A Shadow in the Flames: Available Free 6/10/13 - 6/13/13

It's official. The revised edition of A Shadow in the Flames will be available for download for free starting Monday, June 10th. The promotion is in effect until midnight on Thursday, June 13th. After that, it will return to the regular price of $2.99.

This is my first experience with publishing on Kindle, but if things go well, I'll soon publish the (completed) sequel to A Shadow in the Flames, A Memory in the Black.

Don't have a Kindle? You can still read Kindle books on a computer or mobile device with their free reading app.

I leave you with a review of the original edition, from an Amazon reader review by Wanda Phillips:
"I don't know what I expected when I started this book. I think I was leery of a first novel, but within a few pages Munz had me hooked. The story is remarkably philosophical without being pedantic or rhetorical. The blending of perspective, a sort of speaking stick between characters gave you a chance to see each event, character, and situation from several sides. It was seamless.

The character at the true focus of the novel matures and grows over the course of the story (one of my favourite things, I love adventure and so on but I lose interest in characters that are so wooden they are left unaffected by the most mind-numbing events). The maturation of the primary character, starting from his sense of confusion and hope, to one where he stands not just on his own (another fantasy, the solo superhero), but as a member of a society that shares his values, his ideals, and gives shape to his imagination.

The characters least explored are the violent ones. In truth, no amount of justification in a character study allows me to see the value of violence. Munz treats his characters with a generous heart and even those characters from whom the human heart has been eviscerated, Munz treats with a strong, delicate touch. I felt for everyone in the novel (except, of course, the true evil master mind whose presence was rare and yet pervasive).

There was pretty much a bit of everything in this book, action, adventure, intelligence, thrills, chills, and romance. No book is complete without characters that don't develop feelings for each other. It just wouldn't ring true.

Munz hints at events more complex than those witnessed in the novel. He does this with the deft touch of a story teller, what is needed in the scene is seeded in the scenes before. He gives you enough to be pleasing, not so much that you need a score card in the book to track what is going on. Besides, who said we had to understand mad men and their ways?

Munz ties things up with an opening. Brilliant."

Get it here!

In unrelated geek-news, last night I won a tribble by knowing the rest of the phrase, "Greetings, Starfighter. You have been chosen by the Star League to defend the Frontier against..." (It was "Xur and the Ko-Dan armada." Yes, I know. There's something terribly wrong with me that I remember that even after having not actually seen The Last Starfighter for over a decade...)

A Shadow in the Flames now on Kindle!

As promised, the revised edition of A Shadow in the Flames is now available on Kindle! Note the snazzy, updated cover that includes the name of the series: The New Aeneid Cycle.

Northgate is a city in turmoil. Decaying, violent and corrupt, it is a common enough place in the mid twenty-first century, yet discoveries beneath the Moon's surface have marked it with their first distant echoes.

Into Northgate has come Michael Flynn. Jobless and down to his last few dollars, Michael still dreams of making a positive difference of his own. Yet he has no family, no friends save for the freelancer known only as Diomedes, and tonight the apartment they share will burn to the ground.

When Diomedes becomes his mentor in a search for the arsonist responsible, Michael gets his chance to realize those dreams. But he must face dangers far more personal than fire if he is to succeed, for like a shadow in the flames, neither arsonist nor mentor may be what they appear.

And the ones who search the Moon will be watching him.

The current price is $2.99, but look for a free promotion to happen very soon. The great thing about the Kindle edition, besides the polished prose and correction of some typos from the print version, is that I can update it after you've gotten a copy. I plan to include a teaser excerpt from the sequel just as soon as I choose something that's properly enticing.

Don't have a Kindle? Read it on your computer, tablet, or phone with the free app...

A Shadow in the Flames: Revised Edition coming to Kindle

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I have news regarding my first novel, A Shadow in the Flames: A newly revised edition is coming to Kindle, likely within the week.

When I first published ASITF in late 2007, it was to good reviews, but to say my writing has not matured in the time since would be a lie. I've opened the print version of ASITF a time or two over the past few years, read a passage or two, and found myself still wanting to make little tweaks to things that I once felt were just fine. I eventually stopped opening the print version, or, I confess, even mentioning it.

I retain the rights to ASITF, however, and lately I've been wanting to give people a less expensive way to read the book than the admittedly high-cost print-on-demand version. Kindle therefore feels like a perfect solution to this. The version of A Shadow in the Flames released on Kindle will be very much the same story. Characters have not changed. Plot elements have not changed. But things are now tweaked to fit the evolution of my writing style. It's not a major overhaul, but nor is it simply a word changed every other paragraph.

And now it's in electronic form!

The (U.S.) price will be $2.99, however I do plan to make it available for free for a brief period after release as well.

