Category: Cool Books

Serialized Fantasy Romances and Fairy Tales on the Kindle Vella Store

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Cool Websites, Fantasy, Marketing, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, WritingLeave a comment

Hello, there! I recently started serializing one of my writing projects on Vella, and am joining with a group of like-minded Vella writers led by Callie Thomas to promote our stories. Click here to check out a range of clean Vella stories with fantasy, fairy tale and romance elements! If you would like to know more about how Vella works, read on…

Vella is Kindle’s answer to Wattpad, Radish, and similar websites where stories are released as a series of short episodes with an eye towards reading on smart phones. If you click on the main Vella store link while logged into your Kindle account, you should see a banner towards the top of the page, but below the black bar, where you can claim a free packet of 200 Vella tokens. The button for claiming your tokens will be on the right, and after you have claimed them, the counter showing how many you have left will appear in the same place. Click on the counter if you need to buy more tokens.

The first three episodes of every story are free, and after that, you will need to unlock them with tokens. You can “follow” stories to be notified when new episodes drop, you can leave reviews on any story the way you would on a regular Kindle book, and each Sunday you can “crown” a story as your favorite of the week. You can also “like” individual episodes by pressing the thumbs up icon, or leave comments on them.

Once you’ve read the latest episodes of our stories, please remember to:

-Follow the Stories to Get Updates!

-Like Any Episodes that Appeal to You!

-Crown Your Favorite Story on Sundays!

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” →

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” →

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!

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, WritingTagged , Leave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Covers, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Weird ScienceLeave a comment

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

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Editing, history, Myth, Weird Science, World BuildingLeave a comment

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!

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Cool Websites, Weird ScienceLeave a comment

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.