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I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.
To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. You can download it from this page. Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it; to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version.
I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative works or sell it.
I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here:
In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario. The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency. The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.
If you'd like to read Crisis in Zefra, you can download it in PDF form.
I'll be adding new stories here periodically. First of all, you can try my Aurora-award nominated short story "Hopscotch." The year this was nominated, another of my stories was also nominated: "The Toy Mill," which I wrote with David Nickle. "The Toy Mill" won the award; but I've always been fond of "Hopscotch." Here it is, in its entirety excerpted from my collection The Engine of Recall.
It's my birthday and I ain't writin' no more
Yesterday I finished and submitted my Master's thesis for the Strategic Foresight and Innovation programme at OCAD University. This doesn't mean I've graduated: I have to defend the sucker first. But I'm in training for that now, learning to duck and weave and generally keep ahead of touchy questions, such as "Mr. Schroeder, WTF?"
It was also, coincidentally, my birthday yesterday. I seem to be marking major moments like this lately; three years ago, I had heart surgery a day after my birthday. (Many of you will have noticed that my newest novel, Ashes of Candesce, is not appearing until February, 2012--a couple of years after the last book; blame the surgery. It knocked me back for a good year and totally blew my publishing schedule. With the thesis out of the way and my health excellent again, I should now be able to catch up.)
Anyway, with all that out of the way, I should be able to turn my attention more intensively to writing--and blogging. My recent tenure at Charlie Stross's blog indicated that there's a high level of interest out there for some of my ideas, many of which I was only able to scratch the surface of at Charlie's place. Perhaps now is the time to lay out all my cards.
With that in mind, I've revamped the comments mechanism on this site; anonymous comments are now allowed. It's a bit of a clunky system, since the comment form doesn't have a field for you to enter a name; you'll have to do that in the body of the comment and that's not ideal. It's still better if you register on the site before commenting, but I may make that harder in an attempt to keep the bots at bay.
I'll see how well the anonymous commenting goes; if I get seriously spammed or the trolls start coming out, I will rescind the system without hesitation. But hopefully it'll work and we can have some good discussions!
(Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce are combined in Cities of the Air)
