Welcome to Jeremy Robinson’s Great Kindle Giveaway and Blog Tour

“Hurray for free Kindles!” you say, but who the hell is Jeremy Robinson? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the author of eleven mixed genre novels, published in ten languages, including the popular fantasy YA series, THE LAST HUNTER, and the fast-paced Jack Sigler series (also known as Chess Team—not nearly as nerdy as it sounds), PULSE, INSTINCT and THRESHOLD from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. I’m the co-author of an expanding series of novellas deemed the Chesspocalypse, which take place in the Chess Team universe. If that doesn’t wet your whistle, I’m also known as Jeremy Bishop, the #1 Amazon.com horror author of THE SENTINEL and the controversial novel, TORMENT. For more about me, or my books, visit http://www.jeremyrobinsononline.com/.

I have watched for years as my fellow authors held online events called blog tours. Some would visit ten blogs. Others, as many as ninety. And every day they would bring something different, waxing eloquent about a multitude of topics. When I finally decided to have a blog tour of my own, and settled on doing each and every weekday in October, my first thought was, “This will be cool,” which was immediately followed up by, “Holy crap, I can’t think of something interesting to say twenty times in one month!” I can barely think of something worthwhile for my own blog just once a month. The solution is what follows; each blog participating in the tour could ask me ANY three questions. That means, if the subject matter bores you, I’m not to blame! Huzzah!

But fear not. There are other rewards for sloughing through the questions and answers. I’ll be giving away two Kindles to two randomly selected readers who sign up for my newsletter. Details on the giveaway can be found below. On to the Q&A!

You stated you use science in your books that “kill[s] people, from a military perspective, it’s scientific research gone horribly right. It just happens to be in the wrong hands, or out of control.” Yet characters and action are more important to you than the science. So, how do you combine these elements to make your books great reads?

The first thing I do is to make sure that the science is inserted organically, most often through dialogue and less often through a character’s thought process. But you’ll never find me spending pages on a scientific explanation. I find such things boring and when I read books that have pages of science, I skip ahead. That the science is given organically also means that it’s delivered in conversational language that the average reader can understand. Basically, if I don’t think a reader will understand what’s being said (usually because I didn’t understand it the first time through), then the character who is receiving the information won’t understand it and ask for clarification. Cool science is a great way to launch a story or create a monster, but it can’t carry the story. The characters, and the situation they’re in, are more important, so they get more attention from me. I know that bugs the hard science readers out there, but, well, hard science is boring. Let me rephrase that. Hard science is boring in the middle of a fast-paced thriller. It’s like hitting a brick wall in the middle of a race. So the science has to come from the characters, in dialogue, in thought, but never from me in the form of a lecture.

Although you balance action, tension, and character development, you build your characters over time rather than in the first few chapters of the book to keep “things tense and the pages turning.” How do you then develop your characters through action?

My first real experience with writing was screenplays. And in screenplays there is no inner monologue. Not thoughts revealed. And dialogue is secondary to action. What a character does reveals more about a character that what he or she says, or even thinks. The saying “actions speak louder than words,” is really true, in stories and in real life. Happily, this mode of character development fits fast-paced thrillers perfectly.

Take the character of Bishop from my Chess Team novels. His character is the epitome of “actions speak louder than words,” because he rarely has a lot to say, and when he does, people listen. Despite this lack of dialogue from the character, he is many readers’ favorite member of the team. Because his actions speak to his character. In my novel PULSE, there is a cabin engulfed in flames. Children can be heard inside. While a team’s leader tries to think of a way to solve the problem, Bishop acts. He charges into the flames, which reveals a lot more about his character than if I had him expound about the different reasons he should or shouldn’t enter the fire. He just goes for it. And readers love him for it.

Tell us about some of your favorite moments in your books, the ones that got a reaction out of you while you were writing them.

The moments that usually get reactions from me are the ones that I don’t see coming. I have, on occasion, suddenly killed a character. I had no intention of doing so, but for some reason, it just happens. I don’t want to give character names in case there are readers who haven’t read that book, but there’s a scene in ANTARKTOS RISING where this happens, and when I did it, I gasped. Nearly every fan letter I get about that book mentions how surprising that scene is. I think allowing for surprises like this is effective because when I’m planning to kill a character, I might foreshadow it, or write them differently, especially if it’s a likable character—I might instinctively distance myself from them. But when I kill a character that I had no intention of killing, that’s always a big surprise. The hints that might normally creep in aren’t there, so the reader is totally off guard when it happens.

Other favorite moments are less violent and more about characters that are able to rise above baser responses to someone that has hurt them. In the first book of THE LAST HUNTER, the main character, Solomon, is kidnapped, beaten, broken and changed/brainwashed to the point where he forgets his past and becomes a savage hunter. The man who broke him, Ninnis, becomes his mentor. Later in the story, Solomon’s true self returns and he has the chance to kill the man who did all this to him. But he doesn’t, instead, he forgives Ninnis. The dynamic between the two continues as the series moves into the third book, but that moment of forgiveness, of rising above how most of us would respond to Ninnis’s crimes, I find moving. He’s got a better heart than me.

Hope that was as good for you as it was for me. Now how about that kindle giveaway?

Here’s the deal: to be entered to win one of two free kindles all you have to do is visit my website—www.jeremyrobinsononline.com—and sign up for the newsletter. That’s it. The first kindle will go to a randomly chosen newsletter signup on October 31. For the second kindle, there’s a catch. The second giveaway will only be triggered if one of my kindle books hits the Amazon.com bestseller list (top 100). So pick up some books (most are just $2.99 a pop) and spread the word! If one of the books squeaks up to #100 for just a single hour, the second kindle will be given away to another randomly chosen newsletter sign up on October 31.

