I'm drawing characters. This time it's Andy.

CLICK TO EMBIGGEN IF YOU WANT

Because it was so snowy outside my window this weekend here in Utah, I decided to finish a pencil drawing I started a month or so ago of Andy Callahan who makes his appearance in "Oculus." So this is what I think he looks like. In the last third of the book, there's a part where Jordan spends Thanksgiving with Andy at his parent's home in the Hamptons, which is surrounded by woods. It snows and interesting things happen. And yes, I really like writing about the children of the 1% (because let's face it peeps...the 1% live a lifestyle I will never know).

Thanks for all the support regarding the "Oculus" cover reveal. For those of you who indicated interest in being part of my blog tour, I sent all your contact information to my publicist, Roxanne Rhoades, who is helping me set it up. I just got overwhelmed with individual emails, the book getting plopped in my lap, and planning my business trip to the Consumer Electronics Show on January 5th.

Between that and trying to figure out what to do, I just realized I could use some assistance. Roxanne previously helped Ciara Knight which made me think, if Ciara got help from this lady that's good enough for me. Plus she was uber affordable. I was like, "OMG, I spend that kind of money on one meal out with friends. So totally worth it."

So if you get an email from Roxanne about scheduling, please don't toss it. She's just helping me. Things are super busy at work too. And look at it this way, with her helping me, my visiting to your blogs shouldn't diminish because I'll have time to do so now. :)

Thanks everyone. Have a great Monday.

Oculus is here

So this is my cover. It's full of creepy crawlies. And seeing that you've probably already viewed it by now on my sidebar or through the tab above, I wanted to offer a little explanation of what's going on here. The cover does fit the book. Even if you may be scratching your head and thinking...can Mike really write about spiders
this much? Yes, yes I can. So here's the scene that this cover actually reflects (although it is a symbolic cover and not an actual scene as taken from the book):

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(Kolin and Kathy in front of a computer terminal,

and Kolin tells Kathy to start a video they both can watch)

Kathy did as instructed.  A video started up, showing an individual approaching the front of the building.  He wore a long cloak, but his face was unmistakable.  Charon possessed skin as transparent as glass.  He had silver eyes and deep red hair that flowed down from his scalp and swept over his shoulders to fall in the darkness behind his hood.  As he walked forward, he parted his cloak, and Kolin saw the redness of Charon’s heart, beating under all that transparent skin, supplying blood to the demigod’s limbs so that he may live.

From inside the flap of his coat, millions of glass spiders emerged and washed across the black asphalt like a glittering flash flood.  Charon directed them like Poseidon must command the waves of the ocean.  They blazed with their own silver light and swarmed over cars, benches, and lampposts, scurrying toward the front of the building.  Guards at the doors pulled out pistols and shot off a few rounds but were quickly overwhelmed by the spiders.  These tiny arachnids with gears visible on the inside of their glass skin spun silver thread about the struggling humans, encasing them, and then proceeded to drill into their heads, lacing their brains with microfilament fiber optic wire.

The video had no sound so Kolin couldn’t hear the screaming.  But he could see the men and women shrieking.  He watched.  His skin got clammy under his armor; his mouth dried of spit.  Despite the fact that the wounds inflicted by the spiders were small, blood flowed over the floor as thick and sticky as syrup.

The spiders continued their march and entered the building, cocooning anyone they came across.  The millions of tiny creatures were unstoppable, like a deadly tide, and they crawled over everything, leaving threads of blinking light that flowed into Charon’s body.  People fell in the lobby and became enshrouded in webs.  They collapsed in doorways or in the chairs in which they sat.  Meanwhile, Charon just continued to cackle and smile with glee.

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So what's going on with the cover. Well, the color red is very important to the book. The team that Jordan plays on is called "The Big Red" and its colors are red and white.  Jordan plays ice hockey so the spiders are walking on what could be construed as glass or ice. Blood on the ice is an important theme in this book, hence the blood droplets underneath the spiders. So in a way, the cover is perfect for the story and they definitely look like a part of the same series. I wasn't sure if I quite liked it, but it's growing on me. What do you think?

The book did go on sale today. Go HERE for purchasing options.

A FAVOR ==> If you are looking for an idea for a post (I'm not asking for any special treatment), could you just mention the cover in a snippet either today or tomorrow?

I'm not blogging tomorrow so I'll see you Monday.

Thanking the Resurrected Insecure Reader Support Group Wednesday

Dear reader,

This is my time to say thank you to the many people who have taken the time to read my words. I appreciate you because you invested time in me. Without you, I would still think I had no voice. I would still feel invisible. In many ways, my life is greatly improved for having and keeping this blog.I feel like I am now part of an amazing community of the most intelligent and diverse minds in the world. Even if we disagreed either politically or ideologically, the intelligent discourses that we have engaged upon either on your blogs or through mine has been an entertaining experience, and I look forward to many more in 2013. I am thankful to you, dear reader, for everything that you do.

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." Friedrich Nietzsche

This blog fest is the brain child of Tara and Vicki. You can visit their blogs by clicking on their names in the previous sentence. :)

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Now onto my second blogfest which also happens on a Wednesday. Many of you are familiar with it, as Alex Cavanaugh came up with it and truthfully, I think it's the most brilliant blog fest ever for three reasons. 1) Simplicity. 2) It re-occurs. 3) It's helpful. Alex, my man, you are a genius.

My insecurity comes about mostly this week because I'm wondering when exactly to start a blog tour for my next book. Deron with Double Dragon Publishing gave me my cover art this week. I wasn't expecting it. And truthfully, I don't think he really was expecting to tackle it. Deron is kind of random. He focuses 100% on getting the book to where it can be bought online. That's where his responsibility ends. And, he has tons of projects to do, because as you all know, everyone is writing (this is a good thing in my opinion because writing encourages critical thinking). Literally, DDP has posted on their website that they will probably not get to new submissions until 2014. I said to him, "I have no problem in waiting my turn. Do not give me any special favors." He responded by saying he'd probably get to it in the spring.

Something obviously happened between then and now, because he just got excited about it and is going to publish it this week. I haven't even had time to think about sending out review copies. But none of that matters anyway because the only people that are going to read it are people who have read the first book. No one I know dives into a series in the second book. No one.

Anyway, with regard to publishing Oculus, it hasn't quite happened yet because there were "issues" with the equation editor that I use in Microsoft Word (yes, my book has math in it). However, before you, dear reader, let out a groan...Donna Hole (beta reader extraordinaire) had me remove all the calculus. She said in pretty blunt words "THIS HAS GOT TO GO." And I said, "Yes ma'am." No calculus at all remains. It is simply one square root equation and one polynomial that Jordan explains fully in the narrative. It's easy stuff that we all learn in fifth grade.

Now, my insecurity isn't that I won't have support from bloggers for a tour. It's that I can't make a decision. THIS is one of the things that really does paralyze me. I AGONIZE over decisions. I've been living in an apartment for four years because I can't decide on where I want to live, or what kind of house I want. Seriously. I'm driving an old car because I can't decide if I want a new one or not. I sometimes can't decide whether or not I should go to a doctor. Right now, I can't decide whether I want my blog tour to start in December or January.

Now, I AM going to have some help from a professional marketer/publicist. I've been communicating with her and really like the fact that she'll be helping my scatterbrained mind to stay organized. I may seem organized on this blog, but if you knew me in real life, you'd know how scatterbrained and "not together" I really am.

I may decide to do some in December and some in January and skip over the dead space between Christmas and New Years. But no matter what, I have a decision to make.

If you would like to see my cover art, you can find it on the tab OCULUS BLOG TOUR above or just click on those caps. If any of you are reading this and would like a free blog post (sometimes we could all use one of these), I'd appreciate a cover reveal on your blog whenever you'd like. The book isn't commercially available yet, but I expect it to be on Friday. You can find the blurb HERE under the words "Short Synopsis." I myself am doing a cover reveal tomorrow just because it's Thursday and it's the first day this week that I don't have anything scheduled.

