Love and Blood

We've published another story from my husband's Bite-Sized fiction collection. The Kindle version of Love and Blood is now available, the Nook version coming soon.

Buy it here.

Check out a free wallpaper of Carly Strickland's cover art below the jump.

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Jeremy's Mother is a Vampire

Jeremy's Mother is a Vampire is a short story by Kyle Strickland (the husband). It is being sold now for the Kindle and Nook. Jeremy's Mother is a Vampire is also going to be included in a later collection of vampire short stories alongside full illustrations by Carly Strickland. This collection, Say No to Sparkles will be available in the early spring of 2012.

Check out some of the illustrations below the jump, courtesy of Carly Strickland's site.

Click to enlarge:

Sign up for email updates at Matter Deep Publishing to be notified when Say No to Sparkles is released.

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Reinventing the Book: 10 Improvements eReaders Have Made on the Conventional Book

1. BOOKMARKS ARE OBSOLETE! Never scrounge around for a random paper to hold your place and then later go looking for that important gift card/social security card/police report and be unable to find it. eReaders keep your place!

2. YOU CAN EAT AND READ! Ever do that awkward dance of trying to hold a burger with two hands and hold the book open with your elbow? (see illustration below if you've never had this problem) Then the mustard drips on your page and your perfect book is ruined. eReaders generally have accessible Next Page buttons and the screens can be wiped off.

3. YOU CAN CARRY A WHOLE LIBRARY! You don't need to worry about running out of shelf space. You can download books anywhere and carry them with you. Bring three books on your vacation and still have space in your carry on!

4. FOLLOW LINKS IN BOOKS! Hyperlinks in books can bring you to references, sources, and similar content!

5. BUILT IN DICTIONARY! Reading The Invisible Man? Not sure what that word akimbo means? They keep using it!!! Oh, look. [Click] It means standing with elbows out and hands on hips. Now I know!

6. NO SHIPPING! Free shipping. No wait. Don't wait for Barnes & Noble DHL shipping to take 9 days to bring you your book and not have tracking info until the last 4 (a recent experience of mine). Instantly delivered via whispernet (Amazon) or what-have-you. Don't wait for that book you're jazzed to read now.

7. KEEP YOUR BOOKS NEAT! So many of my books are wrecked from traveling in my purse. My leather Kindle folio and my Kindle are two years old and they are in great shape.

8. SAVE MONEY! Yeah, a Kindle costs at least 100 bucks, but when you start cutting out shipping and cutting out printing costs, you get cheaper books. Over the life of your eReader you will easily make it up. Buy 99¢ books from indie authors who would otherwise have to sell them for $13.99 print on demand. The money saving feature of eReading means that we get to see brilliant indie authors who might otherwise get lost in the publishing house shuffle.

9. BE DISCREET! Don't want anyone know you're reading a romance novel, or a self help book for that embarrassing problem, or Twilight? Nobody has to see what you're reading! Of course, if you're a snob and carry around a Quantum Physics textbook just to look smart, this won't help you.

10. SAVE THE TREES! Reduce your carbon footprint by consuming less paper! 

Speaking of eReaders, did you know that you can read Kindle Books on an iPod, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PC...? And if you're lucky, you can read MINE FOR FREE!

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Apples to Apples: An eReader Comparison

Click to Enlarge

Notes on Book Availability:

There is no way to really say what is or will be soon available on each of these readers. Generalizations could get me in a lot of trouble, so I'm going to make it simple. I will explain how you publish to each of these readers and then you can use your brain to decide which one will have a better selection of available books.

Kindle: Kindle publishing requires a file of the eBook and a cover image. You are assigned an ASIN number (Kindle ID number) and do NOT need an ISBN. Anyone can publish to the Kindle with an Amazon account, meaning that there are indie books as well as professional books available. There is a small fee for some document conversions to be sent over 3G, but you can do conversion without Whispernet (the 3G) for free. If you have the 2nd generation, you'll need to plug in to a USB cable, but 3rd gen users can use Wi-Fi. You can load your own documents by looking up your account email and tagging free. in front of the kindle.com (example yourname@free.kindle.com). The Kindle does not display color.

Nook: Barnes & Noble lets you publish to the Nook without an ISBN through their PubIt! site. Also, B&N users can run a select number of apps, PDFs, and can read eBooks for free within the store, as if they were doing so with a real book.

iPad: iBook publishing requires purchasing an ISBN for the eBook edition, which can cost $125 dollars a book if you are an indie (big publishers buy in bulk and can get ISBNs for a buck a pop). HOWEVER, the iPad runs Kindle and Kobo apps, so you can read indie books on the free Kindle app.

