Today, Saturday, 11/28/2020 and through Monday, the 2020 Collection is free.

Official link:
Amazon link

By the way, here’s the plan (actual screenshot):

Will it happen? Who knows, it’s hard to plan a year out, much less four years out.

Oh, hey, do you want a sample in this email? Here you go:
(Note: this story not indicative of any other story in the collection.)
 

Thank You for the Story

 
Summary: Their efforts cleaning up timelines has nearly ended…
Length: very short
Type: heartfelt, sci-fi
Warnings: violence, death
 
“Thank you for the story, it was nice,” Eve “Flinch” Flinchette said as she sat on the floor with her back against the wall.
    “It’s all true, I swear,” Leyton Stone said, standing several feet in front of her.
    “I know. I know it is.” She glanced down at the gun in Stone’s hand, but only for a moment. “Guess there’s only one more thing to do.”
    “Flinch…”
    “No, don’t, let’s just get this over with.”
    He raised the gun up, aiming at her forehead. He inched forward a couple of steps just to make sure he didn’t miss. For her. “If there was any other way…”
    “Don’t be a pussy about it. Just do it.”
    The situation was weirder for him than for her, it seemed. Killing someone he had been so close to, sort of. Yet it wasn’t murder, it was just business. They both knew that. It was the mission. They were both doing what had to be done. There wasn’t fear, either. There was no chance of getting in trouble; they were in a small abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere. No one would ever know.
    He pulled the trigger.
    Flinch let out a tiny gasp as her head rolled back then off to the side, her expressionless face now frozen that way forever.
    Stone looked at the gun, now useless, and tossed it off to the right.
    He looked back at Flinch and sighed. With some effort, he picked her up, carried her several steps to his left, and laid her gently on the pile, trying not to make eye contact with any of the other corpses.
    He stood there a moment, knowing that each passing second increased the likelihood that his mission, no, their mission, was truly over. He looked back at the door, the only way in or out, and it was still shut. He retrieved the gas canister next to it. It somehow felt heavier than Flinch had. Maybe it was psychological. The canister didn’t look like it should be that heavy and that threw him off. Or maybe it was just the relief of finally, amazingly being done with it all. He lugged it over to the pile, set it down, and popped open the lid.
    Then he heard the door.
    “Flinch,” he said.
    “Hey, Stone.”
    He straightened up and looked at her. Her hair was in a ponytail and she wore a gray sweatshirt and jeans. The Flinch he’d just killed had her hair down and wore a white shirt and black pants.
    He pointed toward the gas. “I was just about to…”
    Flinch shook her head. “It’s okay, I’ll get it.”
    “Damn it,” he said as he sat down where the other Flinch had breathed her last. “I thought I was the end. You’re a little late. Each iteration comes about sixty-three seconds after the previous.”
“I know, and I’m really sorry, but there’s a good reason.”
    He looked up at her. “You’re the end.”
    She nodded. “HQ called to confirm, slowing me down a bit.”
    “Well, that is good news.”
    She looked at the pile of bodies. “So many Stones and Flinches.”
    “And each one bringing us just that much closer to the original timeline, undoing all the damage.”
    “I can’t believe it worked. We’ll be the last time travelers in history.”
    “You’ll be the last.” He looked at her gun. “Just the one bullet left?”
    “Yep.”
    “Amazing how it always works out that way, isn’t it?” He pointed at the Flinch he’d put on the pile.         “She chased another Stone all across time and space, I chased her all across different time and space, and you chased me. And every time, it came down to one bullet and sixty-three seconds — or so — and this room.”
    “It really is.”
    “Were we lovers?”
    She’d been avoiding eye contact for a while, but she looked at him then. She smiled. “You know we were. We had some amazing times.” Her eyes grew slightly wider as the idea came to her. “Would you like me to tell you the whole story?”
    He nodded. “That’d be nice.”

Happy Reading!
-Darren

What is it?! What could it be?!

Rotated and zoomed in:

Oh my god, it’s the next book in the series! How cute!

And look, it barely has any stories in it yet. In fact only one of those is written, one is somewhat in progress, and the rest have yet to be started.

Hopefully it will be due around Thanksgiving this year (2020), just like its most recent older sibling was last year.

