Your Thoughts?

As an author I always want to know what my readers think.  Recently I ran across an interesting idea and thought I’d give it a try.  I’m placing Bastina’s Necklace up for grabs.  That’s right.  You can get your very own copy of the second in my Galactic League of Planets series absolutely free. 

The Galactic League of Planets series is a future fantasy series that involves a little world building, characters from around the galaxy, and some pseudo science fiction.  Rocket ships and other world beings. 

Okay.  Not free.  I expect something in return.  Well, besides your first born.

I’m giving away four copies to four readers that have blogs and will give the book a serious review.  True honest reactions to the book.  Like it, hate it, love it, don’t understand it… whatever.  All you have to do is write it up and post it on your blog.

So if your interested in a little space romance then be one of the first four to post a comment including the address for your blog space.  We can figure out how to get in touch later.

Thanks for dropping in.

 

Roscoe James

Turn Your Sound Up

I don’t believe this video got enough play time when Orion was released.  The book took off and I didn’t drag my home movie out and show it off.  What I really like about this vid is the sound.  I mixed this track from about forty sound bites, loops, and tracks.  The same thing with Bastina’s Necklace and Forever’s Not enough.  Anyway, give it a listen.  And turn your sound up.

 

 

Thanks.  And if you’re looking for Year One AP – scroll down.

RJ

Year One AP (After Print)

Okay. Let’s do a little think tanking. Let’s talk about year zero. We don’t know when it will be we only know its arrival is inevitable. Might be in ten years, might be in thirty, but, as stated in a recent Newsweek article, the train is on the tracks and screaming toward the print publishing industry. Year zero is the year that the last two print pubs collapse (has to be two - it takes two to Tango) under a burden of debt and a business model that is older than plane travel and automobiles.

 

Sure. There will still be pint books. They’ll be consigned to the same arena as cigarettes. They’ll be special order, only for those that can afford them, and rarely seen. The print industry, the one discussed in the trades, the one that the e-pubbed New York Times will still be naming the e-best sellers for, will be found in cloud networking and the world wide web.

So there it is. E-book is the norm, the standard, not the exception. Each year there will be more new books than ever. Just like YouTube and their bevy of garage (read bedroom) recorded original works and covers, anyone that wants can stick their toe into the river of electronic books and get their name out there.

And a new revolution lurks just over the horizon for e-books. Sound, movie clips, pictures, and links. Imagine turning the page on a Stephen King book, the part where the kids are sneaking into the cemetery late at night to do whatever Mr. King has bid them to such a place to do, and the soft sound of crickets, breaking branches, rustling leaves, and wind can be heard. Or the heroine is standing on the edge of a cliff watching the sunset. The waves of the Pacific pounding against the rocks below can be heard. Kids playing. Gulls windsailing just out of reach.

Links to other books, other characters in other books, covers of other books, internet ‘places of interest’ that can bring a new dimension to the reading experience…if the reader feels so inclined. A faded video, like a ghost, runs as the watermark of the page just barely visible with thirty second loops of highlights for that particular page.

Books will become multi-media events and not just words on a page.

 

 

The price of a book will be somewhere around a dollar. The pirate wars will have been fought and won through technology. Sure, just like the print pub industry, the pirates will be out there, but there will be an entire navy of industry ships sailing their seas (because the electronic book industry is now one of importance – just like movies and music) and freeing books held hostage on some ass-talk server in the Ukraine will be a priority. Maybe the publisher everyone wants to be with will be the one with the lowest pirate to sales rate.

So. Here we are. Year zero (which is actually year one as years are counted. The date may be 2009 but we’re in the twenty-first century.

Now what? What will it be like for us, the lowly of the lowliest? The wanna be writer struggling to get our books seen on Fictionwise when the likes of Brown and King have taken over the front page.

Year one could be as close or as far away as we make it.

What do you see year one AP (after print)?

 

Thanks for dropping by.  Leave me your thoughts.  Who knows, I might write a book about them. 

 

Roscoe James

Where Did I Put My Buggy Whip

When was the last time you used a buggy whip? Let me be clear here. When was the last time you used a buggy whip outside the bedroom? Been a while for most of us. I’d venture a guess there are a few out there that wouldn’t know a buggy whip from a bullwhip (that’s the one Indiana Jones uses). I ask because there will be a day in the not too distant future (as in our children’s lifetime) when someone will be posting here at the blog with a new question along those same lines. They’ll be asking when the last time was you cracked open a book made of paper printed with words and was perfectly bound. Just like the buggy whip, books will still be around. But just like the buggy whip there will be people that can safely say they’ve never opened one in their life.

I had a great aunt who died in 1986. A wonderful person full of stories and pictures of the past if you took the time to get her talking. She was born just before the turn of the century. A time when Fischer made horse drawn carriages and everybody knew what a buggy whip was. And more importantly, how to use one. Even outside the bedroom. She was a woman that was born under a sky that didn’t have jet trails and roads were just paths of customary use that were occasionally strewn with rock and gravel to fill up the pot holes.

But she was also a woman who learned about the Wright brother’s historic first flight as a recently passed current event in a one room school house. Prop planes were the big thing when she was dating. That and the latest fad in personal travel – the automobile. She was born without a telephone and died with a wireless handset that, if the sun was right and it wasn’t raining, would actually reach up to the second floor deck. Well, when the battery wasn’t dead. She watched the funeral of an assassinated president and men walking on the moon on a black and white television set. She watched the first shuttle launch on a color console with a beautiful maple cabinet.

Oh. And she always drove an Oldsmobile. A new one every four or five years. When’s the last time someone showed up at work in their brand spanking new Oldsmobile?

Does this mean reading will be consigned to the lost art box along with handwritten letters and drop biscuits made from scratch? Hardly. I actually believe people will be reading more. I also believe that, just like the music people are collecting today, downloaded and licensed, that the personal libraries of the future will stay with a person their entire life. They might even become a point of contention in their last will and testament. Now there’s a cartoon to mess with your mind.

When I look at e-books and e-readers today compared to where they were just four years ago I see this photograph in my head that gets flogged around a lot of black boxy cars belching smoke fighting for space with horse draw wagons and carriages on the streets of Chicago (or maybe New York). Some guy on History Channel talks about the tons (yes tons) of horse manure that had to be cleared daily. Then I look at how long it has taken us to get where we are today and the evolution and impact of the automobile on the world. Not all of it good but certainly better.

Then I think about Moore’s law concerning the advancement of computing power. Basically it said (and the law became a driving force to the outcome as much as a prediction) that computing power would double every eighteen months. And it has. And recently I read an article that discussed re-vamping Moore’s law. Twelve months should do the trick.

So if the Kindle, Sony reader, and whatever Microsoft and Apple finally put on the table in the next six months, represent the prop planes of my great aunt’s era, I can’t wait to see what we’ll have in the next five years.

Then think about getting all those horse manure littering wagons off the road and imagine where our reading technology will be in ten years.

Printed literature, pulp fiction, and text books have seen the Wright brothers of e-readers take flight. You might even say we’re all Charles Lindbergh guiding the publishing industry on its first solo flight across the vast ocean of the best seller. Okay. Some of us are Lindbergh and some of us are Amelia Earhart. But we’re all involved in the same thing. Not just the pioneering moments of a new industry and the technology that will support it.

We’re all involved in defining just how soon someone will get to ask the question – when was the last time you cracked open a book made of paper printed with words and was perfectly bound.

How about we all go out and buy an e-book today? I’d love to be around to see the comment page on that one.

Thanks for dropping by.

www.roscoejames.com

Read Something Different… Bastina’s Necklace

The plan was simple. Evacuate the entire population of a planet orbiting around a dying sun to a terraformed world created just for them by the Galactic League of Planets. At least it was simple until Princess Anleen of Bastina decided the biggest and fastest space vessel ever built could be put to better use. She needed to recover the key to the ancient map. It didn’t matter that the most important relic of the Bastinan people was the good luck charm of an earthling who fancied himself a pirate on the high seas of space and traded in only two things--gold and women. Fair maidens when possible.

When Captain Dirk Roberts, ex-Corporate Space Fleet colonel, now independent space freight hauler--a man who doesn’t always have his papers or his life in order--seeks safe haven at the doomed planet Aznate, he’s only looking for a hot shower, a drink or three at the last spacer bar on the edge of known civilization, and repairs for his ship. What he finds instead is more intriguing than any tale of Blackbeard’s adventures and more beguiling than the fair maiden Guinevere of Arthurian legend.

From a hijacked ark to a plundered heart to the writing of the final Chapter in the ancient children’s fairytale of the legend of Bastina, only Haark, the god of the Bastinan people, knows how the story will end... But that doesn’t stop Princess Anleen from trying to rewrite it.

Buy Here

Thanks,

Roscoe James

Trying Something New

I have a new laptop and discovered a new program – Windows Live Writer.  So I thought I’d give it a try.  This isn’t just about Live Writer.  I do have a quandary I’d like some help with.  So here ya go.

 

Do you prefer the romance between the two main characters blooms out of two Alpha personalities that are in each others face, defensive, agressive… blablabla.  Or would you rather have an Alpha/Beta character set for the leads?

 

That’s really all I have right now.  I think I’ll add a photo just to try it out.

Thanks for dropping by.

 

 

Roscoe James

www.roscoejames.com

Trade Reviews - Orion by Roscoe James

Three reviews.

