I've been blogging a bit as part of the spacecollective.org. Mostly old epiphanies and reveries and other such as my personal cargo, but get the descriptor for the site:

Space Collective.org is a cross-media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking terrestrials.

And I really am enjoying it.

Trevor, a Gallo-Roman god, 300 AD, a pewter statuette about 20cm tall, has been sold. Which means I am now a more successful sculptor than a writer.

He is to be a wedding present. He has his own blog. Follow his story there.

I Want a Mechanical Echidna has been accepted as a submission over at a clockpunk site Da Vinci Automata. It got it crittered first.

28th February 2007 is/was the offical release day for .before Country. Publication dates used to be important when publishing meant printed and distributing.

Now of course with blogs, every day is a publication date.

The PDF of .before Country has been downloaded 9755 times now, I was hoping it would hit 10 000 before today, but it hasn't quite happened.

Imagine if I sold 10 000 hard copies!

But it's better to give it away, apparently most writers cannot live off of writing anyway, so why pretend.

The book is still with us, and will be for a while, but Publishing Houses are fading, hopefully they will not be as stupid as the record labels have been, with their Digital Rights Management (DRM) idiocy.

The market giveth, the technology changes, the market taketh away. Intellectual Property only makes sense when large amounts of money are require to produce something, and you protect the equity invested in equipment by a vicarous method of protecting IP like copyright. But the technology has made those laws ridiculous.

The POD printing of .before Country is part of that story, but reading will not end because the technology changes.

I really suggest possible readers look at Marie-Laure Ryan's paper entitled Narrative and the Split Condition of Digital Textuality, and even though it focusses on computer games, its first sections are quite enlightening and frame .before Country really well. I find on reading it, that I am an Antarctic explorer returning to the temperate zones.

Buy the hardcopy from:-

amazon.com

amazon.co.uk

Powells.com

Barnes & Noble

lulu.com

Or download it for free as a PDF file (prettier) or as a zipped RTF file (uglier but smaller and easier to convert into a PDA or eBook reader format of your choice). Of course it is still easier to read as a 'real book' and will be for the next couple of years.