The Malice Engine

Colum McKnight from Paperback Horror recently took the time to review The Pack: Winter Kill, and he had some great things to say about the book.

You have to be dead not to dig this book. That’s right. Dead.

What you see before you is one of the most incredible mixes of crime, action, and the supernatural that you can ever lay claim to reading. To say that this is the best example of how cross genre writing should be done would be an understatement. Between Greg Lamberson and Mike Oliveri – the bar has been set.

Reading that just made my month. You can read the full review here.

I have to admit, I was nervous about this book as we neared the street date. It’s been a few years since my last release, and a few more years since my first novel release. I felt like I’d been out of the game too long, and I worried that it would show in the final product. Fortunately those concerns have been largely unfounded, as the book has been very well received.

Here’s hoping book 2 gets the same kind of attention. You can be sure I’m giving it my all.

Late again? Crap. Anyway. Finally dipping into the Hawai’i pics.

We went down into the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park one day, and I caught this fun piece.

Ya think?

Back in the ’70s (if memory serves), a lava flow came down the mountain and flowed over the road. This sign has been there since.

Now that I’ve spent two nights promoting other guys’ projects, I should probably catch everyone up on my own work.

The Pack is still my main focus this summer, and of course The Pack: Winter Kill is still available in trade paperback and in a Kindle edition. The short comic Big Bad Wolves will be going live I believe next month, and I’ve just finish scripting the second short.

Just as Big Bad Wolves is a prequel of sorts to The Pack: Winter Kill, the second short will be a prequel to the second prose book, giving readers a little more insight into one of the main characters and his behavior. And no, neither the second short nor book 2 have a title yet, just some working titles my editor and I are still kicking around. I usually don’t have a solid title until I’m done.

I’m already starting to talk to a potential artist for the second short as well. It’s a lot easier to find an artist for the short pieces than it is a longer project, especially for the kind of rates a new startup is able to pay, so the first comic book in the series, The Pack: Chimaera, will be delayed a bit longer. We’re taking advantage of the delay to do a bit more tweaking to the script for Chimaera, and I think those efforts will pay off in the long run.

Meanwhile, I’m pushing the deadline for the 2nd book, but I’m still confident I’ll make it. It’s going to take some extra knuckling down over the next several weeks, but I’m up for it.

There are a few more The Pack developments in store, but none that I can share just yet. Stay tuned.

I sold a short story last year that I hope will see print in an anthology soon. It’s not been announced yet, so I’ll keep quiet for now. I’ve got two more shorts sitting in a slush pile, and two more to write, one overdue and the other with a deadline imminent. It’s tough to make those a priority with my contractual obligations to Evileye for The Pack, but I’ve not written them off yet.

I’ll have some news on a webcomic soon. The artist is inking the strips, and we’re going to wait until we have several in the can before we launch. I don’t want to say too much right now because we’ve both fallen behind on it, but it’s kind of a new direction for both of us and the short strip format will be a new way to flex my creative muscles.

All of this has unfortunately back-burnered my novel Powerless. With The Pack taking center stage and so many other things going on, it’s been hard to revisit my older work. What’s written is edited on paper, but I haven’t been able to get the rewrite in gear. I had hoped to get back to it by the end of this year, but I think the next The Pack commitment may supersede it yet again.

I’m actually a little more interested in writing Sick Day, which also got preempted by The Pack, specifically the second draft of Chimaera. Crime thrillers have interested me a little more both in my reading and my writing, and Sick Day is a straight thriller with no horror or supernatural elements. Heck, I’ve even been tempted to go back and revisit An Ounce of Brass, an abortive first attempt at a thriller novel that has some good material at its heart but it needs to shed a ton of unnecessary weight.

I won’t even get started on the notebook. It’s got some good things waiting to come to light, like The Shattered Man, but I need to finish all this other stuff first and make some room. Until the writing can start paying the bills, I have to let the day job consume the bulk of my writing time. I’m a night owl and get most of my writing done then, but having to get up early makes it tough to do that consistently. Some see a romantic flair in the writer who forgoes sleep for the sake of his craft, but the fact is it actually harms the output in the long run.

Not to mention the toll it takes on one’s health. I’ve said many times I’d love to stay up late writing and then sleep well into the morning, but right now I just don’t have that luxury. It’s one of several reasons I look forward to Spring and Winter Breaks at work.

In the end it may look like it’s been a while since my last release, but never fear, the wheels are in motion.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and I hope you’ll keep coming back.

Following is the red band trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s Machete starring Danny Trejo. Um, not work safe.

Rappelling out a window with a dude’s intestines? I’m there!

Yeah, it’s cheesy, but with Rodriguez you can be sure it’s going to be fun.

AMC is producing a TV series based on The Walking Dead, and a teaser was screened in San Diego this weekend. Someone in attendance recorded it and posted it to YouTube:

Man, I’m really looking forward to this series. I get the impression there was only so much footage available for the teaser, which is why we have so much of Rick just walking around in uniform, but if it’s as faithful to the original comics as they claim, this series is going to kick all form of ass.

