Category Archives: novels

Buy in print, get a free digital copy!

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Amazon has just unveiled Kindle MatchBook. With this program, if you buy a print book from Amazon and a digital version is also available, you get the digital version at a discounted price!

I’ve gone ahead and enrolled all my ebooks into this program. That means Chasing the Dragon, Love & Bullets, Outlaw Blues, The Myth Hunter and Dragon Kings of the Orient are all now part of Kindle Matchbook. The normal price for these ebooks is $2.99.

But, if you’ve bought any of these books in print form from Amazon, then you get the digital versions for the low, low price of free! I don’t believe in charging people twice for the same item just in a different format with no additional content, so if you already own these books in print format, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t also be able to own the digital versions!

And if you haven’t bought these books in either print or digital, then run on over to Amazon and pick them up today!

REMEMBER: This is only for books I wrote on my own which are also available in digital format. So Tales of the Rook isn’t eligible because that’s under the control of Pro Se Press and Fallen isn’t eligible because it’s not available in digital format.

The Cestus Concern (Weir Codex Book 1)

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cestusconcernLooking at Mat Nastos’ biography is enough to give you feelings of inadequacy. If you want to talk about making the most of your creative career, he’s definitely one guy who has done that, as an artist for comics/film/TV, director, writer, and now, he can add novelist to that long list of accomplishments. He’s a self-proclaimed Super Genius, and after reading some of his excellent articles on marketing over at his website, I can say that’s a title he’s definitely earned.

The Cestus Concern is Nastos’ first novel, as well as the first book in the Weir Codex series (Book 2 is due out this year). The story centers on Malcolm Weir, a soldier who awakens in an operating room to find cybernetic arms have been grafted to his body and a computer installed in his mind. Fighting his way out, Weir discovers that he has no memory of the past eleven months and seeks to discover what what done to him. With the help of his old college buddy (and conspiracy theorist) David “Zuz” Zuzelo, Weir tries to discover what transpired in the lost year of his life, all while fighting off super-powered mercenaries and assassins dispatched by the government’s mysterious Project: Hardwired, which is also responsible for Weir’s present condition.

The Cestus Concern is some of the best New Pulp out there. Like any good action movie, it’s a roller-coaster ride that grabs hold of you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the last.

I know from my own personal experience that one of the most difficult things to write in a novel is an action scene, because the reader has only your words to visualize it, and sometimes what you see in your head can be difficult to put into words. Nastos has experience with crafting scenes through his work as an artist and director, but being able to translate that into prose is very different. Fortunately, Nastos is able to transition seamlessly into this new medium he finds himself working in, and his action scenes are so vibrant and perfectly and succinctly described that he gives you just enough to let you know what’s happening, but avoids dragging down the narrative with too much description. These scenes move with such speed, that you feel as if you are watching an action movie play out in your head.

Of course, action can only get you so far. You can craft the best action scenes in human history, but it won’t mean a thing unless you’ve got characters for the reader to care about. Fortunately, we’ve got that. Malcolm Weir is a battle-hardened soldier, but when the bullets aren’t flying, he’s a relatable, down-to-earth and funny guy, the kind of guy you could see yourself tossing back a few beers with as you watch a movie or play a video game. We care about Mal as he goes through his predicament, and we feel for him as things go from bad to worse. Also added into the mix is Zuz, who serves a role both as light-hearted comedy relief, but also provides some much-needed narrative explanation. Although there are times when his conspiracy theorist lifestyle borders on providing a bit too much convenience for the story, for the most part he’s an entertaining supporting character that gives our hero someone to play off, rather than being an irritating nuisance like his type of character usually becomes in some of the poorer action fare out there.

Nastos makes no secret of his influences on this book—in fact, he states them in the book’s description: “Fans of films like Bourne Identity or Smoking Aces, or the comics of Deadpool and Wolverine, will love the over-the-top science fiction action of The Cestus Concern.” There are elements of all those in here, and more—it’s an unapologetic hodgepodge of everything you love about over-the-top action movies and comics, and it’s a whole lot of fun to get lost in.