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This is the last blog fest I'm participating in that also falls on today. It is the brain child of Mina Lobo, a fantastic and supportive author from the blog "Some Dark Romantic." Please go visit her and check out some of the blog fest entries if you have the time.

I wrote a post in the first year that I started blogging. It's about exclamation points, and you can find it HERE. It still gets quite a few views but not any new comments. I promise, it's really funny if you go and take a look.

Whew...I think I survived "Thanking the Resurrected Insecure Reader Support Group Wednesday".

Monsters in fiction need to make sense. Wisdom from author L. Blankenship

I am pleased to welcome author L. Blankenship to my blog. I discovered Ms. Blankenship a few months ago. She's a fantastic speculative fiction author, and I have to say that I've been zooming through this offering of hers like a kid through cotton candy. Perhaps next week, I'll have a review for you. Until then, please read what she has to say :).

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FROM THE BACK COVER:

The saints favor her, else-wise a peasant girl like Kate Carpenter would never be apprenticed to the kingdom’s master healer. But her patron saint also marks her ready for the duty of tending to a mission that must cross the ice-bound mountains.
Their little kingdom faces invasion by a vast empire and desperately needs allies; across the snow-filled pass, through the deathly thin air, is a country that’s held off the empire and may be willing to lend an army.

Kate knows about frostbite and the everyday injuries of wilderness travel. She can heal those.

She’s not ready for the attentions of a ne’er-do-well knight and the kingdom’s only prince, though.

And she isn’t ready for the monsters that harry them night and day, picking off their archers first, wearing the party to exhaustion, pushing Kate beyond the limits her healing abilities.

She must keep them alive, or her blood will be on the snow too.

SOME THOUGHTS ON MONSTERS:

The monsters that Kate and her companions face are unsettlingly smart and organized. The cover story to keep their mission secret is that they're on a hunting trip to thin these monsters' numbers. Who's thinning whose numbers becomes a going question once the travelers are worn to exhaustion.

They call the monsters lamia. The lamia are wolves who've grown up drinking the magic-laced waters of a fount -- it changes them into something more dangerous. But lamia are still part of the local ecology and however intelligent they are, they still need to "make sense."

Any fantasy world that includes monsters, whether it's dragons or unicorns or invented creatures like my wolf-lamia, ought to take basic ecology into consideration. Even monsters need to eat and raise their young. They need places to sleep and everyday lives to go about.

It's a personal peeve of mine that in so many movies, our hero goes into a forest/jungle/desert and immediately trips over a large predator who has nothing better to do today than chase a random human around. This is usually fatal for the predator, too. It's a senseless and annoying trope IMO.

Author photo of L. Blankenship

I asked myself some basic questions, when I was creating my lamia:

• What do they normally eat? Why are humans on the menu? My answer: they eat deer and elk, normally. But most humans are easy to kill, especially children. It's the ones with bows you have to look out for. 
• What ordinary animal are they filling in for? My answer: wolves, bears, and cougars all at once. An area can only support a limited number of predators, and my lamia fill all those niches.
• What are their motivations for approaching humans? My answer: they are defending their territory, especially the magical fount. They know humans are competition for both the fount and for prey in the stretch of forest the lamia claim.  

What questions would you add to my list?

Find L. Blankenship at the following places:

She keeps a book blog at DISCIPLE OF THE FOUNT

Her writing blog called NOTES FROM THE JOVIAN FRONTIER can be found HERE.

Disciple on AMAZON KINDLE is located HERE.

Disciple on KOBO is located HERE

And you can find her on GOODREADS located HERE.

The politics of revenge in a zombie apocalypse

SPOILER ALERT -- This blog post discusses season 3, episode 4 entitled "The Killer Within" from "The Walking Dead."

In the image above is Andrew from Season 3 of The Walking Dead and from the comic book of the same name. Those of you who have followed my blog for some time know I periodically like to talk about story elements present within the shows that I watch. Aside from being another nail-biting episode, upon finishing, I had questions about the moral nature of man and the idea of screwing over your fellow man in a zombie apocalypse for no good reason.

