Rebecca Jones-Howe's Blog, page 20

VILE MEN Now Out!

VILE MEN has been officially released today.

Hooray! Hurrah!

Some of you may have already received your copies if you pre-ordered the book from Amazon (because they get to do whatever they want).

Head on over to the VILE MEN page of the site, which features advance praise, links to order a copy, as well as graphic (as in, “photo” graphic, not “graphic” graphic) excerpts.

Also, feel free share a shot of the book, or you and the book, or the book in your natural reading environment — be it bed or comfy chair or bus or workplace break room — with me on Twitter.

Lastly, if you read the book and like it or hate it or feel the most ambivalent you can about the book, I’d love for you to give it your honest review on Goodreads and Amazon.

Like any freshly-published author, I’ve been checking both obsessively. I’ve got gin and cranberry juice waiting in my kitchen for the positive reviews, and I’ve got the best comeback of all time ready on YouTube for all the negative ones, so give me what you’ve got.

Vile Men Promo Cards

I’ve got some events in my hometown of Kamloops set up for the near future, so I figured I’d get my promotional stuff in the works, the first of which are my business card/bookmark quote graphics, which I had printed with MOO.

The nice thing about MOO printing is that a majority of their products are double-sided, which means you can have information on one side of the card, and a photo on the back. MOO also allows you to select different images for the back of each card, so each one is different. I put my “Sexy Hipster Graphics” to use and ordered a sample pack of 10 cards (and paid the small fee to have the MOO logo removed from each card) just to see how the low-contrast of my images would print.

Turns out, the print quality is fantastic. I went with a matte finish on MOO’s original business card and here are the results:

I’ve got 50 designs in the works for giving out at signings and other events. I also have this handy referral code for 10% off any product at MOO.

Test

Test post of postiness!

Vile Men Release Date

VILE MEN now has an official release date of September 8th, 2015.

A few kinks needed to be worked out, but the book is at the press and being printed as I write and as you read. Nevertheless, it’ll be in your hot little hands before you know it, unless you haven’t yet pre-ordered your copy. Fear not! You can do so at Amazon.

Gearing Up for Vile Men

You’ve probably noticed the changes to the site. With Vile Men wrapped up and sent to the printers, I figured it’s about time I get serious and organize things. Now it’s less blog and more author seriousness, which is fine because I didn’t blog much anyway.

I’ve spent the last few weeks working with Richard Thomas and Dark House Press on getting Vile Men completed, so now that we’re in pre-release phase, here are some great updates:

– I’ve set up a page for Vile Men with contains blurbs, links to purchase, and excerpts. I’ll be keeping it updated with anything new I decide to persue, so keep checking back.

– Vile Men now has a Facebook page, which you should go and like, because then you can have all the updates right on your Facebook feed.

– Dark House Press is currently giving away ten copies of the collection on Goodreads from now until August 1st. The giveaway is open to the US and Canada, so head on over and enter! (You’ll need a Goodreads account to do so, however.)

– Lastly, if you haven’t pre-ordered Vile Men, you can do so at Amazon!

EXIGENCIES is Out!

Amazon has released Exigencies early, so now you can buy yourself a physical copy. The ebook version will be released soon.

Also, if you’re keen, make sure to leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads!

 

“These pages house some of the most exciting writers you’ve never heard of—yet. They make the mundane terrifying, the poignant macabre, the violent touching. The only thing you won’t find is the expected, because these stories will move the ground beneath your feet. Brace yourself.”



— Nik Korpon, author of Stay God

Exigencies Preview

It’s been quite some time since I’ve last published an original story. Luckily the wait for new work to see the light of day isn’t long.

I have a story called “Cat Calls” featured in the Exigencies anthology. Exigencies is the second anthology of neo-noir fiction from Dark House Press. While The New Black was a “best-of” collection, Exigencies is an anthology of all new fiction from a number of authors whose work I admire, including Letita Trent, W. P. Johnson, David James Keaton, Amanda Gowin and plenty more.

