kindle

Part of this year’s resolutions is getting everything up on line. So far I’ve reformatted everything that I’d put up because it didn’t look as nice as it should and today added some more stories.

The new stories, which I’m working on putting up on Smashwords as well, are:

• Amid the Words of War – (Twicefar Station) An exiled alien mourns for the race that will no longer accept it.
• Can You Hear the Moon? – (The World Beside Us) A teenage girl in smalltown faces one of the most difficult challenges she’ll ever endure: upcoming adulthood. As she stands on the brink between innocence and experience, will magic be able to help her cope with what lies ahead?
• English Muffin, Devotion on the Side – (Closer Than You Think) George leaves copies of himself to his friends and family when he dies. The problem is — what happens when you’re only a copy?
• Flicka – (Closer Than You Think) Inhabitants of a small Idaho town have trouble adjusting to their new neighbors, a family of genetically modified humans who have chosen to become more equine than human.
• I Come From the Dark Universe – (Twicefar Station) Life on tumultuous TwiceFar station is much the lonely existence same day to day for Bo. But when he comes upon a mysterious woman who claims to come from an alternate universe, he must face his strange attraction to her.
• Love, Resurrected – (Tales of Tabat) General Aife Croffadottir is acknowledged one of the finest military minds of her time — which is why the sorcerer Balthus commands her to her service even after her death. How will she come to terms with her new existence?
• Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane – Small-town Indiana in the 80s is an uncomfortable place for Arturo, who has a secret life at the local gay bar. When he introduces his best friend, Anna, to the place, he finds both of them swept up in a story of magical obsession and servitude.
• So Glad We Had This Time Together – (The World Beside Us) Television executives come up with a reality series starring supernatural creatures — only to find it enjoying unnatural popularity.
• TimeSnip – (TwiceFar Station) Plucked from the 19th century, Victoria finds employment negotiating with civilizations for the same technology that’s responsible for her existence. What happens when she’s dispatched to a civilization whose ways she finds oppressive in this story of the far future? Contains adult themes.

Hey, if you’re a fellow Kindle-r, I found out today while looking that the five first five of the Mars books (aka Burroughs’ Barsoom novels) available for free in e-form, including the one the movie John Carter of Mars is based on, The Warlord of Mars.

• A Princess of Mars
• The Gods of Mars
• Warlord of Mars
• Chessmen of Mars
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Kindle version of Tales From the Fathomless Abyss is now up! And got a nice review.

Amazon.com: Tales From The Fathomless Abyss eBook: Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Mel Odom, J.M. McDermott, Brad Torgersen, Philip Athans: Kindle Store

Amazon.com: Tales From The Fathomless Abyss eBook: Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Mel Odom, J.M. McDermott, Brad Torgersen, Philip Athans: Kindle Store

If you're test driving your new Kindle, here's a collection you could try on it….I'm just saying.

Amazon.com: Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight eBook: Cat Rambo, Lawrence Schoen, Michael Livingston: Kindle Store

Amazon.com: Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight eBook: Cat Rambo, Lawrence Schoen, Michael Livingston: Kindle Store

Dragons, dragons, dragons – so many writers have written about them in one form or another. Here’s ten books featuring dragons for fellow lovers of the form.

