by john | Jul 29, 2011 | Appearances, Writing
I know, all you’ve gotten out of me for a couple weeks now is a bunch of guest posts and my whining on Facebook about rehearsals and edits. So strap in, kids, there’s an honest-to-God blog post, written by me, coming. This may even be it.
Last weekend I was fortunate enough to weasel my way onto a couple of panels at Fandom Fest 2011 in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the first year Fandom Fest has had a literary track, and I met up with Stephen Zimmer at ConCarolinas back in June. He told me about the show, and I pestered him until he put me on a couple of panels. While I was there I met some great folks and wormed my way in as an impromptu moderator for a couple of panels that didn’t have one assigned, which was good practice for RoundCon 2011.1, coming up in October, which I’m heading up the literary track for.
Yes I know the grammar in that sentence was awful. But if you hold your head just right, it sounds better.
So, Fandom Fest. This is a fantasy/sci-fi con attached to a horror film fest, which made for some disturbing cosplay, but AWESOME t-shirt vendors. I picked up a couple of t-shirts from old movie posters, including the Texas Chainsaw Massacre shirt (in French) and the Fast Pussycat, Kill Kill shirt. I also got one that says “Quint’s Shark Fishing Tours, Amity’s Favorite since 1976,” which I kinda love. So I spent too much money on t-shirts. But I managed to avoid buying any books. Mostly because I just don’t read in print anymore. Everything I read nowadays is on my kindle or iPad, so I only buy print books when I really want the author’s autograph. And I’m not much of an autograph hound, so I don’t buy many print books.
Anyway, moving on. There were a TON of writers and publishers there, Stephen really did an awesome job in organizing things, bringing together a great lineup of talent and setting up some awesome panels. But he got boned by the con organizers, and being the nice guy that he is, Stephen stepped in to run a bunch of other stuff on top of what he was already slated to do, so he couldn’t really enjoy the weekend like he should have. And he had to bear the ire of any writer who didn’t have their stuff go perfectly. I didn’t see this happen, but it always does when you let humans get involved. He did the best job he possibly could have, but he was doing the work of four people, and it almost killed him.
And the hotel almost killed all of us. If you’re ever planning an event in Louisville, I strongly suggest you avoid the Fern Valley Hotel and Conference Center. It wasn’t really worth the $69 con rate. Not by a long stretch. The air crapped out on Friday, and the facility never recovered. There weren’t enough bartenders, and they weren’t particularly pleasant. The banquet services food was abysmal, and I actually walked out of the restaurant after waiting almost ten minutes for someone to bring me a menu and a glass of water. All the hotel facilities were terrible. The place felt, and smelled, like a Comfort Inn from circa 1980, and all they’d done was glass in the exterior entrances. The doors barely worked, and the hallway outside the room was hotter than anyplace I’ve ever been. And I’ve been to Vegas in July. One afternoon I went back to my room for an hour or so between panels, and when I left my room, the door handle was so hot I used a towel to open the door!
All that said, the con was still a good time, and I’d go back if it were in a decent hotel. At least something on the level of a Courtyard or Holiday Inn Express. All the people were nice, and I learned a TON. Not so much about the craft of writing, but that’s not what I was there to learn. I learned a lot about small press publishing, how it works and who some of the players are. I learned that just like everything else, there are major and minor players in the small press market, and I started to identify who was who. I’ve been thinking of shopping The Chosen around to small presses, because it could use a little editorial love, and I’d like to see what we could do with print sales if I had just a little better exposure. The book has decent e-book sales, so I’d like to keep those rights if possible, and the small press world is the only place I can find anyone willing to do that for me. But if the right offer came along, with the right developmental and promotional package, I’d sell all the rights.
Most of the writers there were published with small presses, and typically small presses that were exhibiting. There were a couple of folks who had New York publishing deals, or had them in the past, and a few self-pub folks like me. It was a good mix of writers, and I had a lot of fun hanging out with them in bars. Now I’m really looking forward to Dragon Con, where I can reconnect with these guys, as well as my other writer pals that I’ve made over the last year.
That’s enough drivel for today, I’ve got to go work on edits for Knight Moves. The hopeful release date of August 14 is looking better, but a lot depends on my proofreaders and my cover guy. I did knock together a temporary cover that I can live with if I have to, but I’d really like to relaunch the back stories with new covers and drop them all three at the same time. We’ll see. But it’s written, and I’m almost through with the first round of edits, so I have high hopes for getting it into people’s hands in the next two weeks!
by john | Jul 26, 2011 | Book Spotlight
Why Write Crime Fiction?