Kobo: The Kobo requires an ISBN like the iBook publishing. You cannot simply submit to the store, either. You have to inquire for a publisher kit and fill out a form by email. They take a few days to get back to you, to. Kobo is not indie friendly.

Sony: While you can use Smashwords to publish to the Sony Reader, companies who don't want to use the indie service have to go through an email process to submit a release, much like with the Kobo. Sony books can also be borrowed from a library. The real problem plaguing Sony eBook publishing is that in an attempt at Digital Rights management, to let Libraries loan Harper Collins eBooks, Sony has made them self-destruct after 26 loans. The implication here is that real books are unreadable after being checked out 26 times (which we know isn't usually true) and that rather than embrace the improvement on the traditional book, Sony has gotten greedy and wants to make PUBLIC LIBRARIES keep paying for books. This is turning libraries off and making the library availability feature a moot point.

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JK Rowling: Pioneering New Media

Readers of Harry Potter were excited to hear JK Rowling's YouTube announcement this morning about Pottermore, the site that has been teasing fans for a week. For a while, all we had were a few screen-captures of bookshelves and  a chess board, and now we have just enough to know that whatever this is, it's going to be epic.

I'm writing about this because of the eBook angle. I have become a huge fan and proponent of eBooks over the last couple of years. The publishing company I have started to help build has been exploring ways to expand the multi-media experience with iPad apps and uniquely formatted stories. I am thrilled to see JK Rowling leaping on board the internet-express and helping to break new ground.

Pottermore is more than just a place to buy The Sorcerer's Stone for your eReader. Pottermore, though still largely undefined, is going to be a place for an interactive, Harry Potter reading experience. There will be art (hells yeah!), guest appearances, and Quidditch games. You will be able to create yourself within the Harry Potter World. JK Rowling has promised to share new information she has been "hoarding" from fans.

What down side do I see to this? Sony is hosting it. Considering all that happened with rootkit and the April and June hacks, I'm worried about the security of the site. Harry Potter is perhaps the biggest bullseye in the world when you are trying to make a statement. While print releases of Harry Potter books have had amazing security (threats of jail for anyone who smuggled out text before release), Anonymous still hates Sony, their security, and their policies that drive them to sue someone from modding their home console.

And then another concern comes to mind from Sony's involvement. Sony is way behind in the eReader race. The low price of their reader doesn't seem to keep them ahead of the Kindle and the Nook and there's just no competing with Steve Jobs and Apple's amazing product line. I was selling Sony Readers at Target long before I heard of the Kindle, but I think I sold two a year. I know someone with a reader, but when I see someone reading eBooks at the airport, it's on a Kindle or an iPad. Does Sony's involvement mean that they get exclusive eBook rights?

There is still a lot of uncertainty about this announcement, which you can watch for yourself. One thing is sure, I will be online on July 31, hoping to get in early.

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Book Review: Soul Quest

by Amy Jones
★★★☆☆

Available for 99¢ on Amazon Kindle

Soul Quest starts off in need of a tough editor, but rounds off to a formidable first publication. Structure problems early on do not stop Amy Jones' story from being suspenseful and touching.

I read Soul Quest on my Kindle for a humble 99¢. When I posted my review on Goodreads, Amy Jones contacted me to thank me for my review. She is a smart, gracious, level-headed woman who can appreciate constructive criticism. I highly recommend Soul Quest because-- while the first acts of the book are a bit shaky-- it pulls together to be what promises to be an engaging trilogy. Plus, you can't really go wrong for less than a dollar.


Soul Quest is one of those books that has a really excellent premise but could have stood to be edited a few more times. I feel like the indie writing community has been really supportive of Amy Jones, but perhaps because of the glowing support, she hasn’t had anyone be honest with her. George Lucas realized after it was too late that he had spent too much money making The Phantom Menace a terrible fuster-cluck of a story. Nobody told him they had doubts because he was freakin’ George Lucas, but the Star Wars book series shows that it could have been saved. Lucas has good ideas, as proven by the original trilogy.

Luckily with books, until they are published or the release date is announced, it’s never too late to fix some major problems. Hopefully, as Soul Quest is the start of a trilogy, Amy Jones can learn from some of the problems with the first book. Soul Quest may have suffered from a lack of a tough editor, but it is in no way irredeemable. I enjoyed the book overall. Everyone needs feedback and editing, even if they don’t have a major publishing house behind them. Amy Jones just needs to find a tough friend to help her hone her ideas.

The premise, that demons (we’ll call them demons for those who haven’t read it) would orchestrate a world event on the scale of 9/11 to start a war and feed off of the suffering of humanity is brilliant. I’m still not sure if it’s too soon to use 9/11, but that was a bold risk and I can’t say I was determinately against it.

