Audio
January:
Launch a Kickstarter campaign in concert with Gail Carriger. Yup, we’re gonna be working together on something audio-oriented (this will happen toward the end of the month).
Recording Free Will (big project) and the first 3 Lantham audiobooks

February:
Free Will podcast re-launches (probably. If not Feb, then early March, as I’ll be travelling in late Feb).

March:
Commercial release of the first (or more) Lantham audiobooks

April:
MAYBE the DF10 soundtrack, if the timing works out with me and Schadey

Ebooks
January:
Throwing Lead (the long-awaited “Gun Book”) will see the light of day this month.
Silent Victor (Clarke Lantham #4) will also show up late this month.
Chicken Noodle Gravity (Lombard Alchemist #2, featured last month on Escape Pod) will release as an ebook
There are two other short stories as well that will release, assuming I can find time to do the cover art.

February:
The Auto Motive (Motives, book 1–a steampunk urban fantasy YA adventure series–might release after I get back from my travels in March)
He Ain’t Heavy (Lantham #5, again, this is a maybe)

March or April:
The Summer Town (standalone Southern Gothic romance/horror)
Sunday Morning Giraffe (Lombard Alchemist #3, short story)
Several other short stories, perhaps as many as five

April or May:
Probably either Student Culture or The Last Uploader (both standalone SF novels, both currently in progress)

Paperbacks:
Janurary:
Down From Ten
Predestination (re-release–we had problems with the printer that have dogged us for months on this one)
Sculpting God, Vol. 1
A Ghostly Christmas Present/Smoke Rings (Lantham #2 and #3 in a single ace-double style volume)

February or March:
Throwing Lead
Free Will
Silent Victor

April or May
The Auto Motive
He Ain’t Heavy (assuming it winds up being long enough for a solo paperback release)
The Summer Town
The Last Uploader or Student Culture

— —
Projects that might jump to the front:
The book version of Principles of Contracts (with lots more content and a better title)
A podcast to accompany Throwing Lead

— — —

Like I said, this is all tentative and subject to change at my imperious whim. The stuff slated for January is basically a lock, the stuff further out is less certain. There’s also more going on behind the scenes here that is not directly tied to writing output, some of which will produce results that you’ll see on the blog and in other places around the ‘net.

And if you’re an Antithesis fan, don’t worry. I start work in earnest on Avarice (Antithesis #3) in April.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet

It was worth it. And the folks at the company that manages the Lerner estate were very helpful. Because of their kind work, I can now proudly present you with the ebook version of Down From Ten, a novel uniquely close to my heart.

In early January, a group of friends gather for an annual retreat: eight artists, scientists, and authors cloistered together in a mansion in California’s high country for ten days of games, conversation, exhibition, and hedonism while isolated from the outside world.

“Down From Ten is a brilliant, sometimes creepy take on a bohemian cozy with surreal underpinnings and an irrepressibly touching ending.” –Gail Carriger, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Parasol Protectorate series

For the first time in text, read the story that View from Valhalla calls “Unique, lavish, and challenging…amazing in its scope and its detail…with THE most surprising ending I’ve EVER experienced.”
Get it now for your Kindle, Nook, or any other reader.

Or, read the first three chapters here.

Enjoy!

Because of the diversity of your questions, several sections of the book work well as standalone articles, and since not all of you will want the whole book (or are content to wait to get it all at once), I am pleased to present you with the first of the Throwing Lead Singles: Science Fiction Weaponry.

The author of The Antithesis Progression teams up with the author of The Rehumanization of Jade Darcy to provide an in-depth guide to the science fact that underlies some of the most popular weapons in science fiction. Whether you’re a writer looking to add depth and texture to your weapons technology, or a fan who wants to know how it all works, this is the place.

Find out how it all works! This article covers particle beams, phasers, lasers, disruptors, mass drivers, railguns, coilguns, Metal Storm and more, as well as tactical considerations for combat in science fictional environments.

Buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

The Lunar Revolution is faltering, events are spinning out of control, and Bill Shelley is inches away from achieving victory. Meanwhile, far away in the south, the footsteps of a little girl running for her life bring with them a secret that could start the war before anyone is ready.

From the surface of Mars to the forests of Vermont, the players are at the table, their antes are in, and the next round of cards is about to hit the felt. The winners will determine the face of the solar system…if they can survive the game.

Read the first four chapters here.

Or, buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

A new voice in fantasy, J. Daniel Sawyer has already left an indellible mark on his readers with his trademark tales of human desires and the moral complexity they create.

Contains: Lilith, Angels Unawares, The Coffee Service, We Create Worlds, Control Room, The Man In The Rain, and Train Time, plus a new essay, poetry, and bonus material.

Smashwords
Kindle
Nook
XinXii

Edited, you say?
Well, yes. Subscribers to the newsletter will get the occasional special preview, discount coupon, contest, and other such goodies that won’t be available to anyone else. Those items will be clipped out of the newsletter before it’s posted here. But other than that, it’ll be about the same thing.

If you wish to subscribe to the newsletter, simply email me at feedback _at_ jdsawyer.net, or use the contact form on this site, and say so.

So, if you’ve been trying to figure out what the hell I’ve been up to for the last year and a half, wait no longer. You can now download the inaugural issue as a epub, mobi, and PDF.

Clarke Lantham has a checkered relationship with holidays, and this New Year’s Eve is no different. His space is cramped, his personal life is on the skids, and his business is once again under assault from lawyers and bill collectors.

Yeah, right.

Read the first chapter here.

Or, buy it now for Kindle, Nook, and all other readers.

By mid-day Friday I had my bearings a lot better. We managed to locate some decent casino food–if your only experience with casinos is looking at the advertisements on billboards and the decadent meals there pictured, trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds–and set about hitting panels and trolling the dealer rooms in search of fun and enlightenment.

