While I Was Away

Got a new book out:

 

For a limited time it's yours for the price of a candy bar, so click here now. 

Later on I plan to expound at some length about how it came to be finally published.

I'm also working on a spiffy new author site that will eventually be really cool, but is currently only lukewarm because days are currently 14 hours too short to do what I need to do.  You can see the grinning skull of it here.

Everybody's back in school: Kid #3 got a new job (thank dog it's near the college and not in the wilds of outer Mongolia like the last one). Kid #4 is going for both Honor's Choir and student council and will be singing the Gregory House creepy cabaret version of "Get Happy" for his drama audition. (YES, MY KIDS ARE WEIRD.) Kid #5 has been selected for gifted and talented -- although his current talent as evidenced at home seems to be flinging himself on the floor and wailing hysterically when asked to clean his room. Pete has gotten so fat that he no longer fits in the camera viewfinder. (When he sits around the desk, he really sits around the desk.)

Suits is an awesome show and I love it sooo much. Breaking In has been miraculously uncanceled by Fox, thus breaking the Slater curse. I've become addicted to Sons of Anarchy, but I have to watch it in the middle of the night because it's too violent for all the delicate little flowers around here. It's a constant battle between me, the laws of time and physics, and the DVR.

I'm currently working on three novels and four short stories concurrently to see if that quiets the voices in my head. Details as they emerge.

And that, as they say, is that.

In the Words of The Continental, Wowee-Wow-Wow

I've been invited to publish a story in an upcoming charity anthology edited by a really swell writer, Bernard Schaffer. It was Bernard's idea of do anthology of the best up-and-coming genre writers in the Kindle arena in the spirit of Harlan Ellison's seminal Dangerous Visions and donate the proceeds to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Needless to say, I was very excited to be able to participate from both a creative and a community standpoint.

Well, today Bernard received word from the Man himself, and Ellison has expressed his delight with the project and written a blurb for the book.

Harlan Fucking Ellison.

You'll have to excuse me, I'm a little emotional right now.

The Mighty Pete Performs Sleep-Fu

Your Daily Awesome 8.9.2011

Busy. Enjoy some Hitchcock.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'm going to burn this manuscript, I swear. I've leapt over the writer's block and run headlong into rewriter's block. I've fallen into the narrative hole on page 380 and I can't get up.  In the meantime, Pete and I are going to rework a classic: instead of The Man In the Iron Mask, it will be The Cat in the Plastic Laundry Basket.

And for your daily dose of cute, the small child shows that "anime face" can attack at any time.

He can also do a killer Buddy Hackett impression. Or Lou Costello. He's versatile.

Oh, The Humanity

Well, it's been a horrid last couple of days here at Chez Hades. There was one real disaster, that in retrospect was not as big a disaster as it seemed at the moment, but nevertheless demoralizing, and one barely avoided disaster that could have killed someone but didn't, but still freaked out everyone but me. I figure you should be thankful about barely avoided disasters and not focus on what would have happened had they actually occurred. In short, no one is dead.

I was supposed to have Running Red done before Sunday, and was actually on track to have it done Friday evening. At some point midday Friday, Word freaked out. It did so quietly and without fanfare. When I opened up my manuscript file, it had somehow reverted back to an unchanged file. A file sans revisions. Even though I had saved the file and double-checked it, 300+ pages of revisions were just gone. The file didn't disappear, it somehow REVERTED. And it didn't just erase the changes from the last time I had opened the file, it reverted back to the original file from a week ago. A file that I had opened and closed multiple times. Apparently from my research this is an impossibility. It can't happen. There is no mechanism by which this can occur. So I am left with either a supernatural explanation or Secret Window, Secret Garden scenario in which I did this in a fugue state to sabotage myself.  I'll leave it up to you to choose which is more likely.

So we backed up all the Word files on an external drive (680 of them!) and uninstalled the apparently possessed version of Word and replaced it with Word 2010. Things seem to be normal now, but I'm taking no chances. I back up everything hourly to the cloud and a flash drive.

I started over because there was nothing else to do, but that means most of the revising I'm doing I'd already done multiple times over the past several weeks and I have now looked at the manuscript so much that it's starting to make no sense. It's Groundhog Day, but directed by Frederico Fellini after a meal of hallucinogenic toads and absinthe. I'm back up to chapter 31 out of 55, and it's going sloooooowly. And after I do the revisions, I've to proof it again. (I do have a second proofer going over it too, but I have trouble releasing control.)

Hopefully the next time I take a break to post, it will be to talk about the new project, the one that was supposed to start yesterday, and Running Red will have gone to the big formatting barn in the sky. In the meantime, there is this, which I found delightful. (Warning: if you are easily offended DO NOT PUSH PLAY. And don't say I did not warn you. Because I did. ).