Challenges.

(Morguefile photo.)

Everyone has a different challenge, but we all have them.

Here are just a few of the challenges I face in the next few months. Yes, I have a plan, and I will win, in the long game.


Royalties.

In order to get royalties from Smashwords without paying a thirty percent withholding tax, I need an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, (ITIN.) To do that, I need a birth certificate. Then I can apply for a passport. Then I can properly identify myself to the IRS and fill out W8EN forms, etc. Smashwords would be happy to put money into my Paypal account (next quarter,) but I don’t want to pay the withholding tax.

I have some qualms about mailing a passport and birth certificate to the IRS. There must be a better way, but that’s my immediate interpretation of their letter.

I’m very stubborn, incidentally.

Of course on an Ontario Disability Pension, finding $35.00 for a birth certificate application, $15-20.00 for a passport photo, and $80.00 for the passport may be challenging. That’s because I live 35 % below the poverty line and I’m already performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes on a daily basis as things stand now.

Why I don’t use Kick-starter to get some marketing images.

If I received a gift or series of gifts via ‘Kick-Starter,’ the ODSP would see it as income. They would allow the first $100.00 and then take fifty cents on the dollar in income penalties. They are notoriously ignorant when it comes to allowable expenses or investing back into a business. They make a ruling, and then I can appeal. It takes a year to get a hearing. I do not trust the process, which takes up an inordinate amount of time and you can’t get any justice from them anyway. If I can’t pay the rent, (65 % of my income,) I end up on the street. I find that sort of thing very disruptive to my work.

Getting the electronic funds transfer capability to get small royalties from Amazon is another challenge. The threshold is only $10.00 a month, but of course banks have monthly fees. The trick here is to get an account with access to U.S. banking. The royalties have to be more than the fees, and at some level it’s just not worth it. There’s not much point in getting that account, and paying fees, until I have the ITIN, and qualify under tax treaty for no withholding tax.

Marketing Images.

In order to get marketing images, I can’t get images without money, and I can’t get money without selling books, also subject to ODSP rules. Bit of a vicious circle, eh? That’s why it’s hard to break the cycle of poverty. Unpopular subject, so let’s move on.

Pen Names.

There’s not much point in opening up four or five more Smashwords accounts, and using a few more e-mail accounts, as long as the marketing images aren’t up to snuff. But I do see a point, hopefully not too far off, when I will probably do that. I would have a pen-name for the mysteries, that makes sense, and maybe one for the WW I parody memoir. Do I really need a pen-name for horror, fantasy and science fiction? Argh. Do I get more Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and pretend to be four or five different people? Argh. More workload—that’s what I see here, with a crappy old computer and not enough band-width. Everything takes forever.

Write more books and stories.

While suffering from a singular lack of motivation, and battling strong depression, I need to write more books, taking it on faith that somehow I will find the marketing images to give them an even chance in the world. Also, I would be taking it on faith that people will do the right thing by these books, by purchasing and reading them. Otherwise it would be pointless, as selling a half dozen copies a month is a waste of time, especially if I can never see any hope of improvement in sales or even getting what small monies are due. There’s not much point in getting angry. It is a waste of time.

Submit more stories to pro magazines.

Yeah. While attempting to back up all my work on a disc, due to the incipient and imminent computer crash that I expect will happen any day, I somehow locked up all the stories in my science fiction folder. What that means is that the stories are there, I simply don’t have permission to open them. I think this happened because one folder was just too big for the disc, and yet for some reason there was no way to back out of the process. While I can recover any story e-mailed by clicking on ‘sent’ in my e-mail box, I have never e-mailed anyone my list of submissions. What this means is that I have no idea if I have submitted a given story to a given market. I would prefer not to re-submit a story someone rejected previously, as it looks like sheer cussedness or ignorance, or not being able to take no for an answer.

I guess the answer here is to write more stuff.

When I get a minute.

Less serious is the fact that my document, ‘Titles,’ just a bunch of ideas for stories that I may or may not have gotten around to doing, is also gone. Again, I’ve never e-mailed that to anyone, so it’s not backed up in the e-mails. There may be a copy of that on a disc somewhere, but like the list of submissions, which was up to #700 last time I looked, it won‘t be up to date or complete.

I suppose any idea I had once I can have again. However, there was one incomplete story in my folder, and that one had never been e-mailed either. ‘The Deposits,’ the story in question, was sort of inspired by Robert J. Sawyer, but the world may have to live without such a tribute or parody for the foreseeable future. If you would like to know what that one was about, you’ll have to pay me $1,000.00 because I’m tired of people reading my blog and then running off with all sorts of ideas, and never even giving me a mention. You know who you are.

