22 Aug 2012

An Even Shinier “The Chaos Chronicles: Books 1–3”

posted in: ebooks, publishing, science fiction | 0

If you’re one of the excellent people who have bought a copy of my omnibus ebook of the first three Chaos books, I have good news for you! (At least, I hope it’s good news.) The book has gone through a complete reformatting and general steaming and dry cleaning, and the new, vastly improved version is now up in the Kindle store, the Nook store, Smashwords, and eventually will also be in the Book View Café store, the Apple and Sony stores, Kobo, and wherever Chaos Chronicles books are sold. No actual prose was harmed in the making of this new ebook! It’s the same thrilling story, unchanged except it looks way better on your reader now. (If it’s a Nook, the centered text will actually look centered—not a slam-dunk certainty on a Nook, as it turns out. Or in Aldiko on an Android, for that matter.)

Please be my guest and go back and download the updated version. I’m reasonably sure you can do that without cost, though if you ask me the actual mechanics by which you do it, I’m suddenly going to go all vague on you and excuse myself to go get more coffee. But let me know if you have trouble.

If you haven’t yet sprung for the ebook, well, pay no attention to me; I’m just going to sit in the dark, mumbling to myself about lost opportunities. ($6.99 for three books, are you kidding me?)

By the way, the individual novels, Neptune Crossing, Strange Attractors, and The Infinite Sea are also going to get an update—coming soon, as soon as Ann (who’s doing most of the actual work) finishes up. I’d love to give them new covers, too, but that must be a project for another day.

11 Aug 2012

What’s Up with My Writing Projects?

posted in: audiobook, ebooks, personal news, science fiction, short stories, writing | 0

It’s been a while since I reported on what I’m doing, writing-wise. Here’s the short form:

Chaos 5: The Reefs of Time — Yah, it’s coming; it’s coming. Piece after piece keeps falling into place. It’s long and it’s complex, and there are a lot of things in it  that I could not figure out beforehand; I could only discover these things by pushing at the story and the characters—that is, by writing and sometimes taking wrong turns into blind alleys. That process involves many hours of pounding my head and pulling my hair. Hell of a way to run a railroad, but there you have it. The train called The Reefs of Time will come in.

Audiobooks — Production at Audible has already begun on the books they’ve licensed for audiobooks. These guys move fast; I’ll give them that. I’ve recorded pronunciations of character and place names and like that for three of the books. And three narrators are now at work on From a Changeling Star, Down the Stream of Stars, and The Infinity Link.

Going Alien — My second short story collection is near to completion. I just have to put final touches on the new introductions, and finish proofreading the stories. My able assistant Ann has already done the lion’s share of the formatting work, so the conversion to ebook will be quick. The launch is planned for August 28. I’m enjoying rereading the stories, some of which I have not looked at in many years. Good sign. Here’s what it’s going to look like.

And that’s where I am in the writing projects!

1 Aug 2012

On the Web Radio!

posted in: appearances, ebooks, personal news, radio, science fiction, writing | 0

That’s where you’ll find me, this Thursday evening August 2, from 9:20 to 10:00 Eastern time! The show is called The Author’s Corner, with host Elaine Raco Chase, at www.trianglevarietyradio.com. It’s a call-in show, and I’ll be talking about my writing and books, and pretty much whatever she asks me. So if you’d like to chat with actual spoken words—almost as if we were talking in person—check it out! Go to www.trianglevarietyradio.com, then click on blog talk radio (a silver bar, halfway down the page). You’ll find a phone number for calling in. Listen to the whole show, from 8 to 1030 p.m., Eastern time! (Forget the boring Olympics—they’ll be on your DVR.)

If you must watch adorable and athletic divers and gymnasts instead of listening to our scintillating conversation, podcasts will be available after the show. (But really, you aren’t going to watch the Olympics Sunday night instead of the Mars landing, are you? I didn’t think so. This is similar.)

Edit: You can listen to the interview as a podcast, by clicking this link:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/trianglevariety/2012/08/03/authors-corner-review-with-host-elaine-raco-chase

Several other authors precede me in the interview. My own section starts at around 78:30.

25 Jul 2012

Bring On the Audiobooks!

posted in: audiobook, personal news, publishing, science fiction | 0

Mine, that is. The contracts have been inked, and I am now an Audible author! (In press, so to speak.) Nine of my novels, in the coming year or so, will make their debuts as Audible audiobooks. As I said previously, I’m a big fan of audiobooks myself. I often listen to books while I’m walking the dog, or working around the house. So on those grounds alone, I’m excited. Professionally it’s a welcome breakthrough, because audiobooks have grown to be an important part of the book market, and this will open my work to a whole new potential audience—just as ebooks did.

