Archives (page 443 of 457)

March 24, 2011 / 76 Comments

Books Are The Tits

In fact, books are not only the tits, but it’d maybe be neat if tits were also books, because then in addition to playing with them, you could also read them.

No, I don’t know what I’m talking about.

What I do know is this: I’ve had some good weeks of reading, and I know I’ve got good weeks coming up. First, I read Stephen Blackmoore’s DEAD THINGS, which is a book you can’t buy yet and will be available in… erm, 2012? But fuck it, you need to know about it now. It is urban crime fantasy that is brutal, bloody, and pretty damn hilarious. A very cinematic book, too. Opens with a bang, ends with… well, let’s just go with a much bigger bang. It’s got mages, ghosts, Santa Muerte, fire elementals, murder, Tasers, and snark.

Then I just read Joe Lansdale’s DEVIL RED. Hap and Leonard, the two protagonists, are the clown princes of moral darkness. If you haven’t read any Hap and Leonard, well, what the hell is wrong with you? Do you hate fun? Are you allergic to good books? C’mon. Go grab SAVAGE SEASON and read the — what’s he got, now? Ten books about those two good ol’ boys? Hap is kind of a… what, a liberal softie who can’t help but be a bad-ass, and Leonard is his gay black vet buddy who breaks even worse bad on folks and is twice as funny as any other protagonist you’ve read. DEVIL RED, like VANILLA RIDE, gets back to the darker heart of these two characters. Funny. Sad. Violent as fuck.

Then, after that, I’ll soon get to read the newest from Robert McCammon: THE FIVE. Been eager to read this for a long time, since it’s his first horror book in a good while. McCammon, if you don’t know, is my favorite writer. If you tell me you haven’t read anything of his, beware. I may push you down some steps.

Anyway. I like sites like Goodreads well enough, but I never really use or explore the site to its maximum — social networks with such specificity are very cool, but they sometimes lack in context.

So, here we are. And here I am, asking you: what are you reading right now? Are you digging it? Or, what did you just finish reading? Give recommendations if you care to. Let’s talk the books that currently exist in your ecosystem. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Hell, if you’re reading something self-published or “indie,” share that, too. Anything you got, we want to know about it.

March 23, 2011 / 52 Comments

Revisiting The Culinary Canon

Yesterday, I made the kind of hamburgers that, upon tasting them, made a happy wet spot in the front of my trousers. It was as if I had shaved flesh from the thigh of a chubby angel and gently seared it on my Weber grill. That told me, “Okay. Nailed it. You have your hamburger recipe. It’s time to move on.”

Couple weeks back, I said to you crazy kids, “food me.” (That is not meant to sound salacious, in a R-rated movie on FX or AMC where they replaced all instances of the word ‘fuck’ with ‘food,’ as in, ‘Yippie-Kay-Ay, Motherfooder way.) I said, with my family growing by one here in the next few months, it’s going to be important to have a bunch of recipes nailed down to my preferences rather than be some kind of home cook gourmet dilettante prancing around the kitchen with a bottle of liquid nitrogen and a mortician’s rubber apron. Though, to be clear, I look fucking hot in a rubber apron.

I said, “Hey, I need to figure out this family’s culinary canon.” Just as everyone has family recipes — “This is Grammaw’s Barbecue Tree Grub Salsa! With picante horse scrotum!” — I too want to start getting down the so-called ultimate versions of certain recipes for here in Der Wendighaus before the heir to Der Wendighaus shows up and pitches a spanner into the gears.

You folks leapt to the fore.

You threw a major mega-awesome heapful of recipes into the pot.

You can find those magnificent recipes here.

But no, I’m not done.

I still need more. More. MOAR.

(Hey, sorry. I’m needy. Deal with it.)

Here’s the deal, then. I’ve nailed down a bunch of recipes now that I’m pretty comfortable with. I’ve got burgers down. I’m good with mac and cheese, papaya salad, prime rib, chili, sloppy Joes. I can make eggs that’ll jump up off the plate and kick your teeth in. I’ve got a canon forming.

But, as noted, I need more.

I’m looking to nail down recipes for the following (in no particular order):

Meatloaf.
Fried chicken.
Beef stew.
Mashed potatoes.
Potato salad.
Spaghetti sauce.
Chicken and dumplings.
Chocolate chip cookies.
Chicken noodle soup.
Brownies.
Pierogies.
Korma (chicken, lamb, whatever).
Thai curry (red, yellow, green, whatever).

I’m not necessarily asking for recipes. Should you have a recipe for one or several of these that you care to share, suh-weet. Feel free to drop into comments, point me to a link, or even write it to me via email. But what I’m also looking for is just… any little tidbits of information you have about these dishes that you feel is critical. An ingredient, maybe — “I thicken my mashed potatoes with an eyedropper full of milk from a witch’s nipple.” A technique, perhaps. “I bake my brownies in a used jockstrap to give them that humid, swampy stink of a football player’s salty nether-quarters. Can you say Umami?”

See, you gotta understand, I’m not trying to make my mother’s recipes. I’m not trying to make your recipes. I’m trying to make my recipes. I grab from here, I steal from there, and I experiment until I get the recipe I want. Then, I laser-engrave it into my brain. With an actual laser. It hurts a lot. I think I damaged my cerebral cortex. Whenever the dishwasher kicks on, I pee myself and do a little dance. Damn lasers.

Oh! If you want that burger recipe, it’s taken mostly from the Weber grill app. It’s pretty easy:

Pound and a half of 80/20 ground beef. Mix in a li’l dollop of ketchup, mustard, Worchestershire sauce, Frank’s hot sauce. Mix in a dash of salt, pepper, oregano, chili powder, thyme. Form into patties. Divot with a spoon. Cook on the grill for four minutes per side, toward the very end, pile on top a little cairn of grated Gouda cheese, let melt with the grill closed. Made the juiciest, most flavorful burger I’ve ever made.

It is the bee’s tits, that burger.

Anyway.

If you add anything into the culinary canon of the Wendighaus cookbook, whether it’s a recipe, an ingredient, a tip, a trick, a marriage proposal, a hate-filled rant, or a doodle of a pair of boobies, I’ll take it and offer a quivering Jell-O mold of gratitude.

March 22, 2011 / 32 Comments

Jumpstarting A Stalled Novel

You whip the old nag with a coat hanger.

“Move, you dang horse!” you shout, frothing over with piss and vinegar. You kick it. You pitch pebbles at its head. You hook cables to a car battery and stick ’em up its equine nether quarters and jam some voltage deep into the beast. And still it doth not move. Not a whinny. Not a tail-flick. You nicker at it. You pull your hair. You mumble something about this is why cars replaced you dipshits. You give up and stomp off.

Are you done? With your little poopy-pants hissy-shit-fit over there?

First, that’s not a horse. It’s not even a dead horse. It’s just a bundle of old blankets. You’re embarrassing yourself. Everyone can see what you’re doing. Plus, your underwear is showing. Tighty-whiteys? Really? With your name and the day of the week stitched in the hemming? For shame.

Second, that bundle of old blankets is a stand-in for something else. Come on, don’t lie. You’re a desperate novelist (or screenwriter or transmedia cyborg) and that heap of smelly fabric is a representation — a living emblem — of your stalled-out story. The old nag just won’t move and you think, “Well, you can just nuzzle my turgid teat, you stubborn old coot of a tale.” You lay blame upon it, heaping sins atop the pile the way they used to fill up old goats with present sins. But it’s not the story’s fault. It’s your fault. The story doesn’t exist outside you. Your characters don’t do things you don’t want despite what so many writers will tell you. It’s all you. That hill of nasty blankets will only move if you pick them up and move them. It’s your story. You have authorial agency.

Your story has stalled out because you stalled out. You are the reason that yet another unfinished novel will get shoved into the teetering tower of forgotten stories, reverse-Jenga-style.

And I’m here to jumpstart your heart-shaped derriere and shove your brain back into the game.

Your manuscript needs a cranked-up jolt of adrenalin. For that, I got a buncha tips to jam into your aorta. The first bunch is all about you as a writer and changing your habits. The second batch is about things you can do inside the story to kick free the story scree and get the whole thing moving again.

Think of this as a narrative laxative.

Flip It, Switch It

Sometimes, our brains get vaporlock. We’re idiots, us writers. A gaggle — nay, a mighty parliament — of OCD assholes. A handful of “stupid writer tricks” will go a long way into fooling yourself into overcoming your own tangled web of foolish fuck-brained folly. Here’s one: make a change as to your writing habits. Maybe for a day. Maybe for a week. Do you normally write in your office? Go write at the dining room table. Or at a Starbucks. Or at a Hungarian bathhouse. Do you write in the morning? Write at night. If you write on a laptop, switch to a desktop, or an iPad, or write a chapter long-hand. Sometimes, jostling your habits shakes loose some of the bad juju that’s gumming up the novel.

Discover Your Incubation Chamber

I have three primary incubation chambers: the shower, the lawn-mower, and outside taking a walk. No, these are not the places that I secretly masturbate. Sure, you could diddle your happy buttons on a riding mower, but dang, man, I have a push mower. Plus, I don’t need the squirrels judging me. No, an incubation chamber is my fancy made-up term for “a place you go or a practice you undertake where you can zone out and think.” In other words, you need to find time to let the story incubate. Take time. Bandy some shit around. Play the “what if?” game. “What if my protagonist became his own grandfather and then committed suicide inside Hitler’s bunker?” A good place to incubate stories? Right before bed. Set your brain like a slow-cooker. Introduce a problem or question, then go to sleep. Low and slow like beef brisket, bitches.

No Author Is An Island, Dumbass

Don’t internalize. Contact somebody. Call ’em. Write ’em. Just have a chat to discuss. Creativity lives on agitation. Call up a writer buddy and tell her the problem and see if you can’t work through it. Doesn’t have to be a writer, either. Any conversation can free it. Surely you have friends? You’re not just some mournful cave troll, right? Who do you normally call with your problems? If you were to call somebody and say, “Hey, okay, so. Ahhh, here’s the deal. I have four dead strippers. I am goosed to the nines on mescaline. This isn’t my shirt. And I think I’m on the Disneyworld monorail. What do I do?” — who would that person be? Identify them. Whoever it is that would help you with four stripper corpses is also the same person who can help you talk through your novel’s plot problems. Frankly, put that dude on your payroll, but quick.

A Little Dab Will Do You

Dear sweet chemical intervention. Hey, I’m not advocating illicit substances, but I do think that sometimes a mildly modified state of perception can be a win for a writer. It can be the machete to cut down through all the built-up bullshit inside your story. Caffeine is good to get the pistons firing. Liquor is good not necessarily during writing, but I’m not averse to a little responsible drinking after-hours where you can jot some notes down in a notebook or puzzle out some story problems in conversation with a buddy while under the influence of some adult beverages. Exercising releases other powerful chemicals, too, which can be good. Maybe take a little St. John’s Wort? Or eat a piece of chocolate for Chrissakes. Just a little stimulant. Bzzt. Zzzzt. Zap. No meth, though. I mean, seriously. You ever see a meth-head? Ghouls.

Write A Masturbatory Love Letter

You loved this idea once upon a time. You adored the book. I know you did, because we made fun of you on the playground. “You and the novel, sittin’ in the tree. H-A-N-D-J-O-B. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the Tijuana donkey show.” I think that’s how the rhyme goes. Anyway. This sounds super stupid, but bear with me: you need to fall back in love with the novel again. Write a letter. Or an email. Or a goddamn postcard, I don’t care. Start reminding yourself the things you loved about this book. Jot down why you wanted to write the thing in the first goddamn place. Surprise, surprise: you’ll find old reasons, yes, but you’ll discover some new reasons to love it all over again.

Envision The Cover

This? The epitome of shallow, but fuck it. I know, blah blah blah, you’re writing the book because you love the story, but sometimes you can’t help but look forward and get geeked while imagining some silly future shit. “On my wedding day, angels will descend from heaven and bring with them seven harpsichords.” “When my son is born, a wise shaman baboon will proclaim him the chosen one to rule the jungle.” “The first time I have sex, the hooker I nail will have two vaginas, and one of those vaginas will dispense chocolate coins.” So, hey, if what gets you going is looking forward and thinking, “Man, this book is going to look bitching on the shelves at Your Favorite Indie Bookstore,” then do that.

Boom Goes The Dynamite

Blow something up. (In the story.) Plunge the plunger. Light the fuse. Stephen King did this in The Stand, by the way, to jump start that stalled novel. He couldn’t quite figure out how to move the story forward and felt that the characters were… well, lost. So, in the second act he blew up the Free Zone with dynamite. Now, you don’t need to rely on an actual explosion in the text. “Explosion” is just another way of saying “Some properly dramatic shit that shakes everything up.” A murder. A breakup. The assassination of Santa Claus. The next Biblical deluge. The appearance of a cyborg orangutan from the future.

Feng Shui That Motherfucker

Feng Shui is probably bullshit. “This room has no flow. The chi is getting all gummed up in my heating vents. I need a mirror on that wall. I need something red on the opposing wall. In the corner? A duck carved from lava rock. In the other corner? Tom Arnold. And from the ceiling fan we must hang ribbons woven of my own chest hair and dyed with the blood of the infidel.” Still, there’s something there that’s altogether less mystical. “Hey, the arrangement of this room isn’t right; things feel off.” That can happen in the novel. So, rearrange some stuff. Start the novel at a different point. Change the flow. Move the timeline around — Chapter 5 is now Chapter 2. May require a little rewriting to bridge it, but just some minor rearrangement can feel productive. Rewriting and readjustment can be good voodoo.

Flip It, Switch It: Part II: Revenge Of The Switch-Faced Flippenator

Another flip, another switch. Change the point-of-view. Change the tense. Maybe you’re writing in third-person but it feels like you’d write it more easily in the first. Or, could be that writing past-tense isn’t as urgent as what you’d get out of the present. Yeah, sure, this requires rewriting, but, uhh, shut up. Nobody said this shit wasn’t work. Look at it this way: sometimes you gotta break something to fix something.

Turn Left And Take A Narrative Day Trip

Deviate. Deviate big. Start writing in a different direction. Pick a new character to follow. Explore some untold aspect of the storyworld. Create a sub-plot out of thin air involving submarines and the Christmas gifting habits of human-squid hybrids. See that door ahead? Forget it. Turn left and kick a hole in the wall. Walk through that. No, you may not use this stuff. Or maybe it’ll open up the novel in the same way that knocking down a wall in your house might open up a room. You gotta try something.

Shut Up And Put Your Back Into It

Alternately, if none of the above crap works, just shut up and do the time. Write through it. Flail about like a beached carp on your keyboard. Vomit words. Make shit up. Spasm. Smash together sentences with the grace and aplomb of a drunken moose. Writing isn’t magic. The end result may feel that way, but it’s just putting one word in front of the other. Do that until you feel the novel find its groove. It’ll happen. I swear. You might even go back and look at those vibrating word-spasms and think, “That was actually better than I thought. I expected literature on par with the holy books penned by a tribe of trilobites, but this is at least on the level of what a headless chicken could manage if you stuck a fountain pen in his neck stump.” There’s this feeling in exercise where you hit the wall but then, if you keep pushing past it, you suddenly get a surge of go-juice again. This is like that. Keep writing until you’re out of the dark and into the light.

Oh, and stop whining about it.

Howabout you, word nerds? What tricks do you use to fool your brain into lubricating the arthritic joints of that sluggish nag you call a manuscript? Share and share alike.

March 21, 2011 / 57 Comments

The Care And Feeding Of Your Favorite Authors

Mmm. The $0.99 e-book kerfuffle continues, and continues. And also: continues.

Some required reading, before I yammer.

Zoe Winters asks, “Does low-balling attract the wrong kind of reader?”

Cat Valente points out that if you’re willing to plunk down $5.99 for a latte, you should be willing to shell out more than a piddly buck on an e-published novel.

And finally, sticking the landing, Scalzi makes the electronic publishing BINGO card.

Go on. Go, read those.

I’ll wait.

Back already? Excellent. Here, have a cookie and a coconut water.

So. Do I think that, at its core, a buck is too cheap for novel-length fiction? I do.

Do I think that self-publishers saw the larger prices put forth by big publishers and decided to counterbalance too dramatically with a race-to-the-bottom price? I do.

Do I think that $0.99 represents something of a slippery slope for book values? Do I think readers are accustomed to, even in the cheapest used book format, paying more than a buck for fiction? Do I think that publishing is a totally different ball-game than the music industry and that ultimately you can’t compare the two meaningfully in part because musicians have other ways of earning out while writers have only one, which is the value of their words, and nobody long-term can sustain bottoming-out story values? Do I think that alpacas are part of a giant fuzzy-headed pyramid scheme?

I do.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Really, this is inside baseball. I’m sure readers at some level are aware of this and have an opinion, but the larger readership does not yet understand it. My mother doesn’t know about it, and my mother is a voracious reader. None of the authors she reads price their books like that. Frankly, they may never. Will we start to see Jodi Picoult and Stephen King throwing around $0.99 e-books? I’m not sold on that.