Over the next little while, I will be using my paint program to enhance my marketing images. Adobe CS6 requires a Pentium 4 chip to operate. I'm doing the best I can with what I have.

You'll notice I don't have a 'donate' button. If you seriously wanted to help in the success of this enterprise, the best thing anybody could do is to buy a book.

Excerpt: The Art of Murder.

(Preliminary cover, 'Art of Murder.')












They were in a straggling neighbourhood of working establishments behind a major thoroughfare. Gilles realized he was completely lost, not just in symbolic fashion but for real. He hadn’t been paying too much attention. He had other thoughts, most of them not good.


The taxi sputtered off up the road, trailing dust from the wheels and throwing up a cloud that hung in the air, yellowing the sunshine and desiccating the nostrils. Maintenon and Levain walked up the gravel drive towards a pair of shirtless workmen who were sweating and grunting as they heaved on the chains of an I-beam lifting device, trying to steady a slab of black granite as it swung back and forth. Their contraption was sturdy if obviously home-made. The thing looked like several hundred kilos in mass. Clearly there was some hazard, some difficulty involved. It was all so prosaic.

“Hey, Charles.” Levain stopped, and they waited for a moment to let them finish the operation.

“Hey, Andre.”

This involved setting the stone down on a ramp, and pushing it up on wooden rollers all of fifty millimetres thick and half a metre long, up into the back of a battered black Citroen C4, which had the rear seat removed for this purpose. Gilles saw buckets lined up beside the car, all ready to go, with smaller tools in them, and some shovels, long steel pinch bars, and more rollers. There was a pile of sand and gravel in a corner of the yard, and the shop was at the back, set well behind the house. There was a painted wooden sign over the large door that was visible from the street in daylight hours, but otherwise unlit. He saw a black dog on the back porch and one floodlight set high on a post in the farthest back corner.

After a bored look, the dog put his head down and blinked at them with a look of resignation.

The smell of cooking came from the vicinity of the back door. Gilles grinned unexpectedly, and shoved his hands into his pockets. There were birds singing from a shade tree that grew in the next door neighbour’s yard. Birds were not his strong suit, but they had a certain pugnacious cheerfulness.

“Merde!” It wouldn’t do to get a hand under the slab at the wrong time, but no damage done and the fellow chuckled again just as quickly.

The language was colourful but succinct, and as his apprentice set to lifting the stone with a bar and putting wooden wedges and props under it for security, the sturdy proprietor of the place dusted off his hands and shook first with Levain and then Gilles.

“And, what can I do for you, sir?”

Gilles eyes traveled up and down the lines of stones displayed as they would be set, in that they all sat on a base, although they had no names on them yet. One or two in the front row did have names, and he realized they were all finished and awaiting delivery. His eyes took in the stone laying flat in the back of the Citroen. It had a name on it, an elderly lady going by the dates. She had been predeceased by a husband and an infant. Her child had died. She knew what tragedy was, he thought. She understood loss.

“I want one like that.”

“It’s for his wife.” Levain beckoned Gilles to look at some of the others. “Seriously, Gilles, you might want to look at more than one stone. Come on.”

Maintenon reluctantly followed him along the line of memorials, big, small, simple and ornate. None of them had an actual price marked on them, but that wasn’t any real consideration. He just wanted to get it over with.

“No. I think the first one—and make sure he puts my name on there too, and my birthday. Then when the time comes, it’s a simple matter to chisel in the date of my decease.”

“Sure, boss. But please, come on in and talk to the man.” Levain turned and led the way, relieved to hear Maintenon’s footsteps crunching gravel behind. “I don’t think he uses a chisel. It’s a sand-blaster now.”

The boss had been a little funny lately, but no one else could really do this for him. He had to take charge of things himself.

Gilles found the air inside the workshop cool, a little damp and smelling oddly of something he couldn’t quite place. He counted out the bills as the man pulled out a book and took a pen out of the pocket from a shirt hanging on a peg.

Gilles gave her name, and the fellow gave him a quick look.

“He’ll pay the balance after inspecting the memorial in place.” Levain seemed to know a little bit about it.

“Maintenon?”

“Er, yes.” Levain stepped in.

“This is the fellow I told you about, Charles.” Charles nodded.

“Oh, yes.” He went blank for a moment, but then he seemed to recall the incident. “And you want the black one? With a black base?”

