Friday, January 31, 2014

Cha cha changes

As of tomorrow, Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences are officially going out of print. (How long this will take to percolate out to Amazon, I have no idea.) I will be removing the free downloads some time tonight or tomorrow and modifying them to reflect that they are no longer available through the auspices of Flying Pen Press.

This isn't an acrimonious separation. My contract with FPP allowed me to pull the plug starting in 2010. I didn't do so then, and I didn't do so now. Mostly it's about falling sales, and FPP refocusing on other product lines. Whatever else is said about Flying Pen Press, ultimately they took a chance on a science fiction writer with exactly zero publishing credits, got me professional editing, and made the book available to the public. If you're reading this, there's a good chance it's because of an FPP version of one of my novels. Their timing couldn't have been better, either. 2007, the year Looking Glass was released, was also the year my father passed away, but he did live long enough to see me published, for which I'm grateful, and it's been very valuable to me to have books in print all this time.

That said, what do you, the reader, do if you came here looking for one of my books to buy? Well, as of right now, it's still alive on Amazon. Hit the buy button quick. If it's not there anymore, there are a couple options. First, I own the ebook versions outright - I created them in the first place, and I've been updating the free download version from time to time, so once I've made a few small changes (mostly to the cover and copyright sections) I'll be putting those free downloads back up. Second: I have a fairly abundant supply of the Flying Pen Press edition of both of my first two novels. I will be making arrangements on my website so you can order one via email and paypal direct from me (signed, if you like.) Finally, I own these two novels free and clear again. Moving forward, I'm hoping to find them a new home, perhaps with a third book in the series, even if it's a matter of typesetting them myself (I don't own the FPP typeset version) and putting them on Lulu. You haven't seen the last of my cyberpunk books.

Meantime, I'm making good progress on City of Glass, finally. I added about 10,000 words to it this week, (very) rough drafts of several pivotal scenes that help a lot in fixing the book in my mind. That those four chapters were written in Wordstar won't be obvious in the finished novel, and probably aren't that interesting to you, but it amuses the hell out of me. There are a lot fewer distractions in a 1980s toolset, and it helps with focusing. :) (If you are interested, the computer is one of these, which I built myself, running CP/M 2.2 and Wordstar 4. I have a functional but incomplete Wordstar to rtf translator written that I'm using, and one of my side/hobby projects has been a complete Wordstar to rtf translator, to handle everything Wordstar can do. Turns out that's far more than I thought, so it's taking a lot more time than expected. :)

So yeah. Things are changing around here.

Regards,
-JRS

Monday, January 6, 2014

The Joke's On Me...

In the Brass and Steel stories, I've made great use of Herman Hollerith's name as one of the technology greats behind my 19th century computer revolution. (In the real world, he invented Hollerith cards, first used to tabulate the 1890 Census) Today I decided that the precursors of IBM needed to show up as eager young startups (since IBM itself wasn't founded until 1911, and City of Glass is set in 1897). IBM, formerly known as the Computing Tabulating Recording company, was made up of the merger of three smaller companies; the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company, and the Computing Scale company. You can see where this is going. The Tabulating Machine Company was Hollerith's company. So one of my usual gags writing Steampunk turns out to be exactly backwards. Heh. :) -JRS

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Some things I didn't know about the 19th century: the 20somethings of the time were in the same boat as the Millennials today. Kind of explains the explosive rise of Steampunk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/opinion/anxious-youth-then-and-now.html?_r=0

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