Curtis Edmonds's Blog, page 18

Markdown

Just so you’ll know, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY is on sale this week for 99 cents at your finer e-book establishments. I am doing a promo with two different e-mail lists (BookBub and EBookSoda) to try to get the word out about my novel.

Doing these promotions is an effective way to bring the book to a wider audience, but it costs me money. (If I sell 1oo e-books at the $3.99 price point, I make $300. If I sell a thousand e-books at the 99 cent price point, I make $300 too – the question is whether it’s easier to sell to a thousand people or a hundred people.)

Anyway, if you have a minute, and are on social media, and can mention the sale or something, that would be great. Or buy the book! That would be even better. Thanks.

Money: Income from One Year of Self-Publishing

A little over a year ago, I published my first novel, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, through my own imprint, Scary Hippopotamus Books. For the first six months of its existence, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY was Amazon-exclusive as an e-book through KDP Select. After that, I published versions on Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, and Apple. I published the print version through Amazon CreateSpace.

Over the course of the last year, the price has fluctuated – the e-book started out at $2.99 and is now at $3.99, and there have been a couple of 99-cent promotions and two free promotions. What this chart shows is what I’ve made in each month. I’m going to break out US sales from international sales in e-books, but I’m going to clump international sales because otherwise that’s a lot of zeros. I’ve sold maybe one international print book, so that all gets clumped together, too.

E-book “sales” also include books borrowed through the Kindle lending library for which I got money.

 



Month
Total E-books Sold (US)
Total E-books Sold (International)
Total Print Copies Sold
Total E-book Revenue (US)
Total E-book Revenue (Intern.)
Total Print Revenue (US)
Total Revenue


2/2013
10
0
1
$20.58
$0.00
$1.16
$21.74


3/2013
17
1
5
$34.42
$4.38
$4.64
$43.44


April KDP Select Free Promotion
17736
270
N/A
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00


4/2013
150
4
5
$306.46
$8.38
$5.80
$320.64


5/2013
77
1
4
$153.06
$2.19
$4.64
$159.89


6/2013
977
1
6
$356.88
$0.35
$6.96
$364.19


7/2013
263
0
1
$236.99
$0.00
$1.16
$238.15


August KDP Select Free Promotion
14238
415
N/A
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00


8/2013
51
4
1
$129.86
$5.10
$1.16
$136.12


9/2013
30
0
1
$72.59
$0.00
$1.16
$73.75


10/2013
6
0
0
$16.38
$0.00
$0.00
$16.38


11/2013
33
0
2
$63.88
$0.00
$2.32
$66.20


12/2013
6
0
0
$11.82
$0.00
$0.00
$11.82


1/2014
8
3
0
$21.56
$6.88
$0.00
$28.44


2/2014
12
0
0
$32.62
$0.00
$0.00
$32.62


TOTAL
1640
14
25
$1435.54
$20.40
$29.00
$1480.76

So, what does any of this mean?

I have given away twenty times more books than I have actually sold.
I have spent more this year promoting this book (and learning what promotions work and what promotions don’t) than I have earned writing it.
I have 109 reviews, which means that about less than 1% of the people who have bought the book have done a review (not counting giveaways, which means it’s MUCH less than 1%)
About 1100 people have this book on their to-be-read shelves at Goodreads, or about two-thirds of total sales. (My guess is that this is mostly people who have gotten a free version, or people who signed up for a giveaway and haven’t bothered to buy the book yet.
The poverty level in New Jersey is about $11,000 for 2013. I am not quitting my day job.
RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY is, as I write this, hovering at about #200,000 on the Amazon Kindle store sales rank, meaning what-I-don’t-know but it can’t be good for a lot of other independent books.

Am I going to keep on writing? Well, I have another book completed, and I’m going to see how it does, but if this is the best I can do, I’m not sure.

It’s Meatloaf Time, Recyclers

It is the dark midwinter. You have to put the recycling out, which involves placing the bucket on a very large snowdrift. You need sustenance if you’re going to do this. A terrific, tasty, meat-based substance that will provide you with the nutrition you need to get up Monday morning and SHOVEL ALL THE SNOW, because that’s what you’re going to do and stop whining. You hear me? STOP. It is going to be July before you know it. Quit sniveling and get in the kitchen, pronto.

