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| (C)2005,(C)2006,(C)2007,(C)2008. Some rights reserved. |
| First Creative Commons, community edited, fiction novel. |
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News1/25/2012 - Tragedy turned comedy. Right as the first act of the series was finally complete my phone died. It was a disaster. 11 hard won chapters lost. But a new hope! I have copied the raw memory from the phone and extracted the text. It is jumbled, but is at least in part there. Hurray! Now for the tedious reconstruction. In mere days I may begin put the next act down to bits. BTW looks like I will be at ICON again this year. Planning on giving away copies of TTB soft covers! :) 2/24/2011 - Thicker Than Blood now has 20,001 downloads! Yippee. Between here and the other great sites hosting the book it's probably well of over 50,000! 8o Been getting a buzz of fans wanting me to finish the next one already. Sorry. It's rough. My family has grown, I've moved, and my day job is busier than ever. I can tell you that our heros have just come out of hiding. More soon. 1/26/2009 - Got an interesting phone call today. The mother of a reader wanted to know what grade level the book is written at. Pretending to know everything I told her 6th to 8th grade. Then I looked up how to test your text. Looks like it is largely related to the count of polysyllabic words. I did a quick "SMOG" test and found that the book is actually written at an eighth grade level. I'd say a bright fourth or fifth grader can get through it. That's when I started reading adult science fiction. :) 6/22/2009 - ICON 28 was fun. Especially the "Science of Superheros" panel. It seems that realm of thought is somewhere I like to spend my time. :) I've gotten a couple of complaints about how long the next book is taking me. I've managed to pen a few chapters, but progress is slow. This is silly. I will not quit but I need to pay the rent. If you want me to hurry up, the very best thing you can is help me promote the series from being just a hobby of mine. Go forth and blab about it. Write reviews. Bug you favorite publisher to pick me up. Most of all, buy the book. I am not promoting the book at all at this point, just writing when I can. I can tell you, the next one will be worth the trouble. It's the book I really wanted to write. Thicker Than Blood was just act 1. Many valid criticisms of the characters are actually good hints to where I am going with the story.1/30/2009 - A few little things, and it's about time I pushed the slashdot headline. I am on chapter 21 in the next book. Yes this is going hideously slow, but the good news is I will have more free time at night so things will speed up. I'm aiming for a 2009 drough draft. The novel has been linked by a couple of sites worth mentioning. http://online-novels.blogspot.com/ and http://finding-free-ebooks.blogspot.com/. Thanks! Also I found a post online where someone mentioned Thicker Than Blood as a successful case study for viral marketing. Awesome. Please don't forget to look me up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and rate the book. :) 5/21/2008 - Wow. The book has been Slashdoted. Easily 7000 new downloads. I can still see the steam rising from the server, from Manhattan! I posed the question has anyone released a community edited, CC, fiction novel before. So far I have yet to see a title and author. I have seen attempts, and even a couple of movies, but no CC CE fiction books. Thanks for your help, fellow Slashdotians! 5/20/2008 - Just bought ISBNs for the book over at Lulu. Next steps, proof and press release. 4/10/2008 - The book is now available for purchase on Lulu for $12.98. Please choose your cover and buy the book. 1/13/2008 - Looking good on the download count. TTB has 1133 downloads at scribd and 1008 on http://www.thickerthenbloodthebook.com so far. Easily 2000 downloads! There used to be a much larger download count (380 or so) on manybooks.net but it seems to have been reset to 2. In addition I'm on the first page of a Google search for "thicker than blood". I get lots of downloads from Google searches! 10/21/2007 - Thicker than Blood is 1.0. There are two brand new covers. Join the mailing list. Spread the word. The next book is about one quarter done, that should speed up now. You ain't seen nothing yet! 4/18/2007 - Icon 26 got me thinking. How do you separate the many stages of nanotechnology? What will nanotech's eras be? A lot of that depends if we leverage mechanisms in existing biological systems (top down) or build things from scratch (bottom up). I assumed that some biological structures where copied but needed to be carefully built in a bottom up approach. This assumption is based on the often overlooked but major advantage of more normal scale mechanical structures, predictability. 4/9/2007 - I am once again out of edits. As far as I can tell this book is COMPLETE and ready to print. Please read over it and look for ANY errors. On May 7th I am going 1.0 unless I have additional edits to commit. 3/31/2007 - I am the top hit on yahoo.com search for "Thicker Than Blood" Also in TTB news, I wrote up summary of my experience at ICON 26. 3/17/2007 - I now have my schedule at ICON next week. The people organizing the Authors and Scitech tracks at the 2007 ICON have been nice enough to include me in many panels. Don't miss me Friday when I will be on both the nanotech panel and reading from my book. 2/20/2007 - I am going to ICON 2007 March 23-25. No idea what I will be doing there or talking about yet. I'll keep you posted. Version .65 is released. This covers a couple more corrections in chapter 32, and edits up through chapter 34. 2/15/2007 - version .64 is released. I have corrected an error in my science. Fortunately, is does not need a major plot change. Please keep the corrections coming. My most recent pass is now on chapter 25. 12/17/2006 - I have parsed through five more chapters. Other than that not much to report. I'll keep plugging away. 12/8/2006 - For everybody waiting for updates, I'm sorry. It's been a little crazy. My son was born on Sept 11th and my life is just starting to calm down. So what's new? In short the cover, 3 more chapters of edits and the cover is now included in the the PDF file. Everything through chapter 18 should be final so if you catch any errors, please email them to me. 8/19/06 - I have been actively working on deep editing of the early chapters. In addition there is a new chapter. Chapter 0! Check it out and tell me what you think. I believe it is much easier to read. I will be releasing changes more often again so keep checking back. 6/17/06 - The book is listed on ourmedia. How about writing my first review there? Hopefully it will be a good one. Thanks to the folks over at the Creative Commons community mailing list for pointing me in the right direction. 5/31/06 - It's time for the objective read through. It has been 6 months since the first draft was complete. Then it's time to write the sequel! 4/3/06 - Finally version .5. Time to start promoting the book. While I am certainly still accepting edits, now is the time to write a review and send it out. Thanks in advance for you help. :) 3/16/06 - I confess I think I burned out a little bit in January between the edits, the website and promotion. I will get back to edits now I swear. 2/13/06 - OK the new site is up. Enjoy. Back to edits. Send me your thoughts on the book! Sign up for the shiny new mailing list! 2/12/06 - In my typical irresponsible fashion, I am not following the plan! In addition to the Server Side Include changes made to the site, I am now learning (and implementing) Cascading Style Sheets. I know some people are anxious to see their edits realized, and so am I. I will once again wear my editors hat real soon now! 2/6/06 - Thicker Than Blood has a new website! A couple of people had trouble finding the assorted brick-a-brak so now it should be much easier. Next step, get back to edits. 2/5/06 - Warcloud.net has undergone a hardware and software transformation. This enabled me to easily set up an announcement mailing list with mailman. If you want to keep up with what's happening with the book, that is the place to do it. 1/29/06 - Version .26 is up. Now it has been mutilated by Open Office driving Language Tool's grammar check. Enjoy. 1/23/06 - Version .24 is up. Curiosity is killing the Matt, send me feedback at M.A.Newhall@thickerthanbloodthebook.com. Even if you are not done. Thank you. |
