It's my very favorite internet holiday! Now, if only I'd thought to make up the punch beforehand... But at least I do know where to find newspaper-esque things to make a tree out of this year.

... And it was just Krauthammer Day. April is the new December.

Seeing as how I am experimenting with ebooks, and don't want to get embroiled with the hassles of international taxation, I've been trying out making an ebook

Castle of the Wolf

Old Gods, spirits of the dead, witches, and anarchists: Wolf Baginski had to choose, but when you face a castle full of Nazis, choosing sides is easy.

Kindle compatible version

ePub version

There's a lot wrong with it, and if you think Alberto Gonzales should be played in the movie by a young Clint Eastwood, you have the sort of warped imagination I approve of.

I'm not a professional yet, but I can offer my webcomic if it's okay and people would be interested.

Sure it's okay.

And... some freebies from us (including a previously-unpublished story included in Looking for Futures) here.

or legally-uploaded others

In that case, I want to plug one of my favourite things from an earlier Day:

Names is a self-sufficient extract, introducing one of the lead characters, from a novel by Ryk E. Spoor that's being published this year under the title Phoenix Rising. (For extra amusement, keep the novel's cover illustration by your elbow as you start reading, and see if you can figure out which of the people on the cover is the protagonist of the extract before it tells you.)

Jamie #2: Krauthammer Day would be the one day of the year when you look at your stopped clock just at the correct time?

Gosh, it's been decades since I made (what I now know to be) a Technopeasant tree! I look forward to exchanging technopleasantries with the technopeasantry around the Technopeasant tree.

Excerpts from the Diary of a Henchminion

Written about thirty years ago, and slightly updated.

Well then!

I haven't decided what to post specifically for today, but...

Pay Me, Bug! is a full-length Space Opera/crime heist (complete) written in the tradition of Harry Harrison and Oscar Wilde.

The Points Between is a currently-updating serial that is my attempted homage to Charles Williams, my favorite Inkling.

In 2007, the year of the first celebration of this day, a certain technothriller author published a book that was described by a reviewer on Amazon (not me) as "another unreadable mish-mash of neo-intilectual [sic], metaphysics drenched drivel."

Apparently some of that drivel is mine. One of the minor characters is a Jesuit brother named Guy who is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory and who says things that sound an awful lot like stuff I have been quoted on the internet as having said. Said character also possesses cringeworthy wit; clearly based on me, as well.

Having warned us that things on the internet could be misappropriated, he apparently decided to prove his case.

I supposed I could be upset, but in fact the whole situation (like the book in question) is deliciously absurd.

brother guy... Any plans to attend this year's worldcon in Chicago?

I am badly pixel-stained, and definitely a wretch. Here, have a story.

Fragano,

Actually, the exact opposite.

Sorry, a bit of an in-joke for people who spend too much time following U.S. political commentary. See also, Friedman Units.

Pardon me, I need to soak these pixels before they set. I'll be in the kitchen.

Jamie #13: Ah, makes sense. I think of Krauthammer as being right twice a year (hence the stopped clock metaphor) at most. George Will astonished me recently with a column on drugs that actually made sense.

A fairy-tale of my own devising, from 2010:

Breaking Night Mountain.

I still haven't gotten the "professional" part down, but I've been trying my hand at online fiction with a superhuman short story anthology I'm serializing one page at a time, every weekday, starting here.

Fragano @ 15: George Will astonished me recently with a column on drugs that actually made sense.

I genuinely first read this as "a column that he wrote while on drugs," and thought "Well, that would explain why he was making sense."

Then my parser screeched to a halt, backed up, and told me it must have been a column on the topic of drugs.

I'm not sure whether my initial parsing of that sentence says more about me or about George Will.

Thank you! I enjoy showing-off-and-sharing things I've done, but I worry about coming across as an attention hog or a potential spammer. My comic is No Shit, There We Were.... It does contain some swearing and bloodshed. It's a sword-and-sorcery sort of thing.

Gray Woodland @ 15, that's amazing and beautiful. It reminds me of the tales in The Wonder Clock, only even better.

