Two books. .99 cents each.

From May 22 to May 28, my scary-fun novel Invasive Species is on Amazon's countdown deal, meaning that it costs only 99 cents, which is a savings of $200,000 (if you were planning to instead buy a mid-size house in certain areas of the US).

Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FZ6ZMJS

Also, my short story and sundries collection Book by Author is always only 99 cents. Here's some praise for two of the stories contained within:

I received over a hundred entries, which was great, but it took me much longer than expected to read them all. I was overwhelmed by the high quality of the submissions, which made it tough to choose the winner. After weeks of excruciating deliberation, I finally went with the quirkiest entry I received. The fifty dollar prize goes to Mike Mayer for his story “Boundary Line,” a gripping tale of a kidnapping gone horribly wrong. 
-JA Konrath, author of the Jack Daniel Mystery series 

…the editor of BioMedNet's News & Comment section love it so much, she laughed out loud and demanded I tell you she read it to her children during dinner time. 
-Laurie A. Zamprelli Pasiuk, fiction Editor HMS Beagle (in regards to There's More to Life the Biology) 

Find the book here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KDQKX0S

And if you don't like discounts or short stories, you can buy my comic-fantasy novel A Barbarian for Dinner for its normal (though highly reasonable) price. What's the book about? To find out, use this equation: "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" PLUS "One Foot in the Grave" TIMES the classic fantasy genre EQUALS "A Barbarian for Dinner." 

Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Dinner-Mike-Mayer-ebook/dp/B00JVBL404/ref=la_B00KEXRB7I_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400785878&sr=1-2

Book by Author

A short collection of short stories coming up soon. More info to come, but for now, here's the cover:

Who might be interested in Invasive Species, and who might not.

Long(ish) ago, I sent out a query letter to an agent for an earlier version of my Invasive Species novel. This is the reply I got:

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Dear Mr. Mayer,

I love the title, but this is way, way, way too far-out even for me.  This seems Spider-Man-esque, where the spider bites the guy and he takes on the powers of the spider, which is something that could only happen in a comic book. The whole point about Crichton is that his stuff is based on real science. I do love the fact that you've got slime-molds in a prominent position, though; they are among the Earth's most under-appreciated organisms. In any case, not for me, but thank you for an entertaining e-mail.

Best wishes,

Russ (big-name agent's last name redacted)

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It's a nice reply. And he's right. The book is over the top.

But that's what I was going for.

I do sort of  take issue with the "based on real science" comment, though. My stuff is based on real science. Everything in Invasive Species was inspired by some discovery or by some way that nature works. Like Crichton, I mined the discovers of "real science" and tried to use them in clever and interesting ways to tell a story.

So what's the difference? Crichton takes a more conservative approach in all this, and so his stories may seem more believable. But, and I mean this in the kindest way possible, his stories don't reflect "real science" any better Spider-man's tale. Wrong is wrong when it comes to science, but being right about science is not the point when it comes to telling a story. Your goal is not to write about science in an accurate way. What you're trying to do, I think, is to show the reader, who may be interested in science, that, hey, maybe you can see where I'm pulling the idea out of and isn't it cool how I'm playing with it?

Besides, who doesn't like Spider-man?

Han Shot First! -- Revisions after publishing

I just finished re-editing my book Invasive Species. The new version will soon appear on Amazon. Now, yes, the book has already been published and people have already bought it, and so the book has been committed to the public consciousness. But, damn it, more than a few errors had somehow crept into the “final” text, and I felt they needed to be stamped out.

The idea was to only fix the shaky grammar, but to otherwise NOT change the text. I swore to be ultra-conservative about this. After all, everyone knows what happens when you try to change a “final” work of art (or piece of entertainment, as the case may be). It never goes well. Never! It’s like a law of the universe. If your first effort was good enough to “be” something, then, by law of averages, if you try to change it, the changes will most likely make worse. Once a work of art is out there, it becomes a part of the fabric of the universe, and so (hyperbole alert) to revise a “final” work of art is to, in effect, change history itself! And if history can be changed so easily, what will become of our future? Remember -- Han Shot First! Or did he? No, not any longer! Memories have been tampered with, and childhoods have been destroyed.  

Yeah, but what if changing something truly does make it better.

That’s what I asked myself halfway through my revisions. Now I think at least 90% of the book suits me fine and should be set in stone. But due to a fiasco I had with a freelance editor, and my self-imposed publishing timeline, I think, in hindsight, that I rushed the publishing of Invasive Species. I think it needed one more read through. There were some unnecessarily wordy sections, several odd grammar choices, and some confusing text that should have been smoothed out.

So, I rewrote those parts.

Now I didn’t make extensive revisions. Plots were not changed. Characters were not rewritten. But whole sentences have been deleted, rearranged, and replaced to make for smooth “better” reading. Unneeded words have been cast aside, and other words were added. There’s something about looking at a text after letting it sit for many months, after you’ve let it “cool off,” that makes you aware of the weirdness and mistakes you should have corrected the first time through, things seem so obvious now but at the time had seemed perfectly fine.

Objectivity, I guess is the keyword, and sometimes you only get that with the passage of time.

So the book is better now. It’s not exactly the same book, but in this age of digital novels, I’m starting to think that revising should be seen as a feature and not a bug.