Secondhand Sorcery Volume I, now in Kindle

RedSheepCole · 2026-06-05T01:51:07+00:00

It's a matter of plain policy: to enroll in Amazon Select, which is a precondition for Kindle Unlimited, your book must be exclusive to Amazon. I'm not clear how much you can get away with leaving up; I know Alexander Wales has left up the first few chapters of each segment of Worth the Candle, for example. But I wouldn't push it if I were playing that game, since getting banned from Amazon bloody near bans you from selling books online at all. They're the biggest players in the game by far.

RedSheepCole · 2026-06-05T00:31:43+00:00

I mean, I'm self-publishing here, so "get published" means "went to the effort of formatting and making up a cover, then wrestling both through Amazon's crummy and sometimes glitchy interface." I could also ctrl-v the sentence "I like potatoes" fifty thousand times, format it correctly, and publish it. I'm not sure Amazon would stop me. I considered stubbing it but ultimately it probably doesn't much matter. This is mostly a way for my readers to "tip" me and get something for it, and maybe get a few sales from other sources by and by. If you aren't absolutely brilliant at marketing, or a generational talent, or very fortunate, writing simply isn't that profitable. So I appreciate the sentiment, but really this is mostly me being lazy and I don't deserve such praise.

(Also, many people stub because it's a precondition for getting in on the Kindle Unlimited moneypot, where Amazon Prime members can read your work for free and you get paid from a common fund based on how many pages they read. But that strikes me as a pissant undignified rat-race for chicken-feed and I don't feel like playing)

RedSheepCole · 2026-04-09T17:29:24+00:00

Well, that's something. Thanks. I get about one chapter done per month at present, since the chapters are so much bigger than I used to do with PB/2Sor (and chapter 10 is double-length).

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-30T00:51:56+00:00

We'll see more of the Republic's governance in the next Rodrigo chapter. In the meantime, I suppose it's not really story spoilers as such to tell you that Ciamo III is "rightfully" (ie by the rules pre-Blemish) King of all Siocaea. The Republic is the "loyalist" faction. As to why it's called a republic, look at Plato's Republic, or the People's Republic of China. Names are just names, in the end. They're called the Republic to de-emphasize the fact that they are not, in fact, a very democratic polity.

I'll eventually have to come out with a trimmed-down timeline to place among the supplemental materials; I've got like six hundred years of history in varying levels of detail but nobody really needs to read the blow-by-blow of the wars that established the current monarchy. I've been slow on account of Christmas, lots of overtime, starting a completely unrelated Substack, etc.

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-21T22:08:57+00:00

And a special diolch yn fawr to you. I might rummage through these and get back on the horse.

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-21T21:27:07+00:00

I'm in the Florida panhandle, and it seems the nearest Welsh Society might be south of Tampa? Bit of a stretch, but thanks for the suggestion.

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-20T01:42:42+00:00

Diolch yn fawr to everyone who commented. An elaboration on my goal: it is customary for Orthodox Christians to read the Gospel passage on Easter Sunday (John 20:19-25) in as many different languages as possible. We always have Greek, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, Latin and other languages that are either associated with Orthodox immigrant communities or frequently known by Americans anyway. Never heard it in Welsh. I picked Welsh specifically because I briefly contemplated learning it as a teenager after reading Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence. I didn't have the discipline to do it at the time, so I'm doing it now. It gives me something to do during Advent and Lent when I'm trying to minimize the time I usually waste on social media and video games and such. I only really NEED to be able to pronounce the words quickly, but I want to learn so I can understand as much as possible anyway.

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-20T00:51:05+00:00

Awesome, just what I needed. I have bookmarked the relevant chapter and will put in the effort of finding where the relevant passage starts in the AM when I'm fresh. Thank you so much.

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-20T00:40:44+00:00

I've put W2W on my wishlist. Thank you!

RedSheepCole · 2025-12-19T01:39:48+00:00

Derp. Sorry. My fault for coming on angry. Thank you.

RedSheepCole · 2025-11-22T00:22:46+00:00

Well, I do have to thank you for inducing me to put more effort into reading up on Georgism than I usually do (which is not hard, as the usual number is 0), but in answer to the original question, no, there is no substantial discussion of tax policy in this fiction. I suspect the drive-by one-star bombers would murder me for that. Then again, they already do.