1. R.A. MacAvoy’s Tea With the Black Dragon (Kindle version) features urban fantasy and an ancient Buddhist dragon in search of spiritual teaching. Two of my favorite characters of all time occur in the form of the dragon and his teacher, Martha. There’s a sequel, Twisting the Rope (Kindle version) but it doesn’t quite live up to the magic of the first book.
2. James Maxey’s trilogy, Bitterwood (Kindle version), Dragonforge (Kindle version) and Dragonseed (Kindle version),. This unique take on dragons has characters engaging enough to make you want to follow them forever.
3. Tooth and Claw (Kindle version) by Jo Walton, is an awesome novel of manners featuring dragons. Smart and funny.
4. Naomi Novik has taken dragons and mashed them up with Horatio Hornblower in her Temeraire series: In His Majesty’s Service (Kindle version), His Majesty’s Dragon (Kindle version), Throne of Jade (Kindle version), Black Powder War (Kindle version), Empire of Ivory (Kindle version), Victory of Eagles (Kindle version), and Tongues of Serpents (Kindle version).
5. I first encountered Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (out of print and no Kindle version) in high school. This story of life from a dragon’s point of view is a solid fantasy read and one of the classics.
6. No list like this would be complete without Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels, which feature not just dragons but miniature ones in the form of fire lizards. My favorite of the books remain the Harper Hall trilogy, Dragonsong (no Kindle version), Dragonsinger (no Kindle version), and Dragondrums (no Kindle version).
7. Another classic is J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit (Kindle version), in which the dragon Smaug plays a crucial role.
8. A stuffed dragon is one of the entrancing side characters of Charmed Life (only available in Kindle version) by Diane Wynne Jones. All of Jones’ Chrestomanci books (or anything by her, really) are worth picking up.
9. Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (no Kindle version) and The Dragons of Babel (Kindle version) feature gritty industrial dragons in one of the greatest fantasy settings of all time, full of danger and delight.
10. Last but certainly not least, many of us are looking forward to George R.R. Martin’s Dances with Dragons (no Kindle version listed yet).

I finished up “Villa Encantada”, a short story with a frame clocking in at 4500 words yesterday. It’s urban fantasy, the same world as the novel I just sent off to beta readers.

The story’s set in a fantasy version of the complex I live in, which has been FRAUGHT with HO meeting woes that I will not get into here. It’s the result of sitting at many meetings thinking about how much more interesting it would be to live in Villa Encantada, a similar condo complex filled with witches, retired gods, defunct oracles, and even a centaur. Hopefully there will be more set in the same setting.

The story’s also dependent on a secondary frame story,, which I’m not sure about. Here’s the beginning:

The cats were telling stories, from their spaces in the Game, scattered around the sun-baked parking lot of the Villa Encantada complex.

A grizzled Siamese had grabbed control of the telling. He licked his haunches and said, Once upon a time there was a woman who could not forgive herself. Every day she tried to kill herself in the smallest of ways, with cigarettes and lack of sleep and careless driving. She punished herself for a crime she couldn’t name, burning cups of coffee uncushioned by food, high-strung nights of crap television, unsatisfying and numbing all at once.

A tortoise shell spoke from her perch on the arm of a weathered Adirondack chair, a second-story balcony overlooking the way. That’s not how it was.

He blinked, a gesture as majestic as an ice shelf, kilometers high, sliding into the sea.

The tortoiseshell remained undaunted. She continued.

This is how it was.

There’s pieces from the frame used in the actual story itself, which I think makes it feel less superfluous, but I’m also always wary about devices like that. When they work, they’re beautiful – when they don’t, they’re awkward and distracting. So what makes one frame “work” where the next one doesn’t?

A major joy of my new Kindle is finding free books. I figured other people might appreciate some of the finds (and might share some of their own – bonus!).

So here’s a slew of classic science fiction novels, available free online on Project Gutenberg. (Kindle users, it’s so so easy to mail files onto your Kindle, although it’s not free when you’re moving books on there, but costs a .15 per MB, with a book running 2-4 MB, depending.)

1. Flatland by Edwin Abbot. The story of life in two dimensions, written in 1884 by an English schoolmaster, it originally boasted “A Square” as author.
2. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of the great pulp writers, Burroughs’ work is well represented on Project Gutenberg, and provides a taste of old school sf at its best. including the Mars, Pellucidar, and Tarzan series.
3. R.U.R. by Karel Capek. This Czechoslovakian play first was staged in 1921. It deals with the rise of the robots, and their final rebellion against the humans.
4. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Written by one of the early suffrage leaders, Gilman posits a society without men, and in the tradition of such utopian fiction, explains it at length.
5. Deathworld by Harry Harrison. The first of the Deathworld series, this deals with gambler Jason dinAlt and his visit to the deadliest planet in the universe.
6. Beyond Lies the Wub by Philip K. Dick. No one can be a science fiction fan without at least a little Philip K. Dick in their reading background (in my opinion). Prolific, full of wild imagination, and talented, he produced novels and short stories that are a major influence on the field. Others to read by Dick: Valis, Ubik), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and (always) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which inspired the movie Bladerunner). I’m happy to see so many P.K. Dick novels available on the Kindle, but I miss Eye in the Sky and The Man in the High Castle.
7. Time Traders by Andre Norton. Norton brought countless readers to f&sf through her YA novels. Time Traders is the first of a series and follows sharp-jawed, keen-eyed Ross Murdock in his quest for lost alien technology.
8. Galaxy Primes by E.E. Smith. Another of the Golden Age writers, Smith does space opera like no one else. Here two men and two men are lost in space and must somehow chart their way back to their home planet, Earth.
9. Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. There’s a lot of Wells to pick from, but this is one of my favorites, and certainly has inspired plenty of other works, both books and movies. I’ll note that you should read Ralph Ellison’s version first – while not strictly sf, it’s surreal and enlightening and a great take on the idea.

And the tenth? I’m leaving it up to you to supply, dear readers – what would you suggest, what have you found online that delighted or amazed you?

(Coming tomorrow: story prompt!!)

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Someone mentioned that they’d like to see a post on endings. Endings are hard. You have to go back and look for all the loose ends. It’s like weaving a basket – all those spiky little sticks poking out need to be woven together into a coherent shape. Here’s three things I think about when working on an ending.

1. Circularity is a big help. It provides a sense that the reader has returned to the beginning, but now everything is changed. Here’s a cheat – take something that appears in your first three paragraphs and invoke it in your last three as well. It can be changed – the rose that initially trembled, dew-covered, as our heroine picked it is now lying withered and flat in the road. Or it is a new rose, being picked by another woman who is the replacement for the first?

For an example of this, I’m actually going to be obnoxious and point to my own story, Magnificent Pigs. Technically I cheat, because the object I used doesn’t appear until the fourth paragraph, the brass bed which creaks in protest as Aaron sits down. At the end it’s become the object of Jilly’s salvation, the vehicle that carries her away into the sky. There’s other reappearing things: pigs are mentioned right off the bat (in the title, even) and they’re crucial to the end. And the story begins and ends with the idea of death and (hopefully) changes your perception of it.

I’ve been reading Donald Maass’s excellent, excellent book Writing the Breakout Novel (which is, unfortunately, not available on the Kindle so I actually had to do the archaic order and wait for a hardcopy thing) and it’s at a perfect time for me since I’m beginning the second pass at the current project.

As I’ve read, I’ve collected ideas to apply to rewrite. I’m making the heroine’s past considerably more complex, shoving the hero a bit more ruthlessly out of his depth, making some bad guys more ambiguous morally, killing my very favorite character, letting a villainess be much, much bitchier (and funnier), and raising the stakes repeatedly. I’ve wrestled with the first 33 pages so far, and they are SO MUCH better now, even though there’s a ton of comments that will need to be addressed, particularly moments of B-grade writing that need to get elevated to A-level.

I find it handy to do this sort of pass. Last time, when revising Phat Fairy, I used a list from Holly Lisle and went through scene by scene, checking for criteria like what got accomplished, were there any loose ends, what characters appeared, was there a sensory moment, was there character development for at least one character. I did something similar with The Moon’s Accomplice, which was the first novel that I completed. There is much to be said for making your revision process efficient and mechanical. While moments of inspiration are useful, it’s the elbow grease put into the scenes at this point that pays off.

I loved Kris Dikeman’s Silent, Still and Cold in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It has a high fantasy sensibility mixed with zombies, which always seems like a win-win to me. Also in this month’s issue is Jesse Bullington’s The Adventures of Ernst, Who Began a Man, Became a Cyclops, and Finished A Hero. Both stories have great titles, which is one of the things that’s been obsessing me lately.

Abyss & Apex has a slew of interesting stories in this issue, including J. Kathleen Cheney’s steampunky Of Ambergris, Blood and Brandy, C. J. Cherryh’s The Last Tower and Vylar Kaftan’s Mind-Diver.