My only concern (aside from having so far to go at this point):

What the hell is this thing doing in my kidney?!

My new book is out!

Made my other two free for the rest of Thanksgiving weekend:

Holy schnikes, he wrote another collection. Preorder for $0.99 on Amazon now (it comes out Friday, November 29, 2019, just four days away) or if you’re already on my emailing list, look for the email with links to an even more discounted version.

Non-Amazon links:

https://books2read.com/u/3LpOQ5

What can I say? I’ve been so busy finishing this behemoth, I’ve neglected this blog, my emailing list, everything. Enjoy!

 

Free E-Novels 7/26 – 7/27 (2019)

Egads, forgot to mention this anywhere. Today and tomorrow, BOTH my novels, Arnesto Modesto and my 2018 short story collection, are free on Amazon!

Arnesto: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DM7SBPB

Short Stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NDL478X

Minor update:

• Need to edit Time Travel Romance: As Written by a Twelve-Year-Old Boy Purely for the Money. Also, for the first time, didn’t really separate by chapters, so need to, well, separate into chapters.
• Working on new multi-part story, Single Elimination Earth
• Yesterday, wrote a 600+ word nonfiction short, A Quick Neighborly Problem

You know what, here, enjoy the world premiere of…

A Quick Neighborly Problem

This story happened a few nights ago and is as true as I can remember it (which is pretty well due to the circumstances about to be laid out before you).

While rounding the corner while walking my girlfriend’s half-Corgi, half-Pomeranian dog Fawkes, a car with three or more people cruised past. “That’s my dog,” said a young woman out the open window.

As I had the only dog in the vicinity, it was clear she was talking about Fawkes. However, I strongly believe she was not talking to me, but rather, to someone else in the vehicle. Also, I don’t believe she was claiming Fawkes was hers. I can think of two possibilities: either she was implying she had a dog just like Fawkes, or she wished to own a dog like Fawkes. This sets up the fact that the speaker may not have had the most complete grasp of the English language. Also, intra-car relations seemed friendly at this time.

Just then, Fawkes and I hit a stretch of pavement less than a block’s length. As there’s nowhere for her to comfortably void her bowels in this spot, we like to jog to the next intersection, and in doing so this night, caught up to the car which had stopped. Also, intra-car relations had incurred a most serious degradation.

One young, female occupant (I believe a different one from the one before) had decided she would no longer co-occupy aforementioned vehicle any longer.

“Get out of the car, whore!” she screamed. This was in the late evening in the parking area of an apartment complex. There was little other traffic aside from one other car that approached from the rear, changed his mind, then backed away from the scene. In other words, the scene was perfectly quiet except for this verbal battle surrounded on all sides by apartments mere feet away.

At this point, there was a prolonged and open exchange of increasingly lengthy barbs and slurs between the two young women which brings us to the problem at hand. A couple more examples:

“Fuck you, whore ass!”

“Get out of my car, bitch ass whore!”

Fawkes and I rounded the corner and observed from a safe distance up the next street. It was there that I wondered in my nerdy fashion how many combinations of these insults (only counting the single slurs) they made without repetition.

The stipulations:

• One cannot repeat the same word twice in a row.
• “Whore” was definitely preferred to “Ass,” however, for simplicity, equal weight is assigned to all three words.
• The words are Bitch, Ass, and Whore.

 

Due to no repetition, it’s easy to see that for length n, the number of possibilities is 3 (for the first word) * 2 (for every word thereafter).

Length 1: 3. Bitch, Ass, Whore.

Length 2: 3 * 2 = 6.

Each of the three can only be followed by one of the other two:

Bitch Ass, Bitch Whore, Ass Bitch, Ass Whore, Whore Bitch, Whore Ass.

Length 3: 3 * 2 * 2 = 12.

Length 4: 3 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 24.

Length 5: 3 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 48. And so on.

 

Ah, but what if we want to know the total number of possibilities up to and including length n? Forgive my lapsing math skills, but as this is a short story and not a formal mathematical proof, I’ll skip to the end: 3 * (2^n-1).

For length n:

1. 3 * (2^1-1) = 3
2. 3 * (2^2-1) = 9
3. 3 * (2^3-1) = 21
4. 3 * (2^4-1) = 45
5. 3 * (2^5-1) = 93

We can verify by adding up the lengths from the first part of the problem above: 3, 3 + 6, 3 + 6 + 12, etc.

