The links again:

The ePub format is at Lulu, and the Kindle version is at Amazon. These versions are $1.99 each.

Meanwhile, if you don’t want to pay for it, you can get it right here for FREE!

The Death of Patsy McCoy in ePub

The Death of Patsy McCoy for Kindle

(if you don’t have a Kindle, you can download the free “Kindle for PC” from Amazon)

The Death of Patsy McCoy, is now available as an ebook!

“When you cross the boundaries of society, you are outside society. When you reject rules, you become unruled. When you turn your back on civilization, you become uncivilized. Each barrier you cross is a little easier. You gain a little momentum, pick up a little speed, each time.”

The Death of Patsy McCoy is an exploration of peer pressure and the need to belong, and what these things can do to us.

The ePub format is up now at Lulu, and the Kindle version is at Amazon. These versions are $1.99 each.

Meanwhile, if you don’t want to pay for it, you can get it right here for FREE! (If I do this right…)

The Death of Patsy McCoy in ePub

The Death of Patsy McCoy for Kindle

(if you don’t have a Kindle, you can download the free “Kindle for PC” from Amazon)

(I think I did that right!)

Thank you, Rob!

I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Rob Siders of www.52novels.com, who did the conversion for me, and Joe Konrath, who recommended Rob. Zoe Winters called the conversion “amazing,” and I have to agree with her. Watch this space for an upcoming interview with Rob.

“The nail that rises up will be hammered down.”

–Japanese proverb

In many ways, this is a hard book to talk about.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about because it’s so easy to read. I go back to the book to get a quote and I get swept up in the sheer lyrical poetry of it, and the next thing I know, the time I’ve allotted for working on this review is gone, and I’ve written nothing.

My son,

You are only a child as I write these words, far too young to understand, but the day will come when I hope you will read them. It is in my mind, as I begin this account and look sadly on the days that fade behind me, that these are truly the Latter Days of the Law. This country that men still call the Land of the Gods is split in war; there is no loyalty between servant and lord, no regard between son and father, no bond between husband and wife.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about, because for such an exquisite story, it’s a rather mundane story. It’s the story of a reluctant man who went to war and came back changed forever, and we’ve all read that story before, haven’t we? Well, yes… and, uh, no. Not written like this one is, you haven’t.

In the end I made my decision by doing nothing. I cannot say how many hours I sat in the clearing, my bare knife by my side. I was waiting, I suppose, for that moment of fierce devotion that would drive me to act. The moment never came. I began to grow hungry, and I felt the cold touch of the mountains on my skin, and I knew that my chance to be a dutiful son had passed.

Partly, it’s hard to talk about because Mr Doggett set himself a rather harsh task when he chose Watanabe Kenjiro as his protagonist. When you set out to write a novel, it’s nice if your protagonist can tell the reader some of the things you need to get across, and yet Watanabe is so wrapped up in his own misery that I honestly think he never did see the true picture of what was happening around him. One mark of a gifted author is the ability to tell the reader much more of what is going on in the story than the characters see, especially when writing in first person, and Mr Doggett not only achieves this goal, but he makes it look pretty easy.

I was not happy with our situation, but I trusted him without reservation, as if I were a child. But I was not a child. Amaya understood these things; I mistook her sadness for fear.

Ghost of Iga is the first-person record of Watanabe’s life from his mid-childhood to his adult years. Although this was a period of near-constant war, and although it is, in many ways, the story of that war, nonetheless Watanabe tells us his unique, personal view of the events of that war, or rather, of the events as he saw them. Pursued by the ghosts of his dead brother, his mother and his nurse, his warrior father, persecuted by the very armor and weapons he must now trust his life to, he sets out into the battles believing only in death, and never quite finding it. The moment never came. Or, perhaps, it came and slipped past him in the dark, as so many moments do for each of us.

This is, of course, not a perfect book, but the flaws it displays are formatting errors, not errors of writing. There are widows scattered through the book, and an occasional line was set with a hard return, resulting in a line feed less than halfway across the page, but there is nothing that can be said against the writing itself.

This is an excellent book, and I strongly encourage you to read it.

You can also read D. Hamilton Doggett’s excellent blog, Doggerel, and he is on Twitter as @doggerelblogrel.

