My writing

The Magic Battery: Now on Smashwords!

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My novel The Magic Battery is now available as an e-book on Smashwords. As an expression of thanks for reading my blog, I’m offering it for $1.99, instead of the usual $2.99, with the coupon code RW83R through the end of June.

This is a novel for fans of thoughtful historical fantasy. It presents an alternate Germany where magic works, and where the authorities allow only Christian men to practice it. Thomas Lorenz discovers a way to store magic spells in gadgets that people can buy or rent, putting magic in the hands of anyone with a little money. The conflict that develops parallels the effects of the real-life innovations of Luther, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and others.

In sixteenth-century Saxony, magic is a trade. Mages draw power from the World Behind, but they don’t understand it. Thomas knows that magic needs to be scientific, that it follows mathematical laws. He draws inspiration from his master Albrecht Ritter, who knows nothing is ever “good enough,” his teacher Johan Brandt, who is hiding an infamous past, and later his wife Frieda, who sees the prospect of a more enlightened future. He faces the persistent opposition of Heinrich Gottesmann, a fanatical lawyer and witch hunter. He learns that there is more at stake than just a new way of making lamps.

I’ve been to some of the places used in the book: Heidelberg, Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Hildesheim. I’ve engaged in considerable historical research to get the period right. Apart from the magical elements, the setting is as close to the historical Germany of the 1540s as I could make it. None of the characters hold 21st-century ideas; that would be absurd. However, Thomas and especially Frieda see beyond their time.

Links, reviews, and shares will help to get the word out. You can link to the Smashwords page or to my page on this site.

Saying goodbye to Medium

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I’ve cancelled my Medium account. It’s become a hangout for the most rabid haters of capitalism, as well as often featuring articles hating men, white people, and occasionally human life as such. I don’t know whether it got that way by the design of the people running it or because of other factors. It doesn’t matter very much. Medium has become a sewer.

A number of libertarian accounts can be found on Medium, but they’ve mostly gone inactive. They figured it out before I did, and they gave up.

I should still get paid for my articles till my one-year term runs out later this year. There’s no longer any point in getting a Medium account, but if you have one and feel like supporting me by reading my articles, I won’t mind at all.

Note on Medium

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My income from my articles on Medium.com in November is down from October, even though I have more articles up.

This is what I was afraid would happen. The removal of “claps” as a determiner of income means that whatever gets opened the most gets the biggest share of the income. Writers with a small but enthusiastic following lose with the new scheme. The pages that get opened the most are the ones that appear on the homepage. The ones on politics, society, and culture that get listed there are mostly fanatically statist. (Edit: I should have added that some titles are clear cases of race-baiting. Edit 2: And outright racism at times. I just spotted an article, prominently featured on Medium’s home page, with the title “Lindsey Graham’s Hypocrisy is a Product of Whiteness.” I don’t know if the editors selected that article, or if it popped to the top because so many readers clapped it. Either thought makes me want to throw up.)

There’s a section on the homepage for writers I follow. It lists only four items at any given time, while the list of articles the editors are pushing is huge. Evidently Medium doesn’t want to encourage writers to build their own following.

I don’t know if I’ll bother posting any more articles there.

In more encouraging news, I’ve finished the first draft of The Magic Battery!

I’m on Medium.com

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I’ve started posting articles on Medium.com. Please follow and clap if you’re so inclined.

Here’s the link for the RSS feed. It works in the Leaf reader, but the WordPress sidebar widget doesn’t recognize it, so I can’t add the feed on this site. You can try bookmarking it in your favorite feed reader; let me know if it works or doesn’t.

My latest article, as of this post, is “Remembering the Salem Witch Executions”.

Researching fantasy fiction

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While I make my money writing about tech, I have a fiction project going as well. It’s called The Magic Battery. The starting point was some questions about how magic worked in a friend’s story. Magic always has to be limited in some way, or anything becomes possible with a wave of the wand. But if there are limitations, there will be ways of overcoming them. My comment was “Whoever invents the magic battery will make a fortune!” That was my starting point.

The story is set in 16th century Saxony, and I’m striving to make it as realistic as possible except for the existence of magic. Sorcerers are tradesmen with special skills. They make a nice living because they can do things no one else can, but they aren’t super-powerful. As one of the characters puts it, “Magic isn’t magic.” It has serious limits, one of the most important being the sorcerer’s capacity to draw on the “World Behind.” But what if they could draw on this power and save it for later use? What if they could sell their stored spells to people with no magical talent? That would change the world.
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Smashwords Read an Ebook Week Sale

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Read an Ebook Week I’m participating in Smashwords’ “Read an Ebook Week Sale,” from March 3 to March 9, 2019. During that time, Files that Last and Yesterday’s Songs Transformed will both be available for 50% off! These are very different books, but I’m dealing with change and preservation in both of them. This is your chance to get them at an especially good price.

Holiday e-book shopping: Files that Last and Yesterday’s Songs Transformed

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Here are a couple of discounts for your holiday shopping.

Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek is available at 60% off with the coupon code WZ63B. It’s aimed at any computer-literate readers who want to keep their data usable for many years.

You can get Yesterday’s Songs Transformed: A Historical Tour of Song Rewriting at 30% off with the coupon code LS92Y.

Files that Last cover

Yesterday's Songs Transformed cover

Please share this information with your friends. My book sales help to support this blog. The coupons expire December 26, 2018.

Update: I should have mentioned how you can give Smashwords books as gifts. Recipients do have to register with Smashwords to accept the gift, and there’s not much I can do about that. But if you want to buy a copy (very important!) and give the recipient the PDF, I won’t object to that. Just don’t share a single purchase, please. We writers gotta eat.