The last free bookshelf of 2023.
Couldn’t squeeze this into this morning’s email because it had enough going on already. On top of a freebie, this post also has a link to a sales page, and I don’t like mixing them with my excerpts.
Today’s free bookshelf is the final bookshelf of 2023. A healthy mix of Sci-Fi and Fantasy here, pretty well-balanced.
Beyond that, there’s also a sale on. Not a big bookshelf, but worth looking at. This one expires in about 40 hours if I’ve done the numbers right.
Foreshadowing
In 2024 I’m going to be doing some more branching out with Free Fiction Friday, my secondary Substack publication (owned by Halfplanet Press), to hunt down giveaways on platforms outside of Bookfunnel. If an author has a paperback giveaway, for example, I might talk about it there. I’ll be more open to wider genres as well, so you could find poetry there in the future.
FFF will also be posting monthly overviews of all that month’s free bookshelves, in case you ever miss one of them.
By the way, that link to Free Fiction Friday above goes straight to the most recent post there, where you can see what I’m talking about, and get the links for the other four promos I joined in December.
There was a poll for what sort of stories everyone wanted, and I am happy to report that the majority want WEIRD science fiction.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that this is precisely the type of fiction I intend to be publishing here at Carter’s Cosmos in 2024.
Halfplanet
As FFF grew in the later half of 2023, it became obvious to me that Halfplanet had finally gotten to the place I wanted it to reach, where I could use it to help connect readers to writers, and writers to readers. The obvious step was to give it room to breathe, so it’s a separate Substack publication.
Beyond that, I intend to set up a writing competition there at some point, perhaps continuing my trend of bringing together disparate art forms and building a bridge between Halfplanet and my other big thing, Lego.
Spoilers
I have written the first draft to the final story in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and it is deeply unsettling. I’ve realised I probably should drag the story out a bit just to give the ideas room to breathe. Essentially, the story covers a revelation some of the last surviving humans make on a distant planet. Sounds pretty cookie cutter, but I assure you that’s intentional. You’ll expect a handful of conclusions, but hopefully not the one I’ve stirred up.
There are three main characters and the narrator, all of whom have their own theory about what they find out there in space.
It’s weird.
I couldn’t sleep properly after I wrote it. It kept me awake.
It’s like Mycelial, or Solipsism, or Beyond Uncertain Stars, but heavier.
I think you’ll like it.