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Library Resources

Legacy Fleet: Colossus is Live!

February 14, 2017 by Rob McClellan Leave a Comment

It’s up! it’s live! It’s for sale as part of Nick Webb’s insanely popular Legacy Fleet series on Amazon’s Kindle Worlds!

As I mention in the Author’s Notes section of the book, Legacy Fleet: Colossus was of a universe that I spent a lot of time in many years ago: Palladium Books’ Robotech RPG. While writing those books was a ton of fun, I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters and situations I’d built after we parted ways. I wanted to write more, introduce new characters, cooler ships and gear, and come up with extended stories. Sadly, that door closed. But the ambition never stopped.

So when Nick Webb made his Legacy Fleet series available for new contributions via Kindle Worlds, I knew I could finally bring all those ideas back to the front burner. Colossus is the result.

Take a look, and enjoy!

Filed Under: Books, Library Resources, My projects, Publishing, Sci-Fi, Writing Tagged With: colossus, Legacy Fleet, pew-pew, space opera

Introducing Chronicle Worlds: Feyland

June 29, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Chronicle Worlds Feyland CoverImagine if you will, a world of the future. A world where rich kids are chipped to run automated houses and fly in grav-powered limos while poor kids watch their families dissolve into poor health and struggle to manage the bare necessities. The only thing that brings these groups together is the VirtuMax corporation, an entertainment giant. Its newest hit is an immersive VR high fantasy game that is both addictive and incredibly popular.

But in this world, the veil between fantasy and mundane reality is beginning to shatter and admit the resurgent realm of the Fey. And they are looking to borrow whatever they must from the mortal world to maintain their existence.

Welcome to the world of Chronicle Worlds: Feyland, the latest installment of Samuel Peralta’s insanely popular Future Chronicles anthology series, and the first of his new Chronicle Worlds titles.

Chronicle Worlds: Feyland brings stories from leading authors to the crossroads where individual imagination and gamer sensibility meets author Anthea Sharp’s USA Today best selling Feyland series of YA fantasy books.

Twelve authors contributed to this volume, and every one of them brought exceptional story telling and skills and gamer sensibilities with them into the project. A brief rundown of the work is as follows:

“MeadowRue,” by Joseph Robert Lewis takes the story of an existing Feyland character: a de facto sea hag who must deal with a human girl who has courage and honor on the brain; “The Skeptic” by Lindsay Edmunds, shows how seeking to quantify the impossible but true can bite you on the butt. “The Sword of Atui” by Eric Kent Edstrom felt like a particularly gruesome episode of Sword Art Online, complete with server hacks and apparent game master cameos. “The Huntsman and the Old Fox” by Brigid Collins reminded me of my own experience as a parent gaming with a gaggle of teens and tweens.

“Unicorn Magic,” by Roz Marshal manages to take the story of a girl’s love for her horse and make it both gripping and uplifting.

My own contribution, “The City of Iron and Light,” tells the story of Sabine Jade, a lonely teen who has no idea just how far down the rabbit hole goes…but harbors a burning need to find out.

“The Gossamer Shard” by Dave Adams, shows what the World of Tanks might be like if its players blundered into the Unseelie realm; “The Glitchy Goblin” by K.J. Colt is a dark little tale of broken promises and crushed dreams that will actually make you feel for the goblins (no small task). In comparison, “On Guard” by Deb Logan, is the essence of the short story form: compact, compelling, and utterly without wasted words.

The two final selections, “An Artist’s Instinct,” by Andrea Luhman, and “Brea’s Tale: Passage,” by Anthea Sharp, share a mystical quality of presence. Both tell a story of a young woman struggling to transform herself into something new, but take very different approaches in the hows and whys. Read both back to back and you’ll see what I mean. In fact, you should real this entire book in order, front to back. Leave nothing out. Trust me.

But I think my favorite tale from this volume is “Tech Support” by James T. Wood. Consider: Ranjeet Nagar of Kochi, India is a young man with a strong work ethic and a family to support. He works as a tech support jock for VirtuMax, walking players of Feyland through their technical issues. Ranjeet is a compulsive puzzle solver and some of the wackier calls coming over the phone lately have got his creative juices running wild. But there are problems at work: his job is in danger of vanishing, the crazy calls describe things that cannot exist in the game, and Ranjeet cannot afford a proper VR set so he can’t even log into the game to see the weirdness for himself.

All that becomes irrelevant when Ranjeet finds a woman on the street being attacked by the same demons reported by players. Utterly disregarding his safety and prospects, Ranjeet enlists the help of a co-worker and his ex-fiance, who does have a full-D VR set and is an expert player, to track down the source of the incursions and set things right.

