Looking for some short but high-quality entertainment over coffee or a snack? Grab Bite-Sized Stories and fill your stolen moments with 33 indie flash fiction tales. Just 5 minutes per engaging story.
Discover new authors!
From a creepypasta horror farm to a bullish love tale and from the bloody metal deck of the ESS Arclight to superhero octopus food trucks, you can transform your shortest stolen moments into utter delights with this diverse collection of 33 flash fiction stories.
Commuting to work? Grabbing a quick coffee? Each story tells a complete tale in but a few short minutes with the added promise of a lifelong introduction to new indie writers.
You never know, you might just find your next favorite author.
Amazon is Introducing the All-New Kindle for Kids Bundle
The all-new Kindle for Kids Bundle includes the latest Kindle e-reader without sponsored screensavers, a kid-friendly cover, plus a 2-year worry-free guarantee.
The thinner and lighter Kindle e-reader offers more than 250,000 children’s titles and can power up a young reader’s vocabulary with tools like Word Wise and Vocabulary Builder. They can alsoset reading goals and track progress with Kindle FreeTime.
This bundle comes with a 2-year worry-free guarantee, meaning that if they break it, return it and it will be replaced for free. No questions asked. It’s the perfect e-reader designed with kids in mind.
If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. There’s a curated mythic fiction page up on http://www.mythographystudios.com/promo/. Make sure you sign up at the list and get the limited-time mythic fiction offers exclusive to that promo. That promotion runs separately from the Mythographers, you need to sign up once more at the page.
There are delicious pantheons to choose from, and selected series to binge on, full Netflix style. So like, Mythology and Chill.
Here are the best picks to binge on from that page:
This group is currently beta. Meaning things are about to change at any time.
So what can you do over there? Well, except talk about the God Complex books, we can discuss articles, favorite mythologies, movies like Wonder Woman and Thor, books like Ilium and Percy Jackson, anything you like. Keep it civil, but light swearing is allowed.
It has become a regular thing, Patty’s promos, every month. A big selection of indie ebooks for you to choose, across all retailers.
This promotion is over. To get notified of the next one, sign up at the Mythographer’s mailing list.
Sign up at the mailing list over at Patty’s site and get the email as soon as it goes live.
Once again, this promo is “wide,” as we call it in the business. Meaning we cover all major retailers:
Amazon
iTunes
Kobo
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
Smashwords
Google Play Books
There isn’t a corner of the globe these stores don’t cover. At September the 3rd, you’ll get an email reminding you that the 99 cents bargain is live. Just sign up over at Patty’s page.
This time we’ve really gone far and wide, making books available on ALL major retailers. There’s not a corner of the globe where one of them won’t reach.
We’ve got:
(Yes, the first ones are animated gifs. They are experiments with the digital format ) They are not necessarily books I’ve read or that I suggest, this is just a design thing.
The covers I picked are nice for various reasons, either typography, colors, composition or ideas. Some just work nicely in thumbnail size. They are the ones I browse for brainstorming. You can click the link or browse below:
I’ve happily stumbled upon this article on what Cyberpunk is and what will be. Which I will happily cannibalize for a few quotes on this post.
Cyberpunk does allow you to say a story of, perhaps Celebrity Singers and Biker Amazons 🙂 (credit Petri Rahkola)
It gets a bit academic, and I think the subject doesn’t need that much analysis but I like some of the points. I’ve even had a realization:
A kitsch self-parody
For all its outward cynicism, cyberpunk is often wilfully naive; conspiracies are unravelled, the lone maverick is redeemed, the lone aberration at the head of the system is taken out and all is well again. For all its gritty imagery, this dissonantly contradicts reality. Indeed it is questionable whether cyberpunk is an entirely dystopian genre. For the oligarch-villains occupying the luxury penthouses and boardrooms in which boss battles occur, this is utopia. The ubiquity of scaffolding in the genre’s platform games suggests there is even a building boom. It is a great time to be an engineer. Even for the average citizen, perhaps things aren’t that bad; there are plenty of exotic street-food outlets and sports to enjoy (you can follow the blood and chrome progress of Brutal Deluxe in the Bitmap Brothers’ 2007 Speedball series). Escape to off-world colonies, as we are told repeatedly by advertising neo-blimps, is an option for the rich and genetically sound. Some of the tyrannies are fairly relative. In X-Kaliber 2097 (1994), the reign of the warlord Raptor means “there are no more jobs to go to,” echoing the current fear that automation might render us all unemployable. “Well,” we might say, “thank god for that.” Even when the apocalypse beckons or has already happened (the release of the planet-decimating biochemical Lucifer-Alpha in 1988’s Snatcher, for example), it is survivable.
I like that. Yes, deep down cyberpunk is wish fulfillment, does have a happy ending, the corporations do lose. Vices are plentiful, humanity has far-out options for life extension and survival, heroes are cool and larger-than-life.
My kind of cyberpunk is rather light. All the tropes are there, but they are a backdrop to character and plot. Mega corporations crush people and effectively become worshiped, but we see the casual interactions and the family issues. Not the sweeping socio-economic ones, which frankly, would make a boring read.
Following the maxim of its baptist William Gibson that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” cyberpunk has always been a scrapyard, with pieces of what is to come scattered through the past and present. Indeed, its saving grace is that it recognizes, as other futurology often fails to, that the future will be a collage and it will be considerably older than the present.
