I know, sounds like something a car lot does, right? Well, that’s kinda where we are at the Casa de Hartness nowadays. I’ve got a bunch of copies of The Chosen and Back in Black with the original covers hanging around my house. Since I have no copies of Hard Day’s Knight left with original covers, and Knight Moves debuted with the cover from Extended Imagery, I’d rather only have the books with the series covers at my signings and cons in the future.

So you get a deal!

From now until they’re gone, you can buy copies of Back in Black and The Chosen for only $5!

Plus $5 for USPS shipping per order (up to 3 books) anywhere in the US. $7 to Canada (sorry, it’s a long way from here).

Just click the PayPay button in the sidebar and you’ll be hooked up. I’ll even sign ‘em for you if you’d like.

ONE DAY ONLY! 50% Off Top 50 Books of the Season at BN.com!

Note – This is a sponsored post

So every once in a while, people will send me offers for nice things (or even better, cash) if I endorse their products. I don’t really know how they find me, and I don’t really care. I don’t accept all of these offers, probably two or three a year at most. But the most recent folks to reach out to me were the nice people at EasyCanvasPrints.com. They sent me an email asking if I’d review their product here, and in exchange they’d give me a nice sample.

I said sure, because I figured I could get one of my book covers turned into a nice promo piece, and then I’d give them some bloggy love, and that would be all cool. Well, I have to say, it turned out way better than I could have expected! I got an awesome 18″ x 27″ print of my Hard Day’s Knight cover that I couldn’t be happier with.

But that’s the end result, which is only half the process. Their website is super-easy to navigate, even if you don’t really know anything about printing on canvas (like me). It only took me one pass through to get my image uploaded, scaled and set up for printing. And anything that I can manage in one try must be super-simple. Even though I got my print for free, I thought their pricing was very reasonable. For an 18×27 print I think my cost was less than $100 delivered.

Their shipping was fast, and the packaging was very good. My print arrived in just a few days, with plenty of protective packing to make sure that everything arrived intact and undamaged by the vagaries of shipping companies.

So fast shipping, good packaging, reasonable pricing and awesome product – all adds up to a company I’d definitely use again! I love my print, and if I needed another promo piece or just an awesome piece of wall art I wouldn’t hesitate to use easycanvasprints.com.

Like I said, this was a sponsored post, they did give me a cool thing in exchange for my review, but I was absolutely thrilled with the product and the service, so it’s an honest review, I promise. And if you’re at any of my signings/readings in the next few months, you can check out the print for yourself!

Another guest post by another talented indie writer. Please welcome Erik Lynd!

Thanks for having me over at your blog John.

Let me start with a quick description of my novel, Asylum.

“I am going to tell you the story of how and why I killed my brother. You can think what you want about me afterward, but I want to tell you the whole thing. Even the things I didn’t tell the police, the things I didn’t tell my own family. I am going to tell you what really happened, the truth. But then maybe it is a fiction . . . perhaps a truth existing merely in my head. Truth or fiction, I don’t know, but I do know it’s a horror story, and I will only tell it this once.”

Andrew Harland has been a loner since being diagnosed with schizophrenia. He is shuffled around from juvenile detention centers to outpatient clinics with expensive doctors. Nothing seems to help. His parents, desperate to have him out of the house, decide to send him off to a revolutionary new psychiatric hospital in the Pacific Northwest.

Andrew is different, and he knows it. He always has. So he doesn’t hesitate when the voices in his head tell him to climb out on a window ledge . . .

Haunted by his own son’s suicide, Dr. David Styles rescues Andrew from the ledge and takes a personal interest in his case. After getting to know him, Dr. Styles becomes suspicious of the boy’s diagnosis. What he uncovers sends him on a desperate journey to rescue Andrew.

Because something is terribly wrong at the hospital.

Treatments are conducted at odd hours. Patients disappear into the bowels of the massive, aged building, sometimes never to be seen again, and Andrew is plagued by visions stranger than any he’s ever known.

