Friday, March 30, 2012

Bert the Barbarian - New Cover


Bert the Barbarian has a new cover, thanks to the talented and generally awesome Deedee Davies.  You can hire her at http://www.3dfantasyart.co.uk/.

I also got an awesome 5-star review for Lord of Fire on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V0CTBI.  Yes, the week's just been full of thrills.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Uzuri Wilkerson Guest Post

Today's guest post is from Uzuri Wilkerson, author of Sweet, a racy vampire novel with a bit of mystery.  Sweet debuts this week.  Take it away, Uzuri:

Life as I’d Like to Know It
Here’s how life will go after my novel, Sweet, is released.
It’ll start off with a guest post on a blog.  From there, people will see how witty and funny and sarcastic I am.  Sweet will instantly go viral.  Everyone will link to the blog and find my website.  They’ll tell friends who’ll tell friends who’ll tell their grandmas.  Facebook and Twitter won’t know what to do with all the buzz.  #Sweetlife will take over the boards.  There will be threads so long, the servers will explode. 
People will wait with bated breath for the release of the Sweet book trailer.  It will sweep the Internets.  Ads will pop up online and in print, publicizing the book.  They’ll pay me to create them. 
Sweet will have a midnight release, on a night where the air will be so fresh and clear.  The lines will stretch on for five city blocks, with people camped out for full days.  Passersby will stare in wonder until they reach the stores, see the signs announcing the release, and then go rushing back to hold their own spot. 
I’ll experience that first trill of excitement when I see someone reading my book on the train or in Starbucks or while walking through the mall, mindlessly bumping into others and stationary objects.  The person will laugh or shake their head amusedly or blush ever so slightly at something they are reading. 
I’ll go, “That’s my book,” with happy tears in the corners of my eyes.  We’ll snap pictures together and post them to the web, both of us equally excited to have met the other.  Journalists and late-night hosts will clamor for an interview.  Author signings will be booked across the country and across the pond.  I’ll stand at podiums in very cute outfits, reading Sweet excerpts in intimate settings, where the lights are drawn and tea and cookies are served.  After, I’ll sit at a table covered by a pretty cloth and sign books and I wouldn’t have any trouble coming up with something to write.  My alma maters will request readings, maybe even guest workshops.  I will be stopped on the street by readers asking for my autograph and I won’t be annoyed in the least, even years after my first release.
A generous movie deal will be put together that affords me very bountiful royalties.  I will star in the movie, as I am a natural ahc-tor.  The Oscar nods will roll in for Best Actress in a Leading Role, as well as Best Actress in a Supporting Role and Best Adapted Screenplay.  Might as well throw in Best Director and Best Film.  Since the movie will need a soundtrack, I also will be nominated for a Grammy.
I will travel around the globe.  I will sample cuisines and wines, learn dance and language, view breathtaking art and landscapes.  Celebrities will call me frequently, each trying to become my next best friend and/or lover. 
Action figures and merchandise will only stay on the shelves a few hours at a time and there will be constant back orders (why won’t they just make double the products next time?).  People will ask others jokingly and sometimes salaciously, “How do you taste?”  Girls will wear their hair curly like Sweet’s main character, Celia, and men will try to replicate her boyfriend, Victor’s, dapper style. 
I’ll create an entire series, my branding will be known worldwide, and I’ll blog for Television without Pity.  They’ll make a reality show that follows my exploits.  There will be articles and books written about my rise to stardom.  I’ll live in a spacious home in a location to be determined (will I still mind the brutal winters of Boston or will I try out San Diego or Atlanta?).  I’ll summer in my villa in the Dominican Republic and winter on a stretch of beach in Bora Bora.  It doesn’t matter where I am; I will find inspiration effortlessly.  Life will be grand.
Now that’s the kind of vivid imagination you need to be a writer.  In reality—you know, on Planet Earth where I actually live—writing will probably be my side hustle.  I will always need a regular 9-5 because I will always have bills.  Writing has always been my outlet, for when I’m feeling down, happy, or just plain bored.  I can only hope that my words will reach farther than my computer screen.  As long as someone out there enjoys the works I conceive in my complicated, random mind, I can be happy with life.


UZURI M. WILKERSON graduated from Wellesley College in 2005.  There, she studied film with a concentration in screenwriting.  After finishing school, she eventually moved back to novels, where she found more freedom for her expression.  Sweet came into fruition after a lifetime love affair with the supernatural.  It was only a matter of time before she took her own stab at the genre.  She currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.

To learn more about Uzuri Wilkerson and to read more about her upcoming novel Sweet please visit her website. To reserve your autographed copy of her debut novel and to enter for your chance to win a $25 VISA gift card, visit www.azizapublishing.com and learn about the Sweet photo contest.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

KJ Hannah Greenberg Guest Post


My theory that indie authors are some of the most interesting people around has been reinforced.  Today's guest post is from KJ Hannah Greenberg, whose Don't Pet the Sweaty Things is being released this week.  View it at http://www.bardsandsages.com/greenberg. Take it away, Hannah:

Today, I quelled three uprisings and decimated an entire outpost of spacelings. My occupational hazards, ranging from getting drunk on the particulars of integrating anthropomorphism into subject matter, to losing my cool when defining atomic boundaries, do little to interfere with the fun I am having.
Bewilderingly, I did not always amuse myself by arranging mosaics of make-believe entities. Short of my terminal degree, I left The University of Iowa’s esteemed halls of language and literature to: marry my undergraduate honey, complete my schooling (elsewhere) and raise a family. Along the way, I taught English and communication courses and remained sufficiently distracted by academic activities to not fully actualize my artistic faculty.

