Dane Cobain's Blog, page 35

Buy My Book!

Hey please buy my book

and tell your friends about it,

read it, review it, have bad dreams

and repeat it,

next time my new book comes out.

 

I’ve got books for all ages,

supernatural thrillers where Angels are killers

and deliver us from evil,

poetry books for ages eighteen plus,

come to fuck things up

and put ’em back together again.

 

Literary fiction novels

about social networking sites;

non-fiction books

about social networking sites;

detective novels

about murderers

and social networking sites.

 

Reference books,

handbooks for lexicologists,

university notes,

journals and

short stories;

song lyrics,

chords and albums,

three so far

and more coming soon.

 

Seriously

buy my books,

I need my royalties

to pay my rent;

books from publishers

or self-released

and sold on Amazon.

 

A writer needs a reader

like a teacher needs a student;

please people study me

and learn things.

A Quick Update: What’s Next for my Books!

Hi, folks! Today, I just wanted to post a quick update to let you know what’s next for me and my books. Now that my publisher, Booktrope, has announced its closure at the end of May, the rights to my books revert to me, which means that in the short-term, I need to republish No Rest for the Wicked, my supernatural thriller, and Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home, my book of poetry, through CreateSpace.

I’m planning on getting that done as soon as the rights revert to me so that there’ll be hardly any (if any) disruption to the Amazon pages. However, if you want to read the Booktrope version of either of those then now is a good time to grab them!

Meanwhile, I’m also working on releasing Former.ly, my literary fiction novel about the rise and fall of a social networking site. I designed a cover for that and I’m working on the layout and the final edit of it as we speak – it’s due for release on June 11th, and I’m currently trying to build up momentum ahead of the launch with a Thunderclap. Please do click here to support that!

 

 

After that, I have no shortage of releases to look forward to – in fact, I’m planning on aiming to release a book every two months after Former.ly for the forseeable future. That’s because I have two sources for my material – republished versions of old books, and new books that I was working on and was planning on releasing via Booktrope.

Let’s look at the new projects first. After Former.ly, I’ve got a non-fiction book called Social Paranoia: How Consumers and Brands Can Stay Safe in a Connected World. That will be followed up with Come On Up to the House, a horror screenplay and novella, and then by the Leipfold series of detective novels, that I’m currently working on developing.

I’ve also got a bunch of old projects to republish – I’d self-published twelve books before Booktrope released No Rest for the Wicked, although they were only available as paperbacks through me. Now, I’ll be going back through some of the older projects and reworking them for proper publication.

 

 

Those projects include The Lexicologist’s Handbook, which is a dictionary of unusual and obscure words, Inverted Commas, a collection of quotations, and Oceanus, a book of experimental poetry based upon the Wikipedia page for the Titanic which was live 100 years to the second after the great ship hit the iceberg.

All in all, there’s a lot to be done, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. As always, I really appreciate your support – be sure to check out No Rest for the Wicked and Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home if you’re curious, or to follow me on Facebook and Twitter for further updates. I’ll see you soon!

Cover Reveal: Former.ly by Dane Cobain

Hi, folks! Today is an exciting day – it’s cover reveal for Former.ly, my upcoming literary fiction novel! Read on to find out more about the cover and to learn more about the book.

 

 

Now, you might not be aware of this yet, but there’s been a change in my publishing circumstances – Booktrope, my publisher, is going out of business, and so Former.ly will be self-published. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the manuscript had already been edited and was ready to go, and it’ll still be out from the usual outlets and in the usual formats.

The upshot of this was that I had to design my own cover, although I did take some elements from the work that Michelle Fairbanks, my cover designer, had put into early concepts. Still, what you’re seeing is what I came up with – I’m pretty proud of it!

 

 

Former.ly is a literary fiction novel that charts the rise and fall of a social networking site for the dead. Users sign up to the site and populate their profile with updates which are visible only to them, until they die and their site goes live to the world, often with unexpected consequences.

The book is due out on June 11th 2016 and will be available in paperback and e-book formats from all major online retailers. But I need your help! I’ve set up a Thunderclap to help promote the book, and I need people to help out by supporting it.

Thunderclap is like Kickstarter for social sharing – if I can get 100 people to sign up to support me with a share or a retweet, the messages will all go out on launch day and help me to generate a huge amount of publicity. So please click here to support it!

 

 

Thanks, as always, for your support, and be sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter for further updates. You can also click here to check out No Rest for the Wicked, my supernatural thriller, and Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home, my collection of poetry. I’ll see you soon!

Animals

The problem with people

is that they don’t behave

like animals;

 

animals are loyal

and fiercely passionate;

they know what they want

and they take it,

and have hearts that beat

but don’t break.

 

I’m one of the people,

which means I don’t know what I want

but I know that I don’t want this.

