I'm Baaaaaaack!

Well now, it's been quite some time since last we talked,  hasn't it?  Rest assured, faithful readers, I'm alive and well.  What exactly have I been up to all this time?  Let's take a look:

Previously, my alter ego was employed at a small biotech company, having trained in the arcane practices of microbiology.  In the free time allowed outside of those 40 hours a week, I managed to crank out a few novels over the years and enjoyed every second of it.  Then, in October of 2010, an opportunity came up that would allow me to broaden my writing experience AND get involved with the world of entertainment, movies, Hollywood and the like.  Fantastic, right?  The only downsides were that the job paid only in experience and took a big chunk of my free time.

Fast forward to almost exactly a year ago.  My alter ego was still grinding away at the day job, spending nights and weekends at the entertainment job and attempting to be a normal, functioning member of society, whilst poor Vincent Kale was shunted into a dark corner to brood and weep and lick his wounds.  There he remained for the better part of the last year, for Alter Ego had even more ambitious plans.

Early 2012 saw the packing up of Alter Ego's belongings for a cross-country trip to attend a school teaching, of all the things, a master brewing course.  Not only did that mean the end of the regular, comfortable, profitable and somewhat-secure day job, but a continued hold on my own creative productivity.  You see, Alter Ego was now attending classes from near 9-5 every day and using the free time to keep up with the unbelievable amount of information concerned with the delicious art of beer-making, but was also putting in 30+ hours of work at the entertainment writing position, which had blissfully turned into a paying opportunity.

All well and good for Alter Ego; not so great for yours truly.  So while my other half pursued his academic ambitions, I languished, wondering if I'd ever see the light of day or the white of a new document page, broken only by that hypnotic blinking cursor.  Then, something happened.  Alter Ego was presented with a one-week break from class, free time which he spent researching brewery positions, filling out job applications and contemplating a career in the industry.  He stopped short.  He thought to himself, "If I start on this path now, I'll be in it from the ground up all over again.  If I decide in five or ten years time that it's not for me, I'll have spent the majority of my thirties in an industry that doesn't fulfill me...though free beer is a helluva perk.  Do I really want to do this?"

The answer, apparently, was "no."  Thankfully, the fates were aligned and Alter Ego was offered a full-time position doing entertainment writing.  In his infinite wisdom/foolishness, he decided to leave the home he'd known for 11 years and the state he'd lived in all his life for a small, over-priced studio apartment in the greater Los Angeles area.  (Because that's where dreams are born...!) So we spent one long summer all over Hell's creation: Davis, CA; Detroit; Las Vegas; Denver; San Diego; Pittsburgh; Easton, PA; Dover, DE; Grafton, WV; Washington, D.C.; Skaneateles, NY; Hershey, PA and a 2,700 mile road trip from Easton, PA to Van Nuys, CA...all that in about three months!

That brings us up to the present day.  Alter Ego and myself have been settling in to the new place and are already coming up on one month here in sunny California.  We don't get out much (what was your first hint, the split-personality talk?), but we're making attempts to do so.  The best part of all of this is that Alter Ego only  has one full-time job to worry about now, with a laughable amount of free time to occupy however he sees fit.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is where I come in.  As of this writing, I've submitted "Indigo" to an awesome  competition of sorts known as the "Baker's Dozen Auction."  Hosted by the tireless Authoress over at Miss Snark's First Victim, the event allows authors to submit manuscripts for review by not only other authors, but respected editors and bona fide literary agents.  These agents then place bids on particular submissions, say for an exclusive read of the first 10 pages; those same agents can then be outbidded by others if the property strikes their fancy.  It's a win/win situation (even those without bids receive critiques).  I also plan on submitting "Blackwatch: The Mainspring" for the contest's YA/MG submission window next week. 

But that's not all, friends!  With the past behind me and the future ahead (which is where they both belong), I've got plans to get started on a whole new project.  What that is, I haven't the faintest idea at the moment.  The hopper is full of half-starts and loglines; I just have to pick one!  I make no promise on the regularity of these posts because I've tried that in the past and was simply not able to stick to it.  I'm still getting settled into a routine.  Rest assured that, should any disastrous/wonderful news occur, you lot will be the first to know!

Best wishes and an early happy Halloween!

Sincerely, 

VK

Happy New Year!

Well, here we are, another year in the books. I hope 2011 was great for you. I hope you took some chances and discovered new talents, I hope you laughed a lot and cried a little, I hope you're ending this year in a better place than you began. It's certainly been a crazy year for me (and 2012 is undoubtedly going to start off even crazier)! I just wanted to get one last blog post in for the year and wish you all happy holidays! I'll be back soon to fill you in on what has happened, what is happening and what will happen in 2012, but until then...

Best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year!

Sincerely,
VK

NaNo No-Nos

So it's the third day of November, aka "National Novel Writers Month." How goes your NaNo? At this time last year I was already well on my way to completing INDIGO. How am I doing THIS year you ask? HA!

I am morbidly over-ambitious when it comes to things I love doing or have an interest in. I have this delusion that I can do anything I put my mind to (and I really can...given an infinite amount of time, of course). The problem is that I have once again bitten off more than a mouthful. I've got an unfinished novel, an unfinished short story and a freshly started NaNoWriMo project all in flux at the same time. As of this post, I've written a paltry 1,000 words or so. I'm way behind the eight ball on this one.

So, for the rest of you who may be feeling overwhelmed by the 50,000 word limit of NaNoWriMo, I have a couple of other options. How's 600 words sound to you? Lulu is sponsoring a short-story contest just for you. It costs you nothing (except giving up your publication rights, but honestly, how much do you really think you'll make from one short story? If Neil Gaiman or Stephen King is reading this, the previous statement does not apply.) And here are the prizes!

First place:

$500 cash
Barnes & Noble NOOK
Feature in Lulu Staff Picks and Lulu Blog
Free mentions in upcoming Lulu publicity
Professional review of your work

Second place:

Barnes & Noble NOOK

Third place:

$100 gift card to Barnes and Noble

All participants:

20% off coupon for next purchase on Lulu.com

You only have until Dec. 1st to submit so get crackin'! You can find the full details right here. 600 words still too much for you? How's 100 sound?

The only catch here is that your 100 words need to come together to tell a tale of horror so unspeakable...so unimaginable...so...
If you want to enter, check out details over at Cruentus Libri Press. The good news here is that you have until the end of the calendar year! That's only 1.72 words per day, vs NaNoWriMo, which is now 1,785.7 words per day...I should get back to work!

~VK

PS: Even if you haven't asked, yes, I will probably try to do each of the above contests because I'm stupid.

Halloween: A Time for Snow and Santa Claus

Living in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast has the advantage of being able to view changing seasons: leaves changing color in the fall, melting ice over the creeks in the spring time, blizzards on Halloween weekend...wait, what?

Normally, Halloween around these parts is either incredibly crappy (cold and rainy) or unbelievably gorgeous (60s/70s and clear). This year, Mother Nature decided to change it up with a snowstorm. While it wasn't anything debilitating, waking up to the white stuff in late October does not bode well for the rest of this winter. The Jack O' Lanterns (pictured above) looked pretty strange covered in frost.



In addition to non-traditional Halloween antics, I just watched a little movie called Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. While it sounds like a film that should be saved for late December, it's nothing of the sort. This flick is a re-imagining of the Santa Claus mythology that harkens back to pagan tales of a blood-thirsty, child-stealing yule-time monster. Definitely worth a watch if you like your Christmas a little on the darker side.

Speaking of scary things, NaNoWriMo starts at midnight tonight! I'm anxious to get started but I'm nowhere near as ready as I was last year. Check back in for weekly updates and good luck to those who are attempting their first, fifth or fiftieth run this year!

~VK

R.L. Stine's Trick-or-Tweet Contest!

Halloween is fast approaching. (Do you have your costume picked out already? Or are you the type that wraps a sheet around yourself like a toga and calls that a costume?) I’ve got nothing spooky going on at the moment. Lucky for you, the master of “Goosebumps” has a nice Trick-or-Treat contest. Or should I say, Trick-or-Tweet?

R.L. Stine is hosting a contest through his Twitter account for one of ten signed copies of his new book, “It's the First Day of School… FOREVER.” Check out the book trailer for it here:



Pretty sweet, huh? So you can see how to enter the contest here or just look below for instructions. Good luck!

R.L. Stine’s HALLOWEEN TRICK-OR-TWEET CONTEST
THE RULES

To enter the contest, follow these step-by-step instructions.
STEP 1:

To enter, you must be following @RL_Stine on Twitter.
If you are already a Follower, go to Step 2.
To become a Follower, go to http://twitter.com/RL_Stine and click ‘FOLLOW’.

STEP 2:

You must Tweet the exact text below to enter the contest:

Enter @RL_Stine ‘s Halloween Trick-or-Tweet Contest to win an autographed book! Please RT. Info at: http://bit.ly/mYmlxb

You only need to tweet this ONE time. Tweeting multiple times will not help your chances of winning.

STEP 3:

Complete the scary story below in one tweet. Tweet your story ending with the hashtag #RLSTINE by October 28. Please make sure to put #RLSTINE at the end of your tweet so we can find your submission.

Submit as many story endings as you like. But each entry must be a single tweet.
R.L. Stine will select 10 winning entries-- his favorite story endings.

The winners will be announced on Halloween Day. Winners will receive a Direct Message on Twitter from R.L. Stine notifying them that they won.

Each winner will receive an autographed copy of the book It's the First Day of School… Forever by R.L. Stine. The winning story endings will also be featured on rlstine.com.

CAN YOU FINISH THIS STORY?

It wasn’t my idea to run through the old graveyard on Halloween night. My friends Becky and Ian are a lot braver than me. It has always creeped me out to have a graveyard at the end of my street.

But here we were in our Halloween costumes. The moon was hidden behind a blanket of clouds. A gusting wind sent dead leaves dancing over the ground as if they were alive. And Becky said, "Come on, David. Let's go running through the graveyard, howling like wolves."

"Yeah. Maybe we'll wake up the dead," Ian said.

"I… don’t want to wake up the dead," I stammered. But I had no choice. I had to run with them. And so we went running through the old gravestones, our costumes fluttering in the wind. Running and howling at the top of our lungs.

It was actually fun—until I tripped over an open grave marker and fell to my knees in the dirt. And when I looked up, I couldn't see my friends. They'd vanished into the darkness.

I climbed to my feet, brushing off dead leaves. I called to Becky and Ian. No answer.
And then I gasped as I felt icy hard fingers grab the back of my neck. Icy fingers wrapped around my skin. With a scream of horror, I spun around—and…

Finish the story in one tweet—and tweet it with the hashtag #RLSTINE by October 28. Good luck!

~VK

PS: You can see my story entries by following @vincentkale and looking for the hashtag #RLSTINE.

Rick Riordan and the Olympian Week Book Tour!

Living in Pittsburgh has its benefits (he said before winter hits and he starts suffering through 5 degree mornings). We recently had The Dark Knight Rises film here, our sports teams are pretty good and it's often voted one of America's most livable cities. All that aside, Pittsburgh recently played host to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom. Though, Southside is more amenable to Dionysus, the God of Partying...

Somehow, we were one of 7 cities on Rick Riordan's Olympian Book Tour. The author of the wildly popular Percy Jackson series was touring for the release of "The Son of Neptune" in his "Heroes of Olympus" series. The author (who is very funny, humble and accommodating I might add) took some time out of his schedule to tell us a bit about his career and field questions from the hundreds of kids in the audience. Oh, yeah, I was roughly twice as tall as the average attendant...I sure didn't look out of place at all.



What I found most interesting about Riordan's talk was his path to publication. He started early on by writing a series of adult mystery novels and did fairly well. Then, Riordan was making up a bedtime story about Greek gods for his son when he simply ran out of mythology. His son not only encouraged him to make a story up on the spot, but to put that story to paper. Thus, Percy Jackson was born.

Out of something so simple as a shared interest in mythology between a father and a son, multiple series of best selling middle-grade/young-adult books were born. Riordan has masterfully cornered the market not only on Greek mythology, but now Roman mythology (which was done in a very clever way from both a literary and marketing standpoint), as well as Egyptian mythology in his Kane Chronicles and, eventually, Norse mythology when he can get to it. This isn't to say that there are no Gods left for the rest of us to write about (I'm partial to the Central/South American native Gods myself). Then there's always Jeff, the God of Biscuits.


Watch Roman Gods in Comedy  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

But why settle for interpreting a pre-existing mythology when you can just make up one of your own? That's (more or less) what I'm doing at the moment as I'm wrapping up my current project. Without giving away too much, the story has to do with a race of people who view the trees as their Gods (which will make a heckuva lot more sense once you know what the rest of the story is all about).

I'm hurrying to finish that story in time for NaNoWriMo. This year, I think I'll tackle some Middle Grade once and for all. (Every other time I try, it ends up far too serious and morphs into YA or Adult.) The tentative title right now is: Spiderbeard and the Pirates of Black Sky. And here's the logline:

When habitual homework-hater Sam Muggins gets yanked up into the clouds by a giant fishhook, he finds himself standing on deck of a floating pirate ship crewed entirely by women. Together, they must prevent the dreaded Captain Spiderbeard from destroying the nine World Anchors, or face a world turned upside-down by the absence of gravity.

Nothing too awfully serious about that, is there? I'll keep you posted on my progress as usual! Until next time, go and check out some Middle Grade fiction. There are some fantastic stories out there that will make you feel like a kid again. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments!

~VK

PS: As a side note, while I was at the Riordan tour, a friend of mine passed on the news that Steve Jobs had died. While this statement has been uttered many times within the past week, I thought it was a remarkable feat that the world learned of his passing through devices he helped to create. I echo countless others in saying that he passed on too soon and will be grievously missed.

Win a Signed Copy of Jonathan Maberry's "Dead of Night"

Here's a quick post for you dead-heads out there. Are you a fan of Jonathan Maberry? Of course you are. (And if you're not, click here to read up on him.) As for "Dead of Night," here's the brief book jacket description:

A prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a formula designed to keep his consciousness awake while his body rots in the grave. But all drugs have unforeseen side-effects. Before he could be buried, the killer wakes up. Hungry. Infected. Contagious. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang…but a bite.

If you want to win a signed hardcover edition of Maberry's "Dead of Night," just click here and fill out a simple form! Just make sure to read the disclaimer. If you agree without reading it, Maberry has every right to try out experimental viruses on you...fair warning!

~VK