They are bombing Ikeas.

I had plans to do a lot of posting around here, but then I started reading this reddit thread about whether or not a Marine unit could take down the Roman Empire if it travelled back in time….

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.