Dart Publishing

Dart Publishing, Ltd. is the official name of the business I’ve been trying to get started with my friend for a while now. We’ve made huge leaps recently, thanks in part to having some extra time due to the Crispy Gamer implosion. I’m very nearly done with the first draft of the business plan, and will be sending it out to a few folks I know with way more business experience than I have, in order to get their feedback on it. From there, it’ll be revisions, and then probably applying for some local grants. Investor money is good, but free money is even better. Might as well look for that first, right?

Writing

Last month I finished not one, but two novels — my NaNoWriMo projects from 2007 and 2009, “The Broken God Machine” and “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters,” respectively. If anyone out there wants to read the first draft of The Broken God Machine, it’s ready for criticism. Just get in touch. I still need to make some tweaks to Monster Hunters before I open it up for critique from the outside world, but that should be happening soon. I’m also making some progress on the second draft of the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, currently titled “Blood Hunt.” I expect work on that to speed up significantly once I’m no longer spending my coffee shop time filling out competitive analysis forms and burn-rate spreadsheets for Dart. Speaking of TBTB …

The Blood That Bonds

I haven’t had too many responses in my agent search, and so far the responses I’ve had haven’t been positive. I’m not particularly discouraged — people are still reading the eBook and sending very positive feedback — but I’m beginning to wonder if I should revise the first chapter a little to make it a bit more attention-grabbing right from the start. There’s a little too much opening exposition and I think it’s turning agents off. We’ll see.

Photography

Unfortunately, the broken 18-55mm lens that I fixed with superglue for a while has broken again, so we’re stuck only using a distance lens on our camera, which is a pain in the ass, so we’re not taking many pics at the moment. I need to get off my ass and either re-fix the lens using a better piece of plastic (and more superglue), or just cough up the ~$140 it costs to buy a new one. Why does everything have to be so damn expensive these days? Blargh! Rotten kids … GET OFF MY LAWN!

Cocktails

I went on a bit of a beer kick the past few months, trying lots of craft beers and really strengthening my understanding and appreciation of the different types available (turns out I am way more of an ale guy than a lager guy, with a particular fondness for brown ales, porters, and stouts). I’m coming out of that now though and getting back to crafting new cocktails. I’m still experimenting right now, but when I come up with something good, I’ll post it here.

Video Games

I went out and picked up BioShock 2 the other night at my wife’s urging (one of many reasons why I married her!) and have been playing through it. I’ll post a full review here when I’m finished, but I’m pretty far in and while I’m enjoying it, I’m kind of disappointed in how much more they’ve chosen to focus on combat. You’re constantly being swarmed with enemies, and while I’m not dying a lot, it’s just not a whole lot of fun to be in non-stop firefights. After BioShock 2, I’ll be picking up Mass Effect 2, and Assassin’s Creed 2 … apparently it’s all about the sequels right now.

Reading

Sadly, given how many activities I have going on, I haven’t done much reading since Christmas, when I burned through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball in a week or so. I’ve got three novels and a short story collection all waiting for my attention, not to mention a non-fiction book on real estate investing that I really should finish

French

Mon francais n’est pas superb … but it’s getting better. I do a half an hour of studying per day almost every weekday, and Charlotte and I are beginning to try to speak to each other more in French. We’ve also found some French cultural events to go to around town, and I’m about to start in on French grammar in addition to speaking/listening. It’s still a halting, frustrating process — I don’t like being bad at things — but all these little steps should hopefully add up to me being able to hold something of a coherent conversation with her friends and family back in the homeland, sometime within the next couple of years. Hopefully!

Travel

Speaking of the homeland, Charlotte and I will be making another France trip in May. Her sister is getting married in the south of France, which gives us the opportunity to fly into Barcelona in Spain, and spent the next week driving to Toulouse (actually, the nearby town of Albi), where we’ll attend the wedding, hang out for another day or two, and then I’ll fly back while she goes to Paris to take her finals for the French Lit program she’s working on. We’ve also got a trip to Florida happening in March, to visit my parents and sister, and a trip to Syracuse happening … sometime. Then as summer rolls into fall, we’ve got a wedding in New York City and a wedding in New Hampshire (I think) to attend. Yeesh!

… So that’s what’s up with me, in case anyone was wondering!

