Back in the old ball game...

Hello.

I wasn't sure what to say in the rebirth of my little blog, John's Dark Scribblings, so I thought I'd just say hello.

After all, what does one start a conversation after a nearly 14-month absence?

So, hello, and welcome back.

I have been away from this little corner of the world for quite some time I suppose, and I should explain.

A lot happened in my life last year. I suppose that's always the case for a lot of people, but in my case there were some big, major life changes.

Tragically, my father passed away in February of 2013. I come from a strong family where we've been taught to just keep moving forward, keep working, never let all the bad stuff drag you too far down. So that's what I did, that's what all my family did in the aftermath of our loss – we just kept moving forward.

Between that loss in the late winter and the fall of 2013, there were more changes for our family, more joyous ones to be sure, but change none-the-less. My second oldest daughter went out into the world, going to the University of Virginia, in late August. A couple of weeks later my oldest daughter married a fine young man we've known for years and moved out of state.

Like I said, some major changes.

In the midst of it all I kind of lost my way in my writing, aided by a confusing, on-again, off-again policy by my employer that prohibited any employees from doing any writing or editing outside the company. Even fiction. Except when it didn't. Like I said, terribly confusing.

I never stopped writing – I still write and edit at work on the job as a newspaper editor (though just between you, me and the virtual fence post, my job has become more about compiling and writing reports, meetings, and paperwork than it has been about actual honest-to-goodness journalism -- you know, writing and editing work that is germane to your community). And I didn't call it quits entirely with the fiction work – I do some, let's say specialized type of writing under a pseudonym (and no, I'm not tell you anything else about it, at least not for now).

But the work that moved me – the horror that I once wrote, the mystery and historical novels I outlined - just kind of drifted away from me. Or maybe I drifted away from them. I arrived at a point where I couldn't just put my head down and keep working. I still had to do my day job, because I have a family that depends on me for income and a staff that depends on my to lead it and a company that's paying me to do that job. Beyond that I just wasn't sure what I wanted in my writing, or my life for that matter. So I stopped blogging about my work, even took this blog down from public view for quite a while.

Now I'm back, and I'll be returning to some of my writing roots over the coming months and years. I won't be terribly prolific – I have a burgeoning pseudonym career to keep going (well, okay, a pseudonym CAREER may be overstating it, but it's something I'll keep up for a while). I also still have the full-time job to keep working at, and I need to spend at least a little time with the family.

But I will be publishing a few horror and mystery tales here over the coming months – short stories, a novella or two, I'll be releasing a novel in August and another one in November. Beyond that? We'll just see how it goes.

For now I'll just say hello, and glad you're back with me.

CLAIMING MOON rises in three days

People are dying in Southwest Virginia, their bodies ripped open, each missing a vital organ.

Clearwater Police Detective Frank Taliaferro has served in larger departments, advised the FBI, even worked international cases for the United Nations, but now he’s back where his career began, in the small town of Clearwater, Virginia. And he’s never seen anything like these killings.

Nor has he met anyone like Cassandra Kincaid.

When Frank is forced into a charity bachelor auction as a prospective date, he meets Cassandra, a reporter for the Clearwater Daily Dispatch assigned to participate in the auction as a bidder and report her experience.

That's when things get complicated. The first murder occurs while Frank and Cassandra are on their date, and the two soon find themselves drawn together in an uneasy yet passionate relationship, while they both race to uncover what is behind the macabre murders. Working independently of one another, each discovers an awful truth – the deaths are revenge killings, and someone, or something, is still on the loose, looking for more victims.

Cassandra’s probing also uncovers a dark secret from Frank’s past, one that drives a wedge of mistrust between them, yet Cassandra finds she can’t get the detective out of her mind.

In the end her feelings for Frank may not matter because the two find themselves in a deadly face-off with an ancient cult deep in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. Only then do they learn the truth behind the grisly murders, but that discovery may be too late for either of them.

CLAIMING MOON will be available on Kindle Aug. 1, Nook and other formats to follow. More details soon!

Seven days and counting to the release of CLAIMING MOON

Today puts me one week away from when my paranormal thriller novel, CLAIMING MOON, will be released as an e-book on Kindle. Other formats will follow, but Kindle will be its first trip out into the world.

I have to confess to being nervous. Venturing into the world of e-publishing is a new experience for me. I’m not breaking any ground, plenty of other writers have done this, but for me it’s all new, and in essence one grand experiment.

I’m not sure what my expectations are. In a way I don’t really have any. This being a new venture for me, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what to expect, what would be a good and successful run and what would be disappointing.

