Friday Links: Rogue Redcaps, Reptoid Tunnels, and The Making of Jaws 2

In addition to my big news there's lots of stuff going on in the world of the strange, the macabre, the horrific. Let's take a look back at what happened over the week.

• Sean Eaton began a must-read series of pieces analyzing H.P. Lovecraft's novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at his always-incisive R'lyeh Tribune: "S.T. Joshi concurred with Lovecraft’s evaluation of the novel, which he dismissed as “charming but relatively insubstantial”.  However, Lovecraft’s renowned biographer felt that the novel was autobiographically significant in that it served as a snapshot of Lovecraft’s psyche at a particular point in his life, circa the late 1920s.  In my view the novel seems to be a kind of culmination or systematization of various ideas Lovecraft had been developing in various stories at that time in his career."
• The President of the International Association of Exorcists had something interesting to say about the Devil: "'Satan is not the god of evil against the God of the good, rather he is a being who God created as good and who, with some angels — also created good by God — became evil because they refused God and His kingdom with their free and final choice,' Father Francesco Bamonte, president of the International Association of Exorcists, wrote last week in Vatican Newspaper L'Osservatore Romano."
  
• The little-known but much-dreaded Reptoids' tunnels under Los Angeles were discussed at Ghost Hunting Theories: "The legends state that the key room is the directory to the rest of the city, and to the historical gold record tablets. These gold tablets were slabs of gold, 4 feet long and 14 inches wide. The tablets were believed to contain the records of the origins of the human race, and the history of modern man in the Americas, including details regarding the history of the mysterious Mayan people."
• It's been Karen Malena week at Nev Murray's Confessions of a Reviewer!!. Start with part one of this in-depth interview and keep scrolling: "It’s a scary thought especially when you write dark characters to realize that they are parts of you. For how else could we make this stuff up? You dig deep down into yourself. I also like to joke with people I know and say, “You better watch. You never know when you’ll end up as a villain in one of my books.” But seriously, I think all writers to some extent utilize people and situations they know. Or at least parts of them."
• It's going to seem a bit silly at first, but really, go take a look at these vintage photos of loving couples that Vintage Everyday posted. Some are funny, some disturbing, some just weird.
• Micro-Brewed Reviews reviewed the film Ex Machina: "Ex Machina is a small and relatively contained movie with an incredibly tiny budget for something of this scope with a cast that can be basically counted on one hand; a nice little throwback to the sobering sci-fi tales of the late 1960s and ‘70s."
• Hammer Horror Issue 1 emerged from Zombos' Closet (I'm always amazed at the material he posts: simultaneously nostalgic and bizarre).
• Holly Evans posted a piece of short fiction at her blog that's definitely worth your time, titled Rogue Redcaps: "The stench of old blood and rotting meat surrounded me while I tried to clear my head through the agony. A nail slowly ran down the side of my neck following the line of one of my butterfly tattoos there, I punched in the direction of creature it belonged to. The darkness shattered, bright white light filled my vision before it settled into a warm light that allowed me to see again. I wished it hadn’t."
• Cool Ass Cinema reviewed the book The Making of Jaws 2: "Authors and heavy duty JAWS fans, Pisano and Smith, have amassed a great deal of behind the scenes stories, anecdotes and rare photos from many who worked on JAWS 2; this extends to those who worked, albeit briefly, on the production before being fired and replaced. Among those released from the picture early on included a handful of the young cast, one of which was Ricky Schroder (SILVER SPOONS [1982-1987])."
• Here, I discussed what social media can't do for you as a writer, and announced the publication of the sequel to The Blessed Man and the Witch, titled The Nephilim and the False Prophet.

Illustration by Kevin Ramos for Call of Cthulhu's Cthulhu by Gaslight supplement.

End of Year Post

I'm going to take the rest of the year off to spend Christmas with my family.

Yes, I'm Jewish, but my wife celebrates Christmas, and I don't feel like trying to make my little boy pick between Judah Maccabee and Santa Claus for holiday heroes, so we do both, and now's the time when things get busy: holiday meals to be cooked, Christmas cookies to be baked, house to be cleaned, presents to be wrapped.