You can pick up The Cestus Concern from Amazon in either print or digital formats. Check out Mat Nastos’ website for more information on not only this book, but his other work.

Two Magic Words: The End

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Man, those are two words every writer loves to type at the end of a project. Especially one that’s been with me for as long as SoulQuest has.

It’s funny, actually. Two years ago was the last time I finished writing a book, and that was Dragon Kings of the Orient. I haven’t been writing non-stop ever since, in fact when Dragon Kings of the Orient was released last year, some may recall that I said it might actually be my last book as I was struggling with writing.

I finally decided to get back onto the horse in October and I used NaNoWriMo to help me get started. The project I began work on was titled The Legacy of Frankenstein and it started off good, but quickly hit a brick wall around 16,000 words. At that point, I decided to take another look at SoulQuest, which I had about 10,000 words written for already.

SoulQuest, some readers may remember, began life as a comic book project. The initial artist I tailored the project for stopped responding to e-mails, but I later found a new artist named Frank Jensen. Frank was initially very excited about the project and did a lot of character designs and gave some plot input as well. Then history repeated itself and he also stopped responding to e-mails.

For about two years I didn’t give SoulQuest any more thought, until a friend of mine began a website for original, serialized fiction. I dusted off SoulQuest and decided to do it as a monthly serial novel. The plan was to release a chapter a month online for free and once the entire thing was finished, to take it down and release it as a full novel.

The site, however, fell through before the second chapter was released. And while I attempted to make some more progress on it, it mostly stalled. But when I hit the wall with The Legacy of Frankenstein, I took another look at SoulQuest and felt the desire to jump back into it. That was around mid-November/December and now I’ve finally completed it.

The project’s goals have shifted a lot. Originally I aimed for 50,000 words. Then that became 60,000. Then 65,000, then 70,000 and 75,000. And the book topped out, as you can see from the little guy in the Writertopia image, at 78,440 (by the way, the beer he’s holding is prophetic, that’s definitely what I’ll be doing tonight!).

And it’s not even close to finished. As any writer will tell you, completing the first draft is just the beginning. Next comes the revision process. Normally I’m pretty good about self-editing as I go along, but this time I just went full-speed to complete this draft. And now that it’s done, I know that I’ve got a lot of revisions to do before I send it off to my editor. For instance, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I made the decision halfway into the book that one of the characters was superfluous so I decided to cut him. I have to remove all references to him in the beginning. I also have to change around a few other things.

But first, I need to put it aside for a bit. Editing and revising can be a tough process, and you want to let some time set before jumping right into it so the book isn’t so fresh in your mind. Besides, I’ve got ideas brewing for my next project that I really want to start developing into a full-fledged outline.

Pulp Ark Ballot now available!

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pulp ark logoThe nominations for the Pulp Ark Awards of 2013 have now come to a close. If you sent in your nominations by the deadline, you should have received an e-mail from Tommy Hancock with the final ballot. Make sure you send in your votes! Please note that only those who participated in the nominations are eligible to participate in the final voting. So if you didn’t send in any nominations, you won’t be able to vote. Keep that in mind when the Pulp Ark Award nominations for 2014 roll around in December.

A big congratulations go out to everyone who was nominated. I did quite well this year, and I’ve highlighted my own nominations below. Make sure to take part in the final voting and to mark me down in the following categories! While I’ve been nominated every year for a Pulp Ark Award, I’ve yet to win one, so I hope this year I can buck that trend! But to do that, I’ll need your help!

BEST NOVELLA

Outlaw Blues by Percival Constantine (PulpWork Press)
Dragon Kings of the Orient by Percival Constantine (PulpWork Press)

BEST COLLECTION/ANTHOLOGY

Tales of the Rook by Various (Pro Se Productions)

BEST SHORT STORY

“The Curse of Baron Samedi” by Percival Constantine from Tales of the Rook (Pro Se Productions)

BEST COVER ART

Dragon Kings of the Orient by Percival Constantine (PulpWork Press)

BEST NEW CHARACTER

Carl Flint in Outlaw Blues by Percival Constantine (PulpWork Press)
Sun Wukong in Dragon Kings of the Orient by Percival Constantine (PulpWork Press)

BEST WRITER

Percival Constantine
All in all, I received a grand total of eight nominations this year, including two nominations for Best Novella and two for Best New Character! Pretty exciting all around! And also some stiff competition for the awards this year!

