Deals on Short Story Collections

Jul23

The annual Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale is underway. It gets its name because where I live in the northern hemisphere, readers are loading up their e-readers for great beach reading and vacations. In the southern hemisphere, it’s the middle of winter and people are spending time in a warm and cozy place reading. All of Hadrosaur’s titles are available at deep discounts this month and I’ll be highlighting them all month long here at the Web Journal. If you’re looking for a specific title, you don’t have to wait for me to highlight it, just visit http://www.hadrosaur.com/bookstore.php and click on the book you’re interested in. On its page is a link to Smashwords if its available there. The coupon codes for these discounts are automatically applied at checkout. One of the things I love about Smashwords is that they provide ebooks in all popular formats and they’re DRM free, so you can download them to your favorite device.

Today, I’m featuring two short story collections I’ve been proud to publish. The first is an anthology edited by Sheila Hartney called Exchange Students. The second is a collection of related time travel short stories by Joy V. Smith.

In Exchange Students you can study abroad! See new places! Meet new people!

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is exchange-students-150.jpg — *Exchange Students*

In our exchange student program, you can literally study anywhere or anywhen you can imagine. We’ll send you to new planets. We’ll send you to new dimensions and realms of existence. We’ll send you through time itself!

Don’t believe me? This exciting anthology contains many tales of our thrilling and educational exchange student program. You’ll read tales of aliens coming to earth and humans traveling to alien worlds. You’ll meet a denizen of Hell who travels to Heaven. Some students will discover their super powers on their journey. Other students will have encounters with the undead. You’ll meet a law enforcement officer who travels to the realm of the fae to help solve a crime of truly interdimensional proportions.

Featuring twenty-two amazing stories by Roze Albina Ches, Jaleta Clegg, Ken Goldman, Paula Hammond, Sheila Hartney, Chisto Healy, Joachim Heijndermans, Sean Jones, Tim Kane, Alden Loveshade, Tim McDaniel, J Louis Messina, Jennifer Moore, Brian Gene Olson, David B. Riley, Katherine Quevedo, Holly Schofield, Jonathan Shipley, Lesley L. Smith, Emily Martha Sorensen, Margret A. Treiber and Sherry Yuan

Exchange Students is available for 75% off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1005851

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is sugartime.jpg — *Sugar Time*

Sugar Time is a collection of four connected short stories. Our protagonist’s name is Sugar. Sugar Sweet. But never EVER call her ‘Sweetie.’

When Sugar’s Uncle Max falls ill and his collaborators disappear, she investigates the old Victorian mansion where he conducted his research. She soon finds the collaborators—or what’s left of them—along with an angry Neanderthal. She also finds her uncle’s research project, a working time machine. Sugar must act quickly to unlock the secret of time travel so she can set things right and protect her uncle’s research.

Sugar Time is available for half off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/567992

Short Story Collections on Sale

Jul24

In Exchange Students you can study abroad! See new places! Meet new people!

Exchange Students is available for 75% off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1005851

Sugar Time is a collection of four connected short stories. Our protagonist’s name is Sugar. Sugar Sweet. But never EVER call her ‘Sweetie.’

Sugar Time is available for half off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/567992

2020 Foresight

Jan11

In the last post, I looked back to the previous decade. Now, I want to take a look forward at what’s coming next. As it turns out, I’m entering the year 2020 with three projects right at the final editing and typesetting stages, so those are occupying much of my attention at the moment and I expect they will all go “live” in the first quarter of this year.

One of the projects that will appear in the next couple of months is the anthology Exchange Students edited by Sheila Hartney. It features twenty-two stories from a diverse group of authors who explore the idea of exchange students in a variety of settings. Some stories imagine interplanetary exchange students, some imagine time traveling exchange students. We have an exchange student from Hell visiting Heaven. There are also stories about exchange students crossing between our world and fantasy worlds. Throughout the book, you’ll hear stories from the perspectives of the teachers, students, and parents who find themselves in these situations. The final edited manuscript has just been delivered to me and I plan to start typesetting the book this week, then I’ll get in touch with the cover artist about finishing the cover, teased in the thumbnail at the head of this paragraph.

