by john | Oct 5, 2011 | Writing
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.
by john | Oct 4, 2011 | Writing
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.
by john | Oct 3, 2011 | Book Spotlight, Writing
Your Perception of Poker and Life Should Be the Same
Barry Greenstein said that the way you handle everyday life situations is a determinant of how effective of a poker player you are. For instance, what do you do when someone cuts you off? Some of you may fly into an angry rage and yell obscenities to the top of your lungs. For many of these people, the anger will lead to them driving more aggressively. Some might speed up to catch the driver and cut him off, and some will find themselves in a nasty car accident due to their aggression. Others will be put off by the driver’s sheer stupidity for the moment, but will maneuver out of the situation and drive to the destination without giving it a second thought. The saying to football quarterbacks when no receivers are open is to throw it away and live another down. The guys who can overcome adversity the most will be the most successful in poker.
In paraphrasing Barry Greenstein, I think the people who are best able to let things roll off their shoulders are the best poker players and enjoy the most satisfaction with life. The people who react negatively to someone cutting them off, or their spouse eating the last Ho-Ho are the average poker players who play badly after a bad beat. These guys are dead money in many instances. The ones who choose maneuver out of the situation are the ones who are the most resilient after taking a bad beat and will not become dead money.
In my eyes, poker and life are the same and exist as one. That’s my subjective opinion, but poker does hold parallels to life within itself. For instance, I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that you gotta know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. The parallel to life, and in your game selection is that you gotta know when to stick with a good situation and when to bail out of a bad one, just as you must know when a game is a good one, and when you’re at a disadvantage and need to leave the table.
Some may call it common sense, I think it has more to do with perception. Your perception of a bad beat can be that you’re the unluckiest guy in the world, or that you’re getting action on a move that nets you a winning pot 90% of the time and that the game is good, the player is bad and that dead money still exists in a world of poker books and hard economic times. That may not turn around your current poker session, but its food for thought that you can take into your next session and your next decision when playing a hand. No need to remember that you got your aces full set cracked with a royal flush when you realize that your opponent was chasing 1 out holding AK suited. You need to remember that you’re getting your money in good and that you’re going to win more times than not. In life, if you fail at something look at it as “at least I know what doesn’t work.”
Glenn Gamble is the author of A Thousand Chances, Bon Appetit, Escape, On the Run, and James. All of his books are available on Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook and Smashwords
He also encourages you to go to his website
by john | Oct 2, 2011 | Uncategorized
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
by john | Sep 30, 2011 | Uncategorized
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.
