A while back my parents sent me a big package full of old school papers and such, whence I got the, um, amazing space battle drawing that I posted a few weeks ago. Reaching into this package today, I discovered this small exercise in giant block-letter printing, in which the moon has what may be an overly familiar relationship with a pumpkin:
Tag: fantasy
New Feature: Scene-Of-The-Month
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.
Review: “The Graveyard Book”
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.
Okay, So I Lied
Earlier, I wrote a brief story about how I got into the horror field; now, as promised, is the story of how I got out.
Random Rejection: E-scape, “Comfort”
I got started submitting to online magazines way before they became mainstream, and had a number of short stories published by e-zines. E-scape, however, was not one of them, as they declined to accept my short story “Comfort”.
Random Rejection: “On The Eighth Day”
Back in the 90s, there was a lot of concern about the “Year 2000”, and this translated into a large number of film and fiction projects that dealt with the upcoming inevitable apocalypse. One of these was an anthology called On The Eighth Day, which almost included my short story, “Love and the Tides of Darkness.” Almost.
The Early Years: Rabbit’s Journal
A couple of weeks ago I posted a scan of an old story I wrote for school when I was a kid of somewhere between six and ten (depending on who you believe). That turned out to be pretty popular, so I requested more scans from my suppliers of embarrassing material from my younger days (i.e., my parents). Behold: Rabbit’s Journal.
Continue reading “The Early Years: Rabbit’s Journal”A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man
So my parents like to find old examples of things I wrote when I was a kid and send them to me, just to remind me that I, too, was once a child. I thought it might be interesting to post one or two of them. With that in mind, I present my classic tale of horror and suspense, “The Great Beast Invasion”. If we assume that the date in the story is about when the story was written (which it probably is, given that kids are pretty much creatures of the “now” — just like dogs!), then I would’ve been six when I scribbled down this masterpiece.
Continue reading “A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man”
Recall
A while back, I sent a copy of Dragon Stones to the artist in Italy. With his sharp artist’s eye, he noticed that the cover illustration of the dragon was not anti-aliased properly. This problem has now been fixed, and the cover art looks much better — the lines are smooth rather than pixellated and the details are sharper.
I’m of the mind that anyone who bought Dragon Stones with the pixellated cover art is deserving of a pristine copy that looks the way the artist intended. If you have a copy of the book and would like to get the updated version, please let me know and I will send you one free of charge. (Obviously you shouldn’t post your address information in a public comment, so feel free to e-mail me at the listed address.)
Now, some might say that this could be an expensive thing for me to do. But don’t worry. I know how many copies of Dragon Stones have been sold, and it won’t be. (Too bad …)
“Dragon Stones” Now Available
Dragon Stones is now available direct from Lulu.com! I’m still putting the finishing touches on the formatting before submitting it for distribution via the usual channels, but at this point I think that further changes are unlikely. (And if I do change something after you buy it, then you will have a rare limited edition copy!)
As I’ve mentioned, Dragon Stones is a fantasy novel, so anyone who’s been a little squeamish about reading A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder or Long Before Dawn or (especially) Night Watchman needn’t fear — the goriest thing in Dragon Stones is a swordfight between a couple of the characters (but I won’t spoil anything by saying which). If you enjoy fantasy novels, check it out — I don’t think you’ll be disappointed!
In other news, I’m still editing and formatting my ghost story Father’s Books as my next release. Although it’s a horror novel (again), it’s not nearly as, um, intense (*COUGH* gory *COUGH*) as Night Watchman or Long Before Dawn, so even the squeamish might be able to read that one. I’ll have my wife look at it and report back; nobody’s as squeamish as she is!
Viscosity 