No word yet on who will be doing the narration, but I’ve made some suggestions of readers I like. So here, now, are the books slated for audio:

Seas of Ernathe
Panglor
Dragons in the Stars
Dragon Rigger
Star Rigger’s Way
The Infinity Link
The Rapture Effect
From a Changeling Star
Down the Stream of Stars

I just have one more thing to say about that: Yee-haw! 

P.S. You don’t suppose I should be worried that the acquiring editor at Audible is a fellow by the name of Snape?

Naw…

18 Jul 2012

The Population of Frackville, PA

posted in: Battlestar Galactica, quirky, science fiction | 0

Alert reader Tim Yordy sent me this hot tip on the residents of a town in Pennsylvania called Frackville. (As far as I know, it’s a real place. But I haven’t checked Snopes.) Here’s what Tim said:

Hey Jeff, given your involvement with Battlestar Galactica, I thought you would enjoy this. Go to the Wikipedia page about Frackville, PA and scroll down to the Demographics section and read the first paragraph.

I did. And you should, too. Read carefully. (Passing familiarity with BSG is required. If you’ve never seen the show, move along. You’re not the droids we’re looking for.)

I wonder if the other residents of Frackville know about this.

Edit: I have learned from alert reader Marco that not only is Frackville real, it is right down the road from Vulcan, PA!

19 Jun 2012

Reality and Other Fictions

posted in: ebooks, personal news, publishing, science fiction, short stories, writing | 0

All these years, I’ve been telling you wonderful people about my novels, with scarcely a mention of my short stories. That’s because my short stories have been few and far between. Nevertheless, I’ve published eleven shorter pieces over the years, in publications as varied as Science Fiction Age, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the Boston Sunday Herald. And now I’ve collected them.

The first of two collections is Reality and Other Fictions, now on sale at Book View Café, for the low, low price of $2.99! Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s the blurb:

Explore an Earth being devoured by entropy, in the ultimate runaway environmental crisis. Dive the depths of the sea to prevent the mother of all oil spills. Rocket into space as a tourist. Mine the asteroids with your enhanced border collie, in the can-do spirit of classic science fiction. They include Carver’s first published short fiction, and his most recent. With new introductions, all from the author of The Chaos Chronicles and Eternity’s End.

If you’ve been following my blog recently, you’ll have seen my mention of some new stories going up for sale as singles. Some of those are in this collection. Here’s the contents page:

  • Reality School: In the Entropy Zone
  • Of No Return
  • Seastate Zero
  • Rocket Ride
  • Dog Star

“Seastate Zero” is available only in this collection, as are the insightful introductions I’ve lovingly written for each story and for the book as a whole. At least, I hope you’ll find them insightful, or at least interesting. I do share some memories I’ve never written down before about how these stories came to be, and how they fit into my career.

My second collection, Going Alien, is scheduled for late August. It pulls together all of my short work that involves… can you guess? Aliens.

For both of these books, I am indebted to Gretchen, the high school student (now graduated, and valedictorian!) who typed and formatted a good number of them from old paper copies, while helping me as an intern. And equally to Anna King, who provided extraordinary help in wrestling the final formatting into line. Not to mention Allysen, for catching some embarrassing typos and wordos at the eleventh hour. And finally, Vonda McIntyre, author and BVC founding member, who has been tirelessly helpful in getting this stuff up.

Available exclusively at BVC until July. After that, I’ll release it to the usual suspects.

I hope you’ll give it a try! (Vote for me!)

19 Jun 2012

My Book View Café Launch!

posted in: authors, ebooks, personal news, publishing, science fiction, short stories, writing | 0

Book View Café (BVC) is an authors collective of established writers who have joined forces to help each other publish their own backlists as ebooks. Names you might recognize include Ursula K. LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Katherine Kerr, Linda Nagata—and many more. As of June 19, I’m part of that list, and honored to be so. Here’s my page at BVC.

To celebrate my launch on BVC, I’m releasing my first-ever short story collection, Reality and Other Fictions. It’s on sale as I type this! For the rest of June, it’s going to be a BVC exclusive. Why? Because BVC is a great store filled with great authors, and it deserves enthusiastic support. If you buy a book from a favorite author at BVC, the author gets the highest percent of the money of any bookstore that’s not actually on an author’s website. Because people help each other so much in the whole process—everyone pitches in with their own particular skills—the production values are high. And the books are, of course, DRM-free, meaning no annoying copy protection to keep you from moving it from one device to another, regardless of type. If you want to convert your book to a different format, do so with our blessing.

Can you use these books on a Kindle or a Nook or a Kobo Reader or a Sony Reader?  Absolutely. (Just make sure you download the right format for your reader.)

By the way, BVC is not the same thing as Backlist eBooks, about which I’ve written in the past. The two groups have similar goals, and somewhat overlapping memberships. But Backlist eBooks primarily gathers writers together under one site for mutual help with marketing and promotion. Book View Café is more like a cooperative ebook small press, with its own store. It’s even beginning to distribute to libraries!

