Posted by jukkahoo
I have seldom read a lot of fiction from the screen. I guess a palm or some such could be a different matter, since the little I have managed to browse with various people's PDA's kinda showed me that it could work. Now I have this conundrum.
Just the other day Ellen Datlow's amazingly well-received (numerous awards, including two Hugo's only last August) SCI FICTION met with a decisive "thank you for playing, but we're now going to continue serving people with more of the mindless visual gimmickry they so obviously want!" service announcement from the Sci-Fi Channel. No worries there, as it is their site, but as SCI FICTION has been pretty much the only service of it's kind I've been using, it was a bum news though not that great.
What really has now picked my interest, is the finalization of Lawrence Watt-Evans' new Ethshar-novel. Those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about: Lawrence Watt-Evans is one of my guilty pleasures, a a fairly humdrum-reputated speculative fiction author whose works I have enjoyed a great deal all these years. He has several series, of which the Ethshar is his most well-known to most (who know of his works). It's a very low-key fantasy setting with stories that do not necessarily involve the high and mighty, but most of the times the little people, the salt of the earth, the mundanes, the regular folk. You get the picture. His latest published Ethshar-novel Ithnalin's Restoration was (as I understand it) a qualified non-success and thus his publisher (Tor) pulled the plug on the series, thought they did continue with his Obsidian Chronicles and future works.
Waah, no more Ethshar, or...?
Possibly due to his rather fervent fan-base on the net or some other dubious idea, Watt-Evans decided to have a go and try the not so well-regarded Stephen King Approach and started posting his next proposed Ethshar-story Spriggan Mirror to his website, a chapter at a time. He promised to write and publish a chapter of such and such lenght each week, provided he'd get a sum of $100 each week to his account (via various means). This continued all the way up until few days ago when the novel was finally finished! There is a now brand new Ethshar-novel available for all the people to read for free. A full-length novel! Duh, where is a palm or a cost-effective way of printing this monster? Apparently Watt-Evans will get this polished and edited into a proper book one of these days, which sounds like a grand idea in my (er...) book.
So, I now have the option to either wait for a new book to be released ghud knows when, from roscoe knows where from, or I could just go to the website and read it from there. Or print it, or... I don't know.
In other news: Risto Isomäki is the Finnish GoH of Finncon 2006.
[edit]: Stop the PRESS! Risto Isomäki's new book Saraswatin hiekkaa is on the shortlist for Finlandia award. Congrats!
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