Ghost of Iga, by D. Hamilton Doggett, published 2009, 181 pages, 5 1/2” x 8 1/2” perfect-bound $12.95
(also available as a digital download)

mispeled.net — What They Steal

And be warned: he’s going to point you to a post or two you should read even before that, so if you haven’t kept up with this conversation, go ahead and get caught up. We’ll wait.

Ok, for those of you who haven’t kept up with this issue, and who didn’t go read Luke’s post, here’s an excerpt:

Both of Mark’s scenarios that don’t involve the taking of something from someone else, but still involve physical piracy (free newspaper and concert), stem from the same given: content creators have a right to decide how, why, when, and where their content is experienced, if for no other reason than they created that content.
I’m not sure I agree with that given as it stands… [emphasis added – LM]

People should only have a right to distribute content if their profits from said content are reasonable. What right, beyond the creation itself do I have to price my novel at such an exorbitant price? I created the content, but if the book is so good that it might improve lives, what right do I have to price it so only a few lives can be improved?

Some of the following is actually a reworking of a comment I left on Luke’s blog, but I’m including it here for the sake of completeness (and for those of you who didn’t bother to go read it. Go read it. Really. We’ll wait. Really. While you’re there, subscribe to mispeled. Also Ditchwalk. Both are required reading.)

Before I go any further, I should mention that I know Luke Bergeron nearly as well as I know anyone else that I’ve only met online, and within the constraints of cyberspace, I consider him a friend. I’ve read his novel-in-progress, and it’s a great read. None of the following is to be taken as an attack.

But seriously, Luke? I don’t have the right to price my book at $10,000,000 a copy? (Oh, look. Someone just decided to go read that post after all.)

• If my house has three hundred bedrooms, does it become a hotel, and can I charge for the rooms in my hotel, or must it be free?
• If my yard extends beyond some maximum of good taste, does it become a de facto park? May I charge admission?
• If I drove to the job I don’t have in a 14-passenger van, would that make me a bus service? May I charge fares?
• Do I have the right to create a sculpture and put it in my living room, where no one will ever see it?
• Suppose I take a photograph of wake patterns in Deception Pass, from the bridge there, on a perfect grey day? Suppose I chose not to make it available, but to only hang it in my dining room? Do I have that right?
• Suppose I can do perfect impersonations of every president since the dawn of recording technology, but I refuse to do so for anyone except my wife? Do I have this right?

But someone has said that all comparisons are odious and someone else has said that analogies always break down, so let’s go back to books.

• If I don’t have the right to price my novel at $10,000,000 per copy, and if the denial of that right hinges upon the fact that some people cannot afford that price, then what price may I set? $24.95? There seem to be a lot of books released at that price, for hardcover, at least, but there are a lot of people that can’t pay $24.95 for a book. There are people that can’t afford a buck for a book.
• If I don’t have the right to limit readership based on price, then may I limit readership based on scarcity? You mention selling three copies to the three richest people on Earth. Suppose I write a novel, make three handmade copies of it, and give them to those same three people for free? Is this not just as unacceptable?
• If I don’t have the right to limit readership based on scarcity, then do I even have the right to not write at all? I have a fifth novel completed, but not published. My wife and some of my horde of offspring have read it. @JESeanachai has read it. Can I leave it at that? Do I have the right to not publish this novel at all? Do I have the right to limit the readership of A Place to Die to those few who have already read it?
• Do you have the right to not publish your novel, which I’ve read, but most of the population of the planet hasn’t? It’s a great book, a lot of people would like it, it could effect the lives of many people. Is it more immoral for you to publish it at $10,000,000 per copy, at $24.95, for free, or not at all?

I think I said it best in the comment:

I don’t care if it’s a novel, a software company, or the cure for all cancers, it’s property. It belongs to someone.

In the portion of your blog post that I quoted above, you seem to exclude from this discussion the “taking of something from someone else.” I can’t help but wonder why. Could it be that “something” can be owned, but “content” cannot? Could it be that if I own “something” I can charge what I want for it, but not if I only own “content”?