We are going to make meatloaf. We are going to do this in the full knowledge that the meatloaf that we make won’t be very good. We are not going to make this meatloaf to win any Michelin stars. We are not going to make this meatloaf to make Tom Colicchio or Gordon Ramsay swoon with awe at our kitchen skills. We are going to make this meatloaf because it is going to free up some free space in our condiments shelf in the refrigerator. PERIOD. This is not good, quality meatloaf. This is not a recipe that is replicable. This is what you make when you’re literally running out of usable recipes. But we are going to do everything we can to make it tasty and delicious, because we are not animals. We are men. Men who eat meatloaf.

YOUR TASTY AND DELICIOUS MEATLOAF RECIPE

Turn the oven on to 350 degrees. Get your loaf pan off that high shelf that you put it on after you made all that cornbread for dressing for Thanksgiving. Get a stool if you need to. Get a big bowl to put your meatloaf fixin’s in. And, yes, we’re calling them “fixin’s.” If you don’t like it, move to Argentina and eat grass-fed steak every night, washed down with the local chablis. Hey! That doesn’t sound half bad!

(author does a Spanish DuoLingo level or two, just in case.)

The bare minimum requirements:

1 pound ground meat

1 egg

Okay. Take your ground meat and dump it in the big bowl. Break your egg over the bowl and then throw the eggshells away. If you want to say “The case is cracked” and take off your sunglasses like you’re in a bad CSI spinoff, go ahead, but I kind of wonder why you were wearing sunglasses inside, anyway.

The next thing to go in your bowl is your dry ingredients. The stuff that holds the loaf together. The undersung, underrated bit supporting player. And this can be whatever you want. That bag of croutons that’s been sitting in the back of the pantry ever since you stopped your diet? PERFECT. Smash the croutons down to atoms and drop them into the bowl. If you have premade bread crumbs, fine. Toss those in. Oatmeal? No reason why not. If all you have in the house is leftover white rice from the last Chinese takeout, that’s just fine. That’s in the spirit of the thing anyway. Throw it in there. French-fried onions left over from the Thanksgiving green-bean casserole? You know it.

Then your wet ingredients. The key with the wet ingredients is to do this right before the recycling truck comes, so you can toss everything into the recycling bin and it won’t stink up your garage. What you want to do is rank all the condiments in your fridge by volume, and whatever you have the least of, that’s what you throw in the meatloaf bowl…

(pause for effect)

As long as the condiments aren’t moldy, of course, and…

(pause for effect)

as long as they aren’t things like mayonnaise or ranch dressing that won’t play well in meatloaf.

Other than that? GO NUTS. Last few drops of worcestershire sauce? In you go, boys. Half an inch of A-1 sauce left? In the bowl. Salsa? HELL AND YES. India relish? Yes. Hoisin? Sweet and sour? A couple of packets of Taco Bell red sauce that have been sitting in your junk drawer since 2012? GET ‘ER DONE, SON.

Wash your hands. Mix it all up with your hands. Toss it in the loaf pan (you remembered to get that out when I told you to, right? RIGHT?). Flatten out the top a little bit. Then wash your hands again.

If you have any condiments left, pour ONE of them over the top of the loaf. I had two leftover bottles of red cocktail sauce when I did this last night, and that is probably ideal. But you can just do ketchup spiked with rooster sauce, or just plain barbecue sauce. Just get a nice coating on top.

Put it in the oven for an hour. (Where I live, that’s two on-demand Doc McStuffins episodes plus one Caillou episode, or a whole Sesame Street, depending on how much whining I want to put up with.) Take the loaf out of the oven, let it cool, make chicken nuggets for meatloaf-hating children, and you’re DONE, and you have meatloaf sandwiches for the rest of the week.

Eat. Savor. Feel the random condiments create a unique flavor profile on your tongue. Then go to bed early because you’re going to have to shovel in the morning. Damn winter, anyway.

Nashville Skyline: From The North Country

(N.B. – another review salvaged from the wreck of Epinions.com – this about a Bob Dylan album.)

The morning after Johnny Cash died, I was in my car, driving down to some corporate plaza in South Atlanta to do a training. I was wondering to myself about how long it would take the local country & western Top 40 station to decide whether or not it would actually, you know, play some Johnny Cash music to honor the Man in Black. It took them a while after they first acknowledged the announcement to rustle something up; meanwhile they stuck to their steady diet of Toby Keith and Shania Twain.

I had this mental image of the program managers turning their CD collections upside down, pawing past stacks of Lone Star and Rascal Flats discs, trying to find something, anything, that had a Johnny Cash song on it. And then, from back in some disused back office somewhere, they found a Johnny Cash CD, blew the dust off the cover, and sent out the soulful strains of Folsom Prison Blues to comfort and edify the people of North Georgia.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

There are lots of bad things you can say about the sort of people who select songs to play on your local country-music radio station — sleazy, trend-rubbing brutes, let’s say, or mindless, ratings-drunk Philistines — but you can just sum it up by saying that they won’t play another Johnny Cash record ever again, unless they’re somehow shamed into it.

And if they won’t play Johnny Cash on the radio, for the love of God, how long do you think it will take them to play Bob Dylan?

Maybe we had better not ask.

I can tell you the answer, anyway. I’ve been listening to country music on the radio for the better part of thirty years, and I have never, ever, not even once heard one single cut off Bob Dylan’s masterful Nashville Skyline over the airwaves. Listening to the CD now is like hearing about some long-lost family secret from thirty years ago for the first time — it’s something that just isn’t talked about among the country music family. The idea that, once, for a few weeks in 1963, Bob Dylan was a country-music singer, is more the stuff of legend and myth than anything else.

Part of the problem is the title. Nashville Skyline, of course, implies that one is standing outside Nashville, looking at the city from afar, silhouetted against the morning sunlight. Nashville Skyline is near Nashville, is about Nashville, but is never of Nashville. It sounds like what it is; an album by a talented musician trying to imitate, as best he can, the sounds of 1960′s country music. It’s a wonderful attempt, and it succeeds in doing everything but convincing the Nashville establishment that Dylan’s music deserved to be included in the country pantheon.

I do not set myself up as a music critic, and probably ought not to try. The following is more impressionism than criticism; take it for what it’s worth.

Dylan’s voice: The one reason casual Dylan fans will want to bother with Nashville Skyline as anything other than a curiosity is that Dylan sounds so different here. You can understand every word he says, for one thing. The usual tortured Dylan vocals aren’t anywhere to be heard; his voice rings out clear, but a little thin.

The lilt: Speaking of Dylan’s voice, he’s got a little lilt in it, here and there, which is problematic for a country singer. The lilt is most apparent in Tonight No Light Will Shine On Me, which is a perfectly written song, as bluesy and depressing as country music ought to be. But there’s a huge contrast between the lightness in Dylan’s tone and the darkness of the song – it really needs more of a George Jones baritone growl to it that Dylan can’t get. (The lilt works perfectly for the upbeat and innocuous Country Pie, the weakest song on the album.)

The music: Lots and lots of steel guitar, with occasional piano in the background. Could use a fiddle or two for accompaniment here and there.

The songwriting: Nashville Skyline shows Dylan at his best as a songwriter; he’s trying a lot of different C&W genres here, and does them all effectively. There’s the usual excursion into dumb wordplay (“love to spend the night with Peggy Day”), an inane novelty song or two, a couple of lost-love songs, an instrumental, even. Lay Lady Lay is probably the best song on the album, slow and sexy.

The Man in Black: The first track on Nashville Skyline is something of a folk song; Girl From The North Country, a Minnesotan version of “Scarborough Faire”. Johnny Cash pitches in a verse or two, and sings in an oddly timed duet with Dylan; the two men’s voices are just ever so slightly out of phase.

