I just published Rooksbridge #7, Requiem for the Wicked, at rooksbridge.com. One of Camwright’s old cronies is in town, but this time he’s the honored guest of the Baroness. Which is a little awkward, and then, well… things kind of go downhill from there. This chapbook was actually sponsored by Mister Paul Tevis, that apotheosis of humanity and generosity (which is not to mention his superlative taste in fantastic fiction) and author of Penny for My Thoughts. He asked for Norchester, so I gave him some Norchester!

Requiem was a long time coming (and it’s a long chapbook: 72 pages), and in retrospect maybe it would have been better as a two-part deal across two chapbooks. As it is, it’s sort of a “double issue” with a whole lot of plot, reversals, and character development. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and that’s powering me directly into the next chapbook, Haunting, which I hope to have out in the next two weeks. Hope being the operative word, there.

Additionally, I’ve got the Autumn on the River Collection, a super-bundle of the first four chapbooks in all three formats. That’s four chapbooks, four audiobooks, and four digital editions (twelve PDFs) all together for twenty bucks. The collection is ideal for catching up or getting started if you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water. It’s also good for plugging holes in your own collection: I will be sending out coupons to folks who’ve bought pieces of the collection so they don’t end up paying for the same stuff twice.

And if you’re still hemming and hawing over taking a plunge, take a look at the first chapbook, Dirty Work, available in its entirety for free. Rooksbridge is really shaping up into a project I’m proud of, and I’m just itching to share it with as many folks as I can!

One of the unforeseen advantages of my approach, though, was that it left me with a lot of steampunk “pamphlets” full of colorful descriptions of a fictional solar system and short-short stories of the people who call it home. Content I might be able to use in other ways. For instance, I’ve had a “Spirit of the Full Light Full Steam Century” project on my hard drive for years that I never quite complete. Recently, though, as I’ve been putting Stories from Rooksbridge onto Kindle, it occurred to me that this stuff might be of interest to folks all on their own: pamphlets of the digital age, as kindle minibooks.

There are three, and I fired them off into the intarwebs at 99 cents a piece:

• For Queen and Country
• A Daring Tourist’s Solagraphy
• The Layman’s Reports from the Royal Society

And of course, I’ve got Rooksbridge available on Kindle, too, for the usual two-buck price:

• Dirty Work
• Getting By
• The Divide
• Ravens, Rooks, and Crows

Publishing to Kindle, it turns out, is dead-easy… as long as you have your content in an easily-accessible format, like XML or HTML. The above titles were approved for the Kindle store a couple days ago; when I went to check if they were live, they already had a couple sales on them. This with absolutely zero promotion, which is pretty neat. For maybe an hour’s effort on my part, it’s a nice little revenue stream that I don’t really have to do much to manage. The percentage of revenues that gets back to me is less than awesome (35%), but in the grand scheme of things, that’s 35% of revenue that I doubt I’d be tapping any other way.

So those of you who are Kindle-enabled: here’s another way to get some tasty, tasty content from my corner of the world. Hope you enjoy!

You can read the preview or order the digital edition.

So far I’ve been releasing these on the first of the month, and as you can see, I fell a little behind this month. Summer travel really sucks time out of a schedule! I’m putting up the Digital Edition now, and recording the Audiofile this week: if all goes well, posting it by Friday. The physical chapbooks are going to take a little longer than that. I don’t expect to see them before November. Chalk this one up as a lesson learned, and extra motivation to get the next chapbook, Where There Is Smoke, in the can and into the pipes as soon as humanly possible!

Aside from scheduling, this chapbook had its difficulties in writing. You’ll see when you read, but I had to be pretty awful to my characters, and that’s sometimes difficult to do. I went through a number of versions, each one flinching away from what Had To Be Done, and each one spawning off problems in theme wrinkles and plot holes, until I finally told myself to just go ahead and Do It. Miraculously, all the problems cleared up as soon as I made certain characters sorry they ever got involved in Rooksbridge. It’s amazing what a red-hot coal can do when properly applied.

With this chapbook, I feel like the cast of characters is assembled, the setting is established, and the premise of the series is pretty solid. In a lot of ways, this was the chapbook that I’ve been looking forward to writing since I started. We finally see the baroness in action and most of the cast working together (which is to say, working at cross purposes) to create the kinds of stories I’m really after. This is the kind of fiction I always want to read — and I hope it’s the kind of fiction that you enjoy.

Happy reading (and cringing)!
— Josh

Rooksbridge Serial Fiction Project – Rooksbridge #4: Ravens, Rooks, and Crows – Digital Edition

The latest Rooksbridge chapbook, The Divide, is now available! You can grab it in digital, audio, or print formats (or a bundle of all three).

This month, it’s a murder mystery complete with creepy eldritch evil and amusing if disturbing children. And you know, with a recipe like that, what can go wrong?

I’m also running a little promotion by which you can pick up a free digital or audio version of The Divide by just posting a hello (and your digital-or-audio preference) in the rooksbridge.com forums. So if you’re vaguely interested but not yet sold on the idea, swing by and see what’s cookin.