Daniel Ausema's Blog, page 18

Final days to get the free "The Spire Singers"!

Don't miss out! On October 1 "The Spire Singers" switches over to an Amazon exclusive. So to get a free copy, you need to subscribe before then!

And if you want the early bird discount, do that soon, too. Episode 1, "Lady Janshi's Acolyte," comes out next week Monday already, and from then until the end of the year you can get a new episode every week. But to get the discount, subscribe before Episode 1 premiers.

How to do it? It's simple. Send the $5 US by Paypal here: http://paypal.me/DanielAusema (or for more information, check out the Spire City tab up top).

More about "The Spire Singers"

As promised, here's a bit more about that novelette I'm giving away to subscribers who sign up this month:

Cartesz is a man of routine and propriety. The most important routine is the song of the singers, chained to the roofs of the city's spires, whose voices give him the pattern of how to conduct his life. When one of those singers is knocked to the cobbled street, it falls to Cartesz to help her. As his carefully counted life becomes an uncertain mess of bureaucracy and mystery, he realizes that he's never given thought to what it means that the city so callously chains the singers to its roofs. Trapped by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that stifles so much of the city, what can he do to help the singer? Especially when his own grip on life seems to loosen...

This is not merely another story set in the same location as the Spire City series, but takes that city and gives a very different twist to how we see it. As a story should when it centers on a very different kind of person than Chels and the rest. Cartesz is not wealthy by any means, but neither is he destitute like those characters, and the city he experiences has its differences from what they see. Not that it contradicts anything from the main series, but it has its own, separate feel and mood. There is also one deeply-buried easter egg sort of detail for readers of the main series.

So subscribe today to get all of Season Two as it comes out as well as this bonus story!

Spire City, Season Two: Pursued open to subscribers!

The time has come for Season Two! I have updated all the information over on the Spire City tab, so you can subscribe now to be sure you're on the list right from the beginning.

What do you get as a subscriber? Thirteen episodes of steampunk fantasy, each one the perfect short-story length so you can read it in a single sitting (or stretched over a few, if you like to linger a little more) sometime during the following week. That way the story is still fresh in your mind when the next episode comes out the next Monday. The first few episodes of this season came out from Musa Publishing before it shut down, but they've been unavailable since then, and the rest of the episodes have never before been published.

But wait, there's more! If you subscribe in September, I'll also throw in a free copy of my novelette, "The Spire Singers." I'll have another post later this month with more details about the novelette, but this is where the entire idea of Spire City began. Before there was Chels or the mad scientist Orgood, before there was a deadly infection created in a lab, before there was any thought of producing a serialized story...there was "The Spire Singers."

The familiar sights of the city are there, the clockwork and the beetle-drawn carriages. The singers chained to their towers. And central to this story is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the city itself, something only hinted at so far in the main series. If you're a fan of the series, you'll love this peek into a different face of the city.

The cover art is by the wonderful duo at Worlds Beyond Art.

This novelette will only be available to subscribers who sign up before the end of the month. After that it will be an Amazon exclusive for Kindle Unlimited.

And if that's not enough incentive to sign up now, the regular price of a subscription ($8 US) is being dropped as an early bird discount to $5 US. That's almost 40% off! So sign up through Paypal, at danielausema [at] gmail.com. Or email me at the same address with any questions.

Spire City, Season Two: Infected open to subscribers!

The time has come for Season Two! I have updated all the information over on the Spire City tab, so you can subscribe now to be sure you're on the list right from the beginning.

What do you get as a subscriber? Thirteen episodes of steampunk fantasy, each one the perfect short-story length so you can read it in a single sitting (or stretched over a few, if you like to linger a little more) sometime during the following week. That way the story is still fresh in your mind when the next episode comes out the next Monday. The first few episodes of this season came out from Musa Publishing before it shut down, but they've been unavailable since then, and the rest of the episodes have never before been published.

But wait, there's more! If you subscribe in September, I'll also throw in a free copy of my novelette, "The Spire Singers." I'll have another post later this month with more details about the novelette, but this is where the entire idea of Spire City began. Before there was Chels or the mad scientist Orgood, before there was a deadly infection created in a lab, before there was any thought of producing a serialized story...there was "The Spire Singers."

