Calum P. Cameron's Blog, page 2
December 24, 2013
Christmas Specials!
OK, well, my shameless publicity drive on the Book of the Face worked out, so you can all read my second annual Christmas Special short story here.
Also, I got bored and wrote a bonus Christmas Special of more ambiguous canonicity. That's here.
Tell your friends! And merry Christmas.
Calum P Cameron
The P stands for Presents
December 15, 2013
Who wants a Christmas Special?
Hey, do you guys remember the Christmas Special I wrote last year?
And did you know I was writing another one?
As it happens, you can read the first one again and learn how to unlock the second one by following this link.
Happy (and festive) reading!
Calum P Cameron
(The P stands for Phestive)
September 11, 2013
Reviewing the Situation
After weeks of doubtless-very-important corporate activities, Amazon has finally gotten around to adding a page for my second book (seen here accompanied by its best friend, my first book).
Of course, you can still buy both books from Lulu as well (the first one is even still free in eBook form over there), but this does give us one new way in which you can all chip in to help a struggling author without losing any money yourself:
REVIEWS.
Have you read the second book already? Go to Amazon, WRITE A REVIEW.
Have you not yet read the second book, but read the first one? Go to Amazon, WRITE A REVIEW. When you've finished reading the second one, go to Amazon, WRITE ANOTHER REVIEW.
Doesn't even have to be a very positive review. Be honest. Speak your mind. But please, all of you, go to Amazon, WRITE A REVIEW.
Reviews attract attention, attention increases sales, sales give me money, money allows me to survive, my survival is necessary for me to continue writing books to keep you lot entertained. Feel free to check my working, but I'm pretty sure everyone wins in that scenario.
Yours Pleadingly,
Calum P Cameron
(The P stands for PLEASE GO WRITE A REVIEW)
August 23, 2013
FREE eBook Month!
Do you like the look of the Mediochre Q Seth series, but not enough to risk buying it with actual money until you've had a chance to try it out?
Do you wish there was maybe some way to get the first book for free?
You, my friend, are in luck.
For the month of September 2013, as a sort of reverse birthday present from the author, eBook copies of 'The Good, the Bad and the Mediochre' will be available from Lulu.com FOR FREE.
So, this September, why not head over to Lulu, buy a copy of the first book, and then head across to Goodreads, Amazon or, heck, even Tvtropes when you're done to write a review and check out the sequel?
You have nothing to lose but the time it takes to read.
Yours Freely,
Calum P Cameron
(The P stands for Promotion)
August 22, 2013
BOOK TWO IS GO!
It's also available from this very site - see that "My Work" tab up there? Give it a look.
And it becomes available from Amazon on the 30th, God willing.
Please, everybody, spread the word with your magnificent word-spreading powers.
The countdown is now on for the release of Book III next year...
Yours Publishingly,
Calum P Cameron
(The P stands for Part II)
August 21, 2013
Publishing delays remind me of Joseph Campbell
OK, firstly:
REEEEEEEALLY sorry.
Second book shoulda been published by now. But things... happened.
The cover artist was off doing important research for his degree. I was recovering from health problems and also went off shaping the minds of a generation to my own villainous whims under the guise of Scripture Union activities. The publisher's been looking at other projects and doing, y'know, efficient publisher things, and couldn't get in contact with the other of two of us for a while.
But, good news: we've got it together now.
Seriously, literally in the earliest possible hours of this morning (or last night, depending which way you look at it) we managed to get all the pieces together and in the right place on the publisher's computery systems.
We ARE going to make the August publication date I promised. Just... later than planned.
So, please, don't give up now. We're so close to this thing that if it was a person it could justifiably hit us with a harassment lawsuit at this point.
On an entirely less relevant topic, though, the trials of getting this book published seemed oddly fitting in a meta kind of way when I recently considered my own work in the light of the Campbellian Monomyth (yeah, I do this kind of thing sometimes. It's very sad.)
The Campbellian Monomyth, less pretentiously (and more awesomely) called The Hero's Journey is arguably the oldest story in the world, from every culture simultaneously, because the idea is basically that there is one story - one sequence of events that satisfies the inherent desire for self-contained narrative which is a part of being human - on which every story about any hero ever is, with greater or lesser degrees of variation and subversion, based.
