The Guns of Retribution turns one!

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It's truly hard to believe that it's been a whole year since my first published book, The Guns of Retribution, appeared for the Kindle. Published by Pulp Press, my pulp adventure set in the Old West tells the story of bounty hunter Grey O'Donnell, caught up in a blast from his past as he tries to bring a murderer to justice. I've had good reviews, and I wanted to take this opportunity to really celebrate its first anniversary - after all, it's not every day that you can celebrate a whole year of your first book.

I've lined up a series of guest posts at various blogs, starting with my post about The Guns of Retribution as primarily a pulp story over at the exceptionally talented Heath Lowrance's blog, Psycho Noir. Heath has been very supportive of Guns over the past year, and I've really appreciated his support. I even reviewed his own Western, Miles to Little Ridge, which you can read about here. I'll also be looking at my favourite aspects of the Old West over the next fortnight.

But wait! There's more!

I also edited my Dead Man's Hand trilogy which appeared on my blog as three successive Friday flashes, and I've put them into one collection, along with the first chapter of The Guns of Retribution as a sample to whet your appetite. The events of Part I of Dead Man's Hand kick off the events of The Guns of Retribution so it's a nice snippet of back story! You can currently download it in MOBI, EPUB or PDF format from my website.

If you decide you want to read more of The Guns of Retribution, you can buy the Kindle version here. I have a limited number of paperbacks, so email me at icy [at] icysedgwick [dot] come if you want to buy a signed copy!

More free e-books!

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A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about FREE e-books, notably the Yin and Yang Book by eMergent Publishing. Well they're at it again, and this time you can pick up the Eighty Nine anthology, which features my own story, Thirty Years In The Bathroom. Based on the song title of the same name by The Wonderstuff, released in 1989, I went for a Hollywood twist on the Dorian Grey story, set against the backdrop of the Batman premiere.

Eighty Nine is free from Amazon US and Amazon UK until 8:59am on Friday (UK time) and 11.59pm on Thursday (US Pacific time).

Some Background
The third literary mix tape EIGHTY NINE, based on a playlist of 26 songs from the year 1989, went on sale in October 2011. Editor Jodi Cleghorn randomly assigned a song per author and asked them to create a story around the song that reimagined the events of 1989 through a speculative fiction lens. The 26 authors from the Nothing But Flowers anthology chose the songs for the playlist. Blake Byrnes, a final year fine arts student, turned an accidental promo photograph into the ‘eighties grunge’ cover, based on the character “Amiga” from Dale Challener Roe’s story Shrödinger’s Cat. Byrnes’ artwork provided the visual template for the character of “Amiga” in Devin Watson’s live action book trailer.

Blurb
1989: a cusp between decades. The year the Berlin Wall came down and Voyager went up. Ted Bundy and Emperor Hirohito died. The birth of the first Bush administration and computer virus. In San Francisco and Newcastle the ground shook, in Chernobyl it melted. Tiananmen Square rocked the world and Tank Man imprinted on the international consciousness. Communism and Thatcherism began their decline, Islamic fundamentalism its rise. It was the year Batman burst onto the big screen, we went back to the future (again), Indiana Jones made it a trifecta at the box office and Michael Damian told us to rock on. Based on a play list of 26 songs released in 1989, Eighty Nine re-imagines the social, political, cultural and personal experiences at the end of the decade which gave the world mullets, crimped hair, neon-coloured clothing, acid-wash denim, keytars, the walkman, Live Aid, the first compact disc and MTV.

Free Kindle Books!

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Got a bit of a lovely post today since I'm able to tell you about two anthologies that are available for FREE on the Kindle, both today and tomorrow. The Red Book and The Yin and Yang Book are part of eMergent Publishing's Chinese Whisperings project, and you'll be able to pick them up for the princely sum of nothing. My story, The Strangest Comfort, appears in the latter.

But what makes the Chinese Whisperings anthologies unique? I'll let editor Jodi Cleghorn explain...

"Each anthology is a collection of interwoven short stories by emerging writers handpicked from across the English-speaking world. Unlike other anthologies, Chinese Whisperings is created in a sequential fashion and each story stands on its own merits while contributing to a larger, connected narrative.

The Red Book, the first of the anthologies has each successive writer taking a minor character from the preceding story and telling their story as the major character in the next story. Each writer also references events from the preceding story to tie the ten stories together. The anthology can be re forward, or backward, or begun in any place because of its circular nature.

The Yin and Yang Book takes the concept a step further, with the anthology played across parallel airport universes stemming from a decision to retrieve a stolen painting or to leave without it. It's a sliding doors/spider web hybrid. Readers will see common characters slipping across the two universes, some of them behaving in slightly different ways. The parallel universes are anchored between a common prologue and epilogue."
 
You can pick up The Red Book here, and The Yin and Yang Book here!

Are digital magazine subscriptions the future?

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I came across this post on the io9 blog, and actually went "SQUEE!" when I read the announcement. It seems that the seminal fiction magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, is going digital. It'll be available for the Kindle, with both a stripped down free option, or a subscription to all of the content for just $12 a year. Yes, that's six issues for $12. By comparison, the print version of the same subscription is $35.97. In the UK, it'll cost 99p a month for the digital subscription.

To be honest, I think digital subscriptions are the way forward. As most people know, I'm in the process of packing things up ahead of a big move, and the storage of magazines is a real headache for me. Yes, it's nice to be able to flick through things but once I've read it, what do I do with it? I don't always want to recycle the issue in case I want to refer to it in future but there comes a point where you're just storing an awful lot of paper. To me, digital solves the problem. I can access an archive whenever I want, but I don't have to worry about finding the space to store physical copies.

Besides, you can't argue with a price like that - effectively £1.98 an issue! I used to subscribe to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction a while back but I didn't renew precisely because I was paying a lot of money for something I couldn't find the room to store. Now I can have it delivered to my Kindle app on either my Netbook or smartphone, I might just subscribe again. It stands to reason that if I can be swayed, so can others, and getting people to read short story magazines can only benefit writers.

What do you think? Do you think digital subscriptions will help bring people back to short fiction?