Category: Books

Support Art and other Good Things™: Get $120 in DIY/Makerspace Books for $1!

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The Humble “Makerspace” Book Bundle from No Starch Press is live an insanely good deal!  Pay a buck, and get six rad DIY-ish books (including my first book—Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred—as well as a few of my No Starch favorites). Pay $8, and get another six books (including my second DIY book, Junkyard Jam Band).  Pay a bit more…well, you get the picture.  All in, you can drop $20 and get more than $400 worth of DIY while supporting excellent charities. HUMBLE-00ca3c278db017f39d002720c906997f81f5958d

There are so many books I love in this one! Yoshihito Isogawa’s LEGO Technic books are both amazing and agelessly inspiring, Carlos Bueno’s Lauren Ipsum has been huge for my son (he read it twice in a row when it first came out, and still hits it again a few times a year now—it’s like the Information Age’s Phantom Tollbooth), No Starch’s Scratch and Arduino books are rock solid, and Jason R. Briggs’s Python for Kids is an excellent intro to Python for everyone (i.e., it’s how I learned enough Python to work on a documentation project with a U-M roboticist last year).

Also, I’ll level with you: These bundles (and book/game bundles in general) are a huge boost to authors/creators, both in getting our names and ideas out there, and in getting money into our pockets.  When you buy a bundle like this, you’re doing a Good Thing™ for the dissemination of new art and human knowledge, in addition to getting a good deal.

Humble Book Bundle: Makerspace by No Starch Press (pay what you want and help charity)

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eBooks! eBooks! FreeBooks!!! New horror and sci-fi from Dave-o!

Three offerings today—and you can get ’em all for less than a Subway sub:

  1. My most recent novella, There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House is now available as a standalone ebook. Read the horror tinged “Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure” that’s racking up kudos and five-star reviews at a humbling clip.  (If you want backstory on the story, here’s an interview I did with F&SF about it.)
  2. Price drop on my novelette “The Traveling Salesman Solution.” A time portal story, and also a grim moral koan. If I’ve ever written a story I think everyone in America should read, it’s this one. For a limited time this lil fella—my first sale to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and only true hard-SF tale—is just 99-cents!
  3. FREEBIE ALERT!!! From now until Monday my time-travel novelette “There Was No Sound of Thunder” is free on Amazon! This is the story that introduced the Parable of Too Many Hitlers. Read the story Locus magazine’s Lois Tilton called “Stoopid” (although, in all fairness, it was also a finalist for that year’s Asimov’s Award so maybe check it out and make the call for yourself?)

I know a goodly portion of you have already read one or more of these stories; all are woeful shy on Amazon/Goodread reviews.  If you wanted to swing by and leave your thoughts, it’d be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for helping nudge the wheel!

Goodreads links:

  1. There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House (coming soon?!)
  2. “The Traveling Salesman Solution“
  3. “There Was No Sound of Thunder“

  

“Whatever Comes After Calcutta” in the November/December F&SF

My latest horror story, the novelete “Whatever Comes After Calcutta,” is DMCrmbSW0AAg-xDin the current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction—and it’s a helluvan issue: New stories by Kate Wilhelm, Larry Niven, and Marc Laidlaw, and more.  If you’re interested in the intersection of witches, lawyers, sovereign citizens, highway travel, and rural Ohio, then this is the novelete for you!

F&SF is stocked at Barnes & Noble and lots of indie stores—or you can get the thing as an ebook.  Plenty of options; links below.

If you read the story and have thoughts or feels, I’d love to hear them:  Tweet at me or email. Thanks!

Wanna Buy a Copy?

  • The Nov/Dec F&SF is now in bookstores throughout the US, including most Barnes & Noble locations. 
  • To buy it online:

Wanna Help Spread the Hype?

  • Tweet (retweet it!): 
  • Facebook post (share it!):
  • Goodreads link (review it!)
  • Nebula Awards: F&SF makes every story they publish available to SFWA members on the password-protected Nebula Forums.   If you’re an SFWA member (or know some), feel free to hit them with that link and they can download and read “Whatever Comes After Calcutta” (and tons of other great stories) for free.

Your EXPIRATION DATE is here

The final chapter of my latest novella, Expiration Date, is now available—which means the whole thing is up and ready for you to “binge read” (aka “read.”)  I’m not gonna say that it’s the perfect beach read, but for a certain sort of mind (and a certain sort of beach) it is the perfect beach read.

The good folks at Arbor Teas have also gone out of their way to furnish book group support, and teamed up with the Ann Arbor District Library for special Expiration Date Summer Games badges and prizes.

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EXPIRATION DATE chapter 8 has DROPPED! The End approaches, sheeple! There is only One Chapter LEFT!!!

Hey-hey, all my Best Belovéd:

Just a quick heads-up that Chapter 8 of my novella Expiration Date is now available free online (as are the discussion questions, the Ann Arbor District Library Summer Games points and badges—all that).

This chapter brings us a chemical event, a reunion, a revelation, Bram’s magic chopstick (of limited utility), and something mysterious high in the sky.  Come grab your copy of Chapter 8 now!

And please spread the word: If you know someone who might dig this, drop them a link. Thx!

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Get a digital copy of my JUNKYARD JAM BAND for 80-cents (plus a bunch of other rad books!)

My DIY musical instrument/noise-toy book Junkyard Jam Band is part of the Brainiac 2 Humble Book Bundle. If you’ve never bought one of these “bundles” before, the deal is this:Junkyard Jam Band Final_2_RGB

This is a commercial/charitable fundraising situation.  The Humble Bundle folks and No Starch Press have bundled together a bunch of awesome books.  Pay as little as $1 to get a few, $8 to get a bunch, and $15 to get them all.  If you go in at the $15 level, you get ~$300 in books (all digital, all in multiple formats, all totally DRM-free, so you can read them however and wherever you like).  It’s a really awesome deal (I bought plenty of Humble Bundles way before I ever was part of one—and, I’ll be straight with you: Being part of one as an author is a really big boon for me, too; my last Humble Bundle put an additional 30,000 copies of my book in front of eager makers, and helped me make enough money to stay afloat that year).

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Even if you only drop a buck for the first five books, you’re getting some great stuff—Medieval LEGO is fun, the Scratch book is solid, and my son loved Lauren Ipsum (which is sort of a modern computer-science take on Phantom Tollbooth; he’s easily read it a half dozen times).  Moving up to the $8 tier doesn’t just get you my book (which regularly sets you back ~$20), but also two of my favorite intro programming books (I learned Python from Teach Your Kids to Code, and Scratch Programming Playground is what taught my kid to code) and a really great manga book that’ll explain electricity to anyone.  And, of course, going whole hog just piles on the awesomeness (again, I’m especially pleased to see a couple DIY hands-on electronics books here, especially since Arduino has gotten so dirt-cheap to get into).  Every purchase doesn’t just benefit my publisher and me, but also Teach for America.

 

 

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Oooh! Chapter Six of EXPIRATION DATE has dropped…

… and it’s got a humdinger of a hook at the end!  I don’t want to ALERT your SPOILERS, but Columbus, Ohio is gonna have issues, folks.  Serious, serious issues.  Just sayin’!

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You can read this chapter—and every one that preceded, and every one that follows—for free online, courtesy of our dope-fly pals at Arbor Teas.  If you’re down with book groups, Arbor Teas is even furnishing discussion questions.  If you’re an Ann Arborite, you can earn special EXPIRATION DATE points and badges in the Summer Games!

The first five chapters of EXPIRATION DATE are waiting for you!

The good folks at Arbor Teas have now released the first fifth chapter of my latest ExpirationDatenovella, Expiration Date. (All current chapters are available for free online in both a lovely web versions and nice, tidy PDFs, perfect for offline, ebook, and tablet reading—click on the chapter’s “Print” button to open and save that PDF).

What’s more, the good folks at the Ann Arbor District Library have included Expiration Date in this year’s Summer Games: You can earn points and badges by sussing out clues found in each chapter (scroll down to the “Expiration Date” section of the badge list to get started).

We have four chapters to go, oh my Best Beloved—and, trust me, you have no frikkin’ clue where this one is going (but, SPOILER ALERT!: Bram and Lizzie do indeed die on October 10, 2017, around 8am.)

BONUS: Wanna know more about how the sausage gets made?  You can check out this interview with Gabie at Tea End blog.

“There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” in the July/August F&SF

It seems I’ve been talking about my novella “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” without being super-duper clear that it’s out on newsstands and availableMagazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/Aug 2017 for download in the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  My bad!  The story is being met with a degree of enthusiasm that I hadn’t really expected, and that’s sorta had me spun.  So, here’s the nitty-gritty:

 

Wanna Buy a Copy?

  • The July/Aug F&SF is now in bookstores throughout the US, including most Barnes & Noble locations. 
  • To buy it online:

Wanna Help Spread the Hype?

  • Tweet (retweet it!): 
  • Facebook post (share it!):
  • Goodreads link (review it!)
  • Nebula Awards: F&SF makes every story they publish available to SFWA members on the password-protected Nebula Forums.   If you’re an SFWA member (or know some), feel free to hit them with that link and they can download and read “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” (and tons of other great stories) for free.

Wanna Know About How the Sausage Gets Made?