The familiar sights of the city are there, the clockwork and the beetle-drawn carriages. The singers chained to their towers. And central to this story is the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the city itself, something only hinted at so far in the main series. If you're a fan of the series, you'll love this peek into a different face of the city.

The cover art is by the wonderful duo at Worlds Beyond Art.

This novelette will only be available to subscribers who sign up before the end of the month. After that it will be an Amazon exclusive for Kindle Unlimited.

And if that's not enough incentive to sign up now, the regular price of a subscription ($8 US) is being dropped as an early bird discount to $5 US. That's almost 40% off! So sign up through Paypal, at danielausema [at] gmail.com. Or email me at the same address with any questions.

Spire City, Season One: Infected available in many formats!

At last! Spire City, Season One: Infected is now out in both print and digital formats from a variety of sellers. So if you've been waiting for all the episodes to be available in a single format, now is the time. In case you've forgotten what this is all about...

Targeted by a mad scientist's deadly serum, these outcasts band together to uncover the truth and to fight back. 

Spire City is home to mighty machines of steam power and clockwork, and giant beetles pull picturesque carriages over cobbled streets, but there is a darker secret behind these wonders. A deadly infection, created by a mad scientist, is spreading through the city, targeting the poor and powerless, turning them slowly into animals. A group of those infected by the serum join together to survive, to trick the wealthy out of their money, and to fight back.

You get all thirteen episodes of the first season, which together form what is essentially the first novel of this trilogy of books. So go check it out, and don't forget that Season Two: Pursued should be opening to subscriptions in the coming week!

Amazon (print and Kindle formats): http://www.amazon.com/Spire-City-Season-One-Infected-ebook/dp/B0147IRHHE/

Createspace (print-on-demand): https://www.createspace.com/5600524

Smashwords (multi-format digital book): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/571087

Barnes & Noble (print and epub formats): http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spire-city-season-one-daniel-j-ausema/1122562191

Kobo (epub format): https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/spire-city-season-one-infected

Also available from ibooks for Apple devices and apps. The direct link varies according to whichever country you are in, so open ibooks and search for my name.

And now I'm off to get things set for Season Two: Pursued!

Another (brief,) late-ish announcement

Another thing that happened while I was traveling was that I sold a short story to Diabolical Plots. "The Blood Tree War" should be coming out sometime next year. Woo hoo!

(Even more announcements coming soon...)

A belated announcement..."The Gunpowder Resistance"

I've been traveling for most of this month and didn't always have great online access (nor time to even check if I did...). It was a very good family vacation, a chance to get back to Michigan for a few weeks and show the kids all kinds of things we have fond memories of but that they'd never seen. That's all I'll say about that here, but it is good to be back home, even among the chaos of unpacking and school starting.

One thing that I unfortunately didn't get much of a chance to do while traveling was point people to a new story publication! EveryDayFiction published "The Gunpowder Resistance" just a few days after we began our travels. I shared the link on Facebook, but that was the extent of my promoting. So if you missed the story, go on over there to read it! It's a Spire City story, though not connected at all with the characters of the serial. Not that anyone needs to know exactly how it fits to enjoy the story, but in my mind this takes place about thirty years after the serial, when the steampunk tech is evolving closer toward a WWI-era feel (though the way that effects this particular story is fairly small).

More announcements of a variety of sorts in the coming days. So stay tuned!

How does AI dream of Spire City?

Have you heard of Google's DeepDream project? It basically takes images and runs them through algorithms to identify whatever patterns it perceives, then emphasizing those patterns and running the adjusted image through again and again. At least that's the simplified explanation for what it's doing.  The program at the moment apparently has a tendency to find eyes and dog shapes, as you can see. Well, I decided to run some Spire City images through the program to see what comes out...and it's suitably psychedelic. So without further comment, here are some images (from Worlds Beyond Art and KMD Designs originally), as seen by a dreaming artificial intelligence. (Click on the image to see it bigger.)

Last chance to subscribe to Season One!

Episode 12 went out to subscribers and live on Amazon, etc. yesterday. That leaves only a single episode left, "Mint's Arrival." There is still time to subscribe, though. Sign up between now and next Monday, and I'll send you all thirteen episodes at once.

This is the perfect chance for those of you who prefer to read an entire season at once, instead of episode by episode. Get the entire season at one time and read through it at your own pace. But this is your last chance to be a subscriber. After next week, the only way to get the season will be to buy them individually from Amazon or B&N or wait for the full season bundle.

