by john | Jun 9, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
When I saw the request for submissions for Lawless Lands I couldn’t wait to try and write a story for it.
Westerns. Fantasy. Two of my favorite genres all wrapped into one. My mind started to wander. What made the west so iconic? What could fantasy do to make it different?
I started thinking about the unforgiving nature of the untamed frontier. I started to wonder how individuals could have survived in such trying circumstances. I imagined that the people that did survive it long enough would probably garner quite the reputation. And though most would call it luck, I imagined that it was something more akin to uncanny perseverance and resolve that would allow someone to keep on going when the elements kept trying to do otherwise.
From there Lucky Liza Reynolds was born.
A woman who wanders a strange, harsh land, an even more unforgiving version of the American West, eking out an existence by way of a pistol and a horse, two of the most necessary tools for any good free-gun. After being called lucky for so long, after committing all the acts she had over the years to stay alive, it was becoming harder and harder her to believe she had gotten by on luck alone.
Once I knew the story would revolve around her, I wanted to throw her into a shootout that would truly test where luck ends and the power of a person begins.
After that, it was fleshing out the world she lived in. I started to look at some of the most common sights and people throughout westerns and figured out how I could make them different. A gun that wounds the soul. A tumbleweed that talks. A tribe of centaurs who worshipped horses as gods. A town built inside the hollowed husks of cactuses… It was a blast (pun intended) to explore the west with such a weird lens and see how I could try and turn it into something new. I called it the Spindlelands, a world woven and knotted with a thousand different species and ideas, all trying to compete and make something beneath the relentless attack of nature.
I tried my best to tie it all together in the story, “Out of Luck.” A story I am extremely excited and grateful was able to be a part of the anthology, Lawless Lands.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it. If you do, stay tuned to my website (www.hallwaytoelsewhere.com) for upcoming info about future stories set within this world. Eventually there will be novels exploring Liza’s past and some of her adventures. Eventually… Until then, my concentration goes into my dark fantasy stories set in the Chilongua universe, a world covered by jungle and the mayhem that persists when that many things are living atop of one another.
Thanks again to the wonderful editors of Lawless Lands, Emily Lavin, Misty Massey and Margaret McGraw, for giving this story a chance and their constant professionalism, and also to John Hartness and Falstaff Books for making this anthology happen!
I hope you have fun exploring the weird west!
Stay wandering,
Jeff
by john | Jun 6, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Hey there!
If you follow me on social media, you might have seen a few pre-written tweet and Facebook messages that come out from my account. You might actually have seen enough to make you dread the thought of ever hearing from me again. But obviously not, because now you’re here to read even more of my crap, so either something I’m doing is working, or there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Or both.
Be that as it may, I do post a LOT of tweets and pre-scheduled social media messages. There are a few reasons for this –
- If commercials and junk mail (what I often refer to as the “shotgun approach” to marketing) didn’t still work to some degree, companies with a lot more money to buy marketing and analyze its effectiveness wouldn’t still do it.
- It takes multiple mentions of a product for it to stick in someone’s mind. That product may be a specific book, but more often than not, that product is YOU. So you need a fair amount of visibility. That means being active all through the day, particularly when the bulk of people are in a place to see it. My completely non-scientific belief is that most people fuck off in front of their computers the most from 9AM-5PM Eastern time. And even more between 11AM-2PM, because that’s lunch. That’s when I post most heavily.
- Facebook and Twitter throttle your posts so that only a small percentage of things you put out in the world are seen unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege. To combat this, I send out the same message once per day, six days a week. My hope is that different people will see it each time, or at least that a few new people will see it each time.
So that’s the “why” I post a bunch. But what about the “how?” What makes a good social media post? Well, here are a few things that I try to include in most of my posts, and this is something that is constantly being refined as I learn more and look at what posts get the most interaction.
By the way, I will refer to all of these as tweets, even though I have HootSuite set up to cross-post to Facebook and Twitter. Each message I create goes to five different feeds – my Twitter, the Falstaff Books Twitter, my Facebook page, my Author page, and the Falstaff page. But it’s identical, because I only have so much time in my life.
I try to be funny, witty, or at least entertaining. I frequently use over-the-top examples to push the humor if it’s a funny book or story, or I try to tie it to something that will make the person who sees it go “Wait, what?” In a tweet for the book Changeling’s Fall, I make mention of the fact that unless you read the book, you won’t know what part of a goblin glows in the dark. This is something that people aren’t expecting, and makes them want to look further.
You’re always working toward the click in social media. With pre-written messages, you aren’t just looking to make people remember your name, you’re looking for something that makes them think “I need to know what the hell he’s talking about” and click the link. They can’t buy your shit if they don’t click the link. And that’s the endgame – getting people to buy your shit. You are not playing around on social media because you’re a great artist, you’re playing around on social media because you are in business to make money.
So a good tweet is made up of three things – a hook, a hashtag, and a link.
I’ve already talked about the hook. It’s kinda like your back cover matter, only super-condensed. Or it’s a cover blurb, only super-condensed. When I tweeted about Midsummer, a Bubba meets Shakespeare novella, I made mention of A.J. Hartley, because he’s a Shakespeare expert. When I tweet about Of Lips and Tongue, I mention that it’s one of the best novellas released last year. When I tweet about Pawn’s Gambit and War Pigs, I’ll mention that they are finalists for the 2017 Manly Wade Wellman Award (Congrats to Darin Kennedy and Jay Requard!).
Your hook is that “Wait, what?” moment. It’s what makes the person seeing it read further. It’s what cuts through the noise, and there’s plenty of noise out there. You can (and will) have multiple tweets about each release. You can make one funny, one serious, one scary, one referential to another work out there, whatever. Just use part of your 140 characters to make it interesting.
You need at least one hashtag, preferably two. I’m just getting better at this, because hashtags baffled me for a long time. Hashtags are the way people filter social media. If someone wants to see all the tweets and posts about ConCarolinas, they can search using #concarolinas, and all the posts using that hashtag will pop up.
Do not use very specific hashtags. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you aren’t a huge bestseller. If you aren’t James Patterson, using a hashtag with your name is useless. If no one will ever search for the hashtag, it’s just a waste of space. I find that #kindle #amazon #audible #audiobook #ebook #bargain #free #fantasy #horror #scifi are all broad enough to be useful, while #falstaffbooks or #johnhartness would be absolutely useless. No one is searching twitter feeds for those terms, so don’t bother with them.
Don’t overdo it with hashtags, either. After a while, it just becomes a parody of your content and the message is lost. I think one or two is plenty.
The link – this part is easy. You need something that people can take action on, namely to buy your shit. But there are a few things that go into making a link, and some of them you might not know about.