There's a hero, or a person who will become a hero. He (it's more often a he, but not always) recieves a call to adventure, which he doesn't want to leave his existing life for but one way or another has to. Some external source of help provides him with something he will need in order to complete the adventure ahead of him. He consciously crosses a threshold into the unknown. In his first true experience of the unknown world outside his comfort zone, he is overcome and forced to look inward, learning more about himself, his culture or his goals than he probably wanted. This gives him the ability to start fighting back, setting off down a narrative path where he mist overcome various trials. On the way, he comes to know true love and true temptation. Eventually he confronts the narrative's local symbol of power, and in doing so is able to atone, overcome his own ego and remove the last obstacles between himself and the goal of his quest. In a symbolic death and rebirth sequence, the hero's character development is completed and, in the climatic culmination of all that has gone before, the goal is finally acquired. His quest completed, the hero eventually decides or is compelled to return to his comfort zone (though that zone is inevitably slightly different now than it once was), bringing with him all that he has acquired on his quest for the betterment of himself and his peers, finding for himself a place in life where he feels he now belongs and implicitly living a content and enriched life from that point on.
That's a HUGE compression and generalisation of the full thing. Anyone who's actually read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" is probably really irritated by my oversimplification, but the basic points still stand.
If I think about it for any length of time, pretty much everything I've ever written can be viewed and explored through the lens of the Hero's Journey. I mean, that seems obvious, the whole point of the thing is that, if you make a satisfying story, it will probably end up looking a bit like the Hero's Journey, because that's the kind of story people find satisfying. But I find it kinda interesting to apply it to the Mediochre series, because from that point of view the series is serving a dual function: it details the Hero's Journey of Charlotte pretty-much from start to finish (except maybe without the reluctance to heed the call bit... and arguments could be made about how straight I'm playing some of the others), but at the same time it provides a very zoomed-in look at the Hero's Journey of Mediochre. As the series goes on I will be bringing in some more information about the start of Mediochre's journey and things will start to develop to bring him gradually closer to the end, but really the entire book series from Mediochre's point of view is set in that middle bit. The Road of Trials. Even more specifically, it really all deals with the experience of temptation. When we first meet him, Mediochre's seemingly already been through everything before that bit, having become an established and capable hero already, and these books are, from his point of view, the story of the obstacles he has to overcome in order to reach the point where he can complete his character development and, in a sense, go home.
I was only vaguely familiar with Campbell's work until recently, so I didn't notice all this until pretty-much yesterday. So it's kinda fitting that it was also yesterday that we as a publisher/author/artist team were able to finally overcome the current most immediate trial on OUR road to the end goal of finishing the series.
I don't doubt that, somewhere, God is nodding appreciatively at the fractality of his creation. Because God is totally a Joseph Campbell fan.
WOW, that's a geeky and rambling bunch of words I just dropped on you all.
TL;DR:
Second book published real soon, I PROMISE. In the meantime, go read The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Peace Out,
Calum P Cameron
Author With a Thousand Remarkably Similar Faces
July 6, 2013
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER
While cover art changes instantly on Lulu.com and all the Kindle versions update immediately, Amazon still takes a while to swap the cover art for the new one on all the hard copies it sells.
So if you want the new cover art, DO NOT BUY FROM AMAZON JUST YET.
Give it six weeks, or just buy it from http://www.lulu.com/shop/calum-p-came...
July 5, 2013
July 4, 2013
New Cover for Book One!
Behold the magnificence of Tristan Boyle's artistry! Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!
Not that I'm comparing my cover artist to Ozymandias, or anything.
Copies of 'The Good, the Bad and the Mediochre' with the brand new covers are available from Lulu.com for £6.99 as of tomorrow. 'Black, White and Shades of Mediochre' to follow in August.
June 30, 2013
Cover art
The wonderful people at my publisher's have seemingly found us a permanent signed-on cover artist at last, and pretty-much as I post this the cover art for the first two books is gradually being finished, ready for the August release date of Book II.
Tristan Boyle is a twentysomething student with a passion for his art, such that actually getting paid to do it seems to be a happy bonus, and he has some magnificently stylistic designs with a vaguely Celtic feel to them that fits well with the Scottish setting of the series (the guy's actually from Northern Ireland, so I guess there is a Celtic heritage thing going on somewhere...).
I understand that Tristan is open to commissions and whatnot, so if you're looking for an artist yourself, he can be contacted by email at boyle.tristan@gmail.com
As for the art itself, I'll release it on the site once it's finalised, but it looks pretty excellent to me and - to my mind - it fits the books perfectly in style, tone, and even colour scheme (there's a blue and ochre-red thing going on for Book I, for obvious reasons, and Book II has a nice black-and-white motif).
Perhaps the best thing is that I am now able to use any success I experience as a struggling young literary artist to boost the success of another artist in a similar position, and that's pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure someone somewhere once said that art was all about man's desire to benefit his fellow man or something equally pretentious and clever. And if nobody has ever said anything of the sort, well, I just did right there.
Good things are coming in August, my friends. Stay alert. Stay excited. Preferably also stay alive.
Yours Artistically,
Calum P Cameron
(The P stands for Picturesque)