 

I get up every day

to do work that I hate

to get paid,

so I can live to work

another day.

 

It bothers me

that no-one stops to ask themselves,

“Why?”

 

I mean I get that we’re wired

for survival,

but I don’t see why I should bust my balls

for a cause I don’t believe in.

 

I’d rather admit life is shit

and try to fix it

than to live

in blissful ignorance.

 

See I’m kind of like the weather

whether I like it or not –

sometimes you get a good forecast

and they get it wrong,

and I can start raining

at the drop of a hat.

 

All I’m saying is

I’d rather be a cow in a slaughterhouse

than a butcher with three kids

and a mortgage.

An Important Announcement About the Future

Hi, folks! Today, I’m writing with a heavy heart – it’s been announced that my publisher, Booktrope, is closing its doors, and so as of May 31st, my two books – No Rest for the Wicked and Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home – will no longer be available.

It’s good news and it’s bad news – there’s a lot of fallout to deal with, and the first thing that I need to think about is getting the books back out on the market. Annoyingly, the day before the announcement, I spent the day coming up with new marketing campaigns – unfortunately, without a book to promote, the campaigns are useless.

This isn’t the end – far from it. In fact, I’d self-published almost a dozen books before I was picked up by Booktrope, I just didn’t bother trying to sell them because I wasn’t happy with them. But now, I’ve learned a lot from Booktrope, and so even if I do self-publish my books in the future, I’ll at least have a decent idea of what work needs to go into it.

It’s a sad time, and it’s going to cause a lot of extra work for me, but I’m trying to stay positive about it. It’s hard – it took me six years to get my first book deal, and I’m hoping that it won’t take me another six years to get my next one. And in the meantime, I’ll be trying to get the books back online and in print.

All that said, if you want to buy a copy of one of my books then now’s the time – they’ll only be available in their current form until May 31st. Click here to check out No Rest for the Wicked, or click here to take a look at Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home. It’s been emotional.

New Song: Sober

Hi, folks! Today, I wanted to post a quick update to let you know about a new song that I wrote. It’s a tune called ‘Sober’, and interestingly enough, I wasn’t sober when I wrote it and I wasn’t sober when I recorded it.

That said, it’s a lot of fun, and I’ll probably be using it on my upcoming, as yet untitled, third album. If you want to check it out, you can click here to listen to it on Soundcloud or check out the player below.

 

 

If you’d like to check out more of my music, my first two albums – Nocturne and Sketches – are available for free on Spotify. You can also check out some more of my music on YouTube.

And, if that isn’t enough, you can always follow me on Facebook and Twitter for further updates on everything from music and poetry to fiction, non-fiction and more. I’ll see you soon!

War

Wars are funny

when you think about it –

 

I mean,

you’re basically just

stabbing your neighbour in the face

with a bayonet,

because some guy you never met

decided his gods were better

than your gods.

 

Listen,

I understand World War II

because the Germans killed the Jews

in their tiny rooms,

and as a citizen of the world,

you can’t ignore this persecution.

 

World War I

had something to do with inflation

and the assassination

of some archduke,

or maybe a pop group.

 

World War III

will be fraught

with danger;

World War IV

will be fought

with sticks

and stones.

 

World War V

will be fine

‘cause there’ll be no-one alive

to fight it.

How to write bad poetry

Hi, folks. Today, I want to talk to you about bad poetry, because I’ve been reading a lot of it.

Now, you might already know that I run a book blog called SocialBookshelves.com. I get sent a lot of books to review, by a mixture of independent authors and internationally-renowned writers, and I work with everyone from PR agents and publicists to authors, managers and more.

I’m also one of the few bloggers who’s willing to read and review poetry. I read a lot of poetry, because I write a lot of poetry – in fact, my debut collection of poetry, Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home, was published by Booktrope in March of this year. I like to think I know a lot about it – at least, as much as anyone else does.

Which got me to thinking about bad poetry – what is it about some types of poetry that leaves a bad taste in my mouth? And then I realised, that there are a few different things that keep on cropping up:

#1: Forced rhyming structures: Nothing grinds my gears like poetry which is written to sound like poetry. Now, I don’t mind rhyming poetry, if it’s done well – what I don’t like is when someone writes a piece of rhyming poetry and forces rhymes by writing clunky sentences.

#2: Cliché: A lot of people write poems about what they think poems should be about – love and roses and shit. Poetry should be exciting and relatable – if it doesn’t tick both of these boxes then it’s just going to be overlooked in a sea of sameness.

#3: Passive voice: Always write in the active voice – ‘subject verb object‘, not ‘object verb subject‘. ‘John ate the ice cream’, and not ‘the ice cream was eaten by John’. Passive voice sucks and tends to make the poetry more wordy – with poetry, it’s more important than ever to be as succinct as possible.

