- The Dogs of Cyberwar
My new cyberpunk novella, The Dogs of Cyberwar, is now available for preorder at Dreamspinner Press. Just click on this link.
The official release date is November 30th, so it won’t be long!
New Cover Art for “The Dogs of Cyberwar”!
I just received the final cover art for my novella, The Dogs of Cyberwar! It’s the first photorealistic cover I’ve had designed for me, and it did a good job of capturing the look of the characters. The cover is by Catt Ford, who designed the cover used for We’re Both Straight, Right?
The Dogs of Cyberwar
The story is due out on November 30th this year, and I can’t wait!
Interviewed on Mama Savannah Georgia’s new talk show, “Mama Knows Best”!
Here’s the interview I did recently on Mama Savannah Georgia’s talk show, Mama Knows Best! The entire show is great, but if you’re looking for me in it, I appear in the last ten or fifteen minutes. I really wish I’d worn something less frumpy…
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/7537472/mama_knows_best_talk_show_episode_3_of_season_1.swf
In the interview, I talk about my films and my writing, as well as discussing the state of gay marriage in New Hampshire.
Filed under Film Writing, Gay Marriage, Romance, Writing
Galley Proof for “The Dogs of Cyberwar”!
I’ve received the (nearly) final galley proof for my cyberpunk novella, The Dogs of Cyberwar, and I have until Monday to go over it and correct any minor mistakes. As the editor says, this is not the time for major corrections — mostly just things like typos, mispellings, grammatical mistakes that escaped us the first time, etc. If I don’t find anything major, this will be the last I see of the novella until its release date, on November 30th.
I still haven’t seen the cover art, and I’m anxious to get a look at it. But of course we have a month and a half to go, so there’s no huge rush. Presumably I’ll have a chance to critique it a bit and offer suggestions, such as “I don’t really picture Luis wearing a beanie with a propeller.”
In the meantime, I’ve nearly finished Murderous Requiem. No, really. I’ve just completed the last sex scene and now all that remains is the climactic scene in which the villain gets his comeuppance and All Is Revealed. I’m still not convinced the “mystery” is completely obvious to any reader who isn’t baffled by Murder,She Wrote. (For those of you who never watched the show, the killer is revealed in the opening scene, leaving the audience to wonder, Why haven’t we turned the channel yet?)
I’m trying to wrap it all up before NaNoWriMo next month. My original plan for that was to write another murder mystery, but as I suspected would happen, I’m pretty much burned out on mystery, at the moment. Instead, what’s caught my attention is sword & sorcery. So I’m returning to a YA fantasy novel I’ve nearly finished (still a few chapters to go) and the sequel will be my NaNo project. If I can possibly finish up the end of the first one this month, that will be a bonus.
I have most of it plotted out, which is exciting, because until now I’ve had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in it, apart from the ending. (It is, of course, part of a trilogy.) This month has been incredibly busy, but hopefully things will calm down soon.
Filed under Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Writing, Young Adult
Gearing up for NaNoWriMo
With October approaching, the time has come for me to begin planning my next NaNoWriMo project. The rules state that you can work our your plot, work out your character descriptions and research all you like, as long as you don’t start actually writing until November 1st at midnight, so I like to spend October in the planning stages. So far, I have one finished novella from NaNoWriMo (The Christmas Wager) and I’m getting close to wrapping up last year’s project, Murderous Requiem. Obviously, NaNoWriMo is a good way for me to force myself to come up with a new novel every year.
I’m tentatively planning another murder mystery, but since Murderous Requiem breaks the rules of traditional murder mysteries — and its popularity may suffer, as a result — I’m digging up a very traditional mystery I plotted out in college, or possibly even as long ago as High School. A magazine — I think it was Woman’s Day, though I can’t say for certain, and I can’t recall how I even came across it — was sponsoring a murder mystery contest, hosted by Mary Higgins Clark (I think). The only rule I can remember was that it had to include a certain number of clues from a list provided in the magazine, and the only clues I can now recall are a red dress, an answering machine message and…actually, those are the only two I can remember.
