I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Just for kicks, I took a passage in the middle and ran it through, then the last couple of pages and ran them through, and both times it told me:

I write like
Neil Gaiman

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmm. Can’t really complain with either of those. The only real takeaway is the writer of the program appears to think I write like a modern fantasist. Of course, when I first found this a while ago, I ran a short passage from The Pack: Winter Kill through it, and it said I write like Rudyard Kipling.

Figure that one out.

With teachers and students returning to my workplace soon, maybe I’ll be able to return to some semblance of routine. While I haven’t overextended myself intentionally, a number of things conspired to take care of that for me, not least of which being the Great Heart Scare these last few weeks.

The good news on that front is the stress test, EKG, and nuclear camera pics of my pump show all is well. The bad news is now people are telling me it could be inflammation, an aortal aneurism, a defective gall bladder, torn cartilage and/or a pulled muscle, a pinched nerve, or a hiatal hernia. So yeah, comforting.

Fortunately I don’t yet write for a living because it’s put a strain on both my creativity and my time to create. I’ve been throwing myself at the day job instead.

This weekend i decided I’m done sweating it. I have too much to do. And thanks to that new mindset, a new direction for The Pack reared it’s head, a way to accelerate to the meat of the characters’ stories in Book 2 that the editor and I both dig and I think you all will enjoy.

It’s time to get excited about writing again, not sweat what my body may or may not be doing and the stacks of green paper the hospital is going to be looking for. Hell, it’s even been way too easy to forget about my camera the last few weeks, after things had been going so well for Photo Fridays.

In this same regrouping, I’ve decided I’m going to suck it up and dump the oldest blog posts. I’ve got stuff going back almost a decade, but all it seems to do is attract spam comments. I thought it would be neat to keep that archive visible, but let’s be honest: there’s nothing particularly interesting back there. I’ll stash it away for possible future use, but for now it’s going to come off the web.

I’ll spending a part of the day on a motorcycle, and I’m going to use that quiet time to cogitate on creative activity, not stress. I want to be in the right mindset for Friday, when my Evileye Books editor and I will be making a road trip to visit Cullen Bunn and talk more creativity and business planning. That’s sure to be a good time, too.

More later.

The Pack: Winter Kill

You have to be dead not to dig this book. That’s right. Dead.

What you see before you is one of the most incredible mixes of crime, action, and the supernatural that you can ever lay claim to reading. To say that this is the best example of how cross genre writing should be done would be an understatement. Between Greg Lamberson and Mike Oliveri – the bar has been set.

Reading that just made my month. You can read the full review here.

I have to admit, I was nervous about this book as we neared the street date. It’s been a few years since my last release, and a few more years since my first novel release. I felt like I’d been out of the game too long, and I worried that it would show in the final product. Fortunately those concerns have been largely unfounded, as the book has been very well received.

Here’s hoping book 2 gets the same kind of attention. You can be sure I’m giving it my all.

The Pack is still my main focus this summer, and of course The Pack: Winter Kill is still available in trade paperback and in a Kindle edition. The short comic Big Bad Wolves will be going live I believe next month, and I’ve just finish scripting the second short.

Just as Big Bad Wolves is a prequel of sorts to The Pack: Winter Kill, the second short will be a prequel to the second prose book, giving readers a little more insight into one of the main characters and his behavior. And no, neither the second short nor book 2 have a title yet, just some working titles my editor and I are still kicking around. I usually don’t have a solid title until I’m done.

I’m already starting to talk to a potential artist for the second short as well. It’s a lot easier to find an artist for the short pieces than it is a longer project, especially for the kind of rates a new startup is able to pay, so the first comic book in the series, The Pack: Chimaera, will be delayed a bit longer. We’re taking advantage of the delay to do a bit more tweaking to the script for Chimaera, and I think those efforts will pay off in the long run.