I mention Cash at the last there because his voice is the one bit on the album that sounds authentically Nashville; he shows why Dylan’s effort fell short as it did, and why we don’t have any further efforts from him in this arena. Cash is the real deal; Dylan is the outsider looking in, the man from the North Country who approaches Nashville from the outside, but can’t find his way in.

Still, despite these traces of inauthenticity, Nashville Skyline is well worth a listen, and is superior to a good bit of what was really coming out of Nashville in the 1960′s as it is. It’s not a perfect country album, but sincere efforts like this ought not to go unrewarded. As the glories of music past sink down the memory hole of the Top Forty programmers, Nashville Skyline is a necessary reminder of everything else they’re missing by turning their backs on our great country music heritage.

Live in Aught-Three: Distortion, But In A Good Way

(N.B.: This is a review of a James McMurtry album I wrote from the old Epinions site–they are tearing the site down, and there are a couple of odds and ends that I wanted preserved for no particular reason. I am letting most of the content go, but there are a couple of things that I wanted to keep, and this is as good of a place as any.)

The way that you write a review — some of you know this — is to tease it out. It’s there, already, inside your head, inchoate, waiting to appear on the screen or on the paper or whatever medium you choose, holy, and singular, like one of the Platonic forms. It may not come out of your head in just that way, since the process is what it is, but what would you be if you didn’t try? (You have to try.)

If you’re lucky, everything will spill out at once, in a torrent, and all you have to do is sit back and watch for typos. That doesn’t happen often. No, what you generally have to do is grab hold of a slender thread, something to pull on, some way to get a purchase, and hope that the rest of the review will follow, unrolling slowly. Sometime it’s a fragile thread, and it breaks, scattering bits of metaphor everywhere. Sometimes it’s like a fifty-pound test line of meaning, thin, but strong, pulling everything along like pulling a shiny, wet, silver catfish into a boat. (There are two different fishing references in Live in Aught-Three, but that’s not the right line to use.)

Sometimes, what you get is a thick cord, and that’s what you want, because you can wind other thoughts and feelings and ideas around it. The really thick cord won’t break under the weight of the review, won’t snap in the middle of the process, making you start over.

Which might not, the way things are going, be such a bad idea. Stay with it, though.

The word you have to start with in Live in Aught-Three is distortion, but in a good way. I do not here talk about factual distortion or anything like that, but the sort of rough edges on guitar riffs and suchlike that gets smoothed out in a recording studio. This is a live album, and proudly so. (It is largely free of audience reaction, for some reason; this isn’t a Robert Earl Keen concert with five hundred half-drunk Texan expatriates in the audience who know every single word, and sing along, off-key.) Part of that is the harshness of McMurtry’s growly baritone, part of that is the thunder of the electric guitar, and part of it is just the way that the sound system in a small club sounds on a Friday night.)

Most of the songs, but not all of them, are on McMurtry’s previous album, St. Mary of the Woods; it’s a good mix. Choctaw Bingo is really the only loser in this group, even though it’s got the most infectious beat going. It’s repetitive, and too long, and repetitive, and it’s also the only one you won’t ever hear on the radio, not even in the alternate universe where I am Supreme Director of Programming for Clear Channel Worldwide; there’s just too much stuff about guns and graft and crystal methamphetamine going on. Red Dress is not one of my favorites; it’s a solid enough song but there’s a vicious undercurrent to that I don’t like. The title track, St. Mary of the Woods, is on here, and it sounds quite a bit different than its studio counterpart; maybe the first hint that this is going to be a little bit of a different sound — while, at the same time, being every bit as good as the original, which is all you could ask for. (The songwriting never changes, you see, and McMurtry is the most literate and literary of the y’allternative crowd.) The last of the last-album songs is Out Here in the Middle, which sounds awfully different from the REK version on his last album; it’s much darker and dryer here, with an authentic sense of loss and longing.

