Just put The Holocaust Star on Amazon Kindle

Right now I am waiting for this book, a sequel to The Byzantium Outcast, to publish. I will have to let everyone know when it goes live.

This Vexations novel has been a long time in the waiting. It’s never been quite ready.

Time to re-edit Black Hat Magick vol 1 Dread Vote

I’ve finished vol 2 of Black Hat Magick, which means its time for me to get back to work on vol 1 and make sure that it’s up on Amazon.com as an e-book.

I didn’t really like how I ended vol 1—I’m not going to go into that here because the end of the story is entirely a spoiler. I did what I needed to point the readers (and Elaine) in the right direction, but there’s a long laundry-list of things that were just kruft and not really displayed as much.

When I went to vol 2, I had learned a bit more about how to plot the short of story that a BHM story is.

Now I’m thinking bout vol 3 and that might mean League of Legends players, gold sellers from MMORPGs, and potentially a serial thief stealing virtual items. It’s a good time to bring up Bitcoin again—something I expect Elaine to intersect with often—but I don’t think it’ll be about that technology entirely.

I’ll let everyone know when I finish editing vol 1 and vol 2 and have them on Amazon.com.

I do look forward to starting on vol 3.

Thanks for keeping up and be sure to check out Invincible and Vulnerable on Amazon.

Upcoming covers for Black Hat Magick Kindle-edition short stories

I am slowly working on filling out my Kindle store with e-book editions of stories I’ve written. I have quite a few and from what I’ve heard, the critical mass is about 30. That might take me a while to reach.

So here’s a pair of covers to enjoy as I work towards getting them into the Kindle store.

Fiction Spotlight: “Something Funny Happened At Matsuri”

I remember Matsuri festival back in Phoenix, it's a fun and interesting time of cultural discovery and development. For a portion of desert in southern Arizona, the city does have a notable contingent of Nipponese citizens. As a result, the festival can be quite an experience -- also there's more than enough animé fans in the city willing to participate in the live-action version of their favorite pastime.

Of course, this means something altogether different for Vex Harrow.

As a result, this week’s spotlight Something Funny Happened at Matsuri features the festival and a lot of Nipponense-related elements.

The shining example of this particular booklet is that it includes four pages of manga drawn by one of the Vexations artists and a beautiful cover.

I’ve decided to make this one the spotlight for this month because Matsuri will be upon us soon this year, and it’s about time to pay some homage not just to the Nipponese heritage and culture, but also the way that Americans see them through the lens of literature, animé, and manga.

I am also reminded of the World War II Japanese Internment camps, one of which was situated near Phoenix, Arizona. A terrible and stupid act by the United States that Star Trek celebrity George Takei is working on bringing more attention to so that hopefully it will never happen again.

Link: Something Funny Happened At Matsuri by Kyt Dotson

[Reposted from: Mill Avenue Vexations Blog]

Black Hat Magick gets better navigation via moi Photoshop skills

Behold my nascent and rusty Photoshop skills! I have added some extra navigation to the Black Hat Magick website to make it easier for people to find their way to the salient portions of the story—namely the beginning and the most recent short story.

I know that I had something better before (like a TOC) but the crash really left me in a lurch.

So we’ll all have to suffer with these lovelies on the home page.

Link, via Black Hat Magick.

What to Read on the Web for Halloween

Looking for a good Halloween read? Look no further than your browser. There’s a great deal of excellent weblit out there, tonight Irk and Char bring some of them to us with a blog post,

Let's get this out of the way - Halloween is my favorite holiday. It's sort of my Christmas. I share it with the goths.

Every year I like to get in the spirit of the season (pun not intended but impossible to avoid) by writing something creepy, like last year's Halloween story and... this year's Halloween story! You can read the 2010 story on the 30th and 31st, but I wanted something to keep you busy until then. So I asked everyone on Twitter to send me Halloween story links. As it is with Peacock King, all of these stories are available online to read for free! It's just like trick-or-treating, except I guess tricks don't happen unless someone's server goes down. Please enjoy these stories and support the authors if they show you a good time.

Stories include 100 Candles, DarkSight, Haunting Sins, Bradbury’s Ghost, and The Legend of Sleepy Phoenix (by moi). Irk and Char are the two authors of the Internet famous The Peacock King story weblit serial. If you want more to read after getting your scare on, theirs is a good place to look.

Link, via The Peacock King.

“Invincible” by Kyt Dotson

Go check out my short story, “Invincible” at Black Hat Magick.

This one is just geek-action-cheesecake for people who happen to like Hadaly, the AI from the Black Hat Magick series.

