is more than a little Lucasing (thanks, George) going on. This is the first book in a series I am writing so the desire to get it (the introduction to the series) just right is very strong (book two will be out later this week). But for now, I’m very happy with the results and can finally stop tweaking it (I just can’t promise there won’t be a remastered blue-ray edition with extra Wookies in time for Christmas).
I’ve also included an offer at the back of the book that applies for all of 2013.