Post Halloween Sugar Crash (#IWSG November 2019)

It's a week after Halloween. Does your house look like this yet?

Mine doesn't, but only because my wife threatened to divorce me if I took the decorations up out of the basement before December 1st. 

Last week's Trick-Or-Treat-Reads was loads of fun. Thanks, Patricia Lynne for organizing once again! I got a lot more downloads than usual, so fingers crossed some people will actually read my books and leave a review. I even got a few Kindle Unlimited reads as well, which was an extra-special Halloween treat. It's always nice when a freebie leads directly to an actual "sale." Overall my sales the past few months have been absolute garbage, so even a few pages at half a cent each is encouraging.

I really need to finish some of the stuff I'm working on so I can get new stuff out there. I have high hopes for 2020. Hopes that will probably be crushed, sure, but I'll take the positive emotions while I can.

November Question 

What's the strangest thing you've ever googled in researching a story?

Unlike (apparently) most writers, I've never Googled how to kill someone or how a body decomposes or anything like that. Maybe some people are really concerned by exactly how long it takes someone to bleed out when stabbed three inches below their solar plexus, but I suspect these are the same people who calculate the airspeed velocity of their dragons based on mass and wingspan. For me the answer to both of those things is "whatever makes the story interesting."

Honestly, it's odd when I research anything, but sometimes I get caught up in weird details I dig into in way more depth than needed. A few recent ones:

• The colour of Newfoundland Light & Power trucks in 1992 (I recall they were red but I can't find a picture to confirm this)
• Clowning practices of 1850s travelling circuses
• The history of the Group of Seven artists, only so that I can completely change it and make them into supervillains
• A historic Canadian murder where the victim died on a table, because I needed a haunted table

Don't get me started on how much research I've done on Pokemon.

Did you know that in Generation 3, Girafarig could learn Astonish at level 7 and Confusion at level 13, but since Generation 4 it's been able to learn both moves at level 1, and instead gained a new move called Odour Sleuth at Level 5 that allows it to attack otherwise unhittable targets?

I hate that I know this.

Hugs and kisses,
-CDGK

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

FREE BOOKS! (#Trick-or-Treat-Reads 2019)

It's Time! Spooks, Ghouls, Witches and Sexy Nurses are out in force! You know what that means? Free candy, and more importantly, FREE BOOKS!

Below is a list of authors, participating in this year's Trick-or-Treat Book Blog Hop. Each of them will be giving away free books and stories, just like candy. All you have to do is click on the link to visit their sites. Pretty awesome and easy, right?

Trick or Treat reads is organized every year by the talented Patricia Lynne/Josephine, so be sure to drop by her blog to say thank you! (As well as pick up some free books that are probably better than mine)

So what do I have to give away?

AVAILABLE FREE until NOVEMBER 1st!

AMAZON US | AMAZON CANADA | AMAZON UK

They say love hurts and time heals all wounds.

Sometimes the reverse is true.

Isaac was very good at wasting time. Video games, a mindless job, no responsibilities - he had a simple life and few wants. Despite being hopelessly average, unassuming and kind of useless, he had somehow married the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world.

He had no idea how good he had it - until it was all taken away.

Time does not like being wasted. It is mercurial, inexorable and carries a wicked grudge. And sometimes, just sometimes, it enjoys playing games with people's lives. To be perfectly honest, Time is a bit of a jerk.

Isaac had never learned to appreciate what little time he had, and now he must travel to the ends of the universe and face unspeakable evils in a cat-and-mouse game with Time itself for the slim chance to win back a few fleeting seconds of happiness. The price of failure? Only the end of all existence.

Ten Thousand Days is a fairy tale set in the modern day, a fantastic journey of desperate love and horror with a twisted sense of humour. It's a story of exactly how far a young man will go for love...

NOTE: This is the revised and expanded version from 2017, which is significantly different than the original that was published in 2015. This is also the first time TEN THOUSAND DAYS has been available for free on Amazon.