REVIEW: Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium, by Robert C. Rodgers

Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium is a rock-solid, hilarious foray into a steampunk dystopian alternate past. It’s been getting some rave attention over at Web Fiction Guide and there’s some very good reasons why. Keep reading and you’ll understand.

What a calculating beast is man

Deep within the strong-beating brass heart of every steampunk aficionado is a vacuum chilled series of hopeful gaslit rooms filled wall-to-wall with books. And one day soon, one of those shelves in my heart will have this book.

Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium is a tour de force of silly mixed with the macabre, scabrous copper tinge of blood. It manages to wind the dizzying height of humor and edge it aptly with careful cuts. From the very first chapter—and the chapter that hooked me—it makes its lighthearted swipes at the imagination and drew smile after smile. At first the steampunkish metaphor and simile seemed heavy-handed, overwrought in fact, but soon they became fuel for the whimsical engine of my delight.

Victorian attitudes abound in the brass-city, a dystopia in its own right but not in our future, but our accidentally forgotten alternative-past. A place where villains and heroes alike have an almost cartoonish bearing on a world that manages to tempt suspension of disbelief with daunting and brazen attitude but never ceases to both enchant and frighten at the same time. This tale has left me in fits of gooseflesh laughter more than once.

Expect strong humor mixed with the oil and grease of industry; expect grand legerdemain run through the cogs and wheels of progress and chewed up by clever antagonists, incompetently-competent protagonists, and even a bit of social commentary about the Victorian attitudes about gender wars. Why I even caught an almost-reference to the old television series “Remington Steele” (wherein a woman detective hires a male “face man” to pretend to be the investigator.)

Even people not inclined to the steampunk aesthetic will probably enjoy this story. It has a little bit of something for everyone. Little explanation is needed for much of the far-fetched mathematics and mechanics of the lunatic mind as it’s deeply buried in laugh-out-loud metaphors; allowing the conspiracy, detective work, and general slapstick amazement to drive the story onwards.

Link to review (via “Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium” @ Web Fiction Guide)

Direct Link: Arcadia Snips and the Steamwork Consortium.

REVIEW: Wonder City Stories, Jude McLaughlin

For anyone who likes super heroes and days-of-our-lives style drama, this story reviewed over at Web Fiction Guide, Wonder City Stories, might be just the thing for you.

Superhero life has the mundane and profound too, you know

"Young Paranormals Christian Association of Wonder City, working with super powered youth since 1964!"

The parallels between the YMCA and the YPCA tickled the cockles of my heart when I read the first two chapters of this story (And to start when I saw YPCA, I thought of the YMCA. This simply got confirmed straightaway when there's a pool near the YPCA.) I guess I'm just a sucker for four-letter-acronyms. I also play City of Heroes and I like super-powered stories. This may color my review positive somewhat.

I enjoyed following the heroine through her day, coming to the city, and living her life in the strange shadow of her mother. It has all the hallmarks of young adult drama and romance, with some slice-of-life as well. Especially the parts where sometimes as a reader I forgot that our heroine is indeed taller than most.

In my reading I fell in love with the history of the characters as much as the history of their entire society -- the paranormals and their plight.

Readers who want well-rounded drama stretched over believable, and adorable, characters who dwell in a living, breathing world, will find everything they're looking for in this story. There's almost something for everyone. The conversations and scenes trace a lineage of heroism and paranormal lives from the young (in our heroine) to the middle-aged and elderly lifestyles of these magnificent and interesting people.

Link to the review (via “Wonder City Stories” @ Web Fiction Guide.)

Direct link: Wonder City Stories, by Jude McLaughlin.

REVIEW: Spots the Space Marine, M.C.A. Hogarth

Spots the Space Marine has received some well deserved acclaim over at the Web Fiction Guide. I’ve been reading it this week and it’s certainly shaping up to be a story worth the time of any space opera loving sci-fi geek.

Intriguing, bite sized slices of life from the front lines

War. War never changes.

Except maybe when your squad happens to be named Team Kitty and your callsign sounds slightly silly to remain thematically prudent.

The prose of “Spots the Space Marine” is spartan almost laconic, but the mood comes across loud-and-clear. It reads generally like a radio-play; but retains the solid impact of a heftier work. The presentation forces the reader to instead invent their own voice for each of the characters and imagine themselves into the situation that narrates itself from the screen. The chapters are also so short they can be read in a bite—a style allowing the entire series to be grazed casually, episode at a time, or swallowed in a huge handful as time permits.

