A little story for you to read

Hello, blog.

Sorry I’ve not been talking to you for so long. Didn’t want to waste your time. How’ve you been? Keeping busy?

Oh, why not?

And that’s my fault how, exactly?

…oh.

Well, as it happens I’m probably going to have a few things to tell you about in the next few months, blog. I’ll not spoil the fun in advance, of course, but to get you in the mood I’d like to share with you a little story which has just now appeared in Issue 18 of Mythaxis, the tastefully unadorned webzine in which I’ve featured on several occasions in the past.

It also has a bunch of other stories, including some by people I know and like. There’s a cute comic strip about Martians. You should check it out, blog, you like that sort of thing.

Mine is called Falling Back, it’s all about how to treat man’s best friend, it’s free to read, and it inspired a longer story that now appears in one of my Dark Matters collections, Aftermaths.

If you want to read the previous stories I’ve had in Mythaxis, you can go digging through the past issues at the magazine itself, or you can find them all side by side in one of my ebooks – Five Steps Forward, Three Steps Back. It costs 99p on Amazon, but you can download it for free if you join my totally inactive mailing list. I’m just saying.

All right, I think that’s it.

Keep safe, blog. I’ll be in touch soon with all that other great news I was talking about.

Bye, blog.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Life Imitating (my) Art

Self-aggrandising, I know, but I was, first, impressed by the scale and, second, struck by the parallel with one of my stories when I saw this article online:

Monumental 1,320-Ton Sculpture of Chinese War God Watches Over the City

guanyusculpture2 — *From MyModernMet.com*

Guan Yu, was a Chinese military general who had tremendous martial prowess during his time, and was deified as a god of war after his death. He is also an epitome of loyalty and righteousness … often depicted holding his “reclining moon blade” named the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, which he wielded against his enemies and was said to weigh an impressive 40 lbs (18.25 kg).

A sight to behold, the entire sculpture stands at just over 190 feet (58 meters) tall, seeming to watch over the city and its residents. Over 4,000 strips of bronze were glued over the sculpture, and Guan Yu is portrayed as a fearless warrior who is ready for battle, proudly posed atop his pedestal which was modeled after a warship.

And the connection to me? Well, the last mini-ebook I put out, Dark Matters: Memories, features a story that could have been set in this monument’s past – The Foundation, in which a team of engineers begin to lay the groundwork for a monumental project…

…a strident figure, noble in form, classic in style: an archetypal warrior, naked but for crested helmet, pleated skirts and sandaled feet, one hand resting on the pommel of the sword sheathed on its hip. With the other arm raised to the sky, it is posed in mid-step upon a plinth. Constructing the foundation for that must be my first charge.

It is only then I realise, and am unable to credit, the intended scale. “It must be—”

“Hundreds of feet, let us say only that.” He unrolls the second sheet, revealing the profile view: a mighty forward pace, the upraised hand with palm to the heavens, as though Atlas now carried them without effort. “The Colossus of Rhodes was as nothing beside this. Beneath, rather.”

Okay, yes, my story is set in an alternative Europe rather than present-day China, and this statue’s pose and outfit is a little different, and there’s no supernatural horror on the way in reality — or so I presume — but those minor issues aside…

If I’ve convinced you of my startling prescience, you can get the story here – and if you need more persuading, with some spoilers, you can read a pleasingly positive review/analysis here.

Spoilers in the footnotes

Dear readership,

(although let’s be frank: if I ever had a readership it’s long since sunk)

I’ve been self-pubbing my little ebooks for a few years now, and I can count the number of copies I’ve sold on a multiple of the fingers on one hand (a nicely ambiguous claim, I think, since depending on the multiple it could easily mean a figure in the millions*).

So, depending on the reality I want to claim is dominant, I’ve either earned so much money from my fiction that I’ll never need to work again**, or I’ve earned so little from my efforts that I might as well call it quits and do something else with my time***. Yet, if we’ve learned nothing else from western politics of the last twenty-odd years, we have at least this: there can also be a Third Way.

Back at the beginning, I decided to price my ebooks based on Amazon’s lure of profit sharing: by keeping my prices within a certain margin, I’d get 70% of every purchase! That sounds great, but over time I’ve come to realise (again, depending on which reality is in force) that either “money isn’t everything” or “70% of nothing is nothing”.

Therefore, I’ve decided to abandon that strategy and started dropping my ebook prices. As of now, the first three Dark Matters collections (Dark Matters, Absences and Aftermaths) are available for $0.99 each (and the most recent, Memories, will drop later this year).

My first weird western ebook, End Trails, is also priced at $0.99, while the second, the novella Given Names, is priced at $1.99 – because I’m proud of it, okay? My collection of short-short fiction, Five Steps Forward, Three Steps Back was already available for $1, but if you sign up for my extremely infrequent mailing list you’ll get a copy of that for free, so I’ll link to that instead.

However, not everyone is a Kindle user, so you can get hold of these titles through other retailers including KOBO, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks and Smashwords at the same prices.

…this has rather lost the letter-writing tone, hasn’t it?

Anyway, the reason I started self-publishing in the first place was to share more of my work with as many people as I could, so [ now I’ve achieved that goal / in the desperate hope of making that happen ]**** it seems that dropping my prices is the logical thing to do. And here we are.

If you decide to pick up one of my books, I hope you like it! And if you like it (or even if you don’t, I guess) you could always post a short review wherever you bought it, or here. That would be really helpful, much more than all (or none) of the money in the world.

Yours rationally, give or take,

Andrew LH

FOOTNOTES:

* It doesn’t

** I haven’t

*** I have… but I have also embraced denial

**** Delete as reality demands