If you want to get to the business end of this happy missive, just scroll down a couple of paragraphs and have fun. To the rest of you, I want to thank those who reached out with their concerns regarding last week’s missed newsletter. We had just gotten back from our honeymoon where I had shared my sexy best with Kim by getting sun poisoning and having a series of blisters on my face burst and ooze blood. A good look for Halloween, not so much for a honeymoon. I was also in excruciating pain. It was a half mile from our room to the bar/restaurant center and the only way there was to walk – up and down stairs, over ramps made by demented squirrels, and across uneven terrain. Given that I suffer mobility issues this was not a paradise for me. Plus, I somehow irritated a sinus infection and now sound like Froggy from the LIttle Rascals.
Long story short, in order to leave Cancun I ended up in a wheelchair at both airports, we were forced to pay a tall person tax to get me more leg room, and we learned the hard way that eating at Guy Fieri’s trash chain of mediocre food is a huge waste of money. We will not be doing that again. However, all the fun stuff my wife and I did manage to fit in will go on the “let’s do that again” list we keep.
Okay, on to the cool stuff. Those who follow along know the nice people at Azoth Khem have been burning the midnight oil along with any slacking employees (that’s legal in Alabama), all while doing deep dives into everything I’ve written and assailing every false comma, purging any logical incongruities, and crimping the prose until it’s tighter than a virgin in the back of a Chevy.
We’ll be doing a public release on November 1, 2022, but for cool people like you the 2nd Edition of The Brittle Riders is live and online at Amazon, Kindle only at the moment. Also, thanks to the fun loving trolls who rule the world of Amazon we are being forced to remove the first edition, and all reviews attached to it, to post the new second. After suffering a suitable amount of angst, we decided we didn’t care. While a presence on Amazon is a must, it’s not where we generate the majority of our sales or garner the most reviews. Those come from third party blogs, emails, and social media posts. People seem more inclined to share their thoughts with their friends instead of strangers, so we just roll with that.
Unfortunately, that means that people who bought Book 1 on Kindle will not get an automatic update. We are working on a way to get them the new version, at no cost, but there are still a few more flaming hoops to jump through. If you purchased a Kindle version of Book 1 and would like the 2nd Edition, just respond to this email and we’ll get you set up.
In related news, SPLCE: HIT BIT TECHNOLOGY has updated, sort of. While the preview still shows eighty-five chapters, that seemed like a good idea once, if you purchase it you will get the version with five chapters, each one a section of the story arc, and the updated text. It will update previous purchases if the buyer has “allow updates” selected in their settings. This new version is tighter, more cinematic, and more propulsive than its earlier iteration, and the earlier iteration was voted Best Sci-Fi Novel of 2020 in the Critters Readers Poll, so it didn’t exactly suck the first time around.
Long story short, your favorite McSciFi is being positioned to tackle the multiverse on a larger scale than ever before. It’s not just the heads of film studios who are now paying attention, although they have been an incredible boon, it’s also the foreign literary agents, and promoters who couldn’t spell McSciFi if I spotted them the M-C-S-& I who suddenly want to tell me how awesome I am and how much awesomer they can make me, and so on, if, and this is a big IF, we can just nudge everything to the next level. As noted above, it’s not that everything sucked, but that it could be better. We needed more than an abstract idea to embark on that much work, and now we have it in the form of written communications that point out, clearly, what they are hoping to see.
So, while we whittle our fingers to the bone in the background, tangible results of our efforts are now burbling up for you to see and share.
Until next week, stay safe and sane.
