Get Zombies vs Unicorns now... for free!

Today, October 13, 2012, in honor of World Zombie Day and the return of AMC's The Walking Dead, I'm giving away free copies of Weirdo Company: Zombies vs Unicorns for Kindle and Nook.

They are the US military's special response unit for monsters and other creepy-crawly creatures that go bump in the night. They are Weirdo Company. Lead by Lt. Paul Harper, the team embarks on a mission uncomfortably close to home: Contact has been lost with a small farming town in the northeastern United States. What the team finds there will set them up for the fight of their lives, as the townspeople have been turned into vicious, bloodthirsty zombies.

But Harper and his team, including a green new recruit Davis, will discover that there is far more danger in this town than just zombies. Because if the people have mutated into something grotesque and dangerous, what has happened to the farm animals?

"Zombies vs Unicorns" is the first story in the 'Weirdo Company' series and features thrilling, summer blockbuster-style zombie-killing action and a few fun surprises.

I'm doing these downloads myself, so the links will take you to a Google Docs page.  Click on the link for your preferred format, .mobi for Kindle or .epub for Nook and other e-Readers, and then click "Download" in order to get the file.  

And don't forget to circle me on Google+ or 'like' me on Facebook!

Zombies vs Unicorns for Kindle

Zombies vs Unicorns for Nook

Enjoy!

'Star Trek: Russian Roulette'

'Russian Roulette' is a second story that I wrote and submitted for the "Strange New Worlds" anthology that wasn't selected, I can pretty well guess why this one wasn't picked: it's not very good.  While I've been a fan of this premise for a few years, and have tried to work it into several different projects, I've never really managed to make it work.  My execution hasn't caught up with the idea yet.

In this story, which is a much more traditional 'Star Trek' story than my last post, the Enterprise is damaged in orbit of an alien world.  The engines could overload at any minute, wiping out half the planet below.  To Captain Kirk's horror, the alien denizens try to use the ship's threat of destruction in some kind of sick game of worldwide, political Russian roulette - whichever half of the planet isn't decimated by the explosion wins. Even worse, military units from one of these nations manages to board the ship to try and force it to explode over enemy territory.

Again, I really like this premise.  I'm glad I wrote the story, but in rereading it years later, something about it doesn't click for me.  The ending feels kind of rushed, and I think my characterization of Kirk is... off.  He spends a good deal of the story being something of a bystander, and I think I push his fear of losing the Enterprise a bit too far.

I tried to 'hang a lantern' on the old 'transfer-power-to-the-deflector-to-solve-all-our-problems' trick, but I'm not sure that really works, either.  In the end, all I did was... well... transfer power to the deflector.

Still, on a technical level, I think I did pretty well with this story.  I like my descriptions and a good deal of the dialogue.  And, again, I really like this premise.  One day, I'd like to really do it the justice I think it deserves.  Until then, enjoy.

View PDF

"The Infinite Perfectionist"

My first professional publication was a short story in the anthology "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, vol 9".  I submitted only one story, and I submitted the first draft of that story because I had run up against the deadline.

The next year, I submitted four stories.  None of them were accepted, which was too bad because I thought a couple of them were actually quite good.  The other two... not so much.  But, I've decided to share them here with you.

The first, "The Infinite Perfectionist," may be downloaded in PDF format here.  I think it's a pretty good story, though I can surmise the reasons why it wasn't accepted.  It draws upon a number of concepts and ideas from various eras of the franchise, and concocts a perhaps too complicated idea of a shattered, fractured timeline.

In it, a severely weakened Q finds Christopher Pike, who was to be captain of the Enterprise, but is in this new reality a New York City bar owner, and takes him and his wife on a wild adventure through time and space.  They meet a mutated version of Guinan, who helps send them to the Guardian of Forever.  There, Pike learns how time was fractured and figures out how to put things right.

