This blog tracks the epic of kick-starting a whole writing career, with spies and thrillers, now saints and vampires. I cover the creative process, stuff that blows up, history, philosophy, and theology. If you like any or all of the above, you'll like this one. We talk about comic books, movies, music, and writing. Usually, all at the same time.
[Note: All Amazon links here are associate links. Which means nothing to you, but it means Declan Finn gets a few pennies for the sale. Thank you.]
If you’ve been around me for five minutes, you know how much I hate marketing.
If you look at the best marketer in existence … you’ll also find one of the best selling authors, and maybe one of the worst writers. (Looking at you, James Patterson.)
As far as sales go, quality doesn’t matter, only that an author sells in bulk.
As I’m certain you’ve noticed, Honeymoon From Hell came out over the course of only a few months. I don’t even think it was a whole six months.
Part of the reason why is something called “rapid release.” It’s supposed to manipulate the Amazon algorithm to push your book without needing a Big 5 publisher … or however many number they are these days.
How does it all work? Does it work?
Well, it’s made money. Has it made more more than I would have otherwise?
Nope.
You see, back when I first published Honor at Stake, I sold 240 copies of that first book in the first few months. It was enough for me to get a Dragon Award nomination at the time.
However, I have made money buy selling multiple books at the same time. So it works after a fashion. And probably by condensing sales into a tighter timeline.
Personally, I should be selling more. I know that much. If I spent six months pushing one books, I probably could get up to those sales numbers …
And then push the next book.
it’s why I still use publishers when I can. Because between social media, and marketing the books, well…
And you don’t even want to know the ratio of sales to income. Even in self-pub.
I don’t know. What do you think I should do? Aside from quit. If my brain could let me quit, I’d never have gotten into writing in the first place.
No. Do not ask me for specifics of self-pub versus publications. I’d have to coordinate with Russell Newquist or Richard Paolinelli to figure out exact numbers. And they have enough problems without recreational math being added to the list.
As I’ve said before, if you want to be a writer, I can tell you that you don’t. If you have to be a writer, you’re probably stuck with it.
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.
I used to review the TV shows I watched. Over the last three years, that hasn’t happened as much, because there was nothing I felt was worth even talking about.
And now, things are a little different.
So, a few TV shows to discuss.
RJ Decker
I did not see this coming.
ABC flooded every conceivable channel and outlet with commercials for this show. I could not escape the ads if I tried. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was.
On a whim, I decided to try it.
Thank God I did. It’s been the highlight of the TV season. It really has.
And I knew it was going to be awesome from the moment I saw “Based on the novel Double Whammy, by Carl Hiaasen,” with executive producer, Carl Hiaasen.
If you don’t know Carl Hiaasen, his entire career as a novelist has been “Florida man, the novel.”
Now we have Jim Rockford meets Florida Man the TV show.
RJ Decker is a news photographer who beat up the wrong thief. A beautiful woman seduces him before his last day in court … and before she perjures herself to throw him in jail.
Now that Decker is out, he’s acting as a Private Investigator. He’s living in the pool house of his ex-wife and her new girlfriend, who is a cop. And we proceed from there. The way it’s handled, I’m not sure this scenario would have worked any other way. Also, they don’t hit you over the head with it. It’s barely mentioned unless utterly necessary to the plot. It’s less a “gay is normal and not weird” and more a “Florida is abnormal and very weird.”
You know what makes this stand out? IT’S SMART. It assumes that you’re smart too. Our hero observes something, makes a deduction on it, and we move forward. We’re not lingering on it, we’re not pretending that you the viewers are stupid. We’re not pretending the characters didn’t see what was right in front of them.
It’s also entertaining. These people are likeable.
The Hunting Party
After several false starts, NBC has finally gotten their reformulation of The Blacklist.
The premise for this show is simple: The government has faked the death of hundreds of serial killers in order to throw them into a super secret government prison called “The Pit.” There, scientists experiment on the killers in order to “fix” them.
Of course, nothing could possibly go wrong with this idea, right?
Until an explosion hits The Pit and unleashes a whole wave of inmates on an unsuspecting populace.
To hunt down and recapture these psychopaths, we have “the hunting party,” with a profiler, a CIA operator, and a soldier who was a Pit prison guard.
It’s interesting that NBC’s solution to recreating the Blacklist, only with Criminal Minds instead of Bond villains.