(or any other kind of made-up stuff that never happened…)
by Mary Anna Evans
Author of environmental thriller Wounded Earth
The protagonist in my thriller Wounded Earth, Larabeth McLeod, is the kind of woman who changes the world. I love her for that.
She sees a problem—polluted water or soil or air—and she invents a way to fix it. She uses that knowledge to found a company that employs lots of people. The world is a better place because she’s in it, and that’s one of the reasons readers cheer her on. The man who is stalking her, a man so evil that he calls himself Babykiller, is so angry at the world and at humanity that he’s willing to strike back in some terrible ways. Larabeth doesn’t intend to let that happen, despite the fact that fighting back could cost her everything.
Characters like these are a gift from God for a writer like me. They matter, but sometimes I ask myself, “Do I?” Don’t you ever doubt your place in the universe?
Someone please tell me I’m not the only neurotic soul who wonders whether she has earned her spot on the planet on any given day. When undergoing a bout of end-of-the-day emotional accounting, I feel good about having made sure my daughter had a balanced dinner or about recycling the cans that held the Coca-Cola I probably shouldn’t have drunk.
Mopping the kitchen floor and dusting the furniture don’t give the same karma-improving feeling. The floor and furniture will be dirty again tomorrow, so how exactly have I made the world a better place by cleaning them today? And don’t even get me started on laundry…
So where does my profession rate when it comes to making the world a better place? Am I wasting my time and talents by spending my days writing thrillers and mysteries? Should I go back to environmental engineering, where I have the opportunity to help our society learn to clean up its messes?
Really, one could ask these questions about any work of art. Lovely music, pretty pictures, graceful dancing, exciting stories…none of these things put food on the table. Yet art is what makes us human. It is the only tool we can use to communicate the wordless feelings in our hearts. I can’t show you my soul, but I can paint a picture of what’s in it. Even better, I could write you a story.
Human beings have been telling stories for all of time. Before we settled in cities, before we learned to grow our food, before we could even light a fire to cook that food, we told each other tales that shared important knowledge or that beat back the terrors of the night. Crime fiction is simply a descendant of those old, old stories.
I consider crime fiction to be the literature of justice. I introduce my readers to a world of my own design, then I set it askew in a dramatic way. Murder can do that. Then, slowly, I labor with Larabeth (or Faye Longchamp or whoever is my protagonist of the moment) to set that world right.
This isn’t always possible in real life. Crime goes unpunished and murderers do walk free. But in the tightly controlled world of my creation, justice can be served.
Sometimes, I dance along the boundaries of that justice. What is just is not always what is legal, and what is legal is not always what is just. By exploring that gray and murky boundary, I ask my readers to consider how they want their world to be. When they close my books, they go back into that world with ideas that are slightly different than they were before. Maybe they will be gentler with people who are different from them. Maybe they will stand up and say so when something is just not right.
I hope so. Because I think that asking people to think hard about right and wrong is an excellent way for a writer to earn her place in the universe.
Mary Anna is the author of environmental thriller Wounded Earth, as well as the awardwinning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries and Red Adept’s top short story collection of 2010, Offerings. All her work is available in ebook form. Wounded Earth and the Faye Longchamp mysteries are also available in print.
Website: http://www.maryannaevans.com/
Personal blog: http://maryannaevans.blogspot.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=527135843
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/maryannaevans
Group blog: http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/
by john | Jul 21, 2011 | Appearances, Real Life, Theatre, Travel
I’m driving halfway to Louisville today, stopping off in Charleston, WV for a hopeful repeat of my last few trips there – in other words a little extra green in my pockets (and I need it after dusting off three buyins in our home game last weekend). Then Friday I finish my trek to Kentucky.
I’ll be doing a short reading Saturday night at 10PM – probably a brief segment from Hard Day’s Knight and maybe a piece from The Chosen. Then Sunday morning I’m on a panel about finding alternative sources of writing income, which I’ve certainly done plenty of in my day. That panel’s at 9AM (ouch!), then I’ll hang around the con for a while before driving back to West Virginia, crashing for the night and finishing the trek on Monday. My plan is to spend every morning writing, then be at the con all afternoon and evening, so you can probably find me wherever cheap, crappy beer is served.