At this point, the memories of the weekend blur together. There were lots of parties–conversations with Mike Moscoe (a.k.a. Mike Shepherd), Brad Torgenson, Peter V. Brett, Brent Weeks, Eddie Schneider, Mur Lafferty, Kris Rusch, Alastair Mayer, Dean Wesley Smith, Philippa Ballentine, Gail Carriger, The Brothers Kollin, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, and far too many others to name (let alone remember!). Old friends and acquaintances caught up with, new friends made, and a lot of shop talk. The SFWA suite (and the other parties) are the functional equivalent of the office water cooler in this weird profession where our work is done almost entirely in isolation. The conversations were too numerous (and sometimes too bawdy) to recount here, but if you find yourself at a WorldCon and see a table peopled by any of these fine folks, I can’t recommend their company highly enough. Just be prepared to bring your scintillating banter and a willingness to listen.

It was a very interesting climate in which to do shop talk, too. The publishing industry is in the midst of some startling upheavals, and even in the small quarter of Science Fiction, the awareness of and attitude towards these upheavals varies widely, and that has a lot of interesting knock-on effects on the intra-culture politics and business climate. I’m not quite sure what to report about it–I’ll probably take another several weeks to digest it all. But as a pulse-of-the-industry measure, absolutely invaluable.

Three things of a professional nature leap to the front of my mind, though.

The first was the response to the sample copies I brought along and showed around. And Then She Was Gone and Predestination both drew a lot of raised eyebrows from book packagers and publishers I showed them to.

The second went, in the words of one publisher who looked at them: “These are some of the best packaged books I’ve seen in a long time. If they don’t sell, nothing will.” This was a pretty universal reaction, and a huge relief. It’s one thing when a little two-person team who’s been doing design work for upwards of a decade dips their toes into book packaging–it’s quite another to blow the socks off the pros whose pool you’re starting to swim in. This year has been a hell of a marathon for me so far, filled with a lot of frustration and professional growth–you can imagine the buoying this kind of reaction provides.

The third reaction, not quite as universal, was “Can I take this home to read?” We left a goodly number of copies in the hands of the interested–who knows, perhaps we’ll see a review or two come out of that. If nothing else, though, hopefully a handful of people will have some entertaining evenings.

This is not to toot my own horn so much as to keep all of you, who’ve been extremely helpful over the past few years, in the loop. But the good news didn’t stop there.

I also learned that I’ve made my professional pro-rate short fiction sale (this makes my sixth fiction sale over all), and it’s one of the stories that was sent out during the Asssmoving contest earlier this year. Makes me think I should resurrect the contest, maybe on a shorter time scale. I’m open to ideas.

Hmm…what else?

HUGE congrats are due to my friend Chris Garcia for his long-overdue Hugo win, and for an excellent acceptance speech.

On another note, the con organizers (John Lorentz and Ruth…gah, I can’t remember her last name) had the excellent notion to bring back what (I’ve heard) used to be a standard fixture at WorldCons: a panel called “The Killer B’s.” Basically, you stick David Brin, Gregory Benford, and David Bear on a panel together and get them talking shop. Since all of them are scientists, and all of them are working at the cutting edge of aerospace and/or genomics as well as being consistently long-term sellers in science fiction, and they all disagree on most of the interesting points, it’s a hell of a fun time. And, you’re also prone to learning a lot about things that haven’t hit the press yet. Lots of interesting near-term stuff coming in space travel, some of them from groups that made a big splash years ago and have been relatively quiet since. In space travel, as well as in publishing, it’s a very exciting time to be alive.

So, lessons learned for potential WorldCon goers:

It’s WAY too big to park in one bar. If you want to maximize your time, you have to party hop and stay mobile.

Stay hydrated. Particularly if you’re in a dry climate. Forgetting your electrolyte water is a quick way to exhaustion–keeping it on hand will keep you alert.

When you go to panels, take notes (or a recorder). The ones staffed by writers and editors tend to get facts coming fast and furious, and in times like this a lot of that information needs to be triaged. Things are changing, and nobody is exactly sure how.

I hit the ground back in the Bay Area reeling–a hell of an intense four days. And the autumn in front of me has taken on an even greater sense of urgency.

And it’s an ambitious schedule in front of me, which I’ll put dates to later, but here’s a smattering of what you can expect from me this fall:

Paperback releases of Free Will, Down From Ten, Sculpting God vol 1, A Ghostly Christmas Present, Silent Victor (Lantham 3), Throwing Lead (the long-anticipated “gun book), and either The Auto Motive or The Last Uploader (details forthcoming).

Ebook releases of all of the above, as well as some new short stories in ebook.

Wider distribution for the Predestination soundtrack.

And Then She Was Gone audiobook.

The reboot of the Free Will podcast.

And maybe, just maybe, a kickstater project for a very special hardback project.

On top of all of this, I picked up a lot of business stuff I have to get in line on the back end of this. Exciting times–I can’t wait. But oh boy, am I glad I got some solid sleep after I got home!

Anyway, sorry for the rambling post. It was that kind of experience. Huge thanks to everyone who made my first Worldcon a memorable one!

Grab a pack of cards. Strap your pressure suit on. It’s time to head to the poker game that started it all, and the book that View From Valhalla called “lovingly detailed, well-written thinking man’s science fiction at its best.*”

Joss Kyle is a one-time National Security Advisor who barely escaped Washington D.C. with his skin intact. For three years he’s lived by his wits and the fall of the cards in the criminal underworld of South America, but jumping planet for Space Station Sidon means walking into an ambush more dangerous than any he’s yet faced:
A man named Alex Hart wants to play cards with him.

Their meeting will fling Joss into a game playing for highest stakes in town: control of the entire solar system. Chased by a revolutionary leader, agents of a corrupt senator, and an underworld boss known only as The Green Lady, he quickly discovers that in the looking-glass world above the gravity well, survival, like poker, is just another sport. And in this contest, it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you rig the game.

Now available in paperback from AWP Science Fiction, Predestination is the story Nathan Lowell calls “A sweeping tale of politics, corruption, intrigue, betrayal, and murder…a fast-paced ride through a world that’s too plausible to be ignored**” and that Brand Gamblin calls “…a lush, powerful story of hunter and pray, betrayal and rebellion, and poker.***.” Available for the first time ever in paper, this handsome new edition rings in at 341 pages contains the full text of the ebook edition, plus new line art and a sample of the sequel, Free Will.

Now, it’s true that you can buy the novel at Amazon now, and you’ll be able to find it in bookstores this fall, but for you loyal folk that read my blog, it’s available for a special rate. Until Worldcon, buy your copy by clicking here and using the coupon code XX2QR2Z8, and you’ll receive $2.00 off the $14.99 cover price.

Finally, for those of you who run vending booths at conventions (or who work in bookstores) and would like to carry Predestination (or any of my other books), shoot me an email from the Contact Form and I will send you the AWP Books wholesale pricing schedule.

I’ll be back soon with news about Free Will and Down From Ten, but until then remember…
It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you rig the game.

*Odin1eye, View From Valhalla
**Nathan Lowell, Author of The Golden Age of the Silver Clipper
***Brand Gamblin, author of Tumbler and The Hidden Institute

Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.

But first, the reasons why the two popular methods don’t work for me.

Pulling Down My Pants

“Pantsers” are folks that write by the seat of their pants. They trust their subconscious and just fly on from word one, muddling through as they go–and often, they’re brilliant. Many of my favorite short story writers (including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Dean Wesley Smith) write like this, and they are quite often bloody brilliant.

I’ve done this with short stories–sometimes, I’ve done it really well. But for every short story I’ve finished with this method, I have five that started, sputtered, and stopped. Some I’ve gone back and done in a way more suited to my workflow–others I’ve abandoned and think of fondly, like childhood friends I’m unlikely ever to see again.

Why do they sputter? Frankly, it’s because I often write from a milieu, and only infrequently is a milieu sufficient to sustain a whole story. My process often relies on the collision of two dissimilar ideas in my own head, and without those two ideas, the story won’t spin.

With novels, it’s the same problem, only worse. Unless the story itself is a discovery process with a very constrained point of view, there isn’t a lot I can get a foothold on. Even then, I only get so far before I have to resort to other methods.

Which brings us to outlining.

Sketchy Thinking

The beauty of an outline is that you never have to worry about where you’re going. You decide in advance what happens, and why, and when–sometimes in rough detail, sometimes in minutia. Many of my favorite novelists (including Gail Carriger, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Frank Herbert) work this way, to spectacular result, and the method has innate appeal. The question of “what’s next” that can get writers blocked on a project, and pre-laying the track means you don’t have to worry about going off it and losing the plot.

But it comes with a cost: spontaneity. My particular neuroses innately rebel against tight pre-plotting. Once I’ve written an entire story in my mind once, it’s a slog to write it again, and that slog sometimes shows in the finished product (which is why there are a few novels and stories that will never see the light of day–they are, according to my betas, stale-born, and I don’t have the heart to go back and redraft them from scratch).

However, for someone of my disposition there is a third way to write.

I call it “playing jazz.”

Why Jazz?

Using music as an analog, a pantser would be like a musician who has so internalized structure that they can pick up an instrument and do a solo jam that is neither dull nor directionless. An outliner would be a concert pianist who rote memorizes perfectly a pre-composed piece, and then adds texture and flourish by the way she performs the notes and accents the silences.

Jazz is an artform between. Like writing, music depends upon deviating from a well-understood structure. In both music and writing, structure is king–without it, you don’t have anything that resembles a story, or music. But with jazz, the structure is malleable within certain limits, and the bulk of the piece within those limits is made up of improvisation to such an extent that no two performances of the same piece will ever be the same. Sometimes, they may not even sound like the same song.

To play Jazz with words, you need the baseline structure–a few story beats you must hit for everything to work well. Then, in the vast spaces in between, you connect the dots by playing in between them–exploring the complications, finding the indirect ways between points A and B and C. In a long, plot heavy novel like The Antithesis Progression, the individual storylines will all have those points, and there will be planned points of intersection between them, but the jazz happens in the execution. In books with a more straightforward structure, like The Clarke Lantham Mysteries or Down From Ten, there is more improvisation–but in either case, the method lays in playing to the strengths of both outlining and discovery writing, while sidestepping the aspects of both processes that my particular twisted psychology finds unendurable.

It’s All About Process

My first million-and-a-quarter words qualify me as a neophyte in the writing world, but they have taught me why it takes so long for writers to find their voice. Learning a process will allow you to grapple with story structure in a way that will help you tell stories that connect with your audience. There is no right way. There is only the way that you find that works for you. If you, like my conversation partner last night, are feeling confused by the prescriptions offered by writers further along than you, take heart! It’s normal for all of us to think “my way worked for me, so it should work for everyone.”

But however well-intentioned that advice, the fact remains: only you are capable of working out what process works best for you. And whether you’re writing books and screenplays with highly developed structures (like episodic television, or category romance) or that are more free-form (like slipstream), the process you go through to get there will vary according to your psychology. Take my description of “playing jazz” as another possible option–but don’t take it as gospel. Your mileage may vary.

Some of you will get a sneak peak. You see, this is a big book. It ate up more pages, and more time, than I expected by an order of magnitude, and I’m eager to see it find a good home on the shelves and in the e-readers of all of you, including those of you who have drifted away in the meantime, intending to come back when the series continued.

To let people know Antithesis is back, we’re going to need publicity. Publicity means you! Some of you out there enjoy blogging, posting opinion pieces and reviews, etc., and you are the ones I need. Starting today, the first hundred of you that email me (either the normal way through the feedback at jdsawyer.net address, or through the web form you can find here) with the subject line “Free Will Ebook” will receive a free, pre-copyedits ebook version of Free Will (and a corrected version once the proofs are done).

In return for receiving this advance review copy, you promise to blog the book when you’ve finished reading it and, once the book is released to the general public in the next week or two, to post a copy or extract of your blog review in two of the following: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Goodreads, Kobo, Sony ebook store, Kobo, iBookstore. Those of you who feel enthusiastic enough about the book to post the review in all those places will be entered into a drawing. The four prizes in that drawing will be:

Spread the word!
Also, watch this space. There will be more announcements in the coming days about casting calls, a new Death Threats contest, and other goodies.

But, more importantly for those who have been quietly composing your death threats:

Free Will is done. The continuity edit, all the little fixes, it’s all done. All that’s left now is the copy edit, which’ll take a few days. With any luck, we’re looking at an ebook release this weekend or early next week.

We’re also currently breaking scripts out. Expect a casting call around the same time as the ebook release!

In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

You can find the story at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Below, you can find a sample.

Enjoy!

—Story Sample Below The Cut—

Tap, tap, tap.

The cane foot tapped measuredly on the plank, hammering out a steady tick-tock rhythm. It was not a rubber foot, such as had been common on cane-feet for a century now, but a proper pinned steel cane foot, suitable for a weapon or a prop to lean on or a scepter with which to gesticulate. It kept its clock-like rhythm even as a steam engine pulled out of the station, a few feet from the bench where its owner sat in his frock coat and top hat, measuring the minutes in percussive time.

The late afternoon summer was dry and hot, save for the oppressive blasts of humidity that coated the ticket window with fog for a few brief moments when a locomotive deigned to grace the lonely platform with its presence. The endless in-between times stretched on like the deep-split grain of the wooden planks that seemed to continue uninterrupted from one floorboard to the next. Across the double-tracks, past the far platform, flies and weevils swarmed above the autumn grain, taking from it what pickings they could before the harvest.

It was the last day of summer. Soon the dust would rise from the fields and the northern world would hunker down for a winter season that was comfortable and warm, circumscribed by brick and fiberglass, hearths long since replaced by electric heaters. The days when people froze to death for want of wood, or heating oil, or gas were well gone, but the anachronistic frock coat and cane went seemingly unnoticed on the forgotten railway line, where steam power serviced the nostalgic aging population whose automated homes drew nuclear power from the worldwide grid. The coming months would be a time of hibernation for Europe, but neither the cold slow yearly death the old world had endured, nor the slowed down fallow time of the new world were in the future of this man from out the storybooks of Conan Doyle or the misty streets of Whitechapel. And yet for all his out-of-place formality, the bench he sat on was wrought iron, and the foot of his cane kept perfect time. He seemed a fixture in the weatherbeaten station.

The steel band left small indentations in the old, grey oak, and the cane’s wielder was beginning to regret his promise to await the train from Bonn. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Leaving Gibraltar, they each had business to attend to, loose ends of past lives to tie up before they embarked together for the new frontier. She could have flown in, of course, the airport was near enough from their ship’s moorings. Or she could have driven, but somehow, even back in Morocco, the steam train had seemed best. It had seemed fitting that they leave their old world behind in its proper style, and the Orient Express and a few of the other remaining locomotives on the planet ran right past their destination.

So, it had been settled. They had kissed goodbye with promises to meed in two months. There had been chats, and vid calls, and letters, and every other sort of communication that was available to them, and when they got busy and went without each other for a few days or a week, their reconnection was that much sweeter for the absence. She was a hunger for him, as real as his need for meat and far more dearly sought, while he was to her like water. That’s what she had said, over and over again.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

That was what she had said, and he had believed her. But he had been here, waiting on the Orient Express, its last run of the summer, for two days. It had been delayed, there had been no word. Perhaps a mechanical breakdown had stranded it in a high pass – but he discarded the notion as soon as it occurred to him. This wasn’t the nineteenth century – there were were sat phones and radios, and if nothing else the ticket agent should know something.

But if he knew anything, he wasn’t telling.

She was a practical woman, not one to wait around for repairs. If the train were stranded she’d probably found a flat to let while she waited, even though the train had comfortable accommodations, she’d want to take advantage of a last chance to explore an alpine village. She’d dig in and sample the culture, find a club with a good local band and drink microbrews. She’d tour the local historical monuments and maybe have a long conversation over chess in whatever language was spoken in that remote corner of the world.

She spoke all the languages, she’d have no trouble blending in. But when her train departed she’d be on her way to him again, forsaking whatever brief affair she found to occupy her time, to be her last hurrah.

Assuming she had gotten on the train at all. Assuming she would tear herself away from her new life by the stranded train.

Tap. Tap. Tap…

—

End of sample. ©2007, J. Daniel Sawyer. All Rights Reserved

Read the rest atAmazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

However, it IS coming in the next week or less!

All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.

New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.

What does this mean for you?

Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.

It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).

Time to crack the champagne!

As your fantasy travel agent, allow me to offer you a guided tour of the San Francisco Bay Area like you’ve never seen it before: through the eyes of detective Clarke Lantham, sentenced to the hell of the suburbs in his quest to find a missing teenage girl. For the first time in paperback from AWP Mystery comes And Then She Was Gone, the adventure described by Gail Carriger as “full of snappy one-liners I’m dying to quote” and by Seth Harwood as “a mystery so dark and complex that you could lose a molar biting into it.”

Now available from AWP Mystery in paperback, And Then She Was Gone is a tense, funny, action packed adventure that sticks its fingers just under edge in order to flip it over. The handsome new edition rings in at 214 pages contains the full text of the ebook edition, plus a map detailing the geography that plays such an integral role in the story, along with a sample of the second Clarke Lantham novel, A Ghostly Christmas Present.

Now, it’s true that you can buy the novel at Amazon now, and you’ll be able to find it in bookstores this fall, but for you loyal folk that read my blog, it’s available for a special rate. Until May 15, buy your copy by clicking here and using the coupon code Q38WV4AS, and you’ll receive $1.50 off the $9.99 cover price.

Finally, for those of you who run vending booths at conventions (or who work in bookstores) and would like to carry And Then She Was Gone, shoot me an email from the Contact Form and I will send you the AWP Books wholesale pricing schedule.

I’ll see you between the pages!

Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where book 1 could end naturally–and on a very nice cliffhanger–so I could move on to the new book 2 (which was originally the planned second half of book 1). I’d just sit down and write book 2 as soon as the time afforded.

Yeah.

If you’ve been following my progress with this book, you already know how that bright idea turned out. I’ve gotten four other books written in the meantime, and I’m quick on the way to finishing a further two, and still Free Will mocks me with its recalcitrance. And it’s not because I haven’t kicked ass on writing it either: Predestination rang in at 122,000 words after some serious cutting post-podcast and only had to cope with four major storylines. That’s a healthy sized book–it’s fantasy-novel length. Free Will is…well…bigger.