I’m also excited to be presenting Don Braden’s first novel. Don is a retired high school teacher who has often used science fiction as a teaching tool in the classroom. Don has also written for Tales of the Talisman Magazine. What’s more, I’ve almost literally known Don my entire life. He was my brother’s English teacher before I was even old enough to go to school.

Don’s novel is called Upstart Mystique. The novel opens with the space vessel Marco P en route to a distant colony world. The ship loses all power and an unknown force convinces the navigator that a distant, dead world is the vessel’s true destination. Commander Malcolm Carpenter orders the crew to abandon ship to protect them and to learn how to defeat whatever force has intercepted his ship. The crew discovers a small group of inhabitants, the only people on the planet who were not uploaded into a vast computer network—a computer network captivated by upstart humans and their imaginations. To free his crew and his navigator from the planetary network’s grip, Commander Carpenter must face a moral dilemma. Can he save his crew without condemning a planet’s inhabitants and their digital ancestors to death?

I’ve finished the first typesetting pass of Upstart Mystique. It needs a cover and a final check by the author, then it’ll be ready to go to press!

The third book I’m working on is the 25th Anniversary edition of my own novel, The Pirates of Sufiro. When the rights to the “Old Star/New Earth” series were returned to me, I wrestled with how much to re-edit these books. They were my early books and I renamed the series “The Space Pirates Legacy” in part because one of the major characters has a vessel named Legacy and in part because I do see it as my “legacy” series. It’s the series where I cut my teeth as a writer, so to speak, and mostly I wanted to bring them back so they were available to fans who wanted my early work. Still, I felt like Pirates had some cool ideas that were buried in awkward writing. Also, the only ebook edition of the book had some problems that made it even more of a challenge to read. If I was going to put this book back on the market, I owed it to readers to improve what I could. I’ve just completed the actual rewriting portion of the project. I have a few more edits to do, then I’ll start typesetting. Again, the actual book should be available for purchase in the very near future. That said, people who support my Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/davidleesummers will get a code to download it for free once it’s released.

After this, it’ll be time to move on to the next wave of projects. While typesetting and finishing these books, I hope to make some decisions about what will be next. Some things are clear. I’ll be revising and re-issuing the rest of the Space Pirates Legacy series: Children of the Old Stars and Heirs of the New Earth. At this point, I don’t expect they’ll take the kind of time I’ve devoted Pirates, but I do need to re-read and evaluate them. I do plan to polish and work on some short stories I have in mind and send them out to editors. Presuming Children and Heirs don’t prove as time consuming as Pirates, I’ll probably start work on the next new novel. You can share your thoughts about what that should be in the comments below, although I’ll also be asking my Patreon supporters and I do give their thoughts more weight.

Last Call – Exchange Students

Oct8

Editor Sheila Hartney and I have been enjoying reading the wonderful submissions that have been coming in for Hadrosaur Productions’ forthcoming anthology, Exchange Students. Although we have a full anthology at this point, we are willing to be tempted by a few more good stories and could make room for a truly exceptional story or three. That said, this is last call. We will be closing to all submissions on October 15, 2019. Any submissions received after the 15th will not be considered. The illustration below is a sneak peak at the cover art by Laura Givens.

Exchange Students is an anthology to be published by Hadrosaur Productions that will explore the vast realms of what it might mean to be an exchange student at any point in time, space, or across dimensions. Most of us have known foreign exchange students in our school years. This anthology imagines an exchange student program expanded to include students from the past, the future, fairies, trolls, distant alien races, and any other exchange student the author might dream of. The complete guidelines are available at: http://hadrosaur.com/ExchangeStudents-gl.php.

