5. A can of beans, by itself. (Apparently this is “not a meal.”)

4. Anything sold in a cylindrical plastic wrapping from the bodega on the other side of 5th Avenue North. (We call the bodega on the other side of 5th Avenue North “CreepyMart.”)

3. Anything pickled that isn’t a pickle or a green bean.

2. Anything between 4:30 p.m. and dinnertime. (“[irritated sigh].”)

1. Vienna sausages.

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.

Thanks so much to Andrew Norcross for the redesign. The original Ravis site was one of his first, and both he and WordPress have grown immeasurably since then.

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.

The best things about being an indie fiction writer are getting to collaborate with your friends on stuff like artwork and design, and not having to worry about arbitrary deadlines or the opinions of those who really don’t have a perfect grasp on exactly what it is you’re trying to do.

The worst thing about being an indie fiction writer is simply this: It’s not your job. It’s not your friends’ job. You’re all trying to earn a paycheck, and find the time to do the thing you really want to do for a paycheck in between paying gigs, along with the other folks cool enough to support your creativity when their own time permits. It’s why low-budget movies used to take several years to get made, back when the economic universe allowed for such things as low-budget movies. (And when the space-time continuum allowed for such things as taking several years to make a movie.) It’s alternately frustrating and satisfying, and by the time a couple of the pieces fall into place, you want to revise this or take another look at that or a certain song isn’t relevant anymore or somebody’s died, so let’s take a look at the whole thing again while we let a few of the currently in-place elements slip out of place as our attention is focused elsewhere.

The best thing is the freedom. The worst thing is whatever it is that’s the evil, ironic Twilight Zone analogue of freedom, that thing that perverts time until a project turns to taffy and you can see it stretching out endlessly before you as you put one piece into place and watch two others drift further away.

I’m beginning to understand why big publishing houses take a year and a half to put a book out. But isn’t that why we’re DIY? To cut those corners, that bullshit? Well, we totally could … if we weren’t working other jobs that paid.

Ghostwriter is coming right soon in digital form, along with killer art and a cool new web design courtesy of friends without whom I couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, tilt at this particular windmill.

No matter how much you want to call your new story a short novel, do not do so when discussing it with agents. It’s a novella. No-vel-la.

Novella.

(Just between you and me though, brain, we both know it’s, well, a story. Stupid protocols.)

My friends and I go round and round fairly frequently on the subject of horror film remakes; I suspect that most of you that traffic this site find yourselves in the same sort of conversations often as well.

I have friends that dismiss ‘em outright. I have friends that look forward to dissecting each and every one, and are generally satisfied by what they see. I even have friends that are genuinely able to put aside their love/reverence for the original flicks, and digest remakes on their own merits.

Me, I can’t do that, but I still remain somewhere in the middle. I don’t hate the very idea of classic horror movies being remade; it makes me somewhat uncomfortable on a personal level, just because the originals were such a big part of my inspiration and development as a writer, but I have to agree with the fact/rationalization that human beings are always tweaking/embellishing/re-imagining stories, from Grimm’s right up to the story your buddy told you about the interesting thing that happened at the bar last week. Stories belong to the ages–once you tell it, you release it into the wild. It’s all just a big game of telephone, just one that involves optioning rights.

But yeah, I approach each remake differently, but with the same sense of vague trepidation. My buddy Jack cannot stomach the very idea of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre being defiled via remake; I thought the remake was excellent, gritty and taut. At the same time, however, I tend to think most remakes are terrible, not only because I can’t divorce myself from my fondly remembered reactions to the original material but also because, hey, most horror movies are terrible in any case. I never saw George Romero’s The Crazies, and I really want to see the new one. I don’t want to see the new A Nightmare On Elm Street, because for some weird reason the original really did scare the bejesus out of me (and I still don’t know why–subsequent adult viewings have revealed even the first in the series to be, at least in my opinion, pretty shitty), but I know it’ll show up at my house in a red envelope at some point in the not-too-distant future.

I think all this debate over the validity of remakes serves to gloss over a much more important subject: the lack of new big-budget horror stories for the screen. I doubt we’d all be arguing over remakes quite so much if they were just a part of the offerings, rather than the majority. Yes, there are a ton of indie/underground/straight-to-DVD horror releases every year, but it’s a lot easier to talk about a movie everybody’s heard of than to explain plot points and exposition before even getting into whether or not the film is any good. Also, a lot of them suck; some truly great ideas, probably some great scripts, but too many people think “lo-fi” and “underground” and “improvised dialogue” and “we made it for two hundred bucks” automatically equate to indie genius, and they don’t. Bad cinematography, bad actors, bad effects–any number of things can and do turn awesome concepts into really crappy movies.

For what it’s worth, I think that we as horror-movie fans need to try as best we can to put aside our proprietary feelings about the films that are being remade, and try to view the remakes as something new, to be judged on their own individual merits. At the same time, however, every time a new remake is announced, we need to find a way to let the studios that (sorry) still run the movie industry know that we’re still looking for and will financially reward something new and daring, that when we say we’re always looking for another Descent, another High Tension, another Splinter, we don’t mean that shit literally.

(Oh, and none of this refers to American remakes of foreign horror films. American remakes of foreign horror films are almost always a horrible idea, and should be embargoed pretty much across the board. We got lucky with The Ring and The Strangers–exceptions which prove the rule–and we should’ve quit while we were ahead.)

Who is reading this stuff? Are you guys really doing that? I can imagine a few folks picking one up off the clearance table at Urban Outfitters a year and a half after the book comes out, or some older parents picking it up for their kids in Brooklyn who “love this sort of thing, but I don’t get it.” But is there really a solid market for taking obscure, funny, ironic themed blogs and making books out of them?

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.)

I know a lot of these aren’t exactly hot off the presses, but so what? Good books are like good albums. Have you heard every Stones record? Yeah, I thought not.

1. Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis. Can’t remember if I actually read this last year or the year before, but it really doesn’t matter; Ellis’ utterly original blend of classic noir tropes, black humor and imaginative details was the most entertaining and satisfying thing I’d picked up in at least a couple of years.

2. Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane. I got around to reading most of Lehane’s body of work this year, and it’s all amazing, but this one’s my favorite. The writer steps away from Patrick Kenzie’s violent cases and troubled psyche for a mind-bending thriller that borders on horror and provides a genuinely surprising twist.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon. Can’t decide between this or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union for my favorite Chabon, but they’re both so good it’s sick. Chabon conducts the English language like a maestro.

4. Please Step Back, Ben Greenman. The best rock ‘n’ roll novel ever written? Probably.

5. The Lost City of Z, David Grann. A wonderful and highly informative look back at the early years of Amazonian exploration centered on legendary adventurer Percy Fawcett’s search for what might or not have been El Dorado.

6. Sacred, Dennis Lehane.

7. Prayers for Rain, Dennis Lehane.

8. A Drink Before The War, Dennis Lehane.

9. Darkness, Take My Hand, Dennis Lehane.

10. Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton. Definitely not my favorite Crichton, and I don’t think it was finished, but it did provide an entertaining adventure yarn.

I also got turned on to a great writer named Kelly Link via her blazingly original short stories “Catskin” and “Monster,” and was pleased enough by the intriguing ideas behind Virginia Baker’s Jack Knife to want to check out some more of her work.