Did you know…? In “Space B!tch,” muc

Did you know…?

In “Space B!tch,” much of the weaponry used are homages to old sci-fi weaponry:

“How did you get in here?” Sarah asked, turning her chair around. She crossed her eyes to get a good look at the gun resting a hair’s breath from her temple. “A Rojbuck XZ-38. Nice. Loaded with an improvised particle pack, I am sure.”

Except the Wallfucker. That was inspired by Johnny Dangerously.

http://amzn.com/B016VNSZY2

Space B!tch is out. YAY!

Finally, amirite?  I’m not dead.  I have just been sooooo busy.

Like you can now buy the Kindle version and read it. Only $9.95. Soft cover hopefully coming out by Christmas and will probably be $15.95 like my last book.

Nobody is under any obligation to buy it, but I’d be a happy guy if you did. It’s sci-fi, dark humor. Mature, but not like porn, more like violent situations.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP ME OUT: please review the book. TELL EVERYONE. Put the review on Amazon.com, Goodreads, Facebook, and wherever else you can. Hell, I’ll even take Google Plus. WORD OF MOUTH IS MOST OF MY ADVERTISING. My publisher and I wish we had an ad budget, but we don’t. Same with Trolley, if you liked that. Money I get from this helps me out big time. It prevents me from taking so many spare part-time jobs, allows me to write more, and puts money in the pockets of Soylent Publications, Susan Baiman, and so on.

My reviews have been really good for “Trolley.” I have a 4.6/5.0 rating on Goodreads:

– If you buy it, please read it.
– If you read it, please review it.
– If you review it, please, please recommend to others.

Even if it sucks. I’ll take it. I can’t get any better without honest criticism. But those few who have read it already love it, and I trust their opinion.

In addition, I am creating a few short stories set in the same “universe,” having learned people love this sort of thing. I’ll probably sell them for $0.99/2.99, depending on length.

Get it here:  Space B!tch: Kindle format

So how the writing is going

Fairly well, despite it all.

“Space B!tch” is with the final editor. I have a cover artist. We’re looking at a September-ish release for 2014.

I have submitted a few short stories.

I have been promoting “Trolley,” here and there, like at RavenCon and Balticon, with a brisk sales increase. Oddly enough, sales of my old “Punk Walrus Saga” book have been doing well as well, despite being out of print.

I’ll be hosting the Cosplay at Anime Mid Atlantic June 13-15, then taking a break in July for Camp NaNoWriMo. Then I’ll be back at Otakon, Intervention, and TCEP in August.

What happened to you?

Well, a lot. First, I lost my account credentials for this account, and couldn’t log in. But a lot of really… really… let me sum up.

Okay, so I was elected President of Katsucon Entertainment, Inc. Then elected again. I got to travel and work at their tables, so I did a lot of Anime cons. I think I went to 8 in 2013 alone, including New York Comic con, where I hung out with Yaya Han of “Heroes of Cosplay.” It was our convention’s 20th anniversary, so there was a lot that needed done and a lot that needed changed. I hired some new staff.

I did more stuff with the DC Rollergirls, including being in the DC 4th of July Parade.

I got some part time contract gigs.

Then I got a new job which sent me to exotic places like Washington DC and Las Vegas. 😀

For HR people. D:

I got a large dog.

Of course, then there was Katsucon 20 itself, which was a big party.

But the biggest news, and the worst, really, was my wife of 25 years, Christine Larson, who encouraged my writing the entire time we were married, passed away from ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) in March. She had been very sick, and I was taking care of her a lot. She had sarcoidosis, which is where her lungs were being attacked by her immune system, and she had already lost a third of her lungs to it. She had to take immunosuppressants to slow the growth, which made her susceptible to pneumonia, which she got in October, and had until early February. Just as she was recovering from that, she got the H1N1 strain of influenza, and died.

At least she got to see her fruits of labor, the JCI, take root at Katsucon.

So after some fenagling and searching through lost emails, I got my credentials back for WordPress. How my next book is going in the next post.

Beta copy of “Space Bitch” out to beta readers

SEE… amazing speling errors! MARVEL… at grammar is the poorly! FIND… thongs the spill Czech her din knot kvetch!

So… Katsucon came and went. Major hotel stress. Hotel acting like assholes. Many years from now, I will be able to tell this story in full without jeopardizing any contracts. It makes me sad how quickly some people will blame the Jews from BBYO, but trust me… they were NOT the problem. In fact, they helped us FIX the problem from both sides, and the hotel had to admit all their mistakes on Monday after the con. That was an uncomfortable meeting, let me tell you. If any good came from this, I got to meet some cool people at the BBYO and the hotel will be pretty decent with us in 2014.

ANYWAY… I was co-chair, then I was elected President of Katsucon Entertainment, Inc., which meant I couldn’t be a con chair anymore (conflict of interest), so then I ran their communications division, and while I still do, being President of the Board and head of Communications, PR, and Marketing is about half the work of being co-chair. My wife took over, and then retired due to her health. This means now I can focus on my book, which I did with all speed because I wanted to get the rage of the hotel issues out of my head. Today, Friday, February the 22nd, I released my first draft beta to my readers!

I hope to get these back by April, have a revised Beta 2 for professional editor, and I *hope* to have this book out May 24th!

WordPress ate my last post: here I am in the Balticon Podcast

http://swimmingcatstudios.com/2013/01/14/balticon-46-wrap-up-part-4-late-night-new-media-meet-and-greet/

Listen to me moderate with  Trish Wilson (who writes as Elizabeth A. Black),Paul Elard Cooley, and Doc Coleman. Discussions on new media, steampunk, promotion, and muppet porn.  Only at Balticon 46. 🙂

So… what about my book? “Space Bitch” status.

Ha ha…

Okay, so I got a new job since my last post in May. It can happen! The job is *great*. I love the job. However, unlike my last job where I did a lot of busy work with huge stretches of time with nothing to do where I could do my Katsucon work and edit my book… I actually have to WORK at this work. I mean, go figure. They pay fairly well, so I feel obligated to actually produce something. Also, I do a fair bit of after-hours studying and some workload, like tonight I have some maintenance that will last until the wee hours of Saturday morning.

Sadly, this meant I couldn’t do the swath of e-mails that being a Katsucon co-chair provided. So I had to do that at home. Which meant even though my book was *mostly* done… I still had to edit for beta readers. Then I was elected Katsucon Corporate President. This meant I had to give up my co-chair duties (conflict of interest), although I am still in charge of their communications and marketing. So my job with Katsucon “down shifted” but is still going strong.

So, my book took a back seat. After Katsucon, I’ll have some corporate filings to take care of, financial auditing, and working with the new convention chair elected for Katsucon 20 in 2014. It is my hope that I will manage to have a beta copy out. I’d like to have all this done so I can release a book at Balticon this year, but it’s going to be tight. Luckily, my work hired on contractors to help with the work load, so I’ll have less after hours stuff with them as well.

So there you are…

So I think I know what my next project is gonna be…

I am spiritual and superstitious. It’s true. Maybe it’s dumb and I offend my “there is no afterlife” atheist friends, but a lot the “happy accidents” in my life have happened by following hunches. I have gotten a lot of long-time friends this way. Thus it is with my writing.

So, I was at Anime Mid Atlantic last weekend. I am their cosplay emcee, run by Tiki Tanuki, a great cosplay wrangler and master. I have to plug her work, she’ because she is really a great, confident boss and deserves praise for her work. Anyway, I was also keeping an eye on the Katsucon table, as now my friend and long-time Katsucon staffer Christian was running it for the first time. He did pretty good for the first time around, and took a lot of rolls with the punches as her figured some stuff out. Part of this was he got trapped in traffic on Friday, and we only had 4 volunteers (me, Sean, Scarlet, and Natalie) and a box of flyers to man it. During a break where I alone was at the table, someone came up to me. He looked like a gangly older teenager, maybe 17-19 years old. I am bad at age, so if he’s reading this, sorry if I got it wrong.

“Hey… are you Grig Larson?” He asked with mild enthusiasm. “Writer of the Punk Walrus Saga?”

Holy hell, I rarely hear that title brought up at anime cons. And usually by older people because I published that damn thing in 1993. Nearly 20 years ago. I have to remind myself, because I have a dark sense of sick humor that likes to shock myself, that it would be like graduating high school and meeting someone, “Hey, did you write that book in the 60s?”

“Why yes,” I said with a growing smile. “How did you hear about it?”

“Hear about it? It’s big in the furry community!”

I swear to God, if this was a sitcom, I would hear a record needle scratch in the background. You see, I am not… that cool with furries. A few of you may not know what a “furry” is, so in a nutshell, it is a subculture of people who dress like animals. Some more than others. A few might wear a cat tail and cat ears, and a few wear full body suits like they work for a children’s TV show.

I do not HATE furries, and not that I want them banned from anime cons or anywhere… they just ook me out. Like clowns. After spending some time with furry friends of mine, who were put off by my distaste of their culture and wanted to set me straight, I realized I got ooked out by furries for several reasons:

1. The entire coulrophobic, “scary clown” thing; I don’t trust people I can’t see their expressions behind for reasons that are too spiritually mumbo-jumbo for me to get into on this writing blog. Lumbering, expressionless costumes with people behind them, especially fannish and damaged people, are really disconnecting and disconcerting to me. For those who don’t have this fear, imagine this: you live in a world where a few people walk around with a voiceover that speaks for them. And the voices that emanate from their still mouths don’t always match their expressions. Like a cute little girl, eating an ice cream cone like a normal child, but speaking (without moving her lips) with a deep male voice that says the bleeding won’t stop. That level of fucking creepy. I am more okay with furries who are not wearing large head gear than those who are. I am even MORE comfortable if they LOOK scary. Gwar costumes? Awesome. Girl with cat ears, a tail, and a bell around her neck? Cute. A giant fox with a Disney-like expression, twirling their tail and flirting? GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!
   
