For a limited time, they’re also making it available for the bargain basement price of $2.99.  It’s available right now for the Kindle on Amazon.com and also in various other formats via Smashwords.com.  In the next month or so, it should also show up on the Barnes and Noble site, the Soney e-reader bookstore, and the iBookstore, but if you can’t wait you can get it in those e-reader formats right now over at Smashwords.com.

Here’s the blurb that’s appearing on various sites:

In these six provocative tales, Scott William Carter takes the reader on a journey to places where love and loss intersect: a grieving tattoo artist makes a cross-country trip with a pregnant woman on the run from her disturbed husband . . . a mysterious artist finds a woman washed up on the beach and feels compelled to paint her . . . a young man who made a disastrous choice in wife is forced to crash weddings with his ghostly bride so she can remain on Earth . . .

Reading these and three other stories, you will be intrigued, moved, and troubled as Carter’s clear and engaging prose takes you on a guided tour of the darker corners of the human psyche. But as he writes in his introduction, “There’s hope in there, too. There has to be. Otherwise, why write at all?”

“Scott William Carter makes it look easy. But if anyone thinks that writing good, intriguing fiction with a clear, plain voice is easy . . . Well, they should try it sometime.” — Chizine.com

“While it may be small in size, A WEB OF BLACK WIDOWS is as powerful a package as dynamite.” – Gnostalgia

“The title story is a stunner.” – Fright.com

*Copies of the signed hardcovers were limited to 500 copies, and they’re running out, so if you want to own one of these fine books as a collector’s edition, I encourage you to buy one soon.

How do I feel about this turn of events?  Pretty darn good.  And yet, I can’t say life has changed all that much.  Some family, friends, and coworkers may see me in a slightly different light — it’s one thing to tell them you’re a writer, and another for them to see your book on the shelves at Borders — but life for me continues pretty much as it was before:  Help people with technology issues at the university by day, be a good husband and father by night, and squeeze in the writing wherever I can.

My daughter’s seven, just completed first grade, and is having a blast riding her bike without training wheels.  My son’s four and we have hopes he’ll survive childhood, yet his indefatigable ability to put himself in harm’s way never ceases to amaze us.  Though my wife’s foresight in putting rubber padding on the edge of the fireplace — seven years earlier – finally paid off the other day.

Did all the publishing doors open in New York after I published my first book?  Sadly, no.  I’ve had a lot of near misses with some other books lately, which can be frustrating, but it’s also a reminder that I’m writing well enough to attract the attention of major editors.  The temptation is to rush out there and self-publish, especially now when there’s so many opportunities for writers to do just that and actually make some money (check out J.A. Konrath’s blog for more info on this), but if  you want to reach a wide audience, that’s not always a smart move.  It’s a smarter move than it was ten years ago, but it’s still not usually the best move.

Often the best move is to keep putting your manuscripts in front of major NY editors because they’re the ones who can give you access to the widest possible readership.  This may not always be true, but it’s still true now, and it’s certainly true for the kind of novels I’m writing. However, because publishing continues to change at a rapid clip, I’ll probably have to re-evaluate this decision fairly often.

I keep focusing on the long game.  I keep focusing on keeping productivity high, on striving to write the best I can, and placing my trust that in the long run that if I keep reaching for the widest audience possible, good things will happen.  That’s all you can do as a writer.  I recently finished my seventh book, a little fantasy with a very unique hook, and it’s now in the hands of editors.  I’m already well into my eighth, a young adult novel with a very distinct voice.  I continue to toss in short stories here and there, but most of my focus has been on the novels.

What else?  I’m dramatically curtailing the time I spend online.  I don’t post on this site all that often, or on the social networking sites either, but still, I realized recently that far too much of my reading time has been devoted to the Internet, particularly the most shallow and insidious form of it.  While there’s lots of good stuff out there, it’s come at the expense of spending that time with good old fashioned books.  Since books, and novels in particular, are my creative fuel, that’s something I have to change.  To use an analogy, it basically feels like I’ve been consuming too much junk food and not enough stuff that’s good for me.

The Internet can be a powerful tool, to be sure, but that big flowing mass of information can be terribly addictive.  Before you know it, you’re checking your email every fifteen minutes and worrying about whether Lindsay Lohan has gotten out of rehab.  Not good.

I’m not sure how other writers feel, but for me, there is a refreshing clarity of thought that comes when I disengage a bit from the hive mind, when I stop worshiping at the Altar of the Now and work at my own pace and in the solitude of my own thoughts.

No matter how productive you are as a writer, it’s doubtful you can write all the time.   At some point, you’ve got to call it a day, even if it’s just to catch a few hours of sleep.  The question is, where do you stop?  What’s the best way to quit so that you have the easiest time starting again the next time you sit down to string some words together?

