Still Here

Sort of. Not that you can tell. Turned out I wasn't really done with tax-purgatory, after all. Not when I tried to finalize my daughter's return. You would not believe the ways the IRS has of extracting money from you when you are (or have) a college-age kid whom a generous relative has helped out by putting some money in trust for your education. Turbotax and I nearly came to blows over this one.

Anyway. You didn't come here to listen to me whine about taxes, did you? My family has to listen to that; you don't. (Family is where, when you go there, they have to take you in...and listen to you whine about taxes.)

Right now, we have a house full of college kids. Daughter is home on break, and brought some friends with her. Great kids; it's fun having them here. But I do have to be careful tiptoeing through the house late at night, so as not to trip over sleeping bodies.

The ebook project has been consuming way more time than I had dreamed possible. I probably mentioned, ereads is releasing some new (to their list) titles of mine, to go on sale at Fictionwise and elsewhere—and at the same time, reissuing the ones that have been on sale. A reissue of an ebook sounds wrong, somehow, doesn't it? But it all started because some of the books went on sale with the wrong covers, and it turns out the only way to fix that is to reissue them. And then it turns out there are a lot of irritating formatting errors in at least some of my books currently on sale. So we're just re-releasing the whole lot, along with the new ones. This means a lot of proofing, and a lot of correcting. Fortunately, I have a capable and enthusiastic reader-volunteer helping me with a lot of the grunt work. Thank you, Ann!

Okay, now, back to the proofing, Igor.

Free Sunborn Download (Multiformat)

The weather has turned promising, I've emerged from tax-return and financial-aid purgatory, and it's time for a Spring Special! Things are moving more slowly than I had hoped on the Tor ebook front, so I'm taking matters into my own hands. For a limited time, I am making Sunborn available for free download in all major ebook formats! DRM-free, now and always. So come and get it. Tell your friends! Bring your girlfriend/boyfriend and your grandmother. Bring your dog.

How long is a "limited time"? I'm not sure, but when Tor gets its ebooks out the door and into the stores, I expect these will come down.

"You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better." —Maxim Gorky

That Time of the Year

Every year about this time I suddenly go silent for a little while. That's because I'm up to my eyeballs in tax returns and applications for college financial aid, the first having to come before the second, but the second possibly being the more miserable of the two. (Well, actually, neither of them is as miserable as the realization that I have, once again, failed in my New Year's resolution to keep up with the record-keeping during the year. So I spend a lot of time paging through receipts as a sort of opening volley, before any of the rest happens.)

I'm in the middle of it right now. But I'm about to spend a few days in Washington state, in the Puget Sound area, on family business, so I won't get to finish it until next week.

Lots of interesting stuff is going on: Amazon giving way on the talking Kindle 2, stuff in science, progress on my ebooks, the economy continuing to implode. I'm afraid it'll all have to wait a while. At least for me to comment on it. Have a great weekend, everyone!