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 beg ask 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:

Hal just wants to stay out of trouble and fence a few stolen goods while in Autrain Ford, but an old friend has other plans. Vocachio, poet and actor, desperately needs the quill of a legendary playwright to rekindle his creative flame, and Hal is just the thief to make it happen. But in a city crawling with soldiers all looking for the source of some mysterious wild magic, it remains to be seen whether Hal and Vocachio can prove that the pen really is ‘Mightier Than the Sword.’

‘The Last of His Kind’ follows Tanout, an aging drake hunter with a brutal disposition, as he searches the desert lands of the Yeq for the fabled Glasswyrm. Joined by the boy Hasn, a child wise beyond his years and touched by mysterious magic, Tanout must find — and kill — the great dragon before his competition. But pursuit in the form of a local shaman and a trio of brother assassins from his homeland complicates matters, and Tanout finds himself lost in a tide of conflicting loyalties and suffering under the heavy hand of his own past.

When Daolong Monastery finds itself mysteriously transported into Hell, only Heartless Gao, general, scholar, and poet, has any chance of finding a way to free it. In his journey through the Chinese Underworld, Gao must contend with demons and bureaucrats, a randy old Immortal and the Greatest Poet Under Heaven, and one of the Yama Kings of Hell himself. Told in the style of a myth, ‘Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell’ is both an adventure through Chinese legend and a playful nod to western conceptions of Hell and the afterlife, as well as a parable on duty, honor, and sacrifice.

Kostin may not be a true Sczarni thug, but he still knows his way around the mean streets of Magnimar. When a new con saddles him with an ancient, mysterious chest, only to have it immediately stolen by a gang of Shoanti toughs, it’s up to the young Varisian and his rough-and-tumble companions to get it back.

So that’s what I’ve got, so far. And it goes without saying ‘likes’ and reviews over on amazon would be very much appreciated by your humble narrator. I mean, when you think about it, one day the world might be devastated by plague, and some dying scientist will probably entrust me with the vaccine, so it’s probably a smart bet to get on my good side now before all the other plague victims start lining up telling me what nice hair I’ve got and stuff. Just saying….

I’ve been tinkering….

Tomorrow afternoon (3:00 EST) and Monday night (9:00 EST) Paizo will be hosting a chat featuring all of the great names in their fantasy fiction stables. Also, I will be there.

You can follow the link to Paizo’s chat room from this post on the Paizo blog. You don’t have to register, just give your handle.

And if you really want to brush up on your Pathfinder who’s who, check out my interviews with Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, and James L. Sutter.

So far, these are the attendees:

Saturday 3:00pm EST
Dave Gross
Howard Andrew Jones
Liane Merciel
Erik Mona
Kevin Andrew Murphy
Steven Savile
Amber E. Scott
Bill Ward

Monday 9:00pm EST
Richard Lee Byers
Elaine Cunningham
Ed Greenwood
Dave Gross
J.C. Hay
Howard Andrew Jones
Liane Merciel
Erik Mona
Kevin Andrew Murphy
James Sutter
Bill Ward

For the last four weeks Paizo has been posting installments of a serial short I did for their Pathfinder Tales fiction line. As of yesterday, the entire story is now up, and you can read all four parts for free by following this link to the Pathfinder Tales web fiction section of the Paizo site. Here’s a bit more about ‘The Box:’

When a supposedly easy theft goes bad, Kostin Dalackz finds himself caught up in a deadly criminal conspiracy centered on a mysterious, magically locked box. Enlisting the aid of a diverse group of adventurers and rogues, Kostin strikes out to settle accounts — and re-acquire the twice-stolen property. ‘The Box’ is a journey through the seedy underbelly of the city of Magnimar, part of the Pathfinder world setting of Golarion.

Pathfinder Tales has a great group of talented writers contributing to their fiction line, and I’m thrilled to be in the company of some legendary names — once you’ve read my piece, definitely check out the rest! The Pathfinder world itself was a lot of fun to work in, and it’s a particular joy to see one’s characters illustrated. For ‘The Box’ the amazing J.P.Targete pulled out all the stops and produced four great illustrations.

