On February 4th of 2015, my first collection of Mare Inebrium spaceport bar short stories was published by Dark Oak Press. This one is 17 of my own stories, clocking in at roughly 350 pages, and is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. In addition to the stories, there is an introduction to the series and a time line of all my work that shares the same general background as the spaceport bar stories. In the introduction there's even a small black & white photo of the map I drew of the planet where my stories take place. The cover art for the book was kindly done by the amazing Darrell Osborn.
Do you like adventure stories? Tales of faraway places and unusual people? Ancient history and ultra-modern cities? Locked-room mysteries? Romance? Those "beer and skittles" barroom tall tales narrated by weird and wild aliens? Maybe even a Sherlock Holmes story you've never seen? All this and more can be yours between the covers of this book.
How can I quickly describe my spaceport bar short story series? "Tales From The Mare Inebrium" began as a single sentence I scribbled in a notepad while at work one day in 1979 or so. In 1995 that sentence evolved into a short story. By 1998 that single story had grown into a rapidly expanding shared universe series. Eventually, I had written eight or nine stories in a series that spanned upwards of seventy stories by a dozen or more different writers. Each writer brought something fresh and new to the series. Each writer prompted me to create new stories of my own to expand on the group effort. By the time I found a publisher for my collection, the online series had garnered over two million page hits on my Aphelion Webzine site. My "Tales From The Mare Inebrium" collection features all my own original stories from the series, as well as many more new ones that I wrote expressly for the book. My aim has always been to provide fun tall tales for readers to enjoy. I believe I have succeeded in that goal. So come join us at the bar. Meet Max the head bartender, his girlfriend Trixie and her best friend Blanche who are members of the waitstaff there. Listen to stories told by Kazsh-ak, Hnarcor, Andrew, Jon, and a host of other patrons. Their stories are yours to enjoy, all for the price of a few drinks at your local spaceport bar. So come on in and have a seat, the good times are rolling even as we speak!
In the mid-3100s AD, in the largest city on a planet 65 light years from Earth, there is a bar comfortably close to the spaceport. It hosts hundreds of alien travelers every day, all of whom enjoy their favorite drinks while listening to the occasional tall tale lovingly told by other patrons. Are they true stories? Are they entertaining make-believe? No one knows save the storytellers themselves. So pull up a bar stool, order a drink, and relax while the web of stories is spun in the Mare Inebrium...
The first thing I got paid for was a 1000-word short story in the collection Flash Of Aphelion. That's a Print-On-Demand anthology available from LULU.com. I've also seen it listed on Amazon.com
as well. Hardbacks, paperbacks, and different e-book versions should be
available there. That book is a wonderful collection of flash fiction
stories that were originally featured as writing contests in the
Forums section of Aphelion Webzine. Every writer in the book gets one
fair share of the profits from each sale for each story they have in
the collection. I have one story, so I get one fair share. Other
writers may have two, or three, or more, so they get additional
"shares" for each of their stories. There are over 70 stories in the
book, each one clocks in at 1000 words, so it is quite a bargain for
any reader to buy.
Future Projects:
Sometime in the somewhat-near future, if everything goes
according to plan, I will have a steampunk/western short story coming out in an an anthology from Horrified Press. The anthology is titled "Steam-Powered Dream Engines" and will be published sometime in the Summer of 2017. My story is called "The Dark Side Of Diablo Canyon" and is only one of the many delights offered in that anthology. Look for it soon!
Another thing, or actually "things" would be the correct term is that I will have 5 music CDs of my old garage band music from the old days. All live music, all from my old tape recordings, remastered as best I can, and recovered from a dead hard drive from an old computer. So, very much a sort of "warts and all" set of compilations. Once they come live, I'll post the links here. They will be on Create Space and Bandcamp, for your listening pleasure.
Another thing to look for is that I am now free to go back to my previous Works In Progress that had been put on hold by other obligations:
At the moment, I am slowly working on other projects that might
see the light of day in the next couple of years. My steampunk novel
for one, a pair of steampunk/science-fiction/westerns for another, the script for a steampunk audio
play featuring my music, more spaceport bar stories, other connected Bethdish novels, and so on.
Watch this space for further news as it develops!
Well now, I suppose the question I need to answer is “why should people spend their hard-earned cash on this music?” I mean, really, some old dude dug up a few old recordings of his glory days in a few garage bands from forty years ago. Big deal, right? Well, it's a big deal to me, since I happen to be the old dude in question. And another thing, not all this music is from thirty years ago. Some of the albums are of my present work, composing pieces in computer programs. The Garage Band antiques will be clearly identified in the listings for those CDs. The modern compositions will also be clearly labeled as such.
In fact, my first three album releases are new music composed within the past few years. Only after those all go live will I begin releasing the garage band recordings.
So why should you invest your hard-earned cash in my amateur music? Well, besides the obvious fact that times are tough on everyone and this is a way for me to earn a few extra dollars. Quite frankly, the music is good. The only complaint I've ever gotten about it is that there aren't any vocals. I find instrumental music to be a good background soundtrack for driving, writing, housework, yard-work, reading, and just about anything else I enjoy doing. Sometimes, you just want to listen to the music, to enjoy the way different instruments blend their sounds together as they create something that is beautiful and pleasing to your senses.
Here is a preview of my first album, one of the features of the POD publishing website Create Space. This allows people to listen to a track from the album, for free. The song in question is the title track, “Never Bank On A Learning Curve.” This isn't the only style of music on the album, but it does fairly represent the Rock Music genre songs on the album:
There are a few questions on the preview page. You don't have to answer them if you don't want to. They're just there to help me gauge whether I need to change or improve anything.
Here is a copy of my Create Space page for the first album, along with other info about it:
Instrumental music composed entirely within my computer using the MAGIX Music Maker program. This is an exploration of my imagination, using a very versatile music composing program. No two artists would create the same sounds using the same program. This is an example of how I make best use of the program and instrument voices.
This album is a selection of my solo projects from 2011 to the present day. All the songs were composed using MAGIX Music Maker, a computer program that allows me to be musically creative in a whole new way. The program uses loops and clips of recordings of various musical instruments. These can be put together like building blocks to make a complete song. There are thousands of these clips available. I put them together in a series of sequences, somewhat like composing a piece on a loop-based synth. Some pieces are simple, consisting of a mere four or five instrument voices, each with their own sequences. Others are very complex, featuring sixteen or more instrument voices, straight-up synth sequences I created from scratch, sound effects from within the program library, and even special sound effects that I created myself using other audio editing software.
All the music on this album is just me playing with a computer program. No real musicians were harmed in the creation of this album.
I hope you enjoy listening to these songs.
Dan L. Hollifield -- Studio-D
Song List:
1) Atlanta Virtue
2) Nice And Easy Does It
3) Out of The Shadows
4) New World, Old Worlds
5) WTF? Rednecks Can't Groove!
6) Never Bank On A Learning Curve
7) Slow Dance With The Woman I Love
8) Drifting Along With The Clouds Again
9) How Deep, The Universe? Infinite Beauty It Holds...
10) Rush Hour Traffic - Don't Get In My Way!
11) Love Is The Only Key
12) Somewhat Lighter Shade Of Fail
13) Faster Than Light Is The Only Way To Fly
14) Fanfare For The Common Fen
Here is a link to the Create Space page where you can buy the album:
Here is a link to the Amazon.com page where you can buy the album:
I'll add in the links to all the Digital Downloads sites as they go live.
Here is a link to the Bandcamp site where you can preview the
songs for free and download digital versions for $6.18 for the whole
album and $0.65 for individual songs. And Bandcamp has an “or
pay more” option where you can choose to pay whatever you
like above the list price! My Bandcamp page is here:
So this is now a thing!
I have uploaded the song files to the Create Space site for the release of my second album. It has 15 songs, with a total run time of 68 minutes. The price is $17.59, with an Amazon listing and digital downloads coming soon. The album was just released on September 25th of 2013. I will post a link to the “Buy It Now” page on Amazon.com once it goes live. The digital downloads on my Bandcamp page are already live!
