Scribings, Vol 4: Miscreations ebook now available!

This morning we published the ebook version of Scribings, Vol 4: Miscreations in the Smashwords and Kindle stores. I and the other members of the Greater Portland Scribists have been working hard on these stories for months, and we’re overjoyed to announce that they are finally ready for publication. It’s been a long road, and we delayed the publication several times, but our reason was understandable: there’s a lot here. With twelve stories weighing in at just over 85,000 words, Miscreations is our longest anthology yet. So, while we missed our usual June release date, we feel the extra time spent on these stories was worth the delay, and we know you’ll feel the same.

For our 13th book, we decided to get all fancy and hired local artist Peeter Parkker to design the cover art. Check out the full-sized artwork here and his website at http://akapeterparker.com/

As always with our anthologies, I made a PDF sample that gives you a short excerpt of each of these stories:

Room Two by Steven Inman
If all the world’s a stage, is the next act about to start?

My Toaster Hates Me by Jamie Alan Belanger
They’re just a bunch of smart assets.

Behind The Cloth by Richard Veysey
Sometimes, hate is just a tool.

Non-Working Memory by D.L. Harvey
Birthdays, a timeless tradition, can bring up all kinds of issues.

Breed by Timothy Lynch
He’s fighting for tradition; she’s fighting for survival.

Qi’lin by Shelli-Jo Pelletier
Legends don’t die… They’re born.

X-Ray Glasses by Steven Inman
What you see might just re-make you.

Naked Monsters by D.L. Harvey
Family and identity gain definition by blood, bonds, and broken souls.

The Hunt by Timothy Lynch
The future is unreal.

The Howling of the Storm by Shelli-Jo Pelletier
Winter storm warning: a change is on the wind.

The Joke by Richard Veysey
Morality is no laughing matter.

Dappil Goes To Hell by Jamie Alan Belanger
…and Hell is eager to send him back!

The ebook is currently available at Smashwords and will be live in the Amazon Kindle Store. Other ebook stores will carry it in the coming two weeks or so.

We are also making a paperback of this volume, which should be ready later this month.

Scribings Vol 4 Coming Soon!

Volume 4 of the Scribings anthology series is almost done… we’re putting the finishing touches on the stories and should be ready to publish the ebook this week. The paperback will take another couple of weeks to get all the formatting just right, but that should be out at some point in July.

It took a little longer this year because we have twelve stories… 12! Totaling at just around 85,000 words, this will be the biggest Scribings yet!

Miscreations are things that should not exist, but do. An event happens that transforms an entity into something so amazingly good or so horribly evil that you can’t help but be fascinated by its existence.

Scribings, Vol 4: Miscreations contains twelve stories from the Greater Portland Scribists that explore these oddities. Errors in evolution. Discoveries in supposedly clean rooms. Extreme memory loss. Appliances that are a little too smart. Mythical beasts reborn. And one joke that went way too far.

And click the image on the right to check out the full-sized cover art by Peeter Parkker. His website is at http://akapeterparker.com/

Fun With Word Count Statistics

While writing my post yesterday about my word count statistics, I ran some other numbers through the ol’ spreadsheet and came up with some other interesting facts. I made these word count statistics by highlighting the actual stories, so if you compare to word counts at places like Smashwords, it won’t match up… I didn’t want to include things like copyright text and author biographies in these counts.

• As a company, Lost Luggage Studios has published 12 books so far, for a total of 770,677 words… that’s about 4,000 words less than the Bible!
• The Terran Shift universe now consists of more than half of a million published words… 541,973 to be exact.
• The Scribings anthology series contains 149,461 words and will be closer to 200,000 when we publish Volume 4 in June.
• Including Scribings, the Terran Shift anthologies, and How Mal 780, we’ve published 291,772 words of short stories.
• Our fantasy world, Palamar, currently only has 12,286 published words… but that’s going to change by 2015 for sure. It should almost double when Dappil Goes to Hell comes out in Scribings, Volume 4 in June.

Terran Shift Anthology, Vol 2 is now available!

We just published our latest anthology at Smashwords this morning! It should show up in the Kindle store later today and will start appearing at other ebook retailers over the next few weeks (Apple, Sony, etc).

Genre: Science Fiction (Cyberpunk) / Anthology (multiple authors)

Continue Reading…

Coming Soon: Terran Shift Anthology, Vol 2: The Bio-Tech Era

For a while now, we’ve been working on stories for the second volume of The Terran Shift Anthology. Scheduled for release at the end of this month, this volume currently includes seven stories from five authors. All stories are set in the Bio-Tech Era of the Terran Shift Universe, a plausible near-future where humanity’s dependence on technology has expanded to every facet of life.

Routine hacking jobs, nanobot plagues, casual cryonic freezing, virtual lives, and fighter jets with vulnerable computer uplinks. From Singapore to Mwanza to the liberated city-state of New Seattle, people use technology to augment every part of their lives. Some install computer hardware in their heads so they can link directly to the Internet. Some wear glasses so they can navigate city streets with GPS satellite data, allowing them to remain online indefinitely. Some enhance their Net connections with a new psychedelic narcotic that allows them to access data with all senses.

This title is scheduled for release on December 30th, 2013 as an ebook at Smashwords and Amazon Kindle.

These stories are scheduled to be reality starting in 2039.