Reinvigorating This Blog

I’m ensconced in my favorite office-away-from-my-home-office at The Octopus Literary Salon. It’s the day after my Mechanics’ Institute Indie Publishers Working Group where I learned a lot about positive and negative strategies for self marketing/self promotion. First, blogging is still a thing, and so I’m going to get regular about posting to my blog Playing for Keeps. Second, display advertising deals offered by Kirkus Reviews and others are a bad deal and ineffective in generating sales let alone self promotion. Third, I should seriously consider doing my 10,000 word prequel to my novel as a taste of the novel proper and should be giving it away for free. Lots to think about.

I’ve just submitted my next MRR column to my copy editor, but in doing so I’ve depleted the column reserve I keep as a cushion dangerously low. So this weekend, I’m working on columns. The one about defending the left of the Left is going slowly. Instead I’ve got one about comparing countercultures, from beatnik and hippie to punk. I’m only covering those countercultures I have a working knowledge of, but I hope to draw some conclusions that can be universally applied.

Adventures in Finishing School

A week into my 6-week Finishing School project, I have re-evaluated. I’d intended to write 2-3,000 words a week for the next 5-6 weeks for a total of 15,000 words in order to augment an already existing 17,000 word novelette into a suitably sized novella. But I’m barely managing 1,000 words a week in a slow and painful process that’s like pulling teeth.

I still intend to work on the novelette, but I have another idea. I have a 10,000 word short story, sort of a prequel to my novel 1% Free, that needs work and maybe another 3-5,000 words. I spent yesterday working on it. The writing is much easier and more straightforward, smoother and cleaner. I’m giving myself 6 months to rewrite, get edited, and format the story into a “book” for digital distribution.

There are scores of digital publishing platforms out there nowadays, unfortunately in a constant state of flux. Pronoun recently went belly-up and Amazon’s ClearSpace is changing it’s terms of services, so I’ll wait until I’m further along with the story to chose the right platform. However, because almost anything can be deemed a “book” in digital publishing terms, the idea is to publish new work in different formats to keep up a digital presence, promote and publicize myself and my previous books, and “grow my brand.” I prefer to call it building my empire, but hey, it’s just a slight difference in emphasis.

I have a 10-11,000 word short story that’s just shy of a novelette. It’s also a prequel to my novel 1% Free, or with minimal rewriting it’s become so. I’ve set it in San Francisco in 2023 and I’ve managed three riots in under fifty pages, double spaced. It’s a long way from finished—dozens of rewrites, a professional editing and copy editing, a snappy cover illustration— before I do a super cheap, entirely digital publication using some the platforms out there. I estimate six months and I’ll link it to boosting the novel.

A GALACTIC DÉRIVE–entry by entry

Facebook has made blogs, if not obsolete, at the very least less relevant. Here is my “Interstitial Materials #14 — A Galactic Dérive” entry by entry:

A GALACTIC DÉRIVE–full PDF download

The full PDF excerpt of the “A Galactic Dérive” glossary:

“A GALACTIC DÉRIVE,” Interstitial Materials #14 excerpted from 1% FREE by G.A. MATIASZ

PDF download: A Galactic Dérive

1% FREE POD $18.95

1% FREE ebook $6.99

#onepercentfree #gamatiasz #sciencefiction #62miles #62milepress #galacticderive #selfpublishing

1% FREE ebook now only $6.99

As of May 1, the ebook for my novel 1% FREE will be $6.99. I don’t need to maximize sales or move units. What I need is to get more people to read my book. To do that I’m making the digital version cheaper. You can order the ebook here, and you can always purchase a Print-On-Demand book here for $18.95.

Jon Hunt’s illustrations for “Salvage Run”

Jon Hunt‘s brilliant illustrations for a free downloadable PDF excerpt called “Salvage Run” from my novel, 1% Free.

A glimpse of the process of creating the illustrations.

Three Excerpts from 1% Free by G.A. Matiasz

I have three free PDF excerpts from my novel “1% Free. “The first is entitled “A Galactic Derive” and offers a glossary of terms to help the reader navigate the world of 2042.
#1 A Galactic Dérive

The second is entitled “Salvage Run,” which introduces the main character Becky Wiley in a blaze of glory, a firefight in which she recovers a mysterious artifact.
#2 Salvage Run

The third is entitled “Black Widow Mouth,” wherein the main character Jimmy Hidalgo chases a seriel killer who murdered his best friend.
#3 Black Widow Mouth

Share and enjoy!

Please feel free to copy and distribute these files as widely as possible.

