Just finished a beetle. Getting more proficient with my drawing tablet. My ultimate goal will be to make some promo-illustrations for up-coming books and stories, and to create are for new games I design and to re-skin old games I've already made. Also, there's  a secret project I have in mind, details to come.

Above, my first attempt at a portrait on my new Wacom drawing tablet. This is of Amboise Bierce, the author of the The Devil's Dictionary, of which inspired my own Writer's Devil's Dictionary, which is found in my collection Book by Author. I drew freehand in a program called Krita, a great free and open-source Photoshop-style software. It felt a bit weird to draw on a tablet and see the results on a distant screen, but I'm liking going digital.

And below, a landscape with no particular relationship to any of my writing, except, I guess, it's possible there's a nice bit of woodland depicted somewhere in one of my books. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Promotion wrap-up

Okay, the trumpets sounded and my first free promotion is over. I broke through my arbitrary goal of 100 downloads over 5 days, reaching 114. I celebrated by eating a donut. Though if I had failed to reach my goal, I would have consoled myself by eating a donut, so I win either way.

The daily download breakdown was as follows:

Day 1:  43 downloads

Day 2:  30

Day 3:  18

Day 4:  13

Day 5:  6

So a pretty consistent ~40% decline each day until the last, where it dropped 60%. Barbarian fatigue at the end? Or maybe it was just Sunday.

How did I do in the rankings? Amazon separates the charts for free books and paid books. At the peak, A Barbarian for Dinner reached number 83 on the Swords and Sorcery chart, and 48 on the General Humor chart. It was the 4,504 ‘bestselling’ free book at its height.

A number of downloads came from non-US markets:  32

UK led the way with 20. (I wonder if my mention of the popular Brit-show One Foot in the Grave in the summary had anything to do with it).

Germany came in with 9.

Canada had 3.

So the effect? I now have some nice reviews that resulted from the promotion, and spread my memes all over the world.

I did not pay to advertise the promotion, but did list it on a number of free sites and forums, and a few kind peers in my writing group spread the word. Thanks everyone for buying, plugging, and/or reading the book. I appreciate it.

"Free" the Barbarian...

Huzzah! From August 13th to 17th, enjoy a free copy of e-copy of A Barbarian for Dinner: A Barbarian for Dinner

If you like it, why not check out my other books available for the low, low price of low:
Low, low price of low books

FREEEEEEE!
 ( for a limited time)


========================================================================================

Cheap and scary! Scary cheap!

===================================================================

Contains an award winning short-story!

One Foot in the Grave and and A Barbarian for Dinner

The BBC show One Foot in the Grave never hit it big in the States, and, inexplicably, it almost never pops up on any of the 9000 cable channels over here. But somehow I managed to find it, latch onto it, and absorb it into my bloodstream. The ease in which the show's humor runs from absurdity to darkness to rants and to sight gags amazes me. But what I like most is how many episodes set up various threads and ideas that you don't realize are important into they're recalled at some climatic point. It's sort of like 'mystery' humor, where the ideas are clues that you don't realize fit together until the payoff.

It's the sort of humor I tried to use in my book A Barbarian for Dinner. A lot of plotting went into trying to make various ideas work and be funny in the short term, but also come together in larger ways in the long. Writing the book, I kept searching what I had written for even the smallest idea that I could extend and recall and meld with some other idea later on.

I'm in the show's debt for giving me a framework on how to think of humor in 'mystery' terms.

One Foot in the Grave

A Barbarian for Dinner

Tangential Gecko News

--DARPA Z-Man Program Demonstrates Human Climbing Like Geckos--

"A gecko is able to climb on glass by using physical bond interactions—specifically van der Waals intermolecular forces—between the spatulae and a surface to adhere reversibly, resulting in easy attachment and removal of the gecko’s toes from the surface."

DARPA article

This Gecko ability gets a passing mention in my short story There's more to Life than Biology. It was only a matter of time before we, non-bond-interacting humans would find a way to take advantage of the biological superpower of our lizard friends. They're good for more than selling insurance!

Find the short story here in this book: Book by Author

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