by john | Apr 27, 2011 | Return to Eden, Writing
Not as silly as some, but I really want to work on two stories at once, one in a completely different vein than Knight Moves (pun intended, of course). So each week I’ll present a new segment of Return to Eden, another work in progress. This stuff is so very first draft, but I think it might go somewhere interesting. It will be presented here in bite-size chunks, not even chapters, and when I’m done there should be a book in it.
So here’s the beginnings of a new project, because I just don’t have enough to do, right? All feedback is welcomed!
Return to Eden
The day the world ended started off just like every other Thursday. Christin Kinsey got up after the alarm went off for the third time, staggered to the bathroom in her t-shirt and pajama bottoms, went about her morning business, took a shower, brushed her teeth, yelled at her brother Matt to drag his sorry butt out of bed because she wasn’t going to be late on account of him again this week, went back into her room, got dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a Kings of Leon T-shirt she’d borrowed from her boyfriend Kent a week or two ago, and beat on Matt’s door a couple more times before heading downstairs for breakfast.
While Christin was settling in behind a bowl of Lucky Charms and a Coke, her mom was in the kitchen in dress slacks and a bra, ironing a shirt that had obviously spent the night in the dryer and mainlining coffee with CNN on in the background. There was some other big fuss going on somewhere in the world with people that hated Americans shooting Americans, and Americans going in to stop them from shooting too many other people, and some talking heads with French accents whining about the overbearing American policies.
“Mom,” Christin asked between mouthfuls of cereal and marshmallows, “why don’t French people like us?”
“Because all frogs are douchebags” answered Matt, clumping down the stairs in baggy cargo shorts and Doc Marten boots, the uniform of his whole bunch of loser friends.
“Matthew!” Shrieked their mother, putting on her shirt and zipping up her slacks while simultaneously trying to butter a bagel and put away the iron. “We do not use terms like ‘douchebags’ or ‘frogs’ in this house! There are some French people who would rather eat Brie and smoke stinky cigarettes than do what needs to be done in the world, but that’s no reason to condemn the whole country. The French contributed some wonderful things to society,”
“Yeah,” Matt interrupted, “like eating snails and the guillotine.”
“I can think of some times when the guillotine would be useful, muttered Christin.
“Alright you two comedians, get your butts out of here or you’re going to be late. Again.” Their mother hustled them out of the kitchen and thrust some cash into Christin’s hand. “This should get you some gas and cover lunch for both of you. There’s frozen pizza in the fridge for tonight, I’ve got to go to Charlotte for a meeting with the B of A people about the loan.” She had been negotiating with the mortgage demons at Bank of America for months about refinancing their home, and it was, in her words, time for someone to “shit or get off the pot.” Sandra Kinsey didn’t swear often, but more and more often lately when she did, it involved someone with the mortgage company.
Things had been okay when Christin and Matt’s dad had been around, but Jacob Kinsey had died of lung cancer three years ago, and things had gotten tight with all his medical bills. Sandra had mortgaged the house to the hilt to pay off all the doctors and hospitals, but when the housing market in Asheville, NC went into the toilet like it did all over the country, they owed a lot more on the house than it was worth. President Obama’s plans to help American homeowners sounded good on TV, but didn’t always work out so well when reality hit the fan, as Sandra had become increasingly fond of saying. So today she was headed down to Charlotte, and she was determined to come home with some answers, or at least with a pound of flesh from some useless paper-pusher to make her feel better.
Sandra followed her kids out the front door and watched as they piled in Jacob’s old F-100 pickup truck and headed off to school. She’d kept the truck around until Christin had been old enough to drive, then given it to the girl for her sixteenth birthday. Big, blocky and decidedly un-sexy, the truck was nevertheless dependable and certainly better built than anything that had come out of Detroit in the past 30 years. It was a 1965 model, the year Jacob was born, and he had restored it to working order, if not much more than that. So it was a big rolling hunk of steel that Sandra didn’t mind sending her kids off to school in while she headed down the mountains in her Nissan Murano to do battle with the evildoers at the great corporate headquarters.
by john | Apr 25, 2011 | Real Life
So this weekend I’ll be making my annual trek into the hills of North Carolina for the Merle Watson Memorial Music Festival, or Merlefest. Me and tens of thousands of my closest friends will descend upon North Wilkesboro, NC for some of the finest bluegrass and Americana music the world has to offer. This is a huge vacation for me every year, because I don’t take a computer.
That’s right, I will not be taking a computer to Merlefest. I won’t blog for three days, and I’ll barely check email or look at my Amazon stats (yeah, right!). But this is an opportunity to unplug, relax, commune with nature and music, and generally relax. Obviously I’m looking forward to it, as I do every year, but a little more so this year, because this guy’s going to be performing on Sunday, and he’s been on my list of people to see for, oh, my whole life!
