Elizabeth Báthory had a dwarf accomplice named Fickó.
That fact has nothing to do with the rest of this post. Books! Specifically, my novel! I recently sold a small box of them I stumbled upon, and they sold fast. In fact some people who contacted me were not able to get one. So, I’m going to do a second round of signed copies of my novel, Strangeness in the Proportion.
You too will smile as big as this happy reader…
What do you get?
A physical copy of the book! All three dimensions (plus a bonus dimension). Look at that creepy cover by Christopher Shy.
Autographed, with anything else you’d like scrawled in it.
A genuine toe tag bookmark (never mind how I got them!).
The price (which includes shipping) is $25 to ship to the US and $45 to other countries (sorry, shipping nailed me last round). You can also buy the book cheaper and in electronic format (but sans signature and toe tag) at the link above.
I’ll accept payments through Paypal. If interested, email me at scrivnomancer@gmail.com (that’s not my paypal address, email me first) for details. I’ll get a shipment of the books in October, which means I should be able to have shipped to people before Halloween (a perfect time to read it!).
Want a taste of the novel? This is my short and sweet synopsis:
Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back…one piece at a time.
UPDATE: My copies of the book are sold out, but more can be bought HERE.
The last few weeks saw a lot of road trippin’. A visit home to my parents’ house turned up a forgotten box of copies of my novel, Strangeness in the Proportion. Behold!
I will be moving soon and must shed the weight of as many earthly possessions as possible. That’s where you come in! I will be taking online orders for copies of the book. $20 will give you the following:
A physical copy of the book! All three dimensions (plus a bonus dimension). Look at that creepy cover by Christopher Shy.
Autographed, with anything else you’d like scrawled in it.
A genuine toe tag bookmark* (never mind how I got them!).
Shipping (if you live in some far flung place, we can talk about how much that’ll cost).
Want a taste of the novel? This is my short and sweet synopsis:
Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back…one piece at a time.
I’ll accept payments through Paypal. If interested, email me at scrivnomancer@gmail.com (that’s not my paypal address, email me first) for details. First come, first serve. Only a small handful of these.
*And If I already owe you a toe tag, that’s coming soon!
So… I got to participate in the Lovecraftian Mythos. I got to tickle my inner geek in several places. The Mythos. Call of Cthulhu (the RPG). Chaosium. It’s a short story called “Stained Windows,” and you can find it in the anthology Madness on the Orient Express (edited by the illimitable awesome that is James Lowder). Even better, I got to be nestled in with the names of some writers I really like.
The story is a sort of demented love story (between two recovering lunatics on a train). It’s also a gentleman thief story (shades of Arsène Lupin). It’s a weird noir (shades of Dark City). It’s a story about sleight of hand and escape artistry. And there’s a scary train. It’s got some mythos too.
Stained Windows by Joshua Alan Doetsch. So if the last one made me think of Dostoyevsky existentialism, this story made me think of Camus. The tone and writing style really reminded me of The Stranger although the stories are completely different. Anyway, this is by far the most dreamlike, surreal and offbeat story in the entire collection and it’s the perfect way to end Madness on the Orient Express because honestly the title of this anthology could also be the title of this short story as well.
“Stained Windows is about a gentleman thief who is a bit over his head with his latest ‘acquisition.’ The main character has stolen an ancient tome and he’s on the Orient Express to deliver it to a buyer. However, a lot of other…factions want the tome too and they’re not going to take no for an answer. Along the way, the protagonist meets a whole bevy of characters, each of which gets stranger and madder the closer they get to the end of the line. The snappy dialogue of this piece makes it this a real treat, if not the outright crown jewel of the anthology and the ending is both abrupt and awesome. It’s not at all the ending you will expect for this tale but after you read it (maybe even re-read the story to get the full effect), it’s pretty perfect.
