Star Wars

I took my son to a book fair at his elementary school last week. It's something I always enjoy and try not to miss, because I have a genuine soft spot for books aimed at kids and books in general. One thing that's always bothered me about these book fairs is the focus on what I sometimes call "fake books," meaning things like lego sticker books, or Marvel superhero books, or Spongebob books, or any other stand-in for genuine creativity. I try to steer my son away from those kinds of books and towards books with real authors and stories. And yet, there I was at the book fair with my usual "tsk tsk" attitude, when I saw the Star Wars Character Encylopedia.

Oh, for Crying Out loud...

As some of you know, I've been waiting, waiting, waiting for my next book to come out. It's been a long, unnecessarily painful saga, and I'm still not 100% sure that the book will be coming out in November as promised by my publisher. I'm not going to get into all that bullshit again, but I have been checking on the Amazon page for the book, waiting (always waiting!) for them to finally post the cover image for it.  I check every day, and every day there's no cover image up there.  Except today.

Yes, today Amazon finally posted a cover image for The Forever Knight.  How exciting.  How wonderful.  Except, unbelievably, it's wrong. Instead, they posted a cover for a Tanya Huff book.

Please, someone tell me whose ass to kick.

Taco Redux

The JITB mascot--WTF?

You never know what blog posts are going to turn out to be popular. I blogged once or twice about Skylanders and ever since then it’s been the most popular post here on THN. Sometimes the popularity of posts goes up and down. For a while my post about John Carter was huge, but now almost no one comes here for that. It’s all kind of weird and unpredictable, like the post I did a while back about Taco Bell. Why so many people come here after searching for Taco Bell eludes me, though I’m certainly glad to have the visitors. Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time…

One of Those Days

It's one of those days when I have nothing particular to say but I feel like blogging, so I'm just going to wing it here, folks.

I reached a total of 106 free downloads of my short story The Hundredth Kill. Thank you to all of you who downloaded it and helped spread the word about it. The story is back up to 99 cents now, unfortunately. As far as I know, there's no way to lower that price until I run another promo on Amazon, and I can only do that once every three months. Happily, some people have actually decided to pay for it, though honestly if it was up to me it would be free all the time. But then I suppose Amazon wouldn't be able to make any money, and for the service and platform they offer indie authors, they should make money, obviously.

The Longbow Hunters

Back in 1987 was the second time I really started to get into comic books. The first time was when I was a little kid and a neighbor who used to deliver books and magazines for a living started bringing me home copies of Spiderman. It's funny how you can remember what kicks of periods of interest in your life, because back in '87 was when I heard about The Longbow Hunters. At the time, a friend of mine who was really into comics took me to a (now defunct) comic store where I saw the poster for it. The picture of Green Arrow in his cool new costume captured me immediately.  The Longbow Hunters was a three part graphic novel written by Mike Grell, a reinvention of the character of Green Arrow to make him a bit darker and more serious.  So long trick arrows--hello pointed, deadly ones. 

On Writing--Cover Trouble

Here's the cover I can't use.

I never thought that making the transition to becoming an "indie" author would be easy. Frankly I never would have made the decision if I didn't have to, despite some obvious benefits to being truly independent. The fact is, if I'm going to keep writing I'm going to have to do it on my own. But one of the things that's had me worried from the start wasn't about writing, but about artwork. Specifically, cover art.

A few weeks ago I decided to take one of my old short stories and use it do finally dip my toe into lake indie. I quickly learned how to format the story for the Kindle and make it available for sale on Amazon. All that was pretty much a piece of cake, but when it came to slapping a cover on it I knew I'd be in trouble.

The Avengers

Blogging is a weird thing. You don't do it for a few days and suddenly you feel out of practice. Which is why I'm glad I saw The Avengers last night--it gives me something real easy to talk about. Right now the internet is full of people talking about and reviewing The Avengers, but I enjoyed the movie so much I really wanted to chat about it myself.

First off, there was no way I was going to miss the movie. I wasn't going to wait for the DVD to come out--this was always at the top of my too-see list for the summer.  But I did have my doubts about it.  I wasn't sure how they would manage to get all those great characters to coalesce into one decent movie, and I wasn't at all confident about the story because there never seemed to be one in all the trailers. I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago in fact.