Amazon is giving away Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon. The catch is that it's giving away the Kindle edition only.

This is the first in a four book series entitled The Entire and the Rose. The Entire, as explained on the author's web site, is "a five-armed radial universe that exists in a dimension without stars and planets and that, in effect, tunnels through our own." The other novels in the series include A World Too Near, City Without End, and Prince of Storms.

Bright of the Sky has garnered 4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon.com, with quite a few impassioned reviews.

Kay Kenyon was interviewed on episode 81 of the podcast, Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, back in August of last year.

I plan to review Bright of the Sky and, if I like it, will no doubt continue on to the other novels in the series.

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Tor.com has made available the prelude, prologue, and first three chapters of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings as a free online read. The novel is currently available from Amazon.com as a pre-order.

This is the beginning of a grand ol' epic from Sanderson. It's a world fifteen years in the making, the scope of which I was unable to determine. Having just come off completing Jordan's Wheel of Time series, you have to wonder if Sanderson intends to make this as deep of an epic with as many titles. You can read some comments by the author on this new series.

Here's a bit about The Way of Kings taken from the blurb:

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them.

One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

If you're looking to make a multi-year, multi-book investment, this sounds like a good one.

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I wrote a recent post about one could download Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb for the Kindle for free. While the offer was valid at the time of that post (I know it was valid b/c I downloaded the eBook myself), such is no longer the case if you live in the United States.

As of right now, you'll get the following message box in the upper right of the product page:

 

Well, that sucks.

In fact, if you want to purchase the Kindle edition of Dragon Keeper, it'll cost you $12.99:

Ouch. That's too much for an eBook, IMO (I support the boycott on eBooks costing more than $9.99).

Now, since I'd already downloaded the eBook to my Kindle and given that Amazon has removed eBooks from customers' Kindles without their consent in the past, I was curious to see if Dragon Keeper was still there. So far, it is.

I guess that saying about "striking while the iron is hot" holds true, even for free Kindle offers. Hope you got it while you could.

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See my follow-up post to see why Dragon Keeper is no longer offered for free.

Dragon Keeperby Robin Hobb is the first of three novels in the author's new Rain Wilds Chronicles and, at least for now, it's free for Kindle owners.

While this is a new series, it takes place in the same world as Hobb's Farseer, Liveship Traders, and Tawny Man trilogies. It most closely follows the Liveship Traders series as both contain elements of the Rain Wilds. Of course, the Farseer Trilogy had dragons, and so does this new series, so perhaps it's best to say it builds on most of Hobb's previous work in this world. Wikipedia collectively calls all of these books The Realm of the Elderlings series.

Apparently this freebie idea was tried with great success when the Farseer Trilogy came to the Kindle last year. The first eBook in the series was released and sales for books two and three did very well. Guess you could call it a "3 for 2" deal.

While I loved the Farseer books, I wasn't terribly enamored with the Liveship Traders series. In fact, I barely made it through book one. But I enjoyed The Soldier Son Trilogy (even if some others did not), so I was actually looking forward to giving Hobb another shot.

This one is already sitting on my Kindle, waiting to be read.

Of course, the kicker here is you have to own a Kindle. Sorry traditional book readers.

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Tim Pratt, whose book The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl I reviewed some time ago, posed this question on his blog:

Should I Write the Next Marla Mason Novel?

Marla Mason is Pratt's urban sorcerer character who has appeared in four traditionally published novels to date: Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, and Spell Games. Also, Marla Mason is the main character in Bone Shop, a prequel to the other novels which Pratt serialized and gave away for free (donations accepted, of course) on his web site.

When Pratt originally posed that question on his blog and Twitter, I scoffed. Stephen King had tried it and failed. Tim and I engaged in a brief conversation where he pointed out the difference in scale (King has to make a whole lot more for it to be worth his time) and the fact that King tried it a decade ago. We both agreed that a lot of things can change in 10 years. Our conversation closed with the following comments from Tim:

Turns out his publisher is not interested in any more Marla Mason novels. Pratt has a great affinity for the character, though, and so on the heels of Bone Shop, Pratt's first serialized Marla Mason novel, he's doing it again, this time with Broken Mirrors.