Easy:  Stop when you’re on a roll.

In other words, stop when the words are flowing, when you know where the story’s going, when you can vividly see the road ahead.  It’s much easier to get those creative juices flowing if you’re not staring at a blank white page.  I sometimes even stop in the middle of a sentence.

This is actually harder to do than it seems, because when you’re in one of those creative fugue states, you don’t want to quit, but that’s actually the reason why you should.  You’re quitting the writing session in a positive mental state and with plenty of momentum.

Note:  Now that I’m on a bit of a roll myself, I’m going to be taking a break from the Games Writers Play series.  I’ll likely pick it up again at some point, but I want to focus 100% of my creative energy on the new novel.  Thanks to everyone for reading, and an especially big thank you to those who donated!

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

I hesitate even mentioning this game, not because it’s not good, but because it’s so famous that it seems superfluous.  But because it is such a great writing game I want to include it in my series.

Write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month.

That’s right, we’re talking about the same game that motivates thousands of people around the world in the month of November:  National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short.  If you want extra encouragement, check out their site and participate in the month of November.  But you don’t have to do it in the month of November.  Any month will do.

Now for those of you crying out that no good books could possibly be written in a month, I must remind you that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in the basement of UCLA’s library on a coin-operated typewriter.  And fifty thousand words, divided by 30, is about 1700 words a day.  Even if you have a job, if you just dedicate your evenings to it for a month, you should be able to do it.  Why, if take a look at their site, you’ll see that lots people have.

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

Pick a book or short story at random.  Type the first line and only the first line into a blank document.  Now write a couple pages using that first line to see if it sparks a new story.

If it’s a famous first line, you’re better off deleting or modifying it when you’re done to avoid the inevitable comparisons (unless you’re doing a parody), but otherwise most first lines are not all that memorable.

I call this game “Forking From the First Line,” because essentially what you’re doing is taking a different fork in the road from that first line.  For kicks, you could go back and read the other writer’s short story or novel later on, to see how different they are.  And trust me, they’re going to be very different.

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

One of the ways I like to do this is by doing what I call Crazy Hollywood Pitches.  It’s fairly straightforward:  Make four or five columns of movie titles, separated by genre (horror, science fiction, romantic comedy, etc.), and then combine them at random in a MOVIE TITLE #1 meets MOVIE TITLE #2 fashion.

So let’s say I have Driving Miss Daisy in one column, and the first three movie titles in my science fiction column are Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Dune.  That would give me . . .

• Driving Miss Daisy meets Star Wars
• Driving Miss Daisy meets Blade Runner
• Driving Miss Daisy meets Dune

If you’re laughing out loud at these, that’s great.  This should be fun.  Laughter is a tonic for a tired imagination.  But then ask yourself how you might really make one of these crazy pitches into a story, and don’t be afraid to change the idea to see where it leads you.  What if the story’s about an android driver shuttling a prejudiced old man to his retirement home on another planet?  What if their ship crashes?  What happens next?

It’s just one idea.  If it doesn’t lead anywhere, scrap it and try another.  If you’re looking for an easy way to make lists of movie titles, try IMDB.com.

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

“Writers are, pretty much thieves, stealing ideas from other people who didn’t have the foresight to write them down, and then from the people who did have the foresight to write them down.”  — Lemony Snicket

Probably the number one question I get asked — especially by people who aren’t writers — is where I get my ideas.  The truth is, ideas are a dime a dozen.  They can come from anywhere.  It’s what you do with those ideas that matters.  One of the common mistakes that a lot of beginning writers make is thinking that ideas are a finite resource, that if you think of a good one then you’d better protect it fiercely because you don’t want anyone “stealing it” from you.

In actual practice I’ve often found that the ideas that I find most precious, the ones that I hold onto the longest, turning them over in my mind, shaping and molding them, don’t often turn out as well as the ones I think up on the spot.  I think this has something to do with letting an idea go where it takes you rather than trying to force an idea into a preconceived box.

Here’s a technique that I like to call “ripped from the headlines,” to borrow Law and Order’s tagline, that can help you think up ideas on the spot: Use a newspaper headline to generate a story question.  Don’t read the article.  Just use the headline to ask questions.

Instead of an actual newspaper, head over to a news search site like http://news.google.com and type in something like “burglary.”  You’ll come up with a bunch of articles.  Choose one that raises questions in your mind.  Trying it now, here’s one that jumps out at me:  “Teenagers Arrested In Marina For Burglary.”

Who are these teenagers?  What were they doing in the marina?  What were they stealing?  Don’t settle for the first answer that comes to mind.  Push a little further.  Maybe one of the teenagers was stealing a rare comic book from an artist everyone thought was dead, a guy living on a small yacht, and the other teenager was trying to stop him.  Maybe this crime leads to an unusual friendship.

