One of the things I’ve decided to do is slowly but surely get my entire catalog up and available in paperback through Ingram Spark and its extended distribution through bookstores. Oddly enough, when I started to try to make a cover for it so I could do the simultaneous release of ebook and paperback versions of the new edition, I could not make this cover work. No matter what I did, it just refused to come together. Was it lack of experience using Book Brush or my cataract messing with my vision so that I couldn’t focus properly? Hard to say. This cover happened very quickly, and without the problems of the previous attempt.
Nonetheless, given the winter weather sweeping across the country, this seems like a really good time to be focusing on this book and this series. Shadows opens with a confrontation between mother and daughter, after daughter has returned from sneaking off to go skiing with her forbidden love. Which gets even more into corporate politics, because in the world of the Netwalk Sequence, corporations have gained a lot more overt political power. We somewhat see the evolution of the Corporate Courts (though that was never the intent of these stories) as a means to control a mysterious device. Shadows details the progression of the growing estrangement between Sarah Stephens and her daughter Diana Landreth, set against the politics and the technology they’re both working with. While this is a story collection, it has a definite through line of telling that story, and…many of the stories within Shadows, including “Winter Shadows,” “Shadow Harvest,” and “Cold Dish” explicitly take place in winter settings. Though for the skiing piece, you have to wait for the next two books in the series to have any significant ski scenes!
Honestly, most of this book was drafted when I still taught at Welches, up on Mt. Hood, and was skiing at Timberline. In many ways, I still miss those days. I’ve toyed with the notion of pulling together my old ski blogs from LiveJournal and putting them up as a Ski Days book. So far, however, I’ve just not had the time nor the energy to put it together. Will I? Maybe.
However, those ski days on Hood still resonate within me. I really got into the culture up there on Hood, and the Netwalk books reflect that experience as much as they do the corporate soap opera, the mother-daughter dynamics across four generations, the implications of digital personality uploads, and my projections of the politics of the mid-to-late 21st century.
Life in the Shadows is on sale for $2.99 in ebook through March 31st as well as now being available in paperback. After March 31st, with (hopefully) the rest of the series available in paperback, the ebook price will go back up to $4.99.
I’ll probably spend some time over the next few weeks occasionally talking about this series. A retrospective, of sorts, perhaps pointing out some Easter Eggs in the story for those who know the area. There are some interesting pieces about it.
Here’s where you can find Shadows. Note that both Amazon and Barnes and Noble now link to the paperback:
