Sweet Bippy, It's February Already

Stumbling Toward Semi-Competence | 24 February 2025

I had big plans to come out swingin’ in this, our very disheartening year 2025, but then my wife got Covid for the first half of January, and I got stopped in my tracks by Covid during the second half of the month. Recovery has been slow and frustrating, but in the last couple days, for all my bitching and occasional passing out at odd moments, I think I can say that I really do feel a bit less like I just survived an assassination attempt with some sort of nano-tech designed to unravel my cardiovascular system. I’m taking it easy, resting often, and taking all my supplements. Zinc, iron, magnesium… if I swallowed any more metal I’d be ready to join the Silverhawks. Onward.

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E-Books and Bookplates

One of the projects I’ve been able to finally get back on wheels as the plague has set me loose from its clammy grip is sellin’ things from my website! Yep, greedy grimy retail shenanigans. I think the e-commerce solution I went with is finally ready to launch as an integrated part of my existing website. For a while I was afraid that I might have to establish a distinct new site for this stuff, but it seems I’ve either had a bit of luck or recovered just enough power of concentration to actually comprehend instructions.

In addition to the physical bookplates, I’m also going to be offering my entire line of e-books packaging my shorter works; this means the three currently available plus at long last the new version of my sword-and-sorcery adventure “The Smoke of Gold is Glory,” featuring a lovely piece of cover art by Miles Aijala.

This is the week that Amazon will be pushing through a new limitation on the downloading of e-books purchased for Kindle, and while the change is not as apocalyptic as some early reports seemed to indicate, it is still a stark little reminder that digital goods bound up with DRM are never truly going to be safely yours once purchased.

Now, I sell things at Amazon. That’s life in publishing; Amazon is too much of the marketplace to ignore if you want to have a commercial presence and I have long-time business relations with many companies who are even more stuck with Amazon than I am. But I also sell elsewhere, and absolutely nothing prevents me from criticizing them or attempting to mitigate their ability to frustrate and annoy my own readers.

My first response is that I will be selling only DRM-free files on my own website; when you purchase an e-book from me you can download it to whatever you like and put it wherever you like, forever, and you can even copy it and pirate it all over the place like an asshole; there’s no ethical or economical way to stop that, so the approach I prefer to take is to simply not treat my readers like crooks by default.

My second response is a bit more quixotic. I have decided to post every short story I’ve ever written (once rights exclusivity periods or other arrangements for them expire, for those that haven’t already) on my website, for free, in perpetuity, at the same time I make them available as e-books. Many of them are available elsewhere for free already. I just want to centralize the archive. Those that can’t afford my e-books can still enjoy the stuff, and those that buy them anyway can feel that they’re supporting me, and pirating my work will become largely irrelevant because hey, I’ve already effectively pirated myself.

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Fresh Fiction

Speaking of short stories, if you missed it (because perhaps, hypothetically, some dillweed didn’t mention it in his newsletter promptly and professionally as he should have), you can find my new novelette “Kaiju Agonistes” in all of its glory, for full, free and clear, at Uncanny Magazine. “Kaiju Agonistes” is a sci-fi political satire about a giant space monster that comes to us on a mission of enlightenment and discovers that our species really, really hates that.

The first attack is a food-gathering vessel. Messenger pulls it around by its nets, yanks its cranes out of their housings, shatters its hull with a tail-lash, and finally towers threateningly over the ruptured, listing vessel as terrified natives jump into the sea. It gives them a lingering look before roaring and plunging back into the depths. Next, Messenger finds a war-vessel, striking it from beneath. As it rolls over, water rushes in to douse the hot machinery that drives the ship. A great column of white steam rises from the wreck. Messenger stands wreathed in the mist, holding the upper half of its body twenty meters above the waves, before turning away and vanishing. It has a stage magician’s sense of timing; its creators have imbued it with razzle-dazzle from beyond the stars.

“Kaiju Agonistes” is part of Uncanny’s sixty-second issue, January/February 2025. If you enjoy the story for free, and have the means, I strongly encourage you to support the good folks at the magazine by buying the issue through the options at the link below, or even subscribing:

Likewise, “Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent” is now complete— part two is available in this quarter’s Grimdark Magazine, issue 41:

Return to Camorr with Locke Lamora as he lives through the existential hell of being thirteen, which is somehow even worse than living in a gritty fantasy murder capital during the worst storm season in recent memory:

That summer was storm-lashed. As the weather built up, priests of Iono in their best silver-fringed robes made offerings from air and land to abate the fury of the waters. Blood ran from altars on the South Needle and the West Needle; bulls and goats and rabbits and chickens and pigeons and hawks spilled crimson lines down to the surging sea, and the priests danced in processions with their prayer-flags, blowing horns fashioned like sharks and swordfish and horned whales. They carried out these duties under gray-green skies, and then in spit-warm drizzle, and then bent under sheets of sweeping rain. So it went. Iono was called Stormbringer, not ‘storm-sparer’ or ‘merry pretender.’

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Will “Selected Scenes” be Selected?

Back in July, I broke a long publishing drought with the release of my short story “Selected Scenes From the Ecologies of the Labyrinth” at Sunday Morning Transport; you can still read it there, if you haven’t done your homework for class.

We have now entered the silly season in science fiction and fantasy, when nominations for various awards are being collected. If you enjoyed “Selected Scenes” and think highly of it, I would love it if you’d consider nominating it for a Locus Award (voting open to literally everyone) and/or for a Hugo Award (voting open to members/supporting members of this year’s and last year’s Worldcons).

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That’s all for this week. Thank you for the kind notes and e-mails in response to Howard’s passing. I was not able to be in Indiana for his funeral, but I’m told the tributes were suitably thick and full of love. Howard left a great deal of good will everywhere he went, and many of the best minds in gaming and fiction considered him one in a billion.