I think in several respects “Tech Support” is the most ambitious story in this set. It takes place entirely in India, flips the dominant theme of player vs game on its head, and manages to maintain a convincing level of engagement and suspense from the first sentence to the last.

That said–and the only thing really left to say here–is that at a launch price of .99 cents, and fifteen solid entries into the world of anthology fiction, Future Chronicles creator Samual Peralta and Feyland owner Anthea Sharp have created something genuinely new and compelling. Fans of gamerpunk, high fantasy, and science fiction will all have something to enjoy here.

Available Now

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Filed Under: Books, Free Press, Library Resources, My projects, Nerd Alert, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Small press, Writing Tagged With: anthologies, Chronicle Worlds Feyland, fantasy, Future Chronicles, gamerpunk, science fiction, shared universes, short fiction, short stories

New Book, ‘Til Death, Second Impressions’ Dropping Today!

April 22, 2016 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

A Great New Release.

You may have heard about my friend Jason Anspach's 1950's paranormal noire detective series, 'til Death. Jason writes these suspenseful and witty books like an old Hollywood movie. These books are all about capturing the fun of an old Cary Grant flick.

He's launched the latest book of the series, 'til Death: Second Impressions. It's just $0.99 for one week and he asked me if I would help get the word out. 

Here's the scoop: Wisecracking Private Detective Sam Rockwell is running for his life, but that doesn’t keep him from taking the case of a Return who's slipped past Heaven’s radar and overstayed his time on earth. Together with his fiancé, Amelia, Sam brawls and dances his way through San Francisco to unravel a zany mystery where nothing is what it seems at first blush.

The laughs and silver screen thrills of Jason Anspach’s signature 1950s Cold War tale of Hollywood noire are back in this madcap sequel as Sam and Amelia return once again to right wrongs, solve crimes, send the dead off to their proper eternity, and maybe, set a date for their wedding!  The Maltese Falcon meets It's a Mad Mad Mad world in this smart and witty paranormal romp.

"Funny from the first chapter!"

"Well-paced, imaginative, and just plain fun."

"Witty, engaging, and with an intriguingly original premise!"

If you missed the series from the beginning, the original 'til Death is also on sale for $0.99. You won't find a better value than two wonderfully unique novels going for less than a cup of coffee.

Click Here to Get on the Case!

Filed Under: Books, Library Resources, Publishing, Small press, Writing Tagged With: 'Til Death, books, fiction, ghosts, Jason Anspach, writing

Banned Book Week 2015: Fahrenheit 451

September 29, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Bad news: 451 degrees F is not, in fact, the temperature at which paper bursts into flame. (It’s actually between 440 and 470 degrees F depending on the type of paper).

Good news: Ray Bradbury’s novel about censorship, mass media, and induced apathy in the modern world is as accessible and spooky as it was the day he finished writing it in 1953.

Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Guy Montag, a fireman in the most literaTo everything, burn, burn, burn...l sense: he sets books on fire. Bradbury said in interviews that he wrote the book to address the popularity of the idea of book burning during the McCarthy years in the U.S. As time wore on, he came to describe the book in more general terms. The book has pulled down  a number of awards starting with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Commonwealth Club of California Club Gold Medal in 1954. Francois Truffaut wrote and directed an excellent film adaptation in 1966, and the BBC produced a radio adaptation in 1982.

And of course, it’s been banned, censored, and redacted by schools and libraries since its publication. (The irony of banning a book about burning books is apparently lost in some circles.)

Anyway, Guy Montag burns books. In this world, firemen seek out and seize stashes of books in private homes and ignite them. Books are considered confusing things, filled with all sorts of ideas that make people uncomfortable (“painful, awful, hurting words” as his wife Millie describes them). In that sense, the firemen perform a public service: they keep the masses happy and allow them to focus on the permissible outlets: television (parlor walls), visual mass media, and sports events.

Frankly, Montag is okay with his life until he meets Clarisse, a new neighbor, a high school girl who is far more likely to ask “Why?” than “How?” While she vexes her teachers and fellow students, Montag finds her refreshing and fascinating–until she disappears. Montag’s wife, Millie, thinks the girl died in an auto accident but doesn’t really know or care.

Missing Clarisse is bad enough, but Montag truly questions his life when he takes a call to burn the stash of an elderly woman with a huge hidden library. The house is torched and the woman elects to burn to death with it rather than give up her library. Superficially, Montag understands that the woman sealed her own fate, but his guts tell him a different story.

