An E-Book Sale, Octavia Butler's Mountain, and the Ceremony of Innocence

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I have two pieces of news today and a short essay. So without any further ado...

E-Book Sale for The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Open Road Media is having a one-day sale of the e-book of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, the day after tomorrow only. That's Saturday, April 14, 2018.  My novel will be featured in Early Bird Books (EBB), Open Roads Media's daily deals newsletter tomorrow and  downpriced to $2.99 across all US retailers on that day.

You can subscribe to EBB here so that you'll get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears in the newsletter. Also, they have an astonishing selection of good across a wide range of genres. So if ebooks are your thing... well, there you are.

A Mountain on Charon for Octavia Butler!

Happy news! NASA has named a mountain on Charon, the largest of Pluto's five known moons, after Octavia Butler.

I didn't know Octavia well but I liked her a lot. (And I say that as a guy who lost the Nebula Award to her classic story, "Blood Child.") She was a particularly fine writer who saw her novels as a way to make the world a better place. She died much too young. And she fully deserves this honor.

I only wish it could have happened while she was still alive.

You can read about the honor done Octavia and others (including some familiar names) here.

The Ceremony of Innocence

You don't very often hear someone you love say, "I'm disappointed. I was so looking forward to burning books."

And you rarely see the owner of a small press lament on selling out an edition in a single day.

But both those things happened when the Dragonstairs Press's chapbook, Blue Moon, written in one day, made into an edition of 69 the next, and put up on sale on the third day (not coincidentally, a Blue Moon) sold out. The original plan was to burn all unsold copies at midnight. There being no unsold copies, Marianne (who is the owner, editor, and sole proprietor) and I had to create an alternative ceremony, where I signed the original manuscript and then burned it, along with a bouquet of flowers.

Which was good enough to satisfy the need for a ceremony to mark the event. But not as good as burning twenty or forty chapbooks would have been.

We associate book-burnings with Nazis, racists, and intolerant mobs. It would have been a beautiful thing to burn books without hatred or bigotry. To burn books created for that purpose in a ceremony of joy and innocence.

Well... There was an implicit compact with Dragonstairs Press's customers and it would have been neither innocent nor joyous to hold back a few to burn. So what we have instead is the strange sensation, one which neither Marianne nor I had ever experienced before, of feeling wistful at not burning books.

Now we know that the market for such a chapbook is larger than the number of chapbooks Marianne is willing to stitch. So I have to wonder. What on earth will Dragonstairs do for the next blue moon?

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