New Sean Monaghan story is out now and available from ebook retailers such as Smashwords. $1.99.
The fabulous cover image by Ateliersommerland.
You can read a sample here
Bianca sulked. She’d pushed herself into a corner of the kitchen, crouched and squeezed herself right under one of the benches…
“Canyon Rim” is a new literary story available now. Ernie is a sleepwalker. Quite possibly this is going to become a problem. It begins like this:
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Ernie Freiden had been born to a Canadian father and an Australian mother. Both had been vacationing through the national parks of Utah and Colorado when they met in 1982. Shirley had quickly abandoned the German tourist she’d been traveling with, and taken up with Thomas, in Moab, near Arches National Park. The German, Shirley later told Ernie, though through into his adult life he heard different and increasingly unlikely versions of the story, had flown back to Germany, almost immediately, and years later had been crushed to death in a museum accident by a part of the Berlin wall he was helping to put on display after the reunification.
Thomas, Ernie’s father, had quickly (though not as quickly as the German’s departure from U.S. soil) had his name abbreviated to Tom, and complained little about that, after all Shirley was as decisive a woman as Tom had ever encountered and what was a slight adjustment to his name in comparison to her company?
“Thomas,” he’d said to her a few times, his mother would relate to Ernie as he grew up. “And I would say, ‘Tom’, never calling him Thomas.”
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The story is scheduled for publication in the Static Movement anthology Sleepwalkin’ and Picklockin’ sometime in 2012 and I’m grateful to editor Chris Bartholomew for releasing it to Triple V so it might garner a few readers in the meantime.
Triple V’s new young adult/middle grade novel Habitat by Sean Monaghan is now available on Kindle and other ebook sites. $2.99 download. A POD version should be out soon – currently waiting for the proof from CreateSpace.
“Seve Brigham’s dream opportunity – a cadetship to work on the huge orbiting Habitat – is about to turn bad. Very bad. The station is an unfinished mess: behind schedule and under-staffed. Then there’s the alien voice in Seve’s head. And thieves are trying to steal the whole station. Seve needs to look sharp and think fast.”
Habitat is a backlist title. Originally published on BookHabit – one of the first ebook sites. BookHabit sold it’s inventory to SmashWords, but at the time I was busy with other things (and disappointed with the lack of sales – zero – and the complicated set of hoops to jump through to format it for SmashWords), so it fell into limbo.
Of late I’ve been learning about formatting – seriously not that big of a deal – and about indie publishing. With my newly edited novel Rotations (more on that soon) just released from Lucky Bat Books, now seemed like a good time to bring Habitat back to light.
Beginning a series of Bren Taylor stories by Len Stone. Len is a pen name I’m using for these stories about Taylor – a fix-it man who sometimes gets more than he bargained for. I’m hoping he’ll make it through all the stories. “3am, Persledt Eight” is a pulp, hard sci-fi romp that twists and turns a little. Taylor’s got to get up to an orbitting hospital where one of the patients had run amok, threatening the integrity of the whole station.
As I develop more stories by Len I’ll set up a separate page for him.
I tried a couple of versions of the cover too.
The story is available now as an ebook through Triple V Publishing – 99 cents. It’s a little over 8000 words. It starts like this:
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“Situation?” I said as I picked up the phone. No one calls at 3am unless there’s a problem. I have no family left so no heart attack was worth disturbing my sleep.
“Taylor?” the voice said. Joe.
“Situation?” I said again. He knew it was me. Making an urgent call then messing around did not endear me. I could be sleeping.
“The BonOrbit facility. A patient ran amok and now they’re trapped.”
Initially I was going to publish Rotations here with Triple V, but with the intense copyediting and other opportunities afforded through Lucky Bat Books, I’ll now be publishing with them. The cover has yet to be approved, and I’m still working through the final edits (a bigger job than it first seemed, though smaller than I’d imagined it might be when I first submitted). Will it be out before the end of the year? Hmm. That’s a maybe.
Staring across Schema Menovanni’s shoulder, Gerry looked through the narrow window at the snowy Pyrenees. He glimpsed one of the eagles, wings spread, head fixed then darting as it sought prey.
“Are you listening to me, Brother Mitchell?” the Schema said.
Gerry turned to Menovanni’s face, wondering how it had become so very lined. He’d never seen the old man change his expression from neutral. His outward elderly calm perhaps belied a vexed youth. As the oldest monk in Sopphoreo, no one knew his history. “I am listening, Schema,” Gerry said.
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My story Suitcase Nuke, from Triple V Publishing, is now available for .99 cents from the Diesel bookstore. Also from Smashwords.
The story was originally published in the Static Movement Monk Punk, edited by AJ French.
Triple V’s first short story ebook release – Deadstick, by Sean Monaghan – is now up at Smashwords. Read the first 20% free.
“Deadstick” came from a fairy story I’d conceived, about a burning sailing ship running aground off a fairy village and the problems ensuing. A very different thing to how this dieselpunk story turned out. For a moment I thought of having a pair of stories, one fantasy and one sci-fi, both using that same device. This story, however, wrote itself very quickly, while the fairy one still sits in my head, not quite ready to pour forth. Perhaps it will come to me one day.
Deadstick was originally published in the Static Movement anthology Oil.
