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The Dead Isle is now available for purchase!

The year is 1880, and Jack Baker is a young, driven student at Harvard University for Engineers. In this America, industry depends on "Creation" magic rather than machines, and most engineers are train repairmen, not inventors like Jack. Even his Creationist friend Clare thinks Jack's genius is going to waste at Harvard.

There is one man who knows how to put Jack to use, however: famous novelist and sometimes spy Ellis Graveworthy, who wants Jack to come with him to England and build him a flying ship. Graveworthy has been ordered to cross the heavily-guarded coast of Australia, the "Dead Isle" which has no Creation, and which sealed itself off from the outside world more than twenty years before. Rumors abound that Australia is building a war fleet, intent on conquest, and it's Graveworthy's job to stop it.

Clare, exiled from Australia as a child because of her ability to Create, is determined to return to her homeland with Graveworthy and Jack, but their journey is not easy. Along the way the three of them will encounter the pirate Purva de la Fitte, con the wealthiest robber barons in Australia, meet surprising allies, and possibly touch off a long-awaited revolution.

Join Jack, Clare, Ellis, and Purva in an adventure spanning half the globe, in search of the answer to a centuries-old question: Why is there no magic in the Dead Isle?

This book was the product of an intense editing process conducted entirely online.

The Dead Isle is for sale through Lulu.com:

PAPERBACK EDITION | EPUB EDITION

Use the promocode SEPBOOKS12 and get 20% off! (Lulu pays the difference; I make the same profit.)

The paper edition is available currently for $18.99; the ePub edition is $4.99. It is also available for free as a PDF download from Project Gutenberg. (Or will be -- it hasn't been approved yet but bookmark that page, it'll be there when it is.)

If you are interested in a signed copy, please do not purchase a book! Peep behind the cut for instructions.

( Signed Copies )

Publicity and Reviews:

I am more than happy for you to publicise this book on your own journal if you want. You are of course welcome to do your own writeup, with your own opinion; if you review the book please send me a link! If you'd like to copy and paste a promo, you can use the text ( behind the cut: )

Thank you for supporting your local independent author! You all know I couldn't do it without you.

Also bear in mind that Lulu bundles postage! :) If you're picking up a copy of The Dead Isle and don't yet have a copy of Nameless, Charitable Getting, or Trace, now's the perfect time to save on shipping. And if you're looking for holiday gifts for high school seniors, you could do worse than Other People Can Smell You, my guide to surviving a university education.

This book is gonna end me, I swear.

I'm actually almost through with the rewrite of Dead Isle; I have to fix two major things and do a read-through for minor-but-pervasive problems (description, always description) and then this rewrite will be done, though I'm running it past one final check with specific people before it goes to typesetting.

I also have a decision to make about ( Cut for spoilers, in case you haven't read it. )

I do find it a little eerie that I wrote this book in the midst of a huge family upheaval involving my brother immigrating illegally to Australia, and now that I'm nearly done, we're in the middle of a huge family upheaval over him coming back for a visit. It's an appropriate parallel, I suppose. I'm mostly glad the whole mess never poisoned the book for me, and that while it may end me I still love it.

Trace is now available for purchase!

Colin Byrne is a pickpocket, an artist, and an occasional consultant for the police. He’s also an ex-felon, an initiate into the feral, unspoken magic that only prisoners know: how to vanish, how to tell fortunes, how to steal souls. Now the man who put him in prison wants him to return to Railburg State Correctional Facility to help investigate a case.

Colin has some allies at Railburg: his mentor Gutierrez, who talks to God, and his friend Noel, the best ink artist in the prison. But another powerful prisoner that Colin helped put away is slowly poisoning the food, and there’s impulsive young Laney to protect from the Aryan Brotherhood. With mysterious forces aiming to incite a riot that will wipe Railburg from the map and from human memory, Colin has bigger problems than the one he went to Railburg to solve...

This book was the product of an intense editing process conducted entirely online.

Trace is for sale through Lulu.com:

PAPERBACK EDITION | EPUB EDITION

The paper edition is available currently for $12, and the price will rise to $15 in February; the ePub edition is fixed at $3. It is also available for free as a PDF download.