For now, those are the three main things that I’ve spotted that keep on cropping up in bad poems, but this fits on top of all of the usual rules of writing. Just because you’re writing poetry, it doesn’t mean that the same rules of writing apply. Be smart, people – poetry is hard enough to sell as it is. Don’t make it even harder by writing bad work.

Detective Novel Character Profiles

Note: Hi, folks. Today, I’ve got something a little different for you – I thought it might be fun to share the character profiles that I’ve been creating for the detective novel that I’m working on. Read on to find out more!

 

James Leipfold 

Age: 44

Height: 5’6

Weight: 160 lbs

Bio: James is relatively short for a guy, and is somewhat stocky – he has short legs and a big chest, blue eyes and spiky ginger hair, with a receding hairline. He has worry lines on his forehead and is almost always frowning – he rarely smiles and almost never laughs. He’s usually clean shaven, unless he’s fallen off the wagon, and he wears a three-piece suit with no tie and his top button pen.

He has a dark past full of secrets, which show in his haunted expression. After serving a stint in jail for vehicular manslaughter due to accidentally killing a child whilst driving home from the pub, he lost his job on the police force and became a private investigation. He also swore off the booze, though he did it with outside help. He’s also ex-army, though he doesn’t like to talk about it.

 

Maile O’Hara 

Age: 24

Height: 5’5

Weight: 130 lbs

Bio: Maile has shoulder-length black hair with a side fringe, a nose piercing and a lip piercing, as well as plenty of tattoos – wings across her chest, a sleeve on her right arm, and a string of binary on her leg, which represents the ten digits of pi. She wears lots of black, alternative clothing, with either leggings or denim jeans, and a bunch of bracelets around her wrists. She usually wears big black boots – knee highs.

Maile doesn’t have a problem with authority, but she’s not afraid to challenge it if she disagrees. She knows her own mind and she speaks it, both online and off. She’s very good at using computers, and can indulge in low-level hacking, but her main speciality is doxing. She’s dedicated to her job, but works hours to suit her – she’s often late, something that Leipfold has learned to put up with.

 

Jack Cholmondeley

 Age: 52

Height: 5’9

Weight: 155 lbs

Bio: Cholmondeley is a lifer in the police force, who has mixed feelings about his upcoming retirement. He appreciates that police work has changed in his lifetime and that he’s no longer at the top of his game, but he finds it hard to let go. He’s afraid of retirement because his job defines him.

He has short white hair with a receding hairline, and his staff affectionately call him ‘Cueball’, though not to his face. He has hazel eyes and is always clean-shaven. At work, he wears a pinstripe suit with a tie, and he wears a hat to hide his bald spot when he ventures out from the station. A proud man, whose career, reputation and integrity mean everything to him. He has a wife, who he refers to as ‘her indoors’, called ‘Mary’.

 

Tom Townsend

Age: 31

Height: 6’2

Weight: 190 lbs

Bio: Tom is a third-generation British Asian, with a Welsh father and a Pakistani mother. He looks like an Asian version of Kevin Webster from Coronation Street – short black hair, and hazel eyes with bags around them. He doesn’t sleep much because of his job as a Theatre Manager. He’s clean-shaven and usually wears a white vest with jeans and a hoodie, exposing a tuft of chest hair.

Tom seems pleasant enough at first, but he has a ruthless streak – he’ll do what he needs to do to achieve his goals. He’s also a charmer with a gift for words, a ladies’ man.

 

Jowie Frankowska

Age: 26

Height: 5’7

Weight: 130 lbs

Bio: Jowie is a Latin American cleaner, who displays all of the fire and passion of an Argentinian whilst literally cleaning up people’s shit. She’s ambitious and goes to evening classes to retrain as a financial analyst, whilst working hard to support herself. Her biggest fear is that she might have to move back to her family’s farm in Argentina.

Jowie has a slim build and tanned (but not Hispanic!) skin, and she usually wears heels to make herself look taller, even when she’s cleaning. She usually wears dresses or a smart blouse with trousers, and she has hazel eyes and long black hair, which she usually ties up.

New Recording: Catch Me Out and Defeat Me

Hi, folks! Today, I wanted to post a quick update to let you know about a new song that I’ve recorded, called Catch Me Out and Defeat Me. I actually wrote it a short while back, but I’ve just got round to recording it properly.

You can listen to the tune on Soundcloud or check it out in the player below. I’m planning on including it as part of my upcoming third album, which is as yet untitled.

 

 

I’ve got a couple more tunes that I’m working on and that you can expect to see over the next couple of months, so be sure to follow me on Soundcloud and to subscribe to me on YouTube channel to listen to them as and when they come out.

If that’s not enough, you can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter for further updates. I’ll see you soon!