On July 13 of this year, I will be participating in the Iron Writer Competition. Starting at midnight on that date, I will be writing as much as humanly possible, trying to beat out other competitors for the highest word count in a twenty-four hour period.
Not only will this help me crank out an episode or two (or three or four?) of Voyage: Windbound, but also, I will be raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, a non-profit organization working helping children beat cancer. If you’re interested in sponsoring me for the event, shoot me an email, and I’ll let you know how to proceed. You can also simply give a donation via the link at the bottom of the Iron Writer Competition webpage and let me know that you’re my sponsor. I’ll be posting a list of sponsors on my blog the day before the competition (of course, you may remain anonymous).
I’m really excited to be participating in this event. Socially beneficial stuff like this is right up my alley. Very consistent with the values of Fuzzy Hedgehog Press.
Check out The Dreadful Cafe, and their anthology of speculative literature, Membrane.
Voyage: Embarkation #8 Benevolence is out today. The episode is available directly from this site in PDF, ePub, and Mobi formats. I’ve also submitted the file to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes and Smashwords. It should be available at all of those vendors soon.
Next up is Episode 9, “Nanogen,” which will be released on June 6.
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The Voyage series is seventy episodes long and is broken into five cycles: Embarkation, Windbound, Adrift, Wake and Tempest. Each of those cycles consists of fourteen episodes. That’s why eight is a special number. The first half of Embarkation is complete, and now the second half begins.
An intentional tone shift accompanies this transition. Things are about to get a lot more serious for Kal, and a lot more dire, too. I intended for the first seven episodes of Voyage to give you a sense of his wonder and amazement, about the fun he’s having, the quirky turns his adventure will often take, and his resultant bouts of self-discovery.
And now he will visit the alternate Earth called Glinn.
I’ve gotten this question more than once: “Why serialize at all? Whats wrong with the novel format? Or the novel trilogy format?”
Nothing’s wrong with those formats. I even have story ideas floating around my head that seem ideally suited to be stand alone novels or novellas.
But my passion has always been for serials. As you know if you’ve been following this series from the beginning, Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Farscape were the formative stories of my early adolescence. It was through those TV shows that I began to explore questions of ethics, morality, justice, and philosophy that would eventually grow into the seeds of the series I work on today.
And that’s why I’ve set out to write this series. Why does the serial matter? Until the recent ereader revolution, it was commercially inviable. With the problems of mass produced, physical print matter shrugged off, production and distribution in this format are no longer monetarily problematic. But is it better?
People often refer to children as “impressionable.” There was a point in my life, sometime in my early twenties, when I reflected on my childhood and adolscence and really started to put two and two together regarding this “impressionability” I’d never fully understood. In short, it means that, unlike adults, who have many experiences to draw upon in order to make sense of new experiences, and who already understand a great deal about life and the human condition, a child has no such foundation to work with. In fact, they are in the process of building their foundation, and its shape is therefore highly susceptible to their experiences.
In the case of a story, the child, rather than the adult, can be more greatly impacted by a powerful story, because, in the case of the child, it encounters little “resistance” from already cemented knowledge and ideas. Good stories can have a powerful formative impact on young minds.
* At the time of this writing, Barnes and Noble is in a state of transition from their PubIt system to their new NookPress system. NookPress does not allow me to change the content of ebooks that I have already published (which seems very, very strange). Also, a number of problems on Kobo’s website are preventing me from updating Embarkation 5 and the Special Collection there. I will update my works on those sites as soon as I am able. They are up-to-date everywhere else, including Amazon, Smashwords and Gumroad.
* Late-Day Update: It turns out that PubIt is still active while NookPress shakes out its kinks. I’ve submitted updated versions of all my ebooks to Barnes and Noble. That leaves only Kobo.
* April 26 Update: It took them forever, but Kobo has finally sorted out all their issues, and all the episodes of Voyage are live on the Kobo store in the way they should be.