If you take a glance along the right hand side of the screen, you will see that you can now download the free ebook version of His Robot Girlfriend. It was previously available only as a pdf file, but you can now download it from Smashwords.com as an ebook in a variety of formats. Download and read it on your favorite ebook reader. It’s free.
Well, it’s been five months today since I submitted The Steel Dragon (and prior to my decision to change the title) to Baen Books through their website. Five months is a long time to be waiting on tenterhooks, but according to their site it will be at least nine more months before I hear anything back.
In the meantime, here is the definition of tenterhooks from worldwidewords.org:
It’s been so long since anyone has seen either a tenter, or the hooks on one, that the word and the idea behind it are now quite mysterious, so much so that it sometimes appears as on tenderhooks, which sounds as though it ought to make more sense. But at one time, the phrase on tenterhooks would have evoked an image that was immediately understandable.
It comes from one of the processes of making woollen cloth. After it had been woven, the cloth still contained oil from the fleece, mixed with dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill, but then it had to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease. So the lengths of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames, and left out in the open for some time. This allowed them to dry and straightened their weave. These frames were the tenters, and the tenter hooks were the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame. At one time, it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see fields full of these frames (older English maps sometimes marked an area as a tenter-field). So it was not a huge leap of the imagination to think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in an state of anxious suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter. The tenters have gone, but the meaning has survived.
Tenter comes from the Latin tendere, to stretch, via a French intermediate. The word has been in the language since the fourteenth century, and on tenters soon after became a phrase meaning painful anxiety. The exact phrase on tenterhooks seems first to have been used by Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random in 1748.
God, I love the English language!!!
Today marks four months of daily postings on City of Amathar Blog, and I’m just really getting started. Blogging has turned out to be more fun than I thought it would be– a bit cathartic. I have always eschewed diaries, figuring that no other person would want to read daily ramblings, and I could remember it without writing it down. Turns out I do have something to say and every once in a while it might be worth reading. I really love the fact that I can post some of my writing and get occassional feedback.
I like the fact that I can write out my blog topics for weeks in advance and have them posted each day, but lately I’ve been shuffling prewritten blogs around to make room for things that happen on the spur of the moment or are otherwise timely. Oh well. Now I’m looking forward to the six month anniversary in just 59 days or so.
I’m pretty happy with the response to the free pdf download of “His Robot Girlfriend”. The whole idea from the beginning was to get it out there and get it to as many people as possible. As soon as I have the final edit done, I hope to get it on Feedbooks and similar sites.
I would also like a review. If anyone out there has one, I’ll post it here, good or bad.
I’m so happy with the number of people downloading that I’m thinking I should write another just for free eBook distribution. If my next book is a Steel Dragon book I won’t, because I have dedicated myself to getting that series published by a traditional book publisher, but maybe I’ll write one of the others with that in mind.
I’m also going to be offering some free classics in the form of ebooks here. You can get some of these books from other sites for free but these are books you should definitely get here or somewhere else, because they are great. Look for at least one new addition to the City of Amathar catolog on the 3rd of each month.
I’m pounding through chapter two of Knights of Amathar right now, but I’m already thinking about what should be next on my book list. I have several ideas, and while one might be more appealing to me right now, I’ll probably change my mind by the time I finish my current project. Here are my current ideas:
A novel that takes place between the second and third books of The Steel Dragon, turning the trilogy into a… series with four books in it.
A novel that does the same thing, only takes place after The Two Dragons (making the new book the fourth book in the series. I would have to remove the epilog at the end of the two dragons that tells what happens to all the characters for the rest of their lives.
A novel that takes place in the world of The Steel Dragon, but with all new characters– a family that is split up and travels around the world.
A novel about a shipwrecked sailor (Yes, I just read Robinson Crusoe) taking place in the world of The Steel Dragon.
Enough Steel Dragon for you?
A science fiction novel about a merchant starship captain– romance/adventure.
A sci-fi conspiracy comedy– can’t say anything more than that at the moment.
A story about archaologists in the far future opening a time capsule from the twentieth century.
A fantasy story about people from different eras of earth brought to a magical realm.
A swords & sorcery novel about a warrior and a bard and a queen.
A sci-fi horror story about a starship crew who finds unspeakable horror on a dead world.
A story about children who can cross dimensions.
Well, there you go. When I get to the end of my current work, I’ll let you know which if any of these I decide to work on next.
There just couldn’t be a more timely and valuable blog site than Finding Free eBooks. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t find out about this wonderful resource until its moderator Christine posted a comment here at City of Amathar, but now that I have, you can bet I’ll be checking it on a daily basis. Here you can find not just the big distributors of free ebooks like Manybooks and Feedbooks, but individual authors and small presses wanting to see their books as widely read as possible. Make it one of your regular sites.
My first novel was Princess of Amathar. I originally thought up the story when I was a teenager. It was not a particularly brilliant plot, but was like the adventure stories that I enjoyed reading at the time. I wrote the first chapter several times over the years, but never got much farther. Writing a novel is really hard if you haven’t done it before. Just continuing takes a great deal of will power. About the time I started college, I made my last attempt to begin the book. I expanded the beginning while writing other things (mostly fanfic, which thankfully because no one ever heard of the internet in those days, never saw the light of day). I worked at it sporatically for years. After I got my first job teaching Junior High English, I began to share my writing with my students as I encouraged them to write, and they in turn encouraged me to keep going. It still took a long time. Then, when I was about 75% done, I began to share my writing with some of my teacher friends. With their feedback, I finally managed to finish. It was about eight years from start to finish, and this was only 93,000 words. Four fellow teachers helped me revise the book. When that was done, I was so proud that I immediately sent it off to a dozen book publishers. I recieved a dozen rejection letters. I stuck the manuscript away and forgot about writing for a while. Then one day I mentioned my book to a coworker, who suggested I check out Lulu and self-publish Princess of Amathar, if just for myself and my friends, family, and students. I did. I self-published it. Then a funny thing happened. I felt like I could write another novel and a new story just popped into my head.
City of Amathar 