What this is about is that it’s hard out there for a ~~pimp~~ writer.

I don’t have stats, but from what I can tell, it’s getting harder to make a living as a writer. The money is down. The work isn’t there. Part of it is the recession, but it goes deeper: the Internet democritized content and creation but it also softened the value of that content. Maybe it’s a supply and demand thing. The marketplace is flooded with storytellers. At this point we’re like wandering troubadours. We swarm your town. You throw us your bread-scraps and we move on. Maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe we’re all floating around on yachts and I just didn’t realize it.

It may be true that you consider a dollar a reasonable price point for fiction. It may be true that you don’t feel any responsibility to the marketplace now or in the future.

But hopefully, it’s not true that you don’t care about authors. Authors are awesome. Batshit crazy, maybe. Functional alcoholics, most certainly. But they’re fulfilling a critical task that mankind has needed filled since forever: they’re telling stories. And that’s some pretty nifty shit.

Here’s what I’m exhorting. I’m asking that you take care of your authors. Think of them, perhaps, as little whisky-guzzling Tamagotchi. They require care and feeding lest they wither and die in a cubicle farm.

If you find an author you like, support them.

What does this mean?

It means, if they have other books? Buy ’em. Now. Right away. It means, get on social media and say, “Hey, this book, this author? Some hot shit right here.” Ultimately, it means you’re spreading the word and trying to keep it so that they can buy things like food and mortgages and Bourbon. See an author at a con? Buy him a drink. Does the author have a Cafepress store? Buy something from it. Or donate on his donate button. Become a fan. Expect good storytelling in return. This is doubly true if you’re buying books at a bottom-dollar price. You do that and you like what you got out of the deal, then it’s up to you to make sure they don’t starve in a gutter somewhere while wasting away from ~~a Bourbonless life~~ tuberculosis.

Writers are part of your creative ecosystem. Don’t damage that ecosystem. Give back to it. I know that writers need you. I hope that it turns out that you need writers, too.

This has been a public service announcement from the Bourbon Distilleries of America.

March 18, 2011 / 62 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: Baby Pulp

And we’re back.

Once again, with last week’s challenge (The Hotel), you crazy emmereffers came out of the woodwork and did up some amazingly cool stuff. And, once again, it’s time to re-up the stash. I mean, re-up the flash fiction challenge. Ready for another go?

Okay, so, as you may know, the wife and I are expecting our first progeny — Der Wendigspawn — in the next few months. Which means my life has become suddenly and swiftly baby-focused. Everything is crib-nursery-Pooh-poo-bottle-milk-breast-how-many-centimeters-dilated-diaper-Nuk-Bjorn-Boppy-headasplode. On this subject I’ve been commiserating with fellow expectant father-dude, Anthony “Pulptone” Schiavino. We half-joke that, come summer, people are going to see us online at 3AM, drunk, delirious, feeding our respective infants. We will be the protagonists in some crazy baby-related stories.

Then, he said this:

“…there needs to be flash fiction pulp based around babies. Lord only knows what people would come up with.“

Oh, snap.

And a flash fiction challenge was born.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

BABY PULP FLASH FICTION.

It must be baby-centered.

It must be pulp. Pulp is, of course, a kind of lurid, cheap, fastly-produced genre fiction. Men’s Adventure! Noir! Space opera! Superhero! Detective! And so on, and so forth. So, in other words: baby noir! Baby superhero! Baby space opera! Baby adventure! Detective baby!

Baby Pulp.

And that’s it.

Please, no porny baby stories. I just — I mean — c’mon, no. These tales don’t need to be in good taste, but I don’t want any visits from PedoBear, you hear me?

Once again, you have 1000 words.

You have one week (let’s say next Friday, 9AM EST).

Post at your own blogs, drop a link in your blog to here, and drop a link to your blogged fiction in the comments below. Then at the end of the week I’ll tally it all up right here in this post.

Now get that pacifier out of your mouth. It’s time to fill the flash fiction diapers.

BOOM.

[EDIT, Friday 3/25/11: So, this week I’m going to not compile the links — feels like the links found in the comments work okay for most people. Plus, it gets erm, unusually time-consuming to compile all those links. Between baby class Thursday night and trying to hit Friday morning’s writing deadline, it’s a bit of a time-kill for what may be dubious value. That said, if you would rather I continue to compile them, drop a comment below and let me know. If it’s something you prefer, I’ll make sure to revive the practice with next week’s challenge.]