For the rest of the album, you have things like No More Buffalo and Levelland, which are classic McMurtry tunes. (Lights of Cheyenne is in this category, even though it’s the only new song on the album.) It may be — unlikely, if you have read this far — that you’re not overly familiar with the basic James McMurtry catalog, which would be a shame if true. McMurtry, musically, has what might be called the High Plains outlook; spare, bleak, minimalist, with an undercurrent of bleakness and sorrow and regret running through everything, short and simple words punched through with an aggressive beat and an electric guitar. Levelland is like that; it’s about the depression of living in a West Texas prairie town, and the impossibility of escaping anywhere when you’d show up like a fly on a plate before you got ten miles out of town:

And I watch those jet trails carving up that big blue sky

Coast to coasters watch ‘em go

And I never would blame ‘em one damn bit

If they never looked down on this

Not much here they’d wanna know

Delivered, of course, with more than its fair share of distortion, and accompanied by a sardonic reminder that the song was not, in fact, written by the aforementioned REK.

Paradoxically, the jauntiest song on the album is the only cover; McMurtry takes on Townes Van Zandt’s Rex’s Blues, which sounds like a dirge when Guy Clark does it (beautifully, I might add) but does it up-tempo and with any hint of sorrow buried in the distortion.

I suppose, for me, the highlight of the whole piece is Rachel’s Song, which sounds simple but isn’t; the narrator is the abandoned wife of a runaway drifter trying to manage her soon-to-be-wayward teenage son and her own drinking problem, and you’d wonder why it’s such a great song based on that description. I can only say that it is because it is about my plight, and yours, and while it differs in its specifics it is right on about the tone:

I’m all alone

It’s all right

Isn’t gonna wound my pride

If anyone can say

They’re all right

So can I

And there you have it, clear as clear can be, despite the distortion everywhere around us. Live in Aught-Three is what you should be listening to, even though you don’t know it yet.

Design for Happiness

I have posted a Kindle version of a book written in 1961 by my grandfather, William V. Myres, on Amazon. The book is called Design for Happiness, and it’s only 99 cents. I’ll write about it more a little later, but here’s the link.

The Price You Pay

Before you read anything I’ve written in this space, take a look at the piece Teddy Wayne has in McSweeney’s today. I won’t excerpt it here, because it’s that short and you can read it yourself. If you don’t want to take the time, it’s a riff on the cliche that “every man has his price,” and Wayne is essentially pointing out that since he’s never gotten any money from McSweeney’s, his price must be exceptionally low.

I came away from the piece with two initial thoughts. One is that I don’t understand why McSweeney’s agreed to publish it. I’ve authored or co-authored ten pieces for McSweeney’s since 2008, and I’ve had at least that number rejected, so I have a good idea about what their editorial policies are. (And, of course, I haven’t been paid a nickel for my efforts, same as Wayne.)

One thing that McSweeney’s seems to avoid is the self-referential. You’ll never see the site poking fun at its own quirks, which is why The Onion gets to do it. One of the few substantive edits I’ve ever gotten was a joke about people reading McSweeney’s at work; it was accompanied with a gentle reminder that such antics were perhaps more suited for Yankee Pot Roast. I got the point.

But Wayne’s piece isn’t just self-referential, it’s critical. He hasn’t gotten paid by McSweeney’s. Neither have I. The only way to get paid that I know about is to win the columnist contest, and that seems to me to be a piddling amount of money for the effort that you’d have to put in to it. (I applied one time, pitching a series about horrible lunch destinations in the greater Trenton, New Jersey area; they didn’t bite.) Wayne suggests that a minimum payment of $5 per piece would be “insulting.” I wouldn’t go that far; I wouldn’t be insulted by a $5 payment, although dealing with the resulting 1099 would be far more trouble than it was worth.

The other thought was that Wayne is just trolling people for reactions. His complaint about the wretched plight of the male midlist author is a classic of the genre. If Wayne is just trolling for the sake of trolling, that would explain what he’s doing, I guess, although I don’t know what he gets out of it or why McSweeney’s is letting him do it.

But does Wayne have a point?

