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!
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:
So I was working on part two of my story about how I got into and out of the horror field. I think it was a good post — unusually long (by my standards) and unusually revealing (also by my standards). It was almost finished; I just wanted to add a few links.
And then my browser ate it.
And WordPress, which normally keeps revisions of drafts as you go along, mysteriously didn’t have any revisions of this one.
I’m just not feeling up to retyping the whole thing again right now. So, unfortunately, I’ve got no Part Two to show you today. Can I interest you in some talk about the legendary Chilean Meat Plant instead?
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.
As I mentioned a while back, I periodically Google myself to see if there are any new reviews or other mentions of my stuff. Evidently I don’t do it often enough, though, because I’ve only just now become aware of this review (published last August by Sharon of A Bookworm’s Journey; Sharon’s dog Rusty is good friends with Dennis the Vizsla, and the two can often be found conspiring together against the squirrels) of Night Watchman. A brief excerpt:
Once I started it it was hard to put down. The characters and places Viscosi created were engaging, interesting. I would have loved for Yolanda, a psychic, to have had a bigger part.
I can’t argue with that — by the time I was done writing this book, Yolanda had become my favorite character as well. Perhaps she’ll get her own story some day …
Sharon gives Night Watchman 4 out of 5 stars. Thanks, Sharon!
This week’s random rejection happens to be another one from E-scape, which you may remember from such other random rejections as “Comfort“. Once again the editor has nice things to say about the story, but once again, she doesn’t like it enough to publish it, thus continuing my long tradition of entertaining editors for free.
Viscosity 