Tag: ebook

Yet Another Invader – in Fiction Vortex

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Ficton Vortex July 2014My short piece “Yet Another Invader” appeared in the July issue of Fiction Vortex. This is an odd one, less adventure oriented, but still science fiction. Fex is stuck out in the wilds, trying to figure out how to remove an alien invader lodged in a piece of equipment. Somehow I missed the publication on the day it came out, but I got paid today so that jogged my memory. Fiction Vortex published my dieselpunk story “Memory Book” in August last year.

Here’s the opening of “Yet Another Invader”:

Night came quickly out this way. Always did.

It felt like the sun blasted the desert clean all day, as if some spectacular furnace was set on high and aimed right at this one spot before dropping off the side of the world.

I’d been here sixteen years now, at altitude, watching the sun pass overhead each day. When I arrived they called me Mr. Harding, but now I’m just Fex. I guess I can fix your stuff up better than most.

“Ripples from the Weather Aggregator” at Black Denim Lit.

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

Black Denim Lit June 2014My story “Ripples from the Weather Aggregator” is in the June issue of Black Denim Lit. BDLit is a fairly new publication, but is going from strength to strength. This is my second story with them. I kind of like the cover highlighting Michael Haynes’s story. My own story is another action-adventure with science fiction tinges to it.
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In the line at Heathrow, Jaclyn kept seeing suspicious characters. Any one of these people could be after her. Once she was in the air, it would be all right. Everything would be fine. All she had to do was get off the ground. She wondered if they could touch her once she was through passport control. Did they have people on the other side?

Read on at Black Denim Lit.

“Aerobrake” – short story in The Colored Lens

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CLW2014My hard sci-fi story “Aerobrake” is out now in the Winter 2014 issue of The Colored Lens. The story’s mostly set in low Earth orbit. Claire’s about to call it a day repairing satellites when she gets a distress call. Another tech, ship scraping the atmosphere, could use a hand. Here’s the opening:

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The galaxy, for a moment, looked frozen. Claire’s ship pitched on its axis and she had a passing view of the stars in lockstep with her view through the forward windows. From orbit, especially this low, the distant blazing suns were always sweeping by. The ship’s current altitude, 326 kilometers, had her completing an orbit in just over ninety minutes.
The ranging radar pinged at her. She was less than thirty kilometers from the errant satellite. With a sweep on the controls, she swung the cockpit around on its internal gimbals. For a moment she was in darkness. Only another couple of hours and she would be done for the month. Back to Levithab for two weeks in the station’s gravity spin. After three months on call–basically meaning out all day every day–and a full week in the Demeter’s tiny cockpit and living quarters, she really needed a break. The ship was starting to feel dank and lived in, like old socks that needed a wash, rinse and airing.

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The Colored Lens is published for Kindle – available at Amazon for $3.58. There are a whole bunch of stories in there – a really great magazine.

To Take a Breath – new Triple V/Self-pub story out.

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

to take a breath cover

A while ago I wrote a longish short story (8400 words), science fiction, set well into the future and sent it off to all the appropriate pro markets. It came back each time, sometimes with a form rejection, sometimes with a little personal note but still a rejection. So I’m putting it up through my own Triple V imprint with some trepidation.

You see, it’s about an astronaut running out of air. I haven’t seen Gravity yet, but the previews seem to have given the game away a bit too much (I’m going over the weekend so I’ll know more by Monday). I know my story’s very different from the movie (near-future vs. far future, international space station vs. space wreck, near-Earth-orbit vs. light years away, George Clooney vs. minor character, etc.), but still kind of feel like I’m ripping off the trope a bit, even though I wrote this before I’d even heard about Gravity.

Still, to assuage that guilt a fraction, for readers of this blog/facebook post, here’s a code to get it free. (I know there aren’t many of you, but feel free to pass the code on… it expires in a month anyway: Gravity will be fading from the theatres and I will feel less guilty).

Go to the ebook at Smashwords and enter the code FY77L. You have to be a member of Smashwords, but I think most of you are already. Let me know if not – I’ll send you the epub or mobi or whatever. You can preview 20% anyway with or without joining.

Promotional price: $0.00
Coupon Code: FY77L
Expires: November 24, 2013

It’s also on Kindle, and will show up on Nook, Sony, etc. soon.

Here’s the opening:

Clare Benjamin knew she had three minutes to live. The suit’s oxygen gauge read eighteen liters, atmospheric effective. Fifty breaths. She was already on the emergency tank.

