Update on Book Two

Posted on 2015-06-12 by arjaybe

writer-at-work

It’s been a while since I posted the last extension to Green Comet (Extension Seven), so I thought I should give you an update on my progress. I’ve just completed the first draft of Extension Eight, and now I have to beat it into shape for release. Once that’s done, the first draft of book two of the Green Comet series will be complete. Then I have to start hacking on that to turn it into a presentable novel. I’m looking forward to reading it as a whole, to see what I’ve got.

Book two will be roughly the same size as book one; probably around 130,000 words. I’ve decided on a title for this sequel: Parasite Puppeteers.

The proofreading and editing will take a while, and then there will be the conversions and presentation processes. Not to mention getting the ISBNs. I’ll probably post a couple more updates along the way.

That is all. As you were.-)

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rjb

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Egregious Nonsense Regarding eBook Standards

Posted on 2015-06-06 by arjaybe

Garbate 100

Andrew Upgrove explains why proprietary formats are bad for readers and writers, and why we need to make alternative, open ebook standards readily available and easy to use.

rjb

Making products work on one device is easy. Making it possible for true competition to be active in the marketplace and give true freedom of purchase and movement to customers takes more work – and the results are far better. And where vendors decide that it’s in their economic interest to do this, they do it. With thousands of new standards every year.

That’s why you can buy a phone from any one and call anyone else; buy a tire from anyone and put it on whatever car you own; buy a Wi-Fi router and connect anything to it; and buy just about anything else in the world and use it the way you want to. Except eBooks. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t technical.

Source: Egregious Nonsense Regarding eBook Standards | Andrew Updegrove: Tales of Adversego

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Stranger Things Happen

Posted on 2015-06-04 by arjaybe

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Review – Stranger Things Happen – Kelly Link

Quirky short stories – 82,000 words

Available at Feedbooks

Author’s website

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Kelly-Link

Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link is a collection of eleven short stories. It’s available in various formats, including ePub and Kindle, at Feedbooks. Kelly has released the digital version under a Creative Commons license, bless her heart, so it’s free to download and read.

As I was reading Stranger Things Happen I found myself thinking of Roald Dahl, especially the kind of short stories he published in Tales of the Unexpected. I was also reminded of Ray Bradbury’s October Country. The characters and events are almost ordinary, except they’re not. You quickly learn to accept that you will be taken places and shown things that are anything but ordinary.

The man who can’t remember his name, writing letters to his wife, whose name he can’t remember either? He might be dead. The librarian whose girlfriend takes him to meet her parents. Her mother has a wooden leg and her father a collection of false noses, which he needs. The librarian has to learn what it is to lose something. The young woman who walks across half a continent on broken glass to retrieve her young man from the Snow Queen. The young man who picks up a beautiful young hitchhiker on the way to Milford Sound. Every story is filled with vivid images of worlds that are slightly off. If, like me, you have an occasional taste for quirky stories, you should enjoy Stranger Things Happen.

Visit Feedbooks to download Stranger Things Happen, and visit Kelly Link’s website to see what else she’s up to. Visit Vulture to read an interview.

rjb

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