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Hey there. Just a head’s up that I’m repricing all of my Kindle fiction at .99 for a time to see what, if any, affect this has on sales. If you have purchased a book from me (for the PRINCELY sum of three dollars) and are upset that you paid full price and I went and slashed them, please get in touch with me via the handy dandy email link. Or here: maxwellm AT pobox DOT com I do this somewhat lightly, mostly because my books haven’t sold particularly well and hey, it couldn’t hurt, right? Frankly, I’m not eager to participate in the race to the bottom pricing model that is being embraced by a lot of people right now, including large publishers who are dabbling in the Kindle marketplace. However, I’d rather have readers than piles of money. You can stop laughing now. I’ll note that at this rate, Amazon makes much, much more money on these sales than I do. Is that fair? Not particularly. Is that the way it is? Yes. Mostly because if they didn’t, they’d be DELUGED with people selling cheap books (hint, they already are) and this is supposed to serve as a deterrent from spamming titles out there. But it’s still a better royalty rate than you’d be getting in print. Of course in print you’re supposed to get an advance. Yeah, funny. Gonna take a little while to propagate the change through the system, I’m sure. Don’t all hurry over there. Here’s the link to my Amazon page, in case you’re inclined to head on over there. Thanks for your kind attention. But not the first place that I bought comics. An important distinction. We’re talking about actual comic stores, which indeed predated the Direct Market (some thrived with its advent, some held on and some gave out). First comic stores that I actually shopped at regularly, and not just on an occasional visit to the wilds of Garden Grove. Okay, now that we’ve finished splitting hairs, let’s talk about it a bit. The store in question was called Little Billy’s (and it might have had “Funny Books” or “Comics” in that title as well, but we’re talking 1982 so it’s amazing that I can remember even this much. It was in El Toro, which at the time was about a twenty minute car ride (or couple hours on bike; a trip that I made more than once with the help of my trusty Schwinn 10-speed) from my native Laguna Niguel, CA. It was a small store in a strip-mall, the kind that was nigh-ubiquitous in southern California at the time, on, I want to say Muirlands drive (off of El Toro Road, at any rate), almost into Mission Viejo. You’d walk in and there was a low counter, which as I recall was *not* a display case for all manner of hidden treasures and valuable first appearances, but a place from which the titular Little Billy could hold court. And make no mistake, Little Billy made the rules. You wanted your funny books, you talked to him and did things his way. And his way was to take the comics that came out that week and put them up on the wall, in a series of plastic bags. They were very neatly arranged, impervious and unreachable. Don’t even think of asking to take one out of its protective mylar armor. These were valuable collector’s items (even though you could go to the 7-11 next door and get…some of them). This was in the days before the One Distributor To In The Darkness Bind Them, where your local convenience store might get DEFENDERS this month and then again, it might not. So yes, you couldn’t browse. You knew what you wanted or you didn’t stay around long. You ordered what you wanted based on the cover and you paid and then moved along. Mostly. There was the time that Little Billy suggested that I might want to look into CREEPSHOW, since this guy Berni Wrightson had done the art. But I wasn’t into that at the time. Gimme my X-MEN and my DAREDEVIL and the occasional offering from Epic or weirdo DC thing that looked good (BLUE DEVIL was a favorite and remains one of the few DC properties that I’d cross the street and put out a burning building in order to write). Frankly, it’s a miracle that I kept reading comics. But back then, that wasn’t your only option. And I was pretty singleminded. I’d found something that I genuinely enjoyed and like a great white shark biting into a seal-laden chain, I wasn’t going anywhere for a good long time. But I will say that this. My experience there was about as unfriendly as I got in a DM-oriented store ever. It was Billy’s clubhouse and if you weren’t in the club, well, you were tolerated so long as your cash wasn’t too sweaty. Was he a comic nazi? Well, if he hated the books that you bought, he was polite enough to at least submerge his disgust, something that’s a bit of a lost art. But clubhouse it was. Spare interior, white walls, with only a handful of promotional posters up on the walls, if any, second-hand bookshelves taken from what seemed like his mom’s basement to hold the actual book books, of which he had a couple. Pretty sure I saw the SMITHSONIAN BOOK OF COMICS there and maybe a couple others. CREEPSHOW, of course, which was something of an oddity as it was a perfect-bound book in an age when such things were unusual by their very nature. Still, I put up with the faint and curling sneer of his moustache-darkened lip as he passed the comics over the counter. He knew I’d be back next