Marc Laidlaw's Blog, page 7
August 3, 2016
400 Boys and 50 More
My first collection, the final entry in the Laidlaw Self-Rediscovery Series, is now available for your Kindle or Kindle app for $3.99 (that’s less than 8 cents per story, some genius mathematician informed me).
A few people have told me they didn’t know they could read Kindle books on their phones or tablets, as well as on their PCs. I’m here to inform you that you can. It’s a perfectly pleasant experience however you manage it!
I am posting the introduction below.
INTRODUCTION: 400 + 50 = 51
This collection contains 51 stories, well over a quarter of a million words, written over approximately 40 years, and assembled by the author, which is to say me, a fan of commas, and also afterthoughts. Most have been previously published, but apart from the occasional appearance in an anthology, they have never been collected in whole or even in part. Recently I made them all freely available at my website, marclaidlaw.com, rescuing numerous texts from paper and various obsolete electronic media; therefore it should be considered that this ebook exists mainly for the convenience of those who don’t particularly enjoy reading from a website and prefer the traditional, old-fashioned electronic book experience just the way Nikola Gutenberg intended it.
The decision to choose 50 additional tales to accompany the titular “400 Boys” is largely but not entirely based on my desire to have another zero in the title. Who doesn’t love more zeroes? I could have (and probably should have) included fewer stories; and with a bit more wincing I could have added several more. At the moment I’m on the verge of talking myself into 400 Boys and 40 More, a far more felicitous arrangement of numerals; or maybe I’ll settle in for another viewing of The 400 Blows (a title a much younger me once suspected a much older Truffaut had stolen from him). But no! My resolve is firm. 50—I mean 51—it is!
For now anyway.
Since this is an ebook, and essentially software, I intend, laziness permitting, to continue patching the collection, adding more recent stories without altering the title (though I will append a changelist). I suppose it’s possible that someday the title may have to be changed to “60 More” and then “70 More”; and in some distant future, provided I remain productive into a rich immortality, “Infinitely More.” But for now I’m sticking with 50. Which is to say, 51. I already have some ideas about 52 and 53.
Since my goal was to collect most of my stories in one place, and to exert thereafter very little editorial judgment, I decided to group them more or less in the order they were written and/or published. I have no particular thesis or argument to advance that would be strengthened by presenting them in any other sequence. The weakness of this approach is that the early stories are naturally weaker than the later ones. I have made no attempt to hide this structural defect. I trust that by arranging them by decade, I’ve provided a hint to the reader of what they are likely to find when they wade in at any particular point of their own choosing.
I include here no collaborations, since those have mostly been available in the collected works of my partners. I include no tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe, the gargoyle-handed bard, since I intend to collect those separately as The Gargoyle’s Handbook (“Hello, publishers! All serious offers entertained!). Nor will you find any stories I can’t bear to reread. While I had initially planned to present a “Compleat Laidlaw,” ultimately I could not bring myself to exhume a handful of lackluster stories which well deserve their current obscurity. A few I am not especially fond of were spared excision on account of kind words spoken in their defense by others over the past few decades, but no one has ever stepped forward in favor of “Buzzy Gone Blue” or others nearly as embarrassing. There is one very recent story, “Roguelike,” which I had intended to include; but it depends on typographic gimmickry, and given my limited self-publishing skills, I could not ensure it would hold up on various devices.
While providing a bit of context for each decade, I have mainly refrained from commenting on the individual stories. On my website, where these stories also appear, I have been adding occasional notes as anecdotes occur to me. You might look there for further illumination.
May you find here whatever it is you expect of me. If your minimum expectation is a quarter of a million words, most of them legible, prepare to have your expectations exceeded!
The post 400 Boys and 50 More appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 28, 2016
Missing Stories, Found
Two stories I meant to include in the online fiction section took longer than others to track down, but they are now up. First, a goofy early effort, “The Random Man” (written several years before its 1984 publication date) and then the last story I wrote about games before plunging full-time into the game industry, “Total Conversion.” Enjoy, if you can. Or dare.
The post Missing Stories, Found appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 26, 2016
“400 Boys and 50 More” – Short Story Collection Coming Soon
I’ve started putting together a collection of my short fiction. It will include just about every story I don’t find excruciatingly embarrassing, and a few things that do embarrass me but seem to be enjoyed by others. It will be another Kindle edition, at least at first, and I will continue to add new stories to it over time. This might lead to occasional updating of the title. But for now, the title is 400 Boys and 50 More, and yes it will launch with 51 stories, arranged roughly in the order of publication or composition, grouped by decade.
