A Christmas gift from me: Lucky Penny

As I’ve chronicled here many (many, many) times before, every Christmas I write a new short story to share with all of my friends and family, both in real life and here online. This year I’m doing things differently, but only a little. You see, over the past year I’ve been working really hard to establish a presence in the world of eBooks. I wholeheartedly believe that this is the direction publishing is going, and I think it really helps level the playing field for writers who aren’t attached to a huge publisher.

That in mind, this year I’m giving away my new story, Lucky Penny, as a free eBook download. All you’ve got to do is pop over to Smashwords.com and download the book in whatever format your particular e-reader uses — .MOBI for your Kindles, .EPUB for most other devices, or you can even read it right there on the page if you don’t have any such device!  The book is also currently available for 99 cents at Amazon.com, but only because I don’t know how to set a Kindle book for a free download (I’m looking into it). The free Smashwords offer is for a limited time, though — on January 1 it will go up to my regular short story price of 99 cents.

But what do you get when you download Lucky Penny, you ask? Well, the story is set in the superhero universe I first presented to readers in the novel Other People’s Heroes and the Halloween story “The Restless Dead of Siegel City.” However, the primary characters in this story are brand new, and “Lucky Penny” can be read completely independent of those two works.

But that’s not all! As I was finishing “Lucky Penny,” I got seized with a bit of unexpected inspiration, and dashed out a second Christmas tale, “Stowaway.” I could have shelved it and waited for next Christmas, but I’m far too narcissistic to wait an entire year to get feedback on something that’s finished. So this year’s Christmas is a two-for-one special!

So please, download the book, tell me what you think of it, and pass the word along to your friends. And Merry Christmas!

Special thanks to Jacob Bascle (www.freemindgraphix.com) for the cover image to this eBook. Jacob is also the cover artist for Other People’s Heroes and The Restless Dead, and has again proven himself incredibly generous with his time and talent.

Oh, and as for my previous Christmas stories…

Don’t forget…

My eBook, A Long November and Other Tales of Christmas, is now available in the Amazon.com Kindle Store, the Barnes & Noble Nook Store, on your iPad bookstore, or for every other eBook format at Smashwords.com! This eBook contains the entire short novel A Long November, PLUS eight additional short stories of the holidays, including the short story “Lonely Miracle,” set in the world of my novel Other People’s Heroes. That’s nine stories for just $2.99, friends.

And the two more recent stories, written since A Long November was released, are both still available online for free:

• Turn Right at the Sign (Christmas 2009)
• Toyetic (Christmas 2010)

What to do while I’m writing…

Okay, guys, obviously I haven’t been a postmaster… funk… daddy… I haven’t been posting here very much lately. Like I said, I’ve been hard at work on my project for this year’s National Novel Writing Month. It’s coming along nicely, by the way — I’m rocking it at about 39,000 words right now, and I’ve got way more than 11K to go, so I’m definitely going to hit the required 50K for the story to “win” the challenge. I’ve also placed Erin under strict instructions to keep nagging me, even once I hit that 50K, to keep writing until the story is finished.

But as I’m working on that, I have been kind of neglecting my web presence. So today I thought I’d direct you elsewhere for a little entertainment. Check out this webcomic, Hunter Black.

Hunter Black is a fantasy adventure about an assassin with a cursed blade, The Revenger. Although it has its advantages, if he uses it to kill someone who is innocent of betrayal, that person’s ghost becomes his constant companion… something which has already happened once. Despite that, he’s a hired killer, and he has work to do.

Although the artwork is very iconic, don’t be mistaken — this is an adventure strip. It’s action-packed, often bloody, and definitely hardcore. It’s also relatively early in the run — you can go through the whole archives and be caught up in about a half-hour.

The comic is written by Justin Peniston with art by William Orr and lettering by Jacob Bascle — whom you may remember as the graphic artist who gave us the cover artwork for my own Other People’s Heroes and The Restless Dead of Siegel City, and who (as far as I’m concerned) is the official cover artist for the OPH universe for as long as he wants the gig.