About writing this novel…

This novel had a strange beginning for me.  I am not a big outliner, but I tend to have some sort of basic path mapped out.  Maybe it is a series of bullet points, maybe a more detailed outline of specific scenes.  When I sat down to write Asylum, however, I only knew two things; it started with a boy on a ledge and ended in a mental hospital.

I set up both the main characters, Andrew Harland and David Styles, at the beginning and then just followed what they did.  It’s a great way to write a novel.  In some ways it is like reading the book for the first time while writing it, even as the author I wasn’t sure what would happen next.  My wife thought it was creepy when I would come from the office after a day of writing and “Wow, I didn’t see that coming.”  She would look at me and ask how I could not know what was going to happen.  The closer I came to the end the more exciting it became.  By this time I knew the ending, but getting there was still a surprise.

There is a downside to writing this way.  Frequently the characters would get off path and I would need to give them a nudge in the right direction.  For me this type of writing also means I have to do a lot more editing after I finish the first draft to tighten it up.

I also have a lot more important characters popping up throughout the book who wanted their own stories and had their own motives.  This is great, but I spent a lot of time keeping the book focused on the core story.

I can only hope readers have as much fun with this novel as I had writing it.

Erik Lynd is the author of horror and dark fantasy novels including ASYLUM and THE COLLECTION.  He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two kids.  More information about him and his work can be found at www.eriklynd.com.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Asylum-ebook/dp/B004478FJS/
Barnes and noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/asylum-erik-lynd/1103017088?ean=2940011908651&itm=3&usri=erik%2blynd
Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/26553
Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Asylum/book-c8F_gvUdnESkTWxxAf8vjw/page1.html
sony: http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/erik-lynd/asylum/_/R-400000000000000359810

My buddy Stuart has a new book to promo, so I figured I’d lend him my little corner of the interwebs to promo his stuff.

Hi all!  To start, a quick Thanks to John for letting me guest post today.  If you haven’t treated yourself to a slice of John’s writing, you should do so now!

Okay, to the post:

Since my post-apocalyptic fantasy novel, The Way of the Black Beast, has just been released, I thought I’d share how this one came about.  It’s by far my most interesting (and longest) experience in writing a novel.

In order for you to get the full scope of how I created this, here’s the book blurb to give you an idea of what the final product is like:

Malja wants answers.  She wants to know why the two most powerful magicians in all of Corlin ripped her from her mother’s arms, raised her only to fight, and then tossed her away to die at age ten.  She wants to know why they are trying to recreate the spells which caused the Devastation that wiped out most of the world’s population, leaving behind skeletal cities and abandoned technology.  And she wants to kill them.

With Tommy, an orphan bearing the tattoos of a sorcerer, she crosses this shattered land.  Despite the challenges they face — crazed magicians, guitar-playing assassins, mutated beasts — Malja pursues her vengeance with a single-mindedness that may destroy all she holds dear, forcing her to make a terrible choice between the family she lost and the one she has built.

Okay — to start we have to go back to 2004/2005 — I was attending the first Ravencon (my favorite con, BTW) and met Tee Morris.  Tee was raving about this new fangled thing called podcasting and he got me really excited about its potential.  I went home trying to think up of ways to use it.  I ended up creating The Eclectic Review which I co-host with my wife to this day.  But one of the early ideas was to do a monthly “radio play”-type thing.  I wrote out 8 episodes and planned out 12.  The story was called The Way of the Sword and Gun.  It was a science fiction tale that followed Dana, an ex-security agent struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world and seeking vengeance on those who wronged her.  With her is Owl, a master of the Way of the Sword and Gun, and Tommy, an abused orphan who never speaks.  The idea was to blend Western and Samurai tales (which share a lot in common) with an apocalypse.

Though I tried a few times, the podcast never got created.  Over the years, I kept coming back to those scripts, though.  I tried writing a few short stories from the material there but the ideas in it were too big.

Fast forward to 2009.  ConCarolinas.  After a long day of panels, networking, and drinking with friends, I sat in my bed too wired to sleep.  The spark of an idea hit — what if I wrote about a post-apocalyptic world in which magic had caused the apocalypse?  From that grew the character of Malja and the country of Corlin.  And, of course, I now had a place to plunk down and tweak all that work I had done years before.