- Universal Links – We all know how much is sucks to have your book available on ten different platforms but you can only fit one link into each message. Well – Books2Read is your new best friend! Books2Read makes universal links for your book. You just go to their site, insert the buy link from any online store into the field, and it will scour the internet for everywhere else the book is available, and create a Universal Link that points to ALL of them! What happens is that your customer clicks the universal link, and they are directed to a page that says “Hey! This book is available all over the interwebs! Where do you want to buy it?” You customer says “Here!” and clicks their favorite ebook store. Books2Read sends them there, and remembers their choice for next time. So next time they click any Books2Read link, it takes them to the book on their selected store. This gives you the opportunity to share the link to all online stores in one shot, and your readers can get your shit wherever they want.
- Link shorteners – most social media aggregators like HootSuite or TweetDeck have a tool that will shorten a link for you. I don’t use them. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I use bit.ly. Bil.ly shortens the links, lets you customize the link, and gives you tracking for the link. All with a free account. I use them for all my link creation.
So there you go, the short version of how to build a tweet that sings instead of sucks. Build a hook, a hashtag, and a link, and then go promote the fuck out of your stuff! Remember, art is awesome, and as soon as you make enough money, you can make all the art you want!
by john | Jun 5, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
17
Willis came back through the house, his gun holstered, to where I sat on the front porch swing with Jenny. “The place is empty,” he said, turning the rocker sideways and sitting down to face me.
“I told you that,” I said. “Jenny did a thorough job of checking the place out before she’d even let me go get Daddy’s gun and walk through the whole house myself.” I reached out and patted the ancient twelve-gauge leaning against the wall beside me. Daddy’s old gun had seen a lot of use when he was a younger man, bringing home dinner more than once when deer was in season. Since he passed, it mostly got used to scare crows out of the pecan tree in the back yard, or to take care of the occasional copperhead in the summer. I keep it loaded, though, with a shell of birdshot in first, then four shells full of double-ought buckshot just in case somebody’s stupid enough to still be in my way after I dump a bunch of pellets into their behind.
“How did you know someone had been inside your house, Ms. Carter?”
“I’m Ms. Carter, now?” I asked with a smile.
“Well, I am conducting an investigation. But it could be that we might get a little less formal once my questions get answered. But not before. So, how did you know someone had been in your house?”
“It was too clean,” I said.
“So someone broke into your house and…cleaned up?” Willis Dunleavy gave me almost exactly the same look he gave me the first time we met, when I told him I had a gift for talking to dead people.
“The stuff on the dining room table had been straightened. I left it all in big piles, but when I came back, it was all straight. And then there’s the busted window on the back porch.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a dead giveaway,” he agreed.
“Plus Jenny felt somebody’s presence,” I added.
The sheriff’s pen stopped moving and he looked up at me. “Now, you see, that’s the kind of thing I can’t put in my report.”
“I can’t possibly see how that’s my problem, Willis,” I said with a smile. “It’s the truth. I know it, you know, and poor old dead Sheriff Johnny standing behind you knows it.”
He jumped up and turned around like his butt was spring-loaded. I reared back in the swing, laughing fir to beat the band, and he just turned back around and sat back down in the chair in a huff. “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” I said, still laughing a little bit. “Johnny ain’t behind you. He wandered off after I called you, and I ain’t seen him in half an hour. I was just pulling your leg.”
“That’s not funny, Lila Grace,” he grumped, but I saw a little hint of a smile.
“Oh, don’t be an old fuddy-duddy, Willis. If you can’t laugh about the dead people that won’t leave you alone, what in the world can you laugh about?”
“You are a very strange woman, Lila Grace Carter,” he said, flipping his little notebook closed.
“You have no idea, Willis Dunleavy,” I said, standing up.
He stood, and all of a sudden we were standing on my porch, very close to each other, almost face to face. I felt his breath on my face, warm in the slightest chill of the evening air, and felt a warmth build inside me to match it.
“Well—“ he started
“Would you—“ I started at the same time, then stopped. “Go ahead,” I said.
“No, you,” he waved a hand.
I took a deep breath to quiet the butterflies in my stomach. “Would you like to come in for a drink?”
“That would be nice,” he replied.
“I don’t have anything but Jim Beam, I don’t keep much in the way of mixers,” I said as I stepped past him into my den. I flipped on the light switch. It had gotten dark while we were sitting out there. CHECK TIME OF DAY.
“That’s fine,” he said, following me close, almost close enough for me to feel that hot breath again on the back of my neck. I slowed down a little, let him get closer. I could smell him, the warm man-smells of him. He smelled like leather from his gun belt, oil from his gun, and a hint of aftershave left over from the morning. Or maybe he splashed a tiny bit on before he came to my house? Either way, he smelled good. Strong, like a man should smell.
He pushed the front door closed behind us and I heard him click the lock. I wove my way past the recliner in the den, past the dining room table with all my notes stacked too neatly on my grandmother’s quilt that I repurposed for a tablecloth a few years ago, and walked into the kitchen. I got two jelly jars down out of the cabinet and put a few ice cubes in each one. I turned to walk back to the dining room but stopped when I almost bumped right into Willis, filling the door frame with my three-quarters full Jim Beam bottle in his hand.
“Sit down over there,” he pointed to my ancient formica-topped kitchen table. I did as he said, and set the two glasses on the table. He put the bottle down in front of me, then turned and walked out the back door onto the small back porch/mud room where my washer and dryer, deep freezer, and tool boxes sat.
“What are you doing, Willis?” I called after him.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Just pour the whiskey.”
I gave a little shrug and did as I was told, content for the moment to let him have his little secret. Until I hear a horrendous banging coming from my back porch, that it. Then I shot up like a rocket myself, and hustled to the door to see what the hell he was doing.
What he was doing, was nailing a little piece of cardboard over the hole in my back door. He turned to me and gave me a sheepish little grin. “It won’t keep out anything more determined than a wasp, but at least you won’t have bugs getting in all night.”
“Thank you, Willis, I appreciate it. You didn’t have to do that, though. I wasn’t going to make you work for your drink.” At least not that way, I thought.
He smiled and put the hammer aside. “I don’t mind. I don’t get much chance to do things with my hands except shoot nowadays. I kinda miss it.”
I stepped forward and stood up on tiptoes to kiss him on his rough cheek, enjoying the feel of his salt-and-pepper stubble on my lips. “Well, thank you, kind sir. Here is your reward.” I kissed his cheek again, and handed him a glass with three ice cubes and two fingers of whiskey in it.
“I dusted the knob for prints, but there was nothing but smudges. Not even your prints, which tells me either you wipe down your house every day, or the burglar wore gloves and took measures to make sure he wasn’t discovered,” he said, sipping his drink.
I took a drink of my own, hearing the light tinkle of ice cubes shaking against the sides of my glass. I hated that noise, because I wasn’t rattling the ice around on purpose, my hands just wouldn’t quite hold still. “Do you think it was the killer?” I asked. My voice sounded strange to my ears. It was a light, querulous thing, not the voice of a strong woman who lived on her own most of her life. It was the voice of a scared, delicate thing who needed protecting. I hated that voice a little bit, and knocked back the rest of my whiskey to drown that simpering wretch.
Willis raised an eyebrow as I refilled my glass, but I didn’t respond. He took another sip and replied. “I can’t imagine it would be anyone, else. Just about everybody in town knows you’re working this case in one way or another, and if they don’t know it directly, they could probably figure it out from seeing us together in Sharky’s twice in one day.”
“Yes, I don’t expect they would think much of my chances in the dating pool, so the logical assumption would be that we are working together.” I heard the bitterness in my voice and tried to tell myself it was the whiskey talking, and not the decades of sidelong glances from my neighbors, who were quick enough to knock on my door when they needed something, but had an alarming tendency to find something pressing on the other side of the street when they saw me on the sidewalk otherwise.
“I think your chances of landing a lawman are pretty good, if you ask me,” Willis said. “And I don’t mean Jeff.”
We both laughed out loud at that. Willis, because he probably thought Jeff just another hapless yokel, and me because I would always see him as the sweet but slightly dim boy in my Sunday School class. “No, I don’t think I’ll be having a steak dinner with Jeff any time soon. He’s sweet, but he’s a little young for me.”
“But you don’t have a problem dating a cop?” Willis asked, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. His gaze became suddenly intense, and I thought for a second that I could see myself reflected in his deep brown eyes.
It took me a long moment to find my voice, but finally I said, “No. I think dating an officer of the law might even be a little bit…exciting.” I let the last word linger, a little tease in the air. It had been a long time since I played this game, and I was rusty, but it was much more fun than I remembered. Maybe that’s because I’d only played it with boys before, and this time I was fencing with a grown man. A very grown man.
I straightened up suddenly as Sheriff Johnny walked through the back door. He didn’t open it, of course, he literally walked through my back door, making not the slightest sound to tell Willis that his predecessor had entered the room.
“What is it?” Willis said when I sat up. His cop instincts were on point, and he was on his feet with his gun out in an instant. He spun around to follow my gaze, but of course he saw nothing. He was face to face with Sheriff Johnny, who just stood there looking Willis up and down like he was some kind of interloper poking his badge in where he didn’t belong.
“It’s Johnny,” I said, holding up my hands in a calming gesture. “He just came in through the back door and he’s motioning like he wants us to follow him outside.” I stood up, and the room wobbled just a little bit. Drinks with dinner, a nightcap after, and now a strong drink in my kitchen amounted to more than my normal intake of liquor, and I was feeling the effects. It made Johnny less distinct, harder to see and thus harder to understand.
Alcohol dulls my sensitivity, which is why I spent the month after my mother died drunk as a skunk. I didn’t want to see her ghost, I just wanted to miss her like a normal person. Like every daughter that loses a mother, there were things between us that had been better left unsaid. And just like every strong-willed woman who came from a strong-willed woman, nothing remained unsaid between us. So when she died, I crawled inside a bottle of Seagram’s gin and didn’t crawl out until I had it on good authority that she was no longer hanging around my house or hers. I haven’t had a sip of gin since. Nowadays the mere smell of it makes me sick to my stomach.
I got hold of my equilibrium and followed Johnny out the back door and down the concrete steps. I opened the door, a concession to my physical form that Johnny still didn’t have to make. I was also apparently going to have to have a conversation with him about making concessions to my privacy, because if things moved the way I hoped with Willis, it certainly would not do to have a dead sheriff wandering into my home unannounced. I have enough issues with intimacy without turning my love life into a spectator sport, thank you.
by john | Jun 2, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Promos/Giveaways
One of the best things about being a publisher is bringing projects to life for new writers, or writers that haven’t broken out as big as I think they should. The Soul Wars by J. D. Blackrose is one of those projects. It releases today, and I couldn’t be more proud to be associated with it. You should click on the big picture and check it out.
The Soul Wars started with one question. I was reading one of the Jane Yellowrock books, I forget which one, and once again, there are gunshots, injuries, fire, and turmoil, all happening at night, naturally.
I stopped reading to ask myself: “What do the neighbors think?”
I know there aren’t neighbors right next door, like the suburbs of young families in cookie cutter houses, but there are people somewhat nearby. Wouldn’t they get sick and tired of all this mayhem?
I imagined a society lady, elderly, weak of body but strong in spirit, walking to the front door, rapping it with her cane and telling the vampire that, “This will not do. I need my rest. Keep it down, young man!”
Adelaide was born. I contacted Faith Hunter, the awesome author of the Jane Yellowrock series, and asked if she wanted to do something with this character. Maybe a short story we could write together? Faith laughed hysterically at the thought that I would believe she had any time to write anything that wasn’t required by a contract. She told me, “Write it yourself.” So, I did.
Kara is a Valkyrie, a warrior from Norse Mythology, whose job, like all Valkyries, was to choose those who died with honor on the battlefield and bring them Valhalla, the gods’ realm.
So what the hell is she doing on Earth, babysitting a vampire?
My characters are deeply flawed, and pride is one of their weaknesses. Kara thinks she knows everything, and Gaspard is a master vampire so he knows he knows everything. Such arrogance. This hurts them throughout, but also makes them face their own failings.
The overarching question is: Do vampires have souls? Some vampires behave badly, some are honorable. What would explain the difference? You have to read the series to find out, but one thing is certain…a war is coming that could shake the Earth to its core.
The book is divided into four novellas, Souls Collide, Souls Fall, Souls Rise, and Souls Unite. The first two let you get to know Gaspard, Kara, and Adelaide, and at them and with them. The third is a prequel, and darker, in that it tells you about Gaspard’s past and why a Valkyrie, of all things, is in his service. The fourth wraps things up, but warning – because I have already gotten grief for this – there is a cliffhanger. That way, if y’all like it, I can write novellas five, six, seven, and eight. See my devious plan?
As an aside, I once complained to John Hartness when he left us off on a cliffhanger, and he told me, “Yeah, I’m a dick that way.”
I hope you will go on a journey with Kara, Gaspard and Adelaide, and meet the other characters that weave in and out of the stories. I will tell you up front that one of my favorite characters is Arnaud, and I’m hoping to tell more of his story.
by john | May 29, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
16
We walked out of the restaurant and down the steps, our feet crunching in the gravel. “Well, I reckon this is goodnight, Lila Grace,” Willis said, turning to me. He had that awkward look of a man that ain’t sure if he’s supposed to hug me, shake my hand, or try to kiss me.
I just wore my normal expression. Sheriff Johnny used to say I looked like I knew something he didn’t. I replied that I usually did. “Why should this be goodnight, Sheriff?” I asked with a smile. I leaned back against the fender of my old truck and gave him a direct look.