It will also be nice to see a horror show played straight. Most of them end up over-the-top horrific or they play up the Gothic angle. If this show can blend the dramatic tone of Breaking Bad with some good, old-fashioned zombie horror, it’s going to be huge.

Also, be sure to check out the Walking Dead motion comic, which takes Tony Moore’s original art and turns it into an animated teaser. Cool stuff.

So now that I’ve twittered my trip to the doctor yesterday and generated a flood of “are you okay?” emails, I guess I better get you all caught up on the latest news. Or lack thereof, anyway…

I’ve had this pain in my chest lately. It’s nothing like heart attack symptoms (squeezing, spreading to arm/jaw, shortness of breath, etc.), it’s more like a stitch in the side but occurring behind the ribs just beneath my left pectoral muscle. It occurs for a couple minutes at a time and has appeared off and on all week, so I called my doctor’s office. When I answered yes to the travel question and said I was on an eight-hour flight last month, the computer said maybe it’s a blood clot and to get my ass to an ER.

I didn’t buy it, but when the nurse says go, you pretty much have to go. I went to an urgent care center instead, thinking I’d get through faster than the big ER in Peoria, and the nurse said it’s my call but they’d just send me on to the hospital anyway if it was serious. I opted to stick with short and sweet.

A couple hours of shenanigans ensued, most of which I posted to Twitter. For example, I experienced medical bureaucracy, tried to resist the call of the defibrillator, and then my phone fooled them by imitating their machine that goes “ping.”

Kind of like this, minus the baby. (But wouldn’t that have been a surprise!)

They did an EKG and an x-ray, then the doctor came in and poked and prodded. In the end he just shrugged and shuffled me out the door. They ordered some fancy-sounding tests I’ll need to undergo just to be sure there’s not some other problem with my pump, but the pain wasn’t a heart attack or blood clot.

As expected, I was in and out. The nurses and the doctor were great, but it’s a pity they’re burdened by such a bloated system of bureaucracy. I also can’t wait to get the bills for all this, because my insurance sucks. Between my employer and I, they already get about $15K a year in premiums for my family, and I still have to cough up another couple grand in deductibles before they’ll cover anything.

You would think I’d have a sense of relief now, but not really. I don’t have that feeling of cheating death, nor do I feel like I’ve been given a second chance. Instead I feel like a hypochondriac with a hemorrhage in the wallet. With luck the upcoming tests will also be negative, but for the moment all I’ve done is piss away a Friday night.

The tests next week are a treadmill stress test with nuclear medicine, and what appears to be another cardio exam of some kind, also with nuclear medicine. Looking at the bright side, I guess it will be a day off work during which I get to entertain you all on Twitter again, assuming they don’t take my phone away. The paperwork says the test will take 3-5 hours, so I’m hoping they’ll let me have my notebook or iPad so I can at least get some writing-related work done. I’m way behind on the sequel to The Pack: Winter Kill, and I have to work on a few short stories that should already have been completed, too.

Just pray they don’t take all my toys away. When I get bored and fidgety, I start getting in trouble.

Is it possible to get banned from a hospital?

I’ve noticed the gripes about e-books have largely faded, and today I read Amazon has announced they’re selling more electronic titles than they are hardcovers. I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise given they’re so much cheaper, but I also think the devices have finally gotten to the point they’re both useful and user-friendly.

Given I’ve got a book available for the Kindle, and I’ve watched my wife enjoy hers, I decided to take a crack at the iPad as a digital book reader. I noticed the iBooks store and Amazon are fairly close in price, but I decided to use the iPad Kindle app instead so I’d have the flexibility to read the books on just about any electronic platform.

Next month I'll have all of my purchased Kindle titles on an Android phone, too

I started with the Kindle edition of Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler. The book itself is a great, straight-up crime thriller and a damn fine read. But reading it on the iPad? A pleasure.

I read it on a plane trip to Hawaii, and the iPad battery lasted the entire flight, including through a layover in Los Angeles. I even switched over to Pages for a while to work on some of my own writing with no problems. I liked that I didn’t have to hold it the entire time; I was able to set it down on the seat tray and keep reading. Quick brightness adjustments made reading easy on the eyes when the lighting in the cabin or outside changed, and I had no problems with glare even though I was sitting in a window seat.

In fact, after just a few minutes, I forgot I was reading an electronic edition at all. I just read, swiped, read, swiped, read, swiped, all without thinking about it. I had no troubles with the font, developed no eyestrain with the backlit screen, and never lost my place even when going in and out of the Kindle app. I did use the bookmark, but going back to the same book every time made it unnecessary.

Next I’ll try reading it in bed. My wife reads her Kindle in bed, but she tends to prop herself up against the headboard in a sitting position, while I like to lay flat. I can’t imagine the Kindle will be any worse than doing so with a hardcover, but I’ll find out. I’m already planning on purchasing another Kindle book, probably Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.