In a world where everything was given away free, then perhaps we could all afford to give things away free, but this isn’t that world. It’s never going to be, and requiring certain things to be given away (or idly standing by and allowing them to be) isn’t even the first step in getting there. You say that if my yard is too big, it becomes a park, that if my house is too big, it becomes a hotel, and yet you say that if you won a million dollars in hard cash in the lottery, you would invest enough that you would never have to work again. I say that a million dollars is too much for one man. I say that you have to find the poorest man on Earth and keep as much as he has. Give the rest away.

I don’t say any of that actually, nor will I accept the stipulation that the “the ultimate goal of long-term capitalism” is for one man to own the entire planet (the ultimate goal of long-term capitalism would obviously have to include a thriving market, which implies the existence of a lot of other people who own things, and the ultimate actuality of long-term capitalism (if we could ever get there) would be the existence of cheap, readily available fiction, art, and cures for cancer, but that’s another rant). But there certainly are people who say that owning one penny more than you “need” (by their definition, not yours or mine) is a sin (against God, god, or gods) and a crime against humanity. There certainly are people who say that extreme poverty as a way of life is a form of holiness. When you win your million dollars, are you going to let them decide how much you need to invest?

If there were a place where writers could just crank stuff out and let it go out into the world to sink or swim, I’d pack today. I’d live there in peace and happiness the rest of my life, writing my stories like the guy in Snow Crash spins his ideas out into the Metaverse to live free.

But until then, writers have to be paid, or we’re going to be stuck with amateur fiction forever.

A non-blogging, non-twittering, meatspace friend asked me for my thoughts on the parallels between music and books in the digital age.

This is a part of my response to him:

On the one hand, it is somewhat misleading to discuss parallels between the music industry and the publishing industry, because such a discussion, by ignoring the fact that the music publishing industry is part of the publishing industry, blunts a rather dangerous edge. These discussions tend to end up asking “How can we keep the fox out?” when the fox is already in the hen house. What the book publishing industry should be asking is “How can we keep him from eating our hens?”

On the other hand, there are some valid comparisons being drawn, although what they mean and to whom is open to interpretation. There are two points that concern me, as an independent author.

The first one is the odd fact, insulting but otherwise harmless, that bands or musicians who are using current technologies to produce, record, and release their music are proud, free, and “indie” while an author who does the same thing is deluded and arrogant, and may be criminally insane.

The second issue is that the accepted way to “combat” piracy in the music industry is to simply assume it is going to happen, and to try to make money, anyway. We are constantly told that DRM won’t work, at all, in any way, because “people want to be able to read the book/listen to the music they just bought in any way, on any machine, any time, anywhere.” You can’t fight piracy, the argument goes. You have to try to undercut them. Most people will pay a tiny amount for legal music, rather than take the illegal route, but they won’t pay a real price, so just sell your tracks for 99 cents each. The money you lose on sales you can make up on concert tickets and tee shirts.

This carries over into the publishing world as what has become an increasingly common mantra: “Piracy is not the biggest problem you face, obscurity is.” We are told to give our work away, in order to become known and attract readers. We’re told that piracy is just another form of marketing. We’re told that DRM will never work, in any form, in any way, and that it is absolutely vital to let our e-books go out without it.

Well, novelists can’t make much money on concert tickets and tee shirts. The solid existence of a stack-of-paper book is a form of DRM. You buy one book, and you have one book. If you want one for every car, one for every bathroom, one for the living room, and one for the office, you buy more than one. If you give one to a friend, you have given it away. If you loan one to a friend, you have to wait until it gets returned in order to finish reading it. This is the way fiction will have to work.

If a real, workable, usable, unobtrusive but powerful system of DRM can be created and adopted, then well-written, quality fiction will survive into the digital age. If it cannot, then fiction as we know it is dead. If I can’t make a living as a writer, if I can’t devote the time and energy to it that it needs, then I will simply stop writing, and so will every other writer worth reading. Without the most basic protections that intellectual property needs in order to thrive, fiction cannot be a paying profession. It will become just another hobby.

Go to any one of the dozens of online writers’ communities that exist on the web. Spend some time poking through the archives there. The 95% that Sturgeon’s Law calls “crud” will be what survives, while the 5%, the part that took skills and talents and nurturing, will disappear. This is the future of fiction.