*When you sign up for the newsletter, be sure to include the name of the blog that referred you in the field provided. I’ll be giving away two $50 Amazon.com gift certificates to the blog that refers the most sign-ups and another to the blog who referred the first kindle winner.

** I will announce winners via Twitter, Facebook, my blog, and newsletter (which you will be signed up for!) but I’ll also e-mail the winners directly—I’ll need to know where to ship those kindles!

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Hope you enjoyed the Q&A, and good luck with the kindle giveaway!

— Jeremy Robinson

Fact Catching Up With (and Devouring) Fiction

Guest Blogger: David Sakmyster

What keeps me up at night, cowering in fear, is that fact will catch up with my fiction and make what I’m currently writing—or what I’ve already written—irrelevant.

But will it really?

I’m sure this is a scenario many fiction writers, especially those of us who write thrillers and genre fiction, deal with every day. We pick some current or historical mystery because it’s an interesting topic, something we know readers will be entertained by. And we have our characters discover that lost tomb, explore that hidden city or find that elusive terrorist.

But what if, days before publication (or worse, right after), news breaks that ‘they’ve found IT and IT’s not where we predicted IT would be?

What if the Ark of the Covenant was discovered lying dusty in some Egyptian museum a month after Raiders came out? Would it have diminished the movie’s impact? Perhaps not. I mean, it would still be a kick-ass story with Nazis and occult shenanigans and daring action sequences and lovable characters. But… I’ve got to think the film’s brilliance would be dulled just a little.  Such a discovery would snatch the “Could this really happen?” element right from the story. It’s one thing to suspend disbelief when there are enough mysterious legends and beliefs woven into our shared culture about such an enigmatic artifact. But when the enigmatic is reduced to commonplace, something tangible and right there for all to study and see (and presumably to rule out the mystical factor on which the plot relied), then where does that leave us?

In my Morpheus Initiative series, where my protagonists are psychic remote viewers, I struggled to find a logical reason to have them stay away from publicly-valuable objectives. For example, if they were so good at their jobs, it’s a no-brainer that they would have been asked to locate Bin Laden. Focus on him as the objective, locate his cave or house, and blammo—there’s a chapter that should have been in the book. I at least would have had to mention it, but last year while writing Book 3 I held off, dancing around the issue because I knew we were closing in on him in real life, and it was only a matter of time. And I feared the worst scenario: that shortly after I published my wildly imaginative hunt for him, we would find out that he’d been dead for ten years, and I’d look really foolish.

In the first book, THE PHAROS OBJECTIVE, I worried a little about it, but not too much. I was reasonably certain that the ancient Pharos Lighthouse had indeed toppled in Alexandria’s harbor. There had been enough evidence placing it at the promontory—scuba dives, recovered pillars and statues. And I was fairly confident that no one would be tunneling down to the secret legendary chamber under the foundation any time soon.  But now, in the sequel—THE MONGOL OBJECTIVE, I was and am indeed, concerned.

This time my remote-viewers need to track down Genghis Khan’s elusive resting place, one of history’s most perplexing riddles. The elements of the mystery: a massive funeral procession, legends that upwards of 20,000 laborers worked on the project and then were slaughtered to keep the location secret, a tomb supposedly filled with all the spoils of his subjugated cities, a ‘history book’ full of masterful disinformation, a secret clan dedicated to protecting the secret for all time, and on top of all that—a restrictive government that won’t allow outsiders anywhere near the most likely locations. But despite all this, progress is being made. For the past twenty years, dozens of international teams armed with high tech gear (ground-penetrating sonar and satellite imagery for starters) have been combing Mongolian highlands and parts of northern China. It’s only a matter of time.

I’ve done the same research they’ve all done, read all the books, studied the maps, followed the trails. And, this being fiction (and hopefully entertaining fiction at that), I’ve come up with what I think is not only a plausible location—but a compelling one. To quote one of the characters in my book: “The others are looking in the wrong place.” I really hope that’s true, but from the start of researching this book until now, publication, it’s been almost two years. They could have found him in real life, and that has scared me silly because probably he’s not going to be where I put him; and then the whole fanciful and entertaining twist in this book will go out the window. Or at least, the ‘brilliance’ (if I may be so bold to call it that) will be diminished by the resolution of the great mystery, and readers will kind of shrug and say that this could have been cool, but…

In any case, Genghis Khan lays undisturbed as of this writing. And my heroes can get their moment in the sun. Perhaps it will turn out that I will be prophetic. And like Jules Verne who had many of his ‘outlandish’ ideas later turn out spot-on , a century later people will look back and say, “that Sakmyster guy had to be just as psychic as his characters because he guessed it exactly!”

Maybe, and that’s something that makes me smile late at night. Now, on to the next mystery that might get solved by some darned real-life treasure hunters before my make-believe hunters can get all the glory!

David Sakmysteris an award-winning author and screenwriter who makes his home in upstate NY. He has over two dozen short stories and five novels published, including THE PHAROS OBJECTIVE and THE MONGOL OBJECTIVE, the first two novels in a series about psychic archaeologists tackling the greatest historical mysteries; the horror novel CRESCENT LAKE, and the historical fiction epic, SILVER AND GOLD. His screenplay, NIGHTWATCHERS, has just been optioned. You can step into his mind here.

 


Preparing To Launch

Guest Blogger: Jamie Freveletti

My novel, THE NINTH DAY, launches on September 27 and begins making its way into the world.  It’s my third and the joy of writing has only increased over time. The premise came to me early, the words flew onto the page and each morning I was chomping at the bit to write.

My novels are thrillers, with all the action and twists that are expected in the genre. In this one my biochemist protagonist, Emma Caldridge is hiking in the Arizona desert collecting night blooming plants for research when she stumbles across some human traffickers crossing the border. She’s captured and brought to Ciudad Juarez, where the cartel leader there has a big problem; his marijuana plants are diseased and dying.  He blames the American herbicide dusting activity for the plants’ mutations and he vows revenge.  He plots to infect the United States by sending the disease over the border. The illness transfers to humans and kills them in nine days.  Emma races to stop the shipment and find an answer before the ninth day dawns.

In most of my novels I’ve focused on inserting  classic thriller roots that made me love the genre. Emma is smart, scientific and logical, but she’s not afraid to pick up a rocket propelled grenade and fire it when required.  I wanted to base the events in the real world with the type of bad players that the world can generate. Unfortunately, when researching for this one I started looking into the drug cartel wars occurring in Mexico and was surprised by the level of anarchy that is slowly making its way through that country. A magazine article on the subject called it “the war next door” and I couldn’t help think what an apt title that was. The bad characters there are reaching extreme levels.

I won’t reveal the twist that exists in the story except to say it came from a hypothesis of mine that I formulated after reading reams of clinical studies. My idea was proven possible nine months after I’d turned in the manuscript.  I nearly choked on my coffee when I read the news in the morning paper!

Which goes to show: there’s nothing like reading. Whether for pleasure, factual information or curiosity it can’t be beat.

I hope you enjoy THE NINTH DAY and if you’re near a signing on the upcoming tour and can get some free time I’d love to meet you!

Jamie Freveletti is the internationally bestselling author of thrillers RUNNING FROM THE DEVIL, RUNNING DARK and her third, THE NINTH DAY will launch in September, 2011. In January, 2011 the Estate of Robert Ludlum asked her to write the next in his Covert One series, which is slated for Fall 2012. Her books have won multiple awards and have been translated into three languages. She’s a former trial lawyer and current runner, martial artist and coffee addict. She lives in Chicago with her family.

 

 


When Three Weeks Are Gone

Guest Blogger: Ilsa J. Bick

Talk to folks in survivalist circles, go to classes and workshops and whatnot, and you hear a lot of stuff about threes: what has to be done in those first three minutes, three hours, three days, three weeks.  These parameters all make good sense, too, because there are specific tasks that must be accomplished in a fairly specific order.  You can’t skip over one and hope to retrench later.  Forget something, and you might not make it.

So, let’s say you’re lost or there’s a storm headed your way and you’re still five hours out from any kind of shelter.  What to do in those first three minutes?

If you want a great example of what not to do, check out Stephen King’s THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON.  That girl keeps walking.  She thinks about staying put, but she panics.  She nearly gets herself killed bulleting over a cliff.  My guess is that King was more than a little familiar with those horror stories about kids out hiking the woods with their families only to become separated and, eventually, lost.  More than one of those children wound up dead, and some of them miles and miles from where they started, and all because they either broke or never knew the first rule.

Which is: hug a tree.

I’m serious.  (You ex-Scouts out there know what I’m talking about, I see you nodding.)  For those first three minutes, you must calm down.  Take your own pulse.  Do yoga, sing a song, count ants—but get control of yourself, or you’re toast.

Once you’re calm, then you can afford to let go of the tree because now, for the next three hours, you must find shelter.  Get dry and stay warm.  If you’re wet, you can become hypothermic on even a warm day, and that will kill you pretty fast, too.

What’s next?  Water: three days without, more or less, is the max a person can go.  (And those stories you’ve heard about drinking urine?  Don’t do it.  You’ll just kill yourself faster.)

And after that?  By three weeks, you need some kind of food supply, or all the water in the world won’t save your life.

After that, though, ask a survivalist what’s next, and he’ll just give you a funny look.  There are no rules, no guidelines, no nothing in the books or manuals about what you ought to do next, and that’s because survival is the endpoint.  If you’ve made it in reasonably good shape that far out, you’ve reached a kind of stalemate with nature: things might get better, but what you’re most worried about is that they shouldn’t get worse.  But forget the rules and handy-dandy algorithms.  They don’t exist.

In other words, you are surviving—but that’s not the same as living, if you ask me.

Maybe that’s because living is so very different from surviving.  Once you’ve taken care of the nitty-gritty of keeping yourself alive, how you go about building a life says more about you as a person than it does of disaster, whether that’s the apocalypse, a natural disaster, or an illness from which you won’t recover.

I guess that’s where my YA apocalyptic novel, ASHES, comes in because survival is the name of the game.  To be fair, I think you could call this an apocalypse on top of an apocalypse.  Alex Adair is only seventeen, but the world’s already blown up in her face twice over.  Her parents are dead; she’s got a brain tumor that will kill her.  Really, it’s only a matter of time.  She’s sick of the holding pattern, frankly: of treading water and simply surviving as she goes through endless rounds of failed chemo.  So she decides to call the shots and takes off on a last backpacking trip, pretty much determined never to return—and then the world comes crashing down around her ears.

All of a sudden, this dying girl is working hard to stay alive; she’s totally focused on those first three minutes, three hours, three days.  Three weeks.   Everything she does—building fires, making debris shelters, all that survival stuff—is real, by the way.  I know because I’ve done it.

What happens to Alex after is what interests me.  I want to know what compromises people are willing to make and the rules they’re willing to break in order to survive.  I want to understand what’s worth living for or, for that matter, what living really is.  Conversely, what’s truly worth dying for?  Where are the heroes when the world ends and what place will emotions like compassion and love and hate occupy?  Because the reality is quite stark and one the military knows, very well: there is no good or evil—just us versus them.

If you’ve got some ideas about the difference between surviving and living, tell me in the comments below.  If you think there might be nothing worth sticking around for after an apocalypse, I want to hear from you, too, because the way I see it is this: at the end of the world as we know it, logic fails.  No one can tell you what to do or how to prepare.  Beyond the basics, there are no acronyms, no algorithms, and there will be no one new normal.

There will be only what rises from the ashes.

Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, former Air Force major, surgeon wannabe, film scholar—and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories and novels.  Her 2010 paranormal mystery and first YA novel, DRAW THE DARK(Carolrhoda Lab), earned a starred review from SLJ; won the 2011 Westchester Fiction Award; was named a 2011 Best Children’s Book of the Year by Bank Street College; and made VOYA’s 2010 Perfect Ten List.  ASHES, the first volume of her new YA post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy from Egmont USA, just hit shelves in the U.S. and overseas.  Forthcoming is the gritty YA contemporary, DROWNING INSTINCT, from Carolrhoda Lab.

 

 

 

 

Where Do Ideas Come From?

Guest Blogger: Steven James

Often readers will ask me where I get my ideas. Honestly, the question is a little perplexing to me since I’m overwhelmed by ideas and have hundreds of files of them. I can’t seem to write them down fast enough to clear my brain. I’m guessing it’s this way for a lot of authors and artists.

However, it is a fair question and it got me thinking recently—where did my ideas for THE QUEENcome from?

There are pools we can draw ideas from. Some might dry out for a time, but as long as you have an assortment of them you’ll always have new ideas on the way.

So, if you’re looking for places to dip into for your own inspiration, or if you’re just interested in where a novelist went for the inspiration for his latest book, here you go.

1 – Promises from previous books – Over the last few years as I’ve worked on the previous four novels in this series, I made numerous promises (some stated, some implied), about the characters and the development of the story—what happens with the main character and his love interests? How will his daughter ever find resolution in her struggling teenage life? Will some of the bad guys from previous books ever come back? How?

In THE QUEEN I felt like it was time to answer some of those questions and satisfy readers about what happens. So, that limited the narrative choices I had and helped me to focus the story in a different direction.

2 – Research & Movies – When I was trying to think of ways to hack into a nuclear submarine I watched CRIMSON  TIDE and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. Then, I did extensive research on cyberterrorism and the military’s attempts to stop it. I met with military personnel who were in charge of keeping foreign cyber threats out of our most secure systems and asked them how I could hack into a sub. They told me. I wrote down the ideas in the book.

3 – Personal experience – Years ago when I lived in Wisconsin, I heard about a Navy communication base that used extremely low frequency radio waves to communicate with our fleet of nuclear subs. As I worked on the terrorist angle of THE QUEEN this base became the location of the climax at the end of the story.

The more I tapped into my own background, the more I was able to draw connections to the world of this novel.

4 – Believability – Every character needs to make decisions and act in a way that is consistent for that character at that point in the story. So, by asking, “What would this character naturally do?” and “How can I make things worse?” the story unfolds before me as I write it.

5 – Narrative form -I wanted to isolate my main character and put him at a disadvantage during the climax of the story so I stuck him in an isolated winter town in Northern Wisconsin during a snowstorm and took away his use of high-tech tools, cell phone, etc . . . I also know that he has to chase and face the bad guy, so that helps me create sequences in the story that move toward the climax.

6 – Responsiveness -I think it’s important for writers to remain open to the story, to respond to it as it develops. And so, with THE QUEEN, I didn’t realize who the antagonist, Valkyrie, was until I was nearly six months into the book. When I realized this, it changed the direction of the story and created a triple-twist ending that I would never have come up with otherwise.

For me, outlining a story would take the fun away, the surprises away. I have astute readers and I know that if the ending of the story doesn’t surprise me, it won’t surprise them. But if I can create twists that take me to a place I never would have expected, then I know readers will be satisfied and want to come back for more.

What are your thoughts? In addition to these six areas, where do your story ideas come from? What other wells are there for us to plumb?

Steven James is the critically acclaimed author of many books including the national beselling novels THE PAWN, THE ROOK, THE KNIGHT, THE BISHOP and THE QUEEN. He is a contributing editor to WRITER’S DIGEST, has a Master’s Degree in Storytelling and has taught writing and creative storytelling on three continents. He lives near the Blue Ridge Mountains with his very understanding wife, three lovely daughters, and a quiet, reflective python named Buddy. Find him on the web or follow him on Facebook.


The Black Stiletto’s Stomping Grounds

Guest Blogger: Raymond Benson

They say (who are “they,” anyway?) to write what you know, and while there’s a lot to be said for that adage, I’m not sure those of us who are practitioners of thrillers, mysteries, or other genres such as horror, science fiction, and fantasy—can write what we know, because most of us are not killers, vigilantes, astronauts, aliens, vampires, hobbits, or the opposite sex.  We make it up.  The same is true for the locations in our books.  Sometimes we are required to send our heroes and heroines to exotic places where we’ve never been.  If we’re lucky, as I was when I was writing the official James Bond novels between 1996 – 2002, I could afford to travel to those exotic lands and walk in 007’s footsteps.  I could soak up the sights and smells, taste the food, study the people, and get to know the place well enough to write about it.  In other cases in which I was unable to visit a specific location, I had to do the research—in other words, I hit the travel guides, the Internet, and talked to people who live there.  It’s what most of us do.

