Two Announcements and Some Miscellany

ANNOUNCEMENT ONE: FROST

I’m a few days behind on this one, but I have a new book out in the world and it is a sexy, sexy beast. I mean, take a look.

Frost_Flotsam2

It’s book two of the Flotsam trilogy, which kicked off with the release of Exile a few moths back, and will end with the release of Crusade next year. It contains demons, occult hit men, and a bloodthirsty Valkryie. It brings Ragnarok to the Gold Coast and engages in a moderate amount of property damage. It’s available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and direct from the fine folks at Apocalypse Ink.

ANNOUNCEMENT TWO: GENRECON

Meanwhile, over at the day job, we got to announce this badboy:

GenreCon2015Banner

We’re officially strapping in for a third GenreCon and I am fuckin’ psyched. We’re currently doing my favourite bit – finalizing the guest list so I can start deploying names when I come back to work in January – but even with half our guest list populated, I’m pretty damned eager to program this bad-boy.

Registration opens in February, 2015. Rest assured I’ll post some reminders here in the lead-up.

MISCELLANY

I’ve now hit the point where I’ve written every day for one hundred consecutive days. Admittedly, it isn’t always a lot of writing – the last couple of days I’ve only clocked up a couple of hundred words each due to a regrettable-and-now-done-with distraction caused by Master of Orion II– but after a year where I specifically set out to establish a daily writing habit, I seem to have settled into a routine that lets me hit 1800+ words for two-thirds of the month and maintain a somewhat respectable word count the rest of the time.

I’ve never been one of the “write every day” crowd, which makes this strange and uncharted territory.

Part of the reason I’ve eased off a little is because I’m looking at my potential to-do list for 2015 and pondering whether to try and push up my rate a little. A few years back I argued that one of the reasons I wasn’t much interested in indie publishing came down to the fact that I wrote too slow, but I’m only a couple of hundred words off the daily average I’d like to manage before I seriously contemplated setting up a hybrid publishing approach to my career.

In completely unrelated news, actor Vincent D’Onofrio is doing a spoken word album and, seriously, you have to go and listen to the opening track:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174938345″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

I swear to god, I am all over this once the album is live. Lets not talk about the wheel.

A New Story! Cheap Novellas! Crazy Writing Plans! EXCLAMATION MARKS!

Dead End AllyZOMBIE STORIES

I had a new story out at the start of November. The folks behind the mobile/tablet game Dead End Alley commissioned a bunch of Australian horror writers to put together a micro-fiction based on the prompt:

A blind alley, a swarm of hungry zombies, a chainsaw, and you.
What could possibly go wrong?

Naturally, when asked to write a story about an apocalyptic zombie uprising, I went and wrote a love story. Originally I’d intended to dedicate it to my friends Al and Nic, who did actually have a zombie survival kit in their house when I first met them, but it ended up being a downbeat for that kind of thing.

In any case, you can my contribution over on facebook, along with zombie stories from Alan Baxter, Deborah Biancotti, and the delightfully creepy Kaaron Warren.

CHEAP NOVELLAS & E-BOOKS

Exile, the first novella in the Flotsam series, has been added to the Under an Enchanted Skyline boxed set, featuring eight e-books of magic, adventure and mayhem for under $1.

Over seven hundred pages of epic reading, featuring:

  • Exile by PETER M. BALL–Keith Murphy kills things from the Gloom. On his latest job, he swallows a bullet with his victim’s soul trapped inside. The thing’s followers want the soul back…
  • Demonspell by EPPIE award-winning novelist PHOEBE MATTHEWS–“My trip toward death began the morning the realtor bugged me.” Elaine’s immortal relatives need constant attention, even when she’s struggling with a band of demons.
  • John Golden: Freelance Debugger by DJANGO WEXLER–John Golden is a debugger. He goes inside the computer systems of his corporate clients to exterminate the gremlins, sprites, and other fairies that take up residence. With the help of his sarcastic little sister Sarah (currently incarnated in the form of a Dell Inspiron), everything from man-eating genies to disgruntled Dark Lords is all in a day’s work.
    • BONUS! John Golden: And the Heroes of Mazaroth by DJANGO WEXLER–In the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, players battle the forces of evil. Nobody ever asked the forces of evil how they felt about it. John Golden find a depressed Dark Lord and then finds himself playing a villain, with an army of adventurers ready to thwart his “evil schemes.”
  • Dream Along the Edge by CEDAR BLAKE–Mermaids, dolphin-men, and New Age weirdos collide in this rather salty tale of love, lust, and the bracing cold at the borders of sanity and risk.
  • Fire and Frost by DOUG BLAKESLEE–At the intersection of our modern world and the world of Fae magic, fiery changeling Theonious March stands at a different type of crossroads. To save the woman he loves, he’ll have to storm the frozen gates of Arcadia’s Winter Realm. Will the meeting of Fire and Frost steam up, or fizzle out?
  • Eye for an Eye by ERIK SCOTT DE BIE–A restlessly retired Stardust meets Lady Vengeance, on the run from a vengeful former ally. Can he diffuse the situation before Cobalt City burns around him?
  • getAvailable until December 30 on Smashwords, Nook, Kobo, and Amazon. It’s a great chance to pick up Exile cheap before Frost comes out next month.

CRAZY WRITING CHALLENGES

I’m nineteen days into my attempt to write 600k in a year and still confident that I can achieve my goal and prove Alan Baxter wrong. My standard writing day seems to have settled at about 1,800 words, which is achievable without feeling like I’m pushing myself, and even on my “holy crap, I don’t feel like writing today” days, I’m still managing to get a couple of hundred word’s down.

After a couple of discussions with people about the project, I’ve set up a publicly accessible Google Doc where I track daily word counts, writing patterns, and potential disruptions to my workflow, as well as a list of projects worked on as part of the 600k (this blog post, for example, doesn’t count).

Gone Fishin’

Gone Fishing

 

SO HERE’S THE THING

I’m still getting the hang of this writing, blogging, and working thing. And I still haven’t quite gotten to the point where it’s sustainable when I’m writing, blogging, working, and recovering from illness. I’m still getting knocked around by the throat infection, feeling exhausted, doing that thing where I fall asleep at the keyboard from time to time.

It’s frustrating as hell.

Which is why, this week, I’m instituting rule zero: writing comes first. I’m going to let the blog fall silent for seven days while I do some focused work on getting my current novella draft up and running.

I am, officially, gone fishing writing until next Monday.

See you all then.