March 17, 2011 / 8 Comments

“Sequelitis” (A Visit From The Mighty Russel D. McLean)

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am not Chuck Wendig.

Chuck Wendig is in this box here [points to large wooden box wrapped in chains. The box shifts as though something is struggling to get out]. But don’t worry. I’ve left him a couple of airholes.

I think.

Anyway, my name is Russel D McLean. If you have any trouble understanding me, don’t worry. That’s because I’m Scottish. I’m also a writer – author of two noir novels, the second of which, THE LOST SISTER, has just been released upon your United States. In celebration I’m doing a series of invasions of other author’s blogs in a manic attempt to shill… uh, I mean spread the beautiful word.

Anyway, while Chuck’s locked away I figured I’d talk a little about sequels. Because, ya know, the new book is kind of a sequel (or at least the second in a sequence that started with THE GOOD SON) and I found myself thinking a lot about what that meant.

A sequel has to achieve a lot of stuff. It has to pull in new readers while pleasing old ones. It has to remain true to established facts while giving something new. It has to stand on its own and yet acknowledge the past.

It has to do something different.

Oh, yes. That’s the one that most people forget. While it’s considered the safe action to rehash old glories – see National Treasure 2, The Mummy 2 etc etc – what you wind up doing is boring people. Because while people think they want the same experience, what the really need is that same sense of excitement and unpredictability they got the first time round. It’s just tougher to put that into words than it is to say, “more of the same please”.

Why is THE GODFATHER PART II considered a perfect sequel? It expands upon and gives new life and new perspective on the first movie while still telling its own perfectly logical narrative. You could see GFII on its own, conceivably, and catch up to this world without having seen the original. Sure, some of the grandeur would be lost, but you wouldn’t be so confused as to throw the movie away and then batter your head against a brick wall until your brains dribbled out your ears.

Sequels.

They’re tough.

And not just when it comes to movies.

With THE LOST SISTER – which is a novel, not a movie* – I wanted to tell two stories. First there is the story that stands on its own. The one about the missing girl. Mary Furst, a girl who has no apparent reason to run away, is missing. There are questions about her disappearance, facts that don’t add up. As Our Hero – J McNee – digs into her life, he uncovers some very uncomfortable truths.

That’s my A story. And sure it could have been enough to hold the book by itself. After all, we established our hero in book 1 and if you want, you can keep a series character static. Many people enjoy that kind of thing. Some writers do it wonderfully. Robert B Parker kept Spencer is stasis for decades. Lee Child rarely changes Reacher or gives us any more about him than we need to know.

But I’m not that kind of writer. I need to let my characters change. Be affected by events. So THE LOST SISTER became a chance for me to explore my central character and find more about what makes him tick. I wanted him to confront some of his own choices over the course of the book, to see things in the case that made him question his own ideals and motivations. I wanted there to be something different in his outlook by the end of the book. In short, I wanted to tell a different kind of story with the same characters. Because otherwise… what’s the point? It’s like eating lukewarm leftovers. There’s something in there you recognise, but really it’s not the same.

I also wanted to explore the supporting cast and to see how they reacted in different situations. People I hadn’t expected to see again. Susan Bright, for example, who was supposed to be a throwaway character in THE GOOD SON and became something far more important. And David Burns, local “businessman” who is one of my favourite characters to write for: a man who does bad things for what he believes to be all the right reasons.

THE LOST SISTER changes all of these characters by the end of the book. Not all of them get to “learn” from their experiences, of course. I think we’re all lucky that I’m not God. Because as cruel as He can (allegedly) be, I think I’d be even worse in charge, winding folks up just see how they’d react. But then that’s the job of a writer – wind those characters up and watch them go!

Word so far on THE LOST SISTER – both at home and now in the US – has been positive. I like to think that it’s a good sequel, that it does more than rehash former glories, that it changes things for our characters, that it presents with new challenges and new situations. I’ll tell you what, I had a bloody ball writing it.

The Lost Sister is out now from St Martin’s/Minotaur as shiny hardcover or e-book.

*At least, not yet, if any prospective producers out there are listening…

— THE LOST SISTER at Amazon, and B&N

Russel D. McLean is an author, reviewer and general miscreant from Dundee, Scotland. You can read more about him here, at his website and author page. Click the pic to follow him on Twitter.