I don’t think so, and I think I know why, and it doesn’t have anything to do with McSweeney’s or Teddy Wayne or Dave Eggers. It has to do with me. I am cheap. I am absolutely not willing to pay anything to McSweeney’s for the stuff I read online. I don’t subscribe to their print publications (not because they aren’t good or because I can’t afford it but because I have a ridiculous amount of other stuff I’d like to read that I don’t have time to read now). And there are a lot of other people like me. I would guess that we’re in the majority. As long as most people won’t pay to read McSweeney’s (and they won’t), and as long as McSweeney’s won’t take outside advertising (and they haven’t), there isn’t any money to pay writers. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable conclusion.

And it’s not as though simply spending time writing stuff entitles you to get paid for it. I am not going to make a nickel off this little article, and there’s no reason why I should.

But does writing for McSweeney’s get you anything?

Honestly? I don’t know. I have the McSweeney’s name associated with everything that I think might help sell my book. I don’t know that it’s helped me any. It may give me a veneer of legitimacy, which you need as a self-published author. I don’t know. I do know that my friends are family are cordially sick and tired of me saying that I’ve gotten something new published, so there’s that.

I think I’ve gotten more out of McSweeney’s than they’ve gotten out of me, but it’s close either way. It’s more fun and less dangerous than coal mining, so there’s that. I’ve connected with some other talented writers who I wouldn’t have necessarily connected with before. I have paid a price, in time and creative energy, to be sure. But sometimes, you don’t pay the price. You enjoy the price.

What I can say is that there was a summer day, back in 2009, when my kids were babies, and for some reason I had a free day at home, and the time to write. It seemed like a miracle. I was racking my brain trying to think of something to make fun of, and I’d read one of those NYT travel pieces where they spend 36 hours in some exotic location like Paris or Bora Bora or Fort Worth, and that seemed ripe for parody–if I could find the right hook. “36 Hours in Bedrock?” A little too cartoony. “36 Hours in Winterfell?” A little too bloody. And I remember standing there, in my kitchen, in front of the big huge butcher block where I do the prep work, drinking a Coca-Cola Zero, and it hit me. “36 Hours on Tralfamadore.” It took me maybe an hour to write, and I sent it out, and it got published, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best and truest distillation of the way that you write for McSweeney’s. I wouldn’t trade that creative spark, and its ultimate expression on the site, for five dollars, or five hundred dollars.

Five thousand dollars, now you’re talking my language.

Rules For Going To Costco On a Saturday

1. You are not alone in this world. Actually, if you stopped reading this whole entire rant at this point, and just realized that “Hey, it’s true, I am not alone in this world,” I would be happy. Ecstatic, even, Thrilled beyond words. But people don’t do that, or at least they don’t do that at Costco on a Saturday. Case in point. I had survived all of the numerous indignities and annoyances that are concomitant with a Saturday Costco trip, and I was waiting in line, and the couple ahead of me in line had put all their stuff on the conveyor belt, and that meant that it was my turn to start putting my stuff on the conveyor belt, but I couldn’t, because this woman was standing right in front of the conveyor belt for no good reason. So I said, as nicely as I could, “Excuse me,” and she realized what she had done and apologized. But think about just how self-absorbed you have to be not to realize that, on a Saturday at Costco, somebody might be in line behind you? I mean, honestly.

2. Your IQ drops fifty points every time you walk into Costco. Our ancestors were prehistoric hunter-gatherers once, and Costco is all about hunting and gathering. It is a place for the reptile brain to shine. You’re going to make stupid decisions like paying thirty dollars for a box full of fried cheese. But it doesn’t just happen to you, it happens to everybody, and that means two things. One is to show consideration to other people (in accordance with #1 above), and the other is…

3. WATCH WHERE YOU ARE GOING. WATCH. WHERE. YOU. ARE. GOING. This is not just a rule for Costco. It’s a rule for airports. It’s a rule for grocery stores. It’s a rule for driving your car on the highway. But it applies double at Costco, which, on any given Saturday, is filled to the rafters with people who are not watching where they are going. You are driving a big, heavy cart loaded down with Kirkland Fruit Chews and paper towels and pork chops in an environment with hundreds of other people, all driving big, heavy carts full of discount-priced bulk. You cannot–you cannot–just stand in the middle of a heavily-trafficked aisle and stare off into the distance like you were on a peak in Darien and staring at the wonder of the Pacific Ocean. WATCH WHERE YOU ARE GOING.