He spluttered a little bit before he managed to spit out “W-well, I reckon it don’t have to be, I mean, um…”
“You mean you still need a ride back to your car?” I said with one eyebrow up.
“Huh?” He looked for all the world like a bulldog chewing on a wasp, like there was something hurting his head, but he wasn’t real sure what it was.
“We left your car at Sharky’s, Willis. Unless you feel like walking three miles across town to go get it, I reckon you ain’t getting rid of me that easy.” I pushed off from the truck, reached out and closed him mouth with two fingers under his chin, and walked around to get into the driver’s seat.
He slid in on the passenger side of the big bench seat and put on his seat belt. “Don’t you ever lock your truck?”
“Why in the world would I? This truck is almost thirty years old, has almost four hundred thousand miles on it, a rusted-out rear fender, and a bed held together pretty much with Bondo and paint. I don’t keep anything in it worth stealing, except the shotgun behind the seat, and if there’s anybody in the county that don’t already have something better than a double-barrel four-ten, well I reckon they’re welcome to it.” I pulled the truck out onto the highway in the wake of a log truck hauling a late load of pine. I love the smell of fresh-cut pine logs, but I did hang back far enough not to get sap on my windshield.
“You keep a shotgun behind the seat of your truck? You know that’s against the law, right?”
“It ain’t loaded, Willis. The shells are in the glove box, and it’s locked. Usually. Sometimes. Well, at least the shells are in the glove box,” I said. “Besides, what are you going to do, arrest an old woman for concealing a three-foot long shotgun? Judge Comer would laugh your ass right out of his courtroom.”
He chuckled, and rolled his window down, letting the warm air and the scent of honeysuckle filter into the truck’s cab. “You ain’t wrong, there. I swear that man thinks I ain’t nothing more than a Yankee carpetbagger. He all but said so the first time I went to the courthouse to introduce myself.”
“Well, maybe if that wasn’t the first time I’d heard you say ‘ain’t’ in the time I’ve known you, people wouldn’t think you such an interloper.”
“Now come on, that’s not fair,” he protested. “You use just as many big words as I do, if not more.”
“That’s true, but I have the benefit of living my entire life below the Mason-Dixon Line. You are at the distinct disadvantage of having spent three decades in Minnesota, a place as foreign to most residents of the South Carolina Upstate as Kathmandu. Besides, I say all those big words with an accent. Gives it style.”
We both laughed and I pulled into the parking lot of Sharky’s. There were a lot more cars in the lot now, but plenty of space around Willis’ cruiser. Seemed like nobody wanted to risk having one too many and clipping the police car on the way out of the lot.
“You want to come in, have a nightcap?” He asked, opening the passenger door and slipping off his seatbelt.
“No, I think I better get home. All them cats get ornery if I stay out too late.”
His face got a panicked look. “You have cats?”
I busted out laughing. “Lord, no! But I thought it would be funny to pretend to be the stereotypical crazy cat lady for a minute. No, I don’t have any pets. They don’t like all my unannounced visitors. Cats don’t like ghosts, and I don’t like cat pee on my hardwoods. Dogs are too stupid to care about random dead people showing up, and that means they’re too dumb for me to tolerate. So no pets for me. But I’m still gonna pass on that drink. Two glasses of wine with dinner has me feeling just right. I think I’m going to go home, take a bubble bath with a trashy romance novel, and go to sleep with the ceiling fan on.”
“Sounds good,” he said. He walked around the side of the truck and leaned in my open window. “I had a nice time tonight, Lila Grace. Does this clear my debt, or do I need to keep apologizing?”
I leaned forward a little. “I reckon I’ve almost forgiven you.”
He moved closer. “Well, that means I’ve still got some work to do.”
It had been some time, but I was pretty sure I knew what was supposed to come next, and I was pretty sure I wanted it to happen. I leaned a little closer. “Well, then get to work, Sheriff.”
He pressed his mouth to mine, and I let out a little sigh. His lips were strong, and firm, and he reached up to stroke the side of my head right behind my ear. I opened my mouth and felt his tongue slide between my lips, probing gently, dancing across my teeth just long enough to be promising, then pull back. We parted, and he gave me a look that melted me right down to my core.
“Enjoy that bubble bath. And that trashy romance novel,” he said, his lips just inches from mine, Then he pressed them to me again, this time more chaste, but still strong, passionate. I sighed again, like some silly girl in a Nicholas Sparks movie, but I couldn’t stop myself. The firm lips, the strong hand on my face, the stubble scraping my cheek as he moved forward to whisper “It’s gonna take me a long time to sleep tonight.” All that combined to make me real glad I was sitting in my truck and not trying to stand, because that man made me weak in the knees like nobody in a very long time.
I gave him one last peck on the lips. “I had a lovely time, Willis. We’ll have to do it again. Real soon.” Then I cranked the put the truck in reverse and got the hell away from that man before I jumped his bones right there in Sharky’s parking lot.
Jenny was sitting on my porch when I got home, on the two-seater swing next to Sheriff Johnny, both of them grinning at me like damn Cheshire cats. “Don’t say a word, young lady,” I warned as I walked up the steps and unlocked my front door. “I am allowed to go to dinner with a man if I want to, and I am allowed to kiss him if I want to.”
“Did you want to?” Jenny asked, her voice sing-songy as she kicked her feet on the motionless swing. I was glad it wasn’t moving. I had enough trouble with the folks on my street without my porch swing moving all by itself on a night with no breeze at all.
I felt a slight blush creep up my neck and across my cheeks as I very carefully did not look at the ghost. “I did. Want to, that is?”
“So did you?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t know that I feel the need to tell you that. A woman deserves to have some secrets, after all.” I smiled as I pushed the door open.
“You might as well tell me. If you don’t, I’ll just go over to the cemetery and ask the Three Musketeers.”
I laughed in spite of trying to act mad at her being all nosy. “Is that what you’re calling those women? The Three Musketeers?”
“Well, it sounds a whole lot nicer than the Three Stooges,” Jenny said, a little defensiveness creeping into her tone.
“Oh no, honey, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fine. It’s just that’s what they called themselves when they were alive, and I think it’s funny that’s what you came up with to call them after death, without knowing it before.”
“Oh,” she said, mollified. “Okay, then. As long as you weren’t making fun of me.”
“Perish the thought,” I said.
“Well, did you?” She persisted.
“Make fun of you?” I asked. “Maybe a little, but—“
“No, silly! Did you kiss him?” She barreled right past me into the living room and stared at me, then her eyes got big and she froze. “Somebody was here.”
I didn’t take another step into the house. “Are they gone?” I whispered, moving back out the door, trying hard not to make any noise.
“Yeah, they’re gone now,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. There’s nobody here but us. I can kinda…sense, I guess, living people now. I can feel them. Y’all, I mean.”
That was new to me. I hadn’t heard of spirits being able to sense the presence of the living. It kinda made sense, I reckon, since there are some living people who can feel ghosts when they’re around. “And you’re sure nobody is in there?”
“No, nobody’s nearby but you. I can feel Mr. Martin in his bedroom next door, and Mrs. Cline over on the other side. I can even kinda feel the Jenkins kids home alone on the other side of Mrs. Cline, but that’s all.”
“Johnny, can you do that?” I asked. He was standing behind me, looking worried. He shook his head. I wasn’t too surprised by that. I learned a long time ago that ghosts have different abilities. Johnny can’t talk, and Jenny can. Both of them can move around freely, while some ghosts are stuck near a specific place. That sort of thing.
I turned back to Jenny. “How can you tell somebody was here if they’ve already left? Do people leave some kind of psychic residue behind?”
She looked at me, confused for a minute, then laughed. “Oh! No, there’s a busted pane of glass in your back door, and a muddy footprint in the dining room. I saw it, that’s all.”
“Dammit!” I said, stomping into the house, flipping on every light I passed. Sure enough, broken glass lay scattered all over the floor of my mud room, and there were several muddy footprints on my linoleum. “I just mopped this yesterday, now some son of a bitch had to come in here and make a damn mess.”
“Miss Lila Grace, do you really think that’s what you oughta be upset about right now?” Jenny asked. I turned, and saw Sheriff Johnny flitting from room to room behind her. He walked over to us, held up his hands in a helps gesture, and shrugged.
“Nothing’s missing?” I asked.
Johnny shook his head.
“So something is missing?”
He shook his head again.
“Hold up one finger if you can’t see anything missing, two fingers if you can.” Sometimes working with a deaf-mute dead law enforcement officer is downright exasperating.
Johnny held up one finger. It is a mark of the level of gentleman that his mother raised that he used his index finger instead of a more demonstrative digit.
“So somebody broke in here just to…what? Track mud all over my kitchen? Hell, they could have waited until morning and come to the front door. Really piss me off and track dirt across the carpets.”
“I think they were looking for this stuff,” Jenny said. She stood at the dining room table, looking over the notes I had written from my interviews and the crime scenes. I walked over to join her and picked up one of the yellow legal pads I kept all my thoughts and theories on.
“What makes you say that, Jenny?” I asked. I saw Johnny standing behind the girl nodding, so obviously he thought the same thing.
“Everything is a little too neat. You left things kinda lying all scattered around, because you knew wasn’t nobody but you going to need to use the table. But now everything is in neat stacks, with everything perfectly straight.
I took another look at the table. With the exception of the legal pad I’d just laid down, she was right. Everything was at perfect 90-degree angles, and every pile was now a neat stack. I looked a little closer, and all the stacks were organized by type of information, too. Interviews were in one stack, crime scene notes in another, stuff I thought of while talking to Jenny in another. Whoever went through my things left my house in better shape than they found it, except for the broken glass.
“Well, shit,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” Jenny asked. “I mean, besides the obvious.”
“Now I have to call Willis. And I was going to make him call me.”
by john | May 26, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
You could blame it all on Bram Stoker. He invented the Brides of Dracula, though they’re never actually called that in the novel. They don’t even get names. I devoured Dracula over the course of two days at an impressionable age. I fell in love with the dark and brooding atmospherics, but it’s more than just a scary story. Dracula is a brilliant critique of Victorian society, commenting on sexual mores, class conflict, even British foreign policy toward Eastern Europe. My vampire trilogy Daughters of Shadow and Blood is in many ways an homage to Bram Stoker’s original and explores many of the same themes, including the dangers of obsession, the conflict between the desire for freedom and the constraints of society, and the redemptive power of love.
You could also blame a movie called Van Helsing. In my opinion, this is a very bad movie, despite the presence of Kate Beckinsale, but it sparked the idea for Daughters of Shadow and Blood. In the movie the Brides have names and distinctive costumes. One of them is even dressed as a Turkish harem girl, which got me to thinking. If Dracula is immortal, there’s no reason the Brides have to all come from the same time period, and the Balkan Peninsula is such a crossroads of cultures, they could be from anywhere, too. I decided I would give each Bride her due and let her tell her story.
Then again, you cold blame my obsession with Balkan history. They say truth is stranger than fiction. Balkan history plays that out.
There is a small mountain range in Greece called the Unwritten. It’s called that because when the Ottoman Turks conquered the area, the resident Greeks took to the high ground and waged guerrilla warfare on their would-be conquerors for the next five hundred years. Rather than embarrass the Sultan by showing him an area of his empire not entirely under his control, his cartographers simply left the entire mountain range off the official maps.
The mountain range that separates Albania from Kosovo is called the Accursed Mountains. Tell me that name wouldn’t be at home on a map of Middle Earth.
There’s also the story of the epic rivalry between the Karageorgevi? and Obrenovi? families for the throne of Serbia and later Yugoslavia, better than any soap opera.
Oh, and the word vampire comes from Serbian.
I included as many such weird little nuggets in Daughters of Shadow and Blood as I could, seemingly odd historical events that could have been the result of a vampire’s not-so-benevolent intervention. You can’t prove otherwise.
Follow these links to get the trilogy:
Book I: Yasamin https://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Shadow-Blood-Book-Yasamin-ebook/dp/B00T27F00W/
Book II: Elena https://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Shadow-Blood-Book-Elena-ebook/dp/B01D0UD0XA/
Book III: Elizabeth https://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Shadow-Blood-Book-Elizabeth-ebook/dp/B07257D727/
Follow me on twitter: @jmattsaunders
by john | May 25, 2017 | Appearances
ConCarolinas is next week, and I’ll be there, as always! This year is going to be something special, because we’ll be launching Lawless Lands (which you can totally pre-order now from your favorite digital store), and we’re doing a live Authors & Dragons podcast with THE ENTIRE CAST! I’m really excited to hang out with the boys at my home con, and it’s going to be very cool to actually meet Steve Wetherell and Joseph Brassey for the first time.
So if you want to come hang out, here’s where to find me –
Friday
4PM – I Talk of Dreams – Shakespeare and Fantasy stuff.
5PM – You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive – A Justified Panel at a SF/F Con? YUP!
6PM – Hold Onto the Light – I’m fucked up. You’re fucked up. Come be fucked up together, and learn how to help other people. Bring tissues.
7PM – Princess Alethea’s Traveiling Sideshow – I will read redneck poetry while other people do similarly silly thins.
Saturday
10AM – Going for the Laughs – Can anyone be funny at ten in the morning? If it’s possible, this gang will do it!
12:30PM – An Hour with Sherrilyn Kenyon – come join me as I interview our Writer Guest of Honer
3PM – Falstaff Books Spotlight – See what’s out and what’s coming soon!