The book’s layout is pretty stellar. Here’s a preview and excerpt of my story, which takes place predominately on Vancouver’s Expo Skytrain line.

For more news on the anthology, including other excerpts and early reviews, you can follow the Exigencies page on Facebook. You can also pre-order the anthology on Amazon.

 

It’s About Time

For the longest time I’ve been fooling myself into thinking that I could design my own layout. Granted, the one I was using might have looked nice, but the proof of my shitty coding skills were lurking like termites behind all the hipster graphics.

So I’ve deleted my old WordPress database and started anew with a fresh theme that actually supports widgets and plugins and can be customized within the confines of WordPress instead of me going into the depths of my unorganized text files upon which I built my crappy, crappy website.

Over the coming days I’ll be refreshing my bio and writing and links, so bear with me.

Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up to No Good

A couple years back I wrote a zombie story called “Better Places”. Said zombie story appeared in Pulp Modern #4, which is currently selling for $999.11 on Amazon, so clearly it’s a really, really great story for that kind of dolla dolla bills.

Nevertheless, while you might not be able to get your hands on the obscurity that is a back-issue of an obscure pulp lit mag, you can now get your hands on “Better Places” in Choose Wisely, an anthology of stories written by women who Upper Rubber Boot Books claims are “Up to No Good”.

Getting this reprint was kind of huge for me, because it meant that my story would be included alongside a tale penned by none other than Joyce Carol Oates. As in, one of my favourite literary dames, Joyce Carol Oates. As in, the author of that story you probably had to study in college, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. Yeah, that Joyce Carol Oates.

So anyway, check out my story, along with others by Jessica McHugh, Emily Slaney, xTx, Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter and more in Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up to No Good:

My Other Endeavors

To be entirely honest, I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. Actually, to be entirely correct, I HAVE been conjuring up ideas for my first novel, and I have Scrivener perpetually open on my computer to collect whatever ideas stream into my head while I’m spending day after day with a newborn. Most of my life is clutter right now, but every so often the voice of my protagonist filters in and I feel a little bit like I used to when I was penning the stories I wrote for VILE MEN.

Something I’ve realized over the past couple months of not working was how much my job was stifling my creativity. I loved my warehouse job. I did it well during my pregnancy. I loved getting up early and taking the bus to work in the early morning. I loved clocking out in the mid-afternoon and going home, cooking dinner, having my bath and spending a few hours with the husband. The problem was that that kind of consistency really clogged up all my chances to ever think of characters and stories and plots. Nothing was ever speaking to me but the drive to GET STUFF DONE.

Since Maggie entered my life, though, she’s put a big wrench into the way I had things going. It’s taken a while to really get used to it, but I’m doing okay at this whole parenting role, at least with the newborn stage. That all said, while I’ve slowly been integrating writing back into my life, I’ve also been doing a heavy dose of crocheting, which is a craft I picked up several years ago and would drift in and out of from time to time. I’ve always wondered how to juggle my writing and my crafts, and how I would really integrate both on my website (which was started to endorse my writing). I never posted my crafts because they were always something I’d debated perusing as a business, only I never had the time to devote to it. Cut to this year. My sister and I are currently working on building up a little craft business called Hound&Tooth.

I’d ideally like to keep my writing blog and my crafting blog as separate entities, but I’m not sure how to endorse my crafts when all my online profiles (Twitter, Instagram, etc.) point to this domain. I want to sell my crafts, though, because I’m more likely to pull off making cash from crafting as opposed to writing, but writing is in my bones and blood and I can’t ever give that up. Yet, I’d like to not have to go back to work when my maternity leave ends, so, you see my issue here?

Clearly I just need to start an about.me page. I have one, I’ve just never used it. And now, I have a reason to. So there’s yet another project I have to add to my list of shit to accomplish.

In the meantime, here’s a bit of a peek of what I’m doing instead: