To celebrate the German publication of Lucky Bastard (aka Pech Vogel, which hits Deutschland buchhandlungs October 1), I’m giving away two signed copies of the U.S. hardcover edition to two lucky winners. That’s the U.S. edition over there on the left.
If I get more than thirty entries, I’ll make it three signed copies. Deal? Deal.
So how do you enter to win? Piece of cake:
1) Sign up for my e-mail newsletter by submitting your name and e-mail address HERE. There’s also a link to sign up at the top of the sidebar over there on the right.
2) Comment on this post to let me know you signed up.
That’s it. That’s all you have to do. And if you’re already receiving my newsletter, just leave a comment and you’re good to go.
For those of you who are concerned about getting bombarded with e-mails, I don’t send out my newsletter more than once or twice a month and usually just to announce book releases, events, signings, etc. While you can get this information by following me on Facebook or Twitter, signing up for my newsletter is the best way to make sure you don’t miss out. Also, I don’t share my mailing list with anyone, so you don’t have to worry about getting a bunch of spam.
Contest is open to U.S. residents only.
Contest runs until Sunday, September 30 at 11:59PM PST.
Good luck!
Welcome to another edition of Movie Review Monday. What? This is Thursday? How the hell did it get to be Thursday already? Well, let’s just pretend that it’s Monday because the alliteration works better.
Today is a double barrel entry of dark comedies, which is appropriate because they’re both about killing people. And if you know anything about me, you know that the darker the comedy, the more likely I am to enjoy it. Your mileage may vary.
Killer Joe (directed by William Friedkin) is one of those films with a cast of deplorable characters that is just so much fun to watch you can’t look away. Emile Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church are great as the son and ex-husband of a woman they want to kill so they can cash in on her insurance policy, so they hire Matthew McConaughey—a Texas cop who kills people for money on the side. If you’re not a McConaughey fan, don’t let that keep you away. He’s delightfully disturbing as the titular anti-hero. And if you’re a fan of fried chicken, you might not want to eat it for a while after the climactic scene.
God Bless America (directed by Bobcat Goldthwait) stars journeyman actor Joel Murray (currently in Mad Men) as a modern day Clyde who teams up with a teenage Bonnie (Tara Lynne Barr) to rid society of reality television stars, rude talk show hosts, and generally repellent citizens. While it’s pretty heavy on the social commentary, it does make some valid points about the lack of common courtesy and the decline of manners in a society that values celebrity for the sake of celebrity. If you don’t get some pleasure out of the scene where they gun down four rude people in a movie theater who keep talking on their cell phones, then maybe this isn’t your cup of tea.
Over the past several months I’ve spent the focus of my creative energy where it does the most good: on my writing. It didn’t hurt that I had deadlines for both I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus and Big Egos, which gave me a reason to be motivated. And during that time, I tended to avoid getting derailed by the time suck of Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads.
Now that I have a little more flexibility in my schedule, I’ve discovered that scaling back on Facebook and Twitter has had a markedly positive effect on my productivity and general frame of mind. While I’m aware that the popular way of thinking is for authors to spend a couple of hours a day on Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites in order to be successful, I’ve decided to scale back my engagement on social networking sites so I can focus on other things: like writing and going outside and experiencing life without feeling the need to share every moment.
As I’ve said before, if you’re constantly connected electronically—either by text message, cell phone, status updates, or tweets—then you’re disconnected from your experience and can’t truly appreciate the present moment.
This is not to say that I’m going to vanish from the Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads landscape completely. I’ll still be popping on to say “hey” and share my occasional thoughts or updates and respond to comments or messages or Tweets sent to my attention. So please don’t think I’m not interested in hearing from you. I love my readers. I just need to step away from the distraction a bit. Unplug, you might say.
As my friend John Hornor Jacobs once noted, there’s a big blue sky out there and we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible beneath it. So if you’re looking for me, that’s where I’ll be.
Either there or at my local coffee roastery, working on my next book.
Well, August went by pretty fast. Time flies when you’re doing edits and copy edits and galley edits on your zombie novella that’s been pushed up to an October 30 release date, while in between you’re finishing up your next book that you promised to your agent the day after Labor Day.
Yes, for the past month I haven’t had the time to do any writing that doesn’t involve either I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus or Big Egos, thus the dearth of blog posts. Actually, I haven’t done much of anything else, as I’ve been bouncing back and forth from one project to the other—which isn’t always the easiest transition to make, especially when you’re switching from a sentient zombie who is dressed up like Santa Claus to a narrator who sometimes believes he’s Elvis Presley, James Bond, or Captain Kirk, among others.
In case you’re wondering what it’s like to work on two projects at the same time, both of them under deadline, the last month went something like this:
- Turn in first draft of I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus on August 1
- Spend three days reintegrating with human beings, who you haven’t seen for the past two weeks and most of the past two months
- Catch a cold and get so sick you can’t write for most of the next week
- Work on edits of your next novel, Big Egos, which you stopped editing at the end of May to start writing your zombie novella
- Receive first round of edits on zombie novella; stop working on Big Egos for 4-5 days
- Send in edited draft of zombie novella; start working on Big Egos again for the next week
- Receive copy edits for zombie novella; spend entire weekend reading your novella out loud—twice; make edits; send back to publisher
- Work on Big Egos for the next ten day, rearranging chapters, fixing plot holes, and tying things together
- Send Big Egos off to agent the Wednesday after Labor Day
- Receive 1st Galley Page edits for I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus; spend all day Thursday reading galley pages out loud and making final fixes
- Take a long bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge on Friday morning, eat some breakfast, watch a couple of episodes of Robot Chicken, and then write this blog post
- Go visit your mother
Now I get the weekend to relax, visit some friends and family, and then start working on Big Egos next week once I get edits back from my agent. Then it’s on to Super Duper. Or maybe another project I’ve been working on. Hmm…
To celebrate the German publication of Lucky Bastard (aka Pech Vogel, which hits Deutschland buchhandlungs October 1), I’m giving away two signed copies of the U.S. hardcover edition to two lucky winners. That’s the U.S. edition over there on the left.