 

Conclusion: before the one woman pulled the other woman out of the car and departed, I heard up to and including 93 unique insults without immediately duplicating slurs in combinations from length one to five of Bitch, Ass, and Whore.

 

Just a quick update, since I’m proud. Finished off The Sopranos yesterday, so today it was back to the grindstone.

Started a new short story (why finish a story in progress when you can start a brand new one). The idea just popped in my head, and so I wrote a quick 805 words. I could’ve continued, but decided I’d best get back to the other story, so went back and wrote 565 words there. Still a ways to go (for both), but it was my most productive day in some time. Plus, I have the next parts somewhat ready in my head to get a good start on tomorrow.

Soon I need to use my last free day for this 3-month Amazon-exclusive period…

Been a long time, but I was busy with a bad cold followed by being on a Grand Jury for a couple weeks followed by replaying The Witness and watching The Sopranos and other lame excuses.

Did write a couple real short stories, The Greatest Love that Almost Was, which I probably wrote in my annoyance at those love stories where everything works out perfectly, and The Last Chance, which I wrote in my annoyance at my luck in a certain aspect of a certain popular mobile game. Otherwise, I’m in the process of writing a longer short story entitled, Time Travel Romance: As Written by a Twelve-Year-Old Purely for the Money. Of course, I’m not 12, but the story is written in the voice of one. Hopefully anybody who reads it will find it amusing.

Now, you know you’re doing good when your sales graph y-axis has to measure in the thousands. Feast your peeps on my massive sales!

Haha, oh wait, I already spoiled it in the post title, those were units I gave away for free. Based on Nicholas Erik’s (https://nicholaserik.com/) advice, I promoted via freebooksy and hired Kindlepromotor on fiverr.com. Total spent: $77 ($70 for freebooksy, $5 to Kindlepromoter, with $2 fee to fiverr.com). It may take a while to get my money back in any easily quantifiable way, however, knowing thousands of people at least downloaded my book was a pretty cool reward in itself. I also got 3 new reviews on the U.S. Amazon site (finally), bringing me to 9 there (one away from the magic 10!). But what may be neatest of all:

After a REAL rough estimate, looks like people have read about 17,000 pages of my works in the past month. Neat! Of course, I had to make Arnesto listed only on Amazon to get credit for those page reads, meaning it’s not available on Draft2Digital for now, but I felt this was the better way to go at this time. I have also sold 24 units in that time.

I will probably attempt this again soon with my short stories collection for my last (of 5) free days which one gets for being tied only to Amazon.

Both my novels, Arnesto Modesto and my short story collection, will be free tomorrow and the day after!

Linky-loos:

Not much in the way of news, other than I published the paperback version of the short story collection. Had to remember how to get headers and footers (page numbers) working again. Need to remember:

• unlink “Link to Previous” for each section when I want to change the header
• set header to 0.4″ from Top and footer 0.2″ from Bottom
• replace all page breaks with section breaks (type: “Next Page”)

But whatever, it’s done!

My new, full-length e-book is out!

On Amazon

Starting off with KDP Select again, which means I’ll get five free days over the next 3 months. The first free day will probably be soon, so if you’re interested, stay tuned.

Since my last blog:

• Went over the whole book in Word looking for those little blue undersquigglies indicating a typo. Should have done that with my other titles, but didn’t. Found several, fixed them.
• Added the above procedure to my new-title checklist.
• Republished The Baby Hunter, Chasing Cowquest, and Tyrone Jackson due to errors found above.
• Shortened some of Chasing Cowquest’s chapter titles (in this book) so table of contents would look slightly better.
• Created the “Coming 2019 (Possibly)” section for the back matter. Interesting writing descriptions for stories that mostly only exist as ideas in cells in a spreadsheet.
• Published the above novel just this morning!
• Sent email with link to free copy to mailing list
• Applied for a U.S.-only BookBub feature for Arnesto Modesto, noting that the one I had in November was international-only.
• Updated this blog.

Note: I should have had this done sooner. But I really wanted to write that last story merging characters from the other stories, and though I started it just barely still in 2018, it took a month to finish. Not a big loss, but I can only now start writing for 2019.

Happy Reading!