Another, perhaps more interesting element to this is the fact that I'm seriously considering making the sequel (previously titled Legacy of Memory, but now more likely to be called A Memory in the Black) available on Kindle as well. It's been mostly complete for a number of years now, but its status as a sequel to a self-published novel meant I let it sit in the drawer rather than try to sell it. It does seem a shame to simply let it languish there forever, especially when people have asked me about a sequel. But I've yet to decide. If I do release it (which, I confess, is tempting), and it somehow goes viral, then I suppose I might even have to write a follow-up to that one, even though my main writing focus is with pitching A Memory of Dragons (yeah, so I have a thing for memory) and working on fleshing out a comedic fantasy novel that I plan to write next.

I'll post more in this space when A Shadow in the Flames is actually on Kindle. I expect it won't be more than a few days...

Re-Opening Geek Notes

And so, like the butterfly, I emerge from my cocoon after a long period of absence with new wings, and yadda-yadda-yadda, whatever else metaphor you wanna stick in there...

I've let this place lapse for quite a while, though in truth I honestly hadn't realized just how long it had been. While I've certainly had things to say, my writing efforts have been focused elsewhere. But I'll get to that in a moment.

Firstly, I'll mention a little bit about what's happened with the manuscript I'd been pitching when last blogged here, Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit. I had some decent nibbles from agents and publishers (queries have resulted in requests for longer samples on numerous occasions, and one publisher requested the entire manuscript), but no good, hard bites yet. The main problem seems to be the book's length, which is about 50K words longer than most publishers like to see from a new author. (Longer books cost more to print, and while there are plenty of books out there by established authors at 150K words or longer, publishers don't like to spend the money printing such books if the writer doesn't have an established base.) I haven't given up completely--I'm still pitching it occasionally--but for now I'm focused on pitching the (shorter) book I've written in the meantime, which I'll mention in a moment. I still love Murdering Zeus, though. I'm continually tempted to self-publish it and try to make it go viral in geek circles, but I can't quite bring myself to let go of having it published in more traditional fashion just yet.

But yes, I've written a new book! It's tentatively titled A Memory of Dragons, and the pitching process is (knock on wood) going well--or, at least, encouragingly. In December, an agent responded to a query letter with a request for a sample, and two weeks later asked for the full manuscript. I'm sorry to say the agent ultimately passed, but she did have a few constructive comments which I used to do a few revisions before I started pitching again. Just this past week, I had another agent ask to see my full manuscript! So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

But hey, I should mention just what it's about, huh? Put simply, it's a contemporary fantasy about a man who takes a pilgrimage to Britain to honor his dead girlfriend and encounters a pickpocket who claims to possess her stolen memories. There is, of course, more to it, but that's all I'll say about it for now. Unlike Murdering Zeus, it's not a comedy, though it's not without humor. Characters in the book visit a number of places across Britain that I've been lucky enough to visit myself (Worm's Head, London, Cardiff, Conwy, and others), and it was fun to revisit those places in my mind as I wrote.

Lastly, there's also a little bit of news regarding my self-published novel, A Shadow in the Flames, but I'll get to that in the next entry...

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Insidious? It's GOOD news!

It's hard to miss all the ads lately for the new horror movie, Insidious:

"It's not the house that's haunted. It's your son."

Cue terrible horror with accompanying leitmotif. They treat that like it's such bad news, but let's think about this for a moment. The real estate market SUCKS right now. Even selling a non-haunted house at a decent price is pretty difficult. Unloading a haunted one? That's never going to happen! So, really, the quote above is good news! Now they can keep the house!

The rest of the movie is a two-word solution: MILITARY SCHOOL! Ship the little haunted brat out and make him someone else's problem. Now they've got a spare room for a den, or for guests, or even to turn into a bed and breakfast so you can help pay for the military school. Silly people.

Quite frankly, I bet the CIA or NSA would love to get its hands on a haunted kid. Let's put those ghosts to work protecting America's interests!

Technorati Tags: Insidious April Fools

More on Murdering Zeus...

In my last entry I wrote about how I originally embarked on writing the (completed) manuscript I'm now calling Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit. I wound up making a few veiled comments about what I was working on. "Somewhat less serious" was the phrase I used when comparing it to my previous work, but I didn't mention anything at the time about Greek gods.

Though it was slow going at first, I really had a great time writing it. While I loved writing my first two manuscripts, the freedom to inject more of my sense of humor into the writing (and the different "voice" used) added to the fun of it all. I also wrote Murdering... much faster than the other two. While part of that is due to a more disciplined effort on my part, I suspect the humor is to blame as well. By the end of November 2008 I'd dreamed up characters and the general outline of things and plunged in to the actual writing of it all. Aside from a bit of a slow-down during the holidays, I felt things were going well.

Then, when I was about a quarter of the way through writing the sucker, I wandered through the bookstore and saw something that just about gave me a heart attack: a display for Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I think it was for the first book in the series, but at this point, I don't really know.

I don't know if you've ever come up with an idea that you were absolutely in love with--not only for the idea itself but for the perception that it was actually pretty unique--but that was how I felt about Murdering.... Suddenly here on the shelves was a book that seemed to have used my same idea--independently to be sure, but nonetheless--and made it to publication before I had.