This is herd-sourced fiction.

I need your help.

I have uploaded my first Smashwords book, a novella titled The Dinosaur and the Dragon Lady. This is entirely new for me, and I need to see how well the conversion turned out. If you have an e-reader, either hardware or software, please take the time to download the appropriate version of this book and let me know if anything is wonky. You can set your own price on it, which I realize is going to mean most downloads will ne free, but I can live with that.

This novella is available as a PDF, RTF, or plain text, as well as in ePub and formats for the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Palm devices. It can also be read online, but what I really need to know is how it looks on the hardware devices. If this worked, I have several others I’d like to get posted as well.

Of course, if you want to actually take the time to read it and post a review, that’d be good, too! I think you’ll like it.

The first problem is that the only way to “discover” self-published fiction in a world that still actively sneers at it is to search Amazon and other sites, using the advanced search and entering the name of the publisher of record. For instance, searching Amazon with “CreateSpace” as the publisher will show you a list of books published by CreateSpace.

The next problem is that when the book comes, it turns out to have been published by some tiny press somewhere, and not directly by the author. Now it may be true that some of these tiny presses are, in fact, nothing more than shell entities, and that the books in question really do qualify as self-published. For the record, if an author sends me a book and says it’s self-published, I will treat it as such, regardless of what imprint shows on the cover, but with a book I have purchased, it’s a different story. Given the difficulty of checking the veracity of what is basically my assumption as opposed to what the book seems to be saying, I am simply unwilling to act on the assumption.

So if you’re a self-published fiction author, or if you know someone who is, please get in touch with me!

Self-publishing and micro-presses are the future! There is no doubt about this. Digital publishing and POD print publishing are flattening the walls that have both created and defended the “big house” mentality in publishing. The only thing left to be shaken off is the mantle of scorn and disgust the the big houses (and their hypnotized readers) have placed upon us. That mantle ensures that we must band together and support each other until it has dissolved in the constant wash of reality.

I want to review your self-published fiction!

The Bumbler’s Apprentice

What is there that is ignoble in the fulfillment of destiny?

Streep thought he had it all figured out. He was apprenticed by mistake to a know-nothing old buffoon, Basil the Buffoon, who refused to teach him anything because Basil had no Gift except the curse of jealousy. Streep was destined to be a great wizard. He was going places, just as soon as he got past this one little trouble. Then along comes Bruno. Make me a sword, and just like that, his life is in turmoil. Make me a sword as long as you are tall, taller, even, just a bit, make me a sword that long and then I’ll go away and leave you alone.

But now his life will never be the same.

The Meadow

(c) 2008 Levi Montgomery

     She’s mostly quiet, sitting calmly and watching out the window, sometimes watching him drive, with that little smile she has for so much of what he does. Years ago, that smile bugged him a little, till he figured out it meant she was proud of him. He can see the sun stroke across her face as the car turns, even without looking. He can feel the dapples of it across her hands, folded in her lap.
     He mostly just drives. It’s gotten to be a bit of a problem these last few years, just enough to make him fierce in his vigilance. He’s never had an accident, but he watches things more closely now. This is the first time he’s had the car out in months, actually.
     They used to do this a lot, exploring the roads and lanes around town for as far as they could reach. Saturdays, he only had a half-day at work, and Sundays there was church, but those weekend afternoons were for trying to get lost. They always made it back without without getting lost, without ever even really wondering where they were, but they sure tried.
     She’d have packed a lunch, then; chicken and potato salad and pie, books for afterwards, in the big wicker basket her mother made. ’Course, that was the days when you had to be a driver just to be a driver. Not like nowadays, when just anybody can go get a car and get in and drive. No power steering, no power brakes, no automatic trannies and power thisses and automatic thats. You had to know what you were doing, back then.
     This car, though, loafs along the freeway at a steady sixty-five, leaving nothing for him to do but steer, watch like a hawk, and mutter at the maniacs pouring past him on his left. Seventy, the signs say, and they’re doing eighty, at least.

Read the rest . . .

First up is The Dinosaur and the Dragon Lady. This short (only 16,000 word) novella proves that coming of age can happen at any time.

Only 99 cents! Hurry, pricing is subject to change.