2. A smaller subset of furry fandom is about “yiffing,” which is the sound supposedly made when those in full body costumes have sex; like the sound a fat person wearing corduroy pants might make walking down the street. How much of furry fandom has a bestiality level I do not know. Working in anime, a lot of people assume we all want to fuck underage anime girls with an octopus, so I understand that outsider perceptions are often poorly stereotyped. Bestiality, which I place with necrophilia and pedophilia, are crimes to me because they force sex on the unwilling. But does dressing up as a rabbit and dog, and then fucking one another, constitute bestiality? I don’t know, Punkie, does it? I think if anyone wants a real answer to this, they should ask a furry until I sort this out.
   
3. I have met a lot of messed up furries. I don’t know if there are more messed up furries than, say, messed up NASCAR enthusiasts, but coupled with #1 and #2, it seemed like more. I knew a girl once into “pony play” that I think is a danger to herself and others, but truthfully, the pony play was only a small part of what was wrong with that girl. She also smeared her excrement on the door handles of ex boyfriends (and those she wanted to think were her ex boyfriends) and was arrested for biting people in Harbor Place in downtown Baltimore (no lie; her defense was she thought they were a sugar cube).
   

Me and my furry friends reached a truce where I don’t speak about furry things with them. I have to be honest, I am not out to get them, and if there was ever a “fandom versus mundane” war, I’d be happy to have them on my side. I just have my own issues I have to work through.

Which apparently the Forces-That-Be just decided would have to be done sooner than later. Mildly amused at the Gods’ prank on me, ha ha, I followed up with my usual thanks. He wasn’t done, though.

“Have you written anything more than that one book?”

I had. I had a sequel that never got published because the old publishing company/distributor that put it out was now dead. My old book was available through Mystic Station Designs for a while, but they refocused their core business model back to gaming only, and my book had poor sales, so it got cut. I still have to get those books back.

“You should totally publish them again,” he said. “Let the furries know.”

I told some of my furry friends. They laughed. HARD. While not all of them knew of my book, the tellings of my story were met with a range of, “Of course!” and “You wrote a book in 1993? I was like, 2 years old then.” Thank goodness I don’t have this fear of aging, as I have friends that would see that phrase alone as, “You are a drain on society, and have done nothing with your life. This iceberg we have put you on grandma, will drift only a little while before you are eaten by a polar bear, where you might serve as some final use to those in need.”

But most agreed to the thing I feared most: “You need to republish them.” So, I think that’s my next project after “Space Bitch.” I will medicate on this, but if all goes according to plan, I think I will release them as multiple short stories, with a final compilation as a 20th anniversary edition.

My God have mercy upon my soul. Because they started it.

I am now on Amazon Kindle Direct

For those of you using Amazon Prime’s new lending library, I am now on Kindle Direct, which means you get to read my Trolley as part of your benefits!  Amazon pays me as part of their monthly fund, so I’ll be fine.  My book is also still available for purchase; both in hardcover and Kindle formats.

My upcoming book, “Space Bitch,” is being edited as we speak, and the first beta version should be ready by July 14th. Depending on the speed of the beta editors, we may have a finished version sooner than expected.  I targeted for Christmas, which was to be released Nov 14th, but I may have it way before that.  It depends on what is happening with Soylent Publishing at that time. 

Someone at Balticon asked me if I was worried about the word “Bitch” in my title, and while originally I was going to change it, I kept it because I found it was an attention grabber. Looking on amazon.com, I see there are 4,286 books currently with the word “Bitch” in the title, so I am not sure I have to worry.

 

Alpha 2 Pass done of “Space Bitch”

So, things didn’t happen the way I expected them to today, and I got a lot more time to edit my alpha pass than I planned for. But this is a good thing, as alpha 2 is done.

There was a lot more weeding than I expected, mostly due to story flow, and a few minor inconsistencies. I deleted several pages of “booooor-ring!” side stories and saved them for the sequel, which is already being fleshed out. But I also had to add more stuff to balance some scenes out, and add some helpful dialog. So the final word count is a hair under 141k. But the action is pretty good. This book will be full of action.

Now it’s being reviewed by my first editor so the beta copies are not as rough as last time. That means, beta editions are coming soon! I know some of you have sent me requests, and most of you will get them.