If you are interested in a signed copy, please do not purchase a book! Peep behind the cut for instructions.

( Signed Copies )

Publicity and Reviews:

I am more than happy for you to publicise this book on your own journal if you want! You are of course welcome to do your own writeup, with your own opinion; if you review the book please send me a link! If you'd like to copy and paste a promo, you can use the text ( behind the cut: )

Thank you for supporting your local independent author! You all know I couldn't do it without you.

Also bear in mind that Lulu bundles postage! :) If you're picking up a copy of Trace and don't yet have a copy of Nameless or Charitable Getting, now's the perfect time to save on shipping. And if you're looking for holiday gifts for high school seniors, you could do worse than Other People Can Smell You, my guide to surviving a university education.

MY BRAIN IS FULL OF KNOWINGS.

I spent this morning doing informal but useful training -- mostly in budget maintenance, which I'll be sharing with BossaNova (she has to manage the salary bits, I do the rest). Fortunately nobody else knows any more about budgets than I do -- which is nothing -- so we're all in the same boat. And some of it is a little like a game of telephone; my predecessor just DID all this shit without documenting it, and the guy who's been doing it since she left mostly knows how to, but some things I can tell are getting garbled as he passes them down to me.

Every time I have a meeting I take notes, and then as soon as the meeting is done I retype the notes into the new version of the Big Book, so that they're not only cemented in my mind but explained somewhere memorable in small words as simple concepts. It's a bit like the most boring journal in history.

Still, I am finding time to at least try and whittle down my to-do list; today's project was an epub version of Other People Can Smell You, which I talk about in more detail over on Extribulum. I think perhaps the most remarkable thing is the cost-efficiency of ebooks; an epub of this book is half the cost of a paper copy and yet I make three times the profit per book as I do on the paper ones. I love paper books, but sometimes ebooks just blow my mind.

Tomorrow I'm at a professional conference, and Friday I'm doing more training, so I may be absentee during the day. Or I may livetweet the conference depending on how unintentionally hilarious it is. We shall see. Just, try not to kill each other while I'm gone...

Okay guys, I have thoughts about publishing and nowhere to put them, so you get them. Sorry.

One: I'm seeing a lot of articles lately about how trad publishing needs to "fight back" against e-books or buck the trend or some other utter nonsense. And the truth is they don't. What trad publishers need to do is yank their heads out of their asses and build a hardcopy publishing and sales model that actually functions in the modern world. You know how long the traditional "do a print run, hope it sells, remainder the remainders" model has existed in stasis? Something like four hundred years. Gutenberg was awesome but he's dead now, time to move on.

Because I want traditional publishing to succeed. And I want ebooks to succeed. I refuse to pick a side in the books versus ebooks debate because if you think one has to preclude the other, you're drastically missing the point. Books and ebooks aren't an either-or proposition; they're an "awesome, both" advantage.

Can I build a model for trad publishers to fix what is so drastically broken? No. I could give suggestions, but I'm not a professional restructuring consultant nor am I an economist. Still, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of those out there who actually live in a world where ebook readers exist, and they'd be happy to help.

Two: I have a really hard time feeling sympathy for Borders and their constant bankrupcy/recievership/whatevercakes drama, because Borders is one of the Big Box bookstores and in its time has edged out countless smaller independent bookstores without offering any significant advantage to the consumer, except for maybe about a ten year period between "big box bookstores open" and "the internet appears" when they offered heretofore unknown diversity. But that's over now, and for a long time Borders has been part of the problem, both for the publishing industry and for independent business.

(Sidenote: I cannot tell you of my enraged reaction to You've Got Mail, even as a teenager. The big bookstore corporation and its slimy, manipulative, lying mouthpiece won? The douchebag gets the girl and closes down her store and that was sold to us as an actual happy ending. What the hell was a film from 1987 doing in 1998?)

So yeah, I'm sorry a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and a lot of giant retail spaces are going to stand empty, but don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, Borders. I hope Barnes and Noble follows you down in flames and someone opens a Trader Joe's in all your retail spaces.

