I have some good news for you audiophiles out there! (Or at least the kind of audiophiles who are into audiobooks.) I finally got tired of being asked "Are your books available in audio?" and decided to do something about it. For a long time, I've had to lower my head and admit, "Um, only Fat Vampire is available in audio. Sorry." Now, though, I've done two audiobook-related things that I think you'll like: FIRST, I've put all of the great audiobooks I've had from the past up on my direct...
5 days ago • 3 min read
Last month, I sent you something called "Why most of my books have two authors." It was all about my creative relationship with my constant co-author, Sean Platt. I got a lot of responses to that one. (Something I encourage, by the way. I don't get a lot of replies to these, so sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading.) I must never have explained the way Sean and I co-author to a lot of you ... or maybe I just didn't go into as much detail. Readers seemed to think it was interesting, hearing...
12 days ago • 9 min read
Hey and happy Saturday! I just wanted to remind you that my signed books sale ends tomorrow. Click here to check it out. I've never offered signed books online before, but over the past week, a lot of you have been ordering signed copies of your favorites: everything from Fat Vampire to The Beam, from the "Dark Tower on LSD" epic of Unicorn Western to the first book I ever wrote, The Bialy Pimps. But at some point, I need to close the sale, order the books, sign them, and ship them back out....
19 days ago • 2 min read
I sometimes forget there are two names on most of the books I sell. In fact, it's so normal for me to see "Sean Platt" beside my name that I never realize the idea of a two-author book is unusual for readers. I wasn't always so accepting of co-authorship. I'm a huge Stephen King fan, but until I became a writer myself, I regarded The Talisman with suspicion because "Peter Straub" was on its cover with him. What was I to make of that? How could two authors write a book? I thought book-writing...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
I'm totally distracted right now, so it would make sense if trying to write my current project, called The Ephemera, was harder than normal. (You know: distracted because I've got that Kickstarter campaign going right now, for special signed editions of Plague of Demons and my complete Gore Point trilogy. Running a Kickstarter turns all of life into an ADHD fugue.) But as I think I've mentioned before, I underwent a weird sort of "writer's reboot" last year. As a result, I've been consciously...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
** Quick PSA: My next Kickstarter launches on Tuesday! ** Yeah, yeah, I know. Some of you have been with me for a decade or more. I published Fat Vampire in 2012, for crap's sake. So you're probably thinking, "Dude. What do you mean with a subject line like, 'I finally feel like a real author'? You've been an author for a long time." True. But for all that time, I've dealt mainly with ebooks. And don't get me wrong; ebooks are great. They're great for a lot of readers. They're also great for...
2 months ago • 3 min read
It's funny. Sometimes people tell me about something they liked in one of my books, but I won't remember it. I can usually be goaded into some degree of recall, but not always. And then people will say, "How can you not remember your own books?" Okay. So, first of all, I totally understand why people wonder. I understand why people don't understand it at all. There are two answers to this particular weird question, and they are: I write a lot of books, and the cognitive load of keeping them...
2 months ago • 4 min read
I've got another new book out today ... this one HOT after the COLD of Winter Break. Today's new release is City of Fire -- sequel to my "horror procedural" Gore Point. (Which, in case you missed it, I've pitched as "Backdraft with demons.") A lot of my most ardent readers already have this book, having snapped it up during its Kickstarter campaign last fall. But if you weren't one of those readers -- if you're more of an "I just want the book" kind of reader -- now's your chance to get it at...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hey there, and Happy New Year! I always like the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's a pleasant "dead zone": halfway on vacation (my kids are home, and that means slacking off to do stuff with them) and halfway working (because I love what I do and don't like to be away from it for long). Writing-wise, I've been playing with a brand new book over the past half-and-half week. Or, rather: an existing new book. If you're a die-hard, you might remember that earlier this year, I tried to...
3 months ago • 3 min read
That's the last line of the first chapter of my new claustrophobic thriller Winter Break: "And the floorboards are covered in blood." I've dropped the complete first chapter below for you: a sample of the ill tidings to come in my heroine's snowbound week from Hell. Enjoy. /// THURSDAY AFTERNOON My phone dings with a new text just as I hit my first patch of black ice. The sound is like a warning: a scream announcing danger. The little car’s wheels spin for half a second — not even long enough...
3 months ago • 17 min read