Malja replaced Dana and did so with an entirely new character.  Nothing of Dana remains except her desire to protect Tommy.  Tommy was the only core character that made it into the book but he went from an abused kid who never spoke to an abused kid who never spoke but also could create magic.  And Owl?  Poor Owl and his special fighting style didn’t make the cut.  Malja had too much else to deal with and Owl was too undefined in this new world of magic.

Side note: This odd mixture of magic with Western with Samurai led me to analyze Japanese story-telling and archetypes which I eventually overlaid onto a classic monomythic structure.  And if you followed that, you’ll have an extra level of fun while reading the book.

Now that The Way of the Black Beast is out, I’ve started to work on the sequel where I get to mine my old scripts some more.  The sequel’s title: The Way of the Sword and Gun.  Owl now gets his due with a story that comes crashing into Malja’s story at lightning speed.

Moral of the post: Never throw away the material that doesn’t work for you at first.  You never know when it’ll come in handy.

If you’re coming over from Magical Words, then welcome! Take a few minutes, poke around in the archives, check out some of my lighting design photos, book links, that kind of stuff. Thanks for stopping by. If you’re not here from Magical Words, then go over there and read my guest post today.

Today we welcome T.L. Haddix, promoting her new book, Shadows from the Grave. You can pick it up at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Welcome, readers, to Leroy, Indiana – the quintessential small Midwest town with a twist.  Step inside and see just how dangerous small-town living can be.  Shadows from the Grave is the third installment in the Leroy’s Sins Series, stand-alone Romantic Suspense novels that center around the fictional Ohio-River town of Leroy, Indiana.  All the books are available in both e-book and printed format. Here’s a little hint of what’s inside:

When it comes to murder, the past is never really dead…

For ten years, Chase Hudson has carried the weight of his college girlfriend’s unsolved murder on his shoulders.  When a ghost from the past comes calling, Chase’s friends and family become the targets of a serial killer who’ll stop at nothing to make Chase suffer. Can Chase convince the authorities of his innocence in time to catch the real killer?

Annie Jameson-Tucker has been burned more than once.  Afraid to get her heart broken again, she is careful to keep her lovers at a distance… until Chase Hudson manages to slip inside her walls.  Will she let him stay, or will her insecurities destroy their chance at happiness?

This book came about as rather a surprise to me, the author.  There are times when characters will stand up and demand attention as I’m writing, and the conception of this book was much like that.  I had planned an entirely different book as the third for this series, but by the end of the second book, Under the Moon’s Shadow, it was very apparent Chase’s story had to be told first.

In each book, there is usually a character who stands out, who is my favorite.  As much as I like Chase and Annie, I have to say that I think a secondary character is my favorite from this book.  His name is Murphy, and he’s Chase’s cat.  He’s a very needy little guy, and has serious separation anxiety issues.  Murphy came about a couple of ways – Chase needed someone, and I didn’t want that someone to be a romantic interest off the top of the book.  I wanted to add someone who could contribute an endearing, quirky attitude to the story without being overtly ‘cute’.  As my books aren’t sweet, happy romances, and as I’m not a naturally funny comedian, quirky seemed to fit better.  Murphy is definitely that.  He gets into trouble that most two-year-old children can’t accomplish, and he drives Chase crazy in the process.

The character of Murphy himself is based on a real-life Murphy, who is an eight-pound fawn ‘kitten’ owned by our former veterinarian.  He’s a very alpha cat, despite his size, and is definitely in charge of the household.  When Dr. G shared some of her Murphy’s exploits with us, I knew that I had to include him in a book.  He’s not the kind of cat one would want for a first-time cat owner, and that’s exactly why I ‘gave’ him to Chase.  The real Murphy steals food from countertops and plays “Chase me!”, steals keys, glasses, licks mold off of plants to get high, and generally keeps his mom on her toes.  How could I resist that sort of personality?