Spots presents herself as a likable person, yanked out of her comfort zone and thrust into a war zone. A woman among the war. The story then plays out in the conversation space between Spots and other marines. Their voices resonate, with hers playing the following melody of the narrative. Spots isn’t your normal marine. She’s also a mom. A fact that makes her something different, something familiar yet out of the ordinary to read about.

The part of the story that really began to hook me, however—like any proper sci-fi geek—happens to be the aliens. Not just aliens: bugs. The introduction suggests that the insectoid aliens have brought technology and know-how to humanity to aid them in their upcoming war against invader xeno bugs; but the first time that one of the friendly xenos appears in the story happens to be during a vignette titled “The Violinist,” where one gets an introduction to Spots. I have a soft spot for aliens and xeno racial epithets (like the piggies from Ender’s Game.) The friendly xenos here get to be the “fiddlers.”

The hardcore sci-fi reader and drama aficionado alike will find something to like about “Spots the Space Marine.”

Link to the review (via “Spots the Space Marine” @ Web Fiction Guide.)

Direct link: Spots the Space Marine, by M.C.A. Hogarth.

Do AIs Dream?

About a year ago I envisioned a spin-off for Mill Avenue Vexations in the form of a spunky, geeky college student story and now it’s coming. Introducing the beginning strokes of Black Hat Magick.

Black Hat Magick is a series of occult noir detective fiction webserial novels written by Kyt Dotson. The stories follow the exploits and adventures of college student, computer geek, and occult detective Elaine Hadaly Mercer. She begins her career as an undergrad at Arizona State University majoring in Computer Science and Engineering; but comes from a long blood line of dabblers in the arcane arts with a strong bent for the scientific—hitherto that strange alchemy of genius courses through her veins and neurons.

It is going to start off with a miniseries webcomic called “Do AIs Dream.” The very first strip published this morning.

Wander on over there, let me know what you think, subscribe to the RSS. Let’s make an event of this new webserial!

Also, I think it would be interesting if people would like to write messages to the individual characters. I might even run a tiny contest (where people could win signed back-copies of Vexations.) So, during future posts, feel free to write commentary to characters in the story. We’ll have to see how that might run.

Do AIs Dream? a miniseries webcomic for Kyt Dotson’s Black Hat Magick occult detective noir webserial.

The long silence, coming to an end

I apologize for the long, strange quiet. I have been rather busy with several things going on between my continued work on editing the first book of Black Hat Magick, finding a Canadian publisher/distributor for Mill Avenue Vexations, and getting my hands sunburnt...

Yes, yes, I know. I should carry a parasol when I’m in the sun or something. Either that or I'm just going to have to wear gloves when I intend to spend such a long time out during daylight hours. At least I don't bloody sparkle like some vampires I know (no, I am not a vampire.)

The experience with Brother Jed on ASU campus was nothing short of sublime. We had a visitation by Normal Bob Smith—who even dressed up in the contemporary image of the Christian mythological deity Satan. Then got to talk to many lovely people, found at least two who are now fast fans of Vexations. Good start. Jed has always been excellent for that. I also had a chance to read through a review of his book—with variously unfortunate results: Who Will Rise Up by George Smock, a review.

It'll take me some time to get a lot of my work down for Mill Avenue anthropology and my ready readers. Also there’s lots of things going on in the fiction department as many may guess. Volume 12 is preparing for release next month—and I’m still trying to get Volume 11 out on the web ASAP.

Much to come.

Refuge of Delayed Souls

I am reading this new online serial, The Refuge of Delayed Souls by Miladysa and it's bloody damn good. I am only up to chapter 30, but I highly recommend it. (This is partially untrue, I am actually much further ahead, but I started reading late in the story and now I'm making up the difference.) The story is oh-so-British to my ears (Irish as they are) and it produces a lovely Arthur Conan Doyle style lilt to the narrative. The chunks are bite sized, the characters are highly emotive and engaging.

Her style is something that I'd really love to learn to mimic, and possibly I will use it to help me determine how to write a little bit more emotively.

A lot of my supernatural writing does involve ghosts and hauntings; but more in a horror sense, rarely in the romantic heartbroken distance of the celestial bureaucracy—this work does that in spades. I especially like how it jumps back and forth between time periods to frame the narrative. It develops its story between past and present to compose the development of the characters.

It's a framing technique that I think deserves some experimentation.

Go check it out.

Prologue link, The Refuge of Delayed Souls by Miladysa

Lost Sphinx Cat released into the web and print!

Pulling this directly form my news post on Mill Avenue Vexations.

