The collection is due out next month, and includes many hard-to-find stories unavailable since their original publications, including Assurance Salesman, Inner Strength, Fade, and Robot Vampire.
PS: Apparently trying to find the keywords to locate the image of a painting covered by cloth on an easel is an impossible task. Enjoy my creative solution of an image.
So because I can’t leave a good thing alone, I made more videos to promote the Cyber Monday sale. I now have three, giving me (*monster emcee voice*) A CYBER MONDAY TRILOGY OF TRAILERS!!!
I’ll be posting and tweeting them next week, and of course Cyber Monday, but here they are arranged in a blog post for your viewing leisure.
The Cyber Monday 99 cents sale is a promotion by Seventh Star Press. Pricing on Amazon will auto-drop Dec 1, so you can grab up all three titles and many more from the Seventh Star catalog.
Here’s a little something to help you plan ahead for Monday, Dec. 1, when Haunting Blue goes on sale for one day only. If you already know it and love it, make sure to tell your friends. As most of you know, this is the first book of the series, so “hook”ing new readers with this one is what it’s all about. (Yes, I went there.)
Yep, I made a new video. I learned the limitations of the program and took on something less ambitious. My first project, the book trailer for Gifts of the Magi, took a day and a half. This one took half an hour. Progress! That means there may be more of them.
So here’s what I’ve done with my last day and a half, though to be fair, it should only have taken me a few hours if not for the free interface on a certain popular video site that won’t let you save your work. So I had to start over three times. That means, yes, I know about the typo, and no, I can’t fix it, because that means starting over. Again.
But y’know what, I’m proud of it anyway, and I hope you dig it, too. Click the image to check out the official book trailer to Gifts of the Magi: A Speculative Fiction Collection.
NOTE: due to preparations for last week’s all encompassing Blog Tour, this post-con report is two weeks late.
Rarely have I been so excited about a convention, and I know I’ve never put in as much pre-planning into an event as I did for Inconjunction weekend this past July 4-6.
I teamed up with my author buddies John F. Allen, Matthew Barron and Eric Garrison. (Also thanks to David Jobe for helping man the booth for parts of Saturday). We put the extra effort and expense into splitting costs for a vendor booth, displayed an array of book titles, doo-dads, and nail polish (yes, nail polish!) and went for it in a big way.
And then there were panels. My first was with Eric Garrison and con co-guest of honor Kat Falls in a lively discussion on Book Trailers. Throughout the weekend, I participated on no less than three panels on genre TV and movies (and met a very enthusiastic Mike Suess!), and was part of the candlelight horror reading, where I premiere a new work in progress weird western to great response. I also heard a very impressive reading by a Mr. Jeff Seymour. I plan to keep an eye on this guy, and you should, too!
On top of that, the four of us along with our booth neighbor Crystal Leflar teamed together under the banner Speculative Fiction Guild to run two open mini-workshops designed to offer some structural writing advice for the beginner. Both of these were well attended and received enthusiastically.
We were not without a few bumps in the road (literally and figuratively). John arrived two days post-food poisoning and needed part of Friday to recover, but he quickly got back on track, and brought his knowledge of all things comic books in time for the panel. Saturday night proved a comedy errors. In trying to re-create a local dining experience from a year ago with Kathy Watness and Loconeal‘s James Barnes, we found that, not only didthe Chinese restaurant we target closed for the holiday, but so did our second choice, and ended up at choice number three, an El Jaripeo near Washington Square (very good however!). On returning to the hotel, police cars zipped along 21st and Shadeland, past our vehicle, going full speed, while John valiantly navigated construction and each need to pull over, during which at least a dozen cars passed us! (We found out later they were going toward the tragic east side shooting.)
As convention crowds went, I’d call it a mid-sized group, but an enthusiastic group, eager to talk, and when all was said and done, also eager to support our efforts by visiting our booth and taking home some books!
I can honestly say I’ve never had such an exhausting weekend, but the results were well worth it. Inconjunction was a blast. I’m starting the countdown to next year!
Three years ago, a new author took on the challenge of putting together his first book trailer. He had ambition if no experience and he perhaps took on more than was reasonable or necessary, but he also had a lot of help from his friends. I’d like to take this space to again thank Ash Arceneaux, who created the original art and edited the final video, high school drama teacher Scott Siler, who created the audio track and provided the voices of Gunther and Chip, and Sami Susterich, a former student of Scott’s who volunteered to voice Blue for me.
Yes, voice-work. Did I mention I had a lot of ambition? While the results were not perfect, they were also none-too-shabby, and these people put a lot of time and effort into the clip we created.
When the book went out of print a few months ago, we also removed the book trailer. With the re-release, I could have chosen to start over, but….that was a LOT of work the first time and most of the trailer was still pretty rocking. So I turned to my friend, author buddy and someone also none-too-shabby with digital editing, Eric Garrison, who attacked my wish list of edits and did what was needed to let me reuse most of the old clip. So here it is, polished and back in service, and also showing off the fabulous new work by Bonnie Wasson, the book trailer to Haunting Blue!
Today Seventh Star launched the official book trailer to Virtual Blue, a collaborative effort with local fan and cosplayer Nikki Howard, who opened up and tapped her inner troubled punk girl. Thanks, Nikki, you are awesome! Special thanks to Eric Garrison for editing the pieces together for me so fast and efficiently.
I’m very excited to reveal the cover to my next release, the short story collection Darkness With a Chance of Whimsy: Ten Years, Ten Stories.