But that's not all!

AVAILABLE FREE until NOVEMBER 1st!

AMAZON US | AMAZON CANADA | AMAZON UK

This is a serious story.

A serious, grimly dark short story of hilarious misery.

SUGGESTED FOR MATURE AUDIENCES: Contains coarse language, violence and candid descriptions of the genitalia of various fantasy races.

In a peaceful land of lush prosperity, an ancient eight-tentacled evil has risen to wreck unfathomable havoc. A simple, unassuming warrior named Huckle gathers together the bravest and most dysfunctional band of heroes in the kingdom to battle the beast, but they are fated only for the direst of suffering and failure.

The only way to defeat a monster of this magnitude is with an even more horrifying monster...

Huckle goes to hell and back and back again in this tragic tale of terrestrial cephalopods, ursine lycanthropes and explosive volcano drake diarrhea.

Dark fantasy will never be the same.

With a forward by R.S. Matheny and Philip Overby, hosts of the Grim Tidings Podcast

TENTACLES UNDER A FULL MOON is the first part in the ongoing WEREBEAR vs LANDOPUS series, which just gets more and more silly as time goes on...

Here's the list of participating authors again. Go give them some love and grab yourself some free books! And authors, hey, it's not too late to sign up, so join in the fun!

Stone Man by Charles Suddeth RELEASE DAY

I'm going to turn the blog over to the fine folks at Dancing Lemur Press today to tell you about a brand-new release you should check out:

Driven to Stone Man’s trail...

After U.S. soldiers attack twelve-year-old Tsatsi’s Cherokee village, his family flees to the Smokey Mountains. Facing storms, flood, and hunger, they’re forced to go where Stone Man, a monstrous giant, is rumored to live. 

His family seeks shelter in an abandoned village, but soldiers hunt them down. Tsatsi and his sister Sali escape, but Sali falls ill and is kidnapped by Stone Man. Tsatsi gives chase and confronts the giant, only to learn this monster isn’t what he seems.

Their journey is a dangerous one. Will Tsatsi find the strength to become a Cherokee warrior? And will they ever find their family?

THE DETAILS!

Stone Man
And the Trail of Tears
By Charles Suddeth
Print ISBN 9781939844620
EBook ISBN 9781939844637
$12.95, 6x9 trade paperback, 162 pages
Juvenile Fiction: Boys & Men/Legends, Myths, Fables-Native American/Historical-United States-General
Release date - October 8, 2019

THE AUTHOR!

Charles Suddeth loves to tell stories of all sizes and shapes and flavors. He has published picture books, middle readers’ books, young adult thrillers, and adult mysteries. Of Cherokee heritage, he draws inspiration from hiking Tom Sawyer State Park and teaches in Louisville, Kentucky.

https://ctsuddeth.com/

THE LINKS!

ITunes - https://fnd.io/#/us/book/1455664389-stone-man-and-the-trail-of-tears-by-char

Barnes & Noble – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1130849102?ean=9781939844620

Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Stone-Man-Trail-Charles-Suddeth-ebook/dp/B07X9CM3CH

Kobo - https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/stone-man-and-the-trail-of-tears

Dancing Lemur Press LLC - http://www.dancinglemurpressllc.com/new-adultyoung-adultmiddle-grade

Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44453832-stone-man-and-the-trail-of-tears

Read the Damn Book (#IWSG October 2019)

Warning: This Month's Optional Question inspired a bit of a rant. I apologise in advance.

October Question

It's been said that the benefits of becoming a writer who does not read is that all your ideas are new and original. Everything you do is an extension of yourself, instead of a mixture of you and another author. On the other hand, how can you expect other people to want your writing, if you don't enjoy reading? What are your thoughts?

"It's been said" that writing without reading is a good idea? By who? That's terrible advice.

(To be fair, 90% of all writing advice is terrible, so statistically speaking it checks out. Also, there's a 90% chance that everything I say below is complete and utter garbage.)