Meanwhile, I’m pushing the deadline for the 2nd book, but I’m still confident I’ll make it. It’s going to take some extra knuckling down over the next several weeks, but I’m up for it.

There are a few more The Pack developments in store, but none that I can share just yet. Stay tuned.

I sold a short story last year that I hope will see print in an anthology soon. It’s not been announced yet, so I’ll keep quiet for now. I’ve got two more shorts sitting in a slush pile, and two more to write, one overdue and the other with a deadline imminent. It’s tough to make those a priority with my contractual obligations to Evileye for The Pack, but I’ve not written them off yet.

I’ll have some news on a webcomic soon. The artist is inking the strips, and we’re going to wait until we have several in the can before we launch. I don’t want to say too much right now because we’ve both fallen behind on it, but it’s kind of a new direction for both of us and the short strip format will be a new way to flex my creative muscles.

All of this has unfortunately back-burnered my novel Powerless. With The Pack taking center stage and so many other things going on, it’s been hard to revisit my older work. What’s written is edited on paper, but I haven’t been able to get the rewrite in gear. I had hoped to get back to it by the end of this year, but I think the next The Pack commitment may supersede it yet again.

I’m actually a little more interested in writing Sick Day, which also got preempted by The Pack, specifically the second draft of Chimaera. Crime thrillers have interested me a little more both in my reading and my writing, and Sick Day is a straight thriller with no horror or supernatural elements. Heck, I’ve even been tempted to go back and revisit An Ounce of Brass, an abortive first attempt at a thriller novel that has some good material at its heart but it needs to shed a ton of unnecessary weight.

I won’t even get started on the notebook. It’s got some good things waiting to come to light, like The Shattered Man, but I need to finish all this other stuff first and make some room. Until the writing can start paying the bills, I have to let the day job consume the bulk of my writing time. I’m a night owl and get most of my writing done then, but having to get up early makes it tough to do that consistently. Some see a romantic flair in the writer who forgoes sleep for the sake of his craft, but the fact is it actually harms the output in the long run.

Not to mention the toll it takes on one’s health. I’ve said many times I’d love to stay up late writing and then sleep well into the morning, but right now I just don’t have that luxury. It’s one of several reasons I look forward to Spring and Winter Breaks at work.

In the end it may look like it’s been a while since my last release, but never fear, the wheels are in motion.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and I hope you’ll keep coming back.

Given I’ve got a book available for the Kindle, and I’ve watched my wife enjoy hers, I decided to take a crack at the iPad as a digital book reader. I noticed the iBooks store and Amazon are fairly close in price, but I decided to use the iPad Kindle app instead so I’d have the flexibility to read the books on just about any electronic platform.

Next month I'll have all of my purchased Kindle titles on an Android phone, too

I started with the Kindle edition of Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler. The book itself is a great, straight-up crime thriller and a damn fine read. But reading it on the iPad? A pleasure.

I read it on a plane trip to Hawaii, and the iPad battery lasted the entire flight, including through a layover in Los Angeles. I even switched over to Pages for a while to work on some of my own writing with no problems. I liked that I didn’t have to hold it the entire time; I was able to set it down on the seat tray and keep reading. Quick brightness adjustments made reading easy on the eyes when the lighting in the cabin or outside changed, and I had no problems with glare even though I was sitting in a window seat.

In fact, after just a few minutes, I forgot I was reading an electronic edition at all. I just read, swiped, read, swiped, read, swiped, all without thinking about it. I had no troubles with the font, developed no eyestrain with the backlit screen, and never lost my place even when going in and out of the Kindle app. I did use the bookmark, but going back to the same book every time made it unnecessary.

Next I’ll try reading it in bed. My wife reads her Kindle in bed, but she tends to prop herself up against the headboard in a sitting position, while I like to lay flat. I can’t imagine the Kindle will be any worse than doing so with a hardcover, but I’ll find out. I’m already planning on purchasing another Kindle book, probably Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.

