Kickin' It Old School

...well, not entirely. You'll still have to use the Internet a little. But...

Rhubarb is finally available in print!

You can purchase it directly from Createspace. Or if you don't want to give yet another company all your digits, you can buy it directly from Amazon.

I have had a number of people ask about getting signed copies. So here's what I'm offering. I have ordered a small stack of books and can sell them directly. Send an email to mhvankeuren@gmail.com with your request and a shipping address. I'll invoice you the $14 cover price through PayPal. Because copies have to be printed, shipped to me, and then mailed out to you, I can't promise anything like Amazon's super-duper shipping speed, but you'll get it eventually. If I get more requests than I've anticipated, it may take even longer.

Of course, if you don't order one from me, I'll still be happy to sign your copy next time we see each other.

Thank you all for your encouragement and support.

What's Next?

It’s taken almost six months to the day to take Rhubarb from concept to print. (Yes, the print version is coming…soon…I swear. And it’s a thing of beauty.) It’s been so much fun. I’ve learned a lot and couldn’t be happier with the results.

So—besides the inevitable marketing—what’s next?

Tomorrow, I begin not a new project, but the final major revision on a big novel that’s been in the works for several years. And when I say big, I mean big. The first draft weighed in at over 505,000 words, and thankfully fell in the forest far from where anyone could hear it. I honed it down to about 275,000. A few intrepid beta readers plowed through this version, for which I am very grateful.

Since then, when I haven’t been working on Rhubarb, I’ve been hacking away at the next revision. But through it all, it’s been chipping away at me, teaching me how to write, and it’s been an unforgiving master. I’m hoping for a finely polished word count somewhere between 150,000 and 180,000 words. This is still a sizable novel, but it wouldn’t kill your cat if you dropped it on her.

What’s it about?

It’s the story of a young man disconnected from the ubiquitous virtual world, his robotic lemur with a dark secret, a slacker computer science major who just wants to be a father to his daughter, and the worst disaster in the history of human space colonization. It’s titled Legitimacy, and it’s pretty hard sci-fi set roughly fifty years in the future.

Not every novel can be about dessert.