I diligently plotted out my mystery, creating a number of characters and a complex plot, but it soon became obvious that my mystery, featuring gay characters, wasn’t particularly suited for Woman’s Day (not in the 1980s, anyway), and was going to end up being too long for the contest, anyway. I was also not really up to writing it, at that time. I started it, but didn’t get very far. It would be decades before I learned how to finish writing projects reliably.
I’ve been searching through boxes in the attic, looking for my original notes, but this may be a lost cause. I know they’re kicking around somewhere, because I’ve stumbled across them several times over the years, and every time I did, I thought to myself, “I should really finish this someday.” They might turn up over the next few weeks, but for now, I’m just going to dredge as much up out of my memory as I can. Chances are, I may come up with better ideas now, anyway. I know the basic idea behind the mystery, but it isn’t the greatest mystery ever conceived. With or without my notes, I’ll need to put some effort into reworking the story, if I don’t want the reader to solve it in the first chapter.
But I’m getting excited about it and NaNoWriMo, in general. I keep poking at the website and tweaking my profile. If I recall, they’ll open the site up for people to enter the basic info about their novel projects at the beginning of October.
In the meantime, I’ve finally worked out an ending for Murderous Requiem, and now I just need to write it. Hopefully, I can get that done in the next week or two. It will require a lot of rewriting, I already know, to fix inconsistencies in the plot and possibly to obscure the solution to the mystery a bit more. It seems far too obvious to me, at the moment. But I’ll just finish it and see what the final result looks like. I still think it’s a fun read, and hopefully others will agree.
Filed under Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Writing
Solving the Murder
Okay, so I’ve set up the muder scenario in my occult mystery, Murderous Requiem; I know who did it, I know how they did it, and I think I’ve obscured it enough so that my amateur “detective” doesn’t seem like a complete idiot for not figuring things out immediately.
Now what?
The murderer probably shouldn’t get away with it. I think we’re all agreed on that point. (Be quiet, Tim!) But how is Jeremy (my main character) going to solve the crime? I’ve been dropping clues, but most of them are meant to send him off in the wrong direction. And at the moment, there’s nothing really pointing to the murderer, other than the fact that said murderer doesn’t really appear capable of killing anyone — always a dead giveaway in a murder mystery.
Then there’s the added problem of Jeremy not knowing that the murder has occurred….
Oh, he knows one murder has occurred. But not the one that’s critical to the plot. The way it’s set up, I’m not sure if he’ll find out about the second murder until the very end. If he did, it might mess up my carefully constructed misdirection. Of course, since this is my first murder mystery, my carefully constructed misdirection might be as transparent as glass to the reader. But I’ll have to worry about that later. For now, ignorance is bliss, and I choose to believe I’m a plotting genius.
Except that I can’t figure out where to go next. I know it can’t be a slip-up on the murderer’s part. That would just be lame and make my detective look like a halfwit for needing the solution handed to him. So a new clue has to turn up somewhere, preferrably connected to the mysterious manuscript the entire story is revolving around, and one that points to the identity of the murderer.
Maybe when Jeremy finishes translating the 14th-century Italian manuscript, it will say, “Verily, the murderer is….”
Oh, dear. We’re back to Jeremy being a halfwit again.
Filed under Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Writing
Where do we go from here?
It’s been a moderately busy week for me. First Lou Sylvre kindly let me rant about creating romantic suspense on her blog. I used examples from two of my favorite M/M novels, Dark Horse, by Kate Sherwood, and Bear, Otter and the Kid, by TJ Klune, and ended up making a two-parter out of it:
Riding the suspense roller coaster in a romance novel – Part One
Riding the suspense roller coaster in a romance novel – Part Two
And We’re Both Straight, Right? received a wonderful review at Miz Love & Crew Loves Books!
I’ve also just turned in my first edit on The Dogs of Cyberwar, which is slated to be released by Dreamspinner Press in November.
I’m back at work on my occult murder mystery, Murderous Requiem, though it’s been a bit slow. Only one more chapter added this week. But it’s been a busy week at work and at home, so I’m hoping to ramp up my writing on that, now that I have a few days to breathe.