Primarily...what I wanted to know is why?

Screwing over your fellow man has never really made sense to me in any science fiction drama that features terrible creatures that will eat you. Burke did it in the movie Aliens and when I watch the movie, I still wonder why. Was Burke insane? Did he not see what the alien xenomorph did to humans. It has got to be one of the most gruesome fates ever imagined.

A zombie apocalypse isn't much better.

With Andrew, he had to run for his life from Rick after his nefarious plot (along with inmate Tomas) was exposed and they tried to kill Rick. Rick chased him to a zombie infested yard where Rick slammed the door shut on Andrew. The last thing we heard were Andrew's chilling screams.

Well, we learned Sunday night that Andrew survived without getting bit and somehow made it to a safe place where the zombies couldn't get to him. Now, if that were me (and trust me...there'd be long odds that I could ever survive one day in a zombie apocalypse) I would count my lucky stars, use the skills that I have to obviously survive multiple zombies, and go into the wild and look for a place where I could find food and shelter away from people that want to kill me. Perhaps I could find another group of survivors that could take me in if I showed them that I could be a good person with valuable survival skills.

But this isn't what Andrew does. He gets back into the prison with the intent to screw over Rick and his crew. Doesn't he realize that each time he encounters the zombies that he is risking his life? Why would you ever do that given that the zombies could kill you and the people you are screwing over can kill you? I would be terrified of both. And he literally gets an entire herd of zombies all riled up by blasting the alarm at the prison. This can only end one way.

So why would a person do that? And does it seem just a little unbelievable? Like maybe they needed to establish that the character was a lunatic before going down this road? Or do you think it's perfectly reasonable that a man on his own (that should feel lucky just to be alive in such a cruel world) would turn from thoughts of survival and focus on those of revenge against people who failed to kill him?

I look forward to finding out what you think regarding revenge in settings where the stakes for your very survival are extremely high to begin with, much less inviting wrath from another front.

Laura Diamond and New Pride

Everyone please welcome author Laura Diamond. She's excited about her new book and wants to tell you all about it :)

New town, new love, new terror.

It’s here! My prequel novelette, NEW PRIDE, releases today. I’m SO stoked for it to run wild in the world.

NEW PRIDE was born from my upcoming novel, SHIFTING PRIDE (coming December 7, 2012!). In SHIFTING PRIDE, the main character, Nickie, searches for her missing father, Richard…and NEW PRIDE is all about Richard’s journey to independence and new love.

NEW PRIDE Blurb:

A shape-shifter without a pride, Richard Leone strikes a tenuous friendship with power hungry Derek from an unstable, rogue group. On a hunt in the forest, they encounter a gorgeous brunette, Molly, partying with friends around a campfire. Derek tells the rogue pride and they bristle at humans trespassing on their territory. Richard risks life and tail to protect his secret and the humans—especially Molly—while simultaneously trying to win her heart. When Molly is kidnapped, he faces taking on the rogue pride alone, but quickly finds he has to put his trust in Derek, not only to rescue his new love, but to ensure the rogue pride doesn’t wreak havoc on his new town.

Author Laura Diamond:

Laura Diamond is a board certified psychiatrist and author of all things young adult paranormal, dystopian, horror, and middle grade. Her short story, City of Lights and Stone, is in the Day of Demons anthology by Anachron Press (April 2012) and her apocalyptic short story, Begging Death is in the Carnage: Life After the End anthology by Sirens Call Publication (coming late 2012). Her debut young adult paranormal romance, SHIFTING PRIDE, is coming December 2012 by Etopia Press. When she's not writing, she is working at the hospital, blogging at Author Laura Diamond--Lucid Dreamer , and renovating her 225+ year old fixer-upper mansion. She is also full-time staff member for her four cats and a Pembroke Corgi named Katie.

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A bonus:

I will be giving away copies of NEW PRIDE to several lucky fans! Please click the link below and fill out the form on my fan page to enter.