I’d also love to start building a reference library on the iPad. Not just dictionaries, encyclopedias, or a thesaurus, but technical manuals, programming guides, and even martial arts books could all be handy. For example, it would be nice to have Kodokan Judo and my karate school’s curriculum videos available on one portable device rather than lugging a laptop and book(s) around. This would even make them readily available in class, not stashed away in a gym bag in the locker room. (Now I just have to wait for some of those books to show up on Kindle…)

While on vacation, I started looking at the folks who accompanied us on the trip. Some of them were avid readers, and they packed along several books. They were very curious about my wife’s Kindle, with the obvious advantage being they can cut down on the weight of their luggage. If they needed to pick up another book while on the trip, they could just download one instead of picking up one at the bookstore.

One of those avid readers has poor eyesight. I showed him the Kindle and iBooks apps, and we learned he could read from the iPad much easier if he switched to white text on a black background and zoomed the text a bit. He didn’t read from it for any length of time, but at least we now know it may be an option.

The next step for me will be carrying it around more often. I still haven’t convinced myself it will replace my trusty Moleskine (I can still write much faster with a pencil than I can on any keyboard, and I type almost 100wpm on a standard keyboard), but for writing outlines or making edits that I’ll need to share with other people or push to another computer, I have no problem using the iPad.

Heck, with Dropbox, I have all of my documents available on all devices just like I do Kindle books. I dropped three or four PDFs into Dropbox before the flight, all of them comics I’m reviewing for other folks or needed to look over for Evileye (including Big Bad Wolves), and the resolution and clarity were great, even on a color book. I pushed an outline I was working on from Dropbox to Pages with no problem, though I do wish I could export from Pages to Dropbox just as easily, instead of having to go through iTunes.

I’m not convinced it will ever replace my laptop for day-to-day work, but for travel and short road trips I could easily get by with it instead. Having just a camera bag and the iPad on a flight made things so much lighter and easier, and I could have had several books available should one have been disappointing or just not what I was in the mood for. I still have a pile of dead tree editions waiting to be read on my nightstand and I won’t be completely replacing my library any time soon, but I do think I’ll be making more digital purchases in the future.

Back to my original point, I don’t think e-books are going away, nor do I think it’s fair to assume they’re just a fad anymore. The major bookstore chains have their own readers and stores now, and every time I run into someone with a Kindle they can’t wait to show it off.

Bibliophiles love their paper books, but it would appear the average reader just doesn’t care. It’s LPs vs cassettes and cassettes vs CDs all over again. Paper books will be to future generations what vinyl is to our generation: novelties and collector’s items.

If you’ve read The Pack: Winter Kill (and you have, right?), you may recall the references to Bigfoot and the mention of the “Kenwood Video” by the hikers in the opening chapters. Big Bad Wolves is a short story in comics form that explains where that video came from and why the Lodge is crowded with Bigfoot enthusiasts. Consider it a prequel to The Pack: Winter Kill.

Following are the first three pages of Big Bad Wolves. The remainder will be posted to Evileye Books’ Evileye Reader when it launches, and will be included with future electronic editions of The Pack books. We hope to bring you more short stories like this in the future, offering character insights and brief glimpses of the history of The Pack.

Pencils and inks on this story were handled by Mike Henderson, who I’m sure you’ll be seeing more of in the future. The dude’s got talent.

Hope you dig the preview! Click each image to get the full size.

Big Bad Wolves: Page One

Big Bad Wolves: Page Two

Big Bad Wolves: Page Three

The family and I went to the Peoria Balloon Festival on Saturday, and despite the heat, we had a great time.

We first visited the balloon festival a few years ago, and it was a great photo opportunity. I hoped to get some similar shots this time around.

Balloon Glow

The festival was held at a different park this year, and the setup was a bit different. The sun set behind us, so I couldn’t reproduce the sun shot I took last time, and the balloons weren’t inflated until much later in the evening which made some of the lighting trickier. On the plus side, though, they dropped the barriers and let us get close to the balloons and talk to the pilots, which let me catch some pictures of the engines they used to heat the air in the balloons.

Flame On!

I thought about switching to my faster prime lens to solve some of the soft focus issues I was having, but then I’d have given up a wider angle. Instead, next time maybe I’ll bring my monopod instead and see if that helps at all. Or maybe just sack up and switch to manual focus.

And with that I think I’m back on schedule for Photo Friday. Sure, I cheated just a bit, but the important part is I’m getting it done, right?

Friday night, I was officially awarded the rank of Ikkyu, or first-degree brown belt, in Shuri-ryu karate at the Academy of Okinawan Karate.

The director of the school, Shihan Joseph Walker, and myself

The black stripe down the center of the belt signifies the next step is Shodan, or black belt. This means I’m done testing for rank for a while, and it’s up to me to keep going to class, refining my technique, and helping other students until the big test comes.

Ten years ago, I never would have imagined I’d come this far. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since I was 19. (Yeah, I still cringe when I see pictures of myself in a gi or running kata, but I’m working on that, too.) I’m very fortunate to have found a school of this caliber so close to home, one that offers equal measures of instruction and inspiration.

Now I’m going to go cut that obnoxious white label off my snazzy new belt.