That scrapyard is what I try to put in my own stories. A bit of Greek mythology, a bit of plausible technology, a narrative that draws you in, and some action to keep it exciting. Because, make no mistake, violence is at the cybernetic heart of cyberpunk.
The fear and power of plugging in and losing our humanity in the process, continually evident in cyberpunk, is again not new; we find precedents in Descartes’ Demon and Plato’s Cave. There is also a certain guilty pleasure in immersing yourself in a videogame world that warns you of the dangers of immersing yourself in videogame worlds. The early game Interphase (1989), by The Assembly Line, deftly equates virtual reality with dream-space, a crossover we will no doubt increasingly see with advances in VR, AI and augmented reality. At that time such developments seemed the stuff of dreams, but they are incrementally becoming more real. In Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs (2014), the hacking abilities of the lead character Aiden Pearce suggest that the human brain, the city and cyberspace are now interwoven networks. To accumulate great power in the latter two is to potentially wield power over the first.
My main issue with VR is that one. I too have been brought up with Neuromancer, and Matrix more recently (yes I said recently, shuddup), but I don’t think VR is what we thought it would become in those days. I firmly believe, that instead of diving inside the computer world, we will superimpose the digital word over the physical one. A Shared Augmented Reality, giving us information and allowing us to interact with the digital equivalent of the physical objects. In my works, I call it the veil, a shared overlay of public data. For example, when people look at you with SAR glasses or maybe someday contact lenses, they’ll see your public facebook and twitter profile, all available for interaction.
When the daughter of Greece’s premier singer fails to sing as expected, she finds out about a biker group of women. But will she manage to find the elusive Orosa, the bikers’ motovlogger, when all she has to go on are random street-sightings of criminal behaviour, when her family is opposed to her following this path and when her dad’s employer wants to keep her as she was for marketing purposes?
Do you want to know what’s next for the voiceless Aura? Do you wanna meet the Amazons? Then read this coming of age story in a world where fate is quite literal.
OK, it’s not that they don’t like me, it’s rather like they don’t hit on me.
Ever. Never ever.
I mean, I don’t get what I’m doing wrong. I have my relationship status set to single and everything. My height doesn’t help either. I’m five percent short of two meters. But that’s not the worst part. The absolute frickin worst is my nickname.
Loveless Ada.
My name is Adelaide, so it was bound to get mocked at school.
Hard.
My parents shortened it to Ada at an early age.
Then they went up and died.
That reduced the total number of people who love me on planet earth, to zero.
Okay, one.
My yiayia, that’s my grandmother, is the only person left who still loves me.
Just a bit.
Technically.
Out of need.
She is like ninety eight years old and part-Robocop. Whatever empathy she might have had is gone over the decades. She is like a squeezed version of a human, where you take out the squishy feely stuff and leave a bag of bones behind, lubricated by spit and bile.
I know you’d think that my yiayia loves me deep down, and that she is just like all other lovin’ and carin’ cookie-making machines in the world.
Well, she does not. She calls me by my nickname, which I hate.
So, back to my nickname. It was at school, thirteen years old. I was bullied all day long by this boy Chris. Chris was obnoxious, smelly, and hit all kids at school. He liked me better, which is to say he hit me the most. I was an expert at avoiding him at all times, but in some cases he remembered all about me and eventually he would find me and torture me.
He’d steal my lunch. He’d throw dirt on my hair. He’d make fun of me, pointing his greasy finger at me and the rest of the bully-posse would laugh at me.
Chris was the bane of my existence during my childhood.
It didn’t help that I was beginning to grow much taller than him.
If Chris was nasty before, then after my growth spurt he acted as if it was his legal obligation to bully me. The mere heights of my adolescence were threatening his street-cred, even though I had done nothing to provoke him. I crouched to lessen my frame, I avoided him, I made sure never to look down on him.
It didn’t matter. Chris hated my guts. My tall, leaning over him guts.
I had discovered Ada Lovelace at that time. She was my hero. A countess from a century long forgotten, the very first computer programmer. I wanted to be her, I simply adored her.
The teacher asked for our role models, what kind of work we wanted to do when we’d grown up. That ill-fated moment, I raised my hand and said, “I want to be a computer programmer, like Ada Lovelace.”
Chris misheard the name and mocked, “Loveless? You wanna be Ada Loveless for the rest of your life? Hahaha!” And they laughed. Even the teacher cracked up a bit before she demanded silence.
Boom. It stuck.
Since then I’m loveless.
Ada Loveless.
Do you want to know what’s next for the virgin computer nerd? Do you wanna meet the nasty Yiayia?
Join the Mythographers and be the first to learn all about Ada!
Erinyes (known as Furies in Roman Latin) are three goddess avengers of the crimes of murder, unfilial conduct, impiety and perjury. They recently discovered selfies as well.
Yes, mythical creatures now have their own Twitter profiles. Feel free to follow her, if you dare.
In the story Erinyes, Mahi is a self-adoring teenager who, just like most teenagers these days, only cares about the amount of likes and retweets that she gets on her (admittedly hot) selfie pics.
Mahi notices something strange in her latest selfies.
The entity she notices on her selfies is becoming more and more solid, until it actually starts chasing her non-stop. That entity is Erinyes, and she chases her victims precisely every 109 minutes for one frantic minute of intense manhunt. Along with her friend, Deppy, a remarkably tech-savvy girl in her cutesy personality, and the enigmatic Prodromos, a conspiracy-theorist rebel hacker, Mahi has to find out the truth behind an insane corporate conspiracy while Erinyes is following her. Possibly forever.