The real problem is with the structure. Jones jumps between multiple narrators and relies too much on telling us her backstory rather than showing it. We meet Liv at the start of the book and then jump back in time to just before her birth. This is a smart choice, but one that sets up a missed opportunity.

As we go through the years bringing us back to present, Liv could have been used as an outsider. Characters who were insiders could have taught Liv all of the backstory we needed to know as readers. I think Jones worried that if she didn’t explain it all early on, she’d lose her audience, but I would rather be left curious than read multiple paragraphs coldly explaining how spirits in this universe work. We get back to near-present about 20% of the way through the book (according to my Kindle progress). In the first of a trilogy, that is not too long to wait to really understand what is going on.

Because the narrator changes, I often found myself confused over who was talking. Changing first person narratives need very distinct character voices and not too many of them. A third person narration-- or one that jumped simply between Liv and Beau, would have been easier to manage. She might have lost some opportunity to hear how the head of the oracles felt, but I’m not sure we needed that. Literary critics bash on female writers for talking too much about feelings and not about events. I’m a woman and I maintain that you need to understand emotional processes to understand motive sometimes. We just have to be sure that we try to show feelings rather than tell them, where we can, and that we don’t forget to be concrete about what is actually happening in a scene.

As for formatting, the Kindle version had some flaws. From my own experience, I’m going to guess that return spaces were used where section/page breaks should have been. I found quite a few blank pages between chapters in my read. I also would have liked to see some kind of formatting change between first person, past tense narrative and first person, present tense thoughts. There were a few minor homonym switches (wondering/wandering) that an editor could have caught, as well.

Jones starts off every chapter with a quote. I like it. I’ve been doing the same thing in my book series. Jones isn’t limited to famous Greeks like I am. Jones doesn’t limit herself to pretty, popular, neat inspiration quotes either. She boldly quotes Hitler at a poignant moment.

The descriptions in Soul Quest are quite beautiful. I especially like the description of Arcadia (and that she chose to call it that). Her interpretations of demonic infection, guardian angels, and soul mirrors are clever and serve the story well.

I tend to have a problem in modern fiction when everyone has names that sound like Bratz dolls. It’s my own personal taste and I try to put it aside. Real people have odd names like Brayan, but I like to see them balanced out with normal, common names. That’s probably why I was tickled pink that an oracle, a spirit, a non-human character, was named Kevin. My best friend always wanted to name a hamster Kevin because it was so normal and non-threatening. Naming him Kevin gave me a laugh. I think it’s good when you can find little spurts of joy in something as heavy as a post-9/11 spiritual drama.

As for the characters, I thought they were all very distinct and well rounded. Brayan reminds me of one of my own characters in his heart-breaking insecurity and just as Jones intended, I can’t help but like Laith. I think I liked his narration best. It was sweet, genuine, and distinct. Laith is one of the few characters who isn’t as-smart or smarter than the writer and so his simple diction was refreshing. I am a total Hermione Granger type. Laith’s thought-process was endearing without being too stereotypical slow kid.

More than half-way through you start to see the kids discovering and using their powers. It’s cool, but I feel like it would have been more exciting if we hadn’t gotten a Cerebro File-esque breakdown of their abilities much earlier in the book. Again, I feel like some reorganization and cuts could have made this book a 5-star, easily. By the time the third act was really taking off, I was eager to join the cast and shank the baddie with a light sword in the school cafeteria.

The final act really showed the true potential of this series. Jones writes grief beautifully and genuinely. She has created a cast of balanced, diverse characters and a story I care to see resolved. Soul Quest is an honorable first publication and I believe that I will be reading the next book on my Kindle to see if it gets better.

One last idea. What if this book was subtitled: Soul Quest: The Daeva You Know. Just an idea.

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Story Form eBook

The following eBook contains 2 previous blog posts (A Drama Intervention and 6 Common Mistakes of RP Plot) plus much more content for expert and newbie text-based Roleplayers. It's an in-depth guide to the format I play, "Story Form."

Table of Contents:
Story Form vs Action Form
Story Form vs Tabletop RPG
6 Common Fatal Mistakes of RP Plot
Navigating Game Information
A Drama Intervention: How to Avoid RP Drama and Why
A Guide to Gaming Graphics
Expert Tips for Moderators

If you're new to the medium or just want some ideas for moderating, this guide is for you. Click the cover image to download the pdf eBook!

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eBook Conversion

Owing to the huge popularity of the Drama Intervention post, I have turned my article on how to avoid/resolve drama in online role-playing games into an eBook. Share it, enjoy it! I even found someone using it as the default drop box message in their game and someone else had it as their status on tumblr!

Click the cover below to download the eBook in PDF format.

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