“Yes, and he wants you to deliver it.” Levain seemed to be in charge now, and Gilles let him.

The man named a figure, and Levain shrugged, looking at Gilles. Gilles agreed, and the gentleman started putting figures together in a row on paper. It was a fairly simple sales contract.

Levain told him the name of the cemetery, and that affected the price somehow as well. There were certain fees involved, peculiar to the different establishments around the city. Gilles thought he had paid all of them already, but apparently that wasn’t so. This was different from a funeral, the fellow explained, and some folks went years without a monument while the survivors saved their pennies.

“For you, sir, I’ll let you have the base at half price.” Levain gave an encouraging nod.

“Thank you.” Gilles accepted it at face value.

It was only later, jammed side by side on the Metro when Levain explained that Charles’ wife’s cousin had been strangled by her no-good boyfriend, and that Maintenon was responsible for his apprehension and subsequent execution by guillotine. People had congratulated him before, upon the conviction of a killer. He never knew what to think or to say under those circumstances. There really was nothing valid to say—it sounded like moral condemnation, which he preferred not to do. Most perpetrators were as pathetic as they were dangerous.

“Who says justice is only for the rich, eh, Inspector?” Gilles grinned a little lopsidedly when he heard that one.

He really was feeling better about things, and the ache in his jaw was finally fading.

“We have an interesting errand for Monday.” Gilles’ voice was curiously flat, expressionless.

“Which is?” Levain’s eyebrows rose at the answer.

“We’re going to see a hypnotist.”

Levain thought he was joking.

“At your command, good sir.”

“I’m serious, Andre. Anyway, it’s better than a dentist.”

So he really was serious then.

Formatting an e-book short story collection as a 5 x 8" paperback.

(Set page size to 5.0 and 8.0)



Formatting a short story collection as a 5 x 8 POD print on demand paperback isn’t that much different than any other book.

Since I already have my collection, ‘The Paranoid Cat and other tales’ published as an e-book, I basically use the same file by copying it from a folder and pasting it on my desktop. I re-label it with ‘Paranoid Cat POD.’

A step-by-step process.

Step one is to put the cursor at the end of the front matter. Then click on page layout, click on breaks, and then go down and click on page break/section break. I’m using Word for the entire job. I make nice, simple paperbacks. I read somewhere that a good formatter can do this in about two hours.

Next, I scroll down all the way to the end, and put the cursor just after ‘The End’ and add another page/section break as before. Now we have three sections to the book.

The second step is to scroll down and put the cursor at the end of the last line of each of the stories in the collection. Simply click on page break. These are all in the same section, which is important.

Page size.

Step three is to define the page size, as my e-book .doc file is fine in an 8.5” x 11” size, but my paperback is 5 x 8. Again, this is found under the page layout tab. Click on size. Use the buttons to change from one size to another.

Margins and Gutter.

Next comes the margins. I am using 0.5” at the top, 0.6” at the bottom, 0.4” on the outside edge of the page. I’m using mirrored pages left and right, which is also located under size. The mirrored pages should only be for your text and not the front and end matter.

For my gutter, about 0.712 is the usual, and you can fiddle with that under margins, which is in the page layout section as well. The gutter increases in size with the number of pages. I’ve seen a book with zero gutter, and the text begins in the glue. It’s essentially unreadable. ‘Nuff said.

At this point, I went to Collections Canada ISBN service website and got myself an ISBN number, inserting it into the front matter. A paperback and an e-book of the same title have different ISBNs.

Headings.

Next step is to scroll through the book and make sure all the story titles—what would correspond to chapter headings in a novel, are all down the same number of spaces. I will be using six 12-point spaces with zero trailing space. The important thing is that they are all consistent.

Numbering.

Now, it’s time to put the page numbers in. Sometimes I have trouble with it, as there is more than one way to get to the edit footer or format page numbers interface, but suffice it to say that you want the first page of your text to start at number one, and you want it on a right-hand page. Obviously, no book begins on a left-hand page. You do not want page numbers in the front matter, so make sure you click on ‘link to previous section’ if it’s highlighted and make sure it is turned off.

Headers.

A similar process works for the headers, which in my PODs are very simple. I have the title, a comma, and then ‘by Louis Bertrand Shalako.’ It appears at the top of every page in the text, but not in the front or end matter at the back.

