First Attempt at Amazon Publishing

As a first foray into electronic publishing, I posted "The Promise of a Kiss" on Amazon's Kindle store. It's very easy to do so. I was surprised that there seems to be no way to actually charge nothing for an item. Maybe I missed something. The lowest price one can stick on a piece is 99 cents, at a 30% royalty rate.

Here's the link.

If you read the story and feel like leaving a review, go for it. The license hasn't changed, and you can still download it for free from the site. I even made a zipped .epub of it.

CC changes, Flattr, Workbench

Thanks for the recent correspondence and comments. I learned about Flatter and set up an account, so you can buy me a cup of coffee if you feel so inclined. Don't get too inclined or you might fall over. [update: thanks for my first Flattr!]

Other changes include a quick correction to my embarrassing misspelling of 'emygdala -> emygdale' in Part One e2.0. I have no explanation for how that happened. I've now posted the edition number on the home page. The other change from 2.0 to 2.1 (other than that one spelling) is the licence, which is now more liberal. It allows share-alike non-commercial derivative works as long as they make attribution. As I work through the other pieces in preparation for handing off to the editor, I'll do the same with them. I also added .doc format, which might be easier to manipulate that html or pdf for some purposes.

In the vein of derivative works, I grabbed the blogspace lifeartificial.blogspot.com a while back, and may start using it as a sketchpad for ideas and also to post other bits and pieces that would be considered non-canonical with regard to the story trunk. This would include the screenplay I wrote and many pages of god-mode text in the original prose versions, as well as tossing out some ideas for the sequels. This needs to be in a discrete space because it would contain possible spoilers. This is just an idea at this point. Feedback would be appreciated.

One possible project for this workbench space is a rewrite of "Canman". This novella-length piece is referred to in "Nova's Continuation" as a kind of holy book for the Continuation. I wrote it a long time ago, but it would need a lot of attention to fulfill that purpose. If there's a writer out there with a bent toward political philosophy, have at it. I reserve the right to "bless" derivative works as canonical or not, purely for my own sanity. You're free to ignore these classifications.

Jumbo's Continuation

I'm 6000 words into a novella that will fit between Part 3 and Part 4. It's about Nova and Jumbo and the Continuation. It's quite enjoyable to write. This piece will fill in character development, and make subsequent events more understandable. A limitation of being in Calli's POV all the time is that I can't very well jump into 'God mode' and read Jumbo's thoughts.

You can go straight from part 3 to part 4, just as you can can skip Nova's Continuation between 2 and 3, and the plot should still make sense.

No projected end date for this piece yet.

Edits to Part One

In preparation for the sending off Part One to the editor, I went through the manuscript fixing things. The only significant change is a longer and more detailed Prologue. The rest is minor tweaks and fixes. This e2.0 is now posted to the site.

Valentine's Day Story

I wrote a short story set in the Life Artificial world called "The Promise of a Kiss." It's set a few years after the events of the novel, and doesn't involve those characters. You can find it on the site.

The First Masks?

Apparently, Google is creating something like the mask optics described in the novel. Well, except that they aren't shooting lasers at the retina. Here's the link at CNet News.