Much bigger. Two and a half reams of paper big. It isn’t done yet, and it’s north of 160,000 words with fifteen storylines (eight of them major). That’s too long, even though the second half of the book is wall-to-wall action and the first half moves along as a very fast clip. Too long as it is, and I’ve still got a lot further to go–easily another 50,000 words if I play the story to the original end point.

After printing the whole thing out today and separating out the storylines I had a read-through of each, and I discovered something:

I’ve done it again. My original planned Book 1 of Antithesis isn’t just two books. It’s three. Well, two and a half. And I’ve already written sixty pages of book three by accident.

What does this mean for you who’s been waiting eagerly?

Well, it means I’ll actually finish Free Will this century. Probably this month. And I’m close enough to the end to head back into production on the audio this week, which I’m doing. It also means that Free Will will be a reasonable length–it might even sneak in under the equivalent of 650 pages when all is done. It means you’ll get a book that ends on a sequence of scenes that is the biggest, brashest you’ve seen yet…

And it means that the first two acts of book 3 are going to be incredibly explosive.

This series keeps surprising me with how much story is wrapped up in it. I can’t wait to share that surprise with you.

Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of you who are anything but, I am pleased to announce this spring’s publishing schedule (well, for my books anyway) from AWP Books. In no particular order, here’s what’s coming:

The Clarke Lantham Mysteries
#1 And Then She Was Gone Ebook: Already Available. Paperback: April 15
#2 A Ghostly Christmas Present Ebook: Already Available. Paperback: July 21

The Antithesis Progression
#0 The Man In The Rain Ebook: April 10
#1 Predestination Ebook: April 20. Paperback: June 20
#2 Free Will Ebook and Paperback: July 4

Down From Ten
Ebook: August 1. Paperback: August 1 (see poll in sidebar)

Short Stories
Cold Duty Ebook: April 10
Angels Unawares Ebook: April 10
We Create Worlds Ebook: April 20
The Coffee Service Ebook: May 10
Train Time Ebook: May 10

It should be a great spring!

[poll id="2"]

You may vote for two of the three options (this is to let you voice your desire for hardbacks, as well as priority). Let us know what you want!

Vanity
For your starter today, I’ve recently finished Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. We recently had a three episode set discussing the premise and arguments Harris addresses in the book. I’ve also posted a review at Goodreads. It’s an interesting and provocative book–if you have an interest in ethical philosophy, I highly recommend it.

Whimsy
This is an oldie, but goodie, video of a squid filming its own escape from a skin-diver.

Civil Liberties
Are you offended and frightened by the recent shooting? Wish you could silence people who are talking about “targeting” and “taking down” the opposition? Think that such speech is the moral equivalent of a terrorist threat? I humbly suggest that you might want to rethink your position in light of this excellent piece from Slate.

In a similar vein, the attempt to silence political speech on the Internet has been whole-heartedly embraced by the Obama administration. EFF brief here.

Politics
In the “I reserve skepticism but it’s starting to look like I was wrong” department, there’s encouraging news about the early effects of the new health care bill.

Business and Writing
In the “cool research for Steampunkers” department, the Guardian talks about the FEMALE criminal underworld in Victorian London.

Ever wondered what the real scoop is on the most important part of you’re book’s marketing (i.e. the cover)? Turns out that Laura Resnick did a very extensive series of articles a few years back that goes in depth on how the whole business of covers works. Well worth the read.

The charming Kate Elliot posts a great article at SFWA offering advice to teen writers from someone who’s been there. If you’re a teen writer, check it out.

Bob Mayer expresses admirably why I’ve not yet done a book trailer, and why it would take a special project for me even to consider it. A quick read, worth the click.

For your treadmill-listening pleasure, Gail Carriger gives a delightful and characteristically witty interview with SF Signal, discussing the impact of social media on the book industry and the author’s business model.

Nathan Lowell’s publisher Robin Sullivan does a guest blog for J.A. Konrath in which she busts some myths about indie publishing and talks about the sales growth curve of her authors. Interesting, useful stuff.

If you thought 2010 was tumultuous for the publishing industry, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Borders is in the process of a crash-and-burn, and depending on how it goes down, it could do anything from expanding the print-book market to seriously shrinking it over the near-to-medium term (though I doubt it will actually sink any of the publishing houses along the way, it may mean a lot less cash going around to buy new titles). If you have print books on the market or on the way to market, it behooves you to read Joshua Blimes’s excellent and thorough Borders post-mortem report.

Science and Technology
As an enthusiastic tender of a bacteria culture (lacto bascillus San Francisco), this kind of stuff fascinates me. An in-depth article, with sub-links, on the unique ecosystems that exist within cheeses.

Perhaps I’m showing my age–and I can’t believe I just said that–but I’m still blown away by the return of lay people to the sciences. Last week, a ten-year-old girl discovered a brand-new supernova, and setting a world-record in the process.

The Singularity (in the loose sense) continues apace with the development of contact lenses that display information directly in the field of vision. This is the very epitome of “augmented reality” technology. Wonder how long it’ll be until we can buy them at Walgreens.

Another nifty extra-solar planet discovery–this one very like Mercury.

It’s early days yet, but there’s more rumblings from legitimate autism research that might just have nailed down one of the reasons for increasing incidence and prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the last couple decades. Encouraging news, as this one is completely preventable. Also weird as hell, which tickles my interest-o-meter.

In archeology news, physicists seem to have cracked the secret of the Mayan ability to make dyes that last forever.

At the end of December, the BBC did a wonderful 1-hour documentary on the most world-shaking scientific and technological advantages which, thanks to the marvels of YouTube, you can now see for yourself.

Along similar lines, here’s an article on 8 Science Fiction gadgets and plot devices that became a reality in 2010.

Laser weapons deployed for use on the high-seas! That’s right, non-lethal stun lasers are now being tested for use against pirates. No joke!

And, for the sake of great science-fictiony fun, here’s a great essay by Ronald Bailey speculating on the GOOD things that the lack of ET signals could portend.

Orwell
In other news, moral crusaders continue to Bowdlerize and lie about history “for the sake of the children.” If I can point to the single most harmful strand of human nature, aside perhaps from the propensity to commit genocide, this is the one I’d pick.

