New review

Another review for STG at fantasy book critic. Yay.

Not my strongest review, and a bit rambling and hard to follow, but over all Mahir thinks I wrote a good book that could be better. A true statement of just about everything, isn't it? (And at 'goodreads' he rated it four out of five stars.) But to be candid, I had a lot to say and STG was the best book I could have said them in at the time I wrote it.

I was also happy to see that the critic hit on several of the things I wanted to say in the book (themes....ooohh no, literaryness). STG is a story about flawed people making choices. It's about living with those choices and realizing that the choices you make don't have to define you for the rest of time. It's about relationships, it's about faith, and it's about doing what you think needs to be done, even if you know the outcome won't be in your best interest. (think 'cowboying-up')

Several of the critics also picked out the stylistic components that I was shooting for; noirish, epic themes on a personl level.

This has also been a criticism; 'angels and demons? Where's Armageddon, why such a 'small' book?'

My answer to the smallishness was that most of us make personal decisions that in the grand scheme of things are pretty small scale, they don't change the whole world, most people don't even know we have made them. But that doesn't make them unimportant. In fact the small decisions we make everyday, to show humanity, to do the right things, to be a positive and uplifting influence- rather than making the selfish or thoughtless choices, are the decisions that I think are the most important of all.

If this doesn't make sense, I suggest you read the 'Screwtape Letters' from CS Lewis, then get back to me.

iBook and Nook

STG will be coming out soon as an iBook and in Nook format. Yay.
The publisher also went through and reedited the manuscript. So all future copies (as of today) should be cleaner copies, Also Yay.

I had two reveiwers that commented on the quality of the eiditing- great book too bad it wasn't edited better. Now, before I point fingers at the publisher, these errors were in the original manuscript I sent in. One would expect them corrected, but it's hard to point to someone else for not fixing what I broke in the first place. But no more. All future editions are clean....

The Gift of the Bouda, the Novel

The novelization of my short story, 'The Gift of the Bouda', named imaginatively enough by the same name, has been sold to Salvo Press!

Yes, very cool.

I received the first .pdf proof of the edits and did another line edit. It was fun, after not having looked at the manuscript for six or eight months to go through it again. Like visiting an old friend. (I did spend a year writing it, after all, and got to know the characters rather well.) This book tells the story of John Rogers, a GWOT SF Officer bitten by a were-hyena (Bouda) and now back in the states dealing with his affliction. He drifts up to reno where he works as a part-time bouncer at a strip joint and runs afoul of a werewolf pack. Great fun. I wrote it as a noirish horror story (not crime-noir, but noir in the tight prose, but events for the MC keep deteriorating out of control) and hope you will all enjoy and buy many copies.

The novel is my second, following STG. Salvo is also a small press (like the press STG went to). Been around longer, better distribution, some books have made it big, so cross your fingers.

Beast Within 2- The Beast Unleashed

I just heard from the anthology editor today that my short story, 'The Long Road to Sanctum' has been accepted for inclusion in the Beast Within 2- the Beast Unleashed. Yay.

This is a slightly unconventional werewolf story, written as a postapocolyptic western. I had originally written this for the first Beast Within, but they accepted the Gift of the Bouda first and don't ussually accept two stories by the same author. So I shopped it around a bit, improved it with each rejection and when Beast within 2 posted, submitted again.

It will be worth the wait, as this will be a good anthology. Jenn Brozak is the editor (and top drawer), and the anthology was all invites (me too).