Dreadedin Chronicles Is Published!

I'm pleased to announce that my new novella, Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City has just been published and is available as an e-book on Amazon.com.

It's a novella aimed at a Young Adult (YA) audience, written in cooperation with the Dunedin Public Library.  The story takes place in and around the city of Dunedin (pronounced "dun-EE-din"), Florida.  Most of the novel's supporting characters are based on local teen volunteers.

A limited edition print run will make the book available for borrowing from the Dunedin Public Library in November 2014.

The book blurb states:

Paige Ashton is an ordinary teenager just trying to get through high school. Friendless, she’s socially invisible until bizarre occurrences put her in the spotlight. When disaster strikes on Halloween, why is everyone looking for her? 

College freshman Ryan Kincaid is living a lie: he pretends to go to class but hangs out and drinks with his friends instead. He’s never had to work for anything in his life, so how is he going to save his family from a fate worse than death? 

Soon, they’ll have to face cannibal zombies, a horrible sleeping sickness, and an ancient evil hundreds of millions of years old, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. 

Happy Halloween!

The text includes some Lovecraftian themes, including research using forbidden tomes like the Pnakotic Manuscripts, inhuman civilizations that existed millions of years before our own, and terms like "cyclopean."  At 99 cents, it's practically a steal!

Breadhead Friday: Pizzas I Have Known

It's been another extremely busy week.  Here are the highlights:

• The novella is finished editing and has gone on to formatting.  Once again, I've used Mark Coker's Smashwords Style Guide, which is an excellent resource on formatting documents into ebooks.  It's a somewhat lengthy process, but the results are worth it.
• I trained myself to use GIMP to create a cover for the novella.  GIMP is powerful, easy to use, and free.  Luckily, I have some experience using Photoshop, so GIMP wasn't terribly difficult to learn.  The cover photo was taken by me at 4:30 AM in downtown Dunedin.
• Everyone says that unless you're a graphic artist, you shouldn't do your own book covers.  That's mostly true. However, I have done professional graphic art and have experience designing both book and video covers.  The cover for Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City is good and captures the feel and look of what I'd imagined.
• I changed the look of this blog.
• I practiced baking bread in a dutch oven.  The results have been good, but I want them to be great, so I continue to work at it.

With all that in mind, here are some pizzas I have made over the last few months.  This does not represent all of the pizzas; only the ones I remembered to take photos of.

Turkey pepperoni and chicken parm pizza

Turkey pepperoni, grilled chicken, and bacon

Turkey pepperoni, chicken parm, and bacon

Turkey pepperoni and bacon

Sloppy joe pizza

A few notes:

• Obviously, my family is keeping the turkey pepperoni industry afloat.  It's a heavy task, but someone has to do it.
• A chicken and bacon pizza is about as good as it gets, especially if it's chicken parm.  
• For the sloppy joe pizza, things went in a different but delicious direction: I added some leftover sloppy joes I'd made to the sauce, which gave it some extra protein and diced peppers.  The crust is also different: I used leftover lean dough from a dutch oven boule I'd made earlier in the week.  It's an experiment that's well worth repeating.
• And just so we don't seem like pigs here, a green salad always precedes pizza,  I call it a "kitchen sink" salad because I add diced apples, strawberries, blueberries, jicama, and papaya to the typical greens, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, peapods, etc.  It's become such a habit that our three-year-old naturally expects a salad before pizza. Go figure.

Bits and Pieces

Breadhead Friday's canceled today while I go out and do instead of talk about what I did.  In the calm before today's storm, here are a few more or less random thoughts.

Yesterday, my wife and I went to see Gone Girl.  The dialogue was terrible.  When it wasn't cliche, it was stilted and unrealistic.  Nobody talks like people in that movie did, unless they're in a book.  The notion of the unreliable narrator was so pervasive that you couldn't care about any of the characters.  Not only were they unlikable, they were unknowable.  It was interesting to see Tyler Perry outside of a fat black woman suit.  I hope he does more roles that don't require that contrivance, because he was the only bright spot in the cast.  Ben Affleck shouldn't act in anything serious, because he can't be taken seriously.  There were two moments of real fun in the film, both of which happened near the end: a scene of shocking violence, and a brief moment of pathos.

Previews for Exodus: Gods and Kings left me cold.  I'm a little concerned that they're going to secularize the story of Moses.  On the Passover holiday, "[E]ach person is obligated to see himself or herself [lirot et atzmo] as though he or she personally came forth from Egypt."  So there's a personal component here.

J D Mader has written a piece here about book reviews.  In it, he redefines the nature and purpose of book reviews to only mean what he thinks it should mean, and claims that everyone else is doing it wrong.  Because he's "annoyingly ethical."  Which means that if we don't rethink the review system and review books according to his viewpoint, we're being unethical.  What's missing from the piece are:

1. A comprehensive list of which books are actually worthy of a five-star review so the rest of us aren't acting unethically and ruining the redefined system.
2. Any meaningful discussion of how subjective a book review can be.
3. The difference between great art and great entertainment (some people liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more than Ethan Frome, and there's nothing wrong with rating them according to preference).
4. Specific criteria that will teach the unethical lot of us who broke the perfect system how to review books properly.

The librarian at the Dunedin Public Library with whom I'm working to produce the YA Halloween novella very much enjoyed the draft I sent her, so we're working on next steps.  The book needs a cover image.  And another run-through with an editor.  These things are doable.  There may be a print copy made available, but we'll see.