On the other hand, there are people of genuine moral fiber still circulating in the world. If you want something that will make you cry or stand up and cheer, check out this statement by the father of one the 9-year-old girl slain in the assassination attempt this week. Someone who takes his responsibility as a member of the body politic seriously enough that he’s unwilling to call for the curtailment of the civil liberties of others as salve for his grief? Uncommon! And displays most excellent character.

Weird Apps
Digital Life has info on an app for all you iPhone folks that will tell you when you can leave the theater to hit the bathroom without missing any plot points in currently-released movies. Behold, RunPee!

And that’s it for this time. Catch you around next time the world gets weird!

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

— — — —
I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

It’s hard to beat being thrown in an out-of-state jail on a trumped up charge as a Christmas present, but detective Clarke Lantham loves a challenge. So when he calls up his brother for help with bail, he thinks he’s prepared for the ordeal of spending a holiday weekend with relatives who put the “strange” back in “estranged.”
That was his first mistake. Unfortunately, with an old client gumming up the works, a ten-year-old niece with a ghost problem, and the occasional murder competing for his attention, it’s unlikely to be his last.

Currently available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

This story is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

One of my favorite stories in all of mythology is the Talmudic story of Lilith. The insight it gives into the development of Judaism, of Hebrew mythology and culture, and its naked and impossible-to-talk-around display of preclassical sexual politics have all tickled the cockles of my geeky heart for two decades now.

What would happen, though, if Lilith were able to tell her own story in her own words? Perhaps something like this:

—Story Sample Below the Cut—

Lilith
by J. Daniel Sawyer<

You say I am the night hag, the bewitching moonlight, the child-eater who causes crib death. You say I am the woman your husbands see at the temple when they are seeking something more than you can give. It is true that I seduce, and I destroy, and am unjustly maligned for both. Your jealousy pushes me into the darkness, makes for me the role which you imagine I play. It keeps me at the edge of your firelight and behind the ghouls in the stories you tell your young men. You are the daughters of man, but I am the daughter of the earth.

I came first.

And that was why he hated me.

I awoke in the ground, the mud crumbling off me in the drying Mesopotamian sun. I knew nothing at first but the sun on my skin and the breath in my lungs, a lavender fire. I heard his breath, but I did not yet know what breath was.

The date palms above filtered the light into dozens of fractured, dancing spears, warm on my thighs, my face, my vulva, my toes. I awoke on the ground, and came out of the earth, and heard the Voice whose breath awakened me, whispering secrets in my head. I alone was given the power of creation, the dominion of immortality. I was the Voice’s delight in the world wrapped up in clay, and the man on the ground beside me was the order of life, and from the intercourse of chaos and order would come the future of the universe. We were the progenitors.

And so, we awoke.

I looked down upon him, and touched him. I had never touched anything before. His skin felt like water that never ripples.

I ran my fingers over his brows, behind his ears, down his body. I watched him grow in my hands as I pulled back his foreskin, I felt him twitch and gasp as I probed him, and I heard his voice for the first time when I touched his knees and he cried out and sat upright. Bewilderment and sunlight danced in his eyes.

We had, as yet, no language but touch and gesture, and yet for that one moment, we understood each other. In later years, when he was old and dying, he would tell his sons how he took my hand and led me to the water where we bathed and explored, and where he took me before he discarded me on the way to something better.

An old man needs his ego as comfort, perhaps, before he dies and is no more. But he did not take my hand, nor did he ravish me on the riverbank. I took his hand, and then I washed his body, and then I mounted him and pulled the life from him, and we melted into one another for the first time. I fell asleep on top of him, his cock still warm inside me, our connection unbroken.

It did not happen again. He was order, and I was chaos.

We woke up and he felt himself pinned by my weight, and he panicked. He pushed me off, stood up limply, and stumbled into the stream to speak to the Voice of the forest. As he spoke, we learned language. Both hearing the Voice, our minds were bent into grammar, and we knew sin. The fear of an animal who awoke under a weight became the hatred of a man, full of scorn and fear, who needed order to dominate all.

Even chaos.

The Voice told him that the way of things was for creation to come out of chaos and order. As the Voice’s word dipped into the formless chaos and begot the world, so the man would dip into the woman and together beget the future. The Chaos and Order were co-creators, each one intertwined, flowing into and shaping the other.

But orderly minds are rarely sensible.

When I looked at the birds pecking the dates I saw the flow of life and death in violence and birth, the tension of forces always threatening to break loose. The wings of the bird pushed against the air, a constant dance of dominance. He looked at them and he saw taxonomy and patterns. The repetition of the feathers and the geometry, the elegance of form-fit function, the imperfections that served to reinforce the structure.

But when he looked at me he saw not the lover who had awoken him, the harmony with whom his voice would make a symphony, the saxophone solo on the bed of his bass line; he saw the destruction of all that he was. He saw surrender to forces he could not control. The death of the orderly world that he already loved.

He looked at me with murder in his eyes, and he saw his death.

Until then, there had been no word for death.

End of sample. ©2007 J. Daniel Sawyer, All Rights Reserved

Read the rest on your Kindle, Nook, and other readers.

Bring on the leaves!

Culture
David Brin writes a graphic novel called “Tinkerers” about the maker culture, manufacturing, and the future of progress, and puts it online for public reading.

On the indie film front, here comes a new farm system that might take a couple years to become completely clogged: Amazon is launching a sort of on-line film festival that looks like a hybrid of Project Greenlight and what Sundance used to be. Worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve talked from time to time on Dealing In shows about the unique political history of the United States, and how that has directly contributed to our current culture wars. Here’s some news that dovetails with the discussions about the Civil War and Reconstruction — for some people, the Civil War never ended.

Sexuality
For some reason–maybe because both Down From Ten and And Then She Was Gone featured elements of the BDSM culture?–I’ve gotten a number of people recently asking me how people could possibly get pleasure from pain. I’ve never been a fan of Freudian explanations for this — they’re too much like just-so stories, and they rely on a theory of mind that’s now totally discredited. So, in the interests of science, here’s some interesting neurological research that bears on the question of how pleasure and pain relate in the brain.

Space Science
First ever exoplanet from outside our galaxy. Yes, Virginia, our galaxy does seem typical of this universe.

