Woo hoo!

I decided to release Old Blood, the Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Novella, EARLY! Yup, it’s now avail­able in any E-format on Smash­words HERE.

It should be avail­able on Kin­dle later on Sun­day as it takes time for Ama­zon to process it, but you can always search for the title OR check HERE to see if it’s up to purchase.

As for Barnes & Noble, well… they STILL have not pub­lished On Demon Wings…nearing six weeks now. So, I don’t know…sorry Nook fans, take it up with the big wigs at B&N. I hon­estly have noth­ing to do with it not being avail­able, so please, email Barnes & Noble if you wish and hope­fully they can get back to you.

Oth­er­wise, if your com­plaints aren’t heard, just pur­chase your copy in epub for­mat from Smash­words. Smash­words! Smash­words! So quick and awe­some! Look, the links are HERE and HERE and HERE. SO DAMN EASY! DO IT! IT WILL WORK ON YOUR FREAKING NOOK! JUST DOWNLOAD THE FILE AND TRANSFER IT OVER TO YOUR NOOK. JUST LIKE THAT. AAAAH!!

Whew, got that off my chest.

Any­hoo, hope you enjoy Old Blood and Pippa’s tale. Remem­ber that it IS book 5.5 in the series and should NOT be read as a stand-alone novel. Please read books 1–5 before you embark on Old Blood. You know, for max­i­mum awesomeness.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an epic road trip to pack for, start­ing with a stay at The Ben­son hotel tonight. See you guys in July!!

PS I do have plans to put Old Blood into paper­back come July

Strong words, I know. How­ever, I must express how extremely dis­pleased I am with the com­pany as a writer and a poten­tial cus­tomer (cuz I could have Nook for all they know).

It’s been well over a month since On Demon Wings has been released. There is no sign of it on Barnes and Noble’s web­site. The way it is done for self-pubbers like myself is that I upload the books to Smash­words and they make it avail­able in their pre­mium cat­a­log. This goes for iTunes, Kobo, and other venues.

Well, On Demon Wings has been avail­able for a month now and The Ben­son has been up for a cou­ple of weeks (Red Fox will be there in about two weeks).

Both On Demon Wings AND The Ben­son are avail­able now on Kobo (here and here respec­tively and FREEEE), pos­si­bly iTunes, and of course through Smash­words. But Barnes and Noble, for what­ever rea­son because they never get back to me, has been refus­ing to put the books on their site. After all, I have the books in the pre­mium cat­a­log and it’s up to them to make them avail­able for Nook.

And they haven’t. Well, don’t you just suck B&N?

So I can only apol­o­gize on their behalf. I would upload the books through Barnes & Noble’s PubIt pro­gram HOWEVER it is not open to Cana­di­ans. Grrrrrr. Way to lose out on even more busi­ness, you douchecanoes.

Any­hoo, that’s that. If you’re a Nook user, you can get the books through Smash­words (you’ll need to save the epub file to your com­puter, hook up your Nook via USB and trans­fer them over…it’s really a rather minor incon­ve­nience). Oth­er­wise you can com­plain to Barnes & Noble…and I hope you have bet­ter luck with it than I have!

ON THE PLUS SIDE On Demon Wings (and your help) put me on this list for Best-Selling Self-published books along with Amanda Hock­ing and Kris­ten Ashley…woo hoo!!! Check it out here via GalleyCat.

In other news, I attended Bret Tay­lor (artist, friend, JD swiller, EIT cover artist)‘s art show — Metal Flake Remix — over the week­end. It was a lot fun, live art plus friends, drinks, more art…and we did an impromptu give­away for sev­eral copies of Dark­house. Yay! Fun stuff.

(Pho­tos by Cyn­thia Griffiths)

I think we are going to team up in the fall and have a joint art show/book release party for Into the Hol­low (EIT #6). We’ll make posters out of the book cov­ers and sign them, have lots of EIT merch for sale, have Perry and Dex tak­ing your coats, it’s going to be pretty awe­some. I’ll make the event pub­lic too, if any local looky loos want to say hello

Finally, my friend Can­dice (who makes amaz­ing cakes, who I will have make me an awe­some EIT cake for le party) and I were inter­viewed for an arti­cle in the news­pa­per about social media and work (me being an author, Can­dice being a cake­maker). You can take a look at that arti­cle HERE.

Have a great week everybody!

I’m back!

Just kid­ding. I’m not really. Still on my men­tal vacay which has been won­der­ful so far.…just let­ting myself be free of all stress and tak­ing deep breaths. It works. I’m feel­ing a lot bet­ter and I think I’ll feel even greater when this month is up.

