Read an Ebook Week & Sample Sunday #8

Thought I would double up this Sunday's posting with the kickoff to Read an Ebook Week on top of Sample Sunday. So if you're here for the codes to get Spiral X for 50% off and Split for free, that's coming shortly. If you're here for the sample, that's after the jump. Navigate accordingly.

So I didn't know this, and I like to consider myself a repository for useless information, but apparently Ebooks have been around for forty years. Yes, you heard me right, forty years! You can dig into the history of the Ebook by hitting this link, which also happens to double as the official Read an Ebook Week website. I'm all about doubling up today, apparently. Despite how long it's been around though, it is only within the last few years that the Ebook has hit the big time, so it's been an interesting journey. I only hope my journey doesn't take forty years to take off. Just sayin'.

At any rate, as part of this occasion, Smashwords is holding a site-wide celebration, and any author who wanted to could take part in this endeavor by offering between 25-100% off of their books. Since I'm all about promoting myself these days, I have signed up.

So go to here to grab Spiral X for 50% off with the code RAE50.

Go here to grab Split for 100% off (that's FREE!) with the code RAE25.

And hey, while you're at it, go grab a few others. Indies authors need all the support they can get. Happy Read an Ebook Week!

And now for the Sample Sunday portion of the post.

For those who follow this blog or my Twitter feed, you know that I have begun writing Book Two in The Eternal War series. The outline was finished last weekend, and the first words were written shortly afterward. As of last night I'm about 5k words into the story, which isn't where I necessarily want to be (I'm behind), but things should pick up here quickly since I finished off the the Final Project for my Composition Class and am just about finished with my MS Access class. Anyone who is attending college will understand the significance of that, and even though I will be starting up classes here again later this month, having roughly two weeks in between means a lot of work can get done, not to mention the first couple of weeks of class have typically been light on assignments. All of that means I should roll into April ahead of schedule. I'll need to, I feel, since I have an internal date to meet in terms of getting this book done. I'll let that date slip if it looks like I'll meet it, but in the meantime, I have something else for you.

A couple of weeks ago I highlighted a minor character by the name of Joseph Redmond who will be showing up in Book Two to make Cheryl's corporate life miserable. Today I bring to you the first moment she runs into him. Now, you'll notice that I don't do a whole lot of description when it comes to his physical appearance. That's by design. I'm of the school of writer that believes the finer details of a book are best left up to the reader to fill out. Enjoy, and I'll see you again soon!

Disclaimer: This is the first draft so what you see here might not necessarily make it into the final product. But you'll get the gist of it.

Joseph Redmond was a son of a bitch, and I would argue that point with anyone that bothered. The problem is that most people, most normal people at least, would agree with me. He was just a little too neat, a little too polished, and a little too perfect, something that was easy to tell if you spent more than a minute in his presence. He was corporate America to a "T", and he was the bane of my existence at my own company. When our old CEO resigned two years ago, the board of directors had come to me with a list of candidates they had whittled through during the headhunting process. I looked through the applications, read through the transcripts of the interviews, as well as the comments from the board. Then I'd chosen three to go through the final round of interviews, with instructions to hold a vote on who would best serve the company after they were done. It was more than I had done before when it came to my involvement with the company, but since I'm fairly confident my best traits don't lie in executive business decisions, I had thought it best to leave it more capable hands. Hoo boy was I wrong. Sure, Joseph had talked a good game about increasing our profit margins through exploitation of a bevy of government contracts falling out of the sky, even offering inside leverage to gain such windfalls, but in the end he had come to the company with one goal in mind: Buy me out, then turn around and sell the company off to the highest bidder. Before the kidnapping incident, he'd managed to grab a significant portion of the board to his cause, and was one or two votes away from staging a coup. Since then, however, things had settled into a stalement. Being kidnapped and tortured had yielded unexpected benefits, that being one of them, and the failure of his tactics had irked him to no end, if the rumors were to be believed. A stalement was how I wanted things to be though. The only way I could win was to hope that he realized he wasn't going to get what he wanted, and seek greener pastures elsewhere. It was a hope, at least.