'Murica! It's time to Vote!

 I've written two blurbs for my rough-drafted novel The Tornado Catcher. I will pursue traditional publishing with this one, rather than going the indie route. BUT, to get an agent interested, one needs to pique said agent's interest in taking on one's project with a catchy 30-second pitch. At least, that's what everything I've learned over the past year from writers who have landed agents tells me. 

To make voting at least a little amusing, I'm going to attach a picture to each blurb, so if you just want to read and comment 'tornado' or 'noodlers' to cast a vote, you can do that.

Without further ado, here's two different pieces for the same story:

A - 

Upon rejection for tenure, associate professor Freddo Mancha suffers a minor mental breakdown and puts in writing to the tenure committee that he can use 5G cell phone towers to pull the energy out of rotating thunderstorms. Instead of saving his seat in academia, his claims draw the interest of business and government, each with their own agenda for Mancha’s program. But storm season is a semester away, and his program isn’t going to install itself in every cell tower in the state of Oklahoma. With the help of  local deputy Stanislav Stangle, who’s intrigued with possible riches to be pulled out of thin air, Mancha must keep his program secure, while dealing with the Provost of a university that has no use for him other than the grant money his project brings in.

B - 

University of Oklahoma associate professor Freddo Mancha takes his tenure rejection as well as catfish pulled out of a riverbank by hand. While the committee doesn’t see much merit to his proposal to pull electricity out of thunderstorms, but private interests that shovel money at the Provost of the university do. Instead of firing Mancha, the Provost, the NSA and the private interests look the other way, in hopes of getting ahold of his program before it can go line. Assisted by down-on-his-luck deputy Stanislav Stangle, Mancha travels the state installing the program in every 5G tower from Ardmore to Zena. When Chad Callahan, the NSA agent tasked with tracking Mancha, decides the professor’s project has become a threat to the 400,000 people of Oklahoma’s second largest city, it sets up an electric confrontation in the shadow of a monster storm.

Let me know in the comments which pitch gets you more interested in the antics of Freddo Mancha.

Fun Times with Formatting

Last week, I uploaded my manuscript for an anthology of supernatural horror novellas, titled Blank Mesa: An Anthology of Supernatural Suspense. So far, the reception has been positive, and the eBook version of the anthology drops Sunday, January 29th. It is available for pre-order now.

Which brings me to the first challenge I encountered. Amazon's website will allow you to set up an eBook for pre-order, and, helpfully, allows you to upload changes to the eBook up to 4 days before the eBook goes live. Despite my searching through the depths of the FAQ section, I could not find a 'pre-order' setting for a paperback. So, I opted to go live with the paperback and related in last Tuesday. I ordered a proof copy. When it arrived, I found the same set of printing errors that my friend Mike found, upon receipt of his two copies. (Thanks for buying more than one!)

See if you can spot them:

This is the error I should have caught on final review.

This sentence involving kitchen knives did not show up at all in the original document, so I can only assume it was some funky formatting error going from Pages, to ePub to the KDP file.

This one too, did not show up in the original Pages doc. 

Then there's this one. A title page should always (with only rare exceptions) show up on the right hand page. It did in Pages, but by the time it got to the KDP file, it did not. 

On a positive note; free preview!

You may also notice a lack of page numbers. I got around this formatting error with the second version by uploading a PDF instead of a KDP file.

The point of all this, is that I want people to know that, if you were so kind as to order the book the first week, it will contain these errors. As of Monday, paperback copies that go out should not. Please do let me know if they do. 

If you want a second version of the book, with the errors fixed, I believe you can return it to Amazon at no cost. I will look into that and confirm, sometime over the next week. 

Or you can have a unique copy that shows you heard of my books first!

Either way, I hope you all enjoyed them, and I am working on three more stand-alone novellas and part two of Black Mesa. I plan to release anthology two in early July.

Cheers!

The Adventure Begins...

I once read that; "an adventure is something dangerous that happens to someone else a long way away." Amusingly, when I googled the quote, I couldn't even find where I originally read it. I don't know if the quote is a rephrasing, or original to the author who wrote it, though I'd imagine someone, somewhere else, wrote something smilier. At some point. Monkeys with typewriters and all that...

My point in taking up blogging again is much more about self-promotion rather than self-endangerment. Yesterday, I received the email from the hive-mind known as Amazon saying that the paperback edition of my first (of many, one hopes) book, Black Mesa, is now live and available for purchase. Right here:

https://a.co/d/3B8lYFM

Black Mesa is actually a collection of three stand-alone novellas that fall solidly in the horror genre. Don't worry, the killing and bloodletting serves a purpose. Each novella explores a theme, as all stories should, I suppose, though my novellas themes center on the themes of disaster capitalism and the atomization and alienation of individuals in contemporary America. 

Does that all sound remarkably dreary, or if you feel you could just step outside and check out the real-world effects of disaster capitalism for yourself?

Well. You're not wrong. 

Care to guess the median price of a house in this country?

The answer might horrify you more than anything I can write...

But if you'd rather explore those themes and ideas, through the lens of the supernatural, all while riding on the shoulders of characters forced to make ethical and moral decisions you might find familiar, hop on into the book.

For instance, whatever could be happening in a story involving swords, gavels, and books of forbidden lore?

Because the internet is an amusing place sometimes, and the controls on the KDP website have some quirks to them, the e-book version is available only for pre-order until the release date I set of January 29th. The website led me to believe the paperback would go live at the same time as the e-book. Not to belabor the point, but here's a link to the e-book:

https://a.co/d/cObzHq7

My father created the cover art for the book, as well as the image on the back cover of the paperback. A pair of illustrations didn't make the paperback version, so I will post both of them here:

As you can tell, the drawings are mock floorpans for the house in Distressed Property, the first of the novellas.

Currently, I'm working on four more novellas, one is the second part of the title novella Black Mesa, while the other three offer more stand alone mayhem and mysticism. 

Stay tuned, cause there's alway more...