I also have to spend a couple of hours each day drilling on my lines for The Irish Curse. Rehearsals are going very well, and I think it’s going to be a great show, but our off-book date is Sunday, so since I’m not there I’d damn sure better have my lines down when I get back on Monday night. I also have Tuesday written off as a vacation day, so if I still have line issues I may stay home and work on them all day Tuesday. Probably not, though, because if I have a spare vacation day I should save it for opening week, when I know I’ll be absolutely exhausted.
This has been a great time, working on the show, but my word count is in the toilet. I just don’t have enough energy for three things – work, writing and theatre. So writing has been relegated to a back seat until the show opens, which I’m less than thrilled with. Lesson learned – if I’m going to do a show, pick a time when I don’t have a book in progress.
Knight Moves is at the editor’s right now, so I’m looking hopefully at an August release. If I can get the edits and rewrites done, and a cover done I’m going to push to have it out by my birthday, which is August 14th. That also marks one year since I release The Chosen, so I’d have released four books in my first year, and I think that would be pretty good output. I also have a couple of other exciting things percolating, but they’re not quite ready to talk about publicly yet, so I’m gonna go try and hammer out a couple thousand words, then pack and drive for half a day.
by john | Jul 15, 2011 | Theatre
We take a break from our regularly scheduled discussions of writing and promotion to talk about my imminent return to the stage. On a lark, I auditioned for a role in the upcoming play The Irish Curse, directed by an old friend of mine. There were a couple of factors that made me want to audition. I’ve known the director for ten years or more, and we used to run a theatre company together, so he knows I can act a little. So it was a stress-free audition on that front. There were two roles that I thought would fit my type, which is becoming increasingly rare as I get older and fatter. And then there were the magical words in the audition announcement – “all roles will be compensated.”
You see, I’ve spent more than twenty years in theatre in some form or another. I’ve designed, directed, produced, performed and done almost everything that there is to be done in a piece of theatre. For the record, the list of jobs I haven’t held is – Musician, Musical Director, Choreographer, Dancer, Props Designer, Dresser and Dramaturg. I think I’ve done everything else that has a name, including Costume Designer, Makeup Artist and Poster Designer to name just a few. And I’ve been compensated fairly well for some of those things.
But I’ve never been paid to act. I’ve been paid to speak in front of crowds, and I’ve been paid to perform poetry for an audience and cameras, but I’ve never been paid to be an actor. And that’s always bugged me a little. I haven’t auditioned much (not in years), but it always felt a little off that I’ve never done anything as an actor that garnered me any cash.
So I auditioned. I have no idea how many guys came out that fit the part, but I got it. And having been on the other side of the audition room, I know that there are a lot of things that go into casting. Being friends with the director helps. Being easy to work with helps a lot. Having a proven capacity for learning my lines and not tripping over the furniture doesn’t hurt, either.
So I was cast as Father Kevin in The Irish Curse. The cast so far has been great to work with, and it’s a lot of fun working with Glenn (the director) again after all these years. But I’m working muscles that haven’t seen much use lately, so to speak, and it’s an adjustment. I haven’t been onstage since 2008, and that was only a few lines. I haven’t had a major role since 2007, and haven’t performed any contemporary shows in even longer. So I’m trying to remember how to learn lines, how to learn blocking, and still trying to fit writing in amongst all that. It’s a challenge, to say the least.
But it’s a lot of fun, and it’s reminding me why I decided to do this all those years ago. The friendships, the fun of working hard for a good show, the magic of theatre. If you’re around in August, stop by the show. It’ll be a fun ride.
by john | Jul 13, 2011 | Appearances
Saturday night I headed down to Columbia, SC to hang with Faith Hunter, Kalayna Price, Rachel Aaron and Misty Massey for the first ever Fantastical Mystery Tour multi-author book signing and extravaganza! It was a whole bucketful of awesome, as it is anytime I get to hang with those folks. This whole thing came about from Kalayna and Faith having a brilliant idea at the SC Book Festival, and me being in the right place at the right time. They wanted to do a big signing with a bunch of authors in Columbia to celebrate the release of Kalayna’s new book, Grave Dance.
I just started it, but so far it rocks. Not surprised since it’s the sequel to one of my Top 5 books of 2010.If you haven’t bought it yet, what are you waiting for?
So they wanted to do this thing, and they asked Misty to join. Then they looked over at my booth right next to theirs, and asked me to join. Then they added Rachel, and it was all set. This is just another case of the world being run by those who show up. I was in the right place back in January at RoundCon to meet Faith, Misty and Kalayna. Then I was in the right place in May to get invited into this signing. Then last Saturday night I was TOTALLY in the right place, because we had around 50 people at various times through the signing. It was a fantastic crowd, we had two lively panel discussions, with great questions from the audience, and we all sold a bunch of books.