Mill Avenue Vexations Lost Sphinx Cat by Kyt Dotson is available online for readers to enjoy! And, as usual, there are free copies available to people who can get out to Mill Ave in Tempe.

Augustus Caesar, missing cat, and the little girl who loves him, Holly. Of course, this is a Vexations story, so there is a twist. Even before she starts looking, Vex discovers that what looks like an ordinary domesticated cat is actually a dangerous shapeshifter with an insatiable hunger. Through whatever means the cat landed in a pet store and then in the hands of an unsuspecting family. Vanished under unfortunate circumstances she has to decide how to handle the reunion—if any reunion between loving family and potentially perilous moggie can even happen.

Come, read this story about a bond between cat and girl that transcends the nature of the beast—that in the end, not everything is exactly how it seems. From monsters to housecats.

Cover design by Rebecca Gunter; and the entire back page is dedicated to an advertisement for Pets911.com a website dedicated to animal welfare, adoption services, and of course lost & found boards to help reunite lost pets and their families.

Do you read webfiction?

Another webfiction writer I happen to know has a non-fiction assignment for a class he's in that involves interviewing people about what they read, why they read it, and everything that they might want to tell him about it.

If you read webfiction, drop Alex McG a line.

Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 9 Released

I am proud to announce the release of Vexations Volume 9: All the Night’s a Stage. The first few copies of it have already been handed out for free on Mill Ave last Friday and Saturday and there are still quite a few remaining. So, if thou desire one of these lovely booklets, make thy way out to the Ave and snap one up.

Otherwise, they are available for free online at the Mill Avenue Vexations story section.

The cover was drawn by Rebecca Gunter and the internal artwork once again is done by Allan Gallo. This is number one of six for this publishing season, so we should have a breakneck pace of releases coming up!

Wish me good luck.

See everyone on the Ave.

Kingdoms of Grace

If you are into total Internet cheese, then you’ll be with me on this one. I found this awesome little animated, live-action, comic-book Internet miniseries: Kingdoms of Grace.

It’s totally cheese, do not get me wrong on this, in fact you’ll know it really quickly once you watch the first episode—but, it’s also become my dirty little secret. Apparently I really like cheese when it’s presented in Internet miniseries form.

My heart was stolen by the amazingly effective animation methodology but really what brought the smirk that makes me a viewer happened to be right at the live action sequence. I had to pick myself up off the floor after laughing; then I had to rewind a little so that I could re-watch what I missed.

I found this wonderful work via ALT: Rock Culture and Lifestyle Magazine.

You should really check it out, come back and let me know if you agree. Good cheese?

Link to Kingdoms of Grace.

Helljammer Teaser Site

What is this page?

www.helljammer.com

You are probably here because you found the Helljammer teaser site. Which I have rather kept out of the limelight because it’s only one page at the moment. However, just for grins it was submitted to a couple search engines just so that it’d be indexed while things were being set up.

A “helljammer” is the returned incarnation of a seagoing vessel doomed at sea—yes, undead pirates are involved—some of these ships were merchantmen, some were from various navies or privateers for queen and country, and none too few were pirates. The truth of the matter is that no single naval superpower of the time (the mid 1700s) understands what leads to the resurrection of a sunk ship as a helljammer. Only that often it’s those who perished into dark waters during particularly violent battles that tend to do so.

No helljammer has ever been friendly to any other living ship, nor claimed fealty to any empire after its return—save one. By in large, helljammers have a healthy disrespect and dislike for all other boats on the water and are a hazard more terrifying than even ordinary pirates. Even navy flotillas and armadas are hard pressed to repel a single helljammer. Port towns often do better, having far thicker walls and often outgunning the ghost ships by wide margins.

The HMH Queen’s Salvation is a British navy ship-of-the-line destroyed during an ambush by Spanish forces. Upon her return she sailed directly into the nearest British port flying a union jack and white ensign—much to the terror of the wharfsmen and navy stationed there—and sent for the Captain of the Yard. In such her crew and captain re-swore their undying, now literally, allegiance to the Queen.

The story, Helljammer: The Hunt for the Burning Sails, is a tale of romantic revenge. It follows the military commission of Captain Nickolas Edgeworth as he chases the helljammer that destroyed his home port of call—killing his family—to the ends of the Earth, to the edges of Hell, and into a conspiracy far more vast than he ever expected his naval career to thrust him.

The actual story will be released as a serialized webnovel starting sometime in the Summer of 2009. And, if I am very lucky, will have a supporting webcomic.

I hope you enjoyed the teaser,

Kyt Dotson