Random Rejection: Schooner Bay Literary Agency

So this week I reached into my vast collection of rejection letters and pulled out this one, from Schooner Bay Literary Agency:

“Long Before Dawn” Now Available For Kindle

Not long ago, I announced that Dragon Stones had been ported to the Kindle e-book format. It has now been joined by Long Before Dawn, my vampire novel. Also, both Long Before Dawn and Dragon Stones are now available for Kindle for only 99 cents. Save a tree and a lot of money* and read electronically!

Video Game Review: “Shadow Hearts”

So this week I finally finished up a game I’ve been playing for about six months, a fantasy RPG called Shadow Hearts.  This game is relatively ancient by video game standards (it came out in 2001), but what can I say — I only play one game at a time and I have a stack of games eight inches high waiting for me.  Once I’m done playing those, I can upgrade my PlayStation 2 to whatever is out at that point — probably the PlayStation 6.  But I digress.

Random Rejection: Design Image Group, “The Exclusive”

I haven’t done a random rejection in a while, so here’s one from 1998 from the Design Image Group.  DIG was active in book publishing in the mid-to-late 1990s and I tried a number of times to get something going with them, coming closest with “The Exclusive”, a vampire story that I originally posted here back in 2007.  I did eventually get it published in a webzine (I was an early webzine contributor), where it won a reader’s choice award for the issue.  But still, it would have been nice to see it in DIG’s anthology, which was released in December 1998 as Kiss of Death.

Stumbling Into The Horror Field

In the comments for my “Pinch Bobby ‘Til He Bleeds” post, Almostgotit asked how I got into writing horror and why I got out.  Like many things in life, I just sort of stumbled into it, but getting out again was a little more complicated.

Oops

A while back I mentioned that Dragon Stones was now available on Amazon.com and BN.com, but Long Before Dawn hadn’t arrived there yet.  I recently took another look and LBD still wasn’t out in the big stores.  So I went back to Lulu and took a closer look at the project and noticed that, way down under the “price” section, it said something to the effect of “To be set when your book is approved”.  So evidently I forgot to click the “Approve” button after getting my last proof of LBD way back in, oh, April was it?  Just think of all the millions of dollars in sales I’ve lost because of that!  :-|

Anyway, I have now clicked the “Approve” button, so Long Before Dawn should be showing up on Amazon.com and the other outlets soon.

Dragon Stones Now On Amazon, B&N

Today, during my semi-monthly auto-Googling, I discovered that Dragon Stones has made its way out to Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and the like.  Interestingly enough, Long Before Dawn hasn’t reached those outlets yet, but it is available from online bookstores in the U.K.  Go figure.  Perhaps the British are more amenable than the Americans to proper vampire stories, where the vampires are monsters.

Anyway, for all my legions of fans out there who have just been waiting to be able to purchase my two latest books from somewhere other than Lulu.com (you know who you are), your wish has been granted!  You can get Dragon Stones from Amazon.com or BN.com, and Long Before Dawn from Blackwell Online and WHSmith in the U.K.  Both should be available elsewhere as well.

Random Rejection: The Panettieri Agency, “Long Before Dawn”

After our previous “random acceptance” anomaly, we’re back in familiar territory, with a rejection letter from a literary agent I was hoping to get to represent Long Before Dawn:

(Reading) I Am Legend

I’ve at last gotten around to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend , which has been on my “to read” list for years. I’m liking it so far, but what’s most interesting to me is that (minor spoiler alert), in Long Before Dawn, I took the same approach to crosses and other holy symbols that Matheson did–i.e., a holy symbol only works on a vampire who practiced the represented religion when alive. As the main character in I Am Legend, Robert Neville, says: “… neither a Jew nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor an atheist, for that matter, would fear the cross.” He later goes on to explain that because the classic vampire legend arose in heavily Christian Europe, the cross became identified–wrongly–as the universal anti-vampire ward, which is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote Long Before Dawn.

Other than this little tidbit, of course, the two books are completely different. Matheson takes a rigorous, scientific, naturalistic approach to his vampires, whereas mine are supernatural beasties who can fly around and turn into mist. Still, I find myself pleased to find that my vampire book has something in common with one of the undisputed classics of the genre.

Now if I can just interest Will Smith in starring in an adaptation of Long Before Dawn, that would be another similarity, and one I could definitely live with …

Book-In-Progress Review: “World Without End”

Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth is one of my favorite books (even before Oprah featured it), so when the quasi-sequel World Without End came out, I immediately wish-listed it over on BookMooch. A few weeks later it arrived in an enormous package — this is one massive book, just like its predecessor. I’m not that far into it yet so I can’t do a full review, but I can say that it doesn’t hook the reader immediately the way that Pillars did. However, it does seem to be better than the last Follett book I read, Night Over Water.

One thing that is obvious already, though, is that the author’s breast fetish is operating at full tilt — pretty much every single female character who wanders across the page has her breasts stared at, felt up, fantasized over, or otherwise put front and center (so to speak) of her character’s description. Some would suggest, accurately, that all this indicates is that Ken Follett is a dude. But come on, Ken! We’re supposed to at least pretend to occasionally raise our gaze above chest level! You’re going to make the ladies paranoid, and that’ll just make it tougher on all of us …

Having said that, I have of course written my share of such descriptions, especially in my vampire book, Long Before Dawn (available now!). But you know how vampires are; being dead and all, they don’t have many amusements besides stalking humans and drinking blood (Spike’s addiction to the soap opera Passions notwithstanding; most vampires don’t have television in their crypts), so they spend a lot of time being horny.  Which, I guess, makes them not so different from Ken Follett and the rest of us guys …