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Fantasy short, Seven Into the Bleak, is out

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I’m happy to announce that my third fantasy short story, Seven Into the Bleak, is now available on Amazon.com. If you enjoy your fantasy thoughtful, tense, and meaningful, you’ll enjoy this tale. Just $.99!

Seven is 8,000 words long, or about 30 paperback pages. It includes an Author’s Notes section on the how and why of the story as well as an excerpt from Sword of Kings, one of the other three fantasy shorts I have available.

Synopsis
A band of companions—each with his or her own reasons—delves deep into the heart of the Bleak, the infamous and horrifying cavern world miles beneath their own. But their dreams of a quick journey fade into black when their way home is cut off.

Tavern songs dwell on heroes returning laden with loot, fame, and glory, but rarely do they talk of the fear, and loneliness, and misery of life in the World Under the World. The group of seven is hard-pressed to simply survive—both from struggles within and without–and there will be no song to sing of the companions if they succumb to the horrors of The Bleak.

Many thanks to blog-follower Woelf, who beta-read Seven and provided several great comments and suggestions for improving the piece. If you do happen to pick up a copy, please drop by and let me know what you thought of it!

My sister, consummate reader, gets angry at Penguin

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My sister is a voracious reader and book-aholic. I have her and my mother to thank for the reading–and, later, the writing–bug that bit me early.

Reading, along with horses and dogs, is an absolute passion for her. She routinely buys whole series of authors she likes, often multiple times (her dogs think of them as chew toys), often in hard cover, often in the Kindle edition.

One of the authors she would follow anywhere on the planet, if asked, is Charlaine Harris. She specifically loves the Sookie Stackhouse series and would trade pints of blood for them if that were the going currency.

But not this time. When the latest Sookie Stackhouse book came out in Kindle format just 16 cents less than the hard cover, she lost it.

I’ll let her tell the story in her blog post, Hey Penguin, Bite Me.

Self-publishing as Meaningful Work

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There is a passage in Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing book Outliers that, at its heart, speaks volumes about why writers should self-publish.

[T]hree things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our works fulfills us. …Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

Over and over again on websites and in personal correspondence, I hear writers who have chosen to self-publish talk about how energized (or re-energized) they are. While there’s the inevitable grousing about low-sales numbers or promotions gone haywire, rarely are there complaints about the work itself. I know I find myself ready to write every day, eager to get to the page and get my latest words down.

That’s because, according to Gladwell’s definition, self-publishing is meaningful work.

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Book Critique: Robert Parker’s Looking for Rachel Wallace

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Earlier this week, I talked about the usefulness of the book critique to help refine my writing. I thought I’d show a critique I did on one of crime fiction writer Robert Parker’s best Spenser novels, Looking for Rachel Wallace, a book that has helped me immensely as I try to make a career in the same field.

If the writing seems abbreviated or sloppy or informal, that’s the way I write these so as to better understand the critique later. It’s essentially a monologue I have with myself on paper; if I wrote any more formally or self-consciously, I feel that I’d lose something in the study. Unlike my guide in the previous post, there’s not much in the Issues section and there’s no Summary…I think I cover everything in the other sections. If I get a positive response, I’ll post a more complete critique on another novel.

I hope you find it helpful, but there are huge SPOILERS, obviously. Don’t read the critique if you haven’t read the book!

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