Brodie Wade is Back

Brodie's back in a prequel novella. See Jerry Hanel's troubled, determined hero at a much younger age, as he takes on his first cold case in The Truth Has Teeth. The Brodie Wade series begins with Death Has a Name (free!) and continues in Thaloc Has a Body. 

As an added bonus, Jerry's made a video trailer for Thaloc Has a Body. Enjoy.

Free Steampunk/Lovecraft Goodness

Gears of a Mad God is now free on Amazon, Smashwords, and other ebook retailers.  Check out the series at no risk, get hooked, and come back for more.  The first trilogy is in stores now, and I'm hard at work on the follow-up trilogy, The Zeppelin War.

Gears of a Mad God: Proper young ladies in the 1920s don't get dirty, and they certainly don't get into fights. But Colleen's favorite uncle has died under mysterious circumstances, and she wants answers. 

When a sinister cult comes after her, she pushes back - hard. Soon she's running for her life, hunted by the cult of Katharis and aided by a secret government agency. It will take all of her courage, all of her strength, and every steam-powered weapon she can devise to keep her alive long enough to unravel the mystery of her uncle's death. 

The cult thinks she knows her uncle's secrets. They'll do anything, hurt anyone, to make her talk. But they've made a grave mistake. Colleen is going to take the fight to them, again and again, until the people she cares about are safe - or have been avenged.

Free at Amazon

Free for Nook

Free at Smashwords

Serials are Back!

I got some exciting news today.  eSteampunk Magazine, a new spinoff from eFiction Magazine, is picking up my new steampunk serial, Black Dragon Blues.  It's the globe-trotting adventures of Molly, inventor and tinkerer, and Lan, the dangerous young woman sworn to protect her, as they are hunted by the Kung Fu assassins of the Black Dragon gang.  Subscribe to eSteampunk Magazine, or visit eFiction on the web.

A few different online magazines are publishing a mixture of serial episodes and stand-alone stories.  In addition to some of the eFiction spinoff titles, there's Steampunk Tales, which promises "The 'Penny Dreadful' for your iPhone."  Check them out at http://www.steampunktales.com/.

It's a brave new pulp-fiction world out there.  Amazon has a fascinating new feature called Amazon Serials, where you pay once for a novel that gets released in episodes.  The moment you buy, you get every installment that's been released so far, and each new installment as it's released.  They're including some of Charles Dickens' books, which were released as serials back in the day.

Not every writer can release their work in progress as a serial.  There are some significant quality checks in place, which is good news for readers.  Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=5044445011.  

Then there are smaller players, like JukePop Serials, available at http://www.jukepopserials.com.  The good thing about this innovative new site is that it's a curated collection of episodic stories.  That means that an editor is making some careful choices and only releasing the good stuff.  It's not just crap from any hack who has learned how to type and thinks he can tell a story.  

JukePop is new, so there aren't a huge number of episodes available for any one story.  It will be interesting to see how well the site does.  On the plus side, it's free, there's a rich variety of stories available, and some sort of quality is being maintained.  On the down side, it's web-based only, and being new, you never know when the capital will run out and the site will close its doors.  I'd say it's worth the risk, though.

I just read a couple of chapters of The Case of the Syphillitic Sister, a quirky, hilarious, and endlessly surprising story of a superhero detective agency with a VERY strange case.  It's by the talented James Hutchings, whom I've blogged about before.  Horizon, by John Gregory Betancourt, looks quite promising as well.  It's a much more serious work of space opera.

Visit JukePop, vote for the stories you like, and help this nifty new venture succeed.  I want to find out how the story ends.

The World of Steam Kickstarter

Man, this looks cool. Check out the kickstarter at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2045844095/the-world-of-steam  

Shanghai Steam

Shanghai Steam, one of the coolest anthologies you'll see this year, is now available - sort of.  Amazon's got it in paperback, but the ebook version doesn't seem to be on the digital shelves yet.

I can't wait for my copy, and not just because I have a story in it.  This is one of the most intriguing and fun anthology ideas I've ever come across, a blend of steampunk and wuxia, a Chinese literary genre that can best be described as "Martial Arts Heroics."  Steam-Fu, in other words.

Nineteen authors bring you stories set in China, Britain, Canada, the old West, even Mars. There are dragons, automatons, flying monks, and a coffee maker of terrifying power.  There are heroes and assassins, grim tales of vengeance, and light-hearted tales of comedy. 

I'll keep you posted about e-book availability.  In the meantime, here's a link to the paperback version at Amazon: