Free Novella: New Website

I’m announcing a free story on my website at www.christopherhoare.ca now. The website has been recovered from the scam outfit that stole it and has been recreated in an entirely new form. On the home page you will see the cover illustrations of my four published novels as well as the one due out in March. I’ve also added cover-type images for work in progress and the free novella.

“Gisel Matah and the Slave Ship” takes its background from a paper sent to me by a historian friend. She put together the story of the founding of Sierra Leone as a colony in which to settle released slaves. Over a hundred years or so, the project ran into problems, opposition, and the need for compromises. Gisel, my young officer protagonist of my Iskander series novels, runs into most of those problems during the few days she’s in charge of the captured ship, and trying to find a safe place to release the slaves aboard. I tell the story as entertainment, but Gisel in her conflicts with her impatient commanders, tells the true story of the African colony in miniature.

The e-book downloads I offer are not all perfect – I find ePub is a bearcat of a format. I used two different programs to convert my manuscript, one a free download and one a free online service, and I guess they were worth what I paid for them. Not exactly, because I’ve seen lots of online traffic about the problems between Kindle, Kobo, and Nook versions and the tweaking publishers have to do to produce a clean file. The html and the pdf downloads are far better files.

What else is new? I’m thinking of using this blog site as a location for my MuseItUp Publishing releases, starting with “Rast” which is due out in March. My Double Dragon Publishing novels will stay on http://thewildcatsvictory.wordpress.com/ . It’s not that I want to keep the publishers separated but that the Iskander series novels are alternate world SF and Rast is a high fantasy. Some writers caution a writer not to muddle the genres, although I don’t think SF and Fantasy fight like cats and dogs. The posts I’ve added to trailowner recently have brought in a few new people and doing that is what this promotion business is all about.

Remember, you can download the free novella, “Gisel Matah and the Slave Ship” right now from www.christopherhoare.ca . (The pdf version is the cleanest read.)

Announcing a new ice age

The way glaciers are built up is by the deposition of more snow in the winter than the sun can melt in the summer. You should see the snowdrift in our yard this winter – it covered the 4' fence, then it buried the 2' extensions I built onto it to keep the dogs from escaping. Right now it’s heading for the 8' mark, and almost there.

Two board fences are buried under it now, I think it must be the snowdrift that ate the world. I had to rig a temporary fence across the yard to keep the dogs from reaching the drift or they’d be off every time they’re let out. The doghouse was almost buried last night with a side drift up to the roof. I’d leave it until Spring, or maybe the next interglacial, but when I unload firewood out of the trailer, the shortest route is to pitch the logs over the other (that’s other, other) snowdrift onto the doghouse entry to collect from the house side of our Antarctic garden.

Hasn’t been too warm around her for a few weeks, either. But I’ve discovered why the Arctic has been warming these past few years – it’s been sending the G##### D### cold air down to us. I see the kids at another house a few blocks away have started building an igloo – smart kids, they’ll need it by the time they’re ready to graduate. It never hurts to have a craft skill of some kind under your belt.

Meanwhile, I should start planning a big sunshade to build over my drift. I figure that if I worked at building my drift over the next few years I could have a glacier halfway to town by peak oil. I could charge a small fee for people wanting to skate or cross country ski to town instead of burning gas in their cars. That bit of carbon dioxide reduction, plus the water I can lock up in my glacier, I’m well on the way to saving the world from climate change. And you all thought I was wasting my time.

Hope 2011 has been good to you, so far ...

Keep warm...


Rast to be released by MuseItUp Publishing March 2011
Free novella download available from website (soon) "Gisel Matah and the Slave Ship"
The Iskander series – Arrival, Deadly Enterprise, The Wildcat’s Victory, The Wildcat's Burden
see links to all at –
http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/eAuthor.php?Name=Christopher%20Hoare
http://www.christopherhoare.ca
http://thewildcatsvictory.wordpress.com