Video – The last six weeks
There’s been enough going on in the last six weeks to fill up a video. It’s been, in a word, crazy.
Inventory Reduction Sale!
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.
Product Review – EasyCanvasPrints.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!
Guest Post – Erik Lynd
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
Guest Post – Stuart Jaffe
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.
Welcome
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.
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