Carnival of Cryptids Authors want to be on your Blog!

[Matt]

I am doing publicity for a short story anthology to which I have contributed, featuring short fiction about cryptids (mysterious creatures like Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster), with proceeds going to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The anthology, publishing at the end of January, is called Kindle All-Stars: Carnival of Cryptids. It contains seven short stories by up-and-coming independent authors, introduced by bestselling crime and science fiction writer Bernard Schaffer. Here is the link for the first book in our series.

http://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Fron...

Would you be able to host a promotional interview with one of our writers? We have seven authors (Doug Glassford, Jeff Provine, Simon Cox, Susan Smith-Josephy, Tony Healey, William Vitka, and me), the series founder (Bernard Schaffer), and an author/editor (Laurie Laliberte).

If you would like to write a review for the book on your blog and in other venues, tell me that also and I will arrange an ARC for you.

I appreciate any help you are willing to give us. Please email me at schooloftheages@gmail.com

[Andre Jute]

This sounds like a brill idea. I'll have a bit of that for my blog. Sounds like a bargain. Free content from good writers, and its for a worthwhile charity!

[Dakota]

Cryptids... I had to look them up. What a fun idea. I'll certainly tweet about it.

[Andre Jute]

Here's Bernard J Schaffer on my blog with a super piece about Cryptozoology called "Blame Leonard Nimoy":

http://coolmainpress.com/ajwriting/ar...

Matt has other good writers to share out -- free high-class content for your blog! -- so ask him.

[Matt]

Contact me or any of these other great authors to guest on your site. I have all their contact information.

Tony Healey
Doug Glassford
Jeff Provine
Simon Cox
Susan Smith
William Vitka

Matt Posner (Robust group member)

[J.A.]

My first interview:

http://riftwatcher.blogspot.com/2013/...

Two-Fisted/Six-Gun Alt Reality Meets Lovecraftian Menace: Introducing William Vitka

[Andre Jute]

A grand thing you're doing, Jeremy.

[J.A.]

Well, good cause, and the answers to all the interviews have been very thoughtful and interesting.

[J.A.]

http://www.riftwatcher.blogspot.com/2...

Carnival of Cryptids Day 2: The Jungles Are Not a Place For the Arrogant: Introducing Jeff Provine

[Andre Jute]

Super interview.

[J.A.]

Thanks.

[J.A.]

http://riftwatcher.blogspot.com/2013/...

The Secret Ingredient is WHAT!?: An interview with Matt Posner

[Andre Jute]

Can I come for a taste?

[J.A.]

That would be...interesting.

[Andre Jute]

Having read Matt's story, I take back the offer to come for a taste!

[J.A.]

No Mongolian Death Worm or skunk ape for you? Not a true gourmand!

[Andre Jute]

I've eaten raw capybara (it's a sort of water-living rat the size of a calf) on an Air Force survival course to show the guys in the shooting end of the business that the staff planners really, really care about bringing them back home. (I can't say I ever noticed when I dropped with them the same solicitude for bringing me home to Mama in one piece.) I've eaten some local warlord's mother-in-law because he had us surrounded, and my own guys would have shot me if I choked and thereby put us in a crossfire. I've tasted sliced raw squid in the kitchen of a Greek pervert for a television cookery series I made in a year best forgotten (I bought a Bentley Turbo with the proceeds, and there was some left over for towards the house in Juan les Pins that we never used because with the baby in the car we never got further than the Forest of Devres, only about 15 klicks into Northern France, where fortunately a film producer I knew had a farmhouse we could always borrow for a few months if I had to finish a book). I've eaten Kariba tigerfish (there's no flesh on it, it's all sharp bone) because we caught nothing else and had to have film to send back. That was the day a patented stove we were trying because the maker bribed us to put it on television backfired, literally, and in an instant burned a stove-sized hole in the bottom of the boat in which I was cooking the tigerfishiedelishie (as I nauseatingly called it for an audience that probably remembered When the Boat Comes In, a TV series starring James Bolam I wish they would bring back), and still spitting blood from the tigerfish bones, I went down with the ship, and shortly shot bodily out of the water "like a rocket accelerating" as the French script girl said as she dressed my wounds, because the relatives of the tigerish I ate took their revenge like piranha. I've eaten piranha too, but at least it was thoroughly panfried in this greasy spoon in Manaus. And there's a cheese in Sardinia that consists mainly of live maggots, which is fortunately illegal to export because there isn't even enough of this local delicacy for the Sardinian restaurants. Years before I ate it for television, Mad Mike Hoare (a famous soldier for hire, and a scholar with a nice turn of Greek) and I, sailing the Med, put in there, and he leerily eyed this cheese when the proprietor of the hotel tried to feed it to us, and wondered aloud whether he should shoot the cheese-maker -- or the cheese!

But you gotta draw the line somewhere, and Mongolian Death Worm, now that Matt has thought it up, sounds all too bloody real, just the sort of thing that happens to me all the time. So I'm saying a very firm NO, right out in advance, and Matt and Julie are most definitely required not to bring a dish when they're invited to dinner. In fact, they can leave off the wine and the flowers too, just in case Matt's imagination is working overtime. I don't fancy The Day of the Triffids in my dining room...

[J.A.]

I just read that the capybara is the largest existing rodent in the world:

"dult capybaras grow to 107 to 134 cm (3.51 to 4.40 ft) in length, stand 50 to 64 cm (20 to 25 in) tall at the withers, and typically weigh 35 to 66 kg (77 to 150 lb), with an average in the Venezuelan llanos of 48.9 kg (108 lb).[9][10] The top recorded weight are 91 kg (200 lb) for a wild female from Brazil and 73.5 kg (162 lb) for a wild male from Uruguay."

Yikes!

[Andre Jute]

And (large goes without saying) sharp rodent teeth too. It doesn't want you to eat it, raw, cooked, anyhow. Even its claws are lethal.

[Matt]

The Mongolian death worm is a real cryptid -- I didn't invent it, but I did invent the details about it being parthenogenetic and so on.