I'm a Winner!

To quote thier website: Our Annual Readers' Choice Awards highlights the best stories in each issue of The Bards and Sages Quarterly as chosen by our readers.  Upon the release of the October issue, we start polling our readers for their votes. 

My story won the Best Story of the April issue. I am very honored to win, there were some really great stories in this issue. HERE is the offical announcement. A big thank you to everyone who voted!

Triblogosuperior aka Three Things I Want To Tell You About

So finally life is back to normal, at least for the most part. I have three things I wanted to blog about, so I decided to smoosh(sorry to use such technical verbiage) them all into one blog. Which I will now refer to as the Triblogosuperior or Iblogosup for short.

Item # 1

Brandon Sanderson is super cool. As many of you may know I am a big Sanderson fan and I highly recommend his weekly podcast Writing Excuses. But this item doesn’t really have anything to do with my would be writing career. This post has to do with my real job, as a children’s librarian at the public library.

This semester we started a junior high book club. The kids picked Mr. Sanderson’s YA book, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, from a list of nearly forty books. I contacted the author’s of all five books the kids picked to read this year, to see if I could purchase signed book marks, or a signed copy of the book to give away as a prize. I have not heard back from the other four authors, but Mr. Sanderson assistant emailed me back right away and sent a signed poster for each of the kids for free!

That is so awesome and so something I did not expect an NY Times best seller to have the time to do. I have always liked his books but now Brandon Sanderson’s name has joined Joe Montana, JRR Tolkien, Tom Osborne(I am from Nebraska after all), and Stan Lee on my list of Most Super Cool People Ever, which is much smaller than my list of Super Cool People, which he was on previously.

Item # 2

The Bards & Sages Reader’s Choice Awards

As an act of shameless self promotion I am asking that you go HERE and vote for my short story Mortis Lupus. For those of you who did not get the April  issue of Bards & Sages, the POV character of Mortis Lupus is Brutus, and Julius Caesar is not an epileptic he is a werewolf who was infected during Lupercalia the festival of the wolf. The senators must kill him because they cannot allow Rome to be ruled by such a creature, all in under 2000 words. Come on, that deserves a vote doesn’t it? It even keeps the fact that the characters are Caesar and Brutus a surprise until the last paragraph (though I did drop some clues/hints).

Item # 3

A slight change to my current writing project. As I mentioned above I am an avid listener to Writing Excuses. One of the latest episodes was about the Hollywood Formula. I found this idea very intriguing and plotted a story out using the formula, then of course I had to start writing it rather than waiting until I was done with the novel I was working on. Then I went back and rewrote my outline for Veil of Embers. The chapters I already have done will work just fine with the new outline. So I am now working on two novels using the Hollywood Formula, just to see how it works. After you listen to the podcast if your interested in trying it, script frenzy has a free online worksheet for the Hollywood formula, that made it easier to use. These techniques are for writing scripts but I thought they were pretty easy to adapt, and I love trying new things.

That’s it if you made it this far then dub yourself : Triblogosuperior Aficionado or for short: Iblogosup Afic and thanks for reading my ramblings.

Quick Update

My wife had to have surgery in Denver and we were gone for nearly a week. Everything went okay but I am exhausted. For obvious reasons I have not been doing much writing, but I did have two short stories published online.  One published at the Horrorzine and the other published at Static Movement. Later this week I will update my short fiction and free stuff pages with links. The wife is on bed rest and my mother in law is flying into town to stay with her while I am at work, so I will get back to writing or the blog in about a week or so.

Losing a Bookstore

So yesterday I had to take the day off of work and head up to Rapid City for a doctor’s appointment, in our area if you want to see a specialist you have to make the 100 mile drive up there. In some areas this might be quite a task but in our relatively traffic free part of the country it takes less than an hour and a half(speed limit is 70mph for most of the way). All in all, It is a pretty scenic and relaxing drive.

After the morning appointment my wife and I made the extra 45 minute drive up to Deadwood for lunch. We ate at my wife’s favorite restaurant in the whole world(her words not mine) and gambled at a casino for a couple of hours.

On the way home we stopped by Border’s in Rapid City. Like most Border’s bookstores it is going out of business. They had a 90% off sale on everything, and we got a few heaping bags full of books. Brand new paperbacks were right around $1.00. The idea of brand new cheap books was very exciting.

I thought the whole thing would have been fun, everyone leaving the store was in a great mood, laughing and joking around, but I actually found it kind of…sad.

Now, I should mention that Chadron (my home) does have a used bookstore, but it is run out of someone’s house and kinda creeps me out. Borders is the closest chain bookstore and I stop in there everytime I go through Rapid City(four or five times a year). Despite my infrequent visits and how far away the store is this is/was my bookstore. I didn’t even think about when I heard it was closing but walking around the empty building I started to think about how the next closest real bookstore that I might have a chance to visit would be in Denver.

Denver is 6 hours away. I make it here every couple of years or so. That’s not much bookstore action. After I thought of the that walking between the empty shelves became even sadder. It started to remind me of the feeling I get in a cemetery. I couldn’t believe they were doing this to my bookstore.

I don’t think I was the only one feeling sad or depressed. There were a ton of people in line to check out and no one spoke. Husbands and wives stood quietly next to each other, even the children(there were quite a few) didn’t speak a word. I couldn’t understand why all the readers outside were so happy, a lot of the ones in line looked like they were going to cry.

As I was walking out, feeling pretty depressed about my new bookstore-less state of existence, the manager of the store leaned in and whispered to me, as he had to every other patron “In a couple of months Barnes and Noble will be opening downtown.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

An Interview

Hey everyone, I am going to be in Big Pulp’s new Pirates and Swashbucklers anthology, coming out in September. One of the contributors Kameron M. Frankiln, did some author interview with all the contributors. You can stop by his website Pens & Swords to read my answers to such questions as :

When did you first realize you were a writer?

What authors influence or inspire you?

What book(s) have you read more than once? What drew you back?

In 25 words or less, how would you define “pulp” as a genre?

What made you decide to submit a story for the Pirates & Swashbucklers anthology?

How did you come up with the idea for your story? What is your writing process like?

Do you consider yourself a “pulp” writer? Why? Is there another genre you like to write?

Care to weigh in with your opinion of the e-book?

Where can someone find more of your work?

Shoot-Out Story Published

I’ve been talking about the latest PHP writer’s shoot-out over the past couple of weeks. These are just short story competitions that we have at Pill Hill Press, the rules change with whoever is hosting the event and some are competitions while others are more like writing workshops. No matter what the format they are always fun.

Anyway the time before this one I wrote a story called The Terrifying Legend of Jim, it was a horror story but one written with my own odd sense of humor. The result was what could only be called a horror parody. It got very good reviews during the shoot out. I shopped it around a few places and got some very complimentary rejection letters. Which is kind of a weird thing to say, but when a pro-paying magazine that you really, really want to get in, that usually only sends out form rejections, sends you a personal rejection that says they like your writing but the humor of the story didn’t quite fit the magazine and then they go into a few specifics about what they think would make the story stronger for another market, well that is pretty exciting.

But all I was getting was rejections and then my wife, editor in chief of Pill Hill Press, told me that Shane McKenzie(one of the other participants in the shoot-out) would like the story for an anthology he was editing for Pill Hill Press. When we first started PHP we published a few of our stories to fill in when someone didn’t provide a contract in time, but we try not to publish our stuff.

I made an exception for this when I heard that my short little story was part of what gave Shane the idea to do the anthology. The fact that I had (partially) inspired someone to…well do anything really, with my writing was a huge ego boost and I sent it off right away. Well the book is out!

If you are interested in fun horror parodies pick up a copy of It Was A Dark and Stormy Night

A new project started.

As you may or may not have noticed from my little progress box, I finally decided on which novel to work on. Veil of Embers won out. The idea behind Veil is very simple, I am attempting to combine epic fantasy with a disaster story. In this case a volcanic eruption.

I am at 5000 words and already hit a snag. I had planned a to use a member of the city watch as one of my characters and to have a murder mystery as a subplot. I am starting to get a little worried that all this genre melding isn’t going to work ie epic fantasy with a disaster thriller with a mystery, but at least it should make for an interesting read even if it is not something that will be publishable.