(Though he should totally pick Judah Maccabee as his holiday hero; I mean, what's cooler: a guerrilla fighter or a fat old guy who slithers down chimneys?)

It's been an eventful year.  Some of the highlights include:

• In March, I wrote my first review for the website Ginger Nuts of Horror.
• In April, my short story Hold On was published at Liberty Island.
• In June, Nev Murray reviewed The Blessed Man and the Witch.
• In August, Adam Howe gave me the honor of blurbing his story Gator Bait. 
• In September, my short story How to Fix a Broken World was published at Liberty Island.
• In November, I released the second edition of The Blessed Man and the Witch.
• December was quite busy. Get the Greek, my Kindle Single, made it to #1 in a free category on Amazon; the Beyond Lovecraft Indiegogo campaign I supported made its funding goals (and then some); and I learned that I had been kicked off the website Ginger Nuts of Horror (more on that later).

2016 is shaping up to be a good year, too. I'll release The Nephilim and the False Prophet in the first quarter of the new year, and I hope to be finished the entire Armageddon trilogy by early 2017 at the latest. I continue to meet new readers and writers, which is great fun, and it's a joy to watch my son become his own person every day.

Best to all of my readers, both new and familiar. 

See you in 2016!

The Blessed Man and the Witch 2nd Edition

I've released a Second Edition of my novel The Blessed Man and the Witch that includes a new cover and an excerpt of the sequel The Nephilim and the False Prophet.

While the Second Edition doesn't change any of the story in any way, I have cleaned up some of the grammar and added back matter like About the Author and Author's Note sections. That's one of the great freedoms of digital publishing: improving the product as you go.

It's likely that I'll improve the blurb, but after that, no more tinkering. I'm moving forward. The Nephilim and the False Prophet should be ready for publication early next year, and I'm already working on the outline for the third and final volume in the Armageddon series.

If you haven't already, pick up your copy of The Blessed Man and the Witch today!

A Few Thoughts About Editing Your Indie Book Plus Book News

(This post is not intended to point fingers at individuals, nor is it a reaction to a particular book.)

After having read dozens of indie- and self-published books over the last year or so in several different genres, I've found some common threads that link them together as indie fiction and separate them from traditionally-published books.

Most prominent is the lack of editing.  The vast, vast, vast majority of writers need an editor, or, if nothing else, a competent, experienced proofreader to make their work ready for prime time.  There really is no acceptable number of typos or grammatical mistakes allowable in a published work.  The expression "the perfect is the enemy of the good" doesn't apply to publishing.

There are, of course, more subjective elements to your book that may or may not benefit from a story editor: character arcs, plot arcs, dialogue, a clearly-defined antagonist, etc.  They're important, but their very subjectivity puts them up for debate.  (The subject of a later post will cover the relative value of having a book editor review your book.)  I'm talking about having everything spelled properly.  No wrong word choices like "vocal chords" or "it's" when you mean "its."  Microsoft Word doesn't fix run-ons, comma placement, and subject-verb agreement, and if you can't do it (most writers, remember, cannot), you must find someone to fix these errors for you.

Yes, I know it's expensive.  And time-consuming.  And a pain in the ass and a gut check and you still have to do it because if you don't do it you're putting out marginal work.  These things count.  We've all read traditionally-published books with grammatical errors, yes.  But just because some people put out substandard work, it's no excuse for you to do the same.  Do you want to be good for an indie, or just plain good?

Get it professionally edited, and if you can't, get it proofread.  It shows you care about the reader.

My other concern is book formatting.  I've read some books that were horribly formatted.  There's no excuse for that.  If you can't or won't have your book professionally formatted, download this invaluable guide, follow the instructions, and you'll have formatted your book properly.  Mark Coker is my personal hero for writing this guide and making it available for free.

The bottom line is that publishing is all about being detail-oriented.  Including self-publishing.

In other news, The Nephilim and the False Prophet has been sent to educated, literate readers I trust to sanity-check it.  The end is nigh!