The Telegraph runs a story on being homesick from orbit, which contains some of the most gorgeous astronaut photography yet published.

Project M, the weridest space travel project to date. This is what you get when engineers get really pissed off — and it’s kinda cool, too.

TSA Security Theater
Like a lot of you, I’ve been seriously apalled by what’s been going on the last ten years with air travel. This week, the policy wonks might actually have gone too far by requiring a strip and/or grope search of everyone flying through one of about 68 airports around the country. So I’ve got three links to help you out if you have to travel by air thruogh any TSA occupuied airport.

First, for those of you who have to fly before this mess is resolved, at the bottom of this page is a list of the airports who currently have the new pornographic version of security theater scanners in place.

And if you’re looking for something you can do about it, check out this most creative (and potentially effective) response I’ve yet seen. November 24: opt out of the scanners, force a backlog of pat-downs, and wear kilts to really embarass the fondlers. Full details here.

Finally, a heartening tale of Citizen activism against the TSA

Internet Civil Liberties
For those of you who have been following COICA, the internet censorship bill, it’s been voted out of committee and onto the floor. There’s a big fight coming up on this one — if you’re a fan of social media, art and science on the net, or an author or content creator, this is your fight. Find details here.

Biology, Geology, and Energy Research
Life really is everywhere, and a new discovery makes the question of the origin of oil even more murky. Thomas Gold (and the Russian scientists he plagerized) might have been right after all. Time will tell.

Materials Science
Carbon is your friend, really. It’s at the heart of the current materials revolution that’s giving us both radical life extension and sustainable space travel. Today’s news? Ultra hard graphite, harder than diamonds, developed in a lab.

And then there’s the quantum supersolids–a holy grail of materials science–and the new evidence that they may actually exist http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19748-new-evidence-that-weird-quantum-supersolid-exists.html

And that materials revolution that you’ve been hearing about for years? It’s officially here. First molecular manufacturing tools are in the works.

Medical Science
They’ll fix you with a ray gun! Radio wave-based treatment for hypertension more effective than drug cocktails, and might prove permanent.

I saved this week’s coolest link for last. A new (and replicable) stem cell therapy can now reverse some of the symptoms of Autism. Check it out!

I’ll be at Seattle Steamcon II this weekend — hope to see you there!

The first volume in the new Clarke Lantham Mysteries is now available at all your favorite online book retailers, in all ebook formats. This is the beginning of a year-long experiment with ebooks and other maverick content delivery techniques, and Lantham (in all his snarky, darkly-comic glory) is the headline star.

Today is the day to rush the markets — for only $3.20, what have you got to lose? Find it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

To mark the occasion, there are a few things in store today. First, I’m launching a new website, specifically for the Lantham series, which you can find here. It has a series map and other stuff related to the current and upcoming mysteries. Only a little bit there right now, but it’s still worth the jaunt over. Check it out!

Second, I’ll be doing a live call-in show on Podioracket’s Blogtalk Radio show tonight at 6pm Pacific time. Join me, grill me, hear readings from the book. I’ll be yours for a whole hour, maybe two.

Of course, if you’ve never read e-books before, I’ve written a handy dandy quickie guide to the subject, applicable to all cell phones, e-readers, mobile devices, and computer platforms.

Finally, just in case you don’t know what all this hullabaloo is about, here’s the back cover summary:

A man of infinite social grace he isn’t, but what former disgraced Oakland Police Detective Clarke Lantham lacks in high culture he makes up for with his ability to slip into any role he needs to to get the job done (which is probably why he got fired in the first place).

From the posh shadow of Mount Diablo to the kink clubs of San Francisco to the genetic engineering labs of Stanford, Clarke Lantham chases down pieces of the weirdest puzzle he’s ever seen, all for the sake of a nineteen-year-old girl whose face he can’t stop seeing every time he closes his eyes.

Head on over and pick up your copy now — it’s already getting great reviews!

But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but because weightlessness does weird things to the sense of taste. There’s also the question of what the bubbles will do to the body, and how drinkable beer will be in zero G anyway. Fortunately, someone is officially working on these problems so that we can take into space with us the drink that made civilization possible in the first place: Click here for Space Beer!

Now, on to the main courses:

Consumerism
As part of the Book Retailer wars, Sears will double your Christmas shopping budget by effectively giving away free books.

Autodidacticism

Can’t afford a Harvard education, but have the drive and desire to get one? Well then, today’s your lucky day. Harvard has started offering some classes online for free

History
Bet you, like most people born after WW2, thought Color Photography didn’t really get going until the late 1930s, right? Well, think again. Here’s some gorgeous Color Photos from the great depression in Colorado and some even more amazing Color photos from Imperial Russia (the Ukraine and Uzbekistan, near as I can make out).

Writing
If you live with a writer, or are dating a writer, or think writers are sexy (we are), there are a few things you should know.

Here’s some advice I should pay more attention to: How to write magnetic headlines

An attempt to make an IMDB for Speculative Fiction books and audio: SpecFicDB

For those of you looking to get press for your new indie book, or those of you looking to sample something that’s not just published slush, here’s an Aggregate list of indie book reviewers

Some delightful fan mail from the Golden Age Science Fiction magazines, all written by girls.

Jordan Summers has a series of reports from the Novelists Inc. conference on piracy, some low-down contractual moves by publishers as they panic in the new marketplace, and more. A must read for any writer.

Vanity
Fair Warning: These next couple writing-related links feature me. First, my post on The Creative Penn’s blog about How To Survive the Ebook Apocalypse

And then, there’s an hour of me talking turkey and story with Mark Jeffrey on his video podcast This Week in Books The goofy looking guy is me.