I suppose if I’m sitting here a year from now with maybe a dozen sales I’ll be terribly disappointed. If I have a thousand sales I believe I’ll be beyond ecstatic. A couple of hundred sales would make me pretty happy, I think. So there, I guess between a dozen and a couple of hundred sales is the difference between happy and disappointed.

Even then, is this all about sales? If the writing (already done) and the publishing/marketing teach me something, either about this business or about myself, doesn’t that count for something?

Lots of questions, huh? That’s just a sample of what all’s going through my head right now, not to mention all the work I still have to get done before a week from today (formatting for e-publishing is taking forever).

But for now, I just wanted to remind everyone CLAIMING MOON will be available on Kindle one week from today (and if you don’t have a Kindle, fear not – there is a free app you can download for a PC, Mac, or a number of different devices – click right here to get yours!)

Looking down the road a bit, my novella PROTECT THE INNOCENT will be available Sept. 1 in the collection PROTECT THE INNOCENT AND OTHER TALES, and on Oct. 1 – just in time for Halloween – will be a collection of my stories in SOME KIND OF MONSTER.

But for now, I’m getting set for the release of CLAIMING MOON. I hope you are too.

Well, it's about time

For those of you still around, you know it’s been a while since I lost blogged. Kids, work, other family obligations – you know the drill, a thousand different things get in the way but in the end it comes down to this: If you don’t make the absolute commitment to blog and tweet and write regularly, then…well, you end up not doing it.

Guess I’ve been a little soft on that commitment.

I have been writing, editing, and revising though, even if I haven’t been blogging and tweeting about it, and now it’s time to return to the blog, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the digital world so many of you inhabit.

And I do have a few things to tell everyone about, first and foremost being that my novel, CLAIMING MOON (formerly known as THE RETURN), is due out Aug. 1. More details on that, and another publishing surprise or two, will be forthcoming.

Second, I’ll be doing a bit of regrouping here as I return to the blogosphere, and most likely will be moving on over to Word Press soon.

Truthfully, I like Blogger better – it seems to be easier to use for those of us whose minds just don’t wrap around technology very well, but for some reason Blogger doesn’t seem to want to play well with Amazon. I’m an Amazon Associate (these days, who isn’t?), which means I’m kinda working as an independent sales contractor for them. That means I get paid a teeny weeny little bit (something like one one-millionth of a penny, I think) if you click on a link from my blog that takes you to Amazon, and then you purchase the book or item through that link.

Blogger has decided it just won’t let its users do that – when I take a linking code from the Amazon Associates program and place it here on my blog, Blogger automatically adds extra computer code which invalidates the link. If you click on it, you go to a page which says you’ve followed a bad link. I spent a fair bit of time on the phone with Amazon, and they’ve looked at it eight ways to Sunday and can’t do anything about it.

Interestingly, at least to me, if I just take a generic link from Amazon (or from anywhere else) and place it on my blog, the link works. It is only the Amazon Associate links which Blogger monkeys around with. It would appear Blogger (and by extension, Google) wants us to utilize their services, so long as they are the only ones making money off of it.

Oh, well, if I can figure out all the trap doors and rabbit trails of Word Press, I’ll be moving over there. Stay tuned.

For now, the countdown is on….28 days til CLAIMING MOON is released!

Back to blogging and writing

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and that’s okay I suppose. I know many writers who update their blog two, three, even four times a week, and for the first two months after I started this one, I was determined to do the same.

Funny thing, though. I was reading author John Locke, one of the best-selling Kindle authors in the world, and he takes a different tact. He has a blog, but only updates it a few times a year. His belief is that he tries to write truly heartfelt, deep blogs that take a long time to assemble, edit and revise. He wants each blog to really show him, what’s inside, his personality, his beliefs, as a way for others to get to know him in a somewhat less superficial manner than would be possible through pieces he might hammer out every couple of days.

The reasoning behind his blog, behind most everything he does, is simply to build an audience to buy his books. Who could argue with his results? He’s the first self-published author to sell more than a million Kindle books.

So, the last blog I posted, the one about the basketball team I coach losing the state championship game, was one I decided to leave there for a while. I think it shows a little bit more about me, about who I am and who I’ve become over the past few years coaching this team.

I’ve also been quite busy wrapping up the basketball season. We had our final two weeks of practice after the state tournament, then we attended a national tournament in Lynchburg, Va. It’s a great experience—five games in three days—but it’s exhausting, I don’t sleep well away from home anyway, and add to that the fact that I spend half the nights there watching video I get of other teams we might play, and it is tiring.

But exhilarating.

Then comes the crash. Every basketball coach knows it. You’re playing basketball, practicing three times a week, traveling all over two states for games, going over defenses and offenses in your head during the daily commute to and from work, figuring out ways to motivate the team as the season-ending playoffs occur, and then…..it’s all gone.