6PM – Authors & Politics – Not a comedy panel. Well, maybe.
10PM – Authors & Dragons live podcast – Definitely a comedy panel. Be drunk when you arrive. We will be.
Sunday
11AM – An Hour with Sherrilyn Kenyon – if she’s still speaking to me after Saturday. 🙂
To find out who else will be where, go to www.concarolinas.org.
by john | May 23, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Let’s talk about social media, shall we? I know, you’re probably tired as fuck of hearing about social media. You’re either baffled by the idea of social media, because you don’t really do the technology thing, or you’re paralyzed by anxiety about social media, because you hate dealing with people and are terrified that someone might talk to you, or you’re annoyed with social media, because people like me keep telling you to use social media and you have no idea what is the right way to do it, and you wish someone would just tell you exactly what to do and then you could do it and get on with your life, but you don’t want it to take up too much of your writing time, because you already have a day job, and kids, and hobbies, and other family, and can barely squeeze in an hour each day to write, and now some asshole has you reading these blog posts every week about how to sell books when what the fuck does he even know about how to sell books anyway?
Does that pretty much sum it up?
I thought so. Look, social media is, at its core, two thing. It is a way for friends to communicate with each other, and it is a way for companies to get their name out in front of customers. There are a lot of types of social media, and it is very easy to drive yourself absolutely bonkers trying to keep up with what the cool kids are using. Is it Instagram? Is it Tumblr? Is it Pinterest? Is it Twitter? Is it Facebook? Is it MySpace?
Here’s a hint – it ain’t MySpace. But any of the others are perfectly valid places to spend time interacting with people and telling them about your books, your life, your cat (people fucking love cat pictures), your poop (less love for the poop pictures), or your kids (they might love or hate kid pictures). It’s all about what you want to focus on. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on scheduled posts on Facebook and Twitter, because that’s what I do. I do scheduled posting on Facebook and Twitter because it’s easy and I can do it without taking up too much of my writing time.
A lot of people will tell you that this kind of shotgun, junk mail posting on social media is worthless, annoying, and will alienate fans. I will tell you that on weeks that I do not do scheduled posts, I see an average of 10% less sales than on weeks where I do scheduled posts. I sell between 30-50 books per day, depending on the month and the recent releases, so we’ll say I average 275 books per week. So I sell about 28 books more in weeks that I do scheduled posting. That’s worth around $75 cash.
That is more money than I am willing to leave lying on the ground for the hour that it takes me to schedule a week’s worth of Facebook and Twitter posts.
I also do a lot of organic Facebook posting, sharing, and interacting with people. I don’t hang out on Twitter a ton, but I go on there every once in a while and go on a retweet or liking binge. But I hang out on FB a lot, so I do a lot of organic activity there in addition to my structured posts.
Here’s the way I set it up each week. I block out about an hour on Saturday or Sunday (the days of the week I am most likely to not write) to do my social media. I have created Word documents with pre-written tweets that I copy and paste from. Yes. this is time-consuming on the front end, but if you write 2-4 different tweets for every product you release, and save them all in a master document, it’s really easy to stay on top of it. If you’re coming into this with 25 backlist titles, that’s going to be a pain. Too bad. It’s still worth it.
All this is my opinion. None of my opinions are humble. That’s your last caveat. From here on out, we’re presenting this as the Gospel According to Hartness. Don’t like it? You don’t have to read it. You are welcome to do your social media however you like. This is what I do, and how to copy what I do. If you want to do it, go for it.
So – I have a Word document with 2-3 prewritten tweets for each thing that I have out there. That’s every book, every audiobook, this website, my Patreon, my mailing list, and my podcast. I don’t promote everything every week. Some stuff is older backlist stuff that I just promote when I don’t have a new release. Some stuff I just rotate through. My Patreon gets promoted every week, my newsletter gets promoted every week, and this website gets promoted every week, These things are evergreen, and I always want as many eyes on them as possible, so I make sure they get promoted. Any new releases get promoted first, then new audio releases, then most recent releases. I try to promote at least one product from each of my three main series every week.
I use Hootsuxte to aggregate my tweets and auto-schedule them. Because I’m an early adopter, the plan I’m on costs me less than $10 each month. The same plan now costs $15/month, which is still a bargain. Because ain’t nobody got time to sit down every day and schedule a shitload of Twittering.
I set things up so that I send out a tweet (which cross-posts to Facebook on my timeline, my author page, the Falstaff Books FB page, and the Falstaff Twitter feed) every hour on the hour between 9AM EST and 6PM EST. That’s ten messages every day promoting me and my work. I do this Monday – Saturday, with the idea that fewer people look at Twitter on Sunday, so that’s often the day I’m using to build the following week’s posts.
Then I go back through and send one message per day for every product that Falstaff Books has published or has scheduled for pre-release. Every book we’ve ever done gets promoted every day, once per day. It’s all I can do, because we have a promotional budget of somewhere near seventy-five cents, and this fits within that budget.
I try to make the messages funny and interesting. I use Bit.ly to build all the links, because I can shorten them, and it offers some tracking. I used to embed my Amazon Associates link in the messages, but someone pointed out that it was against the Amazon Associates TOC, so I stopped.
But that’s it. I end up programming somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 tweets per week, and it takes me less than an hour. It will take you time to get the list of messages built, but once you have that established, you can get all this done in not a ton of time.
Is this better than real engagement with your buying public? Not by a long shot. Is this better than sitting around bemoaning the lack of sales? Yes, by a long shot. If commercials and junk mail and spam weren’t effective, we wouldn’t get so much of it. And you’re not just sending out ads for dick pills, you’re telling people who actually like you and/or your work what’s going on with you. This is much more targeted than that email about your schlong or the RedPlum flyer in your mailbox yesterday. So give it a shot. I find it valuable, maybe you will too.
By the way, I’m working on the page to let y’all buy autographed paperbacks from me. If you want to check it out, click the link that says “Autographed Books” at the top of this page. Thanks!
by john | May 22, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
15
Tommy Braxton waved at us from the bar when we walked into The Garden Cafe. I was a bit underdressed for the clientele Tommy wanted to attract, but about right for the clientele he actually had, so I didn’t mind sitting down in the closest thing that part of Union County had to a fancy steakhouse. Sheriff Dunleavy even pulled my chair out for me like a real gentleman and everything.
Leslie, Tommy’s youngest daughter, came over as soon as we were settled, and handed us menus. There were about three other tables occupied, two of them with elderly couples having dinner so they could drive home before it got full-on dark, and one a family with a young child sitting in a booster seat and trying in vain to have a decent dinner out with a toddler. I figured it was their first child and they just didn’t know any better. In a couple years, they’d be fine, but right now everything the poor little boy did was either a crisis or the greatest thing in the world.
