My latest weird western story, “The Angel Azrael Rode Into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse,” just went live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As I mentioned earlier, BCS is one of my favourite speculative fiction magazines because it gives a damn about the literary in literature. The stories it publishes are all over the map, and usually indescribable, but they’re always damned good.

Readers who only know me through my novels Please and The Warhol Gang may be a bit surprised to discover I’ve written a weird western. In fact, it’s not the first weird western I’ve published. My story “The Fourth Horseman” won On Spec‘s story of the year award a few years back, and I’ve got another weird western that I’ve just finished and I’m looking to place now. I’ve also got a few other spec lit stories coming out in the near future, including a Cthulhu superhero story. Yeah, you read that right. But more on that later.

If you’ve checked out any of my other stories, though, you’ll know I have a taste for the fantastic or magic realism or spec lit or whatever you choose to call it. For instance, “We Continue to Pray for Something to End Our Prayers,” which you can read for free at This magazine, or “Beat the Geeks” (Kindle version here), “Has the World Ended Yet?” (Kindle version here) or “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away” (Kindle version here). What can I say — I hate the world we live in….

Anyway, thanks to the generosity of the good people at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, you can read “The Angel Azrael” for free online, although you can also buy the issue, which includes a story by Marissa Lingen, for 99 cents on Kindle. And, of course, it’s free to subscribe to BCS.

When I go out for long rides on my bike, I like to put the iPod on shuffle to see what accidental mashups it makes in my mind. Yesterday’s perfect synchronicity was Bowie and Reznor’s “I’m Afraid of Americans” and Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs.”

John Locke, who writes the Donovan Creed thriller books, has made a small fortune selling ebooks himself. Now he’s signed with the publisher Simon & Schuster and will no doubt find an even larger readership. But while writers usually face crappy terms when it comes to their ebook rights — 25% is the norm — Locke has managed to retain all his ebook rights. He will continue to sell ebooks himself while S&S handles the print side.

This is the first situation I know of where an author has managed to keep ebook rights when signing with one of the big publishing houses. It just shows that publishers need to think about each book and writer on their own terms. Interesting times.

This is why they made the Internet:

This new RPG looks mighty cool.

A little while ago, I posted about how Angry Robot books was trying to build a sense of community with its readers by offering package discounts and selling lifestyle products. They’ve taken this a step further by encouraging readers to write fan fiction of selected Angry Robot books — and by promising to publish the best fan fiction in anthologies and pay the creators. Pay the creators of the fan fiction.

Please take note, other publishers. This is how you keep your fans happy and make a little extra money while doing so.

Self-help writer signs major deal with Amazon because he’d rather be with a technology company than a publishing company. Not sure there’s much of a difference when it comes to Amazon these days.

So it’s clear why the deal is both an outlier and a harbinger. Giving up the store sale is a difficult thing for any author to do, particularly when the math works out to be so close to breakeven (and we haven’t factored in the marketing impact of books in stores, which is real.) It took an author with a particular personal bent to pursue that choice. But it is a harbinger because the math would appear to be moving in Amazon’s direction. The one way I can see for publishers to improve their chances of looking good in this calculation is to raise their ebook royalty percentage. Of course, there’s no reason that Amazon couldn’t do the same thing.

I have no idea what is happening in this video, but I watched it from start to finish.

I can’t decide if these real-life superheroes exist or are just some viral marketing scheme, and I’m too afraid to Google them to find out.

I am rushing to the emergency room to meet a real-life superhero called Phoenix Jones, who has fought one crime too many and is currently peeing a lot of blood. Five nights a week, Phoenix dresses in a superhero outfit of his own invention and chases car thieves and breaks up bar fights and changes the tires of stranded strangers. I’ve flown to Seattle to join him on patrol. I landed only a few minutes ago, at midnight on a Friday in early March, and in the arrivals lounge I phoned his friend and spokesman, Peter Tangen, who told me the news.

“Hospital?” I said. “Is he okay?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. He sounded worried. “The thing you have to remember about Phoenix is that he’s not impervious to pain.” He paused. “You should get a taxi straight from the airport to there.”

At 1 a.m. I arrive at the ER and am led into Phoenix’s room. And there he is: a young and extremely muscular black man lying in bed in a hospital smock, strapped to an IV, tubes attached to his body. Most disconcertingly, he’s wearing a full-face black-and-gold rubber superhero mask.

“Good to meet you!” he hollers enthusiastically through the mouth hole. He gives me the thumbs-up, which makes the IV needle tear his skin slightly. “Ow,” he says.