First LJ Post...

Well, I first got onto this because I happened to (during a Google search) run across a reference to my book Digital Knight -- one that was about one of my favorite scenes. So I've responded to that comment, and now I think I'll try to do this LiveJournal thing from time to time. :)

Musings...

Digital Knight is finally dropping back down the Amazon charts. Whether it's done well or not, alas, there's no good way to tell as I can't (A) know how many books per (day/week/month) a given ranking represents, and (B) even if I did, I don't know what percentage of a paperback's sales would be expected to come from Amazon. For quite a long time (a month and a half, anyway), DK hovered right around #29,000. Now it's dropped back to around 50k.

My next publication will be the story "Diamonds Are Forever", which will be about 1/3 of the anthology Mountain Magic. Diamonds is a collaboration between me and Eric Flint which was a lot of fun to write, and has a tone somewhat similar to DK.

For my next work, things are a bit in flux; there's a chance I'll be doing a full-length novel with Eric next; this novel would be NOT all that similar to DK, though, but more like "Good Clarke".

Aimster Lives???

I worked for John Deep of Aimster for 2 years. In that time I watched him take a reasonably successful company with a good business relationship to the major educational publisher Pearson/Prentice Hall, and destroy both the business and the friendly relations, all trying to become some kind of super-successful clone of Napster; he ended up with a not very functional product, no support ("Ryk, customer service isn't part of what we do here." -- a quote from John Deep about why he wasn't going to let me or anyone "waste our time" on actually trying to deal with user concerns), and no money. The sad thing is watching this horror show keep shambling on like a zombie on the late night show. Rather than accepting the fact that he's completely blown his life, he's now trying to get the SUPREME COURT to hear him? Good god.