I have always loved children, it’s why I spent so many years teaching Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. When I was a child myself, I wanted to grow up, get married, and have a house just bursting at the seams with young’s.
But as I grew older, I realized that my particular gifts make it hard to keep a relationship, thanks to odd hours that ghosts decide to visit me, and the general creepiness that most people see in somebody who actually converses with dead people, instead of just talking at them like most folks do. Add to that the unfortunate tendency of lingering ghosts to be nosy as hell, and I was not what most people would consider a “catch.” So children weren’t really in the cards for me. But I have been blessed with hundreds of boys and girls who love their “Miss Lila Grace,” and most of the time that’s been enough for me.
“Never wanted any, or never had the chance?” Willis asked.
My head whipped back around to look at him, and he just gave me a wistful smile. “Same here,” he said. “I always wanted them, but my ex-wife didn’t, and now it just seems a little late in the game.”
“I reckon that is one of the hazards of having dinner with a detective, ain’t it?” I asked. “He’s liable to know more than you want to let on.”
“Could be, except I’m not a detective anymore. I reckon I’m as close as what we’ve got for this mess, but if I’d wanted to keep dealing with murderers, I would have stayed in Milwaukee.”
“Is that where you’re from, Sheriff?”
“Willis,” he corrected.
“I’m sorry. Is that where you’re from, Willis?”
He gave me one of those little half-smiles again, the kind he had started doing when he knew I was being a smart-aleck but didn’t want to call me out on it. I kinda liked it. “That’s not where I’m from, originally, but I lived and worked there for thirty years, so I reckon it’s kinda where I’m from now.”
“Where are you from, originally?” I asked.
“Carrboro,” he said. “Just outside Chapel Hill.”
“I know it,” I said. “I knew a girl from there when I was in school. We went to Winthrop together.”
“I didn’t know you went to college,” he said.
“I did. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English literature and proceeded to do nothing with it for most of my adult life,” I said.
“Never wrote the Great American Novel,” he asked, that teasing smile back for a second.
“No, I never wanted to be a writer. I thought I would teach, but that didn’t work out for me.” That brought back some unpleasant memories, and I guess they showed on my face, because Dunleavy wasted no time in poking that sore spot.
“What happened?” He asked. I looked up at him, and he shrugged. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I just thought it might be better dinner conversation than dead girls in cars in lakes.”
Of course the second he says the words “dead girls,” Tommy’s girl walks up with her little notepad out to take our food orders. The poor child looked so scandalized I couldn’t decided whether to laugh or cry, so I decided to fake a coughing fit and run to the bathroom, leaving Willis on his own to dig his way out of that one. It served him right, sticking his nose into everybody’s business. I washed my hands, splashed a little cold water on my face, and freshened up my lipstick before I walked back to the table, mostly composed.
“I hope you like escargot,” Willis said as I sat back down. “Because I ordered you an anchovy appetizer with an escargot main course. It’s the least I could do to thank you for leaving me in that mess.”
“I love snails,” I said, hoping desperately that he was teasing, but completely unwilling to ask him if he was.
“Just like I love explaining to high school girls that I am not a serial killer while their father has his hand on a sawed-off shotgun under the bar,” he said.
“I believe you were telling me about growing up in Carrboro,” I said, changing the subject.
“I wasn’t, but I will. I grew up there, and went to Chapel Hill. I studied Political Science, and was looking at law school when I decided to become a cop instead.”
“What brought on that change?” I asked.
“A kid I grew up with got shot in the head trying to buy coke from the wrong guy in the wrong part of town. The Durham police didn’t have a lot of time to look into the case of another dead black kid that summer, so I decided I’d become a cop to try and keep that from happening to anybody else.”
“That’s admirable,” I said. He looked up at me to see if I was picking at him again, but his shoulders relaxed when he saw I was sincere. I was, too. A life of putting yourself in harm’s way for the benefit of others is nothing to sneer at.
“Well, when I applied, I couldn’t get a job at any of the departments near home, and my dad had a sister who lived in Milwaukee. So I went to live with Aunt Gina for a while, got a job as a beat cop in the city, and worked my way up. Put in my thirty, got my city pension, and decided to come back home where I wouldn’t ever have to shovel snow again.”
“And where there’s a lot less chance of somebody shooting at you,” I added.
“That was a part of the thinking, yes. I’m not as fast as I used to be, so I wanted to go somewhere that the pace was a little slower, and a little safer. A man gets past fifty, he starts to think he probably wants to see sixty or seventy. A big city police department is no easy place to get old.”
“A woman does the same thing, Sheriff,” I said.
“You’ve heard,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Lila Grace, you play the old woman card pretty well, but if you’re a day over forty-five, I’ll eat my hat.”
I blushed a little. It had been a long time since a man commented positively on the way I looked, especially given my typical style of dress, and I had to admit, it felt good. I tried not to show it, though, as I grinned across the table at Willis. “Do you want some Texas Pete, or A-1 sauce, Sheriff? Because I’m fifty-years old, and proud of every one of them.”
“Well, I reckon there is something to be said for clean living after all, because you sure don’t look it,” he said.
“Thank you, Willis. You haven’t done too badly yourself, for an old coot.” We both grinned a little bit. “So how did you end up all the way down here? Were you reading obituaries nationwide looking for dead Sheriffs and police chiefs?”
He looked a little abashed, but chuckled as he said, “Well, almost. I set up a Google search for municipal job listings for a sheriff or chief of police position in a town of less than fifty thousand. This one popped up, and the county council was pretty happy to have somebody with my experience apply. Nothing against Sheriff Johnny, but the impression I got was that he wasn’t the most up-to-date in his techniques.”
I almost spit sweet tea across the table at him laughing. “You could say that. Johnny kept a baseball bat autographed by Buford T. Pusser hanging on the wall of his office. That was his hero, and his favorite movie was Chiefs. A fine piece of literature, I will agree, but not exactly what I’d call the forefront of police methodology.”
“What happened to him?” Willis asked. “I get that it wasn’t anything in the line of duty, but nobody seems willing to discuss it. Was he out with the wrong woman, or something?”
I laughed again. If he kept this up, the poor man was going to think I thought he was a moron. “No, nothing like that. I reckon it would be a little embarrassing, because he was caught with his pants down, after a fashion. Johnny was a fisherman, and he liked his liquor, like most fishermen do. Hell, most people around here like a drink or two. Well, Johnny was out in his little bass boat just tooling along Broad River, and he had him a jar, like he would most Sunday mornings. Johnny wasn’t much of a church-goer, you know. He said he felt like if God needed him, he’d know where to find him. Well, I reckon God needed him, because that Sunday morning, he found him, and he took him, right there in his boat.”
“What’s embarrassing about that? The fact that he was drinking? I can’t imagine anybody would care about that,” he said.
