I will have a review of DC Adventures, essentially Mutants & Masterminds rebadged for that universe, in the next day or so. After a day of bed rest due to some kind of funky 24 hour bug I’ve been knocking chapters of Perseus out this evening. I should be on track for an August release in the Kindle store.

The last month was a medical one — I finally have insurance again, so I can do more than basic maintenance. (Unlike a lot of whingers, I actually value my health so I pay for it and am glad I can still buy quality. I could just go to the VA and slough it off on the public.) Teeth got cleaned and a root canal is in the offing. New glasses and my eyes are about the same as last time; not bad. However I might have ocular prehypertension. Shoulder strain fixed. Next, my badly deviated septum gets operated on (fun fun!). Blood pressure is fluctuating between normal and slightly high…not bad considering I’m doing nothing but reading and writing. I really need to get out and do more exericse.

Next month, the baby comes, so I’ve got about two weeks to punch out the main body of Perseus before I become sleep deprived and mostly useless. Cawnpore, my novel of the India Mutiny is in proofreading/editing as we speak and should be on track for a June release on the Kindle bookstore. Print on demand to follow, once I find a favorable venue.

Why Kindle? Why not go through the usual hoops of traditional publishing? For much the same reason many musicians are eschewing the big entertainment companies and going right to the market…I want to profit on my work, not lose most of it to middlemen. Additionally, I don’t find the notion of letting a small group of snobs dictate the literary quality. One only has to look at most postmodern tomes to see the wealth of adject crap that the publishing community has been foisting on us.

The stigma of self-publishing, once a common thing for authors in the 18th and 19th Centuries, is starting to collapse. E-publishing is cheaper and this forces the price point down; it’s good for the customers and bad for the big printing houses. It’s also great for the artists, who get the majority of the tuck from their work. Quality is less an issue than one might think: you can troll through the reviews of a work in the Kindle store and quickly make out if the work is good. Even if it’s not, at $1-3 a pop, you’re not getting shafted as bad as laying down $17 on a trade paperback of the latest postmodern crap that the guardians of taste would have us judge “high art.” (Take Steve Martin’s latest dense, shitty opus which is as dense and unedifying as Shopgirl was charming.)

I foresee a new era of “dime novels” coming, where fiction is predominantly electronic (modern pulp, if you will), while non-fiction and reference style materials continue on primarily in print. E-pub will be equated with “low art”, just as pulps and genre fiction have been for 70 years, but it will be the bulk of fiction sales in a matter of years.

Okay…that’s enough rambling: Release Cetus! (The name of the actual monster that threatens Andromeda, not the Kraken — which are Norse/Scandinavian in origin.)

UPDATE: Final word count for the night — 14000+.