4. Be a shark. Sharks move or they die. Sharks don’t stand still. You know what stands still? Shrimp stand still, and sharks eat shrimp, and Costco shoppers are not going to put up with you if you stand in front of the frozen shrimp and squat there, talking on the phone, or staring off into some other freezer case wondering what the difference between the regular tilapia and the panko-crusted tilapia is. MOVE. Don’t just stand around.

5. Do not block aisles and doorways. This sounds like I am repeating myself. If you watch where you’re going, and if you keep moving, you won’t block aisles and doorways. And yet, people still block aisles and doorways. I often say that there’s a special place in Hell for people who constantly, stupidly block exits–and it’s right by the exit. I am not saying you have to be a rocket scientist to go to Costco, but if you had the common sense and situational awareness that God gave dung beetles, at least you wouldn’t park your cart in the middle of the doorway to the refrigerated room where the milk is. And yet, this happens all the time.

6. Don’t get the food. I don’t care what it is that they’re giving free samples of. They’re doing it in a heavily-trafficked spot. If you stand around, with your cart, waiting for a free sample of ranch dressing, you are going to be in my way or someone else’s. That is really just another way of saying that you should know your store’s layout. Know where the bottlenecks are and whether you are going to be causing people problems by lingering in one spot or another. And, for God’s sake, have your receipt in your hands and ready to hand to the person when it’s time to leave.

7. If you break any of these rules–and probably, you will, at least be embarrassed about it when you get caught. Apologize. Realize that we’re all in this together, that nobody really wants to spend their Saturday in Costco trapped in a large building full of food with a couple of hundred feral hunter-gatherers. Be nice. Watch your kids, and tell them to watch where they’re going.

Thor Slaymaster’s Snowbound Angel

“It’s called a polar vortex, Mr. Slaymaster.”

Thor Slaymaster grunted. Thor Slaymaster liked cold weather, the way that he liked beer and nachos and hot alien women. Zombies were easier to kill in cold weather. The shapeshifter aliens were easier to spot, as the mist from their breath tended to glow in a pale lavender color. And Thor Slaymaster’s hot alien girlfriend positively hated cold weather, and wanted to spend every cold day wrapped up in blankets with a warm body beside her.

But the snow made the roadways impassable, and the winds made the helicopter unflyable, and Thor Slaymaster was restless. Beer and nachos and sex had fulfilled his basic requirements, but he hadn’t killed anything in days and the forced inactivity wore on his nerves.

“Has everything shut down?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

Terry bit his lip and stared at his monitors. “Everything’s still quiet, Mr. Slaymaster. Air traffic is shut down. All the bad guys are stuck inside drinking hot chocolate. Only thing running is the subway.”

“Then that is where I must go.”

“Why?”

“Revenge,” Thor Slaymaster said.

___

Down in the tunnels, deep beneath the city, there lived an angel. Thor Slaymaster had seen her once, and she had defeated him. But he was still alive, and it was a good day for revenge.

Thor Slaymaster had no idea who she was or even if she was still alive. She had attacked him after he had agreed to help relocate the local mutant community to a new housing project in Baltimore. The mutants had moved willingly, and were rapidly gentrifying a bombed-out sector of the city. But the angel had not reappeared, and Thor Slaymaster had been bogged down with a zombie uprising in Miami and had not been able to track her down. He reasoned that she was likely a mutant herself, and had stayed behind in the tunnels. It was a decent place to start.

Thor Slaymaster took the subway to the end of the Green Line and went exploring down the far end of the tunnel. The area where the mutants had been looked like a beehive without the bees. There was a startling assortment of earthmovers and tunneling equipment everywhere, but all the workers were home due to the freezing weather.

Thor Slaymaster trudged through the mess left by the construction crews until he came to the place where the new station was being prepared. He saw the woman with the angel wings and the dead-white mask standing on the platform, as though she was waiting for the next train.

“Thor Slaymaster,” she said. “Predictable.”

“As predictable as me finding you here.”

“Have you come to gloat over your triumph?” the angel asked.

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said.