“Well,” I hesitated before going on, then I figured he was going to hear it eventually, might as well be over a good meal. “It wasn’t so much the drinking, or the fishing, as it was the fact of exactly how he went, that might be considered less than dignified.”
Willis made on of those “go on” motions with his hand, and took a sip of tea with his other. I waited for him to swallow before I went on, not relishing the idea of getting a faceful of the sweet beverage.
“He fell out of the boat taking a leak, hit his head on a rock, and drowned.” I said it all in a rush, so as to get it out all at once, like ripping off a bandage.
Willis did what just about everybody that hears the story of poor Sheriff Johnny’s demise does. He stared at me for a second, then his shoulders shook, kinda like a convulsion, then he couldn’t hold it back anymore and the laughter just blew right out of him like a cannonball. He laughed for about a solid minute before he wiped his eyes with his napkin and got himself under control.
“That has got to be the craziest death story for a cop I have ever heard, and like I said, I been at this for better than thirty years. I’ve heard more than one story about somebody getting caught with his pants down, but there’s usually a jealous husband, or wife, involved in those. This has got to be the first time I’ve ever heard of death by pissing. Damn, no wonder the poor man can’t move on. He’s got a lot to atone for before he feels like his legacy is secure again.”
I gave a little chuckle of my own. “Oh, that ain’t why Johnny’s sticking around.”
“So why is he still here? Waiting on somebody to catch the catfish that ate his nuts?”
“Don’t be crude,” I said. He held up both hands in apology, and I gave him a little grin to let him know that if it was crude, it was at least a little funny, too. “No, he’s just here until he decides if you’re a good enough replacement. If not, he’ll be here ’til somebody better comes along.”
Willis leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Huh,” he said, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “He really loved this town, didn’t he?”
“The Thomases have been in Union County since they came over from England. His people have been here for hundreds of years. There’s a whole row of the cemetery with nothing but his kin. So yeah, he loved this place and its people. Still does, as a matter of fact.”
He leaned forward, fixing me with those blue, blue eyes. “You do too, don’t you?”
I thought for a second before I answered. “I do. It don’t matter if not all of them love me. It don’t matter if some of them think the things I can do make me a bad person, or mean I’m in league with some dark power. For every one of them, there’s somebody like Gene over at Sharky’s. Somebody I can help when nobody else can.”
“Somebody like Jenny Miller,” Willis said, his voice soft.
“Somebody just like Jenny Miller,” I agreed.
“You know we’ll find him, right Lila Grace?”
“The killer?” I asked. “Yeah, I know. We’ll find him, and we’ll make sure he pays for what he did to those poor girls.”
“Yes we will. But right now, I think we have something more important to focus our attention on.” He sat up a little straighter and motioned Tommy’s little girl over to the table. He smiled at the child when she arrived, and gave me a wink.
“And just what could that be, Sheriff?” I was starting to enjoy this side of Sheriff Willis Dunleavy. He was a sharp man, one that could be deep in conversation one second, and light-hearted and teasing the next. The man had layers. I liked that.
“Dessert, Lila Grace. We need to decide if we want to try the apple cobbler or the pecan pie.”
“Well, I do have you at an unfair advantage here, Sheriff,” I replied, smiling at the waitress. “Because I happen to know that this girl’s Granny Hope made a fresh peach cobbler just this afternoon, because I saw her this morning on the way to Farmer Black’s peach shed, and there ain’t nothing better this side of the county that Theresa Hope’s peach cobbler. So why don’t you get us a couple plates of that, darling, and you won’t even have to bother telling us about it?”
The girl grinned and turned around with a little flounce. “Yes ma’am, and I’ll be sure to tell Granny what you said about her cobbler. She’ll really appreciate it.”
I leaned forward when the girl was out of earshot. “That child’s grandmother thinks I had sexual congress with the devil himself to learn how to talk to dead people. Poor girl is going to be praying until daylight if she mentions my name in her presence. The old biddy can make a cobbler like nobody’s business, though.”
by john | May 19, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
I know, I missed a week or two. Sorry. I had conventions, then I had to get over conventions, then life…but anyway, there are a bunch of great Evolution posts coming in the next few weeks, featuring books by amazing writers, including this one, by Lauren Harris. I’ve read Unleash, and this is a helluva kickoff to a new Urban Fantasy series. You should definitely check it out!
If you know me, you know that nine times out of ten, I will gravitate toward characters with swords rather than guns, so UNLEASH was a fat raccoon in the kitchen cupboard–wholly unexpected.
It came at me while I was on my third version of my first novel. Frustrated by an inability to get it past the Revise & Resubmit stage with agents, I shelled out for a novel revision class. While I followed a writing prompt, the first seeds of UNLEASH took root.
I probably wouldn’t have written the book if not for the confluence of several events on October 31st, 2010.
I had come back from Japan mere weeks before and was depressed, isolated, and stuck in rural NC.
- I needed distance from my first book
- I was eager to implement the outlining tools I’d gathered while revising my first book.
- I wanted to prove to myself I could finish a second book.
- NaNoWriMo LITERALLY started the next day.
The moment I realized I needed to write another book, the scene from that exercise sprang to mind. I scrounged up some note cards and hammered out a rough outline of a book I was then calling HELLHOUND.
Okay, so, my outline was almost worthless. I had 24 hours to plot, worldbuild, and develop characters. You know this first draft was a dump. I mean, I ditched a second POV within a few chapters, requiring some structural gymnastics I was not yet skilled enough to accomplish.
Lots of stuff didn’t survive that first draft. There were demons, Celtic ancestor flashbacks, and the bad-guy was immortal. Helena was a fake college student and there was some weird, second-dimension demon gate stuff that I don’t really understand now. All these things were better left on the book-journey’s roadside, though I will forever regret losing the scene where Helena–a shapeshifter–gets arrested while trying to sneak back into her window. Naked.
…which is how I learned that women can’t get charged with indecent exposure in the state of North Carolina. My Sheriff’s Deputy brother sometimes worries about the questions I ask him.
I started writing this book in November of 2010 and finished it that February. That original novel went through an arduous attempt to change it from third to first person before I realized it was the novel equivalent of the money-sink renovation. It was cheaper to just bulldoze the lot and build from all new materials.
After multiple drafts of my first book, I was loathe to get dragged back into the rewrite spiral. So I shoved the manuscript in a drawer, where the ideas fermented and matured while I improved my craft and published novellas and short stories. Finally, I outlined and drafted a book that–though it kept the same main characters and basic plot trajectory–bore absolutely no resemblance to the story I had in 2011.
That book is UNLEASH. Sign up for my mailing list get an exclusive excerpt and a reminder when the book hits the shelves.
Already think you want it? (You do.) It’s available right now, so go grab it!
(Link: www.laurenbharris.com/unleash )
