Archive for July 16, 2009

As I have mentioned before, I’ve been putting the Pure Escapism short stories up on Smashwords as well as being able to download them directly from here.

Recently Smashwords have added a top 100 category, showing the 100 most downloaded stories on the site. Of those 100, 84 are free – hardly surprising really. Nothing of mine is in there yet, but with time perhaps..

There was also another category – top 25 most viewed authors. I was more than a little surprised to spot that, at the time of this posting, I had made the list at #21 for the last 30 days. It was a bizarre feeling to see it there. Admittedly it may be because I split the volumes up into their individual stories and so to read them all you need to download them four times instead of one.

Nevertheless, it does mean that people are downloading them. And hopefully enjoying them as well.

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So there I was working away on The Merchant’s Legacy short story, and right at the end I added to a conversation between Nhaqosa and Kythias, a character who is destined to appear in In Fire, the novel plotted for that world.

And then a curious thing happened. The comments, meant simply as a couple of throw away lines to help explain Nhaqosa’s character, tied in perfectly to help explain why Kythias does what he does in In Fire. I’m not actually going to say what that is, because it is meant to be a mystery and a surprise.

When i saw how perfectly the ideas dovetailed together when I hadn’t even planned it, I sat back and just went ‘wow – this works.’ It was a good feeling.