So Ghostwriter is up and available now in a variety of eyeball-friendly digital formats at Smashwords. The book has also been approved for the site’s Premium Catalog, which means it will be distributed through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and (hopefully) Apple’s new iBooks storefront in a few weeks as well. Then we’ll fire up the publicity machine and set it to HIGH for the next six months or so.

Smashwords basically did all that for me; all I had to do was pay careful attention to the formatting of the original document and provide some good artwork (which came, once again, courtesy of HeathenLife). And I’d just like to thank them and encourage passionate readers and writers alike to check out the site and community. They provide tools and support for DIY authors at a level of quality I really hadn’t found anywhere else online, and they made creating multiple, well-crafted versions of Ghostwriter … not easy, exactly, but a lot easier than it would’ve been had I elected to try to format everything myself. They also made me pay closer attention to my own work as I went through it with a technical eye, so I caught things that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. So, thanks to everybody behind the site, and please give them a look sometime.

Just Googled myself, because I’m a winner, and found a link to a “review” of the Pandora Project Publishers e-book of my short story “The Terrible Twos” on something called Hellhorror.com. No real review, and it looks somehow related to Pandora ’cause all the publisher’s info is pasted in, but somebody somewhere gave the story 3.5 out of 5 stars, so right on, then. It also looks like the sweet hi-res art HeathenLife provided for the book got chomped a bit in the formatting process, and for that I am truly and heartily sorry, ’cause the file he and I passed along was crisp and killer.

Anyway, thanks, whoever or whatever Internet forces flexed to line up some stars in my favor.

I finished Ghostwriter tonight. Doing a long-form story isn’t like doing a short story or a bit or a funny idea. It’s … hard. Exhausting, really, particularly when it’s done in fits and spurts and late nights between paying gigs. I imagine it gets easier; this is only my second completed manuscript of this length. I’m unbelievably stoked, though, and cannot wait to, erm, go through it four or five more times before making it available somewhere. Yay, writing! Also, screw that one teacher who thought I was wasting my potential. I finished two books. My potential is in the process of being realized. Your class was just boring. (Not you, Mr. Hayes–you, you tough-loving bastard, were instrumental in igniting a lifelong passion for the written word, and my gratitude defies transcription. Also, thanks for not ratting me out to that convenience store clerk when you walked in to buy gas and found me trying to buy beer at 17 without a fake ID.)

So I’m reverse-engineering the screenplay I wrote a couple of years ago into a novel. It’s definitely an interesting process; a lot of the stuff that you sometimes put into fiction that you find yourself stripping out on the third or fourth read-through is already gone, or, I guess, was never there in the first place. It’s leaner and meaner than my usual writing style, depending more on the dialogue to get the characters’ personalities and the exposition across. I’m really digging it as of right now, between one-third and halfway done with the process, I think it has a more modern, even noir-ish vibe, at least for me.

Anyway, check out a chapter here, if you’d like.

The Birthright was the first novel I actually finished. I pitched an idea about a family of occultists to a now-defunct serial-subscription website called keepitcoming.net five or six years ago; I actually didn’t have anything written, but I figured that if my story was accepted, the site’s weekly deadlines would force me to keep moving along.

And they did. I finished the story, which attracted a few dozen readers and eventually earned me something like a hundred bucks in royalties, and then went about revising the serial chapters into a novel. It wasn’t a great book, but it was my first completed novel-length manuscript, and I loved it, warts and all. There were actually some ideas and scenes in it that I thought were really cool (like when the bad guys peeled their victims, or when one character communicated to another through the vibrations of a certain sex toy).

My pitches didn’t really go anywhere, and I was kind of glad to move on to other, better – or at least more well-organized or thought-out – projects, but I kept tossing The Birthright at first-novel competitions and publishing cattle calls in the meantime while I worked on new stuff.

Last night I got a rejection from the last contest in which I entered it. I wasn’t too surprised or anything, but it definitely seemed like a sign that it was time to put it behind me for good, stick it in the trunk and move onward and upward, yadda yadda yadda. I’m a little bummed about it, as are, I suppose, all fiction writers whose first “real book” doesn’t set the world on fire. But just finishing it was a personal triumph, and really, why would I want to go on pitching something I know isn’t my best work now that I’ve got better stuff out, and better stuff on the way? I can always dig it out from time to time to enjoy what I got right and laugh at what I got wrong.

So, goodbye, The Birthright. Thanks for all the great feelings you inspired during your creation and upon your completion. You were the evidence that proved to me that I could do this.

New awesomeness: Florida-based indie electronic publisher Pandora Project has just issued a standalone e-book version of short story “The Terrible Twos.” It’s sort of an experiment, we’re going to find out together whether folks will pay around a buck for a single (*cough* great *cough*) short story of a few thousand words, so by all means, please support – and leave a comment or review in the appropriate forum if you’re so moved. This edition, which is available in both Amazon Kindle and MobiPocket cross-platform formats, features wonderfully evocative cover artwork by my good friend and bandmate Joey Neill, a/k/a HeathenLife. An appreciative round of applause, if you please.

“The Terrible Twos” is maybe the least directly horror-themed story of mine yet, it’s about families, and the bonds that are never broken no matter how many choices and/or mistakes have been made, and the simple, unassailable power of love. But, naturally, it’s pretty dark and weird.

You can grab a copy through the links above, or via this site’s BUY portal.

I’m pretty stoked. Thanks, Joey. Thanks, guys.

Just finished it today. Wow. Such a crazy yet coherent mix of noir, psychological thriller, horror, wartime paranoia … before I picked it up, I was really excited about the Scorsese adaptation coming later this year. Now, I’m just not sure it’s even going to be possible to come close to the book’s multilayered quality.