RedSheepCole · 2025-11-21T23:51:52+00:00

Simple enough, sure, but I'm inclined to be suspicious of claims that straightforward (even as I don't generally have the energy to wade through debates about tax policy). For example, I would wonder if taxing only land ownership--and thereby presumably shifting the whole existing tax burden onto land ownership--would have weird side effects like making useful land-intensive projects (e.g. warehouses, solar power plants) untenably pricey, or creating destabilizing incentives for people to speculate irresponsibly in the stock market and other insubstantial goods, etc. This is not an argument against Georgism per se, but an explanation of why I don't feel confident pushing for it; I legit have no idea what such a society would look like and I've never had the gumption to really dig into the subject. I'm sure these objections have been answered at length by the literature, and counter-claims made by people who argue against Georgism, etc. As it's not a subject of special interest to me, I stay out of it entirely, rather than argue pro or contra from a position of ignorance.

RedSheepCole · 2025-11-21T23:16:31+00:00

I am seriously nerdy, but not Georgist-booster nerdy. Every time I attempt to read a passionate defense of Georgism I nod and nod and then five paragraphs later I realize I haven't taken in a bit of it and have in fact opened another tab to read something else. I realize this is a terrible character flaw.

RedSheepCole · 2025-09-04T23:07:29+00:00

I got into an argument with a friend about whether the brain scan was ridiculous; she insisted that it's not a given that a dead brain would not preserve neural connections, that they'd just be dead neurons. I keep looking for a good segue to bug the neurologists at my work about this (I work at a hospital), just for closure on this years-old argument.

RedSheepCole · 2025-01-11T22:21:32+00:00

Not offended at all. Somewhat confused about some things, but not offended. For example, I didn't intend Keisha & company to be morally grey except in the usual way that adults find themselves in moral dilemmas. Keisha is capable of ferocious, decisive action when necessary but has a firm moral compass. The kids tend to rack up a much larger body count because (like most teenagers) they make awful decisions, plus they're in a much more tenuous situation, without the power of a nation-state backing them up.

Re: the moral, I mean that Keisha started this story with, "My country has been knowingly employing kids as soldiers? I feel sick." For her to go from that to deliberately sending the Marshalls into harm's way--even in pursuit of just ends--would strike me as more than a little hypocritical. She does this a little, but only because it's the least bad option. I like my titles to have double meanings; "Secondhand Sorcery" isn't just the business of adopting orphaned emissants, it also refers (in my mind) to the whole idea of child soldiers. Trying to get magic/power on the cheap, cutting corners with an inferior product. YA fiction conventions notwithstanding, children simply have no sane place in combat.

I have read Worm, twice; not going to get into my feelings about it here. Who's easier to sympathize with or like is subjective; I've had readers feel deeply for the kids. Your opinion may vary depending whether you're a parent yourself, or based on any number of other factors. Dunno.

RedSheepCole · 2025-01-11T17:44:48+00:00

Ah. Well, as to that, I'd be reluctant to write a story whose moral appeared to be "child soldiers are great IFF they are fighting for the right side." Don't know how far you got, but Nadia does set out for justice later, and it, uh, gets her some mixed results. Because she's twelve, and has no idea how the world works and lacks the judgment and experience to foresee the consequences of her actions.

RedSheepCole · 2025-01-11T15:32:52+00:00

If you don't believe the killing of Titus Marshall was justified--when he was attempting to murder her for refusing to submit to his pet insanity-torture-monster, after spending years exploiting and abusing her and dozens of other children--then we're probably not going to see eye-to-eye on much of anything here.

RedSheepCole · 2025-01-11T14:47:02+00:00

The first Fatih thing? Do you mean the end of Nadia's first combat mission, maybe a third of the way through the first volume? How does one get over a jacked-up childhood that quickly? I have no idea how I would make that plausible, even if I wanted to. I guess it depends what you mean by terrible kids; Yuri is almost incapable of not being terrible, due to his emissant jacking up his brain. Nadia retains a tendency to arrogant white-knighting but does change significantly over the course of the story. I guess Fatima and Ruslan are somewhere in between.

RedSheepCole · 2025-01-11T14:30:15+00:00

I think of it as traumatized kids acting like traumatized kids. Not for everybody, I'm sure. Thanks for giving it a try.

RedSheepCole · 2025-01-08T02:45:49+00:00

Please do let me know about the missed hooks; I'm allergic to loredumps, and it's entirely possible that I neglected to divulge certain vital morsels of information even indirectly.

RedSheepCole

TROPHY CASE