Oh...only NINE books released the last few months...

• A Most Excellent Fancy
• The Ripped Blade
• City of Tomorrow
• Easter Tales
• The Annotated Series of Short Trips
• The Age of Theory
• American Poems
• Life & Theft
• 52 Reasons to Love

Woo!

So I finally went ahead and cleared the backlog, which resulted in a true glut of new material in paperback edition...

A Most Excellent Fancy, whose release was already reported here, started all this.  This was my final Kindle Vella project, and also the first of the many books to be filled (increasingly so) with footnotes.  I finally poked around my Word program enough to figure out how to do this, and walked away from Kindle Direct Publishing's templates so that I could produce the results in book form, too.  I really, really got carried away.  Read more so I can explain...

The Ripped Blade is the most recent release, which theoretical readers of this blog (I think I've lost all of the real ones finally!) just finished reading last month in the annual A to Z Challenge.  Anyone picking up a paperback edition will find it festooned with footnotes, as previously suggested, which was really half the reason I wrote the story in the first place.  Originally I was going to write them in a fictitious fashion, but I realized I had plenty of real world material to round out the volume.  I got so carried away with the footnotes in other books I desperately wanted to keep it going, so by April (I didn't choose to unofficially participate until the first of the month, so everything was literally generated and written during it) I came up with as convenient an excuse as was available.  I'd previously decided writing a mystery from a host of perspectives, most of them investigators of some fashion, was a good idea, so I was able to graft that onto the experiment from the start.  I had good great fun, anyway.

City of Tomorrow is a collection of material that picks up where my very first short story collection, Monorama (which, incidentally, the publication for which ushered this very blog), left off from stories posted to Sigild V (until last month the bulk of where my fiction is posted).  Of course it's chock full of footnotes.  It's also the longest of the books released in this period, and it's got the best cover, probably the best cover I've ever done.

Easter Tales is the culmination of a project inadvertently begun in 2017 but picked up in earnest in 2020, short stories written for various days of the three day Easter story from various points in history and perspectives, each of them explaining what the death and resurrection of Jesus means to them, and us.  I think it's some of the best stuff I've ever written, and it's a rare reflection of my Catholic/Christian faith in my writing (the hardest book I've ever published to actually recommend is Reading Biblically, which is my tour of the Bible, which happens to include commentary on "the real Ten Commandments" that makes sense in context, but would probably be somewhat controversial if anyone ever just stumbled on it).

The Annotated Series of Short Trips is the most shameless release as far as footnotes go; it's right there in the title, a hodgepodge mishmash of brief material that on its own wouldn't have been considered for any of these books, but makes a nice package, at least as far as authors desperately enamored with footnotes go.

The Age of Theory, American Poems, and Life & Theft wrap up the collections of poems posted to various blogs over the years.  I'd never really publicized these here, but it's increasingly significant material, including earlier volumes that are filled with my personal philosophies as well as mounds of angst...

Finally, there's 52 Reasons to Love, which is not about love itself, but rather 52, the DC weekly comic book series that I've long championed and continue to recommend as one of the great superhero experiences yet created.  This is an unofficial guidebook, including summaries of every issue, background information including about the main creators for the uninitiated (they're all big deals for those already in the know), everything that followed, and tacked on because of the title, 52 concise reasons, well, to love 52.

It's very possible I've finally gone insane.  If true, at least I have a few books to show for it.

A Most Excellent Fancy released

https://a.co/d/11SR5Fz

A Most Excellent Fancy is the last of my Kindle Vella projects, and the latest novella now available in paperback. It’s a farce, ultimately, but a tragedy loosely based on a Shakespearean model, with one chapter in verse. This edition incorporates as footnotes the original notes Vella always encouraged authors to include, mostly detailing the famous Shakespeare phrases used as chapter titles. This is also the first time in fiction I use Mount Rushmore as a backdrop, though it shouldn’t be the last. I hugely valued Kindle Vella as a platform, its ability to draw out material I would likely have never written without it. 

New Danab Cycle Short, farewell to Kindle Vella...

I just completed a new Danab Cycle short over at Sigild V, Soldiers of Ancient Seas, which serves as a prequel to the, um, Earth prequel to the, err, Earth prequel to everything that's going to...

Listen, I know this kind of sounds complicated.  I dreamed up all of this many years ago, and've been further developing and expanding the stories I wanted to tell along the way.  Originally it was what has since been entitled Collider, which is the real winner in finishing Soldiers, since it's fully my intention to make finally writing Collider the major project of the year, only oh some three decades in the making.  But the first book I actually wrote was Seven Thunders, which for years I thought, if there was only going to be one book actually written, that was going to be it, but in the years since, just trying to find a publisher, I really have expanded my ambitions.  I plotted out many books before I really got to thinking about the kinds of stories that needed to be told, and so I plotted a couple of prequels, one that revolves around the war that begins all this, and the other about the events that set all this in motion in the first place...

Soldiers is actually a bridge between them.  It's also the first time I've posted a serialized story (comic book scripting excepted)  at the writing blog in years, having in recent years devoted such efforts to Kindle Vella or entirely offline (what a thought!).  Kindle Vella (and I guess I ought to include Wattpad, where I first used an alternative platform, and I walked away from long ago at this point) closed up shop and is officially winding down and taking down content in a handful of days, I'll forever be grateful for, as it somehow provoked me to write stories that I would never have written, lastly A Most Excellent Fancy last year.

Fancy, in my personal files, now incorporates the footnotes the platform encouraged users to include, in the traditional footnote format (which, honestly, if nothing else I'm certainly happy to have been able to do), which I hope I can figure out how to include in a file Kindle itself will allow me to publish in paperback later.  I still have a backlog of material waiting, including the short story collection I'm including Soldiers.  If I can pull off the footnotes I'll be very happy indeed.  

Anyway, ever onward...

A new Kindle Vella project: A Most Excellent Fancy

In the ordinary course of events, Kindle Vella announced it was holding a contest, and eventually I heard about it, and came up with a story for it:

A Most Excellent Fancy

This is my fourth Vella, following somewhat belatedly from the others after tackling two novel manuscripts in the past few years.  Given the rapid nature of the affair, I somewhat calculatedly followed the minimum guidelines (at least ten chapters, at least 10,000 words), which I was able to accommodate given all my writing experience with little difficulty.

Since Vella, as with much of the internet, is geared toward the fancies of the young, I don't know how likely I am, as ever, to spontaneously appeal to their interests, but it's fun to pretend I might otherwise pique some readers.  

Given the timetable (August 20), I buckled down yesterday and got about half the thing done (the first chapter was written a week ago), with the most important, and crucial, material to go, including a fun final chapter and a bonus one to act as coda.

Happily, this project speaks to what I wrote earlier this year (The Children's Crusade), and what I'm tackling next (Abigail Only).