week, assuming I’d collected enough allowance and had braved the suburban asphalt where auto speeds topped sixty miles per (I know, since I screamed around the curves at that speed more than once). He knew I’d be back for that next issue of THE FANTASTIC FOUR, even if I could tell that John Byrne wasn’t hitting it with the same heart that he once had. I’d be back. So it looks like my next project may actually be a fantasy novel. I have mixed feelings about this. Some of the earliest books I loved were fantasy (Looking at you AMBER series, the first one anyways) but I’m on and off with the genre as a whole. Though I dearly love the CONAN stories from R. E. Howard. And STAR WARS at its best is a great fantasy series (with some caveats). So it’s strange coming back to this. But there were things that always bugged me, conventions that were honored over and over (or simply slackly imitated). So anyways, here’s some of the things that I came up with. By no means an exhaustive list, but some things that I (and others) have observed. If you want attribution, I’ll re-attribute, but for now, I’ll take the heat. Needless to say, the inclusion of one or any of these doesn’t necessarily make for a bad book, but it certainly doesn’t count in their favor.
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THE UNIVERSAL BALANCE PROPHECIES WIZARDS THROWING FIREBALLS WITH POINTY HATS ORCS ENDLESS LINEAGES AND HISTORIES THE CHOSEN ONE NO SENSE OF REALITY BAD LANGUAGE ONLY WHITES ALLOWED THE ONE SWORD THAT WILL WIN THE GAME THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN FEUDALISM ELVES TRANSCRIPTS OF DND GAMES REMAKING LORD OF THE RINGS DIRECT POLITICAL ANALOGY/ALLEGORY THEY’RE NOT DWARVES BUT THEY’RE DWARVES
It’s still early into winter, but soon the season will open up, offering the promise of legions of thronging fans, steam-warmed hot dogs and room-temperature sodas. I’m not talking baseball. I’m talking convention season. The seeds planted last year in hastily dashed-off web forms or emails are now beginning to yield their abundant supply of alternate comics markets and hungry would-be-readers. Kinda. Turned down by TCAF, which is kinda okay. As much as I’d like to go to Toronto and see the show and all my Canadian friends, it’s a very expensive proposition. I suspect that my material wasn’t up to their artistic standards. Unsurprising. I’m not really into this to make art, but to instead tell stories and entertain people. Or it could be that they were just slammed with potential exhibitors who are very eager to participate in comics markets that are not the Direct Market. So that opens up a hole in early May and loosens up the travel budget (or rather, un-tightens it since the money wasn’t actually spent.) Looks like the first show I’ll be doing this year will be the transplanted-to-Anaheim Wonder-Con in mid-March. Oh, and if you’re interested, I don’t see Wonder-Con doing anything but staying in SoCal. Not that I’m particularly happy with that. I’m not. I dislike the venue and dislike the appalling lack of choice of things to do in the immediate vicinity of the convention center once the show closes. People who are used to having San Francisco at their fingertips after the doors close are going to be disappointed or taking a car to anywhere that isn’t Downtown Disney.
BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell (me, not that I like to talk about myself in the third person), available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting. Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). “Third Sight” was yesterday’s. Today’s excerpt is from “The Sunyata Routine,” where a cop tracks an inhuman killer through the (of course) rainy streets of a future Seattle.
THE SUNYATA ROUTINE Red. Her irises were the color of Chilean strawberries, face tinted ruby by sanguine neon light. Satori Optical’s byzantine logo hung in the wet sky meters above her body, humming. Call wanted to be sick as he looked at her body, lying face down on the alley, arms turned painfully away. She was the second in the last three days. Black. The sign snapped off. Her eyes were empty black matched by the wet slick of the asphalt beneath her face, looking nowhere. Call tired to break her gaze, but found himself unable to, something familiar there that kept calling him. The pavement beneath her face was dark and glossy, like she had been crying before it happened. With insect precision, the swing arm of the recorder swept back and forth over the body, committing the scene to impervious digital memory. Red. “Anybody know her?” Call asked, voice dry. He shook some sugared lozenges free from a metal case and put one in his mouth, filling it with a sudden warmth like liquor. “Yeah,” said Marks. “Mary Li. Partygirl, free agent.” Continue reading Blink and Other Stories – “The Sunyata Routine”
BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell (me, not that I like to talk about myself in the third person), available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting. Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). “Blink” was yesterday’s. Today’s excerpt is from “Third Sight,” where an FBI agent on the track of a serial killer finds something else entirely. Free fiction (but not the whole story) after the jump.
THIRD SIGHT
Dracula had been getting careless. Early in his career, Brian Cole might have welcomed such a development. Tracking lone wolf killers, there were nights that as he hunched over the monitor or sat in a dusty property room or sterile lab, there were nights that he would have given his left eye for a single clue to open things up. Something. A laundry ticket or a dormant stolen cell phone being fired up for one last gloating call to the authorities. Early in his career, he thought that the killers growing bolder was a good sign, one that they’d screw up soon and they’d be behind bars or better yet, dead with a bullet between their eyes. It was difficult to work up sympathy for a psychopath, no matter how polite they were or how often they went to church. When a man (or woman, he reminded himself, remembering Two-Finger-Sally from Kansas City) spent his time tying up people and killing them by inches, it became a lot harder to focus on their kindnesses. Eventually the gravity of their crimes becomes a force unto itself, consuming any other qualities they might have pretended to, annihilating them as surely as rolling downhill or falling down a well. But now he knew better. He understood that the carelessness and recklessness that he saw in late-stage killers wasn’t a prelude to capture, but was much more often a recognition that without luck, they would never be caught. Dracula would probably never be caught. He’d moved around too much, gone quiet too many times, outlasted supervisors and even presidential administrations. Didn’t really matter. Once the strings got long enough, the cases became not only a priority, but an urgent one. At least until enough resources were blown and you either drank yourself to death or ate a bullet in despair Getting reckless worked both ways, Cole knew that. He’d seen his mentor transform from dogged pursuer patient like a wall of rock, to being worn down by a constant stream of bad news and fresh bodies. Eventually even the tallest wall crumbles to rubble. Dracula had driven him to a quiet death by garden hose to tailpipe.
BLINK AND OTHER STORIES is the second short fiction collection from Matt Maxwell, available exclusively on the Kindle format for the next 90 days and then perhaps to a wider release after that. Honestly, I’ve only ever sold anything on the Kindle. I’ve sold exactly one copy of one other book from Smashwords, so I’m not fussed by exclusivity. Besides, you can run the Kindle app on anything form a smartphone to an iPad to a desktop machine. Not particularly limiting. Here’s the url to hit: http://tinyurl.com/blinkkindle I’ll be archiving excerpts from the three stories printed within: Blink, Third Sight and The Sunyata Routine (Another Name for Heaven). First up is from Blink. Free fiction (but not the whole story) after the jump. Going to APE. You should totally go there. San Francisco concourse. Same place it’s been forever. This Saturday and Sunday. I’ll have books and buttons. And I’m a lot more active on my tumblr now than my blog. Weird. Unpacking copies of THE THIRSTY, from about forty minutes ago.
That’s Alex Sheikman’s art on the cover. The design is what it is. I still see stuff I could fix and will once this run sells out. It’s a thick sucker. 200 pages. All for 17.95. It’s probably nine issues worth of story and art, maybe a touch more. Even if you cherry-picked three dollar titles, you’d need to spend 27 bucks to approach the value. Sure it’s in black and white, but black and white tells the story just fine. More on this later, obviously. I probably won’t shut up about it.  Most of the art by Tom Neely, some by Alex Sheikman, some by Gervasio and Jok. Mangled by yours truly.
That’s right. I’ll be signing alongside Tom Neely as he hits A-1 Comics in Sacramento (on Greenback near Old Auburn) on 9/21/11, from 3-5pm. I’ll try to make the after event, but I can’t make any guarantees. This will be the official world premiere of the collected version of THE THIRSTY, and I’m honored to be signing with Tom. This is really his tour for THE WOLF, but I’m crashing the Sacramento stop. So bring your copies of HENRY AND GLENN and show up for the mayhem.
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