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.

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.

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.

—

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.]

I’m taking the next week off from the day job to attend a writing workshop on the Oregon coast and it should be a lot fun — a lot of writing, a lot reading, and a lot of good conversations with very serious and talented writers expected to follow.    Life can be so hectic these days that it’s nice to just wear the writer’s hat once in a while.

But at the end of the workshop, I’m going to do another book signing at a local bookstore in Lincoln City.  If you happen to be in the area, come out and see me.  Here’s the details:

DEBUT AUTHOR SIGNING HIS FIRST NOVEL

SATURDAY MAY 15TH

AT 1.00 PM.

North by Northwest Books
6334 S. HWY 101 #9
Lincoln City, Oregon

STREET CAR VILLAGE (map)
Bookstore Phone: 541-994-3087

You can even preview the first 50 pages of the book, if you want to sample The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys before deciding if you want to buy it.

It’s now made its way into print, in the book Cat Tales II: Fantastic Feline Fiction, which you can buy from Amazon and other places. The story is about a man who has a problem with a cat named Polly.  Actually, more than one cat . . . Well, you’ll have to read the story to know what I mean.

And hey, my name even made the cover.  Neat, huh?

So I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that while my first book may not be the kind of book that flies off the shelves right from the get go — hey, there’s no vampires, wizards, or other strange paranormal activity going on here, just two boys who steal their Principal’s car and end up on a life-changing adventure — I really believe it’s the kind of book that if people read the first page, they’ll have a hard time putting it down.  Maybe not everyone — taste is a subjective thing — but a lot of people.

Of course, my friend challenged me to post my first page online to back up my words.  So here it is, the first page of my first book:

The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys
by Scott William Carter

If I’m going to tell you how I killed this kid, I can’t start on the day it happened.  It won’t make any sense, and you’ll just think I was some psycho teenage boy with glue for brains.  No, the whole thing really started three days earlier, on Monday, which made it bad straight off.  It was also raining, which made it even worse.

In fact, it was raining so hard that my tennis shoes were soaked before I even walked two blocks from our house.  Not just kind of wet, either, but really soaked in that way your socks get all squishy and your feet make those mucky sounds each time you take a step.  Muck, muck, muck, all through the halls, everybody staring at you like you’ve just turned into a human squid.  Back then, before all the crazy stuff happened, most kids looked at me as if I was a human squid anyway.  I figured that’s what they’d put in the senior yearbook, if they remembered to put anything in there about me at all:  Charlie Hill, Most Likely To Be a Human Squid For the Rest of His Life.

If it sounds bad, that’s because it was.  If you want to read a nice, happy little story where everything turns out all neat and tidy in the end, you should go read some Hardy Boys or something.  This isn’t that kind of story.

Not that everything that happened that Monday was bad.  About halfway to the school, I realized I had probably missed the bus on purpose.

-

I now have in my hands the author copies of my first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys.  I can’t tell you what a great feeling this is.  What a beautiful hardback book.  As a former owner of a used bookstore, and one who’s sold a number of antiquarian books, I gotta tell you it’s a real pleasure to open this one up and see the words “First Edition” there on the copyright page.  I would have been fine with my first book being a paperback original, but it gives me an extra thrill for it to be a hardcover.

And if you’ve pre-ordered it, you too can hold it your hands . . . in about five days.

There’s some things percolating on the writing front, some things that could be potentially very good, but I can’t talk about them yet.  Regardless, I have this sense that my writing career is shifting into its next phase.  What that phase ultimately looks like remains to be seen, but the shift is happening, I think.

It’s also caused me to do a lot of thinking about exactly what my career goals are as a writer.  Up until now, I’ve pretty much just gone by the seat of my pants, my philosophy that I would just keep trying different types of books to see what sticks.  And because my writing is just like my reading — eclectic — this plays to my strengths.  I just write what I want to write and let the chips fall where they may.

And while I may always be a little that way (it’s just who I am), I also want to give myself the best chance at reaching the widest audience possible.  This might mean being a little more careful about what I write and why.  It might mean thinking about the potential audience a little more, as well as how commercial and marketable a particular concept is.  Up until this point, I’ve pretty much refrained from letting the marketing and business side into my creative space, but lately I’ve been challenging that assumption.  And that’s okay.  I think I’m finally at a point where I can do this in a way that augments my creativity rather than hinders it.

It’s a very subtle shift in the way I’m approaching the craft, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a significant one.  I’m also more willing to allow people into the early stages of the creative process to help me gage these factors.  This is the biggest gamble for me, but there’s some things that have happened lately — and we should see in the near future how these things pan out — that give me hope I’m finally at a point that I can do this without jeopardizing my confidence.  I never would have attempted some of these things ten years ago, and I would seldom if ever recommend that beginning writers do anything but just write what they feel passionate about and finish it before showing it to anybody.

But becoming successful at anything involves some amount of risk, and it’s not just in the product.  It can also involve your methods.  I’m starting to take more risks with my methods right now.  We’ll see how it pans out.