Well, maybe not an e-splosion, whatever messiness that would entail. But, a little over a month ago, I popped three short stories up on amazon in the form of shiny new .99 cent ebooks and just sort of sat back and watched what they did. This, I’m told, is called a soft launch — you put something up and say very little about it, and just let it stew a bit in whatever storefronts you’ve got it listed. Apparently it’s a way for all those algorithms to start filling in stuff like ‘people who bought this, also bought that’ and ‘if you were as good-looking as you think, you’d have gotten this already at a discount,’ that kind of stuff. Also, by way of experiment, I’ve listed these with Amazon Prime, to see if anyone would borrow them (Prime functions in part like an ebook library). No one has, yet, though I’ve had a few borrows of a book I’ve listed under a super-secret pseudonym. Eventually I will take them off of Prime, and list them at Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc., but for now Amazon is the only place to find them.
In addition to those three, my Pathfinder Tales short story ‘The Box’ has also been released as an ebook short available only from Paizo, also for .99 cents. So that’s four pieces of pie you could be having for dessert, not just one. Screw dinner, eat pie!
Anyway, maybe I’ll do a post all about putting ebooks together aimed at authors at a later date, but I don’t want to bore the golf pants off of any civilians reading this particular post. What I do want to do is begask suggest that readers out there that have liked my fantasy fiction in the past go check these shorts out. And if you haven’t read any of my fiction and only know me through reviews and police reports, here’s a chance to sample something of mine for a buck.
These stories were selected because they are some of my longer shorts, and they’ve all been published to good reviews, and the Pathfinder piece promises to be the first in a series of stories featuring these characters.
Click on any of the covers for links to the stories:
You know all those action movies you find yourself mentally justifying as just a bit of dumb fun? John Carter of Mars is a film you don’t have to apologize for, one that doesn’t treat the audience like a bunch of stroke victims, one that isn’t about demonstrating how much smarter than you some jaded producer thinks he is through ironical send ups and oh-so-knowing winks at whatever drek passes for pop culture hipness these days. It’s fun in the uplifting, genuine, sincere way that classic films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars were fun.
I rarely go to the movies, it’s seldom worth the hassle. John Carter of Mars was worth the hassle. Hell, I’m going to go see it again. It’s an event film, it’s the antidote to all the design-by-committee incoherent action movies that come out of Hollywood these days. If the brainless animatronic puppets that ran Disney’s marketing department were even half as convincingly human as the ones in Disney’s theme parks, maybe they wouldn’t have mis-marketed and betrayed this movie to the extent that they have, to the extent that everyone who sees the previews thinks John Carter of Mars must be some unholy hybrid of Avatar and The Phantom Menace.
Here are the trailers it should have had, courtesy of the John Carter Files:
If you like the kind of fiction and movies I talk about on this site, you owe it to yourself to go see this movie.
Pathfinder’s new line of novels are making a good impression among fantasy readers, accessible as they are to fans of Paizo’s game world and the uninitiated alike. If you are not familiar with Pathfinder it is essentially Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, but with its own world that differs from existing D&D settings in various ways both large and small. The world of Golarion itself actually predates Pathfinder as a game system, and the wealth of detail and world-building that have gone into making it a fully-fleshed environment is impressive. And, while there are scads of Pathfinder supplements available at the time of this writing, the fiction end of things for Golarion is just getting started — Master of Devils representing the fifth novel set in the Pathfinder world.
Dave Gross has quickly distinguished himself as the go-to guy for Pathfinder fiction (be sure to check out Black Gate’s interview with him), having written two novels and co-written another, as well as having penned numerous Pathfinder Tales short stories available free at Paizo’s website, he has been fairly prolific. Gross’s signature characters are the adventuring duo Count Varian Jeggare and his bodyguard Radovan, a classically counter-balanced odd couple whose tales are told in alternating first person segments, allowing for the voice of the characters to emerge in interesting ways.
Master of Devils sees the pair in Tian Xia, Golarion’s equivalent of a politically-fragmented Ancient China, a realm as mysterious to the inhabitants of the continent of Avistan, from which Jeggare and Radovan hail, as it is to fans of the Pathfinder game, which has produced very little material on Tian Xia. Gross shows what he can do with this blank slate and admirably fills the gaps in the Pathfinder record with all manner of appealing details that bring the realm of the far east to life.
Fans of Michael Ehart’s 2007 release The Servant of the Manthycore (Double-Edged Publishing) will find a lot of familiar ground in The Tears of Ishtar – in fact the later book contains all of the stories collected in the former, some of which have been enlarged or altered, alongside new material. While I will admit to feeling a slight twinge of disappointment upon discovering that I had already read most of the stories in this book (and, when one factors in those stories appearing in other anthologies such as Rogue Blades Entertainment’s Rage of the Behemoth, I think I may have read nearly all of these tales at one time or another), that feeling quickly dissipated. These are, after all, good stories in the tradition of classic sword & sorcery, and this new collection-cum-fix-up-novel showcases Ehart’s Ninshi stories in a more complete and ultimately satisfying way than the previous book.
The Tears of Ishtar spans something like 3,000 years in the life of the cursed, nearly immortal warrior woman Ninshi, the Servant of the Manthycore. Beholden to this legendary, man-eating beast, Ninshi spends long centuries luring men into murderous ambush to satisfy the Manthycore’s appetite – and in exchange is rewarded with brief glimpses of her imprisoned lover, a man ensnared by the Manthycore’s magic and used as leverage against her. But these grim transactions do not comprise the main action of The Tears of Ishtar, as Ninshi finds herself confronting all manner of gods and spirits as she wanders the lands of the ancient Near East. Set against the backdrop of the rise and fall of empires, Ehart’s stories, which move relentlessly forward and often skip centuries of intervening time, capture the sweep and almost unimaginable chronological depth of a time and culture too-often merely abstracted as ‘Ancient Mesopotamia.’ It is that familiarity with the nuances of history, the inclusion of solid details of material culture and belief, and frequent biblical and historical allusions, which elevate the setting of The Tears of Ishtar in a memorable and compelling way.
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Well, maybe not an e-splosion, whatever messiness that would entail. But, a little over a month ago, I popped three short stories up on amazon in the form of shiny new .99 cent ebooks and just sort of sat back and watched what they did. This, I’m told, is called a soft launch — you put something up and say very little about it, and just let it stew a bit in whatever storefronts you’ve got it listed. Apparently it’s a way for all those algorithms to start filling in stuff like ‘people who bought this, also bought that’ and ‘if you were as good-looking as you think, you’d have gotten this already at a discount,’ that kind of stuff. Also, by way of experiment, I’ve listed these with Amazon Prime, to see if anyone would borrow them (Prime functions in part like an ebook library). No one has, yet, though I’ve had a few borrows of a book I’ve listed under a super-secret pseudonym. Eventually I will take them off of Prime, and list them at Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc., but for now Amazon is the only place to find them.
