Attack of the Kindle Cases: Part 3

After using the New Yorker Kindle case for a while, I noticed that M-Edge had started advertising that soon you would be able to create custom covers using your own pictures and photographs. Hmm, what would make a good Kindle cover for me? Hmm …

New “Crows” User Review On Amazon

So the other day I found a new customer review of A Flock of Crows is Called A Murder (Kindle Edition) on Amazon.com, a mere eight years after it received its first customer review!

New Version of “Flock of Crows” Available!

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been working on a new edition of A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder that, among other things, restores the infamous missing epilogue, plus fixes various issues with the layout from the most recent edition, which was a scan produced by BookSurge of the original DarkTales edition of Crows.  This edition is now available at my Lulu storefront and should become available at Amazon.com and other outlets over the next few months.  I also plan to do a Kindle edition once the ISBN and distribution is finalized.  In the meantime, please visit my Lulu store and check it out there!

Dragon Stones

Last week’s Scene of the Month post was an excerpt from Dragon Stones, which prompted my friend Almostgotit to plead, “More Dragon Stones, please!”  So after careful consideration, I have decided to give Almostgotit, and anyone else who wants it, more Dragon Stones (which are not to be confused with, say, kidney stones).  In fact, here’s the whole thing:

Okay, So I Lied

Earlier, I wrote a brief story about how I got into the horror field; now, as promised, is the story of how I got out.

“Night Watchman” Review

I stumbled across an Epinions review of Night Watchman today. I was surprised to see this, given that Night Watchman came out over five years ago, but it’s nice to know people are still reading if after all these years. (Yes, it’s a recent review … 1/26/08.) Although the review is not unalloyed praise (3 out of 5 stars), it is positive overall, and raises some valid points that I would probably address if I were rewriting the book now. Still, I think Night Watchman does hold up pretty well for a novel that I wrote when I was about 23 years old. (Never you mind how old I am now.) You can visit the reviewer’s Epinions page here and his home page here.

Long Before Dawn is an even older* book than Night Watchman; I started working on that shortly after getting married, and finished it at the ripe old age of 22. But since Dawn was never published, I’ve had the opportunity to go back and “improve” it a couple of times since completing it. I think that this most recent set of revisions, done to get it ready for Lulu publication, has tightened up the plot and characterizations significantly. We’ll see if the readers (all ten of them) agree!

*In fact, Long Before Dawn is so old**, I originally wrote it using the MS-DOS program PC-Write. PC-Write couldn’t handle a document that long, so I had to split it into three or four files for editing. Ahhh, good times …

**And Long Before Dawn isn’t even my oldest book; there’s one more, older still, called Three Detectives, that I actually had an agent working on for a while. He was never able to sell it, unfortunately. This is a (you guessed it) detective novel, set in Utica, NY, that I wrote after a marathon Nero Wolfe reading session. Perhaps it will see the light of Lulu some day, but I doubt it.

It’s Getting There

I’m currently finishing up the Lulu edition of Long Before Dawn. The formatting is just about finished; I think the finished result is looking pretty good. More to the point, so does my wife, and she’s picky. (She won’t actually read the book, because it’s full of nasty gory stuff, but she will comment on fonts, margins, graphics, etc.) I have the latest print edition coming to me; my plan is to read through it as if I were an actual reader, and if I don’t find anything wrong, I will release it for sale. I’m planning to take advantage of Lulu’s ISBN service and make the book available through Amazon.com and other book sellers, so we’ll see how that goes.

Although the book is not yet available, you can get a sneak peek at the cover. In the PDF file, it’s laid out Back Cover/Spine/Front Cover, as if you had put the book face-down on a table in front of you. The photo on the back was taken in a small cave at Cabrillo National Monument in Point Loma, San Diego; the photo on the front is a shot of the moon from our backyard. I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with the blurb on the back of the book, so I do invite comments on how to make it catchier. (As I said previously, self-promotion: Not my strong point.) I realize you might have to actually read the book to know how to plug it on the back, but this way is more of a challenge.

That First Step Is A Lulu

So seeing as the mainstream publishing world has never quite known what to do with me — I have a portfolio of rejection letters eight inches thick full of comments like “highly enjoyable but we have no idea how to market it” and “skillfully written, but not everyone wants to read The Books of Blood by Clive Barker” (I used to get compared to Mr. Barker fairly regularly) — I’ve decided to bypass them and start publishing books myself, with the first one being that old standby, the vampire novel, coming soon via Lulu. Watch for Long Before Dawn to be available in the next few weeks.

I’ve set up a small homepage at Lulu which for now will serve as my main writing, media, and publishing-related site, although I’ll likely continue to cross-post material here … assuming Dennis lets me sit at the keyboard every now and then.