News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #155…
A thank you… to the Montclair Women’s Club for inviting me to talk about writing, publishing, and my novel Rembrandt’s Angel. A good time was had by all. Montclair’s Channel 34 videotaped the talk; here’s the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dLNmI9KdD88 Thanks to TV34 too.
Carrick Publishing. Donna Carrick, who runs this Canadian company, interviewed me in her podcast series. Her series of podcasts is called Dead to Writes; you can find them on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dead-to-writes/id1323768397?mt=2 (choose S1, E3). She begins by reading one of my short stories, “The Case of the Carriageless Horse,” the tale of Detective Castilblanco’s first homicide case (the story is found in the anthology World Enough and Crime).
Carrick will be publishing the second edition of The Secret Lab and the new book The Secret of the Urns in the first and third quarters of 2018, respectively; these are both young adult novels. The reclusive Donegal writer A. B. Carolan will be my collaborator on these two young adult sci-fi mysteries. He completely rewrote and reedited the first book and wrote the second, which is based on one of my short stories, “Marcello and Me,” found in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, a collection of speculative fiction.
Black Opal Books… will be publishing my new post-apocalyptic thriller, The Last Humans. Readers should check them out. They’re an indie publisher (AKA small press) with an extensive catalog of exciting books and authors. I’m honored to join them and their group of talented authors and look forward to working with their staff. In future newsletters, I’ll keep you posted about the estimated date of publication of this new book.
Here’s the blurb for the book: Foes of the U.S. have attacked the west coast of the U.S. with a bioengineered contagion that spreads around the world. The apocalypse kills billions—numbers so large that most survivors’ minds snap shut. One of only a few survivors, Penny Castro, ex-USN diver and L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy, reacts differently. On a forensic dive, she is interrupted. When she surfaces, she finds all her colleagues dead, so she has to battle starvation, thirst, and gangs of feral humans until she ends up in a USAF refugee camp. Penny’s adventures will entertain and shock you into asking, “Could this really happen?”
You can find a pre-release excerpt here: https://stevenmmoore.com/pre-release-excerpt-from-oasis-redux/ (Note that Oasis Redux was just the working title while I wrote the novel.)
And check out my guest post “Novels of Doom” on David W. Spell’s website http://TheScaryReviews.com. This explains some of my reasons for writing this new book. (David’s website offers a lot of good information about scary fiction, and The Last Humans is very scary…and current too, I might add.)
Walmart… has added another feature to their continuing campaign to compete with Amazon: They’ve signed a deal with Kobo to sell ebooks. I sent an email query to Smashwords because Kobo is an affiliate retailer of theirs, but the response was a bit nebulous: the person answering didn’t know how it would affect Smashwords authors.
For those not familiar with Smashwords, this ebook retailer offers all ebook formats (including .mobi for Kindle) and also distributes to its affiliated retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, and so forth) and lenders (Overdrive, and so forth). For both readers and writers, it’s an alternative to Amazon, the giant retailer, who distributes to no one and only lends through Prime. Authors should NEVER be exclusive to Amazon!
It’s good to have alternatives. Readers should frequent their local bookstores for print versions. If they don’t have an author’s book, and you know it has a print version, ask them to order it. They might do 5 or 10 in the same order, and that will help both readers and writers.
Projects in the works. I’d like to list coming attractions AKA book projects in the works. There’s no guarantee I’ll finish or publish any particular one, of course, but they are:
Mary Jo Melendez #3. There were some loose ends in #2, so I decided to make the series a trilogy. It will soon be sent to beta-readers. Tentative title: Goin’ the Extra Mile.
Sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel. Penmore Press should be interested; if not, I’ll try some other small press…or Carrick Publishing. It will be a bit different from Rembrandt’s Angel: a lost Botticelli plays a role, but so does some religious artifacts. Tentative title: Son of Thunder.
Chen and Castilblanco #8. Again, this will be a bit different from the other books in my detective series because it will feature Castilblanco’s adopted children. Tentative title: The Phantom Harvester.
The A.B. Carolan books were already mentioned.
I’ll post pre-release excerpts for all these books as they near publication. You already have one for The Last Humans. I think these new novels will be good additions to my oeuvre, allowing me to entertain even more readers, assuming I don’t abandon them. Stay tuned.
Gaia and the Goliaths. On sale now at Smashwords until March 31–50% discount. #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” has the detectives on a homicide case where the victim is an environmental activist. As often happens, the case becomes much more important and takes on international proportions. Available in all ebook formats, including .mobi for Kindle. Use the coupon code shown on the Smashwords’ book page on checkout. Enjoy the read!
Free for the asking. I can’t publish everything I write, even the good stuff (the bad stuff never sees the light of day, of course). On my website you will find a list of PDFs free for the asking. For readers, most of them are short fiction. For authors, there is also a course on writing fiction. Peruse that list and send me an email requesting those that interest you. I’ll reply with the PDFs as attachments. Some of the projects noted above might become free PDFs, for example.
In libris libertas!
