Category: Cool Books

New Episode for Hunter Healer King

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Fantasy, history, Mel Dunay, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…

I plan to drop new episodes for this serial every Sunday in the Kindle Vella store for the foreseeable future. To learn more about Vella, keep reading.

Continue reading “New Episode for Hunter Healer King” →

Spider Star is Leaving Kindle Unlimited in 7 Days!

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Jetay must destroy the Spiderstar…with or without his new allies!

The psychic warrior Jetay has freed himself and his brother from slavery, and joined Lady Lanati and the Partisans in their interstellar war against the evil Red Knights. Unfortunately the Partisan military is an undisciplined, poorly led force, and the Red Knights grow ever closer to their goal of unleashing the ancient, deadly weapon known as the Spiderstar. Lanati has a plan to destroy the Spiderstar, but it would force Jetay to choose between love and duty. Even worse, he might have to use the same memory removal techniques which were once used against him….

Spider Star, the second and final book in my space opera series, is leaving Kindle Unlimited on June 3, 2023, at which point I plan to publish the novel to other ebook vendors besides Amazon. If you are a KU subscriber, I would advise you to download Spider Star before the deadline, and then hold onto it until you feel like reading it.

I will probably also raise the price on my first space opera, Shadow Captain, at some point after June 3, 2023, so you might want to purchase that one while it is only $0.99.

Happy Reading!

The Star Master Duology is Now Complete

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I finally managed to publish Spider Star, the second book in the Star Master Duology. Spider Star will be in Kindle Unlimited until early June, so I encourage anyone with a KU subscription to check it out in the next three months. Shadow Captain, the first book in the series, has cycled out of KU but is only $0.99. Happy reading!

Weird Wednesday: Hot Rodding the Silmarillion

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Many people are aware that the published Silmarillion was compiled by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher, with an eye towards consistency and concision at the expense of poetic detail, from a wide-ranging variety of incomplete (and often mutually contradictory) manuscripts left by JRRT. I have read some volumes (not all) of the History of Middle Earth, which includes many of the source texts Christopher Tolkien used, but I have only recently become aware of the third-party scholarship showing how it all came together, in books like Arda Reconstructed. Also interesting are the fan attempts to construct more comprehensive and poetic-sounding Silmarillions than the one published by Tolkien’s son. These can seem a little dry, because for copyright reasons, they are basically citations to texts compiled in the History of Middle Earth.

This one is a “finished” one-fan project: http://tasarinan.atwebpages.com/silmap.html

This one, the work of many hands, has been ongoing for twenty years: https://forum.barrowdowns.com/forumdisplay.php?f=16

Weird Wednesday: The Pride & Prejudice Comparison Videos are Back!

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In 2021, Mistress of Pemberley created a series of comparison videos on youtube for the many surviving* film and TV versions of Jane Austen’s most famous novel, and I had great fun following along. She’s run into some account troubles, and had to restart the series from scratch, now with improved video quality and chapters. I encourage you all to like and subscribe!

* There are around four or five lost hour-length “digest” TV versions of P&P, including a Canadian version which featured Patrick MacNee as Darcy, plus two lost miniseries length versions broadcast by the BBC in 1952 and 1958 (with Peter Cushing and Alan Badel, respectively, as Darcy) plus a lost Castilian-language miniseries from 1966 (with Pedro Becco as Darcy). If you have copies of any of these lurking in your parents’ attic, please digitize them and put them up on Youtube, Vimeo, Rumble and Bitchute before handing the originals over to the rightful owners at the BBC, CBC, or TVE. My inner P&P completist would thank you for any of them, and one of my many inner fangirls would be particularly grateful for the 1952 version.

Weird Wednesday: Why is It Furry?

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I generally like Moleskine notebooks. I don’t have any good reason for it. They feel right in the hand (do you know that bit in Princess Bride, the book, about a sword’s balance? Like that). The fancy limited editions make easier for me to keep tabs on where particular ideas might be: alot of the early concept work for Star Master is in the yellowish orange Gundam notebook, my initial reactions to seeing Orgoglio e Preguidizio for the first time are in the green and beige Oz notebook, but also some of them were later transcribed to the blue 007 notebook, which also houses an awful lot of fantasy mystery brainstorming, and so on. I’ve even found a velvet-covered one at a price I could live with. Even so, I find myself asking, why is there a furry moleskine? And why is it sold out?

Weird Wednesday: Audiobooks!

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Jaiya, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Space Opera, Weird Science, WritingTagged Leave a comment

Thanks to the auto-narrator function at Google Play, I now have audio book versions of four of my novels available:

Shadow Captain
Marrying a Monster
Waking the Dreamlost
Loving a Deathseer

Right now I am working on polishing Shadow Captain’s sequel. I hope to have it published by late December of this year, at which point it will spend 90 days in Kindle Unlimited so that the KU readers of the first book can enjoy it. The audiobook for the sequel will be made available around the time it comes to Google Play, sometime in 2023. Once I have Shadow Captain’s sequel completed, the focus will be on re-editing the Ancestors of Jaiya novels in preparation for their audiobook release, and on a new project to be announced later.

Happy Listening!

Where Did THAT Come From: Why Such a Jumble of Influences

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I began making up stories at a fairly young age, 5 or 6 years old, I think. At that age, my family moved around a fair amount, lived out of hotels from time to time, and some of our videotapes didn’t necessarily have the whole movie on them.

Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Why Such a Jumble of Influences” →