Welcome, new readers, to The Logoccentric Orbit! You enter a chamber of experimentation, rumination, and a dose of straight sanity that may make you knurd.* Mind the terrestrial octopi, please don’t touch the praseodymium, and be prepared if you choose to step through the glowing portal; we don’t know where it goes.

I’d first like to thank everyone who showed up yesterday from Superversive Press, and to Jason Rennie especially for allowing me to appear there. I assure you I noticed the huge surge in views, especially the people working their way through William Shakespeare’s Dune, and this is encouraging me to go ahead on that project.

Another project I have boiling away on the metaphorical Bunsen burner, and which I would like your help with, is a steampunk universe that I am dabbling in. You see, I’m a long-form writer, and even my short stories tend toward the lengthy. I was a fan of Ender’s Game when it was a novella, and there are just so many good stories out there that can’t fill a novel, but can’t be told in 5,000 words or less. They can’t be published in standard magazines or on standard podcasts. They can be ordinarily self-published, but it’s not easy to sell them or get up a lot of buzz, even when you promote them on a blog as I am doing now.

So I’ve decided to try a new tack with my novelette, The Chrysalyx: What’s it about? Well…

Aemelia Stapledon has never particularly missed having legs. Her specially-built ambucycle and the neo-Edwardian popularity of floor-length dresses allow her to pass unremarked almost anywhere in pursuance of her duties as an Agent of the Crown. But when she stumbles upon a biosculpted assassin’s murder plot to murder a slave belonging to the President of the Confederate States of America — a slave who is much more than he appears — it will take all of Aemelia’s ingenuity and weaponry to hunt down those responsible and reveal the secret of The Chrysalyx.

I’m selling it cheap for the rest of the month on my Patreon page, and if you finish reading this post, you may have a chance to get it for free!
For becoming my patron, you get The Chrysalyx on Kindle for $1.00. Of course, there are other benefits: my Patron-only feed with updates on all my projects, and at higher levels, access to more material, works-in-progress, and even personalized short stories and writing workshops. But even if you’d rather not remain my patron, you’ll at least get this novelette out of it.

So please tell me a little bit about what you think of this approach. I’d really like to know what you want to see more of on this blog, what you want to see less of, and whether or not you like this idea of buying a novelette via Patreon and why. In fact, I’d like to know it so much, that I will pick TEN people who comment by the end of the week to receive The Chrysalyx for free!
If you would like your shot at a free copy, please just leave the comment and then fill out this Contact Form so that I can send it to you. I’ll choose the recipients at random by next Monday. It’s a mad experiment with a touch of sanity. Or maybe a sane experiment with a touch of madness. Let’s find out!!

*A state, according to the late Sir Terry Pratchett, that goes beyond mere sobriety and out the other side: a dangerous state of mental clarity that may distort ordinary human thought.