Tag Archives: fiction

Get some of my fiction. Pay whatever you want.

by

2

Close Encounters cover

Close Encounters cover

I just got this from the folks at Apex Publishing.

Right now you can grab the eBook of Close Encounters of the Urban Kind and pay what you want over at Smashwords. That means you can grab it for free, toss a coin in the hat, or pay list price. It doesn’t matter. We only want you to get a copy of the book and read.

This link takes you straight to the book page: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/14757

Smashwords provides the book in a number of formats including mobi (Kindle), PDB (Palm), LRF (Sony), ePub, and PDF.

I contributed a story to this anthology — “Gloomy Sunday.” If you’ve been curious about this story, this is a great way to check it out. As mentioned, you can pay what you want, but I’d appreciate if you came back here and left me a comment to tell me what you thought of it.

Pre-Order Now for “Close Encounters of the Urban Kind”

by

0

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Cover of "Close Encounters of the Urban Kind"

Cover of "Close Encounters of the Urban Kind"

Long story short: an anthology I’ve been published in is open for pre-orders. Buying a copy would be awesome.

Details: Pre-ordering opened today for Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, the fiction anthology by Apex Book Company. This anthology features my short story, “Gloomy Sunday.” It’s about a washed-up private detective, his government-employed ex-girlfriend, and a song that kills people. While the story isn’t directly tied to any events in Whitechapel, it does share elements with it (most notably the Lacuna organization, a first-person narration style, and a tendency for me to be really horrible to my protagonists).

The special pre-order price is $15.95, and the book will be available for sale in April 2010. If you’ve been a fan of Whitechapel so far, picking up a copy of this book would be a great way to support me.

The link to the pre-order page is here:

http://www.apexbookstore.com/collections/frontpage/products/close-encounters-of-the-urban-kind-edited-by-jennifer-brozek

What novel should I write?

by

0

Between encouragement (well, mocking) from my family and a few people at work keen on the idea, I’m seriously considering giving National Novel Writing Month a try this year. Which means I have to start outlining… well, now.

I’ve actually wanted to try NaNoWriMo for about five years now, but I’ve never had a chance to. This year I actually do, and I have the energy for it as well — Whitechapel has really gotten me excited about writing longer pieces of fiction. While I’ve written whole books before, I haven’t ever even tackled a novel before, so this will be totally new to me.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t had ideas for novels all this time. In fact, I’ve had several. I’ve managed to narrow it down to five that I have interest in and notes for, but I’m having a hard time choosing, so I wanted to see what y’all thought. I won’t necessarily go with the most popular option — it might be that I look at that option and go "Ugh," which means that I really had my heart set on another idea and didn’t realize it — but it will help me boil my options down to one. Here are the "elevator pitches" for each, and any pros or cons against them.

  • As The Devil Drives: A demon-possessed mobster runs afoul of a washed-up detective who has seen things most people won’t believe. (Horror detective fiction) This is actually a novel I wrote a chapter or two on a while back, but I could never get moving on it. In feel it would be pretty close to Whitechapel, which means I might want to consider something a little different to change it up.
  • Night Fall: A witty female vampire hunter gets caught up in the society of the local undead who are all idiots. (Comedic modern fantasy) This is actually what started the idea of NaNoWriMo going — a parody of various female vampire hunter novels out there. Of course, this is pretty close to what I do for a living, so it’s got a similar strike against it as "As The Devil Drives" in terms of mood overlap.
  • Terrifying Disappointment: The salvage crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment find that they are the only hope left in their sector of space against an alien menace. (Comedic sci-fi) I’ve been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi recently, so this idea is pretty fresh to me, but it would be two genres I’ve never done before.
  • The Bureau: A group of empowered individuals work together in secret to defeat a race of dimensional creatures from taking over the world. (Modern pulp superheroes) This is a pretty old idea that I’ve been poking at again recently. I like the idea, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s a novel or something else.
  • Thy Kingdom Come: The War of Heaven comes to Earth in the late 19th century. (Dramatic alt history) Another old idea, and not something I’ve worked on recently, but I did a lot of research a few years ago, and I’m pretty sure I still have all those notes somewhere.

So, if youhave a second, click on the titles you think are interesting/would be interesting for me to write/think I would have fun writing. You can choose as many as you want — again, I’m not looking for hard data, but just collecting some random opinions to give me something to mull over and help me narrow these choices down.

(Note: Poll is not working for some, so if you can’t vote, just toss your thoughts in a comment, tweet them to me on Twitter, or email me.)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Writing and writing and writing

by

0

New & Noteworthy Books

Image by olinlibref via Flickr

Before I start, I need a moment.

Ahem.

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST I’M GOING TO BE PUBLISHED IN A FICTION ANTHOLOGY.

Whew. There. Now that that’s out of my system, "Gloomy Sunday" has been confirmed as one of the stories in the upcoming Close Encounters of the Urban Kind by Apex Publishing. This is awesome for a couple of reasons: it’s only the second time I’ve been paid for my straight fiction (the first was "Questions" for the Pseudopod podcast), and it’s the first time I’ve been invited into an anthology instead of blindly submitting a story for consideration. I have a chance to do a polish and reformatting pass before the editor gives me redlines. And then, at some point in the future, the awesome happens.

But no time to slow down. I’ve been chugging along on Whitechapel, and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s turning out. I’ve been babbling about my writing process on that project quite a bit — you can check out my post-mortems if you’re interested.

And because my brain doesn’t have enough going on, I’ve been poking around with an older project for the past few days — a weird kind of pulp superhero universe. It’s something I’ve kicked around for a few years now, but it’s been intermingled with some other projects in my head, and I’m in the process of slowly extracting them so I can focus on fleshing out those elements. Originally I had a few different OpenOffice documents that I was trying to keep notes in, but it was hard to keep track of all the interconnections, so I’m now putting all my notes into a TiddlyWiki page. My time running a Scion cycle on Obsidian Portal has helped me to think of ways to use a wiki for cross-referencing world information and characters. Of course, I don’t have any plans to work on comic scripts or a superhero RPG, so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with it just yet, but I’m sure I’ll have some fun with it at some point.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

More Awesome Internet Serials

by

0

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

One week until the launch of Whitechapel! If you’re looking for other free Internet serials to fill your time with while you wait, I have four other sites you should check out.

Jet Pack is a central point for the fiction of three extremely talented writers: Chuck Wendig, Will Hindmarch and Wood Ingham. I’m particularly into Wood’s sci-fi novella “Memory Sticks.”

And if you can’t get enough Chuck Wendig, he and Marty Henley just launched The Storyverse, a dueling serial that trades off between Chuck and Marty every week. It’s… well it’s… there’s kind of a sci-fi thing… with pirates… and pulp… kinda. It’s awesome, and they’re big supporters of the Project (they even changed their release date so as not to conflict with the launch of Whitechapel), so go check out their work.

I’ve always been a fan of Mur Lafferty, and she’s been doing some of her own serial work in a multimedia story called “Her Side.” I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably start catching up really soon. I understand it can be a bit disturbing, but if you’re waiting for horror goodness from me, you’ll probably like Mur’s work just fine.

Finally, I have been ordered by Filamena Young to go check out Tim Pratt’s Bone Shop. It’s a donation-funded urban fantasy novella that’s only a few weeks old, so now is a good time to check it out.

Once you’ve read all that, come back here and get ready for episode 1!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]