So having a full-length novel submitted (published is unlikely) by the end of the year is one goal I’ve set for myself, as a writer. Everything I’ve had published in the past year has been under 60,000 words. And there is a subtle bias in the industry that tends to favor novels over short stories or novellas, when it comes to readership. I also still keep being asked if I can produce physical copies of my “novels.” Until I have something over 60k, I won’t actually have a printed copy from a publisher to show people. And the fact of the matter is, until you can produce a physical book with actual pages people can touch, they tend not to believe you’re really a professional writer.
The frustrating part is, I already do have two novels sitting in the wings, waiting to be published. One of these — Seidhman — is, according to everyone who reads it, my best work. It’s certainly the most polished, having been re-written five or six times and fact-checked by an Icelandic historian. But it’s YA, and not suitable for my current publisher.
So my goal this weekend, is to draft a query letter and the whole package to submit Seidhman to an agent. I have one picked out, but I won’t say which one, in case I jinx it. 🙂
By That Sin Fell the Angels — my other finished novel — needs one or two re-writes, before I consider sending it out. That one isn’t suitable for Dreamspinner, either. Not because it’s YA (which it isn’t), but because there really isn’t much romance going on. I’m not sure where to send that one, but it’s time to start thinking about it.
Filed under Cyberpunk, Mystery, NaNoWriMo, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Writing, Young Adult
Who has time to read?
I admit it. I’m a very slow reader. Very slow.
It’s not that I don’t like reading. I read all the time, but I tend to read short stories and non-fiction books (which you can skip around in a bit). I do read novels, but not that many in a year. At one time, I was churning through massive tomes like Dune, Shogun, Stranger in a Strange Land and Clan of the Cave Bear, and was also digesting classics like The Razor’s Edge, Siddartha, Demian, The Stranger and a host of others. I devoured everything by Robert A. Heinlein and Phyllis A. Whitney that I could get my hands on (a bizarre combination, I know, but I loved both of those authors).
But at some point I lost my ability to focus. Maybe I need Ritalin TM.
I blame working for corporations for years, which demand that you juggle ten things at once. I’ve learned to juggle, but I’m not really that good at it. And the result is that I often don’t finish all of the myriad projects I start.
I do finish things I’m writing, though I tend to have several projects going at once, and hop back and forth between them. But reading — unless it’s research for something I’m writing — tends to fall by the wayside.
But a writer must also be a reader. I think it’s a law. And if it isn’t, it probably should be. I’ve run across far too many stories that read as though the author learned to write by watching movies. As much as I love movies, the sad fact is, most of them are badly written. Cliche’s abound, and the primary focus tends to be on looking cool for the camera. Even good films are by necessity condensed. (Yes, even Peter Jackson films are condensed. Can anyone say, “Tom Bombadil?”)
If you want to write novels, you have to read novels. It’s the only way to see how fiction styles are changing. (And yes, they have definitely changed over the decades since I was a teenager. Back then, romance novels were commonly in first person. Now, limited third person is all the rage, with the author hopping back and forth between the two romantic leads.) It’s also important to vary what you read, in my opinion. It would be very easy for me to read nothing but M/M erotic romances, since that’s the genre I tend to write for. And that would, perhaps, help me learn how to better please that audience. But I really feel that it’s important to read a variety of types of fiction, in order to improve my overall writing ability.
So I do read. But not nearly as much as many of my fellow authors at Dreamspinner do. I envy people who can read a novel a day, or even one a week. If I’m really engaged by a novel, so I can’t put it down, and keep picking it up on every break I have at work, then I’ll get through it in a week or two. But more often, it will take a couple to a few weeks, with a strong possibility that I may put the book down and lose interest, when I pick something else up.
Ah, well. It would be nice if I could learn to focus better, but at least I am reading. Currently, I’m deeply engrossed in very nicely done novel (which I won’t name, in case I don’t finish it, but which I will review, if I do). So far, it’s gripped me more than any other novel I’ve picked up in the past few months, so I think I’ll be able to get through it. If not, it’s certainly no reflection on the author.
Blame it on ADHD. I hear that’s fashionable.
Revisiting werewolves
When I was a teenager, and then later in college, I had a huge thing for werewolves and vampires.
