I’ve come up with a title and the talented Rob Hinckley and I are finishing up a cover, so hopefully Genesis:Return to Eden Volume 1 will be ready to go on November 1. Here’s a little sneak peek at the cover that I posted to the Twitter this morning –

Yes I said “the Twitter.” I can do that.
No, that’s nowhere near the whole cover, it’s just a corner of the image, enough to give you a sense of the setting.

Yes, I’ll be posting some sample chapters and other fun stuff here in the near future.

Yes, this will be the last self-pubbed book I put out this year, because I got my contract from Bell Bridge and it’s all signed and everything, and the schedule we’re going to be on to release Black Knight Books is aggressive, and I will have little time to work on anything outside of that and maybe a few short stories for the next year at least. But the good news is that there will definitely be at least one new Black Knight book out in 2012, and quite possibly other goodies as well.

Bubba the Monster Hunter will be making a Halloween appearance (assuming I can find enough downtime to get the story written between now and then) and he’ll be battling the scariest monster I can come up with – or more to the point, the scariest monster YOU can come up with! That’s right – you get to pick the next monster Bubba hunts. Just leave a comment here and let me know what’s the scariest thing you can think of, and if I pick your creature, I’ll dedicate the story to you. You’ll be forever immortalized on the internets and in e-books. Second place gets their name used as a victim of the first-place monster.

Dick Cheney has already been suggested, so that one’s taken. By entering this contest you waive any and all rights to me having to pay you anything for this – it’s just for funsies and you agree you can’t sue my ass later. So let me know what scares the crap outta you, and I’ll have Bubba kill it. Because that’s what he does.

Let’s start at the very beginning. That’s a very good place to start, don’t you think, Julie?

Never mind.

Amazon unveiled four new Kindle devices last week, for all types of users and at multiple price points. Let’s look briefly at the devices and what they seem to mean in the e-reader world.

The Basic Kindle – $79 (with special offers, $109 without) – This is as close as what I own as the new models get. I have the Kindle with Special Offers that I paid $114 for a few months ago. I love this device. It’s small, fits happily in the back pocket of my jeans. The e-ink display is amazing! It looks like a real books. And I love the way the device turns pages with either hand, so no matter whether you’re right-handed or lefty, you can always operate the device one-handed. I kinda hate that the keyboard is going away, but honestly I never use mine, so I guess that’s what they’re finding in a lot of people, so they’ve killed the keyboard.

The special offers don’t annoy me at all. They only show up when I turn the device off, so that’s oddly enough when I’m not looking at it. So I don’t care what’s on the screen when it’s sitting in my bag, or on my bedside table, or wherever. And for $79, this is clearly meant to be an entry-level device, and I think most people will opt to not play the $30 extra charge just to not have screen savers.

I don’t think we can ever discount the price point of this device. For a long time $99 has been touted as the tipping point for e-readers. That’s been the theoretical price at which the sales growth of these device skyrockets. Amazon not only hit that price point with this device, but blew through it. For a ton of people, anything less than $100 is an impulse buy, and getting all the way down to $79 is going to be huge.

And having now two choices in the sub-$100 market is even bigger.

The next two models of Kindle are really just variations on the same device – the Kindle Touch. Amazon’s first entry into the touchscreen device market promises to be lighter, smaller and generally cooler than its predecessors, although I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment. There are plusses and minuses to the touchscreen device, in my opinion, but I think the price and the cool factor will pretty quickly jump the Kindle Touch to the front of the e-ink device line.

Honestly, I’m not going to buy one of these. I have an iPad, so if I want to read on a touchscreen, I’m good. I have a Kindle, so I’m covered for e-ink display (which really is tons better for long reading sessions). But the thing that I dislike about the Kindle Touch is that you have to use two hands to turn the page. It’s a little thing, I know, but I’m spoiled by my Kindle. I can sit in a restaurant, eat a burger or a pizza with one hand, and have one hand free to read. And I can turn pages without putting my device down. I know, it’s a little thing, but that’s what makes decision-making happen in the world of competing electronic toys.

There are four versions of the Kindle Touch – with and without special offers, and with and without 3G. For my money, if I were to buy these items, I’d go the cheap-o route, because I rarely am in a situation where I have to have a new book right damn now, unless I’m at home, and I have wi-fi. I think most of the time you could go to a friggin’ McDonald’s in a pinch. But that’s me. If I lived in rural SC where my parents still live, I’d be all about some 3g.

Then there’s the mac-daddy – the new Kindle Fire. But I’m out of time, so we’ll talk about the spankiest of new toys tomorrow or the next day. In the meantime, go buy a book. Keep me fed.

Well, yeah, I kinda am, I guess.

Enough equivocation in that sentence for ya? Suzy, who knows full well exactly how crazy I am, asked me roughly that question when I told her I’d come up with a new character for a new series of stories. I replied that Bubba the Monster Hunter is not necessarily going to be a novel-length character, but he’s somebody fun to play around with while I’m between longer works. The first story, Voodoo Children, is out now, and available wherever e-books are sold (it’s free on Smashwords, BTW, and hopefully will be free on Amazon before too long, but I have only limited control over that). But Bubba is just a fun side project, and as the Black Knight books have been taking a little bit of a darker turn, Bubba gives me the opportunity to let my sense of humor have free reign. And since I’m not AT ALL gearing the Bubba stories towards younger readers, they’re free to have more profanity and adult situations than some of my other work.

In a sense, Bubba stories are just fun stories about a giant redneck behaving poorly and killing monsters in the process. And being a somewhat larger-than-life redneck in reality, I enjoy behaving badly, so it’s a big chunk of my id running around loose yelling WOOO-HOOOOO and “Hey Y’all, watch this!” I’m always going to have about eighty-seven different projects in the fire at one time, that’s just the kinda guy I am. Look at this weekend – I want to finish edits on The Chosen in preparation for a relaunch of that book with a new cover, new edits and maybe (just maybe) some bonus material. Then I want to write and do the cover for a second Bubba story (Bubba goes to the Circus), and I’ve got a buddy doing a book signing that I want to go to, the Panthers are playing (hoping for the first win!), I have to drive to Atlanta for the day job, and now that at least one beta reader has told me that Return to Eden isn’t a total piece of crap, I need to start working on a cover and edits for that books. So I’ve got a lot going on, not the least of which needs to be taking a HUGE box of DVDs to the used DVD joint to try and unload them and cover my bar tab in Atlanta this coming week.

Oh wait, I’m on a diet. So much for a bar tab. Guess I’ll just sell off the DVDs to get them out of the house.

On a completely different note – as writers, or any type of creative person really, do we ever get over that terrified feeling of being the awkward kid asking the pretty girl to dance? When I finished Return to Eden I was convinced that it was crap, the worst book ever written, and that no one would ever want to buy it. In my saner moments I knew this was not likely to be true, since I felt the same way about every book I’ve ever written, and they all turned out to be okay in the end. But when I sent that poor little book out to my betas, I didn’t feel like a proud papa watching his kid go off to school for the first time. I felt more like the pizza-faced skinny kid with glasses who sent a rose to the cute girl in middle school then found out that she didn’t like him and he had to get the rose back and send it to someone else “as a friend” despite the entire seventh grade knowing about the whole thing and making him feel small like only middle school kids can do.

Yeah, that happened. What can I say? I wasn’t always the pantheon of cool that I am today.

But anyway, sending a new book out still feels like being that middle-school kid again. All awkward and nervous, just waiting for someone to slap you down, despite the experiential evidence to the contrary. What about you writer types? Do you still get butterflies when you send out a book to the first readers?

I have a problem, I know. But here’s a new character that I think is going to be a lot of fun to play around with. He’s going to be short stories only for now, but expect at least one a month for the near future. Ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of you, please allow me to introduce Bubba the Monster Hunter.

