Category: Fiction

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new book — well, a short book.  Technically, a novella, but usually only writers use that cute term, so let’s just call it a really short book.   It’s little work of historical fantasy called Lincoln and the Dragon. Here’s a little more information:

The fateful first of January. That’s how Abraham Lincoln described New Year’s Day in 1841, the day he temporarily broke off his engagement with Mary Todd.

Although this fact is well known among historians, what is not known is what else happened that day – when a deranged, dimension-hopping descendant of a Confederate general attempted to assassinate Lincoln long before he became the 16th President of the United States.

When the madman’s plan goes awry, Lincoln finds himself stranded in the land of Howander, a world populated by brave knights, drafty castles, and a princess terribly scarred by a one-eyed dragon who’s promised to return for her on her upcoming birthday. As he finds himself falling for the princess, Lincoln must make a choice: stay and fight the dragon, or heed the call of his dark dreams, which offer him tantalizing glimpses of his native country’s future – a country which may need a hero even more than this one.

The print edition won’t be available for another month or so, but if you’d like to buy the e-book, you can do so right now for the bargain price of only $1.99 from Amazon.com, BN.com, or from Smashwords.com (which sells PDF  versions for those of you who haven’t made the leap to e-readers yet.)

One other thing:  I’ve gotten a number of emails from readers who’ve written to tell me that they like my work and asking me what they can do to help.  The biggest thing you can do is write a review (hopefully positive!) at one of the online retailers, especially the big ones like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  Only a tiny, tiny fraction of people who purchase books do this, and it really does make a difference.  There was a study a number of years ago, I forget where, that showed that books with eight or more reviews showed a bump in sales attributable directly to the reviews, so there really is a measurable effect — even a short one like “Liked this book!  Buy it!” is enough.  Plus you don’t even need to use your real name.

Buy Now:

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Back in February, the fine folks at PS Publishing released my collection, A Web of Black Widows, which contains six tales all centered around love and loss.  While the print edition is still available as both a signed jacketed hardcover and a hardcover without a jacket,* I’m pleased to announce that Flying Raven Press has just published the electronic edition.  It also bears a different cover:

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.

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.