Yes, that’s right. For the second time in my life, I decided to join in and try to write a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. I succeeded, hitting 50k on the 28th, and as of this post I’m over 53k. What’s pretty amazing is that I missed four days at the beginning of the month due to my New York trip, and three more over the course of the month due to preexisting social obligations. So I actually wrote 50,129 words in just 21 days, which is an average of 2,387 words per day … which is a lot! Big thanks to my lovely wife for keeping me on track and spending a lot of weekend mornings at the local coffee shop with me.

I think the story’s actually pretty good, too … definitely worth a second draft. It’s about a young girl who is attacked by a werewolf but manages to kill it and is subsequently recruited into a school of monster hunters. You can read an excerpt over at my NaNoWriMo Page if you’d like.

Unfortunately, all the writing and paperwork (not to mention Thanksgiving and our one-year wedding anniversary!) hasn’t left me a whole lot of time for other activities, like updating this blog or promoting The Blood That Bonds. Both of these things will be addressed in December, although I’m also going to try to keep writing on a regular basis, AND we’re celebrating Christmas in LA FRANCE this year, so there will be traveling and such getting in the way as well.

There’s just not enough time in the day, week, month and year, you know?

Much ado has been made over the current “vampire trend” and its potential longevity. People are curious: why and how have vampires become so popular? What has caused them to capture the fancy of the mainstream public after years of being appreciated mainly by fans of the horror genre? The answer to that question lies in the slow move from terror to sympathy that people have made over the past few decades, due in large part to the efforts of many authors, screenwriters, directors, and other artists.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, vampires were the bad guys. Remember those days? Dracula bending menacingly over a delirious Lucy Westenra; Kurt Barlow and his servant Mr. Straker slowly bringing the town of Salem’s Lot to ruin; Keifer Sutherland and his cronies menacing Corey Haim’s family … vampires were nearly always portrayed as voracious, evil killers …

If you’re interested in reading the rest, you can find it at Reading with a Bite. I think it’s a pretty solid essay, and of course I get to plug my book, The Blood That Bonds, as well! Thanks very much to Lindsay for the opportunity.

Oh, and the control to turn off the music that starts when the site loads is over on the right, a little bit down the page. ;)

]]> http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 0 http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/07/29/the-blood-that-bonds-news/ http://www.cerebraldebris.com/2009/07/29/the-blood-that-bonds-news/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:51:26 +0000 chris http://www.cerebraldebris.com/?p=1365 As some of you may know, but most of you don’t, The Blood That Bonds just spent a year in submission over at St. Martins Press. The editor to whom I had sent it recently got back to me, and they unfortunately won’t be buying the book – the basic gist was “you can certainly write, but it was a little dark for me.” So that’s a bit of a bummer, but I’m not angry or anything … this is how the print industry works; you have to find the right editor and publisher for your work, and it can be a difficult and time-consuming process just to get your voice heard over the crowd, let alone by the right people.

I’m not giving up on my dream of print publication for The Blood That Bonds, or my other work. I’ve wanted to have a book published since I was eleven years old, and there’s no reason to stop trying until it happens or I’m dead. However, I’ve decided to use the skills I possess that other authors perhaps don’t in order to help the people who might want to read it, find it. There are a lot of people out there who’ve written a vampire book … but how many of them are professional web designers and developers with over a decade of experience? Probably not too many. Why not leverage those abilities to take a route less-traveled to getting the book out there and noticed?

Which is why I registered TheBloodThatBonds.com and have spent my free time creating an entire website to promote the upcoming free release of the novel, in eBook formats (PDF, Kindle, iPhone and more), to whomever wants it. The site’s not quite done yet and is still locked down under a username and password, which is why I didn’t link it, but it’s very close to finished and I anticipate it will launch in mid-August. I’m really excited about this project, as I think it’s a chance to get my writing out to a much wider audience than it’s previously seen (I’ll be doing heavy promotion of the site and the book, trying to get blogs and sites all over the internet to link it, review it, etc). Hopefully some of that audience will be people with ties to the print industry who might want to publish the book in print … but if not, hey, at least people will be reading, and that’s the goal, right?

It’s time to get this thing out there. :)

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
As with each issue so far, GUD issue 3 contains an eclectic combination of short fiction, poetry and artwork, most of it in the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres. Once again, the overall quality of work is strong. Particular standouts, to me, where the story “Soon You Will be Gone and Possibly Eaten” (sci-fi with a touch of horror) and the nifty Mezo-American sci-fi story “Night Bird Soaring”. I also enjoyed “The Train”‘s incredibly surreal setting.

