Read an ebook week starts today, and for the next seven days, you can get the following books free at Smashwords. Follow the links below and be sure to use the coupon code: RW100.
Astrid Maxxim and her Amazing Hoverbike
Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome
Mysteriously transported to the artificial hollow world of Ecos, Earth man Alexander Ashton finds himself in the middle of a millennium-long war between the reptilian Zoasians and the humanoid Amatharians. Adopted by the Amatharians, Ashton must conform to a society based on honor and altruism, ruled by Knights whose power comes from the curious energy forms known as “souls” which inhabit their supernaturally powerful swords, and rife with its own peculiarities and prejudices. When the Princess of Amathar, whom Ashton has longed for since first seeing her, is captured by the Zoasians, he must cross an alien world, battle monstrous creatures, and face unknown dangers to save her. Princess of Amathar is a sword-swinging novel of high adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is the story a strange world filled with alien races, aerial battleships, swords and energy weapons, amazing adventures and horrible dangers, and the man who must face them all for the love of a woman he has never met.
Princess of Amathar is a sword-swinging science fiction story of high adventure and is available for $2.99 in ebook format wherever fine ebooks are sold. You can purchase this book in paperback for $6.79 by following this link.
I revise my books every so often. I try to do it yearly. I enjoy rereading them and usually find a place or two that needs a touch-up. But I was in the shower this morning thinking about really rewriting a couple of books– completely rewriting them from scratch. Specifically my first two books Princess of Amathar and His Robot Girlfriend would be very different if I wrote them today. I think I’ve learned a lot about story telling and writing in the past seven years. So I think I’m going to do it. But not now. I think I’ll do it just after I retire from teaching. That’s still six or seven years from now. I have too much writing to do between now and then. Besides, think how much more I will have learned in the next seven years.
My first book, Princess of Amathar is an adventure story and an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to whom I owe a great debt of youthful reading pleasure. It is available everywhere fine ebooks are sold, including Barnes and Noble.
Transported to the artificial world of Ecos, Earth man Alexander Ashton struggles to understand the society of his new friends the Amatharians. As he does so, he finds himself falling in love with their princess and being thrust into a millennium-long war with their mortal foes the reptilian Zoasians. Princess of Amathar is a sword-swinging novel of high adventure.
Transported to the artificial world of Ecos, Earth man Alexander Ashton struggles to understand the society of his new friends the Amatharians. As he does so, he finds himself falling in love with their princess and being thrust into a millennium-long war with their mortal foes the reptilian Zoasians. Princess of Amathar is a sword-swinging novel of high adventure.
Find Princess of Amathar wherever fine ebooks are sold, or follow this link to Kobo Ebooks.
Princess of Amathar is on sale for the month of June, only at Smashwords during their Summer/Winter event. Regularly 2.99, pick it up for 1.50 with coupon code SSW50 by following this link.
Mysteriously transported to the artificial hollow world of Ecos, Earth man Alexander Ashton finds himself in the middle of a millennium-long war between the reptilian Zoasians and the humanoid Amatharians. Adopted by the Amatharians, Ashton must conform to a society based on honor and altruism, ruled by Knights whose power comes from the curious energy forms known as “souls” which inhabit their supernaturally powerful swords, and rife with its own peculiarities and prejudices. When the Princess of Amathar, whom Ashton has longed for since first seeing her, is captured by the Zoasians, he must cross an alien world, battle monstrous creatures, and face unknown dangers to save her. Princess of Amathar is a sword-swinging novel of high adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is the story a strange world filled with alien races, aerial battleships, swords and energy weapons, amazing adventures and horrible dangers, and the man who must face them all for the love of a woman he has never met.
Princess of Amathar was my first book and it took a long time to write. It’s not my best work probably, but it gets more positive reviews than negative. I’ve had a sequel in the works forever. There are about five or six chapters done. I decided to look them over today and found them in a mess. The formatting is all crazy and the text is scrambled in some places. I guess it’s been so long since I worked on it, that it’s moved across several different word processing programs and computer formats. If and when I get back to it, it’s going to take quite a bit of work to get it into any kind of shape at all.
Originally, I had planned a whole series of Amathar books, patterned format wise after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series, for which Amathar is an homage. This first sequel would be Knights of Amathar. I don’t know what the others might be… Priests of Amathar? Swords of Amathar? Something like that.
I’m getting ready to count up book sales for the month so far. Some books will have high sales numbers and some low numbers, but I don’t necessarily love my best-seller(s) the most. I have strong feelings for all of my books. After all, I wrote them because I wanted to write books that I would like to read. When some books that usually sell very few copies suddenly do well, even if it’s only a little bit, I feel a bit of pride.
Tesla’s Stepdaughters is one of those books. It’s really different from any other books I’ve written. Science fiction and fantasy are easy for me, but a mystery (such as it is) seems much harder, and I’m just proud to have come up with it.
When Eaglethorpe Buxton sells well, I’m similarly pleased. I suppose its a validation of myself as a humorist. I probably had more sheer fun writing EB than any other book.
I feel good when somebody buys (and reads) Princess of Amathar. It was my first book and took the longest to write (years and years).
Picking my favorite book or my favorite character really would be like picking my favorite child. I love them all. And just like my children, there is a little bit of me in each of them. Even the evil ones.
I’ve been making a concerted effort not to read bad reviews, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it. I am just happy to know that good reviews greatly outweigh the bad ones. But recently I read one of the very few negative reviews of Princess of Amathar and wanted to mention a few things brought up.
I won’t repeat the review or argue about the reviewer’s opinion of my writing. He or she is entitled to his or her opinion. I just want to talk about a couple of specifics. Here is the passage in particular–
A little bit of Burroughs’ Princess of Mars, a kock-off of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a few other sources are cannibalized for this book… our hero is transported to an alien world “for some reason”… he remains nonplussed at this teleportation and the nonsensical and random events that come afterward.
I have always said that this book was intended as a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fact that it is dedicated to him might hint at this. I have read Ringworld and enjoyed it. And two things in this book are ideas that I probably borrowed from Niven– the idea of a world built long ago by an unknown race and that it was populated by that race for some unknown purpose. I would bet Larry Niven didn’t invent these concepts, but he really does a great job with them. I didn’t invent the idea of a hollow world (a Dyson Sphere), and I didn’t get it from Ringworld. I read about it as a kid and had already begun the story before I read Ringworld. The two planet types really only superficially resemble one another. The reason for the hollow world was another tribute to Burroughs– to his Pellucidar stories. The idea of the hero not knowing or worrying about how he got to his new world comes right from Burroughs (though they changed that in the John Carter movie). So does the idea of completely different alien races living seemingly next door to one another. So does the fact that even though they have energy weapons, the characters fight with swords. If those things seem nonsensical or random, you my friend are not a true Burroughs fan.
My goal was not to write Burroughs fan fiction although I did that in my younger days. My goal was to write a book that was something like Burroughs would write today– a new book that would remind me of the things I loved reading as a kid. I just reread Princess of Amathar the other day, and I am just full enough of myself to admit that I enjoyed reading it.
New edits of Princess of Amathar are now available at Amazon and Smashwords and should be available everywhere else within a few days.
There are not too many changes, so unless you are a real completist, you might not want to bother. About 5 words were changed or corrected in the book. The biggest change was with comma usage.
On the other hand, if you have not read my first book before, I invite you to check it out. I have to say that I really enjoyed it as I was reading it through again. I write books that I like to read, and this is especially true of this book– regardless of how that makes me sound.
City of Amathar 