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The text of the petition:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Create a Federal Winterfest celebrating the arts, sports, food, & other joys of winter, & combating the “winter blues.”

The emotional & economic impact of the post-holiday season is well established, with Blue Monday (the third Monday of the year, & your second inauguration date!) confirmed as the most stressful day of the year.

However, as December proves every year, winter can be as festive & prosperous as any season, if only we would continue to celebrate it beyond Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, & New Year’s Day.

To boost the country through the dark days of January, the President & Congress should establish a federal Winterfest weekend holiday kicking off on the fifth Thursday of the year—but officially observed on Friday & the following weekend—filled with concerts, feasting, sports (the Super Bowl could be pinned to Winterfest Sunday, if the NFL cooperates), & other winter-themed events!

Even so, most titles (On the Head of a Pin, the three Observer Tales episodes, and Tysons Corner) will be temporarily unavailable to prepare them for second editions.

Cenolithic thanks you for your continued interest!

I experimented with ebooks in 2012 at the urging of friends and fans of my writing website, sold some stories, got some good reviews and ratings.  But ultimately, the primary result of the experiment was to complicate my 2012 taxes.

This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue except that, while I deeply enjoy the act of writing itself, my drive to be read is comparatively shallow. I have neither the desire for fame nor a fear of it.   I have no hunger for affirmation, no proverbial hole to be filled, no self-esteem issues for fans to assuage.  I have a secure income and no need or lust for money; if there were a reasonable expectation that writing might replace that income, I would commit 100 percent.

As it is, however, there is very little pressing me to expend vast amounts of time and resources marketing my writing to readers, and that is simply a bad fit for a publishing business that increasingly leans on author self-promotion.

-J. Nelson Leith
Washington, DC

The guiding principle behind Diverse Energies (don’t all anthologies have one?) is to present characters of “non-traditional” backgrounds and ethnic/sexual identities. Now, this might raise red flags as a possible PC polemic disguised as sci-fi but, as no friend of political correctness myself, let me reassure the reader that the best thing about how Diverse Energies fulfills its promise is that the stories have characters of diverse backgrounds and ethnic/sexual identities, but the stories are not themselves necessarily about diversity.

As Tobias Buckell explains the anthology in the preface: “Why? It’s the future face of the world.” No political bone to pick, just sci-fi writers being honest about their setting.

Check it out!

In the hard-boiled fantasy novella On The Head Of A Pin, detective Chuck Oliver is hired for an unusual missing-person case: to find the long-lost angel of Despair.  But, during his investigation, he stumbles into the intrigues of Death Herself.  Could a spiritual secret he learns from the daughter of one of the Seven Sins show him a way to cheat Death and become the ultimate detective?  Or will his quest lead to a global apocalypse of Babylonian excess?

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Available on Nook and Kindle.

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When hard-working Will first met Heather, he thought she was just a curious stranger with a playful demeanor … or perhaps a very vivid dream. But then, Will’s room-mate warns him that she’s being hunted by the authorities. Is she a stress-induced hallucination? A mass delusion? Or a seductive chimæra from the ancient past? In an unusual excursion into mainstream horror, Leith straddles the border between the real world and nightmares.

Amazon review: “Creepy. How do you get someone to stop stalking you if you don’t even know if they are real or not? Take a journey on a psychological mind-trip to find out. Once again, I give J. Nelson Leith five stars for his mastery of words. I’m just wowed, by his ability to write strange things and make you wonder if they could be real. Awesome!”

Available on Nook and Kindle.

In a story that could be described as a gaslight fantasy or gunpowderpunk, Leith puts a dark twist on the vampire meme, tracing the origin of the undead back to a primordial act of murder among the Children of God.  When a “woman who wouldn’t die” comes to to port of Lemaigne, hunting a girl of mixed blood, the Security Corps Observer assigned to the city has to overcome his skepticism to keep his commanding officer’s family safe.

Amazon review: “I don’t know about you, but I am a fan of the dark and twisted. J. Nelson Leith has the ability to bring you right into the story … I found myself moving along, trying to solve the mystery of a unknown woman who shows up in town … Who is this woman? And what does she want with the young girls she is stalking? Read this!”

Available on Nook and Kindle.

Another episode in the Observer’s adventures has the Security Corps officer abandoning his post to investigate a string of mysterious killings in the back country above the port of Lemaigne.  In a Hawthornesque fable of frontier mystery, Leith pits man against nature in an eery monster tale that (according to an Amazon reviewer) “keep(s) you on the edge of your seat!”

Available on Nook and Kindle.

All The Seas And Rivers is a serialized tale of genre fiction at war, its title a nod to Chinese jianghu adventure, its narrator an homage to American hardboiled mysteries, its content a commentary on literature itself. Grounded in trope, aspirations in the clouds.

Now, all three plot-lines are up!  The hardboiled story of the Detective, Marshall Finister, is now up to five chapters.  The wuxia mash-up tale of the train-hopping Monk, Jimmy Fu, is now available in two chapters.  Finally, the western yarn of the Gunfighter, Patrick Clark, is now up to four chapters.  When they reach ten, the three plot-lines will come together in a genre-crunching literary epic spanning the globe.

Let the adventure continue…

All The Seas And Rivers is a serialized tale of genre fiction at war, its title a nod to Chinese jianghu adventure, its narrator an homage to American hardboiled mysteries, its content a commentary on literature itself. Grounded in trope, aspirations in the clouds. Let the storytelling storm continue…

All The Seas And Rivers is a serialized tale of genre fiction at war, its title a nod to Chinese jianghu adventure, its narrator an homage to American hardboiled mysteries, its content a commentary on literature itself. Grounded in trope, aspirations in the clouds. Let the storytelling storm continue…

Read Chapter Two, Chapter Three, or start at the beginning.