Three: On a less aggressive note, the above boils down to the fact that I would love to see a new model emerge where small bookstores flourish because they serve a different purpose from the past and a different purpose from the big online bookstores. I was talking about this with some friends the other day and I think it would be fantastic if we developed a sort of social order where if you're looking for a specific book, maybe you go online for it, okay, but if you're looking to browse or to find something new, you will have a small bookstore in your neighborhood where you can go for an experience. (Which incidentally would also be a nice step towards exploding the filter bubble.) I think this would actually get more people out to bookstores, in the same way our cultural expectation that everyone likes coffee gets more people out to coffee shops.

And you know what's awesome too, small bookstores can generally order any book you can order online. That does require that you go out and speak to another person, which I'm generally not in favour of. But they can do it -- and if you're just browsing, most of the time the clerk will leave you alone.

And that is my Friday morning rant.

This is a weird little story about a weird little book.

Quite a while ago, I stumbled on the Duke University Advertising Ephemera Collection. The collection is an archive of ads from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, everything from product-oriented recipe books to single-sheet broadsides. I found one called Dr. King's Lucky Book, a snake-oil salesbook masquerading as a book of folk charms, and thought, I'd like to have a copy of this. I knew it was possible to save off every image in high-res, clean them, set them into a doc file, and publish just a single copy for myself through Lulu.com. I also knew it would be a pain in the ass, so I didn't bother.

Then I broke my leg.

I spent a lot of time off my feet, and a not insignificant amount of time on painkillers, which gave me the time to work on a few projects. As long as I was printing up a copy of Dr. King's Lucky Book, I'd throw in some of the other ads and ephemera I liked. Then I thought, why not make an almanac?

Then I thought, why not make an evil almanac?

My idea for the Evil Almanac was that it would start out innocently, with folk cures and ads and calendar pages and harmless charms and recipes, and then slowly it would slide downwards into incoherent madness (I'd like to remind you all I was stoned and bored when I came up with this). I wanted to emulate what would happen if a book went insane. I tapped a few more resources I knew were good for the creep factor, and I mentioned the book to my friend Kiki, who loved the idea and supplied me with all the additional archive sources I could ever require.

I've been working on it off-and-on since then, so the book's about two years old, but I was always hesitant to share it because really it's just me doing a collage. When I had guests recently I happened to offer it to them to see what they thought, and they really liked it, which bolstered my resolve.

It still needs a few minor tweaks, I think, so in the spirit of Extribulum I'm sharing a proof PDF with all of you before it goes to print, to generate a little interest, get some commentary, the usual. The PDF isn't perfect, but it gives you a good idea of what to expect.

So without further ado, please enjoy Dr. King's Lucky Book:



Download via Megaupload | Mirror
Download via Sendspace | Mirror

If you enjoy the PDF, tell your friends, share it around, and keep your eyes peeled for the paperback edition coming soon from Extribulum Press. The final paperback will be about the size of a very thick comic book, with a colour cover and black-and-white interior, and run you about $10.

Ugh. I'm not going out today. It's not reclusiveness, it's a zillion degrees out. I'm going to stay in and bond with the air conditioner.

I've been alternating between cleaning and creating, which sounds nicely pithy, though at this point cleaning mostly involves Roomba supervision. While the Roomba was running in the kitchen, occasionally bonking into my ankles, I made ice cream; I forgot to chill the mix before I put it in the machine, but it came out all right anyway, and while the machine did its work I did some messing around with the cover for Trace.

And then this got very philosophical, so I'll toss the rest under a cut.

( Cover design, professional publishing, and the everlasting issue of gatekeeping. )

I got a question via email the other day asking whether I'd ever posted anything on how to become a better writer, especially with the long-term goal of being published or self-publishing. I had a lot of thoughts about it, so maybe it's time I wrote them out.

FOUR THOUSAND WORDS LATER...

( Oh god, help. )

I finished reworking Trace yesterday. My feelings, they are complicated.