I also wanted to give a nod to everyone else who worked on Tales of the Rook, as well as those who worked on Monster Aces (an anthology which I edited). Plus a special mention to my buddy Curtis Fernlund, who was nominated for Best New Writer! Well-deserved!

The Muddling Middle

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Yesterday, I passed the 25K mark on SoulQuest, so I’ve hit the middle of my 50K goal. Crossing the 50% mark on a project is both exciting and scary and it’s when I enter what I like to call the Muddling Middle.

On every project, when I hit the 50% mark, there are two thoughts that occur to me. The first is, “wow, I’ve made it to the halfway point! This is great, I’m going to finish this thing!” And then the second thought is one of panic: “Wait…I’m only halfway through? All the work I’ve done so far and I basically have to do it all again?”

It’s more of a state of mind than anything else. The majority of my books are novellas of only around 30K, so I’d be close to the end if I were writing those. I entered the Muddling Middle on every one of those books when I reached 15K. When that didn’t happen with SoulQuest, I thought I was in the clear and on a great track…until I hit the Muddling Middle at 25K.

So like I said, it’s a state of mind. It’s even happened on short stories of only a few thousand words. It’s this whole idea of being so close to the finish, yet so far at the same time and also a sense of, “you’ve invested this much into it now, so there’s no turning back.”

And the Muddling Middle can really be the point where a project will either see fruition…or stop dead in its tracks. There have been a number of projects of mine that just stopped dead at the Muddling Middle because I didn’t know where to go. A big part of this had to do with the fact that in the past, I didn’t plan out as much. These days, I do much more planning and I’ve got everything mapped out with SoulQuest—I know where I want to go and what I want to do. I know one theory could be, “well obviously, it’s time to change the plan if you don’t like it,” except I do like the plan and I think it makes for a great story the way everything is connecting together.

So it’s more of a state of mind than anything else. Given how long I’ve lived with SoulQuest and how much effort I’ve put into it this far, I don’t think the Muddling Middle will be strong enough to cause me to drop it. Nonetheless, it’s a difficult stage to hit, and something I’m sure many writers struggle with.

Back to the well

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The life cycles of my projects can be really funny sometimes, and also a bit bizarre. For example, the project that would eventually become Love & Bullets, my third novel, was actually begun before I even sat down to write my first novel, Fallen. And The Myth Hunter may actually predate both of them, it’s all kind of fuzzy. But one project, SoulQuest, might predate all those books. This project originally came about when I was soliciting artists for a comic book project. I had it narrowed down to two artists, and both of them produced awesome samples of the title character. I had to choose one over the other (who unfortunately had to quit due to a higher-profile gig), but I liked the second artist’s style a lot and wanted to do a project tailored specifically to his strengths. So I came up with SoulQuest, a concept inspired heavily by some of the RPGs I’d played when I was younger (particularly Final Fantasy VII).

The artist liked the initial script and the character concepts I came up with. He drew two initial sketches and then just disappeared. Never heard from him again, never got any e-mail responses from him, nothing. Time went on and I stumbled on the project notes about a year or two later and started soliciting for an artist again. I had a really talented guy approach me about it, but his style wasn’t really what I was looking for. As this was inspired by Final Fantasy VII, I wanted more of a manga-esque style and he definitely wasn’t that. But he asked for a shot so I said sure, sent him the notes and he came up with some absolutely amazing concept art and character designs. They were spot-on perfect. I thought I’d had finally found my guy, as he seemed just as psyched about the project as me. He came up with designs for pretty much every significant character in the series, produced about three pages for what would have been the first issue…and then vanished. I tried e-mailing him numerous times over the past five years, each time getting no response. Even when I’d decide to transform this into a novel, I asked if he’d be interested in doing the cover art on commission, but still no response.

