Malasz

Roger North and Lewis Spender, students and friends in the early Twentieth Century, are on a mission. In order to win acceptance into a club of rational thinkers, they must solve a seemingly paranormal mystery. Spender has chosen the case of the insane playwright, Adelard Odd. One person reading Odd's writings was struck blind, and three other people disappeared while in his room at the Quartersoake asylum. Once at the asylum grounds, the two men find out soon enough that Odd's door , a door ostensibly leading to nothing, is an axis mundi that involves those entering in a myriad of shifting universes. North and Spender are soon separated; Spender is held up as a king in the civilization he happens upon. North reappears with one eye colored silver; he is now able to see past and future and is also gifted with sight in the subjunctive mood. They reunite and contend with multiple realities, described with a Douglas Adamsesque matter-of-factness. Trying to escape from a land run b...

For those who don't already know, Smashwords is an all-in-one platform for authors to publish and distribute their e-books. It has its pros and cons for both writers and readers, which I don't have the time to go into right now, but it is very popular in the indie community. Authors who publish with them are able to track their sales and story sample downloads to gauge how well their works are faring on Smashwords. There's also aggregate reports of daily sales on other platforms that Smashwords distributes your work. But last year, Smashwords began collating all of that data to see if any patterns can be discerned from it or if its random noise. Every indie author should read the findings for themselves . The data regarding price point, title length, length of book, and sales are definitely very interesting and something to be taken into account when an author publishes their work. Anyone wishing to discuss it in the comments section, please go ahead! I've always had ...

Embustero is the follow up to Cleveland's Pale Boundaries , which I reviewed here . As there may be people who haven't read the first book, I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum in this review. Terson Reilly leaves Nivia via his reluctant rescuers. As he's a potential witness to their illicit activities, he's given a choice to join the crew or spend his time in the brig until they can drop him off someplace safe. He ultimately decides that a working passage is better than going stir crazy in the brig, but he soon finds that fitting in on the ship, the Embustero , isn't much better than Nivia. Meanwhile, the situation on Nivia has come to a boiling point for Halsor Tennisor. He's given the order by his mother, the head of the crime syndicate, to shut down the Family's operation and eliminate the Minzoku —the original settlers of Nivia who have been in hiding on a continent-sized wilderness preserve—including his mistress, Dayuki. But Tennisor isn...