First, that my suspicion appears to have been correct: I think I’m probably good with reading the rest of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and then never touching anything that calls itself “LitRPG” ever again. The best thing about Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon is the title, which suggests that the book is going to be delightful. It’s not bad, but it’s not something that, at about the 2/3 mark, is leading me to believe that I’m going to be spending a lot of time with any examples of this genre not written by Matt Dinniman.
The second thing is that, yes, my Kindle is genuinely saving me money, as I’m reading this book for free through Kindle Unlimited and, believe it or not, I don’t think I feel the need to own it. Also, I got to annotate this sentence:
I haven’t used the annotate feature very much, but it might come in pretty handy when I want to be able to find bits of a book to talk about during reviews. Or, y’know, talk about the part in the book where there are worms throwing baby heads at the protagonist. Dungeon Crawler Carl definitely can trend toward raunchy and gross humor– a talking sex doll head is a major secondary character, for crying out loud– but Kaiju is a level beyond.
Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:
Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.
If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.
At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.
(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)
Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.
I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.
(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)
I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”
I have all the books. Do you understand?
And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.
This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.
So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:
along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.
We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.
And you can click– no pun intended– right here to make my latest book a part of your life. Release date is July 26, but why would you wait that long to buy it when you can make an impulse decision right now? This is my wife’s favorite of my books, so you should absolutely listen to her and go order it immediately.
I will be out of town all weekend, so updates are gonna be kinda sparse, but there’s already video content uploaded and waiting over at the yootoobz and nothing can keep me off of Twitter, so the dozens of you who plan your lives around my social media update schedule should be just fine. I will return Sunday, by which time I expect my body to be approximately 50% baklava and shawarma by weight. It’s gonna be a fine few days.
I said it was happening, and yep, it’s happening: My novel Click is even as we speak being approved by Amazon’s fooferall machines and will be available for humans to buy in the very near future. Official release date is July 26, but it’ll be available for preorder soon, and as soon as the fooferall process concludes I will actually have a link you can click on to order it.
This isn’t even the official announcement post, really, because if it was there would be a link. This is like that card you get before a wedding announcement, that tells you there’s a wedding announcement coming and to hold a date, but somehow is not, itself, either the announcement or the invitation. This is just the announcement that there’s gonna be a book and that you should be prepared to buy it, if you like.
In other news, my YouTube channel is still out there and I’m still having fun with it, so you should go look at that and hit Subscribe as quickly as possible. Am I talking about it too much? Yes, absolutely– but if I don’t, no one will know about the great fun we’re having with Chicory: A Colorful Tale over there. And that one doesn’t even cost you any money! Go do it.
In other other news, the prophesied Second Child has entered the house, and I’m realizing as I’m typing this that I don’t currently hear any screaming, so either the children are both dead or they have gone somewhere without my knowledge, which seems like it could possibly be an alarming development. I don’t know where my wife is either, though, so maybe she’s with them.
(Thudding in the hallway)
Okay, I guess it’s fine now.
My sleep study has been canceled, because, I shit you not, my insurance company has deemed me “not sick enough” to require one, which … man, that’s a whole entire rant, right there, and I’m going to not bother writing the majority of it because the fact is I don’t think I have sleep apnea and not having to spend Thursday night in a hospital makes the rest of my week easier. Instead, at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future I have to do a home sleep study, and if you happen to know what the hell that might involve, let me know, because I haven’t gotten around to Googling it yet. Fact is I have got shit to do, and taking an entire night in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and pretending to sleep off my plate makes the chances that all the other stuff will actually get done a lot higher. Tomorrow’s tasks involve finding presents for my cousin’s two children, one of whom I’ve never met, and getting all of my video recording for the entire weekend done and out of the way. None of that can really start until the extra child is out of the house, and there may be a trip to the county fair in there sometime as well. I’m bringing my laptop to Michigan with me so I can keep up with bloggery, but if there’s anybody out there thinking hey, I would really love to write a piece to promote something for infinitefreetime on, like, no notice at all, let me know.
If I let even a single syllable of what’s been running through my head the past couple of days out and onto a screen, I’mma have the fucking Secret Service at my door, and I don’t need that kind of aggravation right now. So instead all of my books are free this weekend— including Balremesh and other stories, for the first time–and here’s a picture of a kitten.
(Also, if you’ve read any of my books, especiallyBalremesh, I am explicitly and openly begging for reviews right now. Seriously. Please.)
I’ve not written anything in the last few days, mostly because my options were “paralyzing anger” and “more paralyzing anger.” Today upgraded everything to “so angry I can’t breathe,” and rather than indulge myself in that at the moment I’m just going to put a bunch of my books up for free. I’ve done a Star Wars Day promotion pretty much every year since my first book came out; I completely flaked on it this time. Let’s fix that.
Tomorrow and Saturday only, all four of my books will be free on Amazon. I don’t think I’ve done all four at the same time before. Check them out:
All of my books other than Searching for Malumba have been re-submitted to Smashwords, and should be available there soon and propagating to the various other online bookstores soon afterwards. Malumbacomes off of Kindle Select in late July and will be popping back up everywhere soon after that. This marks the third time, I think, that I’ve gone back and forth from “Amazon exclusivity” to “available everywhere,” and I will obviously let you know the next time I change my mind again.
What’s made the difference? Mostly that my books aren’t selling for shit on Amazon right now anyway, and so there’s no good reason not to broaden the number of places they can sell poorly at. 🙂 I feel like I’ve done enough free giveaways over the last six months or so of Amazon exclusivity that I’m reaching a saturation point with people I currently reach who might download them, so it’s time to spread my reach out again and see how well that works for me. At least BA Vol 1 will be showing up on OpenBooks again, and it is, notably, once again permanently free on Smashwords and the Smashwords affiliates if you haven’t checked it out yet.
Also: I’ve hinted around a bit at this, but it’s official now: I have a cover artist in the early stages of working on the cover for Tales from the Benevolence Archives, and the characters will be on the cover. I am so fucking stoked for this that I don’t even know what to do about it. Who’s the artist? His name is Jamie Noble Frier. This guy. I cannot wait to see what his early sketches of Brazel and Rhundi look like; we’ll see how much he’s willing to let me post of the early stuff.
I, uh, guess I ought to go work on getting the book finished now. 🙂
All of my books other than Searching for Malumba have been re-submitted to Smashwords, and 
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