Myspace. Woohoo!

http://www.myspace.com/jamesrstricklandbooks

Contains pretty much what this site contains, except with more ads. :) But hey, you can friend me. :)

-JRS

Recommendations from Racheline

On Gather.com, Racheline Maltese gave me a very positive review (Thanks!) some months ago. Today, she recommends Looking Glass again on her Geeks for Gifts Holiday Shopping Guide. Thanks again! :)

-JRS

Bookstores

Ahem. If you're getting tired of me and my squeal-like-a-little-girl moments in this blog, I'm afraid there are more.

See, I just found copies of Looking Glass on shelves at Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble. Wow. :) My first national chain. Now granted, it's very possible the distribution is only regional, and my sales ranking on their website is nothing to write home over, but. Barnes & Noble. Wow. :)

I'm afraid the squealing really must start here.

Best to all.

-JRS

New reviews

First, this one. More squealing like a little girl. Sorry about that. :) Also this one.

-JRS

Welcome, Errant Story fans!

For those who didn't get here through my banner ad for Looking Glass on the Errant Story webcomic site, I've got an ad there. I've never done the advertising thing before, so I'm sure I drove Impy nuts with all my newbie questions, but it's up, and I'm happy with it. I've been reading Errant Story for some time, after getting hooked on Poe's previous comic, Exploitation Now before it. I don't get any kickbacks or anything to tell you that both are good webcomics. I follow Errant Story, and I bought one of the dead tree versions of Exploitation Now some time ago. They also have been pretty darn reasonable people to work with, and they sure sell an attractive advertising product. I think it looks pretty darn sharp. :)

In other news, yeah, a lot of the minor fiddling with the website was in preparation for the Errant Story ad, especially to make it easier for people clicking from there to here to, you know, buy my book.

Thanks for coming.

-JRS

Mile High Con, Updates, and Teasers

Made some site updates: cleanup mostly, plus I added a link to another nice review on the review page.

July 26, 27, and 28 were Mile High Con, in Denver, CO. I gave a reading from Looking Glass, as well as a sneak preview reading from my next book, tentatively titled Irreconcilable Differences. The Looking Glass readings are getting smoother. I found a site online that offered a number of good suggestions for them. Particularly useful were the suggestions to print a large-print version of the reading section, and to understand that readings are differently paced from reading the novel yourself, and it's a good idea to edit the reading to take out particularly description that, while important to the story in the long run, will tend to drag the reading down. Sound advice, all from Charles Stross's excellent site, which in turn was recommended on Wil Wheaton's blog. Thanks to Wil and Charles both.

So about this Irreconcilable Differences book.
The truth is, I'm not going to tell you much about it, because, despite having been originally set down last summer (2006), it's still in pretty primitive state, and a great deal is in flux in it. I can tell you that it is set in the same world as Looking Glass. I can tell you that the main characters are Micki Blake, a teenaged hacker girl, and the personality model of an Interpol agent named Rachel Santana. Rachel exists in hardware installed in Micki's body. She's also the narrator.

It's a bit of a different animal from Looking Glass. It's a deeper exploration into cyberpunk in the great plains, where I've lived almost my whole life, and how the waves of technology that pass through cultures effects these more rural places. Not everyone lives in Gibson's Sprawl, so the impact is very, very different. Differences is also a deeper exploration into how the world of Looking Glass works. It digs into the political angle more, and offers more hints on how the collapse of the United States happened.

Anyway. Happy All Hallows Eve, all. Enjoy the candy. :)

-JRS

Some days, guessing right is scary.

Ever wonder what an early induction rig might be like? See this article. When I wrote Looking Glass, I worried that my dates might be so close to the real calendar that it would be laughable when technologies didn't appear on schedule. Now I have to wonder if I didn't put the technology close enough.

Re: Marta Strickland being the poster of the article; as Babs and Buster Bunny so often said, "No relation."

-JRS