Personal

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The period for this pledge has ended, and I have made the donations as promised. The album is still available.

This is off-topic from writing and more personal, but it’s a chance for you to support two worthwhile charities, so I hope no one will mind.

I currently have three albums up on Bandcamp. I don’t claim to be a musician of any distinction; they’re there for my friends, with payment optional. One of them is on the theme of The Magic Battery, so there’s a tenuous connection to my writing.

For the month of September, the net payments I get from Bandcamp for the latest album, Spontaneous Order, will go to Doctors without Borders. In addition, I’ve just announced that I’ll match whatever net payments I get during September 16-30 from any of my albums with a donation to Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, to a cap of $250. Martha’s Vineyard is currently burdened with immigrants that Ron DeSantis dumped there with no warning, and MV Community Services seems to be the best-placed organization to deal with them.

You can download the albums for free or pay as little as one dollar. Even if you don’t like the music, you’ll have done some good.

To Hell with Twitter

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I am furious. Therefore I will choose my words very carefully.

The ex-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad posted on Twitter: “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” In context, he was cheering on the brutal murder of Samuel Paty. Twitter did not suspend his account and was slow to delete that tweet.

I responded with what I consider an appropriate level of outrage and called on Twitter to remove his account.

As a result, my Twitter account is now suspended. If Twitter went to the trouble of suspending an account as obscure as mine (524 followers, last I checked), it likely did the same to a lot of other people criticizing Mahathir Mohamad, though I don’t know.
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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.