Brief note to any artists out there: If you aren’t able to complete a project, at the very least please have the courtesy to let your partner know. Yes, sometimes things happen and you can’t respond right away. And yes, sometimes you’ll get a gig that comes along that offers higher pay or more exposure and that’s fine. But at the very least, you should let them know what’s happened and why you can’t complete the project. It’s just common courtesy, don’t leave them waiting. I’ve more or less given up on trying to put together a comic, because this has happened to me on more than a few occasions.

Anyway, back on track. A few years ago, a friend began a website for original fiction, presented in a serialized format. This caught my interest and I wanted to get a chance to put SoulQuest out there. But the site fell through as the creator became too busy to maintain it, so he told us that he’d have to bring it to an end. The image you see at the top of this page was something he threw together as a promotional image for the series, combining a bunch of images he found online that were appropriate for the series.

Once the site fell through, I put the project on the back-burner, revisiting it occasionally. Now, I’ve gone back to it once more. I looked at what I’d written before and stripped out a bunch of sections that just didn’t work, the result was that the 10,000 words I had written were reduced to about 7,000. I also broke down the story, figured out the basic outline for it and went from there. As you can see in the sidebar on my main page, I’ve managed to make up a bit of the deficit I got from that big edit and have now broken 11,000 words.

Hopefully it continues.

NaNoWriMo Progress Report

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If you’ve been keeping up with my Twitter updates, or if you just look at the sidebar with the NaNoWriMo calendar (if you can’t see said calendar, click on the banner at the top of this page and it’ll take you back to the main page), you already know that my progress this year on the annual National Novel Writing Month has fallen well short of my expectations. This has happened with numerous other NaNoWriMo attempts in the past. On most occasions, it’s been a case of the story simply running out of steam or the idea lacking the kind of strong foundation needed to build a story on. But this was just a matter of bad timing.

Right before the onset of November, I was asked to edit a novel. I don’t believe I’m at liberty to say much more than that at this point. But the who and why isn’t important, just that I had a task I agreed to. I actually have until January to complete the editing job, but because it was there and needed to get done, whenever I found myself struggling with my own writing, I would just turn to the editing project. This was partly procrastination, but also a helpful tool. If you’re struggling with feelings of inadequacy over your own writing, I’d suggest editing or proofreading someone else’s work. You may find yourself thinking as you go, “hey, wait a minute…I can do this stuff, too!” I found that happen to me as I was editing Pro Se’s Monster Aces anthology. And it did help recently, because as I was editing this current project, gears started turning in my head in regards to my own writing.

Another thing that came up was a potential regular writing assignment for a bit more wider exposure than I’m typically used to. Again, it’s too early to say anything about it now, but I also started work on writing some stuff for that. I also had some non-writing professional obligations, with a two-day teaching conference that involved being away from my computer and even notebook for pretty much the entirety of those two days.

But the important thing about NaNoWriMo isn’t necessarily finishing on time. The important thing is to get writing again. It’s been close to a year since I completed a writing assignment (that would be my Ian Morris story for this past summer’s Tales of the Rook anthology). So getting sixteen thousand words finished in what, according to the calendar, has only been about a week of actual writing is not too bad in itself. I had started off strong, meeting my daily goal of two thousand words, but as the month and story went on, other things started popping up and I hit roadblocks.

I don’t think I’m going to call it quits on this story just yet. It has some real promise and some things that need to be worked around, but I believe I can finish it. I may need to switch gears and look back at another project that’s been stalled for a while. This novel I’ve been editing has elements of fantasy to it, as does another project of mine that’s been sidelined for a long time, and that gave me some ideas.

We’ll see how it all progresses. As we say in Japan, ganbare!

NaNoWriMo

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I mentioned in a previous post that I’d been thinking lately about one of my favorite books, Frankenstein, and how that got me thinking about the monster. He’s always been one of my favorite characters in literature, and although I’ve enjoyed Karloff’s interpretation as slow and monosyllabic at best, I prefer the version Mary Shelley conceived, who was intelligent and well-spoken.