The idea I had in my mind when I was constructing this story was to explore what would happen if something awful happened to the Guardian of Forever - like, say, having it be assimilated by the Borg.  Ultimately, I thought having it being assimilated wasn't right.  But if the Borg Queen were to step through it, the trillions of minds connected to her own would be too much for the Guardian to handle, and an overload would pretty much break time.

How, then, were our heroes supposed to put things back right?  Q and Guinan were natural choices.  Guinan has shown to be sensitive to changes in the timeline, and Q is, well, an omnipotent being.  But of course, I couldn't just let Q snap his fingers and put everything right, so I just said that surviving the time fracture had weakened him greatly.

Anyway, I thought the story was intriguing enough, and I even think it's fairly well-written.  But, like its premise, it's maybe a little too jumbled.  Maybe Pike was the wrong character to pick?  Perhaps it should have been Kirk, or even Picard - who, of course, has a much heftier emotional connection with the Borg Queen.  Pike would have never even heard of the Borg in the original timeline.  But I thought that was the fun of the story.

Ultimately, I can only guess why the story wasn't accepted.  It just wasn't.  Oh well.  If you get some enjoyment out of it all these years later, then, well, mission accomplished.  Sound off with your thoughts in the comments.

A treasure trove of old material

Recently while on the search for something else, I discovered a large treasure trove of old files that include a bunch of writing from the last decade.  Most of it isn't publishable, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is copyright issues - several of the stories I found were submissions I made to the "Strange New Worlds" anthology that didn't get picked.

While I won't be able to release these stories for sale on Amazon, I do plan on putting them here.

But the biggest discovery was that I found the original version of "The Box".  As you'll recall, the whole reason I rewrote the story and released it via KDP Select was because I couldn't find the original to include in "Show Me the End of the World." Reading the story last night, I was pretty surprised to find just how different it is from the second version.  But, if you've read "The Box," what's interesting is that the premise of the story actually allows the two stories to co-exist.  I'm not sure what to do with this old version now that I've found it.  I half gave a thought to packaging it with the new one, but that doesn't seem fair to the hundreds who've already downloaded that.

More than likely, what I'll do is include it as a bonus in my next collection, which I'm already working on in addition to my novel.

Current TV:
'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' Season 3 [blu-ray]

An old story I found

I took a short story class at one point in college, and this was unfortunately the semester that began in September of 2001.  It was a fine class, but the entire semester was... difficult.  The campus had a certain depressed air about it that I suspect is particularly familiar to many Americans old enough to remember that day.

This class pretty much dropped the syllabus and the professor basically just tailored the entire semester around analyzing our feelings regarding the 9/11 terror attacks.  I wrote this story, "What If Captain America Was Dead?" as one of the assignments in the class.  I don't really remember too much more of the context about it, other than it just came out of me very naturally.  The professor loved it and printed copies of it for his other classes.  I recall not feeling like the story was really all that great, and reading it now it seems almost kind of trite.

Is it any good, or am I just hating on my own work like I usually do?

Anyway, "What If Captain America Was Dead?" can be downloaded on PDF from this link or click on over to the Downloads page.

Current Soundtrack
'Skull & Bones' by Cypress Hill

The Amazon KDP Select Experiment: Phase 1

As I've previously posted, I enrolled "The Box" in Amazon's new KDP Select program.  Now, what this means is two things:

Firstly, that it is exclusive to Amazon - I can't sell "The Box" on any other store, which is fine.  To be honest, most of my sales of "Show Me the End of the World" came from Amazon anyway.  I might have sold four or five copies for the Barnes and Noble Nook, but for the most part, Amazon was where it was going.  Since I only had the one book, I was reluctant to give Select a chance, and some of the conflicting stories I've heard about it made me wary.

Secondly, and here's where the meat of Select comes into play, I am allowed to give "The Box" away for free for five days.  And here's why people are saying that Select is a bad idea if you've only got one book: If you give it away for free, you're not getting any money.  I've read accounts from other indie authors who say that they've given away the first book of a series in order to promote sales of the subsequent books.