The first year I coached it literally took a month for me to re-adjust to life without basketball. There was this big hole in my life – in addition to all the time involved, I also missed the players. Over the course of a seven-month season you grow really close to the players, to some of the parents. Then bam! It’s all over.

Since that first year I’ve been better prepared for the end, but it’s still hard that first week or two. We returned home from the tournament about a week ago, and now I’ve mostly re-adjusted my thinking, my emotions, and I’m ready to focus all of that energy and time back on the writing.

And this blog.

That means a treat for you who follow me, because on Wednesday I’ll have an interview with R.J. Cavender. He’s a writer and editor, the man who years ago started this little online entity called the Horror Library that pulled together a group of writing hopefuls into a critique group that has spawned a huge number of writing and publishing ventures, a dozen or so writers who have since garnered  hundreds of short story publishing credits, and a handful of writers who have gone on to publish novels and short story collections, including one best-selling author from the group.

After Thursday’s interview I’ll be back to a few random thoughts from me, some publishing news (I have a couple of novels coming out later this spring), and some more author interviews set for April and May

So, thanks for sticking with me through this little lull, and I hope to hear from you all.

Say it ain't so: Mr. Techno Phobe now reading a Kindle?

A few years back I came across a few accounts here and there about those little devices called e-readers. Most of you will know them by their brand name, the two most popular of which are the Kindle and the Nook.

I found a few folks online who used them, then I did a bit of research on the new-fangled things. My initial thoughts were that these might be neat little toys for computer-nerds, but they would never really catch on with the general public. Come on, who wants to be reading novels on a little screen? Who wants a supposed book that's nothing more than electrodes on a thin electronic device? Virtually no one is going to give up on the feel of a real book in their hands.

Then I joined the 21^st century and got a cell phone. I had it for a couple of years before giving it up this winter for various reasons (cost and simply wanting to be left alone at times chief among those reasons). However, over the time I had the cell phone I found myself using it for more than simple telephone service. I gradually came to rely on the thing for monitoring e-mail. Then I started checking my Facebook account periodically. 

Next thing you know I was using it to...gasp...read! Whenever I was stuck somewhere, maybe waiting to pick up one of my kids, or in an office waiting on an appointment, I'd whip it out and check the latest stories on ESPN.com or Fox Sports. If a major news event broke and I wasn't around a computer or television, the old cell phone would do.

So much for not wanting to read on a little screen, huh?

Still, that's a far cry from reading a book on an electronic device, right? Besides, while my family isn't exactly destitute, with five kids in the household we watch our pennies. A Kindle was simply a luxury we couldn't afford.

Just before Christmas I entered a contest being sponsored by writer Michelle Garren Flye and the prize was the winner's choice of a Kindle or Nook. Guess what? I won! I received the Kindle about six weeks ago. In the time since my wife has probably downloaded and read 50 or more novels (she is a voracious reader). My youngest, a 10-year-old, loves downloading and playing games, and she does a bit of reading on the Kindle (there is, however, a dearth of good, modern children's work in e-books.) I've even come to enjoy reading on the Kindle. Since owning it, I've read about four paperback novels, two novels on Kindle, and two non-fiction books on Kindle (I'm a sloooooow reader with a short attention span).

The other night my wife was lying in bed, reading as she normally does before drifting off to sleep. She put down this big old honkin' hardback and picked up the Kindle, then looked at me. “Reading in bed with this is just so much easier,” she said, holding up the Kindle. Then she picked up the hardback. “Reading this big thing is just so awkward.”

So much for the feel of a real book in your hands.

It's no secret, or at least I try not to make it a secret, that I'm now turning my attention from attempting to break into traditional publishing (paperback and hardbacks) to e-publishing. Sure, I'll continue to submit short stories to small press publications, but even many of those have gone to pdf and online formats.

For my novels and other longer works I'm going with e-pub. While I've been kicking around the idea for nearly a year, it wasn't until holding a Kindle in my own little hands, seeing how convenient and easy it is to use, that I've been able to fully grasp onto the idea.

Truth be told, despite my earlier objections (and suffering from a bit of techno-phobia), as a reader I think I now prefer the Kindle to paper.

P.S. Despite my burgeoning love affair with e-readers, I still like paper, so don't forget you can be entered into a drawing for a free trade paperback copy of either the Stoker-nominated Horror Library Vol. 3 anthology by Cutting Block Press or the recently released Night Terrors 2 published by Blood Bound Books. I have a story in each collection, along side some great writers. Remember, in order to enter into the drawing you must join my blog as a follower AND leave a comment on one of my blogs this month. You have to do BOTH. If you've joined the site prior to the start of this contest, simply leaving a comment will enter you.