That’s right – Robert F’n Plant is closing out Merlefest with his Band of Joy! And there’s plenty of joy for me with that! I just bought the album off Amazon and have been taking advantage of their free cloud storage and music player all day (wish there was an app for iPhone, but I see why that isn’t likely to happen). If you don’t think that Jeff Bezos is a flippin’ genius, then you’re not paying attention. First the Kindle, then the whole thing with giving free access to all the Amazon tv shows to Prime subscribers, now giving 20GB of free online storage to anyone who buys an MP3 album from them. Crazy like a fox, I tell you.
But anyway, I’m looking very much forward to Merlefest for the weekend. A few days of shorts, Birkenstocks, festival food and great music is just what I need before I come back into town to the craziness that will be RENT technical rehearsals. I started loading in gear for that this weekend, and if I wasn’t already convinced that this needs to be my last show for a while, that did it. I haven’t even really done anything yet and I’m tired! But I think it will be an awesome show, if we all survive the tech process :). I’ll post photos as we get into the process, but that will be a while.
And of course the same weekend that RENT opens, which is already the weekend I’m double-booked at the SC Book Festival, my wife has a show opening! Yeah, Suzy decided to go audition for The Edge Theatre Company’s production of Miss Nelson is Missing, and damned if she didn’t land the title role! It’s the first thing she’s auditioned for in probably 5-6 years, and she gets the lead! I’m so proud of her I could bust, but I don’t really know how I’m going to be in three places at once that weekend. I mean, I’m a big dude, but I’m not that big!
Meh, I need a clone. Or a fat hillbilly look-alike.
by john | Apr 23, 2011 | Writing
So it’s been a good month, I think that’s a pretty solid understatement. I’ve sold far more copies of all of my books than I have in any other month, and in some cases I’ve sold more copies this month than I have all other months combined. And in a great bit of circular sales, as my books sell more, they appear on more bestseller lists on Amazon, so they’re easier to find, so they sell more. So they move up on lists, so they’re even easier to find than before, so they sell more. And so on…
It’s been a lot of fun watching my books hover around the middle of most of these lists, but the great part has been watching Hard Day’s Knight skyrocket up the Occult Horror list. It’s currently sitting around #10, and is sharing the list with folks like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, Scott Nicholson, and other big-selling authors. But making these sub-lists isn’t what I’m shooting for – I want to make the big list. The Amazon Top 100.
Honestly, I don’t know what the criteria are anymore for being considered a “best-seller.” It used to be making the NY Times list, and for traditionally published authors maybe it still is. But they don’t count indies, no matter how many we sell, so I think their list is skewed. Obviously the Amazon list is skewed, since it’s only one store, but it is a pretty good barometer for ebook sales. At least I think.But I’ve got a long way to go before I can use the term best-seller with regards to any of my books, at least with a straight face. But sales are chugging along, and if things keep going like they have been, then I’ll probably do fewer book shows and stay home and write more. But we’ll see how I feel after the SC Book Festival and Heroes Con in the next couple months.
Meh, file this under incoherent blog posts, I need a nap. Happy Easter, folks!
by john | Apr 20, 2011 | Writing
Yep, I’m going to try out one of these new-fangled blog tours. I stumbled upon The Bookish Snob while looking for book bloggers to see about getting some love for my books, and I found out that Belinda over there has a service that she offers that is basically a tour director gig. So I checked the rates, thought they were very reasonable, and shot her an email. She replied that my stuff looked like a good fit, and got rolling setting everything up.
So next month I’ll be going on tour! I’ll be visiting more than two dozen blogs all across teh interwebs, ending up here on June 10th. I’ve got a slew of guest posts and interviews to write up, so my output here may be limited during that time. Because between the guest posts and cranking out a pile of words each night on Knight Moves, I’m gonna be a busy boy.
But I finished the outline for Knight Moves last night, so I should be able to jam on that in the next three weeks or so, and maybe (just maybe!) have the first draft complete before I head off to the SC Book Festival. If any of you are in Columbia, SC May 13-15, come see me at this free event! But I do have a couple of things looming before that, including a lighting design for RENT here in Charlotte (not that I’m in Charlotte at the moment, I’m actually in Atlanta for work) and Merlefest! There will be plenty more Merlefest info coming soon, but suffice to say that I’m crazy excited about it for a ton of reasons, not the least of which is ROBERT PLANT.
by john | Apr 19, 2011 | Writing
So the vast majority of this post was taken directly from Derek Canyon’s blog post of yesterday. I asked him to send me over the copy because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to write a blog post of my own announcing this very excellent project. I am very proud to be part of Twelve Worlds, and hope that everyone who enjoys the Black Knight Chronicles will buy a copy to get the exclusive Black Knight story!