She gave the strobe a flash and saw the way ahead. Conduits and wires. Some of them were damaged, pointing stiff and sharp edges into the narrow passages.
Behind the conduits the pressure walls might be intact. Probably were. She’d felt a thrumming in the hull when she’d pulled herself along through the evacuated hold. Somewhere inside there was an engine running. It might just be some automatic function, but it might also be a converter sustaining atmosphere to some sections of the wrecked ship. If she could get inside an atmospheric room, then she could buy some time to figure out her next move.

“You find it yet?” Suz said through the comms.

Clare pulled herself along another meter in the darkness. She fired the strobe again. The gap looked even more vicious up close. Like the serrated jaw of a deep sea monster ready to ingest her.

“Clare? You got an exit yet?”

“I’m here. No. I didn’t find it.” Suzanne Memphis was waiting outside the liner in their eighty ton tender, the Mercy Me.

“You need to move, girl.”

“Oh? Thanks for the reminder.” Two months ago, they’d been salvaging from The New Jersey, a station at Cannon’s Star, busted and orbiting Cooltown, the system’s biggest gas giant. The station had been shut down by its owners. Suz and Clare’s clients had lost all their personal property being shipped through. Suz had gotten herself lost. The memory still made Clare blanch.

continue reading at Smashwords

A Visit to the Theatre – new ebook

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

vttt 2
I’ve just put up my story “A Visit to the Theatre” as an ebook through Triple V Publishing. The story first came out in the Static Movement anthology Bounty Hunter a couple of years back. The ebook is paired with a flash fiction story “The Neuron Thieves”, which was itself published in The New Flesh.

Here’s the blurb:
Nikki’s got a an urgent telex for an easy bounty. Niemann’s in town. All she’s got to do is find him. The trouble is, Niemann wants to be found.

ebook – $2.99
Kindle
Smashwords

Print – $4.99
Amazon

Imaginary Maid
The fabulous cover illustration is by Ateliersommerland, who also created the illustration used on “Imaginary Maid Forgets She is Late for a Banquet”.

Year end review, with a late rally

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Close to the end of the year, close to completing some goals, distant from others.
 
My word-count goal went well: from 300,000 for the year (completed in August), upped then to 450,000 for the year (completed in November) and upped again to 500,000, and right now sitting at 497,065. Catastrophes aside, it looks like a slam dunk on that one. Yay.
 
Publishing 300,000 words didn’t go so great. It went pretty good – right now it’s around 203,000. Mostly self-published under my Triple V Publishing banner through Smashwords, Kindle, and CreateSpace/Amazon. It was gratifying to have several acceptances by publishers in there – about 26,000 words of that total were published in online and print magaziens such as MicroHorror, The Colored Lens and Takahe.
 
What about the other 97,000 words? Well, I sure wrote them. Part of it was procrastination: sitting on a 60,000 word New Zealand Literary novel instead of sending it out to some publishers (and then self-publishing it if it came back as noes). I’ll remedy that in the new year, with my new goals. Part of it was a pig-headed determination to keep things on the market – that is, numerous stories, novelettes and novellas that get rejected and go out again, rather than self-pubbing. I’ll fix that too: with some of the pieces that have been to the seven or eight main markets: the next time they come back I’ll pull them out of circulation and publish them through Triple V.
 
I felt like I spent much of the year feeling out in the wilderness: I’ve had more than a hundred rejection slips since January. Mostly form rejections, but there have been a few personal notes which has been cheering. The acceptances have helped out too – early in the year my sci-fi novella The Wreck of the Emerald Sky appeared in The Colored Lens. I had a few flash-fiction acceptances through the year, which was nice, but most of the longer works seemed to keep cycling. Then, a late rally. An acceptance for Takahe (a New Zealand literary mag), a third-placing in a regional short story contest, and an acceptance for Aurealis – one of Australia’s leading science fiction magazines. Coming just a couple of weeks before the end of the year, that acceptance has buoyed me no end: I am on the right track, and persistence pays (real money in this case, too).

Next year, I’m aiming at 500,000 words from the git-go. And aiming at publishing 600,000 (whether self- or traditional) – and have a plan in place to make the possible.

See you next year, with more goal updates.