I don't believe you can write without reading. Reading will make you a better writer. Period. Reading will provide you new ideas, not just for content but in style and substance. Whether you learn new things to do, or things you shouldn't do, you can always gain something from reading. I find the most formulaic, boring writing comes from people who don't read, because they have limited ideas of what a story is supposed to look like. They keep writing it the same way over and over again.

I'm a just leave this here.

I firmly believe there are no new ideas. In the thousands of years humanity has been writing stories (and tens of thousands they have been sharing them orally), everything has been said. You are not going to come up with a new idea for your first-ever self-published supernatural YA cozy romance mystery. But there are other ways to say the same things, other ways to express similar ideas, new settings and ways to deconstruct themes. You can tell stories with your voice, with your perspective. But in order to do that, you need to learn other people's voices, to learn about other themes, from different writers, different perspectives, different times, different cultures. You can't bake a cake without multiple ingredients. Writing without reading other people's ideas is like trying to make cupcakes with only a bag of flour.

Some people might be into it, I guess?

Tangential Anecdote Time: It's in my bio and I mention it from time to time, but I have a Bachelor's Degree in Theatre Arts. I originally wanted to be an actor. One of the (many) reasons I didn't pursue acting is because I hated the way my school taught performance. They encouraged everyone to be edgy and creative and "true to themselves." The number one lesson was "Break all the rules." The only problem was that they didn't teach us the rules. There was no basic instruction on how to project in front of an audience, how to interpret text in performance, or even how to tell a coherent story. How can you deconstruct something that you don't know how to construct in the first place? I watched so much experimental, weird performance in that class, and so much of it was terrible. There was broken glass, raw meat, gratuitous nudity, fake blood, simulated masturbation, impromptu make-out sessions with strangers and more (I did three of those myself in a single piece; I'll let you guess which ones). The people that came in with a background in Theatre, or that were just really naturally talented, could pull it off and do interesting stuff, but the rest of us were lost and just making horseshit. We thought (and were told) that we were imaginative and creative but we didn't have a fucking clue what we were doing, and no one would watch our shows that weren't forced to sit through them as part of class. It's the exact same reason there are so many terrible self-published books out there on Amazon.

Conclusion: Writing without reading is like pretending to masturbate in theatre class.

I think I'm going to put that on a business card.

TRICK OR TREAT READS!

OCTOBER IS FINALLY HERE! HALLOWEEN SEASON! Know what that means? Yes, dentists are rubbing their hands in greedy anticipation, but also...

AUTHORS WILL SOON BE GIVING AWAY FREE BOOKS LIKE CANDY!

Once again, the lovely and talented Miss Patricia Lynne/Josephine will be hosting Trick-or-Treat reads, an awesome blog hop where anyone can join to give or get free books on October 31! 

Authors, sign up to give out free books! Find new readers and get your books into appreciate hands!

Readers, all you have to do is go through the list on Halloween and grab any freebies that you're interested in!

The list of participating blogs/authors is below. Authors sign up any time between now and October 31. 

Be sure to check out Patricia's blog as well, for full details and just because she's an awesome person.

Until next time!
Hugs & Kisses,
-CDGK

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

Halloween Creep 2K19 (#IWSG September 2019)

Fall is in the air, kids are back to school. I'm not going to talk about stories I haven't finished yet, because it seems like every time I start talking about my progress it immediately stops. Nor will I complain about how I haven't written as much as I wanted to, because I've done enough whining.

Let's take a pass this month, m'kay?

TRICK OR TREAT READS!

It's the most wonderful time of the year! So what if it's only September 4th? Halloween is just around the corner! And as usual, I will be joining many other authors GIVING AWAY FREE BOOKS LIKE CANDY!

Once again, the lovely and talented Miss Patricia Lynne/Josephine will be hosting Trick-or-Treat reads, an awesome blog hop where anyone can join to give or get free books on October 31! 

