Tales of the Parodyverse >> View Post
Post By
Al B. Harper
In Reply To
HH

Subj: Aww man, you mean I'll have to stand on my head to read them?!
Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 at 08:04:33 am EDT
Reply Subj: Just think how collectable they'll be in Australia since they won't be printed upside-down.
Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2013 at 09:36:45 pm EDT



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      Robin Hood 1,2,3 and Blackthorn: Dynasty of Mars are on their way. I will be tracking you down to sign them sometime. I always like to request authors to sign a book if I am able. I once bought a Jeffrey Archer book just to ask him to sign it because he was there (looking rather glum and bored in Brisbane airport). I will also post a review on Amazon once I have read them. \:\)



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    These are all good things from my perspective; especially the bit about Jeffrey Archer being glum.


It was after his prison term. He was probably thinking "I'm in Brisbane airport in a...this isn't even a real bookshop! Oh how my life has fallen."


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      Amazon is annoying. It kept telling me i was eligible for free shipping - but at the end I wasn't because; not living in the Sates. Stupid Amazon. Shipping ended up almost as much as the overall cost of the books themselves for the slow "cheap" option.



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    That is pretty annoying. I bet you'll still get your copy of the new volume before I get mine, though.


I've just received an email to indicate it has shipped and is due Friday 13 of September. Friday 13th. Spooky!


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      I have been wanting to finish RH: King of Sherwood since reading the first chapters a while ago when you first posted it, so am very much looking forward to my early Christmas present. Oh I also got the Blackthorn one due to the spiffy cover. ;\) And because I figure I've already read half - let's read the other half in real book form.



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    That's not spiffy on the cover, it's Shep. And that's not really a common mistake for folks to make!


Shep is moonlighting as the Princess of Mars?


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    I should perhaps warn you, however, that DYNASTY OF MARS is an entirely different novel to SPIRES OF MARS, and precedes it in continuity.



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    Y'see, what happened was I decided I wanted to do a novel to follow up an anthology of Blackthorn stories I'd contributed to a year or so earlier. That anthology was all from Blackthorn's point of view - the Earthman adventurer in space trope. I wanted to turn it around and do it from the female lead's perspective - the mysterious outsider comes into town and sets things right trope. So that meant I had to retell the main events from the first couple of short stories in a different way. And because I like my stories to be self-contained I ended up doing an epic that can stand alone.



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    DYNASTY starts about a thousand years before the anthology THUNDER ON MARS and it ends about two-thirds of the way through, except for the epilogue that continues after THUNDER'S epilogue.



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    It was one of three finalist nominees for best pulp novel of last year but didn't win, making three years running that's happened with my books (Robin Hoods 1 and 2 were also nominated).



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    I was convinced by the publisher to write a short free online story, maybe four parts or so, that could be used to promote the novel. Unfortunately that proliferated to thirty parts or so and became another novel. That's what you were reading online, SPIRES OF MARS, which fits after DYNASTY and just before the last story of THUNDER (a story I also wrote, and which I think might have got an award nomination for best pulp short story and also didn't win!).



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    At some stage I'm supposed to do a refining draft of SPIRES to smooth out the episodic recaps, provide prologue and epilogue, and then send it off so that can be properly published as an actual book. Then you can get drustrated with Amazon all over again.


Understood.


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      Anyway - yay me!



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    Yay you. Thanks for taking an interest.


But of course. I have been interested ever since you first posted about it. It's just been the difficulty in getting a copy here which has precluded me from replying moreso till now. I would still very much like to see an original character/concept novel released from you at some stage too - I think Sir Mumphrey would be great.