I had a few songs left over from the first album, so I got to work writing enough new ones to fill a second album. In less than a month, I was ready to go. I really burned the midnight oil to get these ready in time. As always, the mixing and editing were the hardest parts of the process. The mix of different styles is even more striking on this album. Some day I'll have to do an album in a syngle style, just to see if I can.
UPDATE:"Second Helping" has now been listed on Amazon.
And here is a link to the official Create Space Preview page for one of the best songs on the album:
There are a few questions on the preview page. You don't have to answer them if you don't want to. They're just there to help me gauge whether I need to change or improve anything.
Song List:
01) Highly Energetic Particles Boogie
02) Nwarlens Mud
03) Brave New Worlds Around Each Star
04) Vortex Manipulator
05) Tickle Me, Eno!
06) Quittin' Time - Baby Wants Me Home
07) Whatever...
08) Daytona Boardwalk
09) Supermoon 03b
10) Nature Walk
11) Vienna Cowboys
12) Chill, Dude...
13) Set This Place On Fire!
14) You Asked For It, Now Open Up Wide!
15) Hold My Beer And Watch This Stuff!
"The Displaced Detective Suite" is an album of instrumental music inspired by Stephanie Osborn's series of Displaced Detective novels. It is somewhat similar to my steampunk "Airships Suite" in tone, being a mix of orchestral and rock, with electronica and sound effects tossed into the mix. Quite possibly some of the most beautiful music I have composed so far. The album has been under construction since June of 2013. The songs are finished and the files have been uploaded to Create Space. The cover art, done specifically for this album by Darrell Osborn, is quite lovely.
There is also a bonus track included with the Bandcamp full album downloads, and as being the free preview track on the Create Space site. This isn't really part of the album. It's a unique, stand-alone piece that I wanted to do the whole time I was writing the rest of the music. I kept hearing this in my head as I put all the other music together. Finally, Stephanie and I managed to find a way to make it happen.
"Rescue At Reichenbach Falls" is an 18-minute re-edit of the instrumental track "Rescue At The Falls." It includes clips from a public domain radio play from the 1950s based on "The Final Problem" by Arthur Conan Doyle. These clips feature Sir John Gielgud as Holmes, and Orson Welles as Moriarty. And as an extra special treat, Stephanie Osborn making her voice acting debut as her character Skye Chadwick!
Only the voice acting clips are from the radio play. All the other audio SFX were assembled by myself from various online public domain sound effects libraries. Stephanie recorded her part from a script I wrote that adapts dialog from her novels.
Song List:
01) Indistinguishable From Magic
02) Rescue at the Falls
03) Meditations of a Displaced Detective in the Key of A Minor
04) Unlimited Skye
05) Highly Energetic Particles Boogie
06) I Thought It Was A UFO
07) Race Against Time
08) Tesseract
09) Moriarty
10) Two Become One
BONUS TRACK: Rescue At Reichenbach Falls
OK, this is a sort of Coming Soon section of this page. As new albums are released, they'll move up the page to be highlighted. At the moment, I have eleven or more unreleased albums in the works. They are:
Third Time's The Charm – My third album of modern
solo work.
Fast Friends – Volume One: Warts And All – Garage
Band tapes of Jim Parnell and I.
Fast Friends – Volume Two: Live MO – Garage Band
tapes of Jim Parnell and I.
Fast Friends – Volume Three: Space Dust – Garage
Band tapes of Jim Parnell and I.
Studio-D: Solitaire – My solo work from the garage band days.
Studio-D: Sweet Revenge – Me with the guys.
Studio-D: Aftermath – Me with some of the guys, after I quit
Sweet Revenge.
The 10,000 Airships Suite – A steampunk audio play, featuring
Richard Bristow as the Narrator, and as Voice Acting Director.
The 10,000 Airships Suite, Instrumental – My music for the
play, without the play. This will be longer, and quite a different edit
than the play itself. It might even stretch to a double-album set.
We'll see.
Keep the dream alive. Follow your dreams! More updates as they happen,
And as always, my entire catalog of music can be previewed for free on my Sound Cloud Page, or in better quality on my Bandcamp page.