Kindling: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories

So, I've spent the last few weeks putting together a collection of short stories to sell as an e-book. After some waffling I decided to do two collections and sell each then cheaply, rather than a single collection for more money. Of course, this means that for BOTH collections I feel like my best stories are in the OTHER one. But, I'm selling them for $2.99 each -- two dollars less than an espresso drink -- so hopefully all my ardent fans (at least the ones who have Kindles) will want BOTH.

The first one, Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, is now available here. It is currently only available for Kindle. I'm going to put the other collection together for Kindle, and once that's done, I'm going to convert them to epub. The process, done right, is complicated, and drew heavily on my very rusty HTML skills. I want to do another one, quickly, to hopefully solidify the knowledge in my head before I expand to do the next one. If people are interested I could do a somewhat longer post on whose instructions I followed, what worked for me and what didn't. I felt as I was doing it like I knew JUST enough to really give myself headaches. If I'd been more of an HTML/XML/CSS expert, I would have found many things less confusing. On the other hand, if I knew no HTML at ALL I would have been forced to either do the all-automated oh-well-I-guess-this-won't-look-very-good (but Kindlers are used to that) approach OR I would have had to pay someone else to do it for me.

As it stood, I knew just enough that I could hand-code and hopefully make it look really good. So I really felt like I SHOULD.

A friend of mine with fantastic graphic design skills helped me with both covers. I was really happy with the Gift of the Winter King cover, but the Comrade Grandmother cover is STUNNING.

I have been considering the possibility of trying some electronic self-publishing, and short story collections were a good way to dip my toe in. I am pondering other projects and waffling between writing another novel that I would try to sell traditionally, and writing a novel that I would self-publish as an ebook. (They would be completely different novels. I would not try to do middle grade fiction as an ebook, because not enough kids have Kindles or Nooks. It would be adult fantasy that would cross over well to a teen audience.)

Anyway, if you're considering buying one or both collections, you're probably curious about the short stories I put in.

In Gift of the Winter King:

Brother Mac, You Are Healed!
St. Ailbe's Hall
Gift of the Winter King
Magefire
Masks
Kin
The Price
In the Witch's Garden
Darknight
The Manual
Kitchen Magic, With Recipes

"Brother Mac" is the computer healer one that was originally published at Planet Relish. "St. Ailbe's Hall" is the one about a society that has developed sentient dogs for use as slave labor; it was published by Strange Horizons. "Gift of the Winter King" was my first pro sale, and was published in Realms of Fantasy, even though I think of it as post-apocalyptic SF. (It's set in Minnesota, and was inspired in a sideways way by the St. Paul Winter Carnival.)

"Magefire" was never published. It's the short story I wrote that years later I turned into Fires of the Faithful and Turning the Storm. "Masks" and "Kin" are both short stories set in that same world; "Kin" was published in Sword and Sorceress XXI but "Masks" saw print only in a very small-run print anthology my writers' group did. (I may have also put it up online for Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day one time.)

"The Price" was published in Tales of the Unanticipated, which does not have a very wide circulation, so most of my readers won't have seen that one. "In the Witch's Garden" was also in Realms, and is post-apocalyptic SF-ish fantasy based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen."

"Darknight" is juvenalia. It is the first fantasy story I ever tried to get published, and in the introduction (and afterword) I talk in some detail about the process of writing it and the things that occur to me reading it now that I didn't think about when I was 15.

"The Manual" is a very short play that came out of an extended joke about Creationists who think that if evolution is how the world works, it would say so in the Bible.

"Kitchen Magic, With Recipes" was never published, even though Lyda liked it and nagged me to send it out, because it's supposedly set in the real world and I didn't have the legal stuff right and couldn't figure out how to fix it. (When it's my own collection, I can explain, "yes, I know I got this wrong and there are real-world solutions to this particular problem." I think it's still a pretty good story.)

In Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories:

Comrade Grandmother
The Golem
Honest Man
Fortune
Three Wishes
Spirit Stone
The Good Son
Faust's SASE
The Long Walk
Unreal Estate
When Shlemiel Went to the Stars

"Comrade Grandmother" is a Baba Yaga story set during WWII. It was published in Strange Horizons.

(I should go ahead and point out that all these things that were published in Strange Horizons are still online. If you're thinking, "oooh, I totally want to read THAT one!" you don't need to buy the collection, you can just go over to the Strange Horizons website and pull it up.)

"The Golem" and "Spirit Stone" were published in Realms. "Golem" is also set during WWII, and "Spirit Stone" was my first magic-through-jewelry fantasy story, inspired by Elise Matthesen's necklaces.

"Fortune" was accepted at an anthology that never saw print, so it's never been published anywhere.

"Three Wishes" was also never published.

"The Good Son" was published by Baen's Universe, shortly before they folded. I think very few people saw it. It's not exactly a chipper feel-good story but it's one of the things I've written that I look back at and think, "dammit, that was really good."

"Faust's SASE" was the very first story I ever sold ANYWHERE (to the long-defunct Scavenger's Newsletter) and if you're a writer and haven't read it, just go read it. (Other people find it funny, too, but my fellow writers: this was written for YOU.)

"The Long Walk" was written by me AND by Lyda Morehouse, which was fantastically fun. We wrote it in sections, e-mailing it back and forth as we got bogged down. And then we had a hell of a time selling it. (It is, uh, not child-friendly in the least. We had one editor send us an e-mail saying "oooh, I love this, let me talk to my publisher" and then e-mail us the next day saying, "wait, you know, I don't know what I was thinking. I can't possibly publish this.") It was published in Tales of the Unanticipated.

"Unreal Estate" is a humorous SF story that I didn't manage to sell. It didn't help that it has a lot of political references and magazine editors kept sitting on it for absurdly long periods of time and the references kept going stale.

"When Shlemiel Went to the Stars" is a science fictional Chelm story, which was published in Tales of the Unanticipated. Chelm stories are this subgenre of Jewish folk tales about hilariously stupid people (who are all convinced that they are GENIUSES).




Anyway. I wanted to get Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories out there before Minicon, and my goal is to get Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories out there before Wiscon. We'll see. I apologize to all the Nook people for doing Kindle first. The fact is that Amazon has made it easier than anyone else to self-publish online, so they get to be first. I will get to ePub format, though, which is what everyone other than Amazon uses.

I am not currently planning to make these available as actual books. Low-volume POD book printing is just too expensive -- they'd cost upward of $15 each. $3 is coffee money. $15 is pizza money. If you do not have an e-reader, and REALLY want to read these stories, you have a couple of options: if you have an iPod Touch, you can get the Kindle app for it and use that as an e-reader (I don't own a Kindle, just an iPod Touch, and the Kindle app is honestly pretty awesome. In part that's because I ALWAYS have my iPod, so I can read a few pages as I wait somewhere.) You can also download Kindle for PC or Mac, free, and read on your computer, though I hate reading books on my computer and NEVER bought a friend's ebook before I had the Kindle app for my iPod.

(I have seen speculation that Kindles will be free with an Amazon Prime subscription by the end of the year, FWIW. And I've played with a friend's Kindle; they are awesome, and if you get one you will love it. Although you may be shocked to discover what a profound temptation it is to know that by dropping $10 you could be reading that brand new release before your coffee is done brewing.)

In other publishing news, my short story "Isabella's Garden" will be appearing in a future issue of Realms of Fantasy. Yay!