Crowdsourcing story ideas

Here’s the deal – I’m going to crowdsource a couple of ideas for the next Black Knight short story. I plan to write it this weekend, and offer it for free here on the blog for a week. After that, it’s going to be $.99. By contributing ideas as part of this hopefully fun experiment, you give up any ownership of said ideas, and they become mine to do with as I wish, for this experiment or future stories, books, novels, etc. Your submission of an idea explicitly agrees to those terms. All you get out of the deal is a thank you.

In advance – Thanks!

You can comment, Facebook or tweet your answers –

First – Gimme a villain

Second – Gimme a location

Third – Gimme a Song to incorporate somewhere in the story

Fourth – Gimme an adjective that I have to use somewhere

Fifth – Gimme an expletive that has to be used somewhere

It’s kinda like MadLibs, only sillier. This is why I should always go to bed earlier.

Darker

I wrote a scene last night that took longer than any 600 words I’ve ever written, or at least since high school. I’m working on a serial killer novel, and this was the first scene where we shifted to watching the killer instead of watching the heroes. It was surprisingly tough. Obviously I’ve never killed anyone, and certainly not in as gruesome a fashion as this guy does, but I didn’t expect it to be as difficult as it was.

There were several things that hung me up, and I thought I’d share a little with y’all today. First, the manner of death was not pleasant. It wasn’t even standard, like strangulation, shooting or stabbing. So figuring out how to write a horrific murder without glorifying the act was a challenge. It was hard not to resort to too much cliche, or too many conversational descriptors for things. And it was challenging to write this guy doing things to the girl that he enjoyed, without taking away from the horror of his actions for the reader. I guess at the end of it if I creeped myself out a little, then I was still doing okay.

It got me to thinking about bad guys. In most of my books, the bad guys don’t play a terribly big role. In The Black Knight Chronicles, the attention is all on the good guys. Mostly because the books are first-person, so it’s not really feasible to spend too much time on the bad guy, because by the time the good guys get to where the bad guy is, there’s a fight. But in third person omniscient, I can shift the perspective from the good guys to the bad guy and back, so I have to get into the head of the bad guy from time to time. It’s not a really fun place to go, but the more I dislike it, the better I think the character will be when the book is finished.

I’m enjoying the process, because it’s harder to write than the stuff I’ve been doing. But on the other hand, it’ll be nice to spend part of the weekend hammering out another light-hearted Black Knight short story.

Mathematics and poker – the connection

Some players prefer to avoid thinking about the mathematics behind poker but learning some basic skills in this area could help improve your game.

Poker, like many card games, is a game of chance – but if you can calculate statistical odds, you are more likely to place bets that have a higher percentage of winning and at the same time avoid those hands that are likely to cost you money.

Among the mathematics you can learn to help your online poker game is how to calculate estimated value, which enables you to work out approximately how much each individual play will make – or lose.

Figuring out the pot odds is another way in which you may be able to avoid big losses, by calculating your chances of winning each round and also an estimate of how much money you can make if your odds play out the way you expect them to.

This has been a sponsored post

Knight Moves & Other WIPs updates

So Knight Moves will likely not be available for purchase in July of this year.

It’s not ready. That’s just the deal. I’ve completed a couple of drafts on the book, sent it off to some beta readers, and am awaiting feedback. I’ll then incorporate that feedback into another revision and send it off to my new editor, Lynn. Then (if the sample pages she did for me this weekend that led me to say “you’re hired” in about eight seconds are any indication) she will rip the thing to absolute shreds and I’ll spend a few weeks putting it back together. By this time July will be gone, and there won’t be a book yet. But when the book comes out it will be a few things. First, it will be the most expensive book I’ve published so far. Second, it will be the most polished, and hopefully typo-free. And I think it’s going to be pretty good.

I’m happy with the overall flow of the story. There’s a little more character development in this one than in the last two, and a few new characters added to the world. Some I kill, some leave town and some stick around, at least for a little while. There’s more Father Mike, because people missed him in Back in Black (so did I), and more Sabrina. There’s also a lot more bloodshed, and I think that I’ve successfully raised the stakes for the characters. They have more on the line than in the other books, and I think that makes for a stronger book.It’s about the same length as the others, maybe a hair shorter.

So it needs more polish, and that’s going to mean it won’t be out until the end of July at the latest, and August is more likely. Sorry if there was anyone really desperate for more of the Black Knight boys, but you can go to Amazon and pick up Movie Knight, the short story I published last weekend. That should hold you over. I’ll probably make another short story or two happen between now and the release of Knight Moves, so keep an eye out.