Also — fantasy writers take note — judging from the feedback so far from this particular story, I think it’s safe to say that what the fantasy reading public really wants is more stories featuring badgers. Voles, shrews, weasels, opossums, lemmings, wolverines, beavers, mongooses, groundhogs and the like might also work, but badger mania seems to be trending upward right now, mostly I think thanks to this. Something to think about….

A post over at BG alerted me that Tangent Online has recently put up their Recommended Reading List for 2010, a list that includes some great writers of my acquaintance like John R. Fultz and Chris Braak. Black Gate itself was mentioned a few times as well.

Of course, being completely shallow and self-centered the very first thing I did was scan the list for my name. And it turns out, for the second year in a row, somebody over at Tangent liked one of my stories enough to put it on the list. Last year it was ‘How Antkind Lost its Soul’ from Kaleidotrope, and this year it’s a piece called ‘Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell,’ which appeared in Realms. Here is what Nathan Goldman said about the story in his Tangent review:

Bill Ward’s “Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell” follows a fairy tale format and tracks master warrior Heartless Gao through an Eastern adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. The first line hooks the reader, and from then until the story’s end, the reader is intrigued, if not transfixed, by Ward’s strange and compelling vision of the underworld. This epithet-laden tale would fail in most formats, but in the familiar form of a myth, it succeeds. Amidst a number of minor and clever commentaries (such as Hell’s hysterical bureaucracy) emerges a thoughtful discourse on the nature of what it means to be human, and the moments centering on this topic are no less exciting than Heartless Gao’s confrontation with Hell’s many demons.

Feels good when a story that is a ‘hard sell’ finally makes it in front of readers…and then some of those readers really seem to like it. And it’s fantastic to make this list aside so many great writers whose work I’ve long enjoyed. Glad to see that Tangent has consistently maintained its strong focus on shorter works of genre fiction over the years, and that it covers many of the smaller magazines and ezines in the world of indie publishing. Thanks Tangent!

Last week Jason over at RBE announced the ToC for the second Clash of Steel Anthology, Assassins. Looks like a great line up (and just get a look at that fantastic cover from Didier Normand!) My own story for the anthology is another in a series of adventures set in a fantastical pseudo-China, featuring a pair of Imperial troubleshooters called Shan and Bao that get into all sorts of Sword & Sorcery style predicaments.

* Erin M. Hartshorn ~ “Snake in the Grass”
* Ramon Rozas III ~ “Three Rules to Live By”
* Dayle A. Dermatis ~ “The Sultan’s Sons”
* Seth Skorkowsky ~ “The Blossom of Eternity”
* C. L. Werner ~ “A Blade for the Dead”
* Steve Goble ~ “Otrossius and the 13 Assassins”
* Carl Walmsley ~ “Homecoming”
* Robert E. Waters ~ “The People’s Avenger”
* Josh Brown ~ “Goldenbee’s Savior”
* Jonathan Moeller ~ “Artists”
* John R. Fultz ~ “A Fool in the Court of the Idiot-King”
* Bill Ward ~ “Shadow of the Demonspawn Emperor”
* Phil Emery ~ “Endgame Assassins”
* Alter S. Reiss ~ “Difficulties of the Eight Quarters”
* Bruce Durham ~ “Dark Assassin”
* Wil Dan Collins ~ “Citadel of Screaming Spires”
* Robert Mammone ~ “Blood Fire”
* Christine Lucas ~ “The Last Dues Owed”
* Craig Comer ~ “The Blood of Khalid Al’Tahir”
* J.M. Martin ~ “Blind Ambition”
* Christopher Heath ~ “Azieran: A Penance, of Sorts”

Since RBE received a lot of good stories for this open call, they are also, for the first time, publishing several e-anthos starting this month and counting down to the upcoming release of Assassins. These ‘eSsasins’ anthologies will contain four stories each arranged around a theme (Sorcery, Ruse, Shadows, Revenge) and sell for only $3.00. Glad I just bought a Kindle.