Print-On-Demand $18.95 Ebook $4.99

September 28 Publication Date

My book, 1% Free, will be published on September 28, 2016. You can buy the Print On Demand book here from Barnes & Noble POD, and the ebook can be had at Barnes & Noble ebook. The physical book is $18.95 and the ebook is $13.99

END TIME reprint

2nd printing cover of END TIME built by JOHN YATES at STEALWORKS.

I am reprinting my prescient, near-future thriller END TIME: NOTES ON THE APOCALYPSE through my publishing business 62 MILE PRESS. Written in a slashing, evocative style, END TIME received rave reviews in underground and small press circles in 1994.

END TIME: NOTES ON THE APOCALYPSE

Greg Kovinski, the novel’s protagonist, lives in interesting times. War and civil war rage across the former Soviet Union and much of the globe. The United States is fighting a sophisticated high tech counterinsurgency war in southern Mexico, against a popular revolution claiming the tradition of Zapata, in order to preserve the North American free trade zone. In Alabaster, a small town north of San Francisco, a draft-aged Greg, and a group of anti-war college students, gain possession of enough bomb grade riemanium to build a nuclear weapon several times more powerful than the one detonated over Nagasaki. As Greg struggles to “do the right thing” with his deadly power, friends turn out to be thieves, civil unrest rages, and the City of Oakland rises in revolution to become the 21st century’s Paris Commune.

Born in 1952, I was a late hippie and an early punk. I began self-publishing at 17 with a high school underground newspaper, and burned my draft card at age 18. Essays from my publication Point-Blank/San Diego’s Daily Impulse have been reprinted in Semiotext[e] USA, the Utne Reader, and War Resisters’ League’s short-lived youth publication SPEW! I have also published essays in Against The Wall, the New Indicator, Draft NOtices, and the San Diego Newsline. My first science fiction novel END TIME: NOTES ON THE APOCALYPSE was published in January, 1994 by AK Press when I lived in Oakland, California, with a second edition printed in September, 1996. End Time sold around 4,000 copies and was reprinted in Portuguese by a Brazilian publisher. Presently, I live in San Francisco, where I write a regular monthly column of news analysis and political commentary for Maximum Rocknroll under the name “Lefty” Hooligan. I am currently self-publishing my second novel, 1% FREE, through my business 62 MILE PRESS.

End Time: Notes on the Apocalypse can be purchased for download from Smashwords.

Near-Future Past

California, 2007.

The storm black Hooligans took Van Ness, but never made the jog off to the park, Instead, they massed, some one hundred thousand strong, up to the hastily formed police blockade on Van Ness and Grove, then east back around on Market. They stopped in fact. March peace monitors, realizing what was happening, evaporated from around the autonomous columns to beat hasty retreats up Grove, Fell, Oak and Page with the march’s stragglers. People pulled on masks, bandanas, ski masks and balaklavas. Sunglasses hid eyes. Adrenaline once more raced through Greg, somewhere in the middle of that black mass, as he pulled up his own ‘kerchief. He watched a gauntly beautiful girl, a rare, anti-war Null, put her large black scarf over her gold electroplated cheek plates, before putting on shades in synch with hers…

It’s not just sex, drugs and rock’n’roll!

A wing of fighter jets, low over Nimitz Field, shrieked toward Oakland. Toward Jack London Square and the dual battle laser positions on Oakland’s inner harbor. People were running around the tower then, running away from the Harbor as fast as was humanly possible. A second roar, and surface-to-air missile batteries leapt into action to lay up a defensive curtain of heat seeking rockets. The jets broke into evasive action. Battle laser auroras danced up ultraviolet into the descending sun as the weapons primed. Two jets looped back tightly and managed to let loose their own rockets before having to dodge again. The harbor erupted under the jet strike, counterpointed quickly by one jet taking a direct hit and another spinning off, minus one wing. The battle laser fired. The precise x-ray beam could not be seen. But it produced a sharp fold in the air as it pierced across the bay and stripped the top off San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid…

Armageddon’s been in effect!

For a brief moment Marcus witnessed a phantasm, bathed in the smoky light of its own making. The creature was humanoid, dressed in a form fitting, single-piece, eel-gray body suit. The hands were gloved, with thick seams running up the arms and shoulders. And the head was entirely, strangely helmeted. It was a type of skull-tight ski mask, fitted with shear goggles and headphones, and crested with a soft, gun-metal colored apparatus. The goggles pulsed with that on-edge-of-sight light Marcus had observed seconds before, from under the door.

“Freeze,” Joe yelled, crouched and aimed.

An invisible light, apprehendable by a sense more visceral than sight and tailored minutely to Joe’s shape,streaked with precision from the refractive goggles, cookie cutting Joe perfectly. Joe exploded backwards…

End Time: Notes on the Apocalypse can be purchased for download starting May 1, 2016 from Smashwords.