Unfortunately, two things happened. The first was that Anne Rice came out with Interview With A Vampire and its sequels. They were good books — especially, The Vampire Lestat — and for a while I was as excited about the vampire revival they spawned as anyone. But practically overnight, the majority of vampires in literature and movies turned into Lestat and Luis clones, haunted and “sexy” and brooding and going on at tedious length about how their curse means they can never find happiness. Ugh.
The second thing was that the gaming company, White Wolf, came out with both Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: Apocalypse. Again, though I enjoyed both games, the first compounded the tortured vampire fad and expanded upon the underground vampire clan idea that Anne Rice had used in her novels. (I don’t know that she originated it, but I’m not sure who did.)
The latter game expanded on the idea of clans that White Wolf is so fond of and somewhere the idea of a war between vampires and werewolves was introduced — don’t ask me where. Although Apocalypse never achieved the popularity that Masquerade did, it had an enormous impact on werewolf fiction, to the point where publishers started saying in their submission guidelines, “Please don’t write up your latest RPG adventure and submit it to us as a short story.”
Then the film series Underworld came out, spawning an intellectual property lawsuit by Whitewolf and even more stories of tormented vampires battling werewolf clans, and the inevitable Romeo and Juliet (or Romeo and Julio) takeoffs that came with these motifs.
I’m not saying that, in the hands of a good writer, these themes can’t be done in interesting ways and make for excellent reading, so if you’re writing stories along these lines, more power to you! But I miss the days when vampires were truly undead monsters and werewolves were solitary. I miss the days when these tales were frightening. (Don’t even get me started about how Hollywood has turned horror films into boring parodies of themselves).
Anyway, I’ve avoided vampires and werewolves in my stories for years, because of all this. But recently I’ve decided to dig up a couple old short stories that never found publishers (not that I tried very hard) and a short screenplay that was never filmed. I’m turning the screenplay into a short story, and since the other two short stories feature a common central character, I’m thinking of adding a third story to those and making a triptych. I’m not sure what to do with the short story that will come out of the screenplay. Its characters have nothing to do with the other two stories. I could put them all together in a collection, of course, but I think I’d still need at least one more story. If I had two stories about two characters, then a third with different characters, people would be baffled, wondering if it was going to tie in somehow.
Filed under Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Victorian, Writing
“Finding Love Through Bigfoot” is finished and available for free download!
I had initially planned on this story being submitted for an October anthology that Dreamspinner is putting out, but one of the requirements for that was that the story be no more than 2,000 words (within a small margin). By the time I hit 3,000 words, with no wrap-up in sight, I knew I didn’t stand a chance of editing the finished story down to 2,000 words. But I was having fun with it, so I decided to finish it up and release it as a freebie.
Since I’d been reading H.P. Lovecraft stories when I began the project, the initial tone was a bit Lovecraftian — 3rd-party narration, with the narrator rather distantly removed from the characters, and very little dialog. But I couldn’t really sustain that for the entire story. Humor started creeping in around the edges. The “monster,” which initially was something dark and half seen in the forest, began to appear more and more like Bigfoot. In the end, the story turned out to be rather tongue-in-cheek, if not quite a comedy. But I’m happy with it.
It’s currently available for FREE DOWNLOAD (Did I make those words big enough?) at Lou Sylvre’s blog, since she was kind enough to let me guest blog there for a few days. You can get to the link by clicking the image below.
Finding Love Through Bigfoot
The story was posted in a bit of a hurry, without the benefit of editors or even just friends looking it over, so I’ve already noticed a few typos. When I’ve got a little more time, perhaps I’ll repost it with corrections.
SYNOPSIS:
Stuart moved to the country, looking for a little calm and stability in his life. But that calm is upset, when a large, man-like creature begins showing up in his yard at night. Soon, Stuart finds himself running for his life through the New Hampshire forests, and the only person who can save him is an enigmatic ranger named, Jake. But Jake isn’t just out there on patrol — he’s been tracking the creature. And he won’t rest until he finds it.
Filed under Fantasy, Humor, Occult/Paranormal, Romance, Writing
Jamie Fessenden's Blog 