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Audible, In the Company of Mind, and Me
Feb. 16th, 2013 11:37 pmWonderful news! Audible.com has released my first six novels as audio books. This is so cool! I'm actually chewing the furniture because I haven't gotten access codes for my author copies yet, and I'm really looking forward to hearing them--and revisiting old friends.
The books Audible.com has recorded include two novels I wrote as Steven Piziks (my real name) and the four Silent Empire novels I wrote as Steven Harper. The books are:
In the Company of Mind (by Steven Piziks)
Corporate Mentality (by Steven Piziks)
Dreamer (by Steven Harper)
Nightmare (by Steven Harper)
Trickster (by Steven Harper)
Offspring (by Steven Harper)
I was originally going to do a publicity blast on various social networks to let people know, but then I realized that wouldn't be much fun. Instead, I'm going to take a few blogs to walk back in time and revisit these books, see how each came to exist and what surrounded the creation of each one.
We'll start with In the Company of Mind.
Lance Blackstone's father has used his son as a guinea pig in illegal medical experiments and punishes Lance when the experiments go wrong. His mother knows what's going on, but does nothing to stop it. And Lance loses chunks of time. Days or even weeks sometimes pass while he sleeps. He finds himself in strange places with no memory of how he got there. Odd objects show up in his room and he has no idea where they come from. Total strangers treat him like a close friend. Voices argue inside his head. And then one of the voices speaks directly to him, a voice that claims to belong to an artificial intelligence. Lance has a chance to escape what his father has done to him. But first he must confront his past and the secrets buried in his mind.
In the early 90s, I was living in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan and attending CMU for the second time, trying to pick up a degree in English because I couldn't find work as a foreign language teacher. My spare time was consumed with two hobbies: role-playing games and writing.
My writing was going slowly. I'd sold a few short stories to magazines and anthologies, but my rejections hugely outnumbered my sales. I'd just finished a science fiction novel and was peddling it to editors, but no one was biting. I set to work on a fantasy novel to see what I could do with that.
My role-playing games were going great! I had just joined a new campaign, one set in a dystopic near future. I was noodling around with character ideas, and I remembered . . . this guy. He was in a chemistry class I'd once taken. He was handsome with a capital hand. Women fainted when he passed by. Even the straight guys noticed him. Red hair, deep blue eyes, lantern jaw, cheekbones you could strike a match on. But he was shy as a kitten at a dog park. Every female in the class made an excuse to get close to him, but he only flushed and hunched into himself. He sat next to me in front row every day, I think because I left him alone. I always wondered, though, how someone with such devastating looks could be so withdrawn.
For the hell of it, I modeled my new role-playing on this guy: extreme good looks, natural charisma, and crippling shyness. But this was a science fiction setting, and my writer's mind wondered--was he this good-looking by chance or by choice? Much more interesting if he were good-looking by choice, especially if was someone else's choice. That would certainly explain the withdrawn personality. And so Lance Blackstone was born.
The campaign only lasted a few months, but Lance hung around in my head for a long time, and I eventually realized I wanted to write about him. Except all I had was a character. No plot. What to do?
That summer I happened to reread Sybil, that book about the first woman diagnosed with multiple personalities (now known as dissociative identity disorder). Something clicked in my head, and in that moment I had a plot for Lance.
I sat down at my computer (which had no hard drive and used a DOS 3.0 boot disk) to write a short story, and ended up with a 12,000 word novella. Yeek! Back then, novellas were a tough sell. I managed to trim things down to 10,000 words, but even that was too long. I lamented about the problem to my then wife Kala and went out for a long walk to think about what to do.
A shock was waiting for me when I got back. Kala was sitting at the computer. She had just read Lance's story. Kala never read my writing, ever, until I sold it. But Lance had so intrigued her, she had called his story up to have a look.
"You can't cut stuff out," she said. "You have to put stuff in. I want to know more. How did Lance get these personalities? Why is his father acting this way? What happens after the story ends? You have a novel here, not a story."
And she was right.
I spent two years researching and writing the book. I read everything I could get my hands on in those pre-Internet days. By sheer luck, one of the psychology professors at CMU specialized in dissociative identity disorder, and I was able to consult with him, a huge help.
It took another year to sell the book. By then, I was teaching English in southeastern Michigan. It was the thrill of a lifetime to get a call from Jim Baen at Baen Books. In the Company of Mind appeared in 1998.
