Random

Following the great titles in my previous posts, Awkward Moments in Children’s Books and More Awkward Moments in Children’s Books, here are some more… erm… unusual book titles, courtesy of the Bored Panda.

Naturally, cats are the very first subject to come to mind, proving that pussies were popular long before the Internet was invented:

You can buy this book here.

Before cat videos took over YouTube, people had to flick through books such as this, to get their daily dosage of feline craziness:

You can buy this book here

Not all cats are equal, though.

And some took the whole cat craze to new levels:

You can buy this book here

Speaking of the divine, this unusual title attempts to put men’s infatuation with sex to good use…

You can buy this book here.

…unlike this one, which just gives up with my gender.

You can buy this…

Just about four years ago I started writing Catskinner’s Book.

I didn’t have any real plan when I started it.  I had a narrator and his shadow self, and a desire to play around with some of the ideas that William Burroughs used in his Nova Express novels. I liked the idea of an alien invasion viewed as an infestation of informational parasites.  I knew that I wanted to write about people who had become something other than human as a result of the choices that they had made.

I had a bunch of other influences, Phillip Dick, George Alec Effinger, Tim Powers, Samuel Delany, Robert Anson Wilson, Clive Barker. I was playing the whole thing by ear. Mixing things at random to watch the reactions.  Mostly I wanted to recapture the feel of the New Wave Science Fiction that I remembered from my youth.

The tale grew in the…

This weekend I am engaging in what I devoutly wish to be the final round of edits on Gingerbread Wolves.   If all goes well I should be clicking on that big shiny red publish button by tomorrow afternoon.

I am working from the outstanding notes given to me by The Proulx, a hyperintelligent extra-dimensional life form with the power to appear to be a Canadian to mortal eyes.  I read her latest work, the (soon?) to be publishedChasing Nonconformity and wrote back that I thought it was pure distilled awesome sauce and she shouldn’t change a word, except maybe for the first chapter.

She read Gingerbread Wolves and sent me back voluminous notes and the whole thing edited, with a warning that under Galactic Law my use of commas is punishable by five years on the Penal Moon of Verminthrax VII.

Way to make me…

Audiences love watching characters in dire situations work their way out. We want to believe that with enough determination anyone can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. More than that, we want to believe that people have the power to look inward and turn themselves into someone better.

A character’s growth should account for shifts in his attitude, but if his personality does a complete 180 it will affect his believability.New situations should nurture the hero’s evolution, while his nature should remain the same. Inconsistencies in the hero’s essence will feel like a betrayal to the audience. The more the hero changes, the more parts of them need to remain the same.

Allow me to illustrate my point with a sampling of references pulled from pop culture: from Bill Murray’s filmography, to panned superhero movies, and the Star Wars rereleases.

What Bill Murray Teaches Writer’s About Constructing Characters

Okay, I’ve got a story. It’s a sort of scary one. I think independent/self-publishing authors need to know about it, and telling it carefully and correctly is also important for my own situation, so I’m going to take my time and lay it all out in order.

Pressed for time? You can skip to the bottom for the TL;DR summation.

On Friday, February 27, 2015, I noticed that my bookmarked Amazon.com link to my first novel, Nolander, was yielding, “We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” I went to my Amazon dashboard and discovered the book had been blocked.

In my spam folder, I discovered an email from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon’s self-publishing arm, informing me that someone had sent in a DMCA notice. In response, Amazon had summarily blocked Nolander from sale.

“DMCA” stands for “Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”…