Nonetheless, after my children grew older and my family moved to “the other side” of the globe, I began to contrast the results of my verbal experiments with those of my theoretical modeling. There was rot in the ratios. Espousing rhetorical and literary criticism was doing nothing for my inventive yield. Only reallocating my resources to the construction of stories, of poems, of plays, and of essays might change my essential mix.
Thus, initially, the structure and composition of my offerings were less important to me than was those works’ existence. Without facts on the ground, per se, I feared
I would remain another commentator among thousands. I had to make haste to write creatively, to capture a hibernaculum of pretend hedgehogs, or both.

Accordingly, I dismissed internal arguments against “sensibly,” which indentured my energies to the pursuit of scholarship. As well, I tried out a handful of rationale for allowing my adolescent sons and daughters to receive a little less of my supervision. Our home did not entirely burn down. The toilet overflowed only sporadically, and we grasped that a former President was correct in considering ketchup to be a vegetable.

I muddled. I splattered. I dribbled a little here and there. I made many, many mistakes. What’s more, I refused to apologize for entire suites of efforts that lacked linguistic flourishes or any other “social worth.” Instead, I urged myself to continue to scribble narratives more full of irreverence than grace, and to continue to build poetry containing more superfluous references than measures of parsimony.

My tales became populated with jilted lovers, fledgling children’s book authors, awkward neighbors, and troubled elders. My essays flowed with anecdotes about my sons and daughters, about editors and publishers’ peccadilloes, and about road kill. My verse eked out paramagnetic materials from philological molecules and demonstrated that moral spin would be forever indeterminate. I snuck in paragraphs or stanzas, too, here and there, which suited no onomasticon, yet made my writing the ideal material with which to line budgie cages.

From hornbeam branch to shadblow bough, my craft became washable and worrisome. Not believing, even for a nanosecond or its cousin, that “sexy” or “comfortable” conceptions always superlatively benefit readers, I dared to roll in the waste of slipstream and pulp, and, in doing so caught, mostly by accident, some gatekeepers’ attention. It seems that fairytales, made urbane, are the “new black.”

Meanwhile, both my esteem and my social ranking took hits. Trading in prescribed academic paraphernalia for the less straightforward tools of original output hurt. Whereas the texts I offered up, in my fifth decade, spoke to the human addiction to adrenaline, and to publishers’ appetite for irregular outcomes, they did nothing to build on my previous, carefully structured, professional career. Indubitably, imaginative writing, if properly fed and watered, needs no blender, dryer, or lawn mower to be processed, and has the potential to move more souls than does any lecture on media and society or on the ethics of persuasion (my former areas of expertise). However, the realm of creative writing comes with a much smaller prospect of success that does the staid university world.

In balance, mental sprouting, whispered, shouted, or executed at any decibel in between, is not a “now or never” business, but a soft form of movement. Raging mentations, furthermore, are best facilitated by bobcats, or by intentionally allowing otherworldly monsters to feast on the flesh of invisible friends. Otherwise, powerful ideas persist in marauding on our highways as glittery personalities like crystalline chanticleers. There’s room in writing for growth.

Sure, many “refined” writers claim to operate within the confines of cultural licensure, to act within the parameters of de rigueur notions, to merely cast a sheen of mawkishness on already popular bits and pieces; such goings on are profitable. In spite of that, Yours Truly, even now, usually fails to be deterred by threatening garbles or by gallons of institutionalized drugging and cutting; I still push at edges. There’s little point in running with small, prickly mammals if one’s not willing to risk getting jabbed.

I purposefully fashion villains and heroes seasoned with dashes of imperfection, colonize fictions with the sort of huzzah more often associated with prides of cats lamenting missed wildebeest steaks than with polite exchanges, and engage in the kind of language-related maneuvers most familiar to adolescents who don’t really want to complete their algebra homework. In brief, I intentionally sought to join the ranks of word workers that elect not to employ fire sleeves.

As a result, presently, I write about a regional cleanout company’s monopoly, about Ilocano banquets, and about moments when butterfly kisses subsume all. My art is as likely to reflect my former students’ business acumen as it is to reflect my attempts to get giggy with piles of dishes. Occasionally, my writing espouses means to repair flattened garter snakes, to boot.

In the near future, I’d like to serve up more mindful discourse and to be able to explain why octopuses ought to have the right of way in bathrooms. I aspire, additionally, to be able to clarify why elementary school kids, who let lizards soil carpets, ought to be made to clean up, and why flying squirrels need to be reprimanded when making off with grocery coupons.

I’ve been fortunate to find audiences for my fun and games. I’ve been blessed to glean cheer and energy from my intellectual sport. I’ve been privileged, as well, to continue to embrace the oddities embedded in my performances. In brief, I’ve taken to this nature of output like a carnivorous, two-headed alien that gets invited in for tea.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

This Brilliant Darkness - Free Today


The talented Red Tash is offering This Brilliant Darkness for free on March 4th only. I've reviewed this book before, and liked it a lot. It's well worth checking out, especially at the price. The link's below. If it's not still the 4th, just buy a copy. It's good stuff.

There are rumours of other giveaways coming up, there is a sequel in the works, and she's written some other stuff, so consider a visit to http://redtash.com/.