As I was reflecting on the works of fiction I’ve written these past years, I realised that most of them are behind some form of paywall. The first volume of Minigrooves is available on the iBooks Store and Amazon Store, and it’s not free (you can, however, download a free sample with three full stories). My biggest project, a science fiction novel called Low Fidelity is published in serialised form on my Vantage Point magazine, and a subscription costs $2.99/month [Update: Vantage Point magazine ceased publications at the end of 2016. As of April 2017 work on Low Fidelity has resumed to complete the last episodes and publish the first book of the series]. You can, however, get a taste of the novel’s world with the extra-narrative fragments I publish on the Crosslines/Low Fidelity website.
But still, the problem is that most people aren’t willing to take a leap of faith and purchase something to read without knowing the author, his style, his ‘voice’. I feel I needed to get something out there, available for anyone to read, so as to hopefully generate more interest in the rest of the fiction I’ve published since 2013. That’s why I’ve decided to start a new series, called Off the Grid.
Off the Grid is a science fiction story I’ll publish on this site as part of the Minigrooves Project. It will be published in serialised form, at regular intervals; it will remain freely available to read; and what’s more, while being a completely independent story, it’s set in the same post-apocalyptic world of Low Fidelity. This means that, even though Off the Grid can easily be enjoyed as a separate work, reading both Off the Grid and Low Fidelity will give the reader a richer picture of the world where the events take place.
I hope you’ll like this. Episode 1, Silently, downwind and out of sight, will be published tomorrow.
You can send feedback via Twitter, either at my personal account @morrick, or at the official @minigrooves account. Visit my main website for my more tech-oriented writing. You can find contact information there, too. As always, thanks for reading!
A few links of interest
- Purchase Minigrooves Vol. 1 on the iBook Store or on the Kindle Store
- Purchase Minigrooves Vol. 2 on the iBooks Store or on the Kindle Store
- Minigrooves: Alex Roddie’s review and interview with yours truly.
- Also of interest, in February 2015 Lucas Bale interviewed me about my magazine Vantage Point and the serialised sci-fi novel I publish in it, called Low Fidelity. In the interview I also talk about my writing process.
- Alex Roddie also reviewed Low Fidelity.