Who knows.  You can go anywhere once you have the headline.  It’s just a place to start, and sometimes that’s all you need.

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

My short story collection, The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time, is now available for the Kindle, as well as in several other electronic formats.  If you’re not into the dead tree version of books, here’s your chance to own eighteen of what I consider my best short stories — seventeen of which appeared in places like Analog, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Ellery Queen, as well as one story original to this collection.  It’s $6.99, which amounts to less than fifty cents per short story.

• Buy it here for the Kindle
• Buy it here in PDF, HTML, or other formats

If you want to own the printed version, you can buy it on Amazon here.  Of course, you could also own both.  There’s no one stopping you.

If you’re serious about becoming a professional writer, there’s no way around it:  It’s going to take a huge time commitment.  If you want to dabble and play at it, treating it like a hobby, you can do that on an ad hoc basis, but that’s just not going to cut it if you have lofty ambitions.  You’re going to have to put in many hours of practice.

If you want more time, take a hard look at where your time is going now.  What can you give up?  One of the things I’ve mostly given up is television, which is a pretty big time sink for most of us.

Try giving it up for a week or a month.  You might be amazed at how much more writing you get done.

Now, I’m not one of those people that claim that television is bad for you, or that there’s nothing on, or that it’s a mind control device used by the government to keep us from rebelling.  I actually think there’s far more good shows than there were ten years ago.  There’s also more terrible shows.  There’s just more, which is why we have a bit of both.  If you’re a discerning viewer, you can find some great stuff out there.

But here’s the thing.  Time is a finite resource.  We’re all going to run out of it eventually.  My problem is not so much finding enough time to write, though I can always do better.  My problem is that with a day job and two young children, it’s tough finding the time to read. And television, as good as it can be on its best days, is not reading.  If you want to write teleplays, watch scripted television.  If you want to write screenplays, watch movies.  If you want to write short stories and novels, you must read short stories and novels.  No way around it.

So my point is to set priorities.   Giving up something bad for you, as hard as that is, is much easier than giving up something that’s good for you.  Because, you know, consuming more story, in whatever form, can’t hurt.

However, if you’re not finding enough time to write or read, you might have to give up something else to find it.  Television is a great place to start.

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

The first story featuring this character, “The Bear Who Sang Opera,” appeared last year in Analog.  It’s set in the same “Unity Worlds” universe as many of my other science fiction stories.  Since my writing often veers toward dark and brooding, every now and then I like to write stories like this as a way to change the pace — stories that are meant to be just good fun.  I really like Duff and plan to write more stories featuring him.

Anyway, here’s the opening of the story.  If you want to read the rest, buy a copy of the issue.  You can even now get it for the Kindle.  Or at Fictionwise.

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The Android Who Became a Human Who Became an Android
by Scott William Carter

The last time I saw Ginger, she was sporting two breasts instead of three.  Personally, I thought her breasts were perfect before, but I know that with some guys you could never have too much of a good thing.

When I stepped out of the shower, she was sitting there on the edge of my bed, decked out in a silky red number with a slit up the side that showed plenty of her long legs and a plunging neckline that definitely revealed too much of a good thing.  Steam wafted out from the bathroom and rose from my bare skin.   I was naked except for the towel around my waist.  Outside my tinted floor-to-ceiling window, a constant swarm of Versatian hoverpods hummed and whizzed past, everybody in a hurry to get somewhere on a planet where everybody supposedly came so they didn’t have to hurry.

“I need your help,” she said.

No hello.  No how have you been.  No sorry for breaking your heart, emptying your credit account, and taking off with your ship and your entire twentieth century holodisc collection. The last time I saw her, I was stepping into a shower.  Now, five years later, I stepped out of one and there she was.

“You have a strange sense of irony,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.  How’d you get in here?”

She shrugged.  “Bribed the desk clerk.  I’m pretty sure he thought I was a hooker.”

“You are a hooker,” I said.

She made a tsk-tsk sound.  “That was another life.  I’m a respectable woman now — married to one of the richest stepdock manufacturers in the known universe.  And you can kindly stop staring at my breasts, thank you very much.  It’s not that uncommon.”

“Sorry.  You know, I am working here.  I didn’t ask for you to barge in on me.”

“You’re working?  In a place like this?”

“I’m checking the security system for the hotel.”

“Ah,” she said, and waved her hand dismissively.  “Since when does Dexter Duff stoop to grunt work like that?”

“A lot of things have changed since you ran out on me, Ginger.”

– continued –

[Want to read the rest?  Buy a copy of the July/August issue of Analog, which you can usually find at Borders or Barnes and Noble.  You can also buy it online for the Kindle or at Fictionwise.]