Now, if I were to give away "Show Me the End of the World" for free before I had released anything else, my promotion is doing nothing but giving away free books.  Maybe some of those people would remember me and check back later to see if I have anything new coming out, but that seems unlikely.  More likely, I'd simply have given away a bunch of books and gotten nothing in return for it - and I don't even mean just money.  Will those readers turn into fans?  Again, probably not because I have nothing else to offer them and they'll forget about me and move on.

So I enrolled "The Box" in Select because I figured, now I have something out there to offer and the risk is somewhat minimal.  So I can give away "The Box" for free in the hopes that people will like it and seek out and purchase "Show Me the End of the World" as a result.  At least, that's the thinking behind it. I've seen stories of people who have found success in this method, and others who think it's one of the worst mistakes they've ever done as an author.

I'm not ready to declare anything like that at the moment.  Right now, I'm sort of laughing at myself because for the week or so that I offered "The Box" for a mere 99 cents (it is, after all, just one short story, maybe even the low end of novella but that seems like I'm stretching) I sold about six copies.  Now, because the list price is so small, I only make about 35 cents royalty on each one of those.  I don't get the whole dollar, not by a longshot.  But I put some advertisement out there... I put links on my personal Facebook page, on my Olympus Mans page, on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Goodreads that I was doing this promo.  And then when the time came and the book was live for free, I put the links out there again and asked people to share it around.

So in over a week I'd sold six copies of my 99 cent story and made a grand total of about two bucks.  In 12 hours, I gave away over 100 copies (about $30 that will not go into my pocket).  At this point, "The Box" has given away more free copies than I sold of "Show Me the End of the World" in total.  Am I happy about that fact?  Eh.  Like I said, this is a promotion.  The whole idea is that I'm trying to build an audience, that this audience will hopefully enjoy "The Box" so much that they'll go buy my other book.

Has that happened? Actually, yes.  According to the sales reports, while at this moment I've given away over 100 copies of "The Box" someone did, in fact, purchase "Show Me the End of the World" today.

Obviously, I'll need more time to look into how this whole thing will work out.  For the moment, I'm a little impressed that I managed to give away so many copies.  I hope everyone who reads it will enjoy it, and I hope that I get some fans and some feedback.  "The Box" was, after all, sort of a holdover from "Show Me" anyway, even though I think I got a little more attached to it than I thought I would.

So if you're reading this, and you've read "The Box", please sound off on your thoughts in the comments.  And if you're feeling really generous, rate it on Amazon.  I'd love to get some gold stars up on that page.

Current Soundtrack:
"X-Men: First Class" by Henry Jackman

Free! Free!

That's right, folks - Everyone's favorite word!  Today (April 4, 2012) and tomorrow (April 5, 2012) my new short story "The Box" is free for everyone on Amazon.com.  Feel free to download it to your Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Android device, PC, Mac, read it right on your fancy-schmancy Internet browser, or... I guess you could print it out if you feel like putting too much effort into something.

But it's free!  So do whatever you like!  Read it, share it, tell all your friends and family how freaking awesome I am... :)

But above all, enjoy.

Current Soundtrack
"John Carter" by Michael Giacchino

'Show Me the End of the World' now in paperback!

It's here!  It's happening!  The paperback version of my first self-published book, "Show Me the End of the World," is now available from Amazon.com!  The paperback version is a nice, trade paperback sized volume.  I'm very happy with the physical quality of the book, and I hope everyone else out there is, too.

You can order it here, and please feel free to rate and review it when you're done reading!

You can also check out a free sample here.

Enjoy!

Free sample of 'Show Me the End of the World'

Today I have decided to begin offering a free PDF download of one of the stories in my first book, "Show Me the End of the World," which is available now for your Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and (almost) in paperback!

So please feel free to download and check out one of the stories, and if you like it, try the full book and tell all your friends and family!

Check out the free sample

And be sure to tell me what you think in the comments below!