Z is for COVER REVEAL!!

So as you can see from my using a country and the last letter of a story's title for my last two days, I've run out of characters. I could probably use another character from my fantasy series, but I've milked that one enough, so instead I'm going to share something I've been meaning to show you all month... the cover of my upcoming debut novel, Ten Thousand Days!

For those who missed it, here's the blurb:

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...

It will be available on Amazon and Kobo veeeery shortly. Honestly, I was hoping to announce the official release date today. Everything is ready except for one small detail... I'm waiting for Amazon and the IRS to process my tax paperwork. See, as I'm a Canadian publishing through an American company, Amazon will automatically withhold 30% of any sales I make until they can confirm I am actually a Canadian as I claim I am (Canada and the US has a tax treaty, so I don't have to pay US taxes on stuff like this, only Canadian - as long as I fill out the paperwork). So, I'm waiting for that paperwork to go through, then we're off to the races!

But anyway, you don't care about tax treaties and international economics, you just want to read my book! I promise, if you watch this blog, or follow me on Google+ or Twitter, you will be the first to know.

Thanks for sticking with me the last few weeks, reading about characters you haven't (or even been able to) read about before. Hopefully if you stick around just a little bit longer, you're actually be able to read the full thing...

Characters You've Never Heard Of: ISAAC

“Wake up, boy.” The voice came from directly beside Isaac’s ear, and he immediately woke to full alertness and jumped to his feet.

He was still in his apartment. He was still naked. It was light outside. How long had he been asleep?

“Put this on,” said a man standing next to him, thrusting an armload of clothes at Isaac. It was the man from the street corner, with the neat little black moustache and the horrible teeth. He was still dressed in his luxurious tuxedo, and his overcoat and hat were tossed over a chair at the kitchen table.

“How did you get in here?” Isaac asked, painfully aware of his nakedness and feeling ashamed and uncomfortable. “What do you want from me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the man answered, holding the clothes toward him. Isaac caught a glimpse of his disgustingly twisted teeth. “But if you want to save your wife, you need to get dressed and come with me. Now.”

Isaac knew then he was dreaming. Yet everything, including the man’s wretched teeth, white starched shirt and Isaac’s own shame, all felt perfectly real. “Save her? What are you talking about?”

“Get dressed.” He said again, firmly, finally. Isaac gave up arguing, and took the clothes from him. He got dressed in the clean, neatly pressed pants, shirt and jacket. There were shiny wing-tip shoes nearby to go along with it. Everything fit perfectly.

“Where are we going, a wedding?” Isaac asked, buttoning the cuff links on his sleeves.

“No, a funeral. You should know better than that. Come on.”

-excerpt from the soon to be published "Ten Thousand Days"

* * *

Isaac is the protagonist in Ten Thousand Days. He's a pretty ordinary dude, living in Toronto with a beautiful wife at a lousy job he hates, but he life is pretty simple and carefree.

And then everything goes to hell.

I really run Isaac through a lot of weird shit over the course of Ten Thousand Days, but he handles it well. He's tougher and more resourceful than he seems, and shows immense willpower and determination to be able to go the extremes that he does to get back the things that he loves.

I am purposefully pretty vague about Isaac's description in the book. I know who he is, what is background is, where he's from and so on, but little of it is mentioned in the story. I want him to be an everyman for modern twenty-somethings/early thirty-somethings. I want the reader to be able to connect with him, to sympathize with him, to really feel for him. I want them to place themselves in his shoes. He really is an ordinary guy placed in an extraordinary situation. How will he handle it? How would you handle it, if it were you?

What would you do to save someone you love?

* * *

So I was kinda hoping I could reveal the cover of Ten Thousand Days today, but I still haven't put the finishing touches on it. I'm VERY close, but I just can't share it, not yet.

Of course, I can't mention it and not show you ANYTHING, so here's a little teaser...

That's gotta be worth something, right? (It'll be ready soon, I promise...)

Characters You've Never Heard Of: CLEMENTINE (and my COVER blurb!)

They went in and ordered from menus that looked like they were drawn in crayon by three-year-olds. Their food came on chipped, mismatched dishes, and they ate off of a table that had one leg an inch shorter than the other three. But that was why Clementine loved it, because it was different, and it was weird, and it was special. This, coincidentally, was also exactly why Isaac loved Clementine. She was possessed of a chaotic energy and passion he had never encountered in anyone else in his life. No two days had ever been alike in all the years they had known each other, and no moment he could recall had ever been boring. She was a primal force of nature, mercurial and ever-changing. Not every moment was fun and happy—do not think for a second that everything was perfect. They had fights and arguments that shook the walls, and smashed dishes and sent the poor cat scrambling to hide under the sink. But they also had moments of screaming, child-like joy and passionate, philosophical debates, and wild, toe-curling sex that was even louder than their arguments. They did everything in their lives with their knobs on eleven (well, Clem was always on eleven, Isaac was lucky when he got past seven and a half) but that was why he loved her, because he knew that without her energy in his life he would be a boring and miserable nobody, and the last twenty years would have been an utter and complete waste.

Clementine is one of the main characters in Ten Thousand Days. She's the love interest of the protagonist, and the driving force behind the main conflict and thrust of the story. I don't want to get into it much more than that and risk spoiling anything, so today's post is going to be even more lame than usual.

To (hopefully) make up for it, I'll give you some back story. The name "Clementine" is one my wife and I have tossed around for years, and we always said it would be our first daughter's name. Well, we had our daughter on March 13, and of course we didn't name her Clementine. In fact, her name is one of the reasons/excuses I've been dragging my feet about releasing Ten Thousand Days. I wanted to be 100% sure we didn't call her Clementine before I went ahead and left her name in the book.

I guess I could have just changed the name of the character, but that would have cost me my excuse for procrastinating...

But the time for procrastinating is over. I really, really, want to get this book out there in the very near future. The manuscript has been pretty much done for ages, but there's still some periphery bits to work out. A big one is the blurb.

So here it is ladies and gentlemen, the extra bonus from today's blog post, YOUR opportunity to tell me how badly this blurb sucks, and if you would buy a book based on these few meandering words:

***

They say love hurts and time heals all wounds, but sometimes the reverse is also true.

Isaac was very good at wasting time. Video games, a mindless job, no responsibilities - he had a simple life and few wants and, despite being hopelessly average, unassuming and kind of useless, had somehow miraculously married the most beautiful and 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 Father Time himself 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 what a young man will do for love, and it's not always pretty...

***

So what do you think? Needs work, huh?