Deadstick updated

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


To celebrate a year since my first re-engagement with Smashwords and ebook publishing, I’ve updated my dieselpunk story “Deadstick”. It’s got a new cover, and is combined with my steam/diesel-punk story “How Do You Like These Heights”. Combined with that, it’s also available as a print book. And a new blurb to go with that. I’ve been working on upgrading my blurbs to be a little more punchy. How’s this?

Hank’s scorching across the California sky in a race to save his son. The afterburners are overheating and Sally Jean is tearing apart around him. At 55,000 feet.
A dieselpunk story by Sean Monaghan, author of Pan Am 617 Heavy. Includes bonus story “How Do You Like These Heights”.

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ebook $3.49

Smashwords
Kindle
Apple
Nook (looks like the old version today – hopefully they’ll update soon.
Kobo (also an old version – what’s going on?)

Print $4.99

Amazon
Createspace

First try at publishing a double-header

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


As my self-publishing empire lags and stutters along, I’ll keep trying new things. What a learning curve. Following ideas from Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch with their publishing arm WMG Publishing I’ve published two stories – Pipe Dive and Skinny Joe together, as one package, but as two separate units one with each story as the lead title. The content of each is the same, just in reversed order. They are linked stories – both set on the same world, with the same group of researchers (though in these two stories there’s no character crossover, there are, and will be, in other stories).

As you can see, I’m also working with covers – one is self-designed, the other is a commercial/professional illustration. I’ve bumped up the font size and word layout while trying to retain the general Triple V Publishing look. I noticed on some covers (like Xuento), the author name almost vanishes. Spreading “Monaghan” across the width, then tucking “Sean” in above, nestled between the “M” and the “h” risers makes the name visible at even thumnail size. I’ve simplified the covers too – no tagline, not even the Tripe V logo (perhaps that’s a mistake, we’ll see).

I’ve worked on my blurbs too – trying to be active and succinct. I think next year I’ll look at taking Dean Wesley Smith’s course on writing pitches and blurbs. This is how they look at the moment:

Skinny Joe
A Daron story. Skinny Joe’s on a deadline. And he can’t wait to get home to see Paula. But when he triggers something in the depths of the structure, it looks like he’ll be lucky to get out alive. A short story by Sean Monaghan, author of The Tunnel and Rotations. Includes bonus story “Pipe Dive”.

Pipe Dive
A Daron story. Pieter thought divorcing Mel would have been the end of it. Now he’s trapped in an artificial cavern deep in the structure. With Mel. And there’s no way to get back. A short story by Sean Monaghan, author of The Tunnel and Rotations. Includes bonus story “Skinny Joe”.

Buy them here: Skinny Joe and Pipe Dive. Soon on Kindle, B&N and so on.

Skinny Joe was originally published in Infinite Windows, and this is the first publication of Pipe Dive. That’s a new experiment – most of the Sean Monaghan fiction I’ve self-published has been of previously published works.

The Wreck of the Emerald Sky – new novella in The Colored Lens

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

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My novella The Wreck of The Emerald Sky has just been published in The Colored Lens.

Filled with bright, imaginative speculative fiction, The Colored Lens is a quarterly, available on Kindle for $2.99.

The Wreck of the Emerald Sky is a sci-fi adventure story set in my Barris Space universe. If you’ve read my stories “Barris Debris” in Deep Space Terror or “Eltanin Hoop Anomaly Rescue” in Will It Go Faster If I Push This?, then you might be familiar with the setting.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs as a taster
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Chapter one

Derel Larsen sat bolt upright in the bed as his ear-roll chimed. He was halfway to Meriam’s room before he realized that the chime wasn’t her security alert. It was just a phone call.
“Larsen,” he said, thumbing the connect. He kept going towards Meriam’s door.
“Larsen?” a voice said. One of the controllers at flight. Jamie, Larsen thought. Nice woman, even if she did have to confirm his name right after he’d said it.
“Medical leave is over, sport,” Jamie said.

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The Tunnel – preview experiment

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Just trying a little experiment with ways of letting my novel The Tunnel be out in the world. Issuu is a cool way of publishing documents. Magazines seem to favour it, but then I discovered that I could publish an excerpt from my novel in a relatively straightforward way. So with a click here you can read the first 18 chapters free. Yes, this is slightly stolen from James Patterson, but I’m still learning about marketing and so forth.

At the page there’s a link to buy a print version for $11.09. I don’t know what that’s about (you can buy a print version of the whole book – 100 chapters – for $14.00 from Amazon… why buy just a segment?). Still I hope you enjoy reading a few chapters of it this way.