Reviewing site : You Gotta Read
Rating : You Need To Read
Reviewed by : Heather

Amid the towering monuments of Manhattan's concrete jungle, Pamela Wilkinson wasn't looking for a white picket fence and roses. She didn't yearn for silk sheets and gentle caresses. She wanted something else. Something different. Something good girls aren't supposed to crave and good boys know nothing about. She wanted more than the pull of rope against her wrists, the smell of leather in her nose, and the loud clang of the dungeon door slamming shut on her heart. She wanted the forbidden dance of master and submissive.

Horatio Sloan, wealthy eccentric and not easily denied, demanded more from Pamela than just her body. From a small art gallery in SoHo to the cold marble floor of his study, he would take from her more than her soul, demand more than just her heart, and possess her darkest, most secret place...

Her mind.

In Orion you follow Pam through her journey of finding and experiencing a new way of life. You watch her struggle with knowing what she wants while knowing that most people would find it completely insane. In the opening scenes of the book, Pam tells you that she doesn’t want just the average sexual relationship but someone to dominate her mind.

I was mesmerized by Pam’s journey into submissive. I was one of those people who would look at the pictures of leather, chains, collars, etc and think… Nasty. James puts your mind into another frame, allowing you to understand what is going through the mind of a submissive. It’s not about the sex or kink, but about pleasing your mate.

Anyone that is interested in BDSM really should read Orion. This book was thought provoking to say the least. James has created a world in which you are allowed to learn the inner workings of the mind of a submissive and a dominant. Following Pam through her journey, her decisions to become a submissive, the struggle of finding a Dom, her inner turmoil, and eventually her trial as a Dom will keep you intrigued and turning the pages.


Orion
Contemporary
CinLee
Loose ID
May 19, 2009
9781596329737
http://www.roscoejames.com/
4.5
E-BOOK

After spending an interesting evening at an erotic photography show, something deep within Pamela Wilkinson was stirred. A fantasy, a desire that she is just now aching to have realized. But all of her dates are complete failures at giving her what she needs and even her best friend doesn't understand what Pamela wants. During her birthday party, her friends give Pamela a dog collar and leash, which she promptly puts on. After teasingly leading Pam around on the leash, her best friend hands off the leash to a stranger while she powders her nose. Jolie has no idea what she has set in motion.

Horacio Sloan is immediately fascinated by the drunken woman at the end of the leash. He even warns Pamela that someone might take her seriously, but she doesn't deny that at all. Each week he finds himself at the bar, flirting with her across the distance until finally one week he brings his assistant along. Soon Pamela finds herself in a limo with a man who is a complete stranger and ends up spending the night at his isolated mansion. Frightened and fascinated, Pamela knows this is the one man who will give her fantasy life and he would not disappoint her.

I'm still catching my breath from this one. Each word flickers like a flame from the heat between Pam and Horacio. Horacio is a definite alpha master yet shows a gentleness in his handling of Pamela that borders on the exquisite. Pamela is a well fleshed out character, showing her internal struggle of wanting her fantasy at the same time as fearing it. If you like your stories hot, ORION by Roscoe James is not to be missed. The BDSM D/s elements are very strong in this book and elemental to the story but are written very well.

Wild and hot, you won't be putting this book down. ORION by Roscoe James is an exquisite story you won't want to miss.

Title: Orion
Author: Roscoe James
Publisher: Loose ID
Publisher URL: http://www.loose-id.com/
Reviewer: Amanda Nelson
Rating: 5 stars
Heat level: O

Pamela Wilkinson knows she wants more from a man, but that man is hard to find. While visiting an art gallery in Soho, she finds what she is missing…someone to make her own. So far, none of her dates seem to understand what she is seeking, until she meets the man. The man has been watching her every Friday night, up until the night. It was the night that Horatio Sloan came to complete her. She did things that she never thought she would ever do, and not only did them but found herself to be totally turned on by them. Horatio took her on a journey that began with a single word.

I was totally blown away by this book. Mr. James has managed to intrigue, entice and mesmerize me with this story. Instead of being the usual punishment and reward book that so many BDSM books are, this one showed me what a true Dominant/submissive relationship should be. Mr. James had the terminology and the action that made me fully believe in this relationship and what love can do to a person who craves this lifestyle. When Pamela was without Horatio, I felt her pain and when she was with him, I felt her total obedience. The characters, plot and scene playing were all so well written that I was able to totally lose myself in the story. The analogies used throughout the book were totally unexpected in an erotic story, yet they fit like a glove. The sex was everything that I would desire in a D/s relationship, the anticipation was very exciting and the climax was even more so. If all of Mr. James’ books are like this, I have a lot of reading to catch up on. I can’t say I’d recommend this book for light summer reading, but I would highly recommend this book for some late night titillation.

Amanda Nelson
Just Erotic Romance Reviews

You can get your copy here.

Thanks for dropping by.

Roscoe James