“New material” in this case means “never before posted on the Internet”. Those few of you who have proof-read my first novel, They Who Are Having A Bad Day, will have seen these bits before in earlier revisions.

After five years of no luck trying to catch an agent’s interest and getting the first book published, I decided to change course and start writing a new book, based only somewhat loosely on the first Bad Day book and the material I had planned for the second and third books in that series.

As part of this new strategy, I went ahead with an idea I’d been mulling over for the past few years and posted selected sections of the first novel here on Irvania.com as freebies, to repay you loyal readers out there, to give y’all a teaser of things to come, and maybe even dig up some word-of-mouth interest. If you enjoy the bits, pass the news on to your friends.

The three selections I settled on are sections from the Bad Day book that I felt stood well by themselves, were entertaining and amusing, and yet weren’t likely to be used in the new book. The three selections are:

• Voltoon Walks Through Town - most of the opening of Chapter 2. Following the battle on Gwinn in the first chapter, the Great God Voltoon trudges through the Bad Day capitol city to the traditional post-battle inquest. Voltoon takes a shortcut through the park and encounters the ever-present protesters.
• Benster Aconoyde’s Last Guard Duty - most of the opening of Chapter 3. A background character is introduced, suffers, bemoans her fate, then gets smitten. Includes a brief explanation of the structure of the Bad Day military.
• The Deity Convention - nearly all of Chapter 22, minus the header quotations and chapter intro. Following the Monstrous Jake’s unexpected deification by the desert nomads on the planet Tzuke, The Great God Voltoon takes Jake to a deity convention. While Voltoon tries to get some answers, Jake meets up with a fertility goddess and runs across some old friends. Meanwhile, at the emperors’ convention next door, Todd, the emperor of They Who Are Having A Bad Day, learns some important things about his occupation.

The new book project, tentatively entitled Stories Written on the Side of a Battlecruiser or simply SWOSB, is a first-person account of the Monstrous Jake as he floats in the vast emptiness of space and looks back on his life and loves, his hopes and fears, and tries to work out why he got kicked out of a spaceship yet again.

New material is on the way, and most of it features The Monstrous Jake.

Stay tuned!

I mentioned here a number of months ago that I’m now on Twitter (click here: http://www.twitter.com/MonstrousJake) although, like many in my age group, I’m not sure I understand the point of Twitter.

I’m not sure why I need to post updates on my every move (”Made pancakes for supper. Yay!”). It would make more sense later on, after I’ve launched my plot to conquer the world and need to keep my minions informed (”We will take over Slovakia today. Yay!”) or, better yet, after I’ve got my first book published and need to keep my fans informed (”Have a book signing in Slovakia today. Yay!”) Ideally, it would be handy after I’ve got my first book published and have conquered the world and have to send orders to my minions (”Make pancakes for supper! Yay!”)

The second way to keep in touch with me, and the one I’m more likely to see and respond to more quickly, is on Facebook (click here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1825976284).

Facebook, as an overall concept, makes more sense to me and my way of communication than does Twitter, so I check Facebook more frequently than I check Twitter.

For reasons beyond my understanding, a bunch of old friends have found me, or I’ve found them, on Facebook, more frequently than on any other Internet venue. I’ve had my own web site for 14 years now and have always been easy to find using Google or any of the other web search engines, but for some reason, Facebook seems to work better for this.

I still don’t have a cell phone though.