Science
The man who gave us The Thumbprint of God, Benoit Mandlebrot, died this week. Check out his glorious TED talk here. If you don’t know who Mandlebrot was, or how he and a few of his friends fundamentally changed the game in ever sphere of life, check out This BBC Documentary

Over in Climate-change land, the fight has broken into four camps: The alarmists, for whom we are all doomed and deserve it as punishment for our technological/capitalistic sins; The Warners, who think we’d better do something so we don’t royally screw ourselves; the Skeptics, who are cautiously doubtful of policy prescriptions but also cautiously accepting of a preponderance of evidence; and the Deniers, who think it’s all a left-wing anti-business plot (this taxonomy stolen shamelessly from Stuart Brand). Sometimes, there’s an interesting dataset that allows the skeptics and Warners to make common cause, despite any underlying differences, because they share the same respect for good science. Here’s one such instance, very intelligible to laypeople: a climate history that takes into account all known natural climate cycles AND anthropogenic effects.

If you ever lost a pet as a child, chances are you heard some version of the “Doggie Heaven” story. The one I heard was that Heaven will be happy, and if I want my dog when I’m there, she’ll be there waiting for me. Of course, as we get older we realize that this is a lie told to us by well-meaning parents who, regardless of whether they believe in human heaven or not, don’t really believe in doggie heaven. After all, dogs don’t have a spirituality, do they? Well, according to new neurological research, if humans have anything that can be called “spiritual awareness,” then so do dogs, and most other higher animals.

Social Scientists have a lot to say about educational policy,economics, politics, family values, and culture, so sometimes it’s important to step back and take a long hard look at what they do and do not actually know at this point in history. (This is an excellent article)

Ethics:
And, finally, from the philosophy of ethics department, a paper that argues lucidly that you can’t be good without Science Fiction.

More Reprobates and the final Balticon Adventure next week!
And don’t forget to buy the new Clarke Lantham mystery And Then She Was Gone next Friday!

I haven’t read it yet myself, but at his best, Harwood is phenomenal. Here’s the PDF so you can judge for yourself. Take a gander — if you like it, head on over to Amazon and grab a copy, or get a signed hardcover special edition directly from Seth’s website.

And speaking of crime, remember: Clarke Lantham arrives in ten days!

Welcome to the second of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode ten, part two of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty Nic’Iaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:

Food
Pacing
Screenplays
Chekov
Soulless
Racism and bigotry in the Victorian world
Douglas Adams
Thomas Mann
Cultural change throughout history
The Death of the Author
Focault
Deride
Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
POV characters
George R.R. Martin
Neal Stephenson
Shakespeare
Employing Symbolism in writing
Tee Morris

A man of infinite social grace he isn’t, but what former disgraced Oakland Police Detective Clarke Lantham lacks in high culture he makes up for with his ability to slip into any role he needs to to get the job done (which is probably why he got fired in the first place).

From the posh shadow of Mount Diablo to the kink clubs of San Francisco to the genetic engineering labs of Stanford, Clarke Lantham chases down pieces of the weirdest puzzle he’s ever seen, all for the sake of a nineteen-year-old girl whose face he can’t stop seeing every time he closes his eyes.

And Then She Was Gone is the first of the Clarke Lantham Mysteries, hard-boiled detective fiction with a hard comic edge, the series consists of a planned three self-contained novels and a number of short stories, though I enjoy writing this character so much I would not be surprised if it grew. This is a market experiment–how well can a relative unknown do in the suddenly wide-open ebook marketplace? We shall see. If nothing else, this experiment has yielded one result already: a book which will give you your month’s RDA of adrenaline while making you chuckle maniacally.

I hope you join me on October 29, 2010 for the all-markets rush. More details coming soon!

It’s a handsome trade paperback with pretty cover-art, and will sit handsomely on your bookshelf or coffee table. Hours of entertainment – and, in my case, new and improved versions of stories you love, now available to enjoy at your own pace instead of at mine.

Share and Enjoy!

Beginning in December, we will be working together on a Steampunk YA novel set in San Francisco, about a pair of young troublemakers who just can’t seem to stop fighting about a car, or the strange monsters that come out at night, or the steampunk world they keep stumbling into, or…well, that’s for you to find out, isn’t it? And find out you will, either through podcast or through print, when Philippa Ballantine and J. Daniel Sawyer present The Auto Motive sometime in 2010.

It’s going to be so much fun!

First, the appearances. You can find me on recent episodes of Podioracket, The Dead Robots Society, and doing voice work as the German Army in Philippa Ballantine’s Weather Child. You can also hear my fantasy story Buried Alive In The Blues, for which I also did some of the voice work, on the excellent (if racy) anthology series Erotica A La Carte.

For those of you who enjoy my Open Source madness will be pleased to hear that there are new LinuxJournal articles – one is a review of the Indamixx portable recording studio, and the other, which hasn’t yet published, is a review of OpenGear’s new KVM management console. I’m currently stalking a couple more regular writing gigs, so if the internet gods smile upon me, you may be seeing quite a lot more out of me in this vein in the coming months.

Podcast monkeys, you may have noticed the new buttons on the right side of the page – each podcast feed now has an iTunes one-click subscription link, as well as the normal RSS buttons. There’s also now an Uberfeed, which will give you everything I podcast (except Apologia, which you can get here).

You also may have noticed that I’m now podcasting my new novel Down From Ten. This is a comedic country house mystery with elements of romance, horror, and science fiction around the edges – it’s a change of gears from The Antithesis Progression. It’s also listed on iTunes now, so if you’re listening and enjoying it, please leave a review and tell your friends.

I’m also the subject of, and participant in dialog to, a blog series about the doctrinal foundations of Christianity by Scott Roche on the Spiritual Tramp blog. If you like my arguments on Apologia, you’ll definitely find this one entertaining.

I’ve also recorded MORE Reprobates Hour episodes, which, along with all the other special features I have on my hard drive, I’ll hopefully start spooling out here again this month.

As far as writing projects go, Free Will is picking up steam and is now officially on schedule for a November release. I’m also working on a couple more secret projects, which hopefully I’ll have news about soon here.

Finally, I hope to have some good news on sales in the next couple weeks, so watch this space!

Which is what this post is about. Christiana Ellis’ hysterical send up of epic fantasy, Nina Kimberley the Merciless is now available on Amazon.com. I *LOVE* this book — very clever, loads of fun, and written with a genuine literacy that’s very refreshing in any kind of Fantasy, let alone comedic fantasy. Download the ebook here to read on your computer or portable reader, subscribe to the podcast here, and support the author’s print debut by heading over to Amazon and buying today.