Voodoo Children – a Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story

Skeeter gave me the skinny as I cruised through the sorry excuse for a town. You like that? It’s funny, ‘cause he’s skinny, and I said…never mind. I guess you had to be there. Well anyways, apparently there had been a bunch of robberies on the eastern side of Columbia, where what passed for hillbilly high society lived. One of the robbers had been caught in the act, which was usually a good thing, because robbers tended to talk when arrested. Problem was, this robber had a long criminal record. A criminal record that ended in 1987, when he died in a drunk driving accident. So the local constabulary (I don’t know why the hell Skeeter can’t just call them the po-po like everybody else) had consulted with the nearest Catholic Church, which happened to be in Nashville. Nashville didn’t have very many exorcists on staff right now, thanks to a bad case of non-belief in these here United States, so they kicked it up the food chain until they finally got to Skeeter’s uncle Joe.

Now most of Skeeter’s family didn’t talk to Uncle Joe, because of the whole turning Catholic thing, but most of them didn’t talk to Skeeter neither, because of the whole liking boys thing. So Skeeter and Uncle Joe got to be buds, because they was the only people who talk to either of them at the family reunions, except for Aunt Linda, who had cerebral palsy and didn’t know enough to do anything but love everybody. So whenever something came across Uncle Joe’s desk that seemed to need my particular talents, he sent his favorite nephew a little email, and we went out and killed a bunch of something. We weren’t officially on the church’s payroll, but since we weren’t all that holy, we got to keep any loot the bad guys we smoked were hiding. And supernatural bad guys usually kept some pretty good loot around, so we made ends meet. And when we didn’t, Skeeter whored me out as security for rock concerts.

I pulled into the cemetery at around ten o’clock, which I figured would be good zombie-raising time. It was dark, and the zombies would have plenty of time to shamble off to wherever they were being sent, steal stuff and bring it back before the sun came up. I didn’t know if voodoo zombie could run around in daylight or not, but I preferred to do my killing in the dark. Just always seemed fitting that way.

I knew I’d come to the right place because the gate was wide open. Most cemeteries are pretty good about locking the gate at dark. Not usually for keeping things in, but mostly for keeping kids out. I never saw the appeal to making out in a graveyard myself, but I’ve been killing things that go bump in the night for a long time, so I reckon the place has kinda lost its luster for me.

The three dead guys walking down the path to the gate were the other indication I’d found the right place. I pulled the truck into the graveyard and pulled the gate shut behind me. I took a piece of chain out of my toolbox and fastened the gates shut. I didn’t have a lock, so I ran a piece of baling wire through the links to hold the chain together. I kinda figured zombies wouldn’t have the manual dexterity to unwind a piece of wire. If they did, my troubles were just starting.

By the time I secured the gate, the three zombies walking my way had turned into eight zombies, with two of them standing right in front of my truck. I walked up to one of them and gave him a push in the chest. He fell over backwards, then lumbered to his feet and tried to take a bite out of my face. I swung my machete through his neck and then pushed his body back down. Headless, he stayed there like he was supposed to this time.

I pushed the button in my ear. “Good call, Skeeter. They’re pretty damn slow.”

“That’s good, but don’t underestimate them. There may be quite a lot of them, and they don’t feel pain. You can’t just sever the spinal cord, like with vampires; you have to destroy the brain. Otherwise they can grown back together and attack again.”

“Ow! Now you tell me!” I said as the head I’d just chopped off took a big bite out of one calf. I tossed the machete aside and pulled my battle-axe from my belt. At five feet of sharp steel and bad attitude, that axe promised pain to anything in its path. Too bad for me nothing I was fighting could feel pain. I stomped on the detached head with my other boot, putting one hand on the hood of my truck for balance and finally kicking the head free. It rolled across the graveyard, coming to rest against a headstone.

“I’ll deal with you later, asshole.” I muttered.

“What was that, boss?”