Thor Slaymaster was talented, athletic, and deadly, but certain things were not part of his skillset, and leaping was one of them. He had no more chance of leaping six feet off the railbed to confront the angel standing on the platform than he did of, well, growing wings. He thought about taking a shotgun from out of his over-the-shoulder harness and just blasting the angel into the next world. But Thor didn’t know what defenses the angel had against such an attack–she could be a shapeshifter, or another kind of alien altogether with unguessable powers. And the revenge he truly wanted was to wrap the angel’s whip around her throat and squeeze.

“You have a mission,” the angel said. “So did I, once.”

“Everyone knows my origin story,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I did not come down here to listen to yours. If you want to defeat me, here I am.”

“And give up my strategic advantage? If you want your revenge, come and get it. Don’t think you can taunt me into coming down there, either.”

The only reason that Thor Slaymaster was still alive was his ability to recognize and exploit the weaknesses in the strategies of others. He searched his mind for anything that could give him an advantage. He could fetch one of the construction machines waiting down the track, but they would be slow and he would be a sitting target. He could approach the subway platform from above, but the angel would be ready for such a tactic. There were no ramps or ladders or jetpacks lying around.

“You showed wisdom in dealing with the mutants,” the angel said. “Show wisdom now, and leave this place.”

Thor Slaymaster said nothing.

“I will not harm you. I would even give you some hot chocolate if you wanted some. It is cold, even down here, and far too windy for me to fly.”

Thor Slaymaster said nothing.

“Ah, the famous Thor Slaymaster silent treatment. Let me ask you this, silent man. Why did you come down here? It wasn’t for revenge.”

“Revenge,” Thor Slaymaster said, “is a dish best served cold.”

“That is an excuse,” the angel said. “An excuse made by incompetent or inefficient men. If vengeance works at all, it works when it is sudden and bloody and violent and unrestrained. You know this, in your heart, and yet you did not seek vengeance against me until now. Why?”

“My duties lie elsewhere,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Then I give you a blessing,” the angel said. “And, as is traditional, a curse. Do your duty. Fight the monsters and aliens that infest this world. Protect the innocent where you can, and fight ruthlessly where you can’t. When you are done with your duties, and if you still want revenge, then meet me here. I will be waiting.”

___

“Back so soon?” Charlie said. She was still in bed, wrapped up against the chill. Thor Slaymaster thought he saw a small movement in her lower body, under the thick covers, that might have been her tentacles.

“Yes,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“That didn’t take long,” she said.

“Duty called,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Zombies?” Charlie asked.

“Something more important,” Thor Slaymaster said. He flipped the covers back. He had been right about the tentacles.

A Sense Of Where You Are

There are a couple of things I want to tell people, and, well, you know, if there’s a better way of telling people things than a blog post on an obscure vanity website, well, I don’t know what that is. So here goes.

1. The good news first: I have completed the first draft of my next novel, tentatively titled WREATHED, and have, like, totally started the initial editing process. I am not saying a great deal about it now, other than to say that it’s a contemporary romance, that it’s set in New Jersey, and that it’s very loosely based on a George Jones song. I have to run through and copy-edit it (that shouldn’t take too long), and then I want to go through it line-by-line and make whatever changes need to be made, and then hire a real editor (probably the one I used for RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY) and then it’ll be good. What I will probably end up doing is querying at least a few agents and seeing what kind of response I get, and if that doesn’t work out, self-publish again. If I go that route, it’ll probably be out before the end of the year, maybe as early as September. At which point, if you’re reading this, I will badger you to buy it and to tell your friends, because that’s how I roll.

2. Sales for RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY have gone a bit stagnant, not to say nonexistent, mostly because I’ve put my energies into finishing WREATHED and not promoting the book that’s actually available for people to buy. My bad. So I’m doing some marketing stuff — setting up a new website, for one thing, and I’m doing a Goodreads giveaway (details below) and I’ll probably do some sort of limited-time price cut at some point.

Thanks if you’ve read this far.

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Rain on Your Wedding Day
by Curtis Edmonds

Giveaway ends January 22, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win