Learn more about the eStory Experiment here. Purchase directly from the author – just fifty cents!

Why should you download this story?

1. “Free” is a pretty good price; you can take a chance on a story without losing anything but a few minutes of your time.
2. It’s short–the PDF version is just eleven pages. Short stories are meant to be read at a single sitting; this one could be read while standing in line at the grocery store, waiting on hold with your bank, catching a quick bus ride of just a few blocks. If you like it, you can come back for another free story every week; if you don’t, then no great loss.
3. It’s a pretty good story. Originally published in “Small Spiral Notebook,” a pioneering literary journal and website, it benefited from a sharp editor and received good feedback from readers. “Small Spiral Notebook” is, alas, no longer publishing, but this story surely deserves a home on your favorite e-reader.
4. Every free story includes a coupon code that will let you get any of the non-free stories for just a quarter!

Tomorrow’s story will be in quite a different vein–more Kelly Link, less Edith Pearlman–but if you liked “Pieces,” I’m pretty sure you’ll like “Ichthyology.”

Choose your download format here, and get “Pieces” free!

  ePUB (Nook, Kobo, etc.)

  MOBI (Kindle, Stanza, etc.)

  PDF

Here’s how the experiment works:

Every Friday, I will upload a short story and make it available for free in ePUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. You can always find the current week’s story here, and it will also be announced by a blog post and on Twitter.

For one week, you can download the story free; read it, share it with your friends, let it escape into the wild. Obscurity, not piracy, is the bane of writers and artists.

After one week, the free story will be replaced by another. But all previous stories will still be available for purchase, either directly from this site for $0.50 each, or for $0.99 via Smashwords and, should the whole Smashwords “premium catalog” work as advertised, other ebook retailers. ^*

Regular readers will be rewarded by a steep discount: at the end of each ebook (free or purchased) there’s a discount code that you can use when purchasing any story from this site only. It’s the same code and the same discount for all books.

Enough about the mechanics–what about the stories?

The first story I’m offering is “Pieces,” which was originally published in Small Spiral Notebook in 2005. It’s a story about memory, time, and the things we lose. It was one of my first published stories, and one of which I’m still proud.

Download the story with these links:

    

For the first months of this experiment, I’ll be delving into my published stories. Most will have been published in small literary journals, print and online, and are either “literary fiction” or slightly quirky “speculative” stories (think Kelly Link, Kevin Brockmeier, and Karen Joy Fowler). These are stories you can download with confidence: they were selected and edited by smart and talented people.

But there will be some experiments to come as well: stories offered for the first time here, maybe with a little workshopping, maybe not, possibly at an even greater discount to encourage you to take a chance on them.

I’m open to feedback, suggestions, and commentary, on the stories and on the experiment; this is largely uncharted and mysterious territory that I hope we’ll be exploring together.

Download the collection here: Daily Dickinson

Download the collection here: Peabody River Screensaver Collection

There are indeed some bigger things in the works, but as a quick and easy launch to some Cartwheel Media projects for 2012, here’s the first of several collections of Nook screensavers, this set dedicated to images of Minnesota winters. Winter is, of course, the best season in which to curl up with a stack of books, and since Father’s Day I’ve enjoyed having my stack of books carried around on a Nook.

There are instructions for installing the screensaver in the download file; unzip it to find the “readme.txt” file, and the “mn-winter” folder (which contains the 8 images). There’s not much to it at all–you needn’t be bound to the two default screensavers that came installed on your Nook!

Click here to download: Nook Screensaver – Minnesota Winter

The images are taken from my photoblog, and are covered under a Creative Commons – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Which means that you can download and use these images for your own enjoyment, and you can even repackage and distribute them for free, so long as you include the “readme.txt” file and provide attribution to Michael Hartford, at Cartwheel Media. You may not use these images to make money, though; if you are interested in using these commercially, please contact me to make appropriate licensing arrangements.

The technology quickly caught up with me, though, and now it’s pretty easy for people to make their own videos. But I still had the domain, and continued to use it for other projects, like my photoblog and promoting my book, Dad’s Eye View: 52 Family Adventures in the Twin Cities. The main domain, though, has remained dormant.

Over the last couple years I’ve experimented a little with self-publishing: I’m primarily a short story writer, and since we’re always told that “short story collections don’t sell” (self-fulfilling prophecy?), I’ve taken to collecting my published stories myself. “Cartwheel Media” is a broad enough name that it can cover this project as well, so I’m turning this domain into a site to promote my e-book and POD projects with short stories, essays, and photography.

And since I already had WordPress installed, I might as well have a blog for it, too, to compliment the rest of the blogs I neglect. I’ll very occasionally post things about self-publishing (without the hucksterish tone that usually accompanies such talk) and related topics that interest me. They will not, I suspect, interest anyone else.

Which actually doesn’t bother me in the least.