Thieves! Murder! Fire! I couldn't even bear to pick it up just then. (I may have also been on my way to the restroom after a period of writing in the bookstore's cafe, I suppose.) I went home, grumbling, frustrated, cheated, angry, hungry (unrelated), and despairing. Finally, I managed to pluck up the courage to wiki the sucker and see just what the book was about.

Relief.

More or less, anyway. Some comfort was the fact that Percy Jackson, with its Harry Potteresque hero, was aimed at a younger audience (the mortal characters in Murdering... are in their mid- to late-twenties). Further comfort was that it seemed to be playing everything straight rather than having my own comedic take on things. I did note later that both books contain a character named Thalia (again, a bit of a heart-stopper to learn that), but they're different Thalias. According to Wikipedia, Percy Jackson's Thalia has a mortal mother and is "a very skilled fighter" where as my Thalia is the mythological muse of comedy (and, more recently, science fiction) and can't hardly fight to save her life. (Incidentally, Thalia is one of the two mythological characters to appear in "Playing with Hubris" along with Apollo.)

I like my Thalia better, but then I'm biased.

At that point, I decided that I'd consider it a blessing. Percy Jackson is quite a successful series. It even got a movie. Anything that raised public interest in Greek myth can only help me by creating a market. I feel the same way about the recent Clash of the Titans remake, as terrible as that was. (It's getting a sequel. The mythology fan in me shudders at the thought, but the bit of me that cares about marketing is cheering for it.)

HADES =/= THE DEVIL!!

Sorry. Had to get that out. (Or, as Hermes tells a group of reporters, "He's actually a decent enough chap. A bit inexorable, a tad strict, sure, but it's his job to keep the dead out of the world of the living. You don’t want someone like me in charge of that. One good distraction and wham! Zombie apocalypse!")

So, as I've said, it's now complete. I'm shopping it around to agents and trying to find a happy medium between being bothered that I'm going to appear to have just been jumping on the bandwagon of existing mythology franchises out there and being thankful that they're creating a market.

I take comfort in the fact that mine may be the only one that has flying poisonous feral kittens, Ninjas Templar, and the Poseidon uttering the phrase, "This cannot be solved with baked goods!"

Also, immortal Zeus is assassinated in the first chapter, and hopefully that make at least some of you curious.

Origin Story

Way back when I started writing--at least in any serious fashion--I had an idea about writing an original Greek myth. Not retelling the Odyssey or some such thing, but rather writing an epic of my own plotting, using the already existing (and public domain, obviously) characters of Greek and Roman mytholgy.

But let me step back a little further. Most kids go through a phase where they're fascinated about dinosaurs. When I was little, a mythology phase accompanied my dino-phase (isn't dino-phase one of the phases of cellular mitosis?), and I never really grew out of the former. I took three years of Latin in high school, which came with a dash of mythology along with regular Roman culture. College added still more fuel to the fire: Classics 210 remains one of my favorite courses (I actually still have my final essay test in the bag I carry my writing/laptop around in), in which I read (among other things) The Iliad. Another course a year or so later took me deeper, and while I no longer remember the course number of that one, both courses impressed upon me the idea that the Greek (and Roman) gods were really just supersized mortals: powerful but fallible, with gargantuan egos. How much fun would it be to take these characters and create new tales for them?

I loved the idea, but I loved it so much that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it justice. I'd envisioned something epic, set back in the time of ancient Greece, with divine political intrigue, monsters, adventure, suspense (and now I'm sounding like the grandfather in The Princess Bride--though I'd not envisioned any pirates), and most of all, epic. Yes, I'm aware I said epic twice, but this is my blog and you'll just have to deal with it. My plan was to wait, develop my writing abilities and only approach it when I felt ready.

Flash-forward to, oh, 2002 or so when, in a period of short story-writing, I came up with the idea of how amusing it might be to write something in the present day. How might someone in, say, a café react to a guy sitting down and claiming he was the god Apollo? How would mythology and modern times be reconcilled or viewed through our modern viewpoints? How would a sun chariot be explained when we can put spacecraft into orbit around the sun itself? I personally thought it'd be pretty darned funny, and wound up writing such a story just to play with the dialogue alone. That story, "Playing with Hubris," wound up being critiqued a bit in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. At the suggestion of a friend, I at one point rewrote it as a one-act play for a contest (alas, I don't think I managed the conversion too well). The story then got put down for a while until I dusted it off and officially got it published in 2008.

In the intervening years I wrote two other stories in the same myth-meets-modern vein: "Snipe Hunt," involving a little girl, ditched by her brothers, who meets Hermes; and "The Atheist and the Ferryman," a mix of humor and the macabre about an atheist who finds a passage in his basement to Hades and accuses Charon of running a confidence scam. The former was published in a small speculative fiction magazine called "The Sink," while the other--despite being my favorite--is unpublished. In any case, it was a theme that was a great deal of fun to write.

So when I'd finished Legacy of Memory and was looking for a completely new book to write, the idea I finally decided on was to go back to my old mythological ambitions, tweak it in the flavor of the short stories, and see how things turned out. The result was Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit, about which there is still more to say...

...In another blog entry.