For Readers

For Readers

State of the WIP: March 2025

For Readers

The Vinestead Anthology is Leaving Kindle Unlimited

Cool Daniel has a problem with Kindle Unlimited (KU), and as a result, he has decided to pull the entire Vinestead Anthology from the KU program over the next few months. Most titles will disappear on March 24, 2025, with a couple of stragglers following on in May. After that,

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Upload Complete: Short Stories

I'm happy to report that I've finished uploading all the short stories I care to share to danielverastiqui.com/short-stories. These include selections from The Sum of Memory, Destination Okinawa, and later stories that never made it into a collection. While I'm happy to

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Cue the Gritty Voiceover

House of Nepenthe (2025)When Kenneth Barnes takes a business trip to his old hometown, he finds himself on the wrong end of a gun. Now in the hospital in a coma, Kenneth’s life begins to flash before his eyes in the form of the House of Nepenthe, an

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Twenty Years of Self-Publishing: My First and Only Query

The year was 2004, and the book was Xronixle. Fresh out of the gate as a hopeful cyberpunk novelist, I reached out to Dalton Publishing, a local Austin publisher, with a query for my cyberpunk thriller about a boy who copies his girlfriend's mind in virtual reality. To

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A Clan Without a Name

I never joined a hacker collective when I was younger, mostly because I wasn't a hacker. But I did have a dope-ass handle... XRISIS. Unpronounceable like my last name, Xrisis became my mask of anonymity on the World Wide Web. And then social media came along and destroyed

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Dinner Conversation at Vise Manor

I first had this conversation about superpowers in the Dominican Republic at an awesome destination wedding in 2015, and when it came time to bring all the guests together for dinner in VISE MANOR years later, I knew exactly what they would talk about. Hopefully, it added some depth to

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Brigham Plaza - An Ode To Friends

Brigham Plaza was so much fun to write because not only did it bring together so many fun storylines, I got to draw on my memories of FETCH BBS, which is what we Gen X'ers had before the Internet. My friends Tanzy, Cleo, Whisper, Strider, and I would

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Temporarily a Full-time Author

Although I've never really dreamed of being a full-time author, I can't deny it would be nice to sit around every day and do the thing I love the most: eat French bread pizzas. Then, after the pizzas were gone, I would spend the rest of

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The Best Vinestead Anthology Novel 2024

As I'm finishing up House of Nepenthe and looking to the next project, I'm curious to know which Vinestead Anthology novel has been your favorite so far. Is it the cyberpunk murder mystery Vise Manor? Or the twisty thriller Por Vida? Or the OG hacker against

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Rajink Comes to Town

Sunrise on the outskirts of Pickaxe, Montana. Rajink sat on a small outcropping of rocks examining his hand. All night, it had bothered him, throbbing hard enough to rouse him from his sleep. Now, under the soft glare of sunrise, he tried to find some outward problem with it. It