I have been working, for a while, on coming to terms with the fact that this story will never be As Good As. It's based in a fanfic, and that causes some problems. Prison is a ridiculously restrictive setting for a novel. Plus I'm still learning some basic techniques and styles -- I've been writing for fifteen years but I've had a serious crutch for most of that time. While I've written multiple works over the 50k word count, this is, really, only my third or fourth book. I am very much learning as I go. Steep curve.

Over the last few days, though, especially as I've started to vocalise what I see in my studies on magical realism, my attitude has shifted away from "as good as" and more towards the idea that the book Is As Is. The standards have changed, which is a little like having the rug pulled out from under me -- well, okay, honestly, it's like having a flying carpet pulled out from under me, but it's a net gain.

It's not that within this genre standards are lower, but the expectations are different, and the book fits them better than it fits regular literary fictional standards. Trace falls into a lot of the tropes I talked about and, within the new definition, it is a strong book. Stronger for the feedback I took with me and worked into it, but strong enough now to withstand major criticism in the second round, even though not all of the original flaws were fixed. At this point they are not flaws so much as they are imperfect attempts.

I'm not a perfectionist, not in the difficult, obsessive way some people are. I'm not naturally born to it. But my work ethic and my sense of artistic perfectionism are pretty rooted, at this point. So while I don't struggle to actually reach Perfect, I do my best to get as close as I can. I might regret the gap between where I am and where I could be in an ideal world, but that's just regret, not despair. There will always be another book to write, so the failure is impermanent.

Trace will never be an easy book for readers, not because it's high concept or overly complicated but because it's not based in the template of mainstream literature, and it's not going to hit the expectations people (quite rightly) usually have. I'm okay with that -- more okay than I have been, anyway. Call it a labour of love, I suppose.

At any rate it's been educational, and that counts significantly.

So! Picture me clapping my hands together and rubbing them here. I'm going to do one more pass through for glaring errors and then Trace draft two is going up probably starting tomorrow: free to the public and with commentary encouraged. Didn't quite hit the Solstice as a kickoff date, but it's close enough for jazz.

I've been working myself around back to rewriting Trace, which has taken a while; my pattern for writing seems to be "write furiously, post and edit in situ furiously, finish posting, ignore story for between two months and four years."

Trying to break that.

Anyway, I'm wrestling with the front of Trace because there is a lot of loaded up backstory to these characters. It's by necessity for two reasons: one, yeah, okay, it's a fanfic, these characters came with a history. And if that were all, I could ditch the backstory. But two, a lot of this backstory is integral to the function of the plot. I can't just pretend that there's no prior relationship between Joseph and Colin, because half the story is about Colin watching Joseph's shade become a physical presence outside of him, and Joseph seeing what happens to Colin on the inside where he's more magical than not, as opposed to on the outside where Colin's magic can be written off as "he's kind of weird". And I can't go easier on the politics from Colin's last stay at Railburg, because Noel and Colin need that bedrock to stand on for their intimacy to work.

IN ESSENCE I HAVE SCREWED MYSELF.

I can take out the sex, but that's frankly not going to solve the overall problem. Originally I was just going to write a chapter introducing the backstory, starting with Joseph rescuing Colin from Hoboken, but I wrote it and a) it's clumsy and b) it's kind of obvious and c) if I'm going that route I really should just write the god damned prequel, and that's so much work.

So the goal now is "be a better writer" and work the backstory into the text in a way that is not confusing and not obvious. Which is nice, that something which started as a fanfic is now about to push me out of my comfort zone. (Talking of comfort zones, I stumbled over a very nice review of Nameless the other night, and it made me re-read a couple of chunks of the book. Tell you what, that book didn't suck nearly as much as I thought it did.) Apparently Douglas Adams did this a lot by deliberately writing himself into a corner so I'm just going to go with "I'm pretending I'm Douglas Adams".

There's no real reason to tell you guys all this except that you're way cheaper than a therapist and I don't have an editor. And also I wanted to make a post to let you all know about a coupon deal, and this is the post my brain decided to make.

So. HEY GUYS THERE'S A COUPON DEAL. From now until Monday, enter GIANT305 at checkout to get 20% all books at Lulu.com. These include my books! Just in case you needed any ideas....