A little elf told me you've been very good this year. You washed your hands. You wore your mask. You kept six feet away from strangers. There is only one gift that can repay such good behavior: a pulse-pounding gut-rattling dystopian cyber-thriller novel written by a mildly Hispanic child of the 80s who maybe stole too much from Neuromancer and Altered Carbon.
In the midst of one of the most nightmarish years in my lifetime, I am releasing a new book. If I were a patient man, I would have waited, maybe a year or two (or four, depending), before interrupting stories of disease, racism, and autocracies with silly ads for a sillier book. But I'm not a patient man. And no matter how bad it gets out there, I will still be here, at my desk, writing stories...
On paper, the idea of a book trailer makes sense. So much of what we consume on the webernets is in video form, although usually it's in a tiny window with the sound off as we struggle to read the captions. It just so happened the other day that I saw a blog post about creating book trailers, and they mentioned that Canva can do it now. So I loaded up the ol' computer and went to have a look for...
Everyone's got a side hustle, and mine is writing dystopian cyber-thrillers loosely based on my experiences as a teenage hacker trying to take down a global conglomerate with my knowledge of LOGO and a 28.8bps modem. My books won't make you healthier, stronger, or more attractive. They aren't unique pieces of art you can hang on your wall. But they will take you to an alternate reality where...
Congratulations! You made it through July 2020. Not a trivial feat. Luckily, your TODO list for August is pretty straightforward. Just put on your mask, grab your hand sanitizer, and go preorder the Kindle version of Brigham Plaza at Amazon.
My hope is that my novels distract you from that anger for a little while. But do remember: just because I'm still talking about my little cyberpunk hacker book doesn't mean I don't care about what's happening in the world. I do care. I care to the point that I can taste the anger.
Last night, I powered through the last six chapters of Brigham Plaza to get a sense of how they feel as a whole. I put a lot of work into making the climax of the book satisfying while still leaving a few stingers in the denouement to help you come down. And yet, it was the final page, after the epilogue, that I found to contain the most exciting line of the entire book. At least, in my...
As of 9:00 p.m. last night, I have completed principal writing on Vinestead Anthology book six, Brigham Plaza. It took about 11 months to finish the initial draft, rewrite several chapters, rewrite them again, and rewrite them once more until everything was just so. There is still a long way to go, but I won't be making any more changes to the story. And there were so many changes. Some banal...
Soliciting feedback on a work in progress is a delicate dance. On the one hand, beta readers can point out huge holes in continuity that you can't see because you're too close to the project. On the other hand, they may claim your erotic dystopian cyber-thriller is too erotic. Then you have a decision to make: do you keep the chapter with the threesome as-is because it's the very crux of the...
Some things never change. I've been writing stories and novels for a long time now, and though I'm no longer in the posting word counts to Twitter every day phase, I still feel the need to share the milestones with someone... anyone, basically. There's just something about putting the last period on the final sentence in the last chapter and saying there it is; this draft is complete that makes...
You wish you had a girlfriend. You wish you had some friends. You don't like living in Provo. You haven't spoken to mom and dad since graduation. They call sometimes. You ignore them. You need to get your life together.
It was done anyway. Danny knew it. So what did it matter how he greeted the man who had come to kill him? So many times in his life, he’d felt unsafe, unsure of what might happen. But now… now he was home. These were his walls keeping out the cold and his floors warming his feet.