Believe it or not, I have enjoyed this show. Granted, I needed to get over a few things. Such as “WHY AREN’T ALL THESE PSYCHOS CHIPPED AND LOJACKED WITH GPS!” But it really just boiled down to “we have an illegal but inescapable jail, why don’t need to chip our prisoners! They can’t escape!”
F***ing government.
There are more than a few moments where you’re going to look at this and go “F***ing government.” I’ve lost count of the number of stupid experiments that the government has done in real life. The Hunting Party feels like they’re going to take every stupid idea and apply them on guinea pigs, only the guinea pigs are less sympathetic.
Part of the entertainment value is seeing how much the results of the “treatments”—usually it’s a matter of “We’ve got an evil and broken monster … let’s see how we can break him EVEN MORE.”
Apparently, NBC is dumping money into this show. Kelsey Grammar showed up as a Jonestown like cult leader.
Now, I don’t quite know where this show is going. But so far, it’s been entertaining.
Wild Cards
CW has something good on. Who knew? It’s called Wild Cards, a Canadian production that’s being broadcast on CW.
The premise is simple enough, it’s one part Castle and one part White Collar.
SHE is a career criminal, raised by criminals. She grew up robbing the great places of Europe… and being raised by television and media. She has an amoral viewpoint and more pop culture references than the show can footnote. They literally don’t even try. After she cons her way onto a case, she ends up being a consultant (Think Richard Castle or Neil Caffrey).
HE is a cop in the doghouse— or in this case, harbor patrol. He’s tightly wound, and he has a dead brother who’s murder is unsolved. He’s more tightly wound than Kate Beckett ever was.
So you can see where I see overlaps with other shows.
High Potential
When the show begins, Morgan Gillory is a janitor at the LAPD, and is compelled to correct the murder board in homicide. She’s a single mother of three, and a high IQ … with all the personality quirks that go with it.
After that, it feels very much like the closest they get to Murder, She Wrote. You know, a quasi-police procedural where there’s a Castle-like consultant. This is very much The Mentalist, without the carnie showmanship. Also, the actress playing Morgan Gillory, Kaitlyn Olson, does not have Patrick Baker’s +10 charisma.
And having David Giuntoli from Grimm play one of the killers was just entertaining.
Watson
Morris Chestnut was the black sidekick from Under Siege 2. And he really, really wanted to play a doctor. He had at least one show where he was a Florida medical examiner.
Now, he’s playing Watson.
Watson is supposed to be the post-Sherlock life of Doctor John Watson, only he’s an American doctor, and they’ve all but deleted his military experience. (It was mentioned in one episode. Never again.) He’s now back home in Pittsburgh, a geneticist playing diagnostician with a team of medical experts to help him solve medical mysteries.
Yes. Watson can best be described as House, MD… but without the sadism or the humor. Unlike Hugh Laurie’s psychopath with a medical degree, I don’t want to horribly murder any of the characters.
It’s … okay.
The best actor here is Peter Mark Kendall who plays “the Croft brothers.” The personalities, the mannerisms, the body postures, are so distinct, I sometimes believe they’re played by two actors.
The follow up is Eve Harlow—who I am certain is someone I know from elsewhere, but her IMDB resume tells me different.
I don’t know. She looks like someone… anyway. Next show.
Best Medicine
Did you ever see the UK TV show Doc Martin? This is the American attempt to recreate it. They even hired to play the original Doc Martin to play the lead’s father.
Premise: a tightly wound, antisocial surgeon (redundant, I know) moves to a small town that he has fond memories of so he can hide his recently triggered hemophobia.
Do I like this series? Yes. I watch this for the medical mystery of the week. That’s it. It feels very much like Royal Pains. I like our Doctor. I sympathize with him.
But they’ve made the “small fishing village in Maine” into a freak show. Because small towns apparently filled with retards, racially diverse gay couples, “the kids are too smart for this town,” blah blah blah. And every other episode is a yearly festival that no one told him about until five minutes ago.
If you’re from a small town, you will probably find this offensive. I only watch this on DVR, and fast forward so much, I can get through a 42 minute episode (sans commercials) in 30 minutes or less.
Sheriff Country
I gave up on the series Fire Country in the first episode. It’s a rare thing for me to do. My family trained me to give a series at least three episodes before giving up on a TV show. It’s a TV Guide reviewer policy my family adopted decades ago. I presume TV Guide no longer exists.
Anyway, Fire Country was so heavy in the soap opera nonsense that I gave up on the whole thing.
So when the spin-off Sheriff Country came out, I said “Aw Hell No.”
But it had Morena Baccarin. And I like her. She’s hot. She can act. I just wish she was in shows that didn’t suck.
Sheriff Country is no exception.
Okay, that’s a little harsh. I only recently gave up on it, despite several plot threads that nearly killed any and all interest in the show. But no, at long last, it killed my interest stone dead.
Our Sheriff’s father is played by W. Earl Brown, a veteran of Deadwood. He’s the most interesting, colorful character in the show, and is probably the main reason I put up with Sheriff Country for so long.
CIA
If you look at my review of FBI, you know I had no hope for this spin-off series going in. But I wanted to see Tom Ellis at work in something other than Lucifer.
Tom Ellis went from being Satan to being a CIA agent, and he didn’t have to change character much. That joke writes itself.
It’s stupid.
So, so stupid.
The Joint Terrorism Taskforce, what’s that? We don’t need no stinking task force. We’ll just slap a random FBI guy to a CIA office in the middle of Manhattan and that’ll suffice for CIA to run the streets of America. Yeah. Sure.
Iran’s best assassins are women. Obviously. (Episode two. Honest. That was the plot.)
Sure, let’s send the boss into Hong Kong to exfiltrate a NOC hunted by China. (Literally episode three.)
Of course AfD are white supremacists. No, why bother pretending to research international politics on a CIA show? Our viewers are too stupid to know better…
Someone please stop putting Dick Wolf’s name on everything.
Boston Blue
Remember Blue Bloods? It followed a family of New York City cops (and an ADA) in their day-to-day lives? It featured Mark Wahlberg as Danny Regan?
Well, for real-world reasons (a New York City hiring freeze), Danny’s son has become a cop in Boston. When he’s injured in the line of duty, Danny is on the first shuttle up.
The premise of this series revolves around another family of law enforcement… only instead of Boston Irish, this family is black and Jewish, and grandpa is a Baptist preacher. In Boston. How does this work? In a highly convoluted manner and beggars belief.
I have gotten halfway through season one … also on fast forward.
I thought this was going to be a train wreck from minute one.
Why?
Danny Regan’s Boston partner is the lead actress from Star Trek: Discovery, Sonequa Martin-Green. That was strike one.
Is it crap?
It’s not as much obvious crap as I was concerned it was going to be. The saving grace of this show is Mark Wahlberg and Ernie Hudson,1 and surprisingly the actor playing Sean Regan. But this is a perfectly good waste of actress Gloria Reuben, who I remember being a much better actress than this. But there are some lines not even Wahlberg and Hudson can make work.
Again, this is another show I watch on fast forward. In fact, the more I watch of this show, the more I fast forward. There’s only so much I will put up with for characters I like.
Death in Paradise
If you like Agatha Christie-like puzzles, you should be watching this show. I’ve seen every season of this show at least four times, and these puzzles still get me sometime. Even when I remember the solutions, I sometimes don’t remember whodunit.
And part of the fun is the culture clash, since every lead detective is from the UK, and dropped into a Caribbean environment that they don’t quite gel with. And of course, we have a rotating cast of actors, because UK shows don’t keep casts like American shows. The first detective is downright Victorian. The second looks like a Weasley cousin. We have an Irish Columbo, a hypochondriac and a jerk at different time.
It’s a fun comedy mystery.
NCIS
It’s still on. It’s still an entertaining police procedural. And I like Gary Cole.
And I must admit, their 500th episode was surprisingly good, with a beautiful twist I didn’t see coming.
NCIS Origins
I think this show is finding its footing. The excellent actor they hired for flashbacks of young Doctor “Ducky” Mallard has made two appearances this season—probably for sweeps week.
And they dedicated an entire episode to a dog, who has more acting range and facial expressions than their primary actress.
If you remember The Bone Collector, it had a quadraplegic forensic expert solving murders. It’s based on a Jeffery Deaver novel.
Jeffery Deaver also created Colton Shaw, who is his attempt to copy Jack Reacher. Only Shaw is a bounty hunter, using his prepper skills from his youth to find missing people.
In the TV show, Shaw is played by Justin Hartley, who was in Smallville as Oliver Queen. The producers hired some DEI rejects for background grunt work.
The first season, I gave up on in the first thirty minutes. The women who find him work are an old lesbian couple, who were written to be annoying. His lawyer is an ex who is a raging bitch. And there was the obligatory hacker to be used as a shortcut, because computers are magic. He, of course, was racially ambiguous.
Fast forward a little and I found that Jensen Ackles was being hired to play Shaw’s brother. I gave into temptation and tried it just for Ackles. The lawyer ex toned down the bitchy. The ancient lesbians were being phased out, as was the hacker.
Overall the show is okay. It’s another show that I am heavy handed with the fast forward button.
No, I don’t stream if I can avoid it, and I hate commercials.
That’s all I have for today. Unless you want me to discuss older TV shows I have on disc.
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.
I occurred to me that someone asked me a question, and I never answered it. Literally, never. And it was about my books. I didn’t answer because it was a question on Facebook, and my reply would be a freaking blog article…
Oh wait, I have one of those.
The question was, “How did you turn a thirty page short story into a Tuscany Bay Books novel?”
Come with me now back to 1998. I was writing what would become White Ops—which, you may recall, started as Babylon 5 fanfiction.1 Writing all this was supposed to just get random ideas out of my head. It was not supposed to spiral into 4,000 pages, six novels, and a compulsion with writing.
I had gotten the first two books out of the way, finally, and it covered the events of the TV series. And I kept going. I started plowing into what came next.
My father made an offhand comment about “Why not a terrorist takeover of Disneyplanet?”
That short story—and at that time, everything in the novels was a short story—was about thirty pages long. My characters arrived. They unpacked. The terrorists were already in place in security, so they quietly took the planet hostage during the night. My heroes figure it out and kill everybody.
That was, again, 30 pages … maybe sixty.2 Everyone was dead. The end.
Funny enough, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six came out that August. One of the hostage instances was … a terrorist attack at EuroDisney (Spain, if I recall correctly.) So, timing.
I moved on from the fan fiction, wrote other novels. I went back, tinkered some more. I must have I think I had written about twenty or thirty novels before I went back the for The Final Edit.
By then, most of my books ran entirely on having smart villains, who had a lot of resources and manpower.
And in the original short…
Hey! I developed my own lore during this rewrite. I need to make this make sense.
Why are my heroes within walking distance of the villains? We have a planet to work with. Put them on the other end of the planet. Getting there is now half the fun.
I basically assumed everyone had an idea of what Disney looked like. I gave minimal descriptions of what the Planet looked like. So description? What description?
If getting there is half the fun, I have to set up some threats.
Oh, wait, I can’t just data dump description. I have eight characters, let them have fun for a day, that way I can outline some threats and have the gun on the wall in act one.
Like the killer animatronics (Why, yes, I grew up watching the Yul Brenner Westworld, why do you ask?).
Or Cretaceous World, with the genetically reengineered dinosaurs—oh, who cares if they’re all from three different eras, no one is going to notice.
Most planets are heavy on the water… there was a giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, right? And there were giant sharks, right?3
That’s the ocean. But we have animatronic pirates, don’t we?
Westworld was far too easy. Surely we can up the ante.
This is all too easy. Let’s detail the massive, world endingthreat.
This is too easy. Let’s make the threat harder to disarm.
This is still way too easy. Let’s go Full John Ringo! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This is too simple. Here are the terrorists. Here are my heroes. I’m going to throw in a wild card. And I’m going to address the military response with orbitals overhead.
Wait, I had personal backstory for one of my heroes with the villain. I should probably go into emotional splash damage.
Oh, yeah, MAKE IT NOT DISNEY, YOU IDIOT, YOU DON’T WANT TO GET SUED.
So, yeah. I had some expansion. I had a whole world to play with and I didn’t play with it. For some reason,4 I was way too gentle on my toys. But I was the writer, and I can break my toys if I wanted.
Jim Butcher likes to say that he has no original ideas, he just steals from a lot of places—like Harry Dresden is “just” a magical Jim Rockford or Spenser. If that’s the case, White Ops 3: Main Street DOA is some Rainbow 6, Westworld, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Meg, and some John Wick, just for fun.
As the saying goes: to steal from one source is plagiarism, to steal from many sources is called “research.”
So, how do you expand a short story into a full novel? A little effort, really.
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.
Pardon me while I count off the number of possibilities they could run in the footnote.1
Because right now, there are side quests from the Batman: Arkham Games that could make better films than some of what I’ve seen for the past five years.2
But then again, James Gunn is relying on notorious one-trick pony Tom King for his comic book knowledge. If you don’t know, Tom King’s notoriety comes from a Batman run where he set up a Batman / Catwoman marriage, and then rug-pulled everyone. News about the face-plant leaked the week before the comic issue released. King’s comic book sales catered. He was kicked off… and sent to a Supergirl miniseries. And that series is the basis of the new movie…
Ugh. For the love of…
I can’t imagine why Gunn says he has a problem adapting Batman, can you?
Of course, we all know the real reason.
Gunn says Batman is overexposed.
What Gunn means is that it's hard to make an ADHD, quippy, quirky team film centered on Batman.
In other words, it's not really hard to make a Batman film.3 It’s just difficult to make Batman a James Gunn character.
Of course, we know what we'd get from a Gunn Batman film:
We'd get Batman Forever, but with the real focus being on “the Outsiders”4—a quirky team of misfits that tangentially connect to the Bat-Family.
The real main character would really be the former Robin Jason Todd, in his adult version as Red Hood.
It'll confuse frenetic, frantic motion with action, and be filled with quirky, quippy humor. Because Gunn.
Moral of the story will be "the real family are the friends we made along the way."
So, no, I don’t see James Gunn making a Batman film with his usual gimmick, unless he wants to remake Adam West for "modern audiences."
Meanwhile, if Chuck Dixon5 or Mike Baron6 wrote, consulted, or even gave the nod to a Batman film script, it would be a film I would drag my family to. Why? Because it would involve good writers at the very foundation of the script. Even if Gunn was involved.
How likely is it that James Gunn would bring in a competent, comic book veteran to help with a script?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Like Gunn would let that happen. A veteran comic book author who knows the total breadth and depth of the subject would produce a superior product … not a James Gunn product.
We already know Gunn is using Tom King for his comic book lore. Because why use a successful comic book author? Gunn has to read comics that fit closer to his style.
Let us, for example, take the upcoming DC project, Supergirl.
“I want to speak to your manager!” Winemom Super Karen. No, really, does she have to look like a mouth-breather? Was Kristen Stewart not available?
I mean, Supergirl is going to be another big budget film, isn’t it? It wants to be part of a billion-dollar franchise, right? It’s going to cost at least $100 million to make, isn’t it?
Surely, James Gunn is going to hire only the best writers to tackle a project this important, isn’t he?
Surely, the script writer Gunn hired has written plenty of screenplays…
Of course not.
Meet script writer Ana Nogueria.
These are her writing credits:
Well, that’s … not good.
No, really, why are we entrusting a hundred million-dollar project to someone who has only ever written a short?
Is Gunn relying on director Craig Gillespie to do the heavy lifting? The director of the 2011 Fright Night remake, I, Tonya, and Cruella?
Based on the last two, I guess this will be even lessSupergirl, and more Sympathy for the Devil.
You may have noticed there is a a trend in most (if not all7) of the post-Endgame comic book films. The standard operating procedure is to hire nobodies to write and / or direct, to churn out the product desired by whoever is calling the shots these days—be it the corporate Kevin Feige, or James Gunn. Bringing the Russo brothers back for Doomsday was so notable because everyone previously was brought in to follow orders. Even Sam Raimi. How do you waste Sam Raimi like that…?
Yeah, yeah. I’m cranky. Get off of my lawn.
I guess if you’re a DC comic book fan, I hope you like James Gunn Films. because as long as Gunn is in charge of DC (and nothing makes him change), you’re going to get James Gunn films, no matter whose the writer and the director.
So yes. To circle back to where we began, of course Gunn is going to have problems making a Batman film…
Unless, of course, you liked Batman Forever. If you liked Batman Forever, you’re going to love what comes next. I can see it now. Batman is a literal, humorless bruiser. Batgirl will be super serious and killing people. Jason Todd will be a loveable goofball and mass murderer. The character with the most emotional range will be Cassandra Cain, who will have absolutely no dialogue, and probably played by Pom Klementieff.8 And probably Metamorpho will be thrown in to acknowledge the original 1980s lineup, and Gunn already has that character in James Gunn’s Superman.
And since Tom King is his source material, Catwoman will be a pathological-level thief, who will steal for the sake of stealing, no matter how much actual money she has.9
James Gunn “can’t make a Batman film” with his usual formula. Please. Paul Dini pulled off better Batman films in 40 minutes of cartoon than Gunn could in three hours and a half-billion dollar budget.
So yeah, maybe I’m cynical. Maybe I’m cranky. Maybe I’m so out of touch with the mainstream, that Gunn is an absolute freaking genius.
But I don’t think so.
Pardon me, I have this sudden urge to watch Mask of the Phantasm.
Three Ravens Press is divesting itself of a lot of properties, trying to focus on their primary IPs—something called JTF13 and something else called Car Wars. If you don’t know what these things are, I’m not going to explain.
What does this matter to me worth a damn?
Fun fact: my original Love at First Bite trilogy came out through them…
Yes. This series has killed yet ANOTHER publisher.1
For those of you keeping score at home, this is the fifth edition of the first book, and edition four for the rest.
In the beginning, Honor at Stake went through Damnation Press. Yes. Really. A technically “Christian book” series went through Damnation.
When Honor at Stake was nominated for the Dragons in the first year, I really wanted book two to come out in short order. Damnation Press was taking their time. They gave it back to me. It felt like they threw it at me.
In short order, I found out why:
I believe within the month of my publishing what is now Demons are Forever,2Damnation press folded like a house of cards. It was bought out and eaten by another publisher. Don’t ask me the name, I don’t recall.
I self-published Honor at Stakeand the rest of the series between 2016 and 2017.
In 2018, Silver Empire Press, run by morgon and Russell Newquist, picked up the whole vampire series, my entire Pius series, and they pushed me to write Saint Tommy NYPD.
With nothing else for it, I shopped it around. Love at First Bite was picked up by Three Ravens, and rereleased in 2023.
Three Ravens was also going to publish Honeymoon from Hell. But I wanted to give them four books at a time. (Yes, four. I would have self-published Cross Over.) By the time I wrapped up the series, their situation had changed, and Three Ravens wasn’t taking on any new series. If it was not their IP, it was not their problem.
Flash forward to now, and circumstances have changed. Again.
No, Three Ravens isn’t dying. I guess they’re ditching Love at First Bite before it kills them like it has the others. Heh.3
I’m just going back to straight up self-publishing the whole bloody thing. Like I said, Book one is on the fifth edition. No one wants to republish something that’s already come out repeatedly. I’ve even tried some of the usual suspects already, to no avail. Yes, that one. I know what you’re thinking.
So, I’m getting them all republished. Again. By the time you read this, the latest, self-published editions should be up and running at the usual links. I hope.
We’ll see what happens.
At this point, I just want my books available to everyone who might be interested. Self-publishing is just the most reliable way at the moment. You know, until Amazon just de-platforms me for no reason. I’m certain it’s coming eventually.
But yeah. I’ve been doing this dance for fifteen years. After 40 books (I recently counted), I’ve run out of patience. I have no Ducks left to give. All your ducks are belong to us. Quack.
No. I promise you I’m not losing my mind. Not so that anyone would notice a difference. But if you don’t get the reference, I’m not going to explain it.
Yes, I’m at the point where this feels just plain Sisyphean. I’m really hoping that Blaine likes my work, so I can keep writing novels for Land & Sea, maybe focus on them as my primary work from here on out, and do other novels and shorts in my down time. Maybe I can have down time. Maybe I can even force myself to go to conventions and do nothing by hang out and just …. interact with people. Wouldn’t that be odd?
Anyway, so the Love at First Bite books are being republished, by me, myself and I.
The funny thing is, Three Ravens told me about this change right before I had a new marketing campaign ready go to.
That’s probably a good thing. The marketing relied on reviews from JD Cowan (who reviewed the series when the books first came out), and he’s currently been kicked off of social media, for reasons no one is particularly certain of. It’s weird, but life is getting weirder in general. Or I could be coming down with something. Or both.
I should be coming out with a list of Dragon Award suggestions for you sometime soon. We’ll see. So far, I’m thinking Richard Paolinelli and Shami Stovall. I’m not sure who else, yet. Then again, I’ll have to double check the categories. They keep changing on me.
No, I’m not pushing On Tiber’s Edge for an award. I don’t think Wargate or Blaine care about awards. The Dragons no longer has a Military SF category. And I’ve burned months of my life just trying to host discussions on the topic, so I’m just working with other people to cultivate the next list. I work with a review site, so why not?
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.