Here’s the current tentative Table of Contents.
END OF THE SEVENTIES: FAIL EARLY
Spawn of the Ruins
Rattleground
Tissue
THE EIGHTIES: PEAK OMNI
The Random Man
Sneakers
Faust Forward
400 Boys
Nutrimancer
Your Style Guide
Shuck Brother
The Liquor Cabinet of Dr. Malikudzu
Sea of Tranquillity
Uneasy Street
Bruno’s Shadow
Muzak for Torso Murders
Mars Will Have Blood
The Demonstration
Love Comes to the Middleman
Middleman’s Rent
The Farmer on the Wall
His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes
Loaves From Hell
THE NINETIES: X-GEN
Wartorn, Lovelorn
Wunderkindergarten
Terror Fan
The Vulture Maiden
Gasoline Lake
The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio
To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat
Mad Wind
The Black Bus
Great Breakthroughs in Darkness
Nether Reaches
Total Conversion
NEW MILLENNIUM: HALF-LIFE & LESSONS HALF-LEARNED
Cell Call
Sleepy Joe
Evaluation of the Hannemouth Bequest
An Evening’s Honest Peril
Sweetmeats
The Vicar of R’lyeh
Flight Risk
Jane
Leng
BEYOND 2010: OVER THE INFLUENCE
The Boy Who Followed Lovecraft
Forget You
Pokky Man
The Frigid Ilk of Sarn Kathool
Bonfires
Roguelike
The Ghost Penny Post
The Finest, Fullest Flowering
Most of the work ahead is simply that of reformatting. Note that virtually all of these stories are currently available right here at my website, for free, so I’m putting this together mostly for people who might want them all together in one slightly less unwieldy format.
The post “400 Boys and 50 More” – Short Story Collection Coming Soon appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 19, 2016
boingboing ftw
I notified boingboing.net of the Laidlaw Self-Rediscovery Series, and Cory Doctorow kindly posted about it here.
My ties to boingboing go way back, to when I used to draw terrible, terrible comics for the zine. Mark Frauenfelder is fairly responsible for me having gotten into the game industry, since he’d moved on to Wired right around the time I was looking to review games. I got to be a guest columnist/editor at boingboing for a week, in what I can only contemplate as “olden times.”
The post boingboing ftw appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
The 37th Kindle Edition
…it feels like I’ve done 37 of these anyway.
Yes, The 37th Mandala is now available for Kindle. It is a mere $2.99.
As usual, if you spot errors, please let me know by using ye olde contact forme. Now that I’ve got all five of my novels up, I will be gathering energy to take another shot at further cleaning up the versions. In some cases, these ebooks do not have functioning active Table of Contents, or the TOCs do not work across all devices. So I’d like to remedy that, and also exterminate any typos that crept in.
The post The 37th Kindle Edition appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 17, 2016
Neon Lotus For Kindle
I have just uploaded Neon Lotus to the Amazon store in a Kindle edition, bringing it back into print for the first time since 1988.
In the process of cleaning it up for reprinting, I found it to be embarrassingly naive politically, spiritually, culturally. The sort of thing you can only write when you’re too young to know better, an artifact of youth. Still, some people claim to like it and have asked me where to find copies, so this is for them.
The post Neon Lotus For Kindle appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 10, 2016
The Subterranean Season
Did you miss this one? I suspect you must have–you and everyone else. A meagre four reviews on Amazon for one of the darkest, funniest, most tightly controlled horror novels I’ve read in years?
Dale Bailey’s The Subterranean Season.
If you have room in your life for a book that is nasty, evil, remorseless, and tons of fun, this one will fill that need perfectly.
The post The Subterranean Season appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 9, 2016
Kalifornia Freemin’
It is Kalifornia’s day to be free (on Kindle).
The post Kalifornia Freemin’ appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 8, 2016
Today’s Freebie: Dad’s Nuke
Today only, the Kindle edition of Dad’s Nuke is free.
The post Today’s Freebie: Dad’s Nuke appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
July 7, 2016
Accidentally Free!
For one day (I think), The Orchid Eater in its new Kindle edition is free. This was partly inadvertent, but you may be the benefactor of my incompetence.
Meanwhile, I might as well do one-day freebies on the other two, in subsequent days. Just to make the accident look deliberate.
The post Accidentally Free! appeared first on Marc Laidlaw.