I’m pleased to announce that the science fiction and fantasy short story anthology, Twelve Worlds, is now available for $2.99 on Amazon.com. Buy it here!
I contributed a Black Knight Chronicles short story, Daddy Issues, to the anthology. The story takes place before the events in Hard Day’s Knight, so it should be a lot of fun for fans of the series. Admittedly it’s still a little surreal to me to think about having “fans,” but I think it’s actually starting to be true, so I’ll try not to make snide comments about the fact that I have fans. It’s kinda been a dream of mine, and is somewhat hard to believe that it’s happening, but that’s beside the point.
Daddy Issues was a challenge for me, because I don’t do many short stories. The shift from writing a 60,000-word story to a 4,000-word story was a tough thing for me, because I’ve kinda got my rhythm down for how the books go. In a novel, I take my time setting up the main fight, then there’s a red herring or two, a final plot twist then a resolution, usually with a big honkin’ fight at the end. In a short story, I had to strip away all the extra twists and dig right down to the plot and resolution. I think the story still works, and it’s pretty fun, so I hope you guys enjoy it. Plus the money goes to a great cause, so you should all buy it!
TwelveWorlds contains 14 short stories by new and aspiring authors. Genres include my own gritty cyberpunk as well as epic fantasy, romantic fantasy, paranormal detective mystery, star-faring scifi, and more. There’s around 80,000 words total, so that’s a great deal for $2.99.
Author royalties for Twelve Worlds will be donated to Reading is Fundamental, the nation’s largest nonprofit children’s literacy charity.
Here’s a full list of the stories in this anthology:
By a Whisker by Kevin O. McLaughlin (3500 words): Someone is siphoning magical energy from the powerful ley nexus at Northshield University in this urban fantasy. Ryan goes to investigate, and gets help from an unexpected quarter.
The Accidental Muse by Amy Rose Davis (6200 words): A girl with no memory, a grieving widower, and a sweet-natured boy with strange power live a quiet life in their sheltered Keep until the night a traveling musician arrives at the door. The power of the musician’s harp threatens to destroy their family unless one of them can stop it. A tale of gods, muses, mysterious spirits, and the power of love.
The Price of Vengeance by Derek J. Canyon (7400 words): In 22nd century Atlanta, Maggie hunts the genetically-engineered dwarf who killed her entire gang.
Insomnomancer by JE Medrick (3400 words): Witness life through the eyes of a predator. Kyle Hall, barely remarkable in a world of gray faces, is targeted by a very specialized hunter. To the target, it is night after sleepless night. To the Insomnomancer – a game of points and hungry satisfaction.
Thump by NB Kelly (4650 words): When a hitchhiker becomes part of an impromptu road trip, peace is the last thing that two young men will get out of it.
Iron in Shadow by Edward L. Cote (14900 words): The best thief in Rithmoor, the City of Dark Water, goes by the name Slip. He takes on a promising job, but it gets more complicated and dangerous the more he learns about what exactly it is he must do. To avoid certain death at the hands of the Great Magus Dibian, he must risk the wrath of the world’s hardest people.
Together They Die by Brian Drake (3220 words): A former cop helps a ghost solve her murder.
Incubators by Manley Peterson (3200 words): Lost in space, three astronauts struggle to accept their fate aboard a crippled ship. Could a last-minute rescue be all they hoped for?
Cube by Coral Russell (4150 words): Luke’s family isn’t perfect, but they’re worth saving. How far would you go to save your family?
The Star-Eater by K Gorman (6000 words): Karin wakes up one day on her starship, realizing her sister has been killed–but not before her sister cursed the murderer. Now she’s got a man to kill. And her boss is starting to suspect that she’s a little more than human…
Man-Maker by BC Woods (8050 words): A young boy in a society based entirely around defending itself against zombie-like demons refuses a sacred rite of passage.
Daddy Issues by John G. Hartness (4200 words): Vampires, voodoo, zombies and gold-diggers, it’s all in a day’s work for the boys at Black Knight Investigations. Vampire Private Investigators Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood are called in to dispose of a zombie in the library, but there’s always more than meets the eye where these detectives are concerned. Takes place before the events in Hard Day’s Knight.
BONUS STORIES!
Weird and Wondeful by Tony Lavely (6000 words): Mailira and Marelsa together bring an old Scottish folk tale to life for a young musician.
The Light Stream by Jaylin Baer (3060 words): The transition between waking and sleeping, dreaded by some and enjoyed by others, becomes something altogether different for a very select few. Discover one woman’s journey into the Light Stream.
So, if want to read new stories from 14 talented new authors, you should definitely buy this ebook! Who knows, you might find a new author that you really enjoy!
After reading it, don’t forget to write up a review on Amazon. It really helps sales.
You can also visit the official Twelve Worlds website and discuss the stories.