Kalayna had a bunch of friends and family present, because this was her book release party, but the great thing about fantasy fans is that they don’t lock into one author. When they hear something they like, they’ll buy stuff from anybody who tells a good story. So all the rest of us were able to pick up a few of Kalayna’s stragglers, which is always fun. It never hurts to have a New York Times bestselling author (Faith) at the end of the table, either. I had a great moment chatting with one of my oldest childhood friends, who I haven’t seen in probably twenty years. He now lives only about 15 minutes from the store, so he came over to hang for a while.
It’s always a little tough being the only self-published guy in an event full of traditionally published authors, because the natural inclination is to segregate based on experience. That’s where I have to give a huge thanks to Faith, Kalayna, Misty and Rachel. They’ve never once made me feel like a second-class citizen or an inferior writer because my books are self-published. I read about folks getting snubbed by traditionally published authors just for being self-pubbed and have to report that my experience has been totally the opposite. All the people I’ve met who are traditionally published have been welcoming to me as a writer, regardless of how my books go to market. It might help that I put some of my typical arrogance aside when I’m around other writers because I assume that I’m the least experienced person in any roomful of writers until I’m proven wrong. And since I’m seldom proven wrong in that, it pays for me to be a little humble. I know I’m new to this whole game, and am learning different things every time I get to hang with other writers.
Now back to working on lines, because I’m now in a play. As if I didn’t have enough to do. It’s called The Irish Curse and runs the first three weekends of August. So if you’re in Charlotte around that time, I hope you’ll come by and check it out.
by john | Jul 8, 2011 | Real Life, Travel, Writing
I know, I’ve neglected this space all week. Sorry, I’ve been busy, and when that happens the first thing to go is this blog. Well, the first thing to go is exercise, but since that’s been gone for a while now I don’t think I’m allowed to even count it. Still plugging along at Return to Eden Book 1 – Genesis, with about 32K words done. I know I’m going to have to go back through and completely re-write the beginning, but that’s more an issue of voice than anything else, because the voice I’ve written most of the book in is significantly different than the voice I started it in last year.
Here’s some quick news before I bury the lede too much – TOMORROW at Barnes & Noble, 3400 Forest Drive Columbia, SC I’ll be on a pair of panels and doing a monster book signing with Kalayna Price (buy her new book, Grave Dance right now!), Faith Hunter, Rachel Aaron and Misty Massey. We’ll be doing a panel at 5, then a signing, then another panel later in the evening. Should be a lot of fun! You can sign up for the Facebook event here – we’re giving away a Nook!
Also, please don’t forget to donate to my 24 Hours of Booty fundraising page. I’d really love it if my readers came together and gave a big buttload of money to this great cause. You can really help people. Please do so.
Other news – I’m back in the theatre, but this time not on a ladder! I’ve been cast in the Queen City Theatre Company’s production of The Irish Curse. It’s a great little comedy about men, how we see ourselves, our body image, and who does or doesn’t “measure up.” And if you’ve never heard of the the Irish Curse, just ask any Irishman about it! I play a priest from Boston living in New York, and I’ve got some very nice moments in the script. I’m enjoying being an actor again, and will enjoy even more the check that comes along with it! Yep, for the first time in my 20+ years of theatre, I’ll be paid for my work as an actor! This is a real rarity in Charlotte, and I’m very happy for my buddies Glenn and Kristian that they have managed to build their company from nothing to a place where they can compensate their actors in just a few short years.
What else? I went to West Virginia last weekend, played some poker and wrote quite a bit. I won about enough to cover the trip, so the poker games made it a free writing vacation – always nice. At one point I was up over a grand on the morning of my second day, but I ran into some run-bad and some bad play and bled off until I came home with just a couple hundred extra. But that’s still enough to keep me going back there every few months to replenish the cash flow.
And I’m happy to report that June was another great month, sales-wise. I topped July by a few units shipped, thanks largely to the short story I published, but increased revenue significantly due to a price increase. I’ve seen no slowdown in sales since moving my novel price from $2.99 to $4.99, so that is likely where prices will stay for now.
In other news, I’m listening to a lot of Grace Potter & the Nocturnals. I blame Pauly.
by john | Jun 28, 2011 | Writing
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.
by john | Jun 28, 2011 | Writing
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.
by john | Jun 28, 2011 | Poker
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
by john | Jun 27, 2011 | Fiction, Return to Eden, Vampires, Writing
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.