I’d also love to start building a reference library on the iPad. Not just dictionaries, encyclopedias, or a thesaurus, but technical manuals, programming guides, and even martial arts books could all be handy. For example, it would be nice to have Kodokan Judo and my karate school’s curriculum videos available on one portable device rather than lugging a laptop and book(s) around. This would even make them readily available in class, not stashed away in a gym bag in the locker room. (Now I just have to wait for some of those books to show up on Kindle…)

While on vacation, I started looking at the folks who accompanied us on the trip. Some of them were avid readers, and they packed along several books. They were very curious about my wife’s Kindle, with the obvious advantage being they can cut down on the weight of their luggage. If they needed to pick up another book while on the trip, they could just download one instead of picking up one at the bookstore.

One of those avid readers has poor eyesight. I showed him the Kindle and iBooks apps, and we learned he could read from the iPad much easier if he switched to white text on a black background and zoomed the text a bit. He didn’t read from it for any length of time, but at least we now know it may be an option.

The next step for me will be carrying it around more often. I still haven’t convinced myself it will replace my trusty Moleskine (I can still write much faster with a pencil than I can on any keyboard, and I type almost 100wpm on a standard keyboard), but for writing outlines or making edits that I’ll need to share with other people or push to another computer, I have no problem using the iPad.

Heck, with Dropbox, I have all of my documents available on all devices just like I do Kindle books. I dropped three or four PDFs into Dropbox before the flight, all of them comics I’m reviewing for other folks or needed to look over for Evileye (including Big Bad Wolves), and the resolution and clarity were great, even on a color book. I pushed an outline I was working on from Dropbox to Pages with no problem, though I do wish I could export from Pages to Dropbox just as easily, instead of having to go through iTunes.

I’m not convinced it will ever replace my laptop for day-to-day work, but for travel and short road trips I could easily get by with it instead. Having just a camera bag and the iPad on a flight made things so much lighter and easier, and I could have had several books available should one have been disappointing or just not what I was in the mood for. I still have a pile of dead tree editions waiting to be read on my nightstand and I won’t be completely replacing my library any time soon, but I do think I’ll be making more digital purchases in the future.

Back to my original point, I don’t think e-books are going away, nor do I think it’s fair to assume they’re just a fad anymore. The major bookstore chains have their own readers and stores now, and every time I run into someone with a Kindle they can’t wait to show it off.

Bibliophiles love their paper books, but it would appear the average reader just doesn’t care. It’s LPs vs cassettes and cassettes vs CDs all over again. Paper books will be to future generations what vinyl is to our generation: novelties and collector’s items.

Following are the first three pages of Big Bad Wolves. The remainder will be posted to Evileye Books’ Evileye Reader when it launches, and will be included with future electronic editions of The Pack books. We hope to bring you more short stories like this in the future, offering character insights and brief glimpses of the history of The Pack.

Pencils and inks on this story were handled by Mike Henderson, who I’m sure you’ll be seeing more of in the future. The dude’s got talent.

Hope you dig the preview! Click each image to get the full size.

Big Bad Wolves: Page One

Big Bad Wolves: Page Two

Big Bad Wolves: Page Three

My Father’s Scar

The Pack: Winter Kill

Mike Oliveri, winner of the prestigious Bram Stoker Award, combines horror and mystery in his riveting new novel Winter Kill, the first in a projected series that will delight fans of fast-paced noir fiction.

Writing in the tradition of the hardboiled crime novel pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Oliveri pulls no punches in this hard-edged novel of gun-running and murder. What makes his novel memorably unusual is not only its realistic treatment of crime but also its additional element of horror, featuring the current runaway popularity of werewolf fiction.

Altogether, these many exciting elements combine to make Winter Kill a howling success!

Comparisons to Hammett and Chandler? Nice!

Reviews have been very positive so far. I’ll have to be sure to stay on top of my game as I finish book 2.