Unclear antecedant. I meant that the comic is a sword-and-sorcery sort of thing, not that swearing and bloodshed are. Pretty sure there are many S&S stories without swearing, and I think I've read at least one without bloodshed.

Not officially released for International Technopeasant Wretch Day -- I had no idea this was a thing! cool! -- but here's a little technology-forward flash-fiction piece I wrote for my blog last week based off a comment Neal Stephenson made: "Walk to Work".

Rudy Rucker was kind enough to publish this at Flurb. Oddly enough, Making Light inspired the story when someone here made fun of the idea of a veteran suicide bomber.

If we're gathering links, I should post here throughout the week as I release my dribs and drabs. (Why not today? Because that would be too much work to undertake when I'm busy celebrating my birthday evening by being an unrepentantly useless lump!)

I did put a blog post up stating my intention to spread my pixelstained wretchedness out over the business week. There is a link therein to the reprinted text of my very first published-for-money story.

So, there, doin' my bit.

Did folks plan this to coincide with World Book Night? Did everyone else know about World Book Night but me?

Alex@22: Loved it. Can't quite put it into words very well, but there's something about the tone of voice and sentence structure that just really works for that story.

Ah, curses, gnomed again. There were two whole links in my blog, but they both went to the same domain, so I suppose they made the gnomes suspicious.

It's a bit late to mention it, but I did put this up on the appropriate day.

Fragano@14 - A stopped clock won't do the job. You need a clock that drifts discontinuously to the right. Also a cabbage and some extremely bitter liqueur, like that homemade kummel that didn't work, only without the sugar.

I disagree with George Will much of the time, but he seems like a decent guy who thinks about what he's saying, and I'd enjoy having a beer with him. Krauthammer could write a column about baseball and come to the conclusion that it justified invading Iran or Cuba.

Trailing in, I've put a story up on my blog.

Bride of the Vampire

Guaranteed Sparkle-free!

My contribution for this year: ""Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual." And other things (from past years, or posted in free archives, or whatever) can be found here.

Tom @24

One might blame the choice of date on William Shakespeare, which isn't so bad a reason for picking the day, but World Book Night started several years after International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch Day.

little pink beast@25

Thanks much. At one point I wrote enormous amounts of stuff under the name "Boddhisatva Troutwaxer," but it was all SubGenius stories, so I'm not posting the links here as a matter of basic good taste, but you can search for it if you'd like.

I'm late for the very important date, but as today is my birthday, I feel justified in posting The Education of Junior Number 12.

I wrote the first draft years ago, could never find a market for it, gave it to my publisher for free, and watched it wind up in Year's Best. Suck on that, Hendrix.

Two flash and one standard-length story (all hardish SF, all published to paying markets) are at my home page. Enjoy.

Happy birthday, Madeline!

Now posted: Passengers, a short story written around late 1993 or early 1994, ish, and published in 1998 or 1999 by Rogue's Gallery, the literary magazine of Rogue Community College in Grant's Pass, Oregon. (The editor of the litmag was also the teacher of the creative writing class series I kept signing up for so as to carry enough credits to keep a student job. The RCC years, for John and me, were by no means the best years of our lives, but they were formative in our relationship. '97 to '99, I salute you.)

Gnomes! One URL, just one! It's nothing like A Whole Lotta.

Possibly it is the construction of the URL. Too many name/value parameters. Deep sigh.

I, too, am attempting to get some of my stuff on Amazon. I would like to negotiate with an artist regarding the use of their work as a cover and thumbnail for each of four or five different books for that purpose only. If anyone is interested, please email rather than cluttering up the thread, for which I apologise.

And, on the following day, the first significant crack in the DRM control of ebooks was announced.

Tor and its associated imprints to go DRM-free

We shall have to see how it works out, but may I take this chance to propose that the 24th of April be pencilled in to Technopeasant calendars as "Flatiron Day".

Bill Stewart @ 28:

All you really need is some pickled cabbage and a hammer. And it's never the right time.

Finished the week of IPSTP offerings on my blog. Today's is the thrilling story of Mephisto and His Toaster. The others can be reached by paging back through the blog.

(Gnomes awayyyyyy!)