© James Pyles
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
It’s in my hands.
I’ve now got my own personal copy of the Cloaked Press anthology Meteor Fall: An Anthology of The Collective. It features two of my short stories, “Eden and the Starcat” and “The Sins of the Fathers and the Sons”
Here’s a brief description:
I just saw that the blog shared by Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie has reviewed my SciFi/Fantasy novella Ice.
I actually saw it in my twitter notifications. I was checking social media one last time before settling down into bed with a good book and a cup of tea.
Yes, I am an old guy. Sue me.
It’s a very nice review, too. I don’t want to spoil it by quoting it here, but they do use words like “exciting,” “dramatic,” and “gripping” so I’m feeling pretty good about it (please write the same thing on Amazon and Goodreads).
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
© James Pyles
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
I’ve noticed other indie authors doing this sort of thing, creating a graphic representation of the books and stories that were published in the past year. Sounded like an interesting idea, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I’ve already posted the graphic on social media, but thought I’d add some details for my blog readers.
Here’s a list of my publications from the beginning of 2021 to the end:
Cover art for the mass market paperback edition of “Hounded”
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
I admit that I only read Kevin Hearne’s novel Hounded because my twelve-year-old grandson enjoyed it along with the rest of the Iron Druid Chronicles.
Actually, for a long time, my grandson and I have played a two-person “role playing” game of one sort or another just for the run of it. In our current game, he based his character very heavily on Hearne’s protagonist Atticus O’Sullivan, a two-thousand year old man and last of the Druids posing as a twenty-year-old bookstore owner in Tempe, Arizona.
I can’t swear to the lore in Hearne’s book, but he did add more than a little whimsy to his tale. Speaking of “tail,” Atticus also has a rather intelligent wolfhound named Oberon who likes sausages and French poodles and the two manage some interesting conversations.
© James Pyles
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
Ben found himself wistful in recalling the green and growing Spring, the triumph of life in its myriad expressions. The world had been a lively place back then, marked by the paint of the Sun’s light upon the world.
But life eventually will falter and bend under the forces of time and circumstance. As much as he wanted to lift above the sorrows, he sank back down in his nakedness. The icy hiemal that was now existence ruled everything. He doubted he would see another Spring, even when the season actually arrived.
Screenshot from Amazon
There are certain milestones that I think a lot of authors pay attention to. One of them I chronicled yesterday when I said that Time’s Abyss received 3 five-star reviews on Amazon and Ice had received it’s first five-star review.
Having also created a promotion for Ice where it can be downloaded to Kindle for free from now until Christmas created another interesting effect. It started “selling” much, much better (see image above-right). Well, it’s free and I have been telling everyone on every social media platform to which I belong about it, so why not? Still, it’s pretty satisfying.
Ice just received it’s first five-star review on Amazon, which is a tremendous thrill. Also, Time’s Abyss now has 3 five-star reviews. This is pretty terrific since both of these titles are my initial efforts at SciFi novellas as I emerge from authoring a long collection of short stories.
© James Pyles
Thank you “Ice” (still a free download through Christmas) and “Time’s Abyss” readers as well as those of you who have been reading my work in anthologies such as Winter of Wonder, Meteor Fall, Fall Into Fantasy 2021, Deep Space 2, and those are just my most recent projects.
As in indie writer and an author still relatively new to being published in SciFi, Fantasy, and Horror, I’m “over the moon” that these works are getting this kind of attention. Thank those of you who have read and left reviews and the rest who have read these or are in the process of still reading.
Cover art for the anthology “Winter of Wonder”
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
My short story “That Which Burns” is now available in the Cloaked Press anthology Winter of Wonder: Superhuman: 2021 Edition.
The theme for this new anthology series this year is “superhuman.”
What does it mean to be ‘Superhuman’? Not just super powers or flashy costuming. What lies beneath the surface? What makes the psyche tick? Fourteen authors from the Cloaked Press Family explore this theme in our first Winter of Wonder anthology. Join them as they explore strange alien worlds, yet find some humanity within its monstrous inhabitants. Come along with an assassin long due for retirement, and a bounty hunter pushing his luck far beyond his competitors. Magical weapons and magical tapestries abound, while one incredible man serves a wife he didn’t choose. Meet those who chose not to blindly follow protocol and serve, be that from a teacher, a friend and former lover, or the Queen Goddess herself. Superheroes are sometimes not what they seem, and sometimes allies come from unexpected places.
My story has been around for a while but like many creations, it didn’t sell on the first try or on a few subsequent attempts.
Tyler Melody Ross is a very special young woman, but her being “special” isn’t always considered a good thing to her family, her friends, and her neighbors. We meet her as an inmate of an asylum in update New York in 1954. Normally, she’s kept heavily sedated, masked, and her hands covered in thick mittens. Then she gets a new doctor who says he wants to help her, but unbeknownst to him, that help may well bring disaster.
Here’s a small excerpt from “That Which Burns:”
Starting midnight Pacific Time on December 21 through Christmas, my SciFi/Fantasy novella Ice will be free to download onto your kindle device. That’s right, just in time for the holidays, give yourself the gift of this unique tale of adventure on the high seas, of magic, science, and dinosaurs, or make it a present for a friend.
I first announced the release of this book at the beginning of the month and published an excerpt just a few days ago.
All that, plus I was interviewed on a podcast about “Ice”, Time’s Abyss, my two short stories published in the Meteor Fall anthology and other projects soon to come.
If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.
As I’m sure my regular readers know by now, my self-published novella “Ice” has been available for nearly two weeks now. Since I’m the publisher as well as the author, I’m doing all of the marketing for the book myself. While I’ve written summaries and discussed the book on one podcast so far, I still plan to promote the daylights out of it.
To that end, I’m putting up an excerpt of the story. It’s adventure and mutiny on the high seas, but these seas and the ships that sail upon them exist at the farthest reaches of human history where magic and science co-exist. The state of things on the merchant vessel “The Star of Jindo” have gone from bad to worse following a devastating storm that has crippled the ship and killed most of the crew. Captain Ki-Moon Yong has lost control of his command of his vessel for the first time in his career. Here’s what follows:
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