Now I'm planning on pricing the season bundle at $4.99 US, so you'll spend the same thing as if you subscribe, but you'll miss out on subscriber perks, including an exclusive Spire City poem and a special deal on a season two subscription. So subscribe today!

Duolingo update, Dutch

A half a year ago, I wrote an extensive post about my experience learning Portuguese with the Duolingo app. At the time I was just beginning to try to learn Dutch. As of this past weekend, I've completed all the lessons, so I thought I'd share a bit how that has gone.

First, the most obvious thing is that this took me only half the time it took me to get through Portuguese. Is there a learning curve to the app itself, and going through again with a new language is that much faster? I don't think so. Changes in the app itself? They made a few changes to how the app works--instead of running out of hearts and having to completely start a lesson over if you get more than three things wrong, it has a meter, which moves toward your goal with each correct answer and a step backward with each wrong answer. It's a good change, at least for how I learn, cutting back on the frustration of having to do an entire lesson over but forcing you to answer more questions when you do mess up.

So is it just that Dutch is so much easier than Portuguese? Actually the opposite. Portuguese was so similar to Spanish that it was easy for me to slack off, take my time. If I missed a day, no big deal. I could remember the vocabulary and grammar without much effort. I knew Dutch wouldn't be so easy to be casual about. So there was one weekend early on when I missed two days, but otherwise I've done at least one new lesson every day, usually two. I prefer not to do more than two new lessons each day. So if I had any extra time to do more (and more often than not, I made the time), I'd go through one or two review rounds ("Practice Weak Skills") as well.

That's still pretty casual, 10-15 minutes per day. If I were cramming to travel somewhere and wanted to have a good base before I arrived, the app would work for that. You'd just have to do a lot of lessons and have a good balance between reviewing weak skills and learning new.

(Worth mentioning that I think the total number of lessons for Dutch was fewer as well. Not way lower, but enough that it surely affects how fast I went through them.)

So how is my Dutch now? Well, there are really four ways to judge someone's ability in a language: speaking, writing, reading, listening. The app doesn't demand speaking. I do my best to say everything out loud that I can, so I think I could be understood, but it wouldn't be fluent, I'm sure. Of the rest, the lessons are split probably 50%-60% on reading, 30% on listening, and 10% on writing. Then with some basic vocabulary focus that could apply to any of those and bleeds into those categories here and there as well.

So that's probably reflected in how I'm doing on those skills--a pretty solid base for reading, some experience with listening (although it's always only one person doing the spoken parts, so it's specifically her accent and voice I'm used to--same thing with Portuguese when I did that), and a rudimentary base for writing. Probably not too far off how I was with French after a year of college classes or Portuguese after a year of Duolingo... Both of those being Romance languages, I could draw on Spanish to fill in many gaps. Dutch being Germanic, could I do the same with English? For some of it, but not as much.

Favorite sentences: "Vijfentwentig schildpadden zwemmen in het water." That sentence practically sings. And "De vriendschap dat ik had met de kooien koeien was heel special." I'm not sure I want to know the backstory of how that second sentence ended up in the app...

Of course, where am I going to use this? The vast majority of people in the Netherlands speak English anyway (not that I have any real potential to travel there any time soon, either...). It's really just a thing to learn, to connect with my ancestry. I'm hoping to dig around YouTube for videos just to broaden my familiarity with hearing it, and I may try to track down some written works to practice reading. In fact, I have a relative, Egbertus Ausema, who wrote some thrillers in Dutch. I discovered him a while back in Amazon and assumed he was some distant fifth cousin or something...and only just discovered the other day that he was actually my dad's first cousin. Huh. I may have to try to get a copy of one of those books...

And what's next? Not a new language at this point. I've been offered a job teaching Spanish this school year, so I'm going to be immersing myself in Spanish for a while at least. Hopefully still maintaining (and improving!) my Dutch and Portuguese, but not something new. I'd love someday to learn ASL or some non-European language (or both!). Re-try to learn Arabic? Learn Standard Chinese or Hindi or some other Asian language? Learn Quechua? Hmm, just typing it out makes me want to learn them all... But none are available in Duolingo at the moment, and it would be best not to tackle a new language for the time being. Much as I might like to...