Montag starts stressing out. Beatty, his fire chief, takes him aside to explain that the books aren’t really illegal per se. A fireman is even allowed to keep one and read it as long as he burns it within 24 hours. It’s the books’ effects on the public that forces the state to employ firemen. After he leaves, Montag reveals to his wife that he does have a stash of books, and he has no intention of burning them.

Montag loses his desire to play by the rules and obsesses about the books. He contacts an old English professor in a desperate attempt to figure out how reading works (and why it’s forbidden), only for him to avoid Guy like the plague. Guy then crashes his wife’s “parlor wall party,” reads the poem Dover Beach, and makes one guest cry. Millie flips out, Guy burns the book to mollify the guest, everyone storms out, and his wife turns Montag over to the authorities.

Millie leaves him on the spot while firemen burn his house. After a grand chase, Montag escapes the city to find a group of exiles who live by the river. Each of them has memorized one book in the hopes that the future will be more receptive to the idea of reading and preserving thoughts through the written word. War breaks out, the city is destroyed, and when the flames die down, Montag and his new friends head in to rebuild.

Bradbury’s work is generally allegorical, but Fahrenheit 451 is a thematic wonderland. Besides the obvious comparisons to real-life book burning which are perpetrated in the name of racial, political, or cultural purity, Bradbury equipped many of his characters with “Seashell ear-thimbles,” tiny earpieces through which individuals received streams of personalized media entertainment. On the surface, it’s just a radio, but just beneath that is the desire to surround oneself with a cocoon of sound to keep the world at bay. In that respect, one can’t exactly look at a world where tens of millions of personalized iPhones, Androids, iPads, tablets of every size and price range, float around keeping their users’ attention focused on their glowing screens at the expense of their neighbors and not be a little concerned.

Beyond that the book itself has been the victim of corporate meddling in the name of education standards. Starting in 1967 the book was subject to the expurgation of all words “hell,” “damn,” and the word “abortion” by its publisher, Ballantine Books, to create a high-school friendly version. Worse, by 1973 the cleaned up edition was the only version on the market. When Bradbury learned of this in 1979 he insisted that the original text be reinstated, and in 1980 it was.

One bit that appears frequently in the text that I sped over in this review is the mechanical “hound” that follows Montag, literally sniffing out trouble. It’s basically a robot that’s designed to assist the firemen in their daily lives, including sniffing out book stashes. Besides emerging as a stand-in for continual state surveillance, it’s one of these drones that chases Montag all over the city as a last ditch attempt by the government to silence him. For all that, the hound fails. It’s his wife, Millie, that rats him out the the government, showing that people are still the more dangerous enemy.

Another bit that recurs in the text: there are very few scenes where the subject of war isn’t in evidence. Bombers constantly fly overhead on their ways to foreign targets, Millie’s friend’s husband has been called up (she figures he’ll be back in a week because it’ll be over quickly), and Montag’s home town gets annihilated at the end of the book. The fact that war even exist in this world gives the lie to the danger that books and reading supposedly represent. If everyone must be kept happy and quiescent, why even have wars? Bradbury’s characters are not even sophisticated enough to ask that type of question. Even Beatty is, at heart, a just a functionary. And while Montag and the exiles have the best intentions, we have no clue if they have the skills to rebuild anything, even as they’re willing to try.

As always, many thanks to Shiela DeChantal and her Book Journey blog for giving awareness boosts to Banned Book Week.

Filed Under: Free Press, Library Resources, Literature, Politics, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Still True Today, Writing Tagged With: banned books, books, censorship, Fahrenheit 451, freedom, Ray Bradbury

You Can Have WEIRD Things

May 13, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

(I know, I owe you a post about imagining the “death of the library.” But this is a big deal.)

I recently got into a Facebook thread with a former (now grown up) student over e-book pricing decisions. She’s an avid reader but refuses to buy any e-book that’s more than a dollar or two in price. It was nothing against the authors, or the books themselves, she explained. She just didn’t see why she should ever pay more than that for a book. Neither did her friends.

It’s a fair point, especially if all you’ve ever known about the experience of acquiring books is looking at price lists on Amazon and clicking a button. From the producer’s side of the transaction, it’s more complicated.

There’s the author, who creates a labor of love until the minute someone decides to click that yellow button that says “Buy”. There’s the editor, who toils over the manuscript to make it readable. Some editors will carve out whole chunks of text to achieve that, others will simply correct the grammar, spacing, and spelling, but the effort is the same.

There is the cover artist who brings a point of story from inside the pages of the manuscript into blazing life.