When you check your file, go to the end of the book and check for headers and page numbers. You can put the cursor in the header or footer and click, and a box will come up, ‘edit footer,’ etc. Make sure to click ‘link to previous section’ if it is highlighted in yellow, and turn it off, otherwise the page numbers will disappear in the previous section. Concerning footer style, I use the one called ‘tildes.’ And I use 10-point, usually in bold for page numbers. Cambria is nice font, which goes well with Times New Roman, which I use for text. For my headers, I usually go to a nine-point face, again in Cambria. For this I click on the format dialogue box so that I can pick a colour, and for this I use grey as opposed to black. That way the header is there, but it’s also unobtrusive.

The page numbers are far more important, and so I make them easier for the reader to see.

For a paperback, the final end matter doesn’t have to be mirrored, and you may have to turn this off, making sure not to link to previous section when you do it. Otherwise it has a tendency to stick out too much and Createspace will notify you that it’s outside the printed area of the page. The same is true for the front matter. It’s entirely a matter of taste as to whether front and end matter is centred, or justified left, or justified to both margins. A sentence with few words will stretch in an unattractive manner when justified on both margins.

For the text in your paperback, bear in mind my e-book is running a ragged right margin, so I’ll have to go through section by section and right justify everything. I do it section by section to avoid messing up the centering for the titles and scene breaks.

Inserting the proper number of blank pages.

Now, for the front matter, you put the cursor at the beginning of your copyright information and then insert three blank pages. The third one is your title page, my title is 18-point and my name is 12-point, and they are in bold Times New Roman. Next comes your copyright page, and then insert two more blank pages to separate the text. This is section one.

At the end of the book, simply insert enough pages so that your book ends, there is a blank, and then your author bio, links, next-book preview or whatever falls on the right hand page when you visualize your book in your head. This will always be an odd-numbered page, as the book started off on page one. A book will always have an even number of pages when going by the Word document page counter, that’s because every page has a back—it’s really a sheet of paper, even though we’re doing it all by computer.

Notes.

In other notes, for headers with the author name on one side, and the title on another, sources say you can do this with Word, but I have no idea. I have done it successfully, including mirrored page numbers on the corner of the page, (rather than centered) using Open Office free software.

 

(The book has three separate sections.) 



Writing a mystery.

(Felix Valloton, Swiss, 'At the Cafe,' 1908.)







When writing a mystery it’s important to pay attention to the expectations of the readers.


While the occasional person who reads your book might be a first-time reader of the genre, the odds are that they have read quite a number of mystery books, and they’re looking for certain things. They hope to get something out of it, which is an entertaining puzzle that ultimately makes sense.

It’s self evident that readers of romance are a looking for romance, readers of westerns are looking for justice, and readers of horror are looking for thrills and chills.

In the mystery I’m writing now, ‘The Art of Murder,’ which takes place in Paris during the '20s, I have read and thought about what others have to say on the subject. While the genre probably does have limitations, not least of which is structure, you could probably do what you want with it. Most are familiar with Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s noir futuristic mystery where Harrison Ford tries to catch a bunch of murderous replicants, who escape their world of labour and confinement and sort of go looking for what to them must seem like eternal life.

But in my book the technique varies perhaps in the technical sense. So far, I have just under 50,000 words and no chapter titles. How does that affect the writing? In some ways not at all. But by not picking a chapter title, and then writing what comes to mind regarding that title, the structure of the book is still open. Most would agree that the body should come first in a mystery novel. One source says in the first three chapters, and I can’t argue against it without sort of committing myself to proving it in writing…be that as it may. But now when the time comes, I can figure on a 65-70,000-word novel, decide just exactly how many chapters it should have, and then simply divide up the material accordingly.

This is purely nuts-and-bolts stuff. The actual content doesn’t suffer. In fact, it makes it easier to write. When I have an idea, I simply tack it on to the end of the book. When I come to the end of the idea, I put a scene break. I use three asterisks, jammed up against the left margin. There is no stylistic or format considerations here, although the copy I write for fiction is as clean as the copy in this blog post.

***

And when I get another idea, I tack that on too.

What this does is to keep the material flowing, even if it’s only 250 words. The next bit might be 700. Who cares? When I go through the book fleshing out sights, smells, and sounds, the feel of gravel on a wood floor in stocking feet or whatever, I can just pay a little descriptive attention to the sections that need it. Those that need more get more. And each chapter can be about the same length, as logic and structure seems to dictate.

As for a body in the first chapter, no one can really say just how long the first chapter of a mystery really ought to be, but I think in mine he’s pretty much in the first paragraph; or at least one of the bodies is.

