Category: Fiction

One of my goals the next few months is to make sure all of my published stories are available for purchase for all the major e-readers, as well as in PDF format if you want to read them on your computer.  I’d been slowly been doing it at a rate of one or two a month, but I’ve decided to buckle down and accelerate the process a little.  I’ll be mentioning them here from time to time.

If you’re in the mood for a fun romp with an interstellar private investigator, check out “The Bear Who Sang Opera,” which originally appeared in Analog.  It’s the first of two published stories featuring Dexter Duff, and there are more in the works.  Here’s a little more info:

The Bear Who Sang Opera

When a grizzly bear walks into your office, it’s enough to get your attention. When that grizzly turns out to be an opera-singing, biological-robot hybrid claiming someone stole his singing voice, it begins one of the strangest cases of Dexter Duff’s career. Originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction.

“The old gumshoe detective story goes into the future…Instead of a beautiful dame, the client is a biological-robot hybrid in the form of a bear who hires a PI to find his lost voice. Like the old tales, the characters are well-developed and interesting, each a possible suspect. However, in this futuristic tale the settings are stunning planets in various solar systems, not some filthy back alley or office. As in both, the fight scenes are realistic. Carter weaves a successful tribute to old-school detective stories with the modern twist of exposing man’s foibles.” – Tangent Online

Buy:  Amazon | B&N | Smashwords*

*For those of you who haven’t yet jumped on the e-reader bandwagon, you can download a PDF version of the story at Smashwords.  Eventually most of these stories will appear in a print collection, but it may be down the road a bit.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new book — well, a short book.  Technically, a novella, but usually only writers use that cute term, so let’s just call it a really short book.   It’s little work of historical fantasy called Lincoln and the Dragon. Here’s a little more information:

The fateful first of January. That’s how Abraham Lincoln described New Year’s Day in 1841, the day he temporarily broke off his engagement with Mary Todd.

Although this fact is well known among historians, what is not known is what else happened that day – when a deranged, dimension-hopping descendant of a Confederate general attempted to assassinate Lincoln long before he became the 16th President of the United States.

When the madman’s plan goes awry, Lincoln finds himself stranded in the land of Howander, a world populated by brave knights, drafty castles, and a princess terribly scarred by a one-eyed dragon who’s promised to return for her on her upcoming birthday. As he finds himself falling for the princess, Lincoln must make a choice: stay and fight the dragon, or heed the call of his dark dreams, which offer him tantalizing glimpses of his native country’s future – a country which may need a hero even more than this one.

The print edition won’t be available for another month or so, but if you’d like to buy the e-book, you can do so right now for the bargain price of only $1.99 from Amazon.com, BN.com, or from Smashwords.com (which sells PDF  versions for those of you who haven’t made the leap to e-readers yet.)

One other thing:  I’ve gotten a number of emails from readers who’ve written to tell me that they like my work and asking me what they can do to help.  The biggest thing you can do is write a review (hopefully positive!) at one of the online retailers, especially the big ones like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  Only a tiny, tiny fraction of people who purchase books do this, and it really does make a difference.  There was a study a number of years ago, I forget where, that showed that books with eight or more reviews showed a bump in sales attributable directly to the reviews, so there really is a measurable effect — even a short one like “Liked this book!  Buy it!” is enough.  Plus you don’t even need to use your real name.

Buy Now:

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Back in February, the fine folks at PS Publishing released my collection, A Web of Black Widows, which contains six tales all centered around love and loss.  While the print edition is still available as both a signed jacketed hardcover and a hardcover without a jacket,* I’m pleased to announce that Flying Raven Press has just published the electronic edition.  It also bears a different cover:

It’s available right now for the Kindle on Amazon.com and also in various other formats via Smashwords.com.  In the next month or so, it should also show up on the Barnes and Noble site, the Soney e-reader bookstore, and the iBookstore, but if you can’t wait you can get it in those e-reader formats right now over at Smashwords.com.

Here’s the blurb that’s appearing on various sites:

In these six provocative tales, Scott William Carter takes the reader on a journey to places where love and loss intersect: a grieving tattoo artist makes a cross-country trip with a pregnant woman on the run from her disturbed husband . . . a mysterious artist finds a woman washed up on the beach and feels compelled to paint her . . . a young man who made a disastrous choice in wife is forced to crash weddings with his ghostly bride so she can remain on Earth . . .

Reading these and three other stories, you will be intrigued, moved, and troubled as Carter’s clear and engaging prose takes you on a guided tour of the darker corners of the human psyche. But as he writes in his introduction, “There’s hope in there, too. There has to be. Otherwise, why write at all?”

“Scott William Carter makes it look easy. But if anyone thinks that writing good, intriguing fiction with a clear, plain voice is easy . . . Well, they should try it sometime.” — Chizine.com

“While it may be small in size, A WEB OF BLACK WIDOWS is as powerful a package as dynamite.” – Gnostalgia

“The title story is a stunner.” – Fright.com

*Copies of the signed hardcovers were limited to 500 copies, and they’re running out, so if you want to own one of these fine books as a collector’s edition, I encourage you to buy one soon.