Spotlight: Haunted Gothic Mansions with Mirrors!

Today I'm spotlighting a collection of short stories called The Other Room by British author James Everington. Sounds creepily delicious, am I right?

The Other Room is a collection of weird horror fiction, containing twelve stories of the uncanny and the surreal.

A naive student finds that his crumbling bedsit can be as haunted as any Gothic mansion.

A man stumbles across another world which is the mirror image of his own.

A young woman who everyone thinks is beautiful wonders why, given what she sees in the mirror each morning.

Influenced by writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Shirley Jackson, and Robert Aickman these tales, like all good horror stories, are as much about the psychology of the protagonist as the fate that awaits them.

The Other Room contains both new and previously published stories that will challenge your conceptions of horror and literary fiction.

If you're not in the UK, you can find The Other Room here.

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Another Belated Friday Book Club

Maybe I should just change it to the Saturday Book Club? :-)

Honestly, this week was the Week From H*££. It was mad. It was mental. And I'm still feeling slightly shell shocked.

However, the show must go on!

This week I started Kevin Hearne's Hounded from the Iron Druid Chronicles. So far I'm really enjoying it.

What are you reading this week?

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The Long Haul

The other day Joe Konrath had an interesting post: “Why You Won’t Succeed As A Self-Published Ebook Writer.” I highly encourage everyone to read it. It’s good and it will give you some great food for thought regarding your own writing career.

On of the things that particularly struck me was point number two. For those who don’t want to pop over to Konrath’s blog, here it is:

2. You expect instant success. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time to find an audience. But you have a much better change finding it with an ebook, which has an infinite shelf life.

Actually, I don’t expect instant success, but the rest rings true. I’ve been wandering around with the old traditional publishing mindset of launch dates and big splashes lodged firmly in my brain. As though I needed to let everyone know my book was available the MINUTE it came out.

Interesting enough, this was something I discussed briefly with Dave Gaughran over at his blog. He was talking about how to get reviewers and I was thinking I needed to line them up RIGHT NOW, even though my book won’t be out until (hopefully) the end of June. Give or take a few days.

But that is the OLD way of thinking. Traditional publishing needs a big splash on launch date because they’ve got literally weeks, if not mere days, to prove that this book is the Next Big Thing before it gets yanked off the shelves forever.

Guess what? My book won’t be going away. Once it’s out, it’s out. It’s forever, and as JA is fond of saying “Forever is a long time.” Yeah, it is.

I don’t need to worry about launch parties and making sure the world knows from day one that my book is there for them to buy and read and tell me how fabulous I am. It’s all about the slow burn, baby! Slow and steady wins the race and all that.

In the wonderful world of self publishing, authors no longer need to rush around like headless chickens trying to push their books like mad the minute they go live. Instead, they can work on the next book and the next and the next while slowly building an audience.

I don’t know about you, but I find that kind of liberating.

This doesn’t mean that marketing can take the back burner. It just means that you no longer need to chain yourself to the old way of doing things. Find your own way. Isn’t that the point of being an indie, after all?

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Spotlight: A Vampire, Shapeshifter, Western, Historical, Unwed Mother.... Parody?

Romance Novel by PJ Jones

Smella Rosepetal must find a millionaire husband to finance her baby’s heart transplant. She flies home to her deputy father’s ranch in Pitchforks, Texas, where she falls in love with Deadward Forest, a wealthy environmentalist vampire.

When a deranged murderer is on the loose in Pitchforks, killing romance heroines, Deadward assumes Smella would be safer without him. Smella turns to her childhood friend, Snake Long, for comfort. But Snake doesn’t have the money to save her baby, so Smella places herself in peril in a desperate hunt for a rich husband.

Time is running out for Smella’s baby, and she must escape from the Australian Outback and face down Flabio, an overweight and disgruntled, aspiring cover model, plus enraged vampire wives and their homosexual, vampire, cowboy husbands, a jealous were-gerbil, James Bond, a drunk rodeo clown and Smella’s strange boyfriend who wants to drain her blood, yet is repulsed by her smell.

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This book is seriously freaking funny. Like laugh out loud funny. Or pee your pants funny. I'm not the only one who thinks so, either. Just check out the reviews on Amazon.

Also, PJ Jones is awesome. And a very funny person. Who possibly bakes blueberry muffins (Though hopefully NOT in a kilt.) But definitely writes awesome parodies of romance novels.

For the UK peeps go here.

Things To Be Grateful For

Over at Writer In Progress, author Rebecca Knight talks about the things she's grateful for this week:

Rebecca Knight: Writer In Progress: Things To Be Grateful For

That got me thinking. I've had a pretty manic week so far. Things are completely insane at work. I
haven't had much time (or energy) to write. I've had a trip to the dentist AND a trip to the doctor. My
cover artist was supposed to have the cover for my book done this week, but it ain't gonna happen until
the end of the month. And that's just for starters. Seriously, a girl could get depressed.

Yeah, good times.

So, maybe it's time to turn off the crazy for a minute and focus on the thankful.

1. I already have a great critique partner, but I've always been of the opinion that while two heads are better
than one, three heads is a winner. I now have another fantastic crit partner I met over on the Kindle Boards.
Two of them are keeping me on the straight and narrow and giving me brilliant feedback. I'm rocking this
writing stuff right out of the park!

2. I have a box of Magnums in my freezer. For those of you in the USA, Magnums are like Dove ice cream bars.
Yeah, that's something to be grateful for.

3. My parents are incredibly supportive even though I will never allow them to read anything I write. Well, maybe
I'll have to write something nice and clean just so they can read something I've written. Sort of a Grace Livingston
Hill meets Louis Lamour. I shudder at the thought. Maybe a cozy mystery ala Agatha Christie. Yeah, that's better.

4. And finally, the Kindle Boards. Every visit I make I find inspiration, support, confirmation, and information. Huh.
Too bad "support" doesn't end with "ation". Bygones. I'm so happy to have f0und a place where I can yammer about
my craft to other people who are just as obsessed about it as I am.

Oh and another thing...

Free food. I'm really grateful that tonight I'm going to a snazzy party, thanks to my day job. Even better than the free food?

Free booze. ;-)

Check Me Out On WereVamps Romance

I'm being spotlighted by Melissa over on WereVamps Romance today.

SQUEEE!!!

Belated Friday Book Club

I usually have Friday Book Club on, well, Friday. But the ruckus yesterday prevented such feats of logic.

Bygones.

This past week I've been reading J.R. Ward's paranormal romance Lover Unbound (part of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series), and yeah, it's just about as kinky as it sounds. The thing about the BDB is that they've got more cheese than the entire dairy section at Tesco. They're also like chrack. Chocolate choated chrack. Once you pop, you can't stop.

(For those of you unfamiliar with with the reason for the extra "h"s, Ward drops an "h" randomly into various words and names in BDB. This is to give it the "feel" of a foreign language. Told ya. Cheese!)

I'm also about halfway through the YA paranormal Shimmerspell byKimberly Spencer. It's taking me awhile since I have to read through Kindle for PC. I don't do well reading on a LCD screen so I read about a chapter a day or something.

So far I'm finding quite enjoyable. I'll be doing a full review when I'm finished. (Shimmerspell on Amazon UK is here.)

What did you read this week?