Amazing News: 3-26-2017

Will not appear this week* because we have foolishly decided to rely on ephemeral electronic media.

Had our records been stored in a more permanent medium, such as PRINT on PAPER, it would certainly take us longer to compile the news, but then, if that were the case, we’d have a bevy of reporters earning 35 cents an hour to do the grunt work.

Perhaps this is related to the two year string of paper book sales eclipsing electronic book sales…or maybe we’re just pissed that electronic technologies do not yet posses the reliability, robustness and permanency inherent, I say INHERENT in our so-called legacy technologies.

Go ahead, call me a Luddite.  I won’t kick.  But mark my words:  10,000 years from now they’ll be digging plenty of CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, hard drives and tablets out of land fills, and not a single one of them will convey any information…only a profound sense of puzzlement on the part of our future archaeologists as they try to rationalize our culture’s embrace of impermanent records.  They’ll come to the conclusion that we just didn’t care all that much…and they’ll be right!

The silver lining, if one can call it that, is that paper will survive and remain decipherable.  Our culture will be analyzed through the scraps and shreds that remain of all of those airport reads…Suzanne Collins, Tom Clancy, E.L. James…and the one thing they’ll know for sure about us, is that we didn’t know shit from shinola about S&M…

*Except for this somewhat appropriate announcement:

Ian Randal Strock’s Fantastic Books has contracted with Tom Easton and Judith K. Dial for an anthology of 40 science fiction stories under 2,000 words to be called:

SCIENCE FICTION FOR THE THRONE

ONE-SITTING READS

The stories should be reprints–because the budget permits us to pay only $20 per story.  The stories should NOT involve bathroom humor.

Send submissions (and questions) to Tom at profeaston@verizon.net.

We also need blurbs.  Anyone dare to call the book “A moving experience!”?

If the book does well, we expect to follow it with more titles in the same vein, such as:

FANTASY FOR THE THRONE

ROMANCE FOR THE THRONE

MYSTERIES FOR THE THRONE

HORROR FOR THE THRONE

and this announcement:

All good things must come to an end, they say – and so has my exclusive association with Amazon. As of now, my novel CHILDREN OF THE DIFFERENT is available on many different stores in lots of different countries – Australia, USA, UK, Canada, Italy, France, Brazil, Japan and the Netherlands. There will be more, but here are links to all the stores I know of so far (as well as good old Amazon for the traditionalists): Kobo ibooks (ebook) ibooks (audiobook) Smashwords Amazon Australia Amazon US Amazon UK Barnes & Noble (Nook) inktera Scribd Angus & Robertson (ebook) Angus & Robertson (print) Indigo bol.com Rakuten (Japan) livraria cultura FNAC (France) Mondadori Feltrinelli If you are interested in checking out CHILDREN but don’t use Amazon, there are now plenty of options for print, ebook or audiobook. I recently gave away some prizes in all formats to email followers – I hope they enjoyed them! In further news, I am revising the next novel, to be published (provisionally) in November this year. This is a different kind of novel: a quasi-historical fantasy mystery entitled THE HIDDEN FACE. This is one of a series of novels set at different eras in the same world (this one inspired by the Carolingian empire and Islamic Spain) linked by reincarnation and mysteries connected with a fabulous ancient treasure. THE HIDDEN FACE goes back a long time for me – I first wrote it when I was working together with my former literary agent (now sadly deceased). I can’t wait to let other people see it! I will be putting together the all-professional production team (artist, copyeditor, formatter) over the next months. Probably the next time I send out one of these newsletters, I will have definite dates for publication or pre-orders for THF! Till then – enjoy Spring (or autumn, depending on where you are in the world!)