Book Status Update

Here's the latest news on my books:

The Sixth Discipline is still free everywhere except Sony, and I have great hopes that it will be free on Sony soon, as it has been "reshipped" from Smashwords.

The Nostalgia Gambit is only for sale from Amazon until some time in March. I have scheduled it for a giveaway in the Kindle store on February 8 and 9.

King of Trees will launch on Amazon in February.  If anyone wants a review copy, let me know.

The Nostalgia Gambit got a wonderful review!

The book blog An Eclectic Bookshelf reviewed The Nostalgia Gambit! Reviewer David Killie had some very nice things to say about the story

“The plot follows Tychon Damiano, a small time crook who takes pleasure in stealing from his nation’s aristocratic rulers. ... Basically this is another novel in which Buxton continues to impress me with the interesting and varied worlds she creates which are a main element in the overall attraction of her novels.

[The author] manages to keep the reader interested and entertained via the use of politics, intrigue and Ty’s psychological response to the situation.”

The Eclectic Bookshelf blog lives up to his name, and since the reviews are all neatly categorized by genre, with  links on the main page, it's always easy to find books of interest. David reviews both traditionally published books by well known authors and self published books, and he reads a lot, so there is a wide selection. Plus, since David lives in the UK, he always includes "buy" links for sites other than the US. 

The Nostalgia Gambit got its first Amazon review!

I was remiss about sending out ARCs (advance reader copies) of The Nostalgia Gambit, so it has just now gotten its first Amazon review, four stars! The reviewer zeroes in on the themes of family and identity, and  notes:

“... things get even more complicated as Tychon is forced to doubt everything about himself and his memories. The result is a story that builds very slowly and quietly, but packs a punch at the end as Ty learns many truths about himself and his history.”

One more try

I'm still trying to get The Sixth Discipline to be free on Sony. Supposedly, Sony matches whatever price I set on Smashwords, but it has been months since I made the book free on Smashwords, and as of a few weeks ago, it was still 99¢ on Sony. After several attempts at reshipping it didn't work, I decided the only thing left to try was to actually take it down from Sony and then to re-ship it. It's supposed to be shipped again soon, so we will see if that works.

Fingers crossed!

The future is (more or less) now!

The future has always been now, in the sense that time never stands still. Once someone gets an idea for a better way to do something—and starts to work on it—things starts to change. What's different now is how much the pace of change has accelerated.  When my daughter was much younger, she asked me if I fought with my siblings over what videotapes to rent at the video store (because she and her brother could never agree). I explained that we didn't have videotape or VCRs when I was a kid. Now, of course, it's either DVD's from a vending machine or downloads from Amazon or Netflix. Baring some kind of freaky time reboot, her generation will be the only one to rent videotapes as kids.

There's a science fiction blog called i09 that has a wonderful post about predictions from science fiction that came true in 2012. They're all pretty cool, but the three I found most intriguing were these:

• Dawn of the Cyborgs:  South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is a double amputee who raced in the Olympics wearing blade-shaped prosthetic legs. His nickname is (naturally) Blade Runner. 
• Flowers for Five Unnamed Rhesus Monkeys: Scientists were able to improve the cognitive ability of monkeys by implanting a chip in their brains. And unlike poor Algernon the mouse, this effect didn't wear off.
• Warp Factor One: NASA has begun working on a design for a faster-than-light drive! It's all very theoretical, but still, it is so cool that NASA is trying to "Make it so!"

This is one reason it's so hard to write science fiction! Reality keeps catching up!

Why do we say “sick as a dog”?

I had a wonderful dog for 14 years, and he was very rarely sick. He tore both ACLs (I didn't even know dogs had knees, let alone that they had anterior crusciate ligaments, those things in knees that athletes are always tearing) when he was about eight. That affected his quality of life later, but he still lived to be 16 or 17 (he was a rescue so we're not sure of his age).

So why, when we are miserable with, say, the flu, do we say we are sick as a dog? I am pondering this because, like a sizable percentage of the US East Coast population, I have the flu. I'm quite miserable, actually. I ache all over like someone beat me, I have a headache, my throat hurts like heck, I cough all the time, and right now I can feel I'm spiking a fever.

But I did want to thank the folks who posted Amazon reviews of my books in the last couple of weeks. Almost every title got a new review, which is pretty good, considering that most of them have been out for well over a year. Of course, they weren't all glowing, but even a somewhat-negative review is better than no review.  The exceptions were the fantasy novella Where Magic Rules, and the new novel The Nostalgia Gambit, but I have hopes TNG will get a review soon.

So thank you, and I'm going back to bed now, because I'm (you guessed it) sick as a dog.

Happy New Year and a request for reviewers

Today is the first day of 2013. As a friend pointed out on Facebook, the new century is now a teenager. It can go to its room a sulk for a while if it likes, but meanwhile the rest of us have to get on with life.

For example, I plan to launch my alternate history King of Trees later this month.  I'm hoping to get a review or two lined up for this one closer to when it launches, as my regular reviewers are a little backed up.  If anyone out there would like to get a free review copy, please post a comment to let me know, or if you prefer, send an email to me directly: carmen (dot) webster (dot) buxton (at) gmail (dot) com.  Be sure to specify if you need epub or Kindle format, but I would like the review to be posted on Amazon US, as to start with, the book will only be available in the Kindle store.

Here's the blurb to see if you're interested:

“What if the world we’re on is only one thread out of millions of threads in the rope of time?” The question the Outsider woman posed to him left Bardolph as confused as ever. He knew the Outsiders had appeared as if by magic many years before, during his great-grandfather’s reign, but he had never understood where they came from. He only knew they had changed Albion forever.

Melissa York might have been grateful to her rescuer, who called himself King of Albion, but she saw no reason to let her gratitude influence her opinion of antiquated notions like monarchy and pagan religions. Let the Druids go back to their forests. She and her people were the best defense Albion had against the invaders.

Bardolph knew better. All the peoples of Albion would need to work together, or they would find themselves conquered again. Only this time instead of a Roman emperor, their tribute would be paid to one in faraway China.  He only hoped the Outsiders were as clever and as powerful as rumor said they were, because Albion needed all the help it could get.