It started with a crashed server at work. It took a turn for the better this evening when I burned through two more steps of my karate review process, leaving me only sparring and ju ju undo to complete to earn Ikkyu, or first-degree brown belt.

Then it ramped up again when I got some good news from Evileye Books, which I hope to share with you in the coming weeks. It means more work, but that’s a good thing.

Now I’m all amped up and need to burn off some energy.

A belated song of the day:

Thanks again to those of you hanging out in the chat room. I thought about trying to keep up with both the chat and the interview, but in the end I know I’m horrible at multitasking and would have ended up punching keys instead of talking horror flicks and Lovecraft. It was a fun time, and I’ll definitely have to link the show when they post it to their website.

I fully expected to be talking about the paranormal, but it was just a great conversation we could easily have had at bar instead of on the air. That’s what makes a great show as far as I’m concerned, and I recommend folks check them out. (And though I fall more into the skeptic category regarding the paranormal, I do enjoy that sort of thing. The geek in me never left, I just give him a swirley from time to time to keep him in line.)

So browse around, kick the tires, and maybe next time I’m on the show I’ll remember to mention there’s a small reference to Bigfoot in The Pack: Winter Kill.

It doesn’t stop there. Amazon may keep their sales figures quiet, but it’s clear they’re enjoying a fair amount of success and it was only a matter of time before Barnes & Noble responded with their own e-publishing arm. Realistically they’re more digital distributor than digital publisher (individual authors and small presses like Evileye are technically the publishers), but that line gets fuzzier when they sign exclusive authors.

Now I wonder how long before Barnes & Noble — maybe even Borders — jump into the POD market, too. It appears Amazon will be the first with an official Android reading app, though, and as the first to understand the store is the real killer feature, they’re just going to keep pushing the envelope. You don’t stay the leader by waiting to see what the other guy is going to do next.

Which reminds me of the Sony Digital Reader. There are several ideological and some technical advantages to being open, but it just doesn’t have the convenience of Amazon’s WhisperSync. Sure, my wife’s a bit bummed she can’t loan a book to her mother or her sister, but to her it’s hardly even a nuisance as it’s far outweighed by the system’s advantages. (It also doesn’t help that, in my experience, the Sony reader is slower on refreshes and somewhat awkward to navigate.)

This eDGe thing is technically interesting, though it strikes me as more prototype than product at the moment. Here’s their intro video:

They obviously have the best of both worlds in mind. However, why do I care about being able to scribble on the eInk display if I’ve got the tablet right next to it? In watching the usage, it doesn’t appear it has an accelerometer, and the interface seems slow compared to the iPad’s (which to me suggests it will be underpowered). For my taste, a touchscreen has to be instantly responsive to be worthwhile (a test the Nook also failed). Ommus called it ugly, but what really bothers me is you can’t use a simple protective sleeve on it and hope to flip it open, and when it is flipped so the screens are back-to-back, you’re always going to have one screen face-down when you put it down. How rugged are the surfaces of their screens?

I don’t know. I’m sure this is more subjective opinion than objective, but I really don’t see the need to carry a two-in-one device. I’d be content to carry one device that nails it’s job than something that, for the moment at least, may be playing catch-up in two categories. Battery life and outdoor reading are the only real advantages of eInk, and the iPad’s battery life is long enough to make the eInk advantage negligible. So now I’m paying the same price for what may be an inferior device just so I can read outside? No, probably not.

I’m sure there are more in development, and we have yet to see what some of the iPad competitors will bring to the table. Anything with a reading app — be it Kindle, B&N eReader, or something like Stanza — is now an e-reading device. Battery life is getting longer, processors are getting smaller and faster, storage is getting cheaper (or is effectively replaced by cloud storage in Kindle’s case), and displays won’t be far behind.

We can call it a craze for now, but I’m thinking soon this will be the status quo. I still don’t believe they’ll replace paper anytime soon, but I do see a future where paper books become more about collectibility and nostalgia. They’ll be to the next generation what vinyl records are to us.