Surprise Release of Red Slaves omnibus edition – Happy New Year

Posted by tmycann on Jan 3rd, 2021 in indie, writing | 0 comments

The Red Slaves Collection - omnibus edition of books 1 through 4

Starting with good news: I was able to work with Kelley to come up with a “collected works” cover strategy for my Red Slaves series, so I could release all four eBooks in the series at a price point that rewards readers for continuing through the whole story–essentially, buy books 2 and 3, and get books 1 and 4 for free. (I’ll keep updating that page as new buy locations roll in.) What surprised me was that these four books together represent almost 200K words. I never would have anticipated that I could write that much. Especially given that my earliest creative efforts were poems.

Which brings me to my not-great news: I was gung-ho to at least manage 25K words in November to finally finish book 2 of my Planet Seekers series. Then I got the kind of interesting news from the day job that boils down to longer hours and more responsibilities, and that energy got re-allocated. If you’re following my blog’s side-bar tracker, you can see I’m still 9K words away from finishing writing. Which was a lot of what drove my decision to release the omnibus.

I’m hopeful book 2 will come out in the first quarter of 2021. I’ll keep you posted either way. By way of background research, I read an interesting article about how an evolutionary biologist is coming to terms with the Gaia theory, which makes for a different take on my sentient planet characters.

Other science news I’ve been digesting relates to the relationship between eigenvectors and eigenvalues. More important in our current, COVID-restricted environment was an opinion piece in Scientific American talking about how current scientific debate is being shut down. As a writer in the SFF spectrum, the ability to question everything is a key skill–and, ironically, generally considered the hallmark of good science. Listening to absolutists who regularly bloviate in the public sphere, combined with the concerns outlined in that article have both been key drivers to push me toward tuning out what is commonly reported. In fact, I closed out 2020 having read 121 books, and was intrigued by an article that emphasized how important fiction reading is to developing “mentalizing” skills. Maybe if more people read more fiction, it would be easier to cross the barriers that have become so evident in society.

🙂

In the meantime I read about the effort to protect “one square inch of silence” and was intrigued by the concept of being in a space where no human-generated sounds would intrude within the span of 15 minutes. Given the wild number of distractions available, this sounds like the pursuit of paradise to me.

And then there are the articles that talk about making peace with not having a legacy; how overexposure to cortisol as a child has life-long impacts on the ability to remember, organize, and pay attention; and the importance of peripersonal space. An intriguing recollection of the early friendship between Sartre and Camus led to an analysis of their disagreement over the nature of freedom that drove them apart. Finally, the balm of these days, friendship, was beautifully described by Kahlil Gibran.

I will be returning to my monthly blog habit, as well as posting select reviews (watch for one later this week about the upcoming release from Suleikha Snyder, which does all the kinds of genre-bending mash-up things that make me happy) this year. And I will try to stay on the 1K words per week path that seems to be my minimum regular output in the face of … waves hands … life. Be well until next time.