This is worth it just for the Waldrop and Link, which you can get for as little as a buck! Howard Who? and Stranger Things Happen are great collections.
Humble Book Bundle: Super Nebula Author Showcase Book Bundle
Category: Books
Simple DIY Guitar Stompbox Demo: Seeing is Believing; Be Hear Now (pun!)
A reader recently asked for audio samples of a few projects from my first book, so I made this quick lil video:
(Daaaaamn does that fuzz tone wail—and it’s literally ~$5 in parts!)
You might need headphones to hear the detail on the straight tremolo, but the throb becomes really pronounced at the end when I chain the two effects together.
In the process of uploading that demo video, I stumbled across this guy’s build of the Single-Chip Space Invader synth from my most recent book. Oh, man, do I love that Star Wars lunchbox he used as a case! So rad!
Any of this look rad? You can download a “jam pack” of complete projects drawn from both books. Click here now to get your free Junkyard Jam Pack PDF!
My novelette “The Traveling Salesman Solution” is now available on Kindle! #FridayReads
Read the tale that David Gerrold (the guy who invented Tribbles!) called “a very disturbing story”!
In “The Traveling Salesman Solution” a wheelchair-bound veteran of the “War on Terror”—now working in the IT department of a Big Ten university—starts investigating suspicious marathon results, and ends up face-to-face with an absolutely chilling mathematical conundrum.
FREE FICTION FRIDAY: The Final Installment of “The Faster Horse” is racing toward destiny! @motor1com
My alt-reality horses-and-highways serial sci-fi story is rounding the home stretch over at Motor1.com! You can now read the entire story in one go; enjoy this FREE READ for your Friday!
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses!'”—attributed to Henry Ford
Fist fights, affable drunks, and belligerent horses! Check it out: “The Faster Horse” (part four of four)
Read a nice chunk of my new novella, “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God,” over on Asimovs.com
Here’s a tiny excerpt of the big excerpt:
Chico and the portal guy were waiting for me outside FDA Annex D. Chico was smoking a cigarette. If this was a screenplay, his entire character description would read “sinister Mexican.” The portal guy was just standing there, hands in pockets, staring up at the stars and whistling that “Yakkety Sax” song from Benny Hill. He abruptly cut off as I climbed out of my car.
“This is your New Guy?” he asked Chico. The portal guy was one of those cheap-blue-oxford-&-khaki-pants cubicle drones, but younger and skinnier than the stock character. He looked pretty damn rumpled—not just “it’s three a.m.” tired, although it was three a.m. It was more the “I’m tired of my whole stupid life” kind of tired. Chico blew twin streams of smoke out his nose, flicking away his cigarette butt without acknowledging the portal guy’s question.
“New guy?” I mugged like a vaudevillian, joining them at the glass door, “What happened to the old guy?”
“Gal,” the portal guy answered as he waved us in through the glass doors of FDA Annex D. “She got burned as a witch.” . . .
If you dig actors, gastropubs, meth dealers, heists, Early American Material Culture, academia, mobsters, or Mexican food then this is the novella for you!!! Read more: “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” by David Erik Nelson
@SquiDaveo !!! pic.twitter.com/jo7jdUorao
— David Helder (@dhelder) December 7, 2016
For those with a taste for “inside baseball”: The original working title of this novella was “Colonial Meth.” That is an awful title—but still an improvement over “Time-Portal Crystal Meth Missionaries,” which is what I scrawled at the top of the first index card. If you squint, you can see that the first legal-pad draft is already titled “Where There is Nothing, There is God”—a title I cribbed from William Butler Yeats by way of my old pal Fritz Swanson.
I’m not sure when I started the index cards for this story (these tend to get carried around in my pocket and taped to the bathroom mirror for a few months while I mull a story over) or the long-hand legal-pad draft, but I’ve got typed draft pages with creation dates as old as November 2013. My submissions log indicates I first sent this out in November 2014—so I guess it took a year to write/revise—and then basically another year-and-a-half to sell (the story was actually accepted in March of 2016), and several more months to revise to everyone’s satisfaction, proof, etc.
FREE FICTION FRIDAY: Part Three of “The Faster Horse” is champing at the bit! @motor1com
Installment three of my alt-reality horses-and-highways serial story for Motor1.com pounding headlong toward destruction! DISASTER TIME!!!
In Part 3 of our alternate reality, everything goes to shit.
Blood on the highway! “The Faster Horse” (part three of four)
Catch Chapter 2 of “The Faster Horse” for FREE on motor1.com!
Installment number two of my latest alt-reality serial story for Motor1.com is now up and ready! Learn what crazy contraption could possibly replace the huge, angry highway horses we all know and love—and how they hell you’d make the damn thing move!
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘Faster horses!'”
—attributed to Henry Ford
“The Faster Horse” (part two of four)
Check out my new novella, “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” in ASIMOV’S!
My latest Time Portal novella— “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” —is in the current issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, on news stands now! (Most Barnes & Noble locations stock it, as do many indie bookshops).
Our blockbuster December 2016 novella, “Where There Is
Nothing, There Is God” by David Erik Nelson, is a rollicking Time Portal tale. It’s filled with a cast of unsavory characters who operate as though Cotton Mather’s favorite TV show was Breaking Bad. In this vastly entertaining story, it’s hard to know whom to root for so just make sure your inertia dampening system is on and enjoy the ride!
The other two stories in the series— “The New Guys Always Work Overtime” and “There Was No Sound of Thunder” —can be purchased for Kindle (click those links), or you can get that first story in many DRM-free formats for free(!!!) when you sign up for my newsletter using this link:
Pseudopod: Year 10–Support this Lil Engine that Can and Does
In celebration of their 10th anniversary Pseudopod—a consistently solid horror fiction podcast—is running a kickstarter:
Pseudopod has an excellent track record—both in terms of delivering the goods and doing right by their contributors—and impressive longevity (10 years of weekly operation publishing fiction for free is hard going; I know from experience). Their goal is to raise funds to increase what they pay artists and ensure their longevity. These are Good Things™
Kick in a few bucks; the 21st Century is nuts, and perhaps the nutsiest thing is the jaw-dropping array of free arts & letters we each enjoy every day—but it can only be free on the daily if we all kick in now and again. This is one of those moments.
Add bonus: there are some really nifty backer premiums, including this rad-as-hell mug and their first ever anthology, For Mortal Things Unsung—which features both reprints of pieces they
bought for the podcast (including mine), as well as new work A.C. Wise, Jim Bihyeh, and others.
Did @KatheKoja Write this SNL Skit?!
Would she maybe consider doing so?
(Also, just gotta say, I *love* Sasheer Zamata. Her delivery is always so. Damn. Perfect.)
No idea who Kathe Koja is? Read this now: