Category: Book News

Characters of Hometown: Valerie Robard

So here we see Vicki just hanging out with her best friend Valerie Robard.

Val is another one of the bad girls of Belford High.  Sort of.  She likes a lot of the same things that Vicki does, certainly – she likes to party, she likes to drink, she likes to smoke a few nugs now and then, and she’s very easy to talk out of her knickers.  Especially when she’s been partying and drinking and smoking a few nugs.

The difference is that she’s not magnificent in her bad girl-ness like Vicki is.  Where Vicki is angry and defiant, Val is timid and submissive.  Or rather, as Natasha VanDyne and the other snobs would put it, Vicki is a bitch and Val is just a dumb trailer trash ho.  The teachers and other adult authority figures of Belford mostly agree with that assessment, though they’re more likely to use words like “troublemaker” and “underachiever”.
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Heroines of Hometown: Vicki Powers

This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!

Victoria Powers (the redhead on the right) is the only child of Brenda Powers, a single mother who lives in a trailer park on the edge of Belford (the town where Hometown is set). In 1994, at the time Hometown begins, Vicki is just shy of eighteen years old. Brenda is thirty-five.
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Dreams of the Boardwalk Promotion Announcement!

Hey all!

I’ve got a birthday coming up next Friday, and I’ve decided that a gift I want to give myself and all of you is a free giveaway of Dreams of the Boardwalk.  It’s been more than a year since I first published Dreams, and I never did get around to giving it a proper promotion because…well, reasons.  There was always just one more thing I needed to do before the conditions were just right.

Well, I’ve waited long enough.  I want Dreams of the Boardwalk to be read and circulated.  It’s time to do what I should have done when it was first released: starting next Friday, October 12,  and running through Tuesday, October 16, Dreams of the Boardwalk is available for Kindle download absolutely free.  Get one.  Read it.  Review it.  Tell everyone about it.

More to come.

Hometown Book Trailer!

Hey, all!

I’ve signed up for a premium membership at Booksgosocial, an online book promotion service, and one of the services they provide for premium members is creation of book trailers.  Of course I’ve taken advantage of this service, and the first one, for Hometown, has been completed!  It is now available at both their Youtube channel and mine.  Have a look:

(And of course, if this trailer convinces you that Hometown is something you want to check out, then just head on over to Amazon and get yourself a copy!)

Heroines of Hometown: Angelina Santos-de la Cruz

This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week. Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art. If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive. Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!

Angelina Santos-De La Cruz (seen on the left above, with the leg injury) was born in late February of 1977, nine months to the day after her parents’ June wedding. At the time the Hometown begins, in the fall of 1994, she is seventeen.

Angelina is just a Good Kid in pretty much every dimension: she’s a shoo-in for valedictorian, she’s an athlete (captain of the field hockey team), she’s in the school choir, and she’s in all the school plays. The eldest of seven children, she got used to taking on responsibility early on, and she helps out a lot at home – once all those school activities are done, of course. She’s also an active participant at her family’s church, though she’s maybe not quite as devout a Catholic as they are (more on that later).

What’s more, she doesn’t fall into the trap of many a Good Kid and become self-righteous. She has friends among all strata of Belford High School society, and she doesn’t judge people for having a different life than she does. Many of the school’s bad girls – including Vicki – have waited for quite some time for the slut-shaming to begin before they realized it wasn’t going to.
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The Art of Hometown: Angelina and Vicki At The Last

This post is a re-run, leading up to a new post in the same series coming either later this week or early next week.  Sort of a “Previously on Hometown promotional art.  If you want the archived versions of all of these articles plus more, check out the Promotional Art archive.  Just keep your eye out for that new post, coming soon!

The brave young women you see before you are Angelina Santos-de la Cruz and Vicki Powers, the heroines of my novel Hometown. I can’t tell you exactly what they’re facing because, well, that would be telling. This scene is from the end of the novel, and Angelina and Vicki are facing the final horror with nothing but a flathead screwdriver, an injured leg, and their indomitable wills.

The thing they’re facing might be in more trouble than it thinks.

For more information on Angelina, see here.

For more information on Vicki, see here.

Thanks to the talented MJ Barros for this marvelous interpretation of my two heroines.

And if you want the whole story of Angelina Santos-de la Cruz and Vicki Powers, just pick yourself up a copy of Hometown at Amazon.

On The Truth of Rock and Roll – Part 1: The Inspiration

I started The Truth of Rock and Roll shortly after my first wife told me we were through.
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What An Idea!

So I was reading this post on the BooksGoSocial Writers Blog, and it made a suggestion that should have been blatantly obvious, but which I have managed to miss in nearly ten years of blogging:

Want to use your blog to promote your writing career?  Then blog about your books!

This should not have been as much of a revelation as it was.

I’ve posted about my work before – mostly the odd excerpt or giveaway notification – but I’ve mostly been pretty shy.  I think I had the idea that I needed to draw people in and entertain them with other material, then give tantalizing glimpses of the fiction.  Kinda like ads and previews in a magazine.

Well, there will certainly still be other material.  I’m not going to stop being a movie buff or having Thoughts after all.  And a great deal of material still needs to be imported from my old blog.  But in the days to come, you’ll see a lot more about my fiction and its inspirations.  Hope you find it as moving as I do.

Difficult Decisions

As the title suggests, I’m struggling with two difficult decisions.

First: All of my books and stories are currently enrolled in Kindle Select, which is to say they’re exclusive to Amazon. The upside to this are the promotional tools available and, more importantly, the option to enroll in Kindle Unlimited.  I recently took a look at my account, and saw that almost half of my income from my ebooks – such as it is – is from pages read on Kindle Unlimited.  The downside is that they’re exclusive to Amazon.  Amazon is 75-85% of the ebook market, but still, I personally know people who don’t have access to Kindle for one reason or another.  So my choice was between maximizing the use I got out of the single largest market for ebooks, or trying to have as broad a base as possible by publishing in as many venues as possible.  Until recently, that choice was actually pretty easy, since the one site I knew of that allowed me to publish to multiple platforms in a semi-efficient manner, Smashwords, is a serious pain in the neck.  Formatting a document to publish there involves working through a 100+-page style instruction manual, or hiring someone to do it for you.  But now a friend has introduced me to Draft2Digital, which publishes in multiple platforms and formats (including Kindle), but allows you to simply upload a Word document and then handles the formatting for you.  That made the decision harder.  Now that one is as easily accomplished as the other, do I go for the broadest possible base, or most effective use of the platform that “only” covers 75-85% of the market?

Second: I am currently working on an urban fantasy novel called City of Dreams, which is set in the same setting as Dreams of the Boardwalk. City of Dreams is going to be a full-length novel, not a novella like Boardwalk, and I’m already about 200 pages in.  Would it be foolish of me to start posting excerpts and chapters on this site?  How about the entire first draft, chapter by chapter and excerpt be excerpt?  On the one hand, it’s publicity and proofreading all in one, and I always work better and faster when I know there are people waiting to read my work.  On the other, am I losing potential buyers of the finished product if I let them read even the first draft?

On a related note, I have the beginnings of a slasher novel that could go up chapter-by-chapter in the grindhouse. Anyone interested in seeing that?

And the third isn’t a decision so much as something I’m just worried about. I’ve recently come into a bit of money, and I’ve decided to use it to promote my writing.  The thing is, I’m not sure what the most effective use of that money would be.  I would very much like to turn my writing into a side-hustle worthy of the name (a career is too much to hope for), and the worst thing that could happen is to spend all that money and find myself no better off than I was before…unless it’s for the money to slowly dribble away on bills and little things and accomplish nothing at all.

Advice on any of the above would be welcome.

New Pages Added To Promotional Artwork!

Two new pages have been added to the Promotional Art page, specifically to Angelina and Vicki At The Last.  If you look at that picture and want to know more about those brave, frightened, extraordinary young women, you can find the backstory for Angelina here, and for Vicki right here.

Check it out!