David Lubar's Blog, page 23

At least it wasn't a pulpit

Last night I was playing Dead to Rights: Retribution on the Xbox 360. This confession, alone, will lose me large amounts of gamer cred, but DTR has everything I look for in a game: short cut scenes, limited stealth requirements, and head shots. Toss in a cute-as-heck attack dog, and the game becomes irresistible. (I'll freely admit having played not only both of the PS2 DTR games, but also the PSP title.) Worse, I wasn't playing the game itself, I was playing the downloadable content I'd ...

Death to all zombies.

I finished my pass through the galleys of Enter the Zombie yesterday. This means I am totally done with all aspects of writing and revising for the entrie series. Done. Wow. I started writing book one, My Rotten Life, in November, 2007. Except for short stories, I've pretty much been writing Nathan Abercrombie books for the better part of the last three years. While I feel very good about how the books came out, I'm ready to move on. Though the series ends conclusively, I left the door...

Picture this

An idea hit me this morning for a movie that I'd love to see made. Imagine this -- The Jim Cramer Story, starring Louie CK. That would just be so perfect.

Publisher love

Last week, my editor told me she was sending me some ARCs for The Big Stink, which is book 4 in my Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie series. She also mentioned she was sending me a surprise. That always makes me feel like a kid. I tried to guess what was coming, but I wasn't even close. Look what I got:



Seed packets! Yeah -- Tor/Starscape is using seed packets to promote the fifth and final book in the series, Enter the Zombie. And yes, eagle eyes, Nathan is losing his head in the pi...

Output

I'm writing what looks to be a really bad short story right now. But I'm going to finish it, even though I suspect it won't improve all that much as I near the finish line. There are three reasons I'm going to keep going. First, I could be wrong. The story could surprise me and turn out being less than bad. Second, you can't revise a blank page (or screen). The right alchemy can turn crap to gold. It can't turn a vacuum into a summer breeze. Third, as many pepople have already stated,...

Safety tip

Since many of you will be celebrating the 4th of July by hosting parties and serving beverages, I figured I would pass along a safety tip. Be sure to rinse the Everclear bottle before you use it for bottle rockets.

Final thought on my current obsession (for now)

Okay -- I've been posting about some deep-discount book sales that have several peculiar aspects. (In brief -- the books have different ISBNs from other versions and they have recent or future release dates.) If these are actually overstocks or remainders, that's a fact of life and is something all writers have to accept. (I love browsing through overstock bins.) But if the publishers are intentionally printing and selling these books at an extremely deep discount, that is evil. It's per...

The plot sickens

I love looking for patterns and solving puzzles. Here's one I haven't cracked, yet. Check out this list of new teen releases, sorted by price. (I assume the list changes over time, but the pattern should still hold.) The first 61 of them (except, currently, for the first one, which doesn't have a price listed) are all offered for discounts of 70% to 88%. Each one has an ISBN starting with 9781615 or 9781616. Each is also available in the same format for a regular price with a different...

It's not just Penguin

Being a geek at heart (or at mind), I couldn't help playing around by checking ISBN numbers close to those of the deeply discounted books I posted about the other day. So I put one of the numbers into Google and started changing the last two digits. Imagine my surprise when a book popped up that was from another publisher, and happened to be written by a friend of mine. So the plot thickens. There are tons of deeply-discounted books listed for online sale, all with an ISBN number starrti...

Apparently 161 is the real number of the beast

I'm on the run, and don't have enough time to do a good job here, but I'll be posting more about this, and I'm hoping those of you who like sleuthing and puzzles will take a look at what is going on. I recenty noticed one of my books was listed on Barnes and Noble's web site at a deep discount. This isn't unusual. Hardcovers sometimes get discounted when the paperback releases. But this was something different, and it doesn't involve just me. It also involves books by John Green, Sara De...