I’m really excited by the breadth and diversity of stories we’ve selected so far. The thing that makes an anthology compelling to me is to see what authors do with the concept. We have serious stories that take a good hard look at humanity and we have humorous stories. We have flash fiction that hits us with a cool idea and we have longer stories that allow us to get to know the characters better. Longtime readers of Tales of the Talisman Magazine will recognize some familiar names, but I’m pleased that we have many new authors as well.

At this point, I hope I’ve whetted your appetite and you’re now asking when you can get your own copy of the anthology to read. My goal is to publish this by February 15, 2020, so I can have it available at the Hadrosaur Productions dealer’s table at Wild Wild West Con in March 2020. The book will also be available in all popular ebook formats through vendors such as Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes and Noble.

Anthology Announcement: Exchange Students

Dec15

I’m excited to announce that on February 1, Hadrosaur Productions will begin reading for a new anthology with the working title, Exchange Students, which will be edited by Sheila Hartney. I thought this would be a great time for Sheila to tell us a little about herself and how she got the idea for the anthology. I will share the link to the anthology guidelines at the end of the post.

I started reading science fiction as soon as I learned to read. When I was a little girl in Utica, NY, the room that held science fiction books was off-limits to little kids, so I had to sneak in when a librarian was turned the other way and then hope some kind librarian would actually let me check the books out. Otherwise I had to persuade my older brother to check the books out on his card. That same brother belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club back in the 1950s and early 60s, and tried to keep me from reading his books by putting them on a high shelf he thought I couldn’t reach. He was wrong. I figured out how to reach it.

I attended Jim Gunn’s short story workshop in Lawrence, Kansas, and from it came my Writer’s of the Future story, “Kidswap”. Over the years I’ve attended other workshops, notably the Taos Toolbox, and the one that came along with being a Writer of the Future. Chris McKitteridge, who has taken over from Gunn was in my workshop. In the service of name-dropping, Fred Pohl was a guest instructor back when I took it.

The job that has had the most impact on who I am is that for ten years I was a ticket agent at National Airport in Washington, DC. It was an enormously difficult and stressful job much of the time, but it taught me to think on my feet (literally, as I stood for eight hours in high heels on a concrete floor), to solve seemingly unsolvable problems, and best of all it came with free travel. I got to see the world.

I am not sure how much my own love of science fiction was an influence, but my son is in a PhD program in astronomy.

Currently I live in Santa Fe, NM. The amazing clear night skies are perhaps the best thing about living here. A close second is that so many science fiction writers live here or very near here, and I count any number of them as friends. I even got to see last year’s eclipse with one well known writer.

Like a lot of writers I’ve worked at a variety of jobs: paralegal, retail, temp office work, nurse’s aid. I worked at an art gallery here in Santa Fe for two and a half days and then was fired for “unbridled exuberance”. Yeah, really. I also ran for office once. The Kansas State House. You can probably guess that I lost, but it was a fascinating and educational thing to have done.

So far as hobbies go, I crochet and embroider, and of course read a lot. Half or a bit more of what I read is non fiction, and I’m especially entranced by epidemiology, earth science in all forms (earthquakes, volcanoes, continental drift), genetics and human evolution, dinosaurs, the list goes on.

My favorite authors at present are James Van Pelt, a fabulous short story writer and nice guy, and Connie Willis, a fantastic writer of novels and perhaps the sharpest and funniest person I’ve ever known.

As for the Exchange Students idea, one of my relatives wrote a story that referenced an exchange student from ancient Rome, which immediately struck me as a great idea and I asked if I could steal it. They said yes, of course, and I wrote a short story which goes by the title “Exchange Student”. In generating ideas for a possible anthology, the exchange student idea was always there.

I hope you’re as excited about the prospect of the Exchange Students anthology as I am! Now, be sure to check out the guidelines and start thinking about the tale you want to tell about an exchange student of the past, present, future, or across dimensions. http://hadrosaur.com/ExchangeStudents-gl.html

David Lee Summers’ Web Journal

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and More!

Tag Archives: Sheila Hartney