One Day Lucky can now be used to physically assault people

A very heavy box showed up at my house this week. It was one thing to have the proof copy in my hands, but now I have an actual stack of One Day Lucky sitting on my desk. I was going to set them all up like a little bookstore shelf while I prepped the goodies that will be tucked into the boxes with them when I send them out next week, but that just made me realize that this is all even stranger than just having a copy of my own book. I don't generally have physical copies of any books.

99% of my reading now is via an eReader app on my phone. Most of my titles are still on the Kindle, thanks to years of 'oh hey that looks good' purchases that are still in my unread queue and Amazon's deliberate obfuscation of the flow for exporting them to a transferable ePub format. I'll get around to doing that one day so I can move everything to TreeReader (still in a closed beta but a really nice, simple reader app developed by a Scottish scifi author). I love bookstores, and I love having physical books in the house as everything we do have a copy of is something that has helped shape the kind of writing that I do, but so much of my reading time is fifteen minutes here, an hour on the train there, that the convenience of having whatever I'm reading in my pocket even when I didn't think I'd have a chance to read has defeated the tactile pleasure of a real book.

I also can't do audiobooks, but that's an entirely different problem. It's the same inability to pay attention to the spoken words in audiobooks that leads me to not skip highly inappropriate tracks in my playlist when the kids are listening. I can listen to a song a hundred times and still not know the lyrics.

There is also a bit of a genre conflict in having a paper copy of a cyberpunk book. It's a common trope in cyberpunk especially, but scifi in general as well, that actual physical books are relics. I will try to get a few local bookstores to stock copies, but otherwise I expect the (limited, very limited) number of copies of One Day Lucky that do make it out into the world will be almost exclusively digital.

And a couple more recommendations, if you're on the hunt for something to read. I joined a collection of dark reads, which includes horror and suspense, in addition to scifi. There are a few interesting looking options in there, especially if you like more traditional horror novels (I grabbed A Monarch Among Kings and The Theory of Anything). For the more dystopically minded, there is a small collection of novellas and full novels available in this batch (Splinter caught my eye) that I am going to dip into a bit. And One Day Lucky is a bit of a scifi heist adventure as well, so I also got looped into this adventure themed group. I grabbed No Gods at Night based on the title alone.

There is a bit of a common theme with most of the books I end up grabbing from these promos, one that makes me glad I took the time to find an actual cover artist. When I look at these promo pages, Roller Dogs always stands out thanks to the awesome art that Dave Law kicked out and the fact that it is very obviously not A.I. generated. But this email is already getting pretty long, so I'll leave that for next time.

Thanks,

Dave