Why? Well I’ve got that sur­prise for you, that hope­fully will be com­ing your way in a few weeks. And then I’m head­ing off on an epic 9-day road trip with me and my man down to Ore­gon. With­out even plan­ning it to be so, it has turned into the Perry Palomino trip. We’re stay­ing overnight at The Ben­son (where I have stayed before) in Port­land, and at some other point we are stay­ing just out­side Uncle Al’s place in the town on Man­zanita. Also, stay­ing in Seat­tle for a cou­ple of nights at my favorite hotel (the Moore) that’s a few blocks up from where Dex’s apart­ment is.

Weird, right? Weird and won­der­ful. Those nine-days are going to be filled with camp­ing, hik­ing, and lots and lots of read­ing. I can. not. wait.

Any­hoo, that’s not why I’m back on the blog. I came to inform you of two awe­some things!

One is that I’ve opened a Red­Bub­ble store for EIT mer­chan­dise (more will be added):

And the other is that the lovely Maryse at Maryse’s Book Blog has cre­ated an Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Sup­port Forum:

Go join HERE

A spoi­lerific zone where read­ers (who have read all books in the series thus far) can go and bitch and moan or cheer and swoon or what­ever over the series. You guys, I know this series isn’t easy at times and cliffhang­ers suck and man do you not under­stand _____ or ________ and you want to KILL that fuck­ing ____ but this seems like a great place to get it all out with­out wor­ry­ing you’re spoil­ing it for some­one. And, regard­ing cliffhang­ers, believe it or not but I’m not fond of them either. I just end the book where it nat­u­rally feels like it should end and it’s usu­ally it’s plot­ted out WAY (like, years) ahead of time. But I can tell you this much…Book #6 won’t have a cliffhanger like Lying Sea­son or On Demon Wings, so you can rest assured you won’t be left dan­gling. Now, of course, some argue that Dark­house had a cliffhanger so I’m sure it’ll still be hang­er­ish to some peo­ple but anyway…you won’t be mad, is what I’m say­ing. Or maybe you will be. YOU’RE SO HARD TO PREDICT.

Hi every­one.

So I have a few updates for you, not all of them are pos­i­tive but it’s good to clear the air and be hon­est and open about things, espe­cially things that affect my writ­ing. I’ve always been some­one that over­shares with strangers, so this is noth­ing new, but I’ve veered away from being too per­sonal on this web­site. But, meh, now is a good a time as any.

I’m going on a bit of a social media break. Cur­rently, my day-job and my writ­ing job aren’t mesh­ing very well. Yes, I work 40 hours a week at an office, a posi­tion that has recently got­ten very high-stress.

I don’t han­dle stress well. Blame my genet­ics, blame men­tal issues, blame what­ever, but I don’t. There’s good stress, like when I’m writ­ing and I have a dead­line and it helps me get things DONE. And there’s bad stress where I panic and every­thing over­whelms me, I find myself  throw­ing dishes, cry­ing at work (no I’m not throw­ing dishes there), cry­ing in my dreams, feel­ing like there’s no way out.

This is silly because there is a way out and there is a beau­ti­ful rain­bow at the end of this tunnel.

How­ever, part of this rainbow’s real­ity depends on the amount of work I am able to do NOW and by work, I mean my real job. My writ­ing work. But how can I do that when I can’t seem to get out of the door every morn­ing with­out a panic attack? It’s a Catch-22. And it sucks.

When I wrote Dark­house, I was work­ing full-time. When I pub­lished Dark­house and became a cover-planning, editor-hiring, social media-guru, marketing-and-PR-powerhouse, and every­thing else that run­ning your own pub­lish­ing com­pany entails (remem­ber, I do this all myself…just me), I was NOT employed. Nor was I employed when I did the same with Red Fox, Dead Sky Morn­ing, The Ben­son and Lying Season.

Alas, I had to get employ­ment ear­lier this year and AT THAT TIME I was not sell­ing enough books to sur­vive on that. So, I thank­fully got a pretty nice day job.

Then came time to write On Demon Wings. Well, I did it in six weeks and I did it while work­ing full-time…but at a time when my day job wasn’t stress­ful or busy. And, yes, it was actu­ally HELL to get On Demon Wings out. You think it was just Perry going through hell in that book? It was me too.

I once said that it would be impos­si­ble for some­one to self-publish and hold a day job, and I think I was kind of right. Oh sure, lots and lots of peo­ple do it and do it well but I don’t think I am one of those peo­ple. I REALLY wish I was, believe me and if you are that sort, my hat is off to you. It’s one thing to try and write a book and hold down a job, it’s a dif­fer­ent ani­mal when you throw publisher/PR team/designer, etc into that mix. It is fuck­ing hard. I’m at that point where things are really tak­ing off and I need to focus on my real job, the one that makes me more money than my day job, the one that ful­fils me to no end: my writing.

But, I find myself unable to.

Like I said, there is a rain­bow but it’s going to be hell until I get there. I’m get­ting sup­port from coun­sel­lors, doc­tors who will hope­fully help me han­dle the stress in the interim. I’m get­ting sup­port from friends who are won­der­ful sound­ing boards. And hope­fully fans will be pretty under­stand­ing too about what I am about to do.…

Which is…dun dun dun. Take a vaca­tion from the inter­net. Not in total, but my pres­ence will be lim­ited. Aside from an amaz­ingly unique give­away cur­rently going on right now (more info at bot­tom), I won’t be doing any blog posts or tours or inter­views or give­aways or any­thing because I sim­ply can’t han­dle it. I KNOW this might hurt my stand­ing in the pub­lic eye, but honestly…I just can’t do it! I don’t know what else to say.

I’ll prob­a­bly be on Twit­ter less, my EIT Face­book page less…just less of me every­where. I’ll prob­a­bly read less reviews because neg­a­tive reviews and a neg­a­tive soul don’t go well together (or maybe they go TOO well together). I’ll just be…less.

This will be temporary…I can’t say how long…maybe two weeks, maybe till July? When I do come back though, I will have a sur­prise for EIT fans…so that’s some­thing. But I do need to just drop out of this world for a bit so I can screw my head on straight. I’m in full-on panic mode at the moment and when I panic, I make mis­takes. I don’t want to make mis­takes or lose my head at either of my jobs.

Also, some books are affected. Noth­ing Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror related but my adult con­tem­po­rary novel, Lost in Wan­der­lust is being pushed back until the late Fall. I just don’t have the time to fin­ish it right now. It sucks because I really NEED to prove that I can write other things than the EIT series but, thems the breaks.

ALSO ALSO paper­back ver­sions of my books will be gone — for a short while. Until now, I had been using Cre­ate­space for my paper­backs. Things went wrong with my On Demon Wings ver­sion, I com­plained, they didn’t fix it, I com­plained harder, they gave me an answer that didn’t make sense, I asked them to clar­ify, they cut and pasted the same answer as before, I sent them a screen­shot and asked them to explain what is going on, THEY CUT AND PASTED THE SAME ANSWER AS BEFORE, finally I told them to fuck off and that I am going to take all my books (which actu­ally do bring them money) off of their site and go to another POD printer (Light­en­ing Source) and…you guessed it…THEY CUT AND PASTED A PREVIOUS ANSWER.

FUCK YOU Cre­ate­Space. Your cus­tomer ser­vice is dis­gust­ing and you can’t even address that issue with­out a generic reply.

So.…the paper­backs won’t be avail­able for a while. But even­tu­ally I’ll find the time to move them over to Light­en­ing Source and get that all set up and when I do, I’ll let you know.

Also, if you’re want­ing a paper­back ver­sion, I sug­gest you buy from Ama­zon or Barnes and Noble right now while you can…I’ll be pulling them this week.

So this blog prob­a­bly won’t be get­ting updated much as well, and as such I will leave you with some tidbits:

- I did an inter­view with tal­ented + won­der­ful local author Lorna Suzuki (of the soon-to-be-a-motion-picture Imago Tril­ogy) HERE

- I did a musically-slanted inter­view with Emmy from Sin­fully Deli­cious Reads which was a lot of fun, and you can read it HERE

- Jes­sica at Hacka­roos Reviews is host­ing a cool give­away. I ordered those fucked up books from Cre­ate­space (the ODW with the funny mar­gins). While totally read­able, they look like crap inside and as such I have decided to give these defec­tive books away — com­plete with com­ments, scrib­bles, draw­ing, cut out pic­tures and what not, cour­tesy of me. Hey, I may even through in ran­dom pho­tographs of peo­ple you don’t know! Plus book­marks, EIT stick­ers. It’s all fun. Enter that give­away HERE (open only to North Amer­i­can res­i­dents — sorry, I can’t afford to ship out­side of that).

- There should be another inter­view with Sara Vallejo on her blog HERE this week

I think that’s all. Thanks for read­ing this. I feel bet­ter know­ing every­one is up to speed with what is going on in my life and hope­fully when I come back, I’ll be shin­ing brighter than ever.

Just don’t for­get about me.

And please, if you love EIT, keep spread­ing the word. I know you guys are and I really appre­ci­ate it — I feel your pas­sion and addic­tion, hell I hear it — but it all helps me get one step closer to my dream