Thanks! >>>> LINK TO GIVEAWAY <<<<

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Buy New Pride today on Amazon HERE for $2.99.

How to find Laura Diamond on the web:

Blog: http://lbdiamond.wordpress.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/diamondlb

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/laura.diamond.52

Facebook Author Page: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorLauraDiamond

Amazon.com Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Laura-Diamond/e/B009Y7L432/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_8

Website: www.AuthorLauraDiamond.com

And now, you get to see the author in the flesh talking about her work. Grab a drink, click play, and listen.

In The DM Zone—Talking about SHIFTING PRIDE

Five things I don't want to see in the new Star Wars films

So the Star Wars/Disney deal is big news and my mental preparation includes a list of things that I hope Lucasfilm will not do in episodes 7, 8, and 9. I have a lot of faith in producer Kathleen Kennedy, as her name is on every single Spielberg film going back to pretty much Jaws. That is a resume of pure excellence that hardly anyone in my mind could top. Still, I do have five suggestions. Could we not have:

1) A romance in the middle episode of the trilogy. You can't dispute that Star Wars is pretty formulaic. The first in the trilogy is the introduction to the characters wherein they fight something evil and triumph with all happy faces to closing credits of John Williams iconic score. But the middle episode has always dripped with gushy romance. Empire had it first and then it continued with "Attack of the Clones." I say break with the formula. Of course, audiences could expect it by now so who am I to complain?

2) Can we not screw over the "extended universe." There's this word that floats around the sci-fi world. It's called "Canon", and it refers to the material that is officially endorsed within the Star Wars universe. Anything that is an outlier, gets kaboshed with the phrase "That's not canon." So if something in a Star Wars comic book or novel gets crushed by the words "not canon" then what the hell is it? I suppose "made up" would suffice. But then, isn't the whole thing "made up?" The whole "that's not canon" is just irritating. The Alien franchise is awash with this as movies like Alien vs. Predator get proclaimed "not canon." It just seems to me to be something that a nerd uses to dismiss the contributions of another that are viewed publicly as piss-poor.

3) Can we get new actors/actresses for Leia, Han, and Luke? I really do not want to see their old asses playing these parts. Harrison Ford looked like he was about to die in Cowboys and Aliens and don't get me started on Mark Hamill. He looks like Roger Moore does (remember James Bond)? My suspension of disbelief can only go so far and this pic of Roger just makes me cringe. We all gonna age and age sucks. Hollywood is definitely not immune.

4) Can merchandising not include Princess Leia and Queen Amidala as "Disney Princesses."

5) Disney please please please do not take on Michael Bay as a director even if he begs and pleads. Just imagine "Star Wars Transformers." No No No No No. And please no Megan Fox or that awful Kate Beckinsale. Every movie either of these women is in sucks the big one all the way home. They are terrible.

One of the worst directors ever. Sorry,
money does not equate skill or intelligence.
It just means "you're rich."

I think if we steer clear of these things, I shall be a happy movie goer. I have to admit, I'm excited about Disney taking control of this franchise. As much as I liked episodes 1-3 (I have watched them several times), I think they could have been better. Almost in the role of a beta-reader, I would have made suggestions if possible. For example, I would have cut the Jar Jar character and redone Darth Maul so that he had more speaking parts and more of his back story on display. I would have hired a different child actor for the boy that played Anakin. Oy...he was terrible.

But I wasn't a beta reader for Lucas so all that's a moot point. What Lucas came up with (in my opinion) was still really good but it could have been better.

Having seen what Disney has done with Marvel's movies really blows me away. So I expect HUGE HUGE things. I expect to have directors like Joss Whedon or J.J. Abrams. Just please...no Michael Bay. Transformers makes my brain melt out of my ears.

And that my friends is all I have to say on that.

If you didn't visit Mary's blog yesterday, I was a guest on Spacedock 19. I talked about Japanese Kaiju and it was awesome. Read about it HERE.

Have a great Thursday.