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.

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]

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.

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.

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