This, combined with the onset of National Novel Writing Month coalesced into a perfect storm, and so I’ve decided to participate once more. So this month, I will be working on…

Although this is a Frankenstein story, it’s not a horror book, not even really a sci-fi book. All I will really say about it is that it will be a pulp book. Should the book be completed, it will likely be published via PulpWork Press.

You can keep up with my progress on Twitter and Facebook, or on the sidebar of this site, with a word count widget checking my daily progress throughout the month. To meet the deadline, I need to write around 1667 words per day. My daily goal is 2000 to give myself a bit of a buffer. Today, the first day, I managed 2447 words. So already off to a good start.

Let’s hope it manages to stick.

 

Monsters everywhere!

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I’ve got two pieces of news for you today. The first is that Pro Se Productions has just released a new book in time for Halloween, called Monster Aces! Here is the description from Pro Se:

Having selflessly abandoned their identities, their pasts and their futures, the Monster Aces are all that stand between humanity and the fell creatures that lurk in the shadows. Four men and one woman use their amazing abilities as a team to scour the globe for monsters and bring an end to their unholy existence – whatever the danger, whatever the cost.

The book includes two stories by Jim Beard, creator of the Monster Aces. Also included are stories by Barry Reese, Van Allen Plexico, and Ron Fortier! So altogether, you’ve got some great stories by some of the best New Pulp has to offer!

And this collection was edited by yours truly, so check it out! Well worth the price of admission!

The other piece of news I have is Mark Bousquet, writer of Gunfighter Gothic and Dreamer’s Syndrome, recently reviewed Dragon Kings of the Orient! Here’s a bit of what he had to say about it:

Percival Constantine sets his own course in DRAGON KINGS and Elisa is her own woman. Where this novel shines are the moments when Elisa finds herself, in the same instance, fighting both moral and physical quandaries. Her willingness to work with previous combatants when the situation calls for it, even if she doesn’t want to do it, makes her seem like a very real, very practical character. Which is important when you’ve got fox spirits and Dragon Kings running around with magical swords.

Head on over to Atomic Anxiety to check out the rest of Mark’s review! While you’re there, check out some of his work. And if you haven’t read Dragon Kings of the Orient yet, what are you waiting for? Jump over to the Novels section to see how to get yourself a copy!

National Novel Writing Month

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It’s the end of October and that means we’re on the verge of yet another National Novel Writing Month.

What’s that, you say? What the hell is this all about?

National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) occurs every year in November. The idea is to produce a novel of 50,000 words between the dates of November 1st and November 30th. The rules are that all the actual writing occurs just during those thirty days. You can plot, outline, etc. in advance, but you have to wait until midnight on November 1st before you enter one word into your manuscript. Of course, there’s no enforcement of this, it’s all on the honor system. And there’s no prize, except for the satisfaction of having finished a novel.

So why do it?

If you’re an aspiring writer (or a writer in a dry spell) struggling to get something on the page, an event like this can give you that kick in the pants you need. I’ve participated in it a number of times, but only actually finished once. That was my first novel, Fallen. I’ve attempted other novels since during NaNoWriMo, but they fizzled out. The other books I’ve written were not written as part of NaNoWriMo (I actually finished The Myth Hunter on the eve of NaNoWriMo 2009).

The website has forums to get encouragement from other participants and advice on all manner of things related to writing. There’s also fun things like word counters to chart your progress. You may have seen your writer friends posting progress updates on Twitter, Facebook, or blogs. I’m toying with the idea of jumping into it again, the question is which of the ideas I’ve got notes on will I focus on.

One of my favorite things about the forums are the write-in events. There are regions all over the world for NaNoWriMo and many of these regions will schedule write-ins where people meet up somewhere with their laptops, tablets, notebooks, whatever to just write. It can be a fun way to do some work, participating in an environment like that and feeding off each other’s energy.

I say it’s worth the effort if you want to write a book or even a book of short stories for that matter. If you don’t complete it, there’s no punishment and you can always continue working on the book past November. And if you complete it, you get to pat yourself on the back for a job well done and breathe a sigh of relief.

…until the editing begins, of course.