Sunday, September 18, 2011

Story Launch: "Freeing Truth" + First Batch of Audiobooks Launches! + NEW PUBLISHING SITE: deviantART

Good news: I'm starting again on The Current next week!

In other news, one week ago, I launched my newest short story, "Freeing Truth." This was written as part of a school assignment, which was to make a creative piece (story, poem, painting, sculpture, etc.) involving the quote, "The truth shall make you free," in the light of Cory Doctorow's dystopian, modern-day 1984 novel, Little Brother, which was the "all-school read" for this past summer. The result is "Freeing Truth," my longest short story to date, at about 5.25 pages long in Word. Like "Trust Fall" before it, "Freeing Truth" is split into "chapters;" there are six in this one, as opposed to five in "Trust Fall." The story is of the fantasy genre, and involves a selfish king who holds a mysterious power in his castle. A youth then tries to steal it and learns a startling fact about the king and the kingdom. "Freeing Truth" is currently available on both the ZU Forums and Figment, and in the next few weeks, it will also be available on deviantART (more on that later).

Today marked the launch of the first batch of audio versions of my short stories! In case you never noticed the "Audiobooks" page here, it's been here for about three months with a message saying "Coming soon! (I promise!)" Well, it wasn't quite as soon as I'd hoped, but I'd say not bad! Each audiobook is read by me, unabridged. If you download the whole thing (as a ZIP file), you get some extra goodies. Unfortunately, that's not out yet, as I haven't recorded all of the audiobooks yet. The first nine have been recorded, as well as the version of "Trust Fall" with the extended second chapter, the version of the audiobook that will only be available in the ZIP file. I will also be recording "The Blind Man Who Could See" later today (UPDATE, 17:38: Done and available!), and maybe another, as well. If you enjoy books more when you can listen to them, then you'll benefit from the really dramatic (at least most of the time) audio versions of my stories! Even if you're a visual reader, you can still enjoy! Just head over to the "Audiobooks" page, and you can download (individually) the available audiobooks. (There is a small error in "Twelve Chimes" when my microphone apparently cut off for a second. No need for you to worry, as I will be fixing that--by rerecording that cut-off sentence--and re-uploading the file within the next week or so.)

As I hinted at earlier in this post, I now have a new official publishing site! It is the well-known art site deviantART, which has a relatively small (compared to its art community) writing/fiction community. You, readers, are much more likely to be on deviantART than on Figment or, especially, the ZU Forums. So now you have access to some of my works directly on a site you may frequent! Because DA's literature-publishing system is limited to text and HTML (really crappy, in other words, but at least easier to work with than FictionPress's, which is as buggy as heck), I am uploading the Word documents in PDF format. This means that you will be reading my works through an embedded Google Docs Viewer (like The Current on this blog) on deviantART. Not very pretty, but better than nothing, I suppose.

Currently, the only work of mine on DA is "Resolution." I will be uploading the rest of my works from 2011 to DA in the coming week. Be aware that for the time being, I will be limiting my library on DA to just my 2011 stories (excluding The Current), the Midnight Sequence, and the original version of "Trust Fall" (without the extended second chapter).

Finally, just a few bits of information. "Wonders of the Sky" is now available on Figment, as of one week ago. Also, I have officially changed the title of "Just a Bite: A Tale of Medesaelus" to the shorter, easier title of "Just a Bite," a move mostly made to establish that the Tales of Medesaelus series will not come to fruition as originally planned. (If you want to write it, shoot me an email or something!) While previously-published versions of the story will maintain the original title, all future publication of the story and all future mentions of it will refer to it as "Just a Bite." Lastly, I have begun writing a new, longer list of my short stories that includes more details, including the exact release dates (for most of them; I wasn't able to get exact dates for all of them because Figment does not list dates of publication anywhere) for each one at each location. Currently, this list is private, located in an unshared state in my Google Docs; however, I may do something with it in the future.

In my next post (probably sometime this week or next weekend), you can look forward to seeing some "Freeing Truth" reception (already got some from ZU), some "Open Gate" reception (also from ZU), some musings about my first couple weeks of school, and probably also a new song! Remember when I posted a song I had written in 2008? Well, I'll post another one next time, too!

Enjoy your week!