The Future is Ours

Inspirational videos may be this decade's motivational posters, but I wanted to share this one:

 
The Future is Ours from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.



http://vimeo.com/44658040

Robots. Asteroid mining. Glorious launches and daring deeds. Asking the big questions. But the moment that the deaf woman hears for the first time through an implant...I'll admit I almost cried along.

As a writer of science fiction, and not a scientist, I can only hope that my work will contribute in some small way. To reflect the possible. To inspire the hitherto impossible. To allow readers a glimpse, a dream, of a possible future, and dare them to make it happen.

The Mother of all Free Book Promotions

This is it. Your last chance to get a Kindle version of Rhubarb for free. It will be free for 48 hours starting midnight Saturday 6/23 and ending midnight Sunday 6/24. (BTW: Amazon works on Pacific time.)

If this promotion goes like my previous ones, it should be a spectacular success. Rhubarb came close to #1 in free sci-fi last weekend, nearly reached the top ten in free humor, and for some reason was in the top 100 books for single women. You don't know how fun it is to see that.

But this will be my final free promotion. It's coming at the end of my exclusive obligation to the Kindle Select Program (which I won't review in this post), but it's great news for readers of other formats. Sometime in early July I will be releasing Rhubarb for the Nook, through Barnes & Noble, and for the Apple store and all the other various ereaders (Sony, Kobo, chisel and rock) through Smashwords.

Oh, and Saturday is my mother's birthday. So give her the only gift you can, and tell a dozen friends about Rhubarb. Happy Birthday, M.

Father's Day (is) Special

Just a quick post to announce that the Rhubarb will be free for the Kindle all day on Father's Day. (Sunday 6/17/12).

I don't know what my family has planned for me, but I'm sure it won't be as exciting as a free ebook. I'm jealous of you all. Peace out.

Towel Day 2012

“A towel, (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

My deep admiration for Douglas Adams is no secret. (Link here if you have only just crawled blinking and confused from a cave.) Those who know me very well might know that the first possession I would rescue from my burning house is my signed edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Those who know me inordinately well know that nearly every night of my life, I’ve gone to sleep listening to recordings of the Hitchhiker’s radio shows.

This morning, a couple of new Amazon reviews compared my writing and Rhubarb to DA and THGTTG. I fully, and shamelessly, claim him as an influence. But it got me thinking. What is it about Douglas Adams that I admire so much?

I was introduced to DA in the eighth grade by new friends in a new town, who thrust his books into my hands flabbergasted that I’d never even heard of him. (Hipster moment: I read DA back when his trilogy had only three books.) So is my admiration simply nostalgia—that I spent my most embarrassing emotionally formative years comforting myself by reading and rereading those books? Nah. It’s got to be more.

I do admire his writing style. He’s concise. (A sentence construction and paragraph design and planning skill, often related to proper word selection, that I have often neglected in the recent past.) He took big risks with his writing and never shied away from absurdity; yet somehow always seemed to make a salient point. (See almost any quote from Marvin the Paranoid Android.) I admire his work ethic. (“I love deadlines,” he famously said. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”) And I have learned to enjoy a good soak in the tub now and then. (What better use for a towel?)

Do I admire his later work in the cause of endangered species? Is it his ability to blend true satire and speculative fiction to lampoon everyone and everything? (“To boldly split infinitives that no man has split before…”) Do I admire his willingness to wade into any and every medium that would have him—radio, novels, comics, nonfiction, television, computer games, Hollywood, theater? That the Guide is ostensibly the inspiration for Wikipedia? It’s impossible to put a finger on a single thing.

During the production of the notoriously horrible BBC television series of Hitchhiker’s, a bit actor called in sick, so Douglas stepped in to replace him. This wasn’t unusual; he played other bit extra parts in the series, and had appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But on this particular day, Douglas Adams stepped in front of the camera, and on action promptly waded naked, and towel-less, into the ocean.

That’s the kind of author I’d like to be.

Freebook!!!

Are you looking for a light, refreshing Memorial Day read? Have you been sitting on the fence about acquiring a copy of Rhubarb of your very own? Do you know someone who would love a charming little tale of love, pie, and aliens on Montana's High Plains?

Then Have We Got A Deal For You!

For two days only, Thursday May 24th and Friday May 25th, the Kindle ebook Rhubarb by M.H. Van Keuren will be FREE on Amazon.

You heard right. Free. $0.00. Zip. Nada. Nothing. No shipping. No handling. No hidden fees.

So spread the word and come on down to your local Amazon, for the best value in reading entertainment since Gutenberg figured out the whole thing printing thing.

BUT WAIT, there's more. Inside every copy of Rhubarb is a recipe for the greatest rhubarb pie in the galaxy. And for every friend you tell, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling of having spread a little more good into this crazy, mixed-up world.

What do you have to lose? Act now. Amazon algorithms are standing by.

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.