Showing posts with label Last Night at the Video Store. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Last Night at the Video Store. Show all posts

Monday, July 13, 2015

July and August Releases!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This month and next are shaping up to be 60 days of non-stop releases from yours truly.

Last Night at the Video Store dropped 10 days ago and is available through Kindle Unlimited, meaning you can read it "for free" if you're enrolled. It's a funny little romp and the perfect read if you're got fifteen or twenty minutes to kill.

Next up is probably going to be Through the Narrows, the second book in the historical series I'm co-authoring with Nathanael Green. It's with our editors and cover artist right now. Beta feedback has been great so far. Our early readers are saying it's better than the first book.

After that comes Not Safe For Work, the third and probably final tale in my Close of Business series of wildly profane short stories about the absurdity of office life in corporate America. Since this is the last, I'm swinging for the fences in terms of offending any and all. And the mystery part features a classic locked room puzzle our hapless, witless, and mostly useless protagonist has to solve in order to maybe keep his job.

Following the release of NSFW, I'll bundle the Close of Business series into an Omnibus, which I'll make available through Kindle Unlimited as well. Subscribers can read the whole series "for free."

Hopefully rounding out July will be another short story set in the world of corporate America. It's a weird one (if I had an agent or worked with a traditional house they'd tell me not to put it out!), tentatively called The Boss. We'll see how it does. I like it but it's one of those hard-to-classify stories that readers will either enjoy or hate.

(In case you haven't noticed a theme with my work, it's this: I love writing stories that don't fit squarely within genres.)

Then comes August where I...wait for it...wait for it...hopefully release two novels.

OtherWorld, my YA fantasy adventure, is with my editors right now. I've gotten great feedback and hope to have that out in early August. I can't believe this one's close to publication. Not so long ago, I was writing a blog post about not having the chops to do this book...I'll follow-up about that in another post soon.

The Board, my collaboration with Jann Gott, might be out by the end of August. That's a stretch goal, though, but worst case scenario is it comes in early September. Really excited for this one.

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Separate from all this, I'm repackaging The Unearthed series in two new bundles that will be available through Kindle Unlimited as well. That way, KU subscribers can check out "one book" but get multiple titles. Win-win for reader and author ;-)

Friday, July 3, 2015

New Short Story Out!

I just dropped a new short story on Amazon, Last Night at the Video Store.

It's a funny little romp and quick read about three college students slowly drifting apart that takes place during a twenty-minute trip to the video store. (Remember those?)

I usually don't talk about process because I'll bet most readers find it boring, but the development of this story might be of interest, so a quick digression from the normal blogging here...

I actually wrote this story years ago, when I was fresh out of college and looking back with ambivalence about my time as an undergraduate. Showing wisdom beyond my years, I put that draft away to let some time pass so I could come back to it with fresh eyes.

When I did read it again, I was disappointed. The story dripped with sentiment and the existential quarter-life crisis the protagonist faced was, for lack of a better term, little more than navel-gazing.

I came back to it recently and thought the premise was good enough but the execution was lacking. So I took it through a few more iterations, excising most of the protag's inner reflections and focusing more on telling a quick, funny, heartfelt slice of life story. The draft went from 10,000 words to 6,000 after several passes and eventually I got it to this point, where I felt comfortable hitting PUBLISH.

Who knows? It might still suck. Authors are usually the worst judges of their own work. I'm sure readers will let me know if it's horrible ;-)

But enough about process...

One thing I did want to mention. If you had signed up for my Newsletter, you would have gotten a free copy of this story last night before it was even available on Amazon.

Just saying.

And I'll probably do that from time-to-time, send my Mailing List random free stuff. It's just the kind of guy I am.