A Couple of Flash Fiction Recommendations for 3/19/2013

Happy New Year, one and all! I thought I’d start the New Year talking about what I’m working on at the moment, putting individual stories up on Amazon and Smashwords. Between publications and backlog, I’ve got about 200 to play with, so it’s a pretty big task, given that I’d like to have almost all of them up by the end of the month. But if I consider that some are flash, which I’ll put up individually on QuarterReads and release in a compendium, it becomes less daunting.

I’m getting faster at the process as I go, and I’m also refining it, which unfortunately means I need to go back over some of the earlier releases, just to make them all look the same as far as prettiness and completeness goes.

Would it be better to space releasing the stories out over the course of a year? Probably. But I’d like to get this all set up and done so I can move onto other things. I have enough stories that will be added over the course of the year as I write them or their rights become available that there will be plenty of additions as is.

What I’ve done with the stories is split them up into series. This is an easy enough task because I’ve got plenty of clusters of stories where characters or locations repeat, as with Twicefar Station, which is the backdrop for “Amid the Words of War,” “Kallakak’s Cousins,” and “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.” It’s also the same world as “TimeSnip,” whose main character appears in “On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go.”

Why I’m doing this:

1. This allows me to provide readers who like a particular story with a way to find similar ones. If they read “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart,” for instance, and want to find other steampunk stories by me, they can look at the others in the Altered America series.
2. This lets me play with KDP in a meaningful way. If I make the first book Kindle only for at least the first year, I can use the Kindle Select promotional tools and get readers to sample a story by giving it to them free.

Here’s what I’ve got sorted of the series so far, with a description of each.

Altered America (steampunk)
Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart
Rappacini’s Crow

Closer Than You Think (near future SF)
All the Pretty Little Mermaids
Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable
Zeppelin Follies
English Muffin, Devotion on the Side
Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars
Therapy Buddha

Farther Than Tomorrow (slipstream & space opera)
Bus Ride to Mars
Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain
Grandmother
Elsewhen, Within, Elsewhen

Superlives (superheroes)
Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut
Acquainted with the Night

Tales of Tabat (secondary world fantasy)
Narrative of a Beast’s Life
How Dogs Came to the New Continent
Events at Fort Plentitude
Sugar
Love, Resurrected
In the Lesser Southern Isles

Twicefar Station (far future SF)
Kallakak’s Cousins
On TwiceFar Station, As the Ships Come and Go
Amid the Words of War
I Come From the Dark Universe

Villa Encantada (urban fantasy/horror)
Eagle-haunted Lake Sammammish
Villa Encantada
Crowned with Antlers Comes the King

Women of Zalanthas (secondary world fantasy)
Aquila’s Ring
Mirabai the Twice-lived
Karaluvian Fale

The World Beside Us (urban fantasy/horror)
Jaco Tours
Magnificent Pigs
Heart in a Box
Can You Hear the Moon?
Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane

So far, after approximately a month of getting stuff up there, I’m seeing some small sales, but also a tiny uptick in my collections that could be due to something else entirely. (Self-publishing is such a mysterious process!) So over the course of the year, I’ll be tracking the results.

Along Vera’s neck, on either side, are three round bits of grillwork, and when she comes in hard and fast, they scream, a whine that grates along all your nerves, even when you’ve heard it before.

They screamed now, and even muffled by the tents, they still forced Roto’s ears to flatten back, his whiskers tensed in an involuntary sneer and made me clamp my forearms over the sides of my head, muffling it. Shots barked out, then a rat-a-tat of semi-automatic followed by another like an echo. Vera’s own guns boomed.

There were screams.

I unfolded myself and started to rise. Roto yanked me back down just as a round of flying metal buried itself in the canvas bundle. If I’d stood, it would have decapitated me. We both stared at it. My ribs pulsed with ache and I realized I’d been holding my breath, I didn’t know how long.

There’s only so many ways for a group to attack you on particular terrain, and everyone had done exactly as they were supposed. The Bird Woman had a wing clipped, high and gouging the bone and all her children were fussing about her while Sieg bandaged it, the littlest with their heads buried in her skirts.

Bodies were slumped on the ground, five or six of them, but none of them were ours, so they didn’t matter. No one seemed worried about the post where the flashes of light had come from, so Vera must have taken care of those before coming down to us, as she was supposed to.

June was there with Vera, checking her over, fanning the long metal pinions out and examining them for wear and tear. The guns athwart her prow swiveled in two directions as though still alert, worried that something might happen. Pal was riffling that packs and pockets, but with little luck, judging by his expression, other than the pile of weapons slowly accumulating underneath the sign that read, “Trucks this way”.

Wren and two roustabouts who’d come on three towns ago were off to one side. On the road they didn’t smoke anything but jitter weed, and drank thermoses of strong black coffee, the good stuff, horded for when we were on the road.

Vera stirred as I went past, headed to bum a smoke from Wren. June turned, chuffing out a chuckle under her breath as she saw me.

“Miss Meg,” she said. “It’s just Miss Meg.” She patted Vera’s flank where she leaned up against it, and the war machine went quiet, though I could still feel its eyes on me.

“Good job, Vera,” I said, feeling daring. Most people didn’t talk to Vera. It was as though they forgot she could talk back. “Thank you for saving all our asses.”

June’s eyes widened, a tell so small I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been watching her.

Vera chirped. “You’re welcome,” she said, after waiting a few seconds to make sure the chirp was not returned.

Neesh had most of the livestock out for a graze and mostly a poop. He knew the more of it they did on the cracked asphalt of the plaza, the less he’d have to clean out of the trailers. I checked the mini-elephants over out of habit, from the summer I spent tending them, but they were all unharmed, and engaged in eating all the nasturtiums out of the circular flowerbed in front of the runs that had once been a rest stop building. Out of habit I looked to see if it was loot able, but places like that have all been scavenged away, decades ago.

I got to Wren, Roto in my wake, and at my outstretched hand and upturned eyebrows, she shook a smoke loose for me and tossed it over.

“How long’s the break?” I asked.

Wren shrugged. “Never too short, out here in this heat. Once we get further down, we’ll be out of the heat.”

“We push on then?” I pursued. Wren shrugged again. She was affecting herself a bit in front of the new hires. She was circus born and bred, they were newbies, but she was still unused to the sway she held as their temporary boss.

Her nonchalance made me a little hot under the collar. She acted so cool. But she’d surely been hunkered down under cover like all the rest of us.

She narrowed her eyes at me as though reading my mind. “Problem, Meg?”

I shrugged and would have left it at that, but she just wasn’t content to let it go. Angry heat spiked through me as she stepped forward, towering over me.

I stuck my hands out to repel her.

She reeled back as my skin burst into flame.

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