By the Campfire with Stuart

Wouldn't it be great to visit every country at least once? I think the experience of seeing so much of our world would be very enlightening. I've visited or lived in a few countries in North America and Europe, but there is a lot of the world I have not yet seen.

I may not be able to visit every country in person, but what if my books could? As I thought about that, I decided to set an open-ended goal for myself of having one book sold in every country. It's not likely that I will ever reach them all, but I know I have books in a good number of countries already. Starting now, I'm going to try to reach as many countries as I can and keep track of them here on my site. Read on for details about how you can join me on my world tour by books!

Apart from making solid progress in a new fantasy novel for NaNoWriMo, I have another book-related development to share, this time not about writing but about reading. This gives me a good opportunity to share some thoughts on e-reading in general and about one e-reading platform in particular. If you look closely at the vendor-supplied image shown with this blog post, you may recognize it as a Kobo Glo HD, which is an e-ink reader with optional lighting.

I've wanted an e-ink reader for years—originally I had my heart set on the Kindle that had a physical keyboard—and the Glo HD has been near the top of my list for months. And now? I have one on order! Read on for my thoughts on why I chose this device over others, and about the many available options for reading e-books.

As I write this, just after midnight and a few minutes into Halloween here in the Seattle area, NaNoWriMo is less than a day away. I've been scurrying along the past couple of weeks trying to make sure I would be ready, and apart from the thing that matters most — the story I plan to write — I think I'm sort of ready. I re-read the book for which I will be writing the prequel, and I created a blank project on Penflip to hold my novel. Now I just need to figure out what I'm actually going to write! Read on for a little more about my NaNo prep and plans.

My novelette Wolf Block is not my main focus for writing, but I did dust it off and put some work into the story this month, in a couple ways. One way was to create a print edition, which you will see at the above link. As a very small book I doubt it will get many sales (if it gets any at all), but it's there for the many people who do not like (or know how) to read e-books.

Another way I worked on the story was to write a spin-off short story, "The Silent Wolf," that looks at things from the prisoners' viewpoint. After getting some valuable feedback from beta readers, including Ashley Carlson (author of The Charismatics, who also provides editing services), I posted it for my patrons on Patreon. Read on for more details about that short story.

Although I don't have much time for blogging as I try to get caught up on projects before NaNoWriMo arrives in a couple weeks, I wanted to share some thoughts about my most recent release, No Fanfare. It's been on the market for about a month and a half now. It was experimental right from the start, even before I decided to publish it, and I might as well share some results even though the experiments were not rigorously constructed. As seems fitting for the "no fanfare" title, the story itself has had no significant response from readers and thus, in a sense, all of the experiments eventually failed. Read on to see what I mean.