Cover Reveal: MUDCAT

You know what? I love this so much, I'm not even going to build it up first. Without further ado, here's the full print cover for MUDCAT!

Click the image to make it bigger, so you can enjoy it at full size!

Thanks go out to the appropriately named Michael "Fish" Fisher for his incredible work on this one, and for elevating my "B-Movie" theme into an "A" cover.

Look for it to escape very, very soon!

#MudcatLives

The Fun of Writing Fantasy

I have two loves when it comes to fiction: horror and fantasy. Just as I've lost myself in a novel by Stephen King or Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon or Brian Keene, so, too have I gone to other worlds in tales by Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, and George R.R. Martin. By extension, I've tried my hand at writing fantasy, too, to mixed results.

One of the first original novels I did was fantasy. I intended for it to be the first of a series, and while I think there were some good bits, most of it was utter garbage that will hopefully never see the light of day--at least not in the form it is now. A few years ago, I tried again. I got through a few chapters, and then I put it down. It just wasn't time.

Then a friend and I came up with a fantasy world for a Dungeons & Dragons game, and something clicked. I picked that in-progress novel back up, read over it, and realized it wasn't as bad as I thought at the time. So I went back to work on it. And finished it. And then finished the second book in what will probably be a trilogy called The Time of Ashes Cycle.

Here's the problem: I'm a pantser by nature. That means I have a story idea and start writing. I don't plan things out, I don't think very far ahead, I just let the characters and story pull me along. Fantasy, due to the intricacies inherent in the genre, doesn't work well with pantsers. Therefore, I've had to do a hybrid plotter / pantser thing that I am totally not used to.

I Definitely Know How to Run My Mouth

September is creeping into October, Halloween is almost upon us (yay!), and looking back, I've had a productive summer. THE JOURNAL OF JEREMY TODD came out near the end of July, I hit Scares That Care Charity Weekend days later, and I've done three different podcast interviews that came out since then where I've talked about JEREMY TODD, CONSEQUENCES, and dropped some hints about my forthcoming novel from JEA Press, MUDCAT. In case you missed any, here they were:

Arm Cast Podcast Episode 165, Recorded Live at Scares That Care
Armand Rosamilia had a revolving door on his guest seat during this one, so in addition to the segment where I appear with Wile E. Young, you can also hear him chat with author and podcaster Tommy Clark, super fan Tim Feely, podcaster Elizabeth Katheryn Gray, and author and podcaster Frank Edler.

The Horror Show with Brian Keene, Episode 130
Brian was slammed with helping to keep Scares That Care running smoothly, so I got the privelidge of being Mary SanGiovanni's first solo interview that Sunday morning, with Dave Thomas providing occasional comments as well as running the technical end of things.

Unnerving Magazine Interview Series, September 25, 2017
I had a chat with Eddie Generous from Unnerving Magazine about the origins of JEREMY TODD, Stephen King's hit or miss movie adaptations, and other things for his Author Interview series.

In addition to those, I also made a cameo appearance in The Mando Method Episode 47, where I was a member of the live studio audience at Scares That Care, and was occasionally pulled in by Armand and Chuck as they talked about their experiences at the con.

I'll be adding all this to my Publicity page soon, but for now, you can feel free to follow any or all of the links above and see what I had to say. For that matter, check out their other episodes as well, as all of them are entertaining and - in the case of Mando Method - quite informative, especially to anyone who wants to try their hand at this insane profession of writing for a living.

You'll Float, Too: My Review of Stephen King's "IT: Chapter One"

Adapting a novel to another medium is no easy task. Add in a previous adaptation that has achieved a level of cult success, and things get even harder. When the work in question is from Stephen King, a man whose career is littered with a series of hit-or-miss (mostly miss) adaptations to the screen, the task might even start to border on the impossible. Finally, consider that the source material is a whopping 1,000+ pages, and many would prefer to give up before they even begin. The odds are almost guaranteed that you'll produce something closer to Maximum Overdrive than you will to Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile.

Thankfully, IT gets it right.

There's a balance to adapting a novel to a visual medium, be it comics or television or movies. The printed word allows you to get inside your character's heads, to be the character in a way. Since a book can be as long as it needs to be, the story can be a slow-burner to develop the characters and the world and the problems. Movies and television have a set amount of time to tell the story, so often such luxuries fall by the wayside. In Hollywood, it's generally accepted that 1 page of script is the equivalent of 1 minute of screen time. A thousand hours is longer than most television series ever get, much less a movie. So how do you adapt it, and do it right?

By getting to the essence of the story and the characters, and not spending a large amount of time on the fluff.