512 Words or Fewer

(With apologies to Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Today's the day! You can now buy Thursday's Children in paperback or Kindle editions:


I know traditionally published authors may wait as long as two years from the time they submit a finished manuscript to when the book actually goes on sale, and I imagine that's rather torturous. It's been maybe five months since DeeAnn and I started working on Thursday's Children, and though I'm very happy with how much we accomplished in such a short time, this final week has been a real crunch, and I'm ready for the production process to be over. (Mostly. I still have to produce an EPUB file to push to other, non-Amazon eBook distributors, but that's always been lower priority.)

Today is also the the start of the Chinese New Year, traditionally a time for celebration and hope (and red envelopes). It's now the year of the horse. In Chinese, the characters for "horse" and "mother" are very similar, and in fact, they're near-homophones in Mandarin, differing only in inflection. I don't know why I mentioned that. It's not really relevant. I may be a little punchy. Did you know my mom worked for many years as a public librarian? It's true.

One last thing... I may not have mentioned it before, but I'm releasing Thursday's Children under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. (You can download PDF and plain text versions of the entire book for free, and re-share them as much as you like. Please. I'm begging you.) I started the 512 Words of Fewer project with the same license, and I still believe it's a good idea. Because I am pretty much a nobody in the wider writing world, and making a name for myself is more important than making money at this point.

Sure, my friends and family and other acquaintances who like me are extremely supportive, but the few hundred people I know personally isn't a big enough audience to build a career. If I ever want one thousand true fans, I'm going to need an even greater number of casually interested readers, and I want as few barriers as possible between them and my content, for that fraction of a second between pictures of cats with pork products adhered to them.

Hi! I'm Curtis Chen. I write science fiction and fantasy. Would you like to read some of my stories?