As this series was inspired by Georges Simenon there is in fact a double mystery, which I sort of refer to as a ‘figure-eight’ structure. It has two loops, a variation on the circular story structure. Going by Ridley Scott, structure doesn't interfere with saying what we want to say, and it can cross genre barriers without losing everybody.

Anyhow, I don’t care if you’re selling a whole lot of books or just a few, but there is a whole ‘nother world outside that door and between my novel and this post I’ve done 1,150 words today. And I’m not a replicant, slaving away on some prison planet, doing the bidding of some evil master who merely exploits me like a steer or a hog.

The life outside that door is also worth living, and no one gets out alive anyway.

Interview with Bryan Thomas Schmidt, author of The Davi Rhii Saga.

When you look back, has your writing improved, and if so, in what ways?

It’s a journey, so of course I am seeking to get better every day. For one thing, areas of craft I used to have to intentionally focus on in a later, dedicated draft are now internalized and incorporated from the start. I polish them in later drafts but the foundation is already there. For another, I am learning how to write with description and more emotion. Screenwriting stripped me of the need for it, which is my background and Bachelor course of study, but in novels it’s at the heart of bringing a story to life. I continue to work on that. Certainly I can see improvements in motifs and themes as well as how I build character. Also, ideas about how to deal with POV and find unique approaches to scenes seem to come easier these days.

You believe heroes don’t have to be deeply-flawed individuals. Do you often write something as a reaction to something else?

Actually, I think all humans are deeply flawed. I think depravity is a common condition of man. But what I don’t believe is that everyone seeks to rise above that and counter that nature and focus on doing something to make themselves and their world better. And those who don’t seek this are not heroic. They are the antithesis. Heroism, in some way, involves selfless sacrifice and a focused effort to not let your weaknesses drive or control you. Those who suffer their weaknesses get little admiration from me.

Why a trilogy? You spent over twenty years visualizing it in fine detail.

I’m tempted to say nothing here because you make me sound better than I will. I visualized it quite a bit as a teen when I came up with it. Revisited the idea a few times during college, then pretty much forgot about it until I was trying to write novels and had failed already at my first try. I remembered the antagonist’s name, the protagonist’s father’s name, the first line of the book and the basic premise. The rest was pretty much reinvented from there. I suppose subconsciously old ideas probably came back to me and were incorporated. But I had no idea what book 2 would be until I started writing it. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to tell the tale. It seems to have worked out. Going into book 3, which I start next week, I have a pretty clear idea now what that needs to be based on the others though.

Some of our fellow authors are English teachers. Does that worry you?

No. I freelance edit for pay. No one’s perfect. If they want to nitpick, fine. It doesn’t lessen my talent or value as a writer. And people make deliberate choices for voice or style to forego grammar all the time. Even those with English degrees. It may be a pet peeve for some other writers but that’s their problem not mine.

Tell us about this Davi Rhii Saga. What is the basic premise?

A prince discovers he was born a slave and secretly adopted. He sets out to find out who he is and what that means. Along the way, he discovers an injustice and decides he has to set it straight. This alienates him from family and friends, especially his uncle, who is the dictator enslaving his birth people. When he helps them fight for freedom, he becomes hunted and unleashes an age-old conflict. Along the way, he finds love, a new family, new friends, and a new understanding of himself and the world.

Do you tend to see characters as good and evil, or are there moral grey areas? One reason why I ask is because of henchmen, those faceless and nameless individuals. What sort of motives dictate their behaviour? Are evil henchmen victims too?

In line with my earlier comment, no one is perfect or completely good or bad. We all make choices. And we all follow our instincts differently. Some surrender to them, some fight them. Are some manipulated? Yes. And some know it and allow it anyway for various reasons. Are they accountable for that choice? Yes. When it’s a choice. When they are victimized, which some can be, they are more sympathetic but that doesn’t entirely erase bad things they did. You can choose not to obey if you really want to. You might be killed for it, but you did have a choice. And choosing to preserve yourself is a choice which can be selfish. It’s complicated, I realize, but in the end, it’s not a one hundred percent absolution.

If you won the lottery, would you still write? Would you quit, or would you simply hire the best editors, cover designers, and just keep going? What would be the motivation to do that?

I don’t write for money. It’s nice when that happens though. I write because I have to communicate and get these stories out and this is my medium for doing so. The fact that readers and others respond well certainly encourages it but I still get rejected a lot and all writers do. If it was all fun and easy, it would not have nearly the meaning, I think. But I’ll never face this question because I don’t play the lottery. I consider it a complete waste of money. Look at the stats. Whatever I do though, I will seek the best editors, cover designers, artists, etc. which I can find and afford to help me make it the highest quality possible. Always.