Now Lance (and Garth and Andy and Jessica and Robin and . . . ) have been given new life at Audible.com.
The books Audible.com has recorded include two novels I wrote as Steven Piziks (my real name) and the four Silent Empire novels I wrote as Steven Harper. The books are:
In the Company of Mind (by Steven Piziks)
Corporate Mentality (by Steven Piziks)
Dreamer (by Steven Harper)
Nightmare (by Steven Harper)
Trickster (by Steven Harper)
Offspring (by Steven Harper)
I was originally going to do a publicity blast on various social networks to let people know, but then I realized that wouldn't be much fun. Instead, I'm going to take a few blogs to walk back in time and revisit these books, see how each came to exist and what surrounded the creation of each one.
We'll start with In the Company of Mind.
Lance Blackstone's father has used his son as a guinea pig in illegal medical experiments and punishes Lance when the experiments go wrong. His mother knows what's going on, but does nothing to stop it. And Lance loses chunks of time. Days or even weeks sometimes pass while he sleeps. He finds himself in strange places with no memory of how he got there. Odd objects show up in his room and he has no idea where they come from. Total strangers treat him like a close friend. Voices argue inside his head. And then one of the voices speaks directly to him, a voice that claims to belong to an artificial intelligence. Lance has a chance to escape what his father has done to him. But first he must confront his past and the secrets buried in his mind.
In the early 90s, I was living in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan and attending CMU for the second time, trying to pick up a degree in English because I couldn't find work as a foreign language teacher. My spare time was consumed with two hobbies: role-playing games and writing.My writing was going slowly. I'd sold a few short stories to magazines and anthologies, but my rejections hugely outnumbered my sales. I'd just finished a science fiction novel and was peddling it to editors, but no one was biting. I set to work on a fantasy novel to see what I could do with that.
My role-playing games were going great! I had just joined a new campaign, one set in a dystopic near future. I was noodling around with character ideas, and I remembered . . . this guy. He was in a chemistry class I'd once taken. He was handsome with a capital hand. Women fainted when he passed by. Even the straight guys noticed him. Red hair, deep blue eyes, lantern jaw, cheekbones you could strike a match on. But he was shy as a kitten at a dog park. Every female in the class made an excuse to get close to him, but he only flushed and hunched into himself. He sat next to me in front row every day, I think because I left him alone. I always wondered, though, how someone with such devastating looks could be so withdrawn.
For the hell of it, I modeled my new role-playing on this guy: extreme good looks, natural charisma, and crippling shyness. But this was a science fiction setting, and my writer's mind wondered--was he this good-looking by chance or by choice? Much more interesting if he were good-looking by choice, especially if was someone else's choice. That would certainly explain the withdrawn personality. And so Lance Blackstone was born.
The campaign only lasted a few months, but Lance hung around in my head for a long time, and I eventually realized I wanted to write about him. Except all I had was a character. No plot. What to do?
That summer I happened to reread Sybil, that book about the first woman diagnosed with multiple personalities (now known as dissociative identity disorder). Something clicked in my head, and in that moment I had a plot for Lance.
I sat down at my computer (which had no hard drive and used a DOS 3.0 boot disk) to write a short story, and ended up with a 12,000 word novella. Yeek! Back then, novellas were a tough sell. I managed to trim things down to 10,000 words, but even that was too long. I lamented about the problem to my then wife Kala and went out for a long walk to think about what to do.
A shock was waiting for me when I got back. Kala was sitting at the computer. She had just read Lance's story. Kala never read my writing, ever, until I sold it. But Lance had so intrigued her, she had called his story up to have a look.
"You can't cut stuff out," she said. "You have to put stuff in. I want to know more. How did Lance get these personalities? Why is his father acting this way? What happens after the story ends? You have a novel here, not a story."
And she was right.
I spent two years researching and writing the book. I read everything I could get my hands on in those pre-Internet days. By sheer luck, one of the psychology professors at CMU specialized in dissociative identity disorder, and I was able to consult with him, a huge help.
It took another year to sell the book. By then, I was teaching English in southeastern Michigan. It was the thrill of a lifetime to get a call from Jim Baen at Baen Books. In the Company of Mind appeared in 1998.
Now Lance (and Garth and Andy and Jessica and Robin and . . . ) have been given new life at Audible.com.