In the meantime, while I’m polishing Knight Moves, I’ve made some pretty good progress on Return to Eden. I’m pretty sure that will end up being the title for the series, so I’m not sure what this book will be called yet. For now, we’ll keep it as is and call it R2E. I hammered out a couple thousand words this weekend, then got stuck. I mean bad stuck, like a Hummer in a mudhole kinda stuck. So Suzy and I sat around for the better part of an hour brainstorming, and between the two of us we got the thing back on track. She helped a ton with the overall plot arc of the book, and that let me get back to outlining and writing. I’m about 25,000 words into the thing, and now I actually know where I’m going with it.

It’s going to need some serious love and attention when I finish the first draft, because I know the first 15K or so needs a total rewrite. The language just doesn’t work, it’s way too formal for the book, but I’m consciously not going back to work on that until I get to the end of the first draft. I can’t let myself go back and edit until I’m done with the first run – otherwise I’ll never write the damned book! But now that I know where I’m going it should come together pretty quickly, and I might have it ready to go as early as September. It’s a big departure from The Black Knight Chronicles, but I think most folks will like it. I’m really starting to dig these characters, for totally different reasons than the BK boys.

Then since I didn’t have anything better to do, and because I can’t resist a bright shiny, I started a completely different book. And by completely different, I mean a cop thriller. No magic, no supernatural creatures, just a serial killer and a cop that’s chasing him. I’ve got the first couple of chapters done, and I’ve got the outline done for that as well. That one’s been an interesting journey as well, because the character that I started Chapter 1 with, who I thought was going to be the main character for the whole book, turned out to be the sidekick. Because it can’t be his book, it has to be the cop’s book. I think it’s an interesting concept, and once it’s a little further along I’ll give you a couple of hints about it to see what you guys think. It should be finished up early fall as well, maybe October or so.

So in summary –

Knight Moves will not be available in July, but should be out in August.

Return to Eden (tentative title) will be out early fall, maybe as early as September.

Untitled Thriller will be out later in the fall, maybe as early as October.

I’ve got a bunch of Black Knight short stories in mind, and want to get at least one per month out for the rest of the year.

Black Knight Book 4 will be coming late this year or early 2012, depending on how quickly I finish up the other stuff. I already know a little about that book, as in what will be the Big Bad and what a couple of subplots are going to be. I also know the Big Bad for Books 5 & 6 in that series, so that’s a good outlook for next year.

Screw Cancer – you can help

This was originally going to be a sad piece about not having the right words at the right time. You see, a young woman I went to high school with died last night from leukemia. It sucks. She was a sweet person, and even though I hadn’t seen her in 20 years, she was good people growing up and her older sister (who I was much better friends with because we were in the same grade) is still good people. She left behind a loving family including three young kids, all under ten.

So I had a post written (twice) about how sad it all is that she’s gone and that her kids don’t have their mom anymore, and I scrapped it. Twice. Because of course I’m sad. A very nice person is gone way too soon and her family has to live with that loss. But that’s not the point. The point is I’m pissed off about it. If I were just a little more religious I’d be pissed off at God, but I’m not quite there. I’m pissed off that we as a society have not made this enough of a priority to fix it. We can put men on the moon, land a space shuttle (most of the time) and drop a bomb down a chimney easier than beating Legend of Zelda, but mothers are still dying of cancer before they see their 40th birthday.

It’s bullshit. And I’m going to try to do something about it. For the last several years I’ve ridden in the 24 Hours of Booty charity bike ride to raise money for cancer research and treatment. This is a great cause, one that’s touched me personally more times than I care to think about – from my friends that are survivors (Yay Roz & Lou & Lydia!) to my friends, relatives and acquaintances that are gone (Blair, Caroline, Breana, Joe, Ed, Debbie, Mr. C, Laura and more than I care to name). 24 Hours of Booty is a national and local-level organization – half the money raised goes to NC cancer treatment and research organizations, and half goes to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which regardless of whether or not you think he doped to win the Tour de France, is a great national organization dedicated to keeping more people alive.

So do me a favor – help me raise money for a cure. There are a lot of people I’ll be riding for this summer at the 24 Hours of Booty ride to fight cancer, and unfortunately now there’s another name to add to the list. But rather than whine about not having anything comforting to say, I’m going to let myself be pissed off, and we’ll test the load rating on my old road bike one more time. Screw cancer.

I’ll even throw in a few incentives for people who donate –

For a $25 donation I’ll email you a copy of any book you want in either Kindle, Nook or iPad format.

For a $50 donation I’ll mail you an autographed paperback copy (continental US only).

For a $100 donation I’ll name a character in an upcoming novel after you (or someone else of your choosing), and I’ll mail you an autographed book.

For a $500 donation I’ll send you autographed copies of all of my books, name a character after you or someone of your choosing, and buy you a nice dinner (scheduling might take a while unless you live in the Carolinas or the Atlanta area).

So go to my 24 Hours of Booty page and donate something. Cancer touches all of us, and I’m tired of it touching me. I’ve decided to smack it back. You can help.