Hell and High Water launches!

It's here! Book 1 of the North Florida Trilogy: http://tinyurl.com/5uuk78j

This is the first volume of a threesome of novels I and my writing partner P. V. LeForge have been working on (and off) for too many years to mention, but now it's done!

Don't have a Kindle? No problem - download Amazon's free app Kindle for PC and read it right on your computer!

The book is located on Smashwords.com as well as on Amazon. Download the Kindle, Nook, Sony, iPad, Kobo, and whatever format you want from Smashwords. And yes, you can read it on your PC in several different formats: Kindle, ePub, PDF, HTML and more.

By mid-November 2011, it will be available in trade paperback on Amazon (Black Bay Books, ISBN: 978-0-9624878-6-6).  

What's in the works?

As much as my company, Kitsune Books, would like to take over my life completely and suck up every available moment for its own dark purposes, I have recently been diligent about setting time aside for my own writing. That means I have some projects underway and a few completed.

I've just completed a short story titled "The Real Deal," for a horror fiction anthology I was invited to submit to. Hope they'll like it. Involves a visit to an S&M parlour with unexpected consequences.

A bigger project is a new novel, The Cornerstone, which has been simmering for several years and is now at the bubbling-over stage, where it's writing itself in my head no matter what else I'm doing. Time to get serious about it and bring it to life.  Basic premise: what happens when you try to catch a banshee? The results aren't pretty... maybe even a little messy, and highly unpredictable!

 I've also been hatching another long-term project with my writing partner of many years, P. V. LeForge. Watch for the emergence of Hell and High Water, Book 1 of our North Florida Trilogy series. What genre is it? Who the hell knows...we'll let readers decide, if it matters at all. More on this soon! 

And the winner is...

Congratulations to Kat Whittaker, winner of the Earth's Book Nook giveaway contest!

Kat wins Books 1 and 2 of my dark urban fantasy novel series (Thin Line Between and Shaman's Blood).

Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest! 

Preparing a ms. for submission

Excellent advice from JournalStone Acquisitions Editor Joel Kirkpatrick on preparing your ms. for submission. This particular essay focuses on the value of careful in-depth editing (not the same as proofing or copyediting): Read more...

Interview with Heather Powers

Be sure to check out my interview with Heather Powers at Earth's Book Nook:

www.earthsbooknook.blogspot.com
www.earthsbooknook.wordpress.com

Comment on the interview and you'll be placed in a drawing to win the set of novels Thin Line Between and Shaman's Blood!

Rosemary Beach Writers Conference 2011

Spent most of this past week in beautiful Rosemary Beach, Florida, attending a stellar writers' conference masterminded by prolific south Florida novelist John Dufresne. Teaching master classes along with John were poet Michael Hettich, author/editor Lynne Barrett, and novelist Laura Lee Smith, plus a number of other writers (including myself) rounding out the faculty.

Although a small conference, I must say it was one of the best-run, most precisely organized conferences of this type I've taken part in. Excellent camaraderie, well-paced daily events, and inspirational surroundings: a combo hard to beat. Rosemary Beach is like a postcard from some vaguely European village. Sure, it's all faux Paris or Austria or Milan or Barcelona...or maybe all of those tossed into a blender, but somehow it works. And with the weather cooperating, it was a great place to spend 4 days. I managed to read through several manuscripts while sitting in a shady park serenaded by a troupe of little birds warbling their hearts out.

I think the high points of the conference for me were the late afternoon/evening readings that took place each day after all the classes and discussion panels were done. I heard some amazing literary voices in a wide range of styles, and came away energized and eager to get my own writing back in gear. Completed a flash fiction story and got a good start on my next novel. Also really enjoyed the one-on-one discussions with conference attendees, some published and some not. So many fun moments... not to mention the death-by-chocolate creme brulee that nearly did me in at the tapas bar on the block where my little pensione hotel was located.

So thanks, John and everybody who took part in the conference - it was just what I needed.

Musings on Reviews

Book reviews... if you're a writer you have to live with them, like it or not.  My second dark-fantasy novel, Shaman's Blood, is shaping up to be one of those books readers either love or hate. 5 and 4 star reviewers "got" what I tried to do and loved it, while the 1 and 2 star reviewers didn't get it and didn't want to, not one bit.

So it goes. As a writer, while I don't enjoy the bad reviews, on some level I'm still pleased that a lot of people seem to be reading the book. And in this digital age where anyone with access to a computer can create a blog or join a site like Goodreads and call themselves a book reviewer, reviews carry less critical weight than they used to. If you've spent time learning the craft of writing knowledgeable, literate book reviews, you'll be slightly appalled to see that much of what passes for book reviews these days is pretty pitiful. Misunderstanding the plot and rehashing it badly is not a book review.

There are still competent reviewers out there, of course, and when you get one of those, it's like a gift from a dragon's hoard. A skillfully written book review, even an unfavorable one, can reveal things about your writing that are useful in honing your skill. It can help you spot aspects of plotting, character development, tone, diction, and so forth that you may need to work on. And praise for doing something well is golden.