Like why do it at all, or why does it have to be more than a hobby? There is some mission as a writer, isn’t there? A writer takes some responsibility for the world around him.

The writer’s mission as I see it is to release stories inside him or her to the world and see what happens. They become a part of the living tapestry of the world and the world interacts with them. For some, that manifests in popularity, fame, wealth. For others, it’s almost unnoticed and continued obscurity. Some make a living or significant income from it. Others don’t. You don’t write because of what you want to see happen but because you have something to say.

As far as responsibility though, I absolutely believe you bear responsibility for what you put out into the world. If you glorify rape and someone imitates a rape scene in your work and says it inspired them, you should feel responsible, even though that person made choices. So I think you must exercise the gift, talent and responsibility of writing well. I don’t put stuff out there in the world I’m not willing to bear responsibility for, that includes sex scenes, language, certain levels of violence, etc. I write stories the way they need to be told, but I don’t buy the myth that they aren’t real or true without four letter curse words and graphic sex and violence. Because I think readers are smarter than that and they are creative. It used to be we wrote to stimulate and engage our readers as participants. Remember the “choose your adventure” books for example? Now, it’s almost like writers want to spoon feed them everything and control how the novel comes alive for and interacts with the reader. I don’t think you can really do that. So you write intentionally and with care and then you set it free. You are responsible for that output.

In a stand-alone novel or story, do you leave a door open for a sequel, even if you have no real ideas?

Depends on the story or novel. I think good characters, settings and stories always bode possibilities for further exploration. You don’t have to just set up open ends you can exploit. They are often organic to the story. Every novel or story is just a brief window on a specific period in the life of the characters and the world. There’s always more to be told and to know.

Tell us a little about your hometown, Ottawa, Kansas.

Ottawa is a town of 13,000 people in East Central Kansas just between Interstate 35 and Interstate 70. It’s 45 miles from Kansas City, 18 from Lawrence (home of K.U.) and about 2 hours from Wichita. Its downtown is on the National Historic Register for Victorian historic buildings. It has a rich history including one of the older private universities in the state. It’s blue collar and tends to be a bit more of the less educated, rougher around the edges people, but it’s quiet and safe, and not heavily crime ridden (outside of, sadly, domestic violence issues), and it’s close to big cities yet far enough out as a Kansas City satellite to allow a small town, less stressful life that’s very conducive to writing and healing for someone like me. It would be a great place to hold a writer’s retreat. Someday, perhaps I will.

If money wasn’t a problem, would you go off to some other country? Would that really help in the process of writing?

I would love to buy a place in Ghana and Brazil or somewhere and write full time, travelling when I needed to. I think my writing would improve because I would learn and grow so much and new environments and lessons always bring strong bursts of creativity. Plus it would infuse and inform my writing with new elements, ideas, themes, etc. that would invigorate the work and the writer both.

Your books are on sale right now? Tell us about the deal and what we have to do.

I’m offering a discount for a package of the two Davi Rhii novels and prequel short story ebook on my website at http://www.bryanthomasschmidt.net/store  as well as 33% off The Returning paperback and ebook, both signed by me, for a limited time. I also have contests to win copies by helping as book ambassadors, and a book trailer contest which can be found here:

http://bryanthomasschmidt.net/2012/07/05/join-the-returning-street-team-win-a-free-copy-plus-book-trailer-contest/

In Bryan’s second novel, The Returning, new challenges arise as Davi Rhii’s rival Bordox and his uncle, Xalivar, seek revenge for his actions in The Worker Prince, putting his life and those of his friends and family in constant danger. Meanwhile, politics as usual has the Borali Alliance split apart over questions of citizenship and freedom for the former slaves. Someone’s even killing them off. Davi’s involvement in the investigation turns his life upside down, including his relationship with his fiancée, Tela. The answers are not easy with his whole world at stake.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novels The Worker Prince, a Barnes & Noble Book Clubs Year’s Best SF Releases of 2011 Honorable Mention, and The Returning, the collection The North Star Serial, Part 1, and several short stories featured in anthologies and magazines. He edited the anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6 for Flying Pen Press, headlined by Mike Resnick. As a freelance editor, he’s edited novels and nonfiction. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chat every Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter under the hashtag #sffwrtcht. A frequent contributor to Adventures In SF Publishing, Grasping For The Wind and SFSignal, he can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Bryan is an affiliate member of the SFWA.