The point, as Kevin G. Summers makes clear here, is that books cost money to make. Considerable amounts of money. In the case of indie publishing, everyone except the author makes money, at least until he or she sells enough copies to recover the costs of the book in question. Speaking as someone who has just started down this road, it’s a steep learning curve.

Indy authors Nick Cole and Michael Bunker, and ThirdScribe creator Rob McClellan have made a thing, called Apocalypse Weird. I’ve mentioned it on Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve reviewed a bunch of the books they’ve released.

aw8-1024x785

To be blunt, they need money to keep the ball rolling, and have built an Indiegogo project to raise it. Three greats ways of donating stand out:

First, just drop a buck into the bucket. It makes no dent in your budget and still helps us out.

Second, you can drop a fiver into the bucket and get a neat perk.

Third–and my favorite option–$20 buys you the first eight AW novels, which have been getting rave reviews across the board for months. Or, for the same $20, you can pre-order the next eight AW novels in the series, which are sure to be every bit as good.

Sixteen outstanding works of End of the World fiction for $40. It doesn’t get better than that.

Actually–it does get better. There are plenty of awesome perks to choose from. But, the sale ends in 8 days, so check out the fund raiser to donate now!

[books_custom size=”150″ type=”random” custom_sort=”publisher” custom_sort_value=”Wonderment Media Incorporated”]

Filed Under: Books, Free Press, Library Resources, Publishing, Reader Advisory, Sci-Fi, Writing Tagged With: Apocalypse Weird, fiction, publishing, science fiction

Digital Recovery Plans, Libraries, and Us

May 6, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I’ll just say that if you couldn’t make it to NYTSL’s Spring Program last night, you missed an excellent discussion.

The program was “”Disaster Recovery and the Digital Library”, and as such, it brought a bit of real world application to the often abstract world of disaster planning. NYTSL’s guest speakers were Frank J. Monaco, a retired Army Colonel and the recently retired CIO of Pace University; and Neil H. Rambo, the Director of NYU Health Science Libraries and Knowledge Informatics.

Both men spoke about experiences that put their training, planning, and experience to the test. In Frank Monaco’s case, it was managing the school’s recovery from the 9-11 attacks.

Verizon facility serving most of downtown Manhattan
140 West St, damaged by 7 WTC’s collapse.

Monaco has already written extensively on what he did that day but briefly: after he transitioned from the military to CIO of  Pace U., the first part of his plan was to move the institutional data centers as far away from downtown as possible, meaning Briarcliff Manor, the site of Pace’s Westchester campus. This turned out out to be a fortuitous decision. When the Internet collapsed (literally, as data transfers relied on the Verizon facility at 140 West Street which was damaged by the 7 WTC building collapse) Pace’s CTO had to physically carry the school’s mission-critical external servers and move them to a disaster-recovery site in Hawthorne, NY. After 24 hours to allow new IP addresses to propagate, web pages and e-mail returned to functionality.

Importantly, Monaco noted that their disaster recovery plan was still incomplete at the time of the attack. He also pointed out that restoring service was a very small part of the tremendous effort exerted by Pace’s president, executive staff, administrative staff, faculty, and students.

Neil Rambo told a hair-raising tale of the events that occurred in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy heaped a few million cubic feet of water on New York City. Long story short, a 14-foot  storm surge sent a wall of water powerful enough to blow steel doors off their hinges and send part of the East River into the lowermost levels of NYU’s Langone Medical Center on First Avenue. The result was a ruined library, destroyed archives, and a non-functional hospital.

Part of the problem was that NYU had previously weathered hurricane in 2011, Irene, which did minimal damage, and created a plan that expected similar damage from Sandy. After creating a response that planned for a cleanup and restoration of the medical center, library staff were enabled to work out of different facilities in a building across the street, reducing the loss of activity. It’s taken this long to determine that the library will be rebuilt into a superior environment which will devote nearly all its space to electronic resources, and is due to open later this year.

The lessons here aren’t really that surprising: make plans when things are running well, because there won’t be a chance when things break. A great plan, properly executed, is always better than an okay plan properly executed and light-years ahead of no plan at all. Optimally, the highest levels of administration need to be on board from the first stages of planning. Monaco’s advice on achieving this: “Scare the hell out of them.” Rambo’s advice was a bit more circumspect: “Imagine what would happen if you library was just gone, and work from that.”

And so I did. I’ll tell you what I figured out in the next post.
 

Get My Books

[author_books amount=”3″ size=”150″ type=”random” name=”jonfrater”]

Filed Under: Conferences, Events, Library Resources, Still True Today, Tech Stuff Tagged With: disaster recovery, libraries, NYTSL, NYU, Pace

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