Authors, sign up to give out free books! Find new readers and get your books into appreciate hands!

Readers, all you have to do is go through the list on Halloween and grab any freebies that you're interested in!

The list of participating blogs/authors is below. Authors sign up any time between now and October 31. 

Be sure to check out Patricia's blog as well, for full details and just because she's an awesome person.

SEPTEMBER IWSG QUESTION

If you could pick one place in the world to sit and write your next story, where would it be and why?

Honestly I can write anywhere, and I do. But part of me wouldn't mind writing back home in Newfoundland, mostly because I may or may not be working on a story set there...

Hope everyone had a great summer! Be sure to check out Trick or Treat Reads!

Hugs and kisses,

-CDGK

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

Stranger Things Have Happened (#IWSG August 2019)

Summer rolls lazily on. I've been struggling with a lack of energy, the brief flurry of productivity I had the beginning of last month is long gone.

I'm not sure if I'm depressed or just bored, but I've had so much trouble getting down to writing. My head is constantly swimming with ideas, but I can't get any of them down on paper. It's been busy sure, but I've written during busy periods before. In fact some of my most productive times are during times when life gets hectic. Anxious energy I guess. But I have none of that energy now. Hell I took a week off work, put the kids in summer camp and daycare, and spent the whole week sleeping and binge-watching all three seasons of Stranger Things. I don't think I wrote a single word that week, despite having, theoretically, lots of free time.

I have a couple of deadlines coming up at the end of the month, so I really hope I can get back on track.

How about everyone else? Is your summer going as planned?

August 7 question - Has your writing ever taken you by surprise?
I have a good example for this one, and I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every one of my acceptances were on the first submission of that particular story. As a corollary to that, I've never had a story accepted beyond the first submission, either.

In other words, if a story isn't accepted the first time, it doesn't get accepted. It's a weird sort of pattern. I'm genuinely surprised every time something gets accepted, because I've had a few stories that have been rejected a lot.

That's all for now. Hope you enjoy the rest of your summer!

Hugs and kisses,
-CDGK

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.

Serious Collector (Of Rejections) #IWSG July 2019

Me collecting rejection letters...

Writing has been picking up the last month. I haven't made any progress on my main manuscript, because I've been focusing on submitting short stories to several anthologies and journals. I wrote and submitted one story last week at the very last possible minute to their deadline - it was very rushed and I probably should have given up, but the story is so particular to their theme that I doubt I will be able to place it anywhere else, so I pushed through to get it in. I've also received a bunch of rejections lately on older stories, which is fine (I'm inching closer to my coveted 100 rejections). Only one of them was a bummer, as it was a story I really enjoy and a collection I thought it fit perfectly - plus there were names involved that I quite like, so it would have been cool to be part of it. To be honest though the rejections are nowhere near as disappointing as not finishing something I set out to do.

I've got at least three more short stories to finish and submit over the next couple of months, and then I can get back to and hopefully finish my current novel. We don't have any big summer plans so I have my fingers crossed I can get some work done (and not waste too much time playing Pokemon GO).

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

It would be really nice to not get bored of something and actually finish it for once. In the last two years I believe I've started 4 different manuscripts and got between 1/4 and 1/2 through before giving up on them. Hopefully one of them will stick one of these days.

How about you? Any good writing coming up this Summer?

July 3 Question: 

What personal traits have you written into your character(s)?

Most of my characters are awkward losers, so what does that say about me? There has definitely been some of my insecurities written into my characters, though I have the most fun when I write characters who say the things I wish I could say/had said. To really let the asshole side of my personality out, which I generally try to keep in check. I suppose that's wish-fulfilment writing, in an odd sort of way.

Anyway, that's all for now. Keep writin', keep livin', keep catchin' Pokemon.

Hugs and kisses,
-CDGK

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Writers post their thoughts on their blogs, talking about their doubts and the fears they have conquered. It's a chance for writers to commiserate and offer a word of encouragement to each other. Check out the group at http://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/.