That said, almost all of my original thrillers, i.e., those that are not work-for-hire tie-ins and such, are set in locations I know well, and these are places where I have lived at some time in my life.  My readers will find that I like to use parts of Texas (particularly West Texas, where I spent the first seventeen years of my existence), New York City (which I called home for half of my twenties and half of my thirties), and Chicagoland (where I’ve been since 1993 and still reside today).  These locales are stamped in my DNA, so it’s only natural that I write about them.

My new thriller, THE BLACK STILETTO, is no exception and in fact uses all three.  It’s the story of a female costumed vigilante working in 1950s New York.  The metropolis really hasn’t changed that much since 1958 except in the details, which, of course, I did have to research.  For example, there are a few scenes set in the famous Algonquin Hotel.  I remember being in the Algonquin when I lived in the city during the 1980s, but I had to refresh my recollections and also talk to someone who was there during the time period in question to find out what was different.  It’s a good thing I did, because the names of the restaurants had changed.  Nevertheless, after living in Manhattan for eleven years, there’s something about the city that sticks to your blood and I find that I can write about it as if I’m still there.  New York plays heavily in some of my other books, such as FACE BLIND, A HARD DAY’S DEATH, and TORMENT.

The Stiletto, we learn from the story, grew up in West Texas, specifically Odessa (home of the original FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, and yes, Permian High School was my high school!).  Once again, it’s a city that is a part of me, even though I had to dig into its past to get the details right.  For example, I had to find out what schools my heroine would have attended as a child in the early 50s—one of which no longer exists.  I have used West Texas a number of times in books such as EVIL HOURS, SWEETIE’S DIAMONDS, and ARTIFACT OF EVIL.  Basically situated in the desert with a notoriously flat landscape dotted with oil wells, the region has a mystery and mood all its own.

Finally, Chicagoland makes an important appearance in THE BLACK STILETTO because the heroine’s son—in present day—lives in the northwest suburbs and takes care of his elderly, Alzheimer’s-stricken mother.  I use real towns such as Buffalo Grove, Riverwoods, and Arlington Heights, and I mention real streets and buildings—but I changed the name of the nursing home just to be on the safe side.  Once again, the Chicago area features in several of my books, such as SWEETIE’S DIAMONDS and DARK SIDE OF THE MORGUE.

So what is the lesson here?  If you use locations that you know, they’re easier to write about.  Yes, there is still research involved.  You have to get your facts straight, especially if you’re talking about a different time period.  Nevertheless, if you’ve been to your hero’s or heroine’s stomping grounds or actually lived there, you will find that the locales are imprinted in your memory banks, that never-ending well of inspiration—and this all gets colorfully rendered onto the printed page.

Raymond Benson is the author of 25 published books.  His most recent thriller is THE BLACK STILETTO, from Oceanview Publishing, which BOOKLIST awarded with a starred review. The sequel, THE BLACK STILETTO: BLACK & WHITE, will be published May 2012. Raymond was the 4th official author of James Bond novels, and his work is collected in the recent anthologies CHOICE OF WEAPONS and THE UNION TRILOGY.  His “rock ‘n’ roll thriller” DARK SIDE OF THE MORGUE was a Shamus nominee for Best Paperback Original P.I. Novel of 2009.  Raymond is also a prolific tie-in writer, the most recent work being HOMEFRONT—THE VOICE OF FREEDOM (co-written with John Milius).

THE BLACK STILETTO:  Check out the value-added packed official website to download a free teaser short story, watch the promo video, and listento the “Black Stiletto Song.”

 

 


Zombies

Guest Blogger: Jonathan Maberry

DUST & DECAY (Simon & Schuster) is the second in my series of post-apocalyptic thrillers set fifteen years after a zombie plague has wiped out most of mankind.

Okay…if you’re still reading this then you haven’t been scared off by words like ‘post-apocalyptic’ and ‘zombie’.  Good for you.  They aren’t bad words.  Reading stories about them will not lower your I.Q., damage your social standing or turn you into a fiction gourmand rather than the gourmet you’ve become.

That’s not actually as snarky as it sounds.  All things zombie –books, movies, TV, comics—have gotten a seriously bad rap over the last few decades.  The common perception among mainstream readers (and, yes, we have polled this stuff) is that this kind of entertainment is always over the top gory with little or no redeeming social or literary value.  That perception is even sometimes true.

But it’s not true across the board, especially when applied to zombie fiction.

Sure, there are plenty of zombie books where intestine chomping is a major theme.  However the very best zombie books are not about zombies.  Not really.  They’re about people.

Ever since George A. Romero presented the landmark indie film, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the zombie has been used as a metaphor.  For Romero, that metaphor changed with each film.  In NIGHT, it was a statement about racism and the faceless moral majority who dictated American policies prior to the Civil Rights movement.  In DAWN OF THE DEAD, the whole movie was a metaphor about the rampant consumerism that was devouring America during the 1980s. DAY OF THE DEAD took a swing at the mega-expansion of the military-industrial complex during the Reagan years.  And so on.

When serious authors began writing serious books about zombies, the use of metaphor deepened and became more subtle, even layered.  Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks) had an incredibly popular mainstream hit with WORLD WAR Z, which was a thinly disguised indictment of international politics.  That book was a bestseller for years, selling over 600,000 copies.  It was inspired by The Good War, an oral history of World War II by Studs Terkel.  And, oh yeah, there were zombies in it.

S.G. Browne’s wickedly insightful BREATHERS: A ZOMBIE’S LAMENT, is a novel of self-discovery with a subtext dealing with the exploration of human rights.  With zombies.

And so on.

