This is a feature that my wife suggested a while ago: Putting up a few random paragraphs from my books once a month or so. She also suggested putting up a poll so readers can choose which book they want to see excerpted. My wife is so smart! Here’s the poll:
The books are tagged (broadly) by genre: “F” for Fantasy, “H” for Horror, and “DF” for Dark Fantasy (essentially fantasy with a strong horror element, or horror with a strong fantasy element). At the end of the month, I will choose a scene at random from the book with the most votes and put it into a post. I won’t choose scenes that give away major plot twists, but other than that, pretty much anything will go.
I’ve decided to start with the prologue from my nowhere-near-finished werewolf novel (unimaginative working title: The Wolf). It’s a very short scene, but I like it.
I had been wondering for a while if this would happen … one of the agents whose (ancient) form rejection letter I recently posted came across the post and added a comment in response. What did he have to say? Read the thread and find out.
Welcome to the wonderful world of new media, where you can get a lengthier comment on a simple blog post than you would ever get on a rejection letter!
As you can see by my sidebar, Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors; I’ve loved all of his books except one — his children’s book, Coraline, pretty much left me cold. I can’t really explain what I didn’t like about Coraline; it just didn’t grab me the way Gaiman’s books usually do. I was interested to see if The Graveyard Book would be different, and it sure was.
These “early years” samples are not really writing-related, but they probably explain a lot about why I spend so much time on Dennis’s crazy adventures.
Last week, A Blog in the Rough tagged Dennis and me for the “Honest Scrap” meme, in which you have to list ten honest things about yourself, along with the exhortation “and make it interesting”. Gosh, ten honest interesting things about me? I’m not sure I can manage that, but let’s find out. I’m pretty sure that by the time you’re done reading this list, you’ll consider me an even bigger geek than you do already.
Well after the last couple of weeks of me being chatty about my checkered past in the horror field, this week we are back on more familiar ground, with a lovely random rejection letter from the Maria Carvainis Agency:
Viscosity 