How writers deal with reviews--whether positive or negative, competent or amateurish--is as personal as the books they write. I have a fantasy writer friend who becomes paralyzed when bad reviews surface. She says her muse goes into hibernation and refuses to come out, threatening to never let the author pen another word. Eventually she gets over it, but on some level, her joy of writing her books is lessened.  Another friend of mine who writes M/M mysteries & romances says he never reads his reviews. He doesn't write for reviewers and really doesn't care what they write about him, one way or the other. He writes for himself and his many fans. He's been criticized for having this attitude, but that's how he deals. And it seems to work because he sells a lot of books.

I guess my own attitude toward book reviews falls somewhere in between these two. A really poor review might leave me stunned for the time it took to read it, but unless I feel there's something useful for me to glean from the review, I let go of it and move on. This is especially true if the reviewer is not literate - I allow myself a moment to despise those types of reviews, acknowledging all the while that the so-called reviewer has just as much right to post what they think as anyone else. 

I tend not to read every review I find, but instead just look for trends. If there's something everyone mentions that was a problem for them, I take note. Or if some aspect of the book continually gets high marks, I remember to keep that going. The important thing is not to let reviews sap your writer's creative energy. As my friend says, who are you writing your books for, anyway?

I'm curious to know how other writers deal with reviews. Have you published and gotten reviewed, for better or worse? How did you deal with it, and have the reviews had any effect on your style or creative output?

Writing Weekend

I spend so much time running my small literary press Kitsune Books that I often don't leave time for my own writing ventures, sometimes going months without writing anything of my own (marketing fliers for Kitsune Books authors don't count!). So with the long Labor Day weekend at my disposal, I'm setting this weekend aside for some of my own projects that have been sitting patiently curbside, waiting for a little attention.

I also figured out how to get back into my personal Facebook account, which I'd been locked out of since the new "improved" privacy/security measures went into effect. After about six days of locked-out frustration, I finally figured out that if you click on the "Yes, this is me" button, you won't get back into your account - you'll just go around in a endless loop, always ending back on the "Your account has been temporarily locked" screen. So I finally wised up and clicked on the "No, that wasn't me" button, which then gave me a bunch of nifty ways to prove the account belongs to me. So essentially, I lied and got back in. Go figure.

The point is that I'm no longer distracted by trying to crack the FB ridiculosity code and can focus my full attention on my writing. I have this great notion for a short story (too late for JournalStone's competition, but there's still Absent Willow Review) that's been bubbling for awhile and I think is finally starting to cook. Time to get fully immersed in the wordstream and let the ideas flow. But... wait. Insert real life snake drama out in the yard, where a fat 5 1/2 foot long Diamondback decided to take up residence in the leaf litter around the carport and started challenging me a good 30 feet away when I went out to burn some trash. Bill points out this is a good thing, because there is a gradual trend evolution-wise toward rattlesnakes that don't alarm-rattle as a survival trait. Because normally when a snake rattles at a human, it (the snake) gets shot dead. Those that stay invisible survive. They're the ones you step on without seeing them. This snake was clearly not one of the new breed and did in fact get shot dead. Bill nailed it on the first shot. Not bad for self-professed "old geezer" with questionable eyesight!

But back to my story. Totally lost the thread of what I wanted to write, but was cheered by the knowledge that the Diamondback encounter I'd written for Shaman's Blood was accurate as to the sound of the rattles and the state of excitement of the warning snake. Yeesh.

Facebook FAIL

As some of you may know, I've been locked out of my personal Facebook account since last Friday, which was about the same time a bunch of new security/privacy changes went into effect. I tried to log on, and got a password/identity error screen. Tried resetting password, but every time I tried to log in with the new password, the "temporarily locked out" screen appears.  I've tried every trick I can think of to get past the "temporary locked out" screen, but nothing works. It says that if you click on Okay to indicate this is truly your account, you'll regain access within 24 hours. Obviously it doesn't work, or I'd be logged in by now.  Have sent the FB bug report numerous queries, etc. but no response.

All of which leads me to believe that maybe I can do without Facebook.  I have this nifty blog, I'm on Twitter every day, I have a Goodreads account. I guess that's all I need.  It's all I can keep up with, at any rate!

Irene and other blowhards

Watching the Weather Channel's frenzied drumbeat countdown to destruction (wait, wasn't that a Megadeth album?).  I truly wish all my friends and colleagues along the U.S. East Coast safe passage through the storm, and hope even more that the media buildup for this hurricane will turn out to be not so much.

As a Florida native, I've lived through so many hurricanes that I've lost count. Most were not as bad as expected (some were outright duds), but a few were so frightening they'll always stay in my memory. Luckily for me as a writer, I'm using those experiences to craft the opening chapter of my next novel. I think the most shocking 'cane I lived through was back when I lived in Panama City around age 8 or 9, and I remember watching my mother fill the bathtub with water in preparation for the approaching storm. The eye came right over us, and I'll never forget how I listened to the howling winds dying down and then all was silent...bright and sunny, but no usual neighborhood sounds of birds, dogs barking, etc. My parents, my sister, the family dog, and I stood around in the front yard gawking up at the sky with its deceptive bright blue eye, which lasted about 10 minutes. Then the breeze started to kick up, which turned into strong winds, and here it came again.  When it was all over, we had 3 pines down in the yard just barely missing the roof, and a live electrical wire snapping across the sidewalk in front of our house. Huge scary excitement for a young kid. And great grist for the storytelling mill.

Hoping Irene will not be as terrible as predictions are trumpeting. But then again, you shouldn't take warnings for granted. We'll see how it plays out over the weekend.  Hunker down!