I’ve take a few swings at zombies over the last few years.  My first novel, PATIENT ZERO (St. Martin’s Griffin), is a mainstream thriller that explores the connections between multi-national corporations, the pharmaceutical industry and terrorist groups. Think NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets 24, with a dose of Michael Crichton’s weird science.

I have another adult thriller due out in October in which ‘zombies’ are used to explore the mishandling of radical science during and following the Cold War.  There is also an exploration of the trauma of abandonment.  The zombies are there to help tell the story.

More recently I’ve been writing the Rot & Ruin series for Simon & Schuster, of which my latest novel, DUST & DECAY, is the second of four planned books.  In this world, the zombie apocalypse has already happened.  The survivors call it ‘First Night’.  As far as teenager Benny Imura knows, there are only about 30,000 people left in the world, and they live in fenced-off communities in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. For Benny, the world is focused on death.  The adults in his town are all suffering one form or another of post-traumatic stress disorder; they’ve lost their optimism and in many cases their will to live.  Only predators and scavengers like bounty hunters seem to have any real life in them.

Benny’s brother, Tom, is a kind of bounty hunter called a ‘closure specialist’.  He’s hired by families to locate loved ones who have become zoms, and then give them a quick and ‘final’ death –usually after reading a last letter from the family.  Tom is humane, but he is a killer.  Benny, on the other hand, believes that Tom is a coward because in Benny’s earliest memory, Tom grabbed him and ran away from home just as zombies took their parents.  He believes that Tom abandoned their mother to a horrible death.

As the story unfolds, Benny is forced by town ordinance to apprentice to Tom, and when his brother takes him out into the great Rot and Ruin –the vast zombie wasteland that was once America—Benny quickly and painfully learns that virtually every assumption he had about the world is wrong.

ROT & RUIN is a coming of age story in which the zombie apocalypse is used as a means of exploring the value of human life, and the nature of what it means to be human.

I’ve gotten so many letters and read so many reviews where people say that they read the book reluctantly because they don’t like zombies, don’t want to read about zombies, and basically just don’t ‘do zombies’.

Then they read it and they cry.  As I cried when I wrote it.

DUST & DECAYpicks up seven months after the painful end of ROT & RUIN. Benny, his girlfriend Nix, their friend Chong and an orphan known as the Lost Girl, accompany Tom out into the Ruin to search for evidence of surviving humanity.  As soon as they step outside the gate things go from bad to worse.

So…what’s the new book really about?  Yeah, it has plenty of zombies in it. But the book is about the search for identity, about closure, and about taking a stand against evil.  The evil in these books, by the way, are not the zoms.  Zombies have no personalities, therefore they can’t be evil.  Humans on the other hand…yeah, they do evil pretty well.

DUST & DECAY was a lot of fun to write.  It was also heartbreaking to write.  Partly because I had to dig deep to uncover the real and genuine emotions that drive the book; and partly because not all of the characters make it out alive. There is a saying when editing fiction: “Don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.”  Yeah.  Hurts like a bitch, though.

For new readers and returning readers, there are some extras that go along with the series.  There are thirteen pages of free prequel scenes for ROT & RUIN available on the Simon & Schuster webpage for the book.

And there are twenty-five pages of free scenes set between ROT & RUIN and DUST & DECAY.  Here’s a link to the main page; access the scenes by clicking on the banner that reads: READ BONUS MATERIAL BY JONATHAN MABERRY.

Benny Imura and his friends will return in FLESH & BONE (2012) and FIRE & ASH (2013)

I hope you take the journey with Benny and Tom, Nix and Lilah and Chong.  They’ll be your guides into a world where zombies are both less and more frightening that you thought.

Go on…take a bite.

Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer.  His novels include the Pine Deep Trilogy (GHOST ROAD BLUES, DEAD MAN’S SONG and BAD MOON RISING); the Joe Ledger thriller series (PATIENT ZERO, THE DRAGON FACTORY, THE KING OF PLAGUES, and ASSASSIN’S CODE); the Benny Imura Young Adult dystopian series (ROT & RUIN, DUST & DECAY, and FLESH & BONE); the Scribe Award-winning film adaptation of THE WOLFMAN and the standalone horror thriller –DEAD OF NIGHT.  His nonfiction books include the international bestseller ZOMBIE CSU, The CRYPTOPEDIA, THEY BITE, VAMPIRE UNIVERSE and WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE. He has sold over 1200 feature articles, thousands of columns, two plays, greeting cards, technical manuals, how-to books, and many short stories.  His comics for Marvel include MARVEL UNIVERSE VS THE WOLVERINE, MARVEL UNIVERSE VS THE PUNISHER, DOOMWAR, BLACK PANTHER and CAPTAIN AMERICA: HAIL HYDRA.  He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founder of The Liars Club; and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at conferences including BackSpace, Dragon*Con, ZombCon, PennWriters, The Write Stuff, Central Coast Writers, Necon, Killer Con, Liberty States, and many others.  In 2004 Jonathan was inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame, due in part to his extensive writing on martial arts and self-defense.  In October he’ll be featured as an expert in a History Channel documentary on zombies. Visit him online at his website/blog , on Twitter, and on Facebook.

 

 

Sacrifice

Guest Blogger: Christine Johnson

I love music. All kinds of music, from punk to folk to blues to classical, I have a little bit of everything. No matter what kind of mood I’m in, there’s some album in my collection that fits. Like lots of writers, I listen to music when I write, but it has to be something that very specifically fits the atmosphere of whatever I’m working on. I didn’t start doing this until I wrote NOCTURNE, but now I’ve done it for both NOCTURNE and my next novel, THE GATHERING DARK.

I’ve tried creating playlists, but for both of those novels I ended up finding a particular album in my collection that just . . . . struck a chord. rimshot With NOCTURNE it was Amanda Palmer’s first solo album, WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER (WKAP). I literally listened to nothing else for three months while I wrote that book. When I finished, I went back to the rest of my music collection, listening randomly as I am wont to do. I didn’t think much of it, other than to be grateful that there was art out there that could inspire me so perfectly.

Then I started writing THE GATHERING DARK. About the same time, I discovered the band The Black Keys. I love their album BROTHERS, and I started listening to it while I wrote. And Holy Word Count, Batman, was it the right music for that novel. Like WKAP before it, I put that album on repeat and typed my little heart out. Somewhere during the drafting, I got a little stuck. I wondered if WKAP might shake me loose, since I’d found it so inspiring during NOCTURNE.

That’s when I realized what I had done.

I RUINED THE ALBUM. Done. Kaput. Toasted.

Any time I try to listen to it, I’m right back there with NOCTURNE. The album belongs to that book now. It’s not part of my general life. I love those songs, and now I can’t listen to them. They’re lost.

And, as you might have guessed, it turns out that the same is true for BROTHERS. That music is strictly the property of THE GATHERING DARK. I broke it as surely as I broke WKAP.

Once I started kvetching about it, I found out that I’m not the only author who’s ever done this. I talked with Saundra Mitchell about the whole thing, and she lost music to her novels, too. It is nice to know I’m not the only one, I guess.

I know that—if you’re doing it right—you give part of yourself to a book, even if there’s nothing autobiographical about it. But it never occurred to me that it would be so literal; that music I had loved would become unlistenable because it would belong so utterly to a novel.

It does make me wonder what other people have lost to their books—whether there’s something they can’t eat anymore, or wear, or smell. The writing process takes different things from all of us, and it makes me look at the books on my shelves with a new eye. It’s not just the words and paper and shiny covers up there. Those shelves are full of lost music, TV shows and coffee drinks, particular tables at the cafe where someone wrote.

If you’ve lost something particular to one of your works, let me know in the comments. I’ll add it to my virtual collage. I think I’ll call it: Sacrifice to the Muse.

Christine Johnson grew up in, moved away from, and finally came home to Indianapolis, Indiana. Now she lives in an old house in an old neighborhood with her husband and kids. She have too many books and a weakness for anything sweet. She loves yoga and cooking, but she’s not much of a movie person. She likes watching soccer, and always looks forward to the first sweater-worthy days in the fall. But mostly, she likes making things up and writing them down and having people read them. So that’s what she do, and she feels very, very lucky to be doing it!



Building An Anthology

Guest Blogger: Toni L.P. Kelner

Charlaine Harris and I have co-edited four urban fantasy anthologies together—HOME IMPROVEMENT: UNDEAD EDITION, the most recent, just came out this week. But I have to be honest—when Charlaine and I started working on our first anthology, we really weren’t that sure what anthologists did. And having recently attended a couple of panels about anthologies, I’ve realized that the way we work isn’t typical but our method is working for us.

In his book WHICH LIE DID I TELL? MORE ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, screenwriter William Goldman says, “It bears repeating; by the first day of the movie, the fate of the movie is sealed. The point, once again, is that if you have prepared the script right, if you have cast it right, both actors and crew, you have a shot. If you have made a grievous error in either script or casting, you are dead in the water.”

If you substitute anthology for movie, theme for script, and contributors for casting, that’s about how I feel about our anthologies. If we’ve got a good theme and a good bunch of authors to write stories, I’m sure it’s going to be a good book, even before the stories start coming in.

The fun part is getting those two pieces into place.

CHOOSING A THEME

Coming up with the theme is actually pretty simple. With the help of our agent, Charlaine and I come up with a dozen or so ideas and present them to Ginjer Buchanan, our editor at Ace. She invariably picks the one that makes her laugh the most.

Seriously.

Of course we start out knowing that there will be paranormal content of some sort, but that’s too vague for our tastes. We’ve done holidays—vampire birthdays and werewolves at Christmas—but recently we’ve moved done supernatural denizens on vacation and, in this latest book, fixing their homes. Apparently it’s the juxtaposition of paranormal and normal that makes Ginjer giggle.

Obviously this means our themes are pretty broad, and that’s great. We want our contributors to have room to move!

Speaking of contributors, once the theme is decided, we can do our casting.

PICKING CONTRIBUTORS

Charlaine has compared our making a list of proposed contributors to making a Christmas list, and that’s about right. We pick people whose work we like, people we like, people we want to work with, famous names who will bring readers to the anthology, and less famous writers we’d love to see become more famous. Obviously, these categories overlap, but there’s one thing they all have in common: they’re good writers. Look at the crew this time around.

These are urban fantasy anthologies, so it’s a no-brainer to include some of the big names in urban fantasy like Patricia Briggs, Simon Green, and Melissa Marr, plus up-and-comers like Stacia Kane, Seanan McGuire, and Suzanne McLeod. In fact, we’ve been lucky that some of these guys were up-and-comers when we asked them, but they’ve moved right into the big name category. We sure can pick ‘em!

Urban fantasy is pretty close to paranormal romance, so that gave us an excuse to invite Heather Graham. There are links to SF, too, and we couldn’t wait to invite E.E. Knight.

Charlaine and I also like to go back to our roots, the mystery world where we started out (and still hang out). Ginjer has repeatedly said how impressed she is by the way mystery writers step up to the plate in our books. This time, we invited Victor Gischler, Rochelle Krich, and S.J. Rozan.

Last there’s James Grady, who neither of us knew other than from his pivotal spy novel SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOR. But he’s friends with one of the contributors from DEATH’S EXCELLENT VACATION, who got us in touch.

Add in a Sookie story from Charlaine and whatever I come up with, and we’re ready to go.

I worry about what will happen if two authors give us similar stories, but so far it hasn’t happened. I think that’s partially luck, and partially because we keep the themes loose and pick pro writers who are doing their best to think outside the box.

WHAT NEXT?

We go through a pretty thorough editing process as the stories come in, with both of us reading each story. But for the most part, the hard work is done. Which is to say that the contributors have sent us great stuff.

As I said, it’s worked four times so far, and we’re already well into work on our fifth anthology, which will be stories about supernatural creatures in school. (Needless to say, the idea got a snicker from Ginjer.) And we’ve lined up a whole new crew of excellent contributors, and can’t wait to see what they come up with. Look for AN APPLE FOR THE CREATURE sometime next fall.

Now I admitted that Charlaine and I were pretty much playing this anthology biz by ear, so I’m sure there are things we could be doing differently. If you’ve got any suggestions to make our anthologies better, I’d love you to post them in the comment section here.

Toni L.P. Kelner is the Agatha Award-winning author of the “Where are they now?” mysteries and the Laura Fleming mysteries. She was awarded a ROMANTIC  TIMESCareer Achievement Award, and her short stories have been nominated for the Agatha, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Derringer awards. She has co-edited with Charlaine Harris four very successful fantasy/mystery anthologies. All four have debuted on the NEW YORK TIMES Best Seller list. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, fellow author Stephen P. Kelner, Jr. and their two daughters.

 

 

Unlikely Friends

Guest Blogger: Lisa Unger

A long time ago I stopped thinking of characters as creations of my imagination, and started to understand that they are more like people who I’ve met along my colorful, complicated, ever-changing fictional journey. They come to me as they are, with their own names, personalities and spirits. Sometimes I love them, sometimes I endure them, and sometimes I pity them. Always, I try to treat each of them with compassion and respect.

There have been a few to whom I have connected in profound and important ways.  Most recently, I have had this experience with Jones Cooper. He first showed up in FRAGILE, married to the character that is the centerpiece of that book. Maggie is the lynchpin in FRAGILE; she holds everyone together. But as the story wound on, Jones started to play a deeply significant role. And after the book was finished, he stayed with me. He had more to say to me. And I wasn’t ready to leave him.

This has happened to me before, of course, with Ridley Jones in BEAUTIFUL LIES and SLIVER OF TRUTH. (I know:  What’s with the “Jones” thing? I don’t really understand it myself. Sometimes you just have to obey your subconscious and hope for the best.) But Ridley was a lot like me. She was a youngish writer. She had a white hot love affair with New York City. She was naïve, a little reckless, long on courage, somewhat short on common sense. I could relate to her, understand her. If we’d met in the real world, we would have been friends.

But Jones Cooper is a small town cop in his late forties. He has buried a terrible secret that he has carried since childhood, and it has influenced every decision he’s ever made about his life. He has a teenage son to whom he can’t connect, a marriage straining under the weight of deception, and he’s about to confront some ugly demons. By the end of FRAGILE, he’ll have to walk away from the only career he has ever had or wanted and find a second act, a new path forward. In other words, he and I have nothing in common at all.

And yet, I feel hugely connected to him. Enough so that I’ve had to go on with him into DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND (Crown/August 2011). At the end of FRAGILE, I left him so adrift, and with so many questions about his marriage and his future, that I just couldn’t stop thinking about him. And when that happens, I have no choice but to start writing.

I am having a similar experience with The Hollows, the fictional town where Jones and Maggie live. The Hollows is not unlike the kind of area where I grew up in New Jersey.  But it’s not that place or any other place. It’s a fictional town, a character in and of itself.  Again, this place is nothing like my current “bipolar” existence—I divide my time between a sleepy beach town in Florida and New York City. And it should be noted that growing up in a place quite similar to The Hollows, I absolutely loathed it. I simply could not wait to escape the semi-rural suburb so far removed energetically from New York City that it might as well have been on the moon.

Yet, oddly, in the fictional world I kind of like it. There’s something spooky about The Hollows, something just a few degrees lighter than darkness. There are forces there that encourage paths to cross, secrets to be revealed, demons to be confronted. It’s not supernatural, exactly. No, not quite. Let’s just say that, even though the surface appears peaceful and idyllic, there’s lot of potential for bad things to happen. And when those bad things happen, The Hollows is happy.

Dwelling in a town where I would never live by choice, exploring the life of a man with whom I have little in common, I couldn’t feel more at home. I understand and like Jones Cooper in a way that I can’t help but feel is special. He’s a little grouchy, somewhat (okay, deeply) cynical. He has a hero’s heart, can’t resist a damsel in distress. I find him endlessly amusing; he makes me laugh. He’s a good man at his core, but with a real connection—and an attraction—to the darkness within him, within everyone. “I guess,” said my editor, “that inside you there’s a middle-aged, retired cop waiting to get out.” Maybe so.

Lisa Unger is an award winning NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY and international bestselling author. Her novels have been published in over 26 countries around the world.

She was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1970) but grew up in the Netherlands, England and New Jersey. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, Lisa spent many years living and working in New York City. She then left a career in publicity to pursue her dream of becoming a full-time author. She now lives in Florida with her husband and daughter.

Her writing has been hailed as “masterful” (ST. PETERSBURG TIMES), “sensational” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY) and “sophisticated” (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) with “gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose” (ASSOCIATED PRESS).