I think for every Fourth of July since I published Political Pies – my collection of short stories of a political nature – I’ve had a free sale for it. On one hand, it’s hard to make money if you give your books away for free, but on the other hand the point of Political Pies was to get people to start thinking about politics in the hope we could start working on some of the problems we face to make a better world. I’ll sacrifice a few sales for that. At first, I only offered Political Pies by itself, but in the last few years I’ve started having bigger sales with four or five of my books for free. This year, I think I’m having my biggest Fourth of July Sale with eight of my Kindle books available for free. That’s 188 short stories all for the price of eight clicks.
But
before you go and snag some free books to read, I have a favor to ask. If you are an American citizen who will be
over eighteen by Election Day, November 8th of this year, all I ask is that in
the next few days you either double check your voter registration or register
to vote, your state’s website should have all the necessary details. Democracy only works if the people
participate and the first step of participation is to be registered to
vote. So if you do that, I’m happy to
let you have several of my books for free.
And if you aren’t an American citizen, then I’ll ask you to get involved
in your nation’s politics in whatever way you can.
The
following ebooks will be free to download on Kindle between Friday July 1st,
and Tuesday July 5th.
This
work contains some profanity and sexual situations. It is intended for mature
audiences only.
A
plague that kills men has devastated the world’s population. Only a few
thousand boys and men were able to be quarantined. But Mike Shay is the only
man known to have a natural immunity to the plague. Therefore, he is
practically the only man in a world of women. He spends his days reading,
playing video games, and making the occasional sperm donation. Then Dr.
Veronica Barrett shows up, disrupting what passes for his life. She says she’s
there to investigate his “mental wellbeing,” but is there more to her visit?
Instead
of the normal, adolescent, heterosexual male fantasy of being the only guy on a
planet of women, “Relics” tries to give a more realistic view of Mike’s life.
For
reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a
Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political
historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out
on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.
Everybody
complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to
do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political
element into my Political Pies
anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of
the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another,
my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might
grow out of all the political manure.
A Man of Few Words is a collection
of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on
steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers?
How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and
more using less than 1,000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and
general fiction to science fiction.
The
majority of the stories were previously published (most on my website) but all
were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by
some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about
the writing of it to give a fuller experience.
Useless
Cogs is a collection of forty, of my science fiction stories. They range from
only a few dozen words to a few thousand and are filled with time travelers,
AIs, clones, aliens, even sexbots, although not often as you would imagine. As
example, there’s a time traveler that’s always a step behind, an AI that’s late
on rent, and a sexbot with bad software. Some of the stories are humorous, some
horrifying, and some … depend on your point of view.
On
The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as
their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had
belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new
body. Set months later, “The Only Certainty” follows Derrick Gorton on an
average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the
semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.
Over
the years, I’ve posted several short stories on websites that later – for one
reason or another – died. While the corpses of some of these sites are still
around where you can read the stories, many have vanished from the internet.
And since there are few sites that will publish such previously published
works, the only way you could read them was if I self-published them in a
collection.
In
addition to such “lost” stories, I’ve included some new stories that – for one
reason or another – I felt I’d have a hard time finding someone to publish
them. So Seventh Story Stockpile
basically contains stories I didn’t know what else to do with.
The All-You-Can-Read Buffet is a collection
of forty stories covering various genres and themes ranging from six to over
4,200 words in length. Some of these stories I wrote a decade ago, while others
were written especially for this collection. All together, they are a buffet of
my writing. As such, I encourage you to read as much as you want. Go back for
seconds, thirds, fourths even. I won’t even mind if you skip over the stuff you
don’t like, but, to quote your mother, “How do you know you don’t like it? Have
you tried it?”