My next post, which I am going to start writing as soon as I’m done with this one, will tell you all about Reality and Other Fictions.

7 Jun 2012

Venus Video Montage

posted in: astronomy, science, science fiction, space, videos | 0

Mars shouldn’t get all the glory. I used to travel to both planets regularly in my head, via the great stories I read. One of my favorites, when I was about twelve, was the Tom Corbett Space Cadet book, Revolt on Venus.

Venus just made the last transit across the face of the sun that will be visible from Earth this century. Here’s a lovely montage of video images in various wavelengths taken and edited together by NASA. Who says NASA has no poetry in its soul? You can make it full screen for best effect.

View on youtube

And just for fun, here’s a time-lapse shot from the last transit, in 2004, showing the International Space Station and Venus making a transit across the face of the sun, almost as if in formation.

7 Jun 2012

Ray Bradbury, SF Master (1920 – 2012)

posted in: authors, farewells, public affairs, publishing, science fiction, short stories, tributes | 0

Ray Bradbury, the last of the Big Four in science fiction, died today. Over the years we’ve lost Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and now Ray Bradbury. We’ve lost many other great writers, of course, but few would argue with placing those four at the top in their influence on the literature, and influence on young writers. It’s like the passing of a Great Age in Middle Earth.

Bradbury was a master of the short form, and probably the first acknowledged science fiction writer to gain the respect of the mainstream literary world. (Probably because he was at heart really a fantasist more than an SF writer. He was also a remarkable stylist.) Did your high school literature book have any science fiction In it at all? If it did, it was probably by Ray Bradbury. “The Pedestrian,” maybe. Or “The Veldt.”

He wrote for the screen, as well. I’d been a fan of his fiction for many years before I discovered that he’d written the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston-directed adaptation of Moby Dick, with Gregory Peck and Richard Basehart.

I was one of probably thousands of young writers who found both encouragement and frustration in reading his work. (My favorites: The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes.) The encouragement is from the delight in reading his visions. The frustration is from the illusion he cast that it was all so easy. He really made storytelling look simple. And that is a mark of a master. I never knew him personally, though I saw him a few times at Nebula Awards events. The last time, I think, was when I saw him accept his SFWA Grandmaster Award in… you know, I don’t remember the year or the city, but I can see him inching his way up to the stage, with the assistance of his son, as though it were yesterday. Edit: I also remember that he had a sense of humor about his infirmity. When he finally got to the microphone, his words were, “Do you ever have the feeling that everyone’s watching you?”

There’s a fine remembrance at the Washington Post, and all kinds of interesting details on his Wikipedia page. 

Godspeed, Ray Bradbury!

2 Jun 2012

Audiobooks!

posted in: audiobook, personal news, publishing, science fiction | 0

Great news from my agent —nine of my novels are being signed to become audiobooks! I am excited. I’ve been wishing for this ever since I became hooked on listening to audiobooks myself. This package does not include my Chaos Chronicles book, and won’t affect our homebrew full-cast audio production of Neptune Crossing (still in the “we hope to get started again realsoonnow” stage). It does include most of the Star Rigger books and several of my standalone novels. Nothing’s ever final until the contracts are signed, of course, so I should probably hold off on more specific details until things are official.

My own love affair with audiobooks started when I discovered you can download them for free from the public library and listen to them on your favorite MP3 player (a Zune, in my case). I love listening to books while walking the dog, which I do for at least an hour every day. I’ve been listening to a lot of books outside my own genre, books I’d never find time to sit down and read, even as ebooks carried in my pocket. I started with Robert Parker mysteries, and moved on to some thrillers. I’ve learned that the voice of the narrator makes an enormous difference even with a good book. (With a bad book, it just makes it harder to decide when to give up.) In some cases, I’ve stumbled onto some fine listening simply by looking for other books read by a narrator I like. Here are some of my recent favorites:

  • The Jack Reacher series, featuring a retired MP turned wanderer, by Lee Child (read by Dick Hill)
  • Cold Choice, a well-crafted and realistic submarine thriller by Larry Bond (read by Dick Hill)
  • The Myron Bolitar series, featuring a pro sports agent who sidelines as a detective, by Harlan Coben (read by Jonathan Marosz) [The last couple in the series were narrated by other readers, including the author. Not even in the same universe.]
  • Leviathan, Behemoth, and Goliath—a young adult, alternate history, SF series by Scott Westerfeld (read by Alan Cumming) [This one the library only carried on CD.]
  • Ender’s Game, the SF classic, by Orson Scott Card (read by Stefan Rudnicki, with Gabrielle De Cuir and David Birney, Scott Brick, Jason Cole, Harlan Ellison, Christian Noble, Don Schlossman, M.E. Willis and Orson Scott Card) [Ditto, on CD.]

What are your favorites?

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