Even though ‘my’ Murphy doesn’t catch any bad guys or solve any mysteries, he’s still an integral part of the story.  He humanizes Chase, provides comedic relief during heavier scenes, and hopefully his antics will ring true with cat owners, helping them connect to the story.  One thing I’ve tried to make sure I do with my books, my hallmark, if you will, is that ninety-nine percent of readers who pick them up and read them can relate to someone or something in the books.  For me as a reader, that is a quality that I look for. If I can’t connect to the story, I can’t become invested in it, and my enjoyment of the reading diminishes.  I want to provide that connection to my readers, and I think characters like Murphy help me do it.

T. L. Haddix is the author of the Leroy’s Sins Series, stand-alone Romantic Suspense novels which are available in both print and e-book form at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other fine online retailers.  She lives in northeastern Ohio with her husband and three cat-children, and is hard at work on the next installment of the Leroy’s Sins series.  You can contact her at www.tlhaddix.com, through www.facebook.com/tlhaddix or at www.twitter.com/tlhaddix.

Brent is more than welcome to come squat in my cyber-space, especially after the great review he gave to Hard Day’s Knight! Check out his new book, Bert the Barbarian, over on Smashwords! You can find out more about Brent and Bert on his website here.

I’m thoroughly happy to be kicking off my blog tour in the company of John Hartness.  John writes his books just the way I like ‘em.  I checked out Hard Day’s Knight and I think I was laughing out loud before I reached the end of the first page.  He doesn’t let a good joke get in the way of a good story, though.  Mystery, suspense, action, it’s all in there.  And the prose is solid as well.  John’s hitting the marks that I’m aiming for.

But enough about him.  I’m here to talk about myself, or more accurately about my creation.  I’ve been a novelist for a couple of decades now, but not a successful one.  It takes a long time to learn this goofy trade.  I wrote, I re-wrote, I sent submissions off to editors and agents, and I racked up an impressive stack of rejection letters.  And I got discouraged.

After a while I wasn’t writing very often.  I wasn’t satisfied with the results when I did write.  Writing was a disheartening chore, and the meagre results hardly seemed worthy of lining the floor of a bird cage.

Then I heard about NaNoWriMo.  How many of you have heard of it?  Let’s have a show of hands.  Okay, more than I expected, but not nearly everyone.  NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month.” Speaking as a Canadian I can assure you that it’s international.  The idea is to spend the month of November writing a novel of at least 50,000 words.  NaNoWriMo is a beautiful concept because it gets writers out of all kinds of mental traps.  If you’re going to finish a novel in a month you can’t agonize over every paragraph.  You can’t spend a year trying to get the first chapter perfect.  You have to move on.

It was exactly the kick on the seat of the pants that I needed.  After years of dithering I finally got back to work, and an unexpected bonus was that writing became fun again.  It actually took me about three months to get through my first draft of Bert the Barbarian, but that was still a massive increase in productivity.

At the end of it, of course, I had a deeply flawed manuscript.  However, you can’t fix a blank page.  For me at least, the only way to write a good novel is to write a bad novel and then refurbish it.  It’s been a couple of years and an astonishing amount of learning since I finished that first draft.  I’m pretty proud of the end result.

Bert the Barbarian is science fiction that reads like heroic fantasy.  Bert Hoover, who’s a bit of a loser, gets kidnapped and taken to a primitive planet.  His friend Janice is in terrible danger with no one else to turn to. Bert must find strength and courage to escape from slavery, rescue Janice, and find a way back home.  Look for it wherever fine e-books are sold.

Thanks for stopping by Brent, and good luck with Bert!

Today we welcome Christine Amsden, author of The Immortality Virus. Christine is the first indie author to take me up on my offer of guest posts here, and I’ve got one scheduled weekly for the next two weeks as well. She’ll tell us a little about her book and where the idea came from. You can check it out on Amazon here, and on Barnes & Noble here.

Dreams of Immortality

Inspiration never strikes me all at once. It grows from seeds, and it takes time to blossom. When it came to “The Immortality Virus,” it all began with Wikipedia, and the “random article” button. My debut novel, “Touch of Fate,” had just been released and all I had were vague notions of doing something more science fiction than fantasy for my second book.