“Not you, Skeeter. Now lemme go do some killin’. I’ll call you back.” I pressed the button in my ear and looked around again. All seven remaining zombies were gathered around my truck, bumping into it as they tried to walk forward.

“Alright, assholes!” I yelled, waving the axe in the air to try and get their attention. “Get the hell off my truck! I just had her detailed!” One zombie turned to follow me as I walked out from behind the truck, and I caved in its skull. Pain sensors or not, twelve pounds of axe in your head will ruin your day. I pulled it free and spun around, crushing two more zombies with one big swing. Problem was, that big swing ended in a big tree, and my big axe got stuck big time. I tried for a minute to pull it out, but when a pair of dead hands grabbed my ponytail, I returned my attention to the problem at hand.

I solved the problem in my hair with Bertha, my polished chrome Mark XIX .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol. I pressed Bertha under the thing’s chin and squeezed the trigger, removing most of the top of the zombie’s skull. I used my left hand to knock the thing’s hands off my hair, then dispatched the other four zombies in fairly quick succession with Bertha. When I’d splattered the last one’s brains all over the ground, I gave Bertha a little kiss on the rear sight, replaced her half-spent magazine with a full one, and put her away in her holster. Then I walked over to the grave marker with the last zombie head lying against it, reared back my size fourteen steel-toe boot, and kicked the head to jelly.

If you like that, then you can go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and buy the whole thing. It should be available by tomorrow (Saturday). Or you can hit the drop-down menu below and I’ll email it to you for a buck!

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Voodoo Children $1.00

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So I may have mentioned here that a couple of weeks ago I decided to completely blow up Return to Eden and start over (or at least mostly start over). That wasn’t a lot of fun, but I’m pretty sure it was necessary. I had more characters running around in there than an X-Men reboot, and trying to drive nine or ten characters in a 65,000 word book just wasn’t working for me. So I killed off a bunch of characters (or more to the point made them never exist in the first place), cut the first couple thousand words to start the book with more tension right off the bat, and started rewriting.

I’m almost 20,000 words in now, and think I’m making good progress. I’ve got the apocalypse started, and my protagonists are hiding out from the world while it goes to hell. We’re about to have the first major confrontation with the remnants of polite society, as it were, and then things are really going to take off, magic-wise. I still hope to have the first draft ready to go by early October, but it might take a little longer. I hope not, because from a business standpoint I need another book on the market by Christmas, and it obviously now will not be a Black Knight Chronicles book. So it’s either going to be this guy, or the serial killer thriller, and I’m not really sure which one would work better.

What do you guys think would be a better draw for the holiday book market? A thriller about a serial killer who copycats a fictional serial killer who in turn copycats real serial killers and the female FBI agent who chases him? Or the first book in a trilogy about magic-wielding teens surviving the collapse of modern civilization?

I’ll admit to a little post-Con slump the past week or so, though. Sales took a little dip after Dragon, probably because the higher prices hit for Hard Day’s Knight and Knight Moves. And I hit a little writer’s slump, too. I don’t believe in writer’s block, but there are definitely days when it comes easier than others. The past week has been living firmly in the “others” camp. Every word is like pulling teeth, and it’s a chore just to sit down at the computer. But once I can get rolling (and get the cat off the keyboard, which he has suddenly decided is his favorite perch) things move along quite nicely. It’s just focusing for that hour or so each night that’s tough right now.

I know, I know – quit whining! I landed a book contract, I’m making a great supplemental income writing make-believe, and I’m even approaching the point where I’m thinking about doing this full-time. So shut up and write, already! I know. But it’s just like any other job – sometimes there are things you’d rather do. And this is perfect hammock weather, is all I’m saying.

So tonight I’ll go home, eat with Suzy, watch an episode of Angel (we never watched the whole show when it was on, but we’re up to season three on Netflix), and then go try to drag a thousand or so unruly words out of my head. But you kids let me know what I should put out for Christmas – the magical kids novel or the serial killer thriller.