I have to admit, the “flying machines” theme didn’t really stand out to me. True, every story involved them in some way, but I didn’t feel it made the issue any better or worse than the preceding ones. I might not even have noticed it, had I not been aware of it from their call for submissions last year.

Overall GUD continues to represent arguably the strongest collection of short genre stories that I’ve encountered. I strongly recommend it.

View all my reviews.

“No! It’s too strong! I … oh, damn it, the f*cking troll killed Carbomb.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asks my wife Charlotte, who with a quick glance toward the little bed perched on our window-shelf can see that our cat, Carbomb, is still totally alive and sleeping peacefully.

“Oh,” I say. “I set the game so that if I start with a pet cat, the cat’s name is Carbomb.”

“That’s a game?”

“Sure. This little ‘at’ symbol is me, and that ‘T’ is a troll, and this is a …”

“Sounds great,” she says, and goes back to her book.

Okay, so perhaps not everyone understands the appeal of Nethack. Actually, it seems likely that the vast bulk of today’s gamers have never heard of Nethack, which really is something of a shame. How many games do you know of which have been in near-constant development for thirty years, boast a stunning depth of artificial intelligence unrivaled by modern titles, and will run flawlessly on any computer, of any speed, running any operating system available?

Check out the full article and let me know what you think!

Recent releases like Gears of War 2 and Killzone 2 have offered gamers visual fidelity of unparalleled quality. For over a decade, improving visuals has been the focal point of development in gaming, and titles have advanced by great leaps during that time. We’ve also improved the audio in our games, and arguably even moved into telling deeper, more interesting stories. Text-adventure advocates may disagree with that last point, but certainly we expect a great deal more story from today’s mass-market titles, such as Gears of War, than we did of titles like Bubble Bomb or DOOM.

Unfortunately, the characters that populate our games seem to have been lost in the shuffle. One could easily argue that modern gaming characters are shallower and less compelling than their ancestors, some of whom had great reams of text-driven dialogue to spout. Even in a Game of the Year-quality title like Fallout 3, we’re still presented with primary story characters about whom we know virtually nothing, and with whom we have a hard time forming compelling, coherent relationships.

You can read the entire article over at Crispy Gamer!

Additionally, I’ve got an editorial in the editing phase for Crispy, so I’ll post when that goes up.

Additionally part two, I’m working on something fairly awesome with my friend Gabe that we’re hoping to launch this month. More on that soon!

Largely when I write poems, I do so as an exploration of the language. They’re structural in nature, focused on rhyme scheme, syncopation, meter and beat. I haven’t yet graduated to a level of ability at which I feel comfortable playing with symbolism, or theme. That may never happen, actually, given that my poetry output is somewhat less than prodigious.

Still, I have two or three poems that I feel are solid, in one way or another, and I feel like sharing them here. This being my blog, where better to post this sort of thing, right?

I appreciate comments, whenever I get them, though that occasion has proven to be rare so far. If you have thoughts on any of the poems after the jump, please feel free to leave a note!

To Me, From You

You said you would,
But didn’t.
And the tast it left was bitter:
Wine gone bad,
Empty cellars, full of litter
And hidden.
You said you would.

Santa Ana

There’s pleasure in the wind that creeps,
Bone-dry and hot like desert sighs

In broken hands. The silence weeps
Like ghosts in walls, for binding ties

To days that wait, while darkness seeps,
Through wood and stone, and all realize:

Ancestral shades in silence keep
Their bitter watch with shotgun eyes.

In times like these, when all retreats,
Men pray for blood and tell their lies.

The House at the End of the Street

Yes.

The house at the end of the street …
Where broken windows stare like eyes,
And spiders crawl where darkness lies.
They spin their webs to catch the flies,
And other creatures that they eat
In the house at the end of the street.

There is a smell like rotting meat,
That wafts out of its crumbling walls.
It sickens, maddens and appalls
All those who walk within the halls,
And many make a quick retreat
From the house at the end of the street.

Things lurk within its darkened suites,
And shades of children play with toys.
These spectral wisps of girls and boys,
Go quietly and make no noise,
And ignore all those that they meet
In the house at the end of the street.

They hide there in the summer heat,
And sit alone through winter’s night.
They smile when the moon is bright
(the only time they love the light),
And whisper verses that repeat,
In the house at the end of the street.

They flee it now with running feet,
Those who view its wasted space.
Their fear is etched upon their face.
They grimace, gibber, moan, and pace.
They must admit to their defeat,
By the house at the end of the street.