I like to tell beginning writers that ideas are cheap, and they’re everywhere — in the news, in the fight you had with your best friend, in your dreams, and even in Wikipedia. An article on DNA led me to look into a genetic cause for old age, which led me to consider a world in which that did not happen. How? With The Change, an event that, in my world, takes place in the mid 21st century, though no one is sure precisely when. Most people barely noticed the odd strain of flue that hit so many people that year, nor did they connect their fevers and runny noses to the life-changing event that followed.

What would cause an entire race to stop aging? If immortality were for sale, it would go to the highest bidder, and not everyone would have access. For a fundamental change to the human genetic makeup, we needed something else: Biological warfare. An engineered virus, highly contagious and capable of altering DNA on a cellular level. I drew this idea from a novel by Orson Scott Card: Xenocide.

Who would do such a thing, though? And how? This was probably the toughest part of the entire process, and one that took several revisions to perfect. My heroine and sole point of view character, Grace Harper, was a far easier character to create than the elusive Jordan Lacklin, who we get to know mostly through old journal entries. First, he had to be smart, capable, and armed with a lifetime of experience, so I gave him a background in developing biological weapons for the military. Then, I had to turn him into someone who honestly believed the entire race would be better off if they didn’t age. Deep inside, I wanted him to be a good person, with good intentions, even if they didn’t work out very well. So I gave him a wife, a woman he loved deeply, a woman who was there in body, but who, thanks to Alzheimer’s Disease, had pretty much gone in every other way that mattered. He did it for her, and for everyone else who might have to experience similar pain. Growing old, he believed, was the worst thing that could happen to people.

After that, I spent a lot of time working on his journal entries. The ones in the book are sort of the highlights, the ones I hoped would convey his motives and character most concisely. He’s a complicated man, however, and by the time I finished with him he had become, at least in my mind, more than a tool to implement The Change. He and The Change have kind of blurred together a little bit in my mind, so that despite the results, I think of the actual event as a work of honest human compassion, and a sign of the best humanity has to offer. I suppose the message there is that we sometimes don’t know what’s best for us.

I began working on “The Immortality Virus” in the summer of 2006, and finished it in the fall of 2008. It wasn’t a smooth process, as I set the manuscript down several times while I worked on other things, and at some points I wasn’t sure it would ever be truly finished. Perhaps it still isn’t. I did leave the end open for a sequel, even if I haven’t written it yet, and I hope to one day revisit the world and the possibilities therein.

Thanks for stopping by, Christine, and I hope you have great success with your book!

Another year here on the interwebs. I worked out this morning, and now I know why they call it “work.” That crap’s hard. But I’ve let myself become a great big fatass again, so I’ve gotta do it. I can hear Suzy pounding away on the treadmill downstairs as I write this, so we’re definitely getting something going. Of course, it’s January 1, so that’s easy enough to say today. Check back in April, and if I’m still wearing this size jeans, you can feel free to kick my ass. And I’ll still be an out of shape tub o’ lard, so it’ll be easy, too!

Played a little online poker last night, over at Full Tilt. I do a little bit of Rush Poker most every day, micro stakes PLO usually. I’ve found that it’s easier to get people to put their entire stack in while behind in PLO, because most folks just aren’t very good at it. I’m not very good at it either, but I have a little tiny edge in that I’m so broke online right now I cant afford to shove unless I have the nuts, even at micro limits. So I’m making a little bit. I usually open up two tables, and if I win or lose one buy-in, I rathole it and go away. That keeps me from playing too long, so my minute attention span can keep up, and it also doesn’t get in the way of other things I need to do, like writing and working out. And obsessively checking my sales numbers at Amazon. But it’s fun, and is a good way for me to pass a few idle minutes. I’ll have to step up my attention span when the Gambling Tales Freeroll Series kicks off (hopefully this Thursday, download the latest episode for more info!), because if folks are going to just give away money, it would be rude of me not to try and take it, right?

Just a quick note for now, because I need to finish getting ready to head south for my annual New Year’s Poker excursion this afternoon. More about that upon my return. In the meantime, I know you’re off work, go buy a book!