Broken Mirrors will appear online one chapter at a time and run for "20-25 weeks". The first chapter will go up March 8.

While you can download the chapters for free, donations are, of course, accepted. In exchange for your contribution, Pratt has a tiered reward system. The more you donate, the more you get (beyond the author's undying appreciation, of course).

While I had read the before-mentioned The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, I had no experience with his Marla Mason novels prior to reading about his plans for Broken Mirrors. Intrigued by the serialization idea, I went out and bought the first Mason novel, Blood Engines (actually, I bought it through my Kindle, so I didn't really go anywhere). So far, so good, and I'm looking forward to watching Broken Mirrors unfold.

You can subscribe to the upcoming chapters via the RSS feed on the Broken Mirrors web site.

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Below you'll find a short (but growing) list of short fiction I make available for free. There's no commitment to do anything but read. However, if you enjoyed a story (or even if you didn't) and would like to let me know, please leave a comment either below or click-through to each of the stories and leave a comment there. You can read in HTML, MOBI/Kindle, or PDF format.

 

Fine Wine

In which an assassin makes a deal.

"Fine Wine" is a short piece I wrote in about an hour, with several edits following that initial brain dump. It started with a single sentence that just popped into my head: "Abelard ate a lot. That was why, after I'd slashed my knife across his belly..."

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Dropbox has become my cloud storage vendor of choice, replacing Office Live Workspace for those times when I need to synchronize files between multiple machines (think home vs. work; no more sneakernet with USB keys), when I want to make sure files are accessible from anywhere, and when I just need to get a large file (or files) from one place to another. It's also great as a secure backup solution.

Dropbox is free (2GB of storage, 50GB is $10/month, prices/storage go up from there), secure, and fast. One of the best things about it--and what ultimately made me abandon Office Live Workspace--has to do with the way Dropbox works.

You can access your Dropbox account through their web site, sure. But they also have a client application you install that creates a special "My Dropbox" folder:

You save/copy files into this local folder. The first time you do so, the Dropbox client app will auto-sync with the Dropbox servers, copying those files up into the cloud. Further, if you have Dropbox installed on other machines, those machines will have their individual local Dropbox folder sync'ed as well. In other words, since I have the Dropbox client app installed on my laptop at home and my work machine, anything I copy into my Dropbox folder on either machine is sync'ed with Dropbox's server as well as all machines where I have the client installed. Not only is it excellent redundancy, it's a great way to transfer files (especially when they're large) from one computer to another.

This differs from Office Live Workspace in one very crucial way: With Dropbox, you're in effect saving to your local machine. The Dropbox client software takes it from there, sync'ing automatically in the background when it notices changes. Office Live Workspace, on the other hand, saves files remotely into the cloud exclusively and in the foreground. This is slow. If you're like me and lived through the unreliability of computers in the 80's, you save a lot. Sometimes I add a sentence and hit a quick Ctrl-S. Then I have to watch as Office Live Workspace proceeds to save the document. Twenty seconds, thirty, or longer, and the save is done. I can't deal with that kind of slowness when I'm trying to save my work; I need to keep my thoughts flowing onto the screen.

The Dropbox client is unobtrusive, sitting idle in your tray (in Windows) until it detects a file change:

It performs its sync by changing the icon briefly.

Some other features taken from the Dropbox web site:

• 2GB of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers.
• Sync files of any size or type.
• Sync Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
• Automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected.
• Work on files in your Dropbox even if you're offline. Your changes sync once your computer has an Internet connection again.
• Dropbox transfers will correctly resume where they left off if the connection drops.
• Efficient sync - only the pieces of a file that changed (not the whole file) are synced. This saves you time.
• Doesn't hog your Internet connection. You can manually set bandwidth limits.

I'm happy with the service and have yet to have any problems.

If you're at all interested in giving the service a try, you can use this link to sign-up. I get 250MB of additional space for the referral. Thanks!

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