‘Stained Windows’ by Joshua Alan Doetsch is the final story of the collection, and was a real highlight for me. It’s one of the very longest stories, possibly too long. But it’s full of wonderful rich and disturbing imagery, that conjured up a world I was happy to stay in for as long as possible. I wasn’t quite sure what exactly was going on for a long time. You do find out eventually, but I liked the uncertainty that the story built. Was the main character really insane – despite their protestations – and delusional, or was there another explanation? As I said it was a real highlight for me, and I was quite sad when the story finished.
‘Stained Windows,’ by Joshua Alan Doetsch, is my other top fave (it was a close battle). It’s both nightmarish and dreamlike, a journey of true madness, brilliantly written and the best possible close to the book to make for maximum lingering unreality and can’t-stop-thinking-about-it effect.
A while back, Chaosium held a Kickstarter campaign for an updated version of Horror on the Orient Express. One of the stretch goals was an anthology called Madness on the Orient Express (edited by James Lowder). I wrote a story for that and it looks like the book is coming together now. Here’s a final list of stories/authors. A lot of names I’m excited to accompany. More as it develops.
“A Great and Terrible Hunger” by Elaine Cunningham
“A Finger’s Worth of Coal” by Richard Dansky
“There is a Book” by Dennis Detwiller
“Stained Windows” by Joshua Alan Doetsch
“The Lost Station Horror” by Geoff Gillan
“Bound for Home” by Christopher Golden
“Demons Dreaming” by Cody Goodfellow
“La Musique de l’Ennui” by Kenneth Hite
“Inscrutable” by Robin D. Laws
“Daddy, Daddy” by Penelope Love
“The Pattern” by Ari Marmell
“Bitter Shadows” by Lisa Morton
“On the Eastbound Train” by Darrell Schweitzer
“Black Cat of the Orient” by Lucien Soulban
“The Face of the Deep” by C.A. Suleiman
“The God Beneath the Mountain” by James L. Sutter
Back when Strangeness in the Proportionwas being serialized on White Wolf’s website, we received feedback from readers, even as we were still editing sections to be released (and further polishing for its upcoming ebook and print incarnations). That was the coolest thing about serializing and the immediacy of interaction on the web — being able to get feedback while the clay was still a little damp. One World of Darkness denizen in particular, Marshall Finch, gave back a lot of copy-edit input that went into improving the book (you can find him in the Acknowledgements).
Marshal recently sent me an immensely nice letter. I think it’s my first fan letter. I’ve communicated electronically with a lot of people, but I do believe this is the first physical missive sent to me by someone who knows me primarily through my writing. I’m several hundreds miles away from my parents’ fridge. So I’m posting this here. Enjoy. Or don’t. This is for me.
Dear Joshua:
Thank you so much for signing this (and for writing it)! It was a pleasure to be one of the first to read it during proofreading. I have several favorite books, between which I cannot choose because they fall into different genres and do not compete with one another for the niches they occupy in my heart. Strangeness is among those favorites, establishing its superiority in the ranks of those works that populate the peculiar realm at once morbid and humorous.
There are few perfect characters in fiction. It’s the rare author who ever creates a character perfectly. most characters are flawed by design, too passive, uninteresting, or unrelatably without error, Even those characters designed perfectly usually come with some error in their execution, a scene in which they deviate, a page which doesn’t seem to fit with the rest. Simon is without such error. Simon is one of those rare perfect characters.
You deserve all the praise you’ve been given by your fans, and more attention. You’re handicapped by the strange void that your work fills — unfortunately the romance genre is more popular. Notwithstanding, yours is the better novel, better than any I’ve read in a very long time. Thank you for making it a part of my life.
In Christ,
Marshall Finch
Christiangoth
A big…proportion (see what I did there?) of credit, for Simon turning out the way he did, should go to my editor, James Lowder. I had a very raw idea, and Jim helped me hammer it. Simon had quite a few changes from the first draft on, both in conception and execution. Jim helped me make the most of him.
Good Lord! You should see some of the offshoot ideas I had in the re-outlining phase, that Jim killed with expert scythe swings. Simon just may owe him his life. Once a year, he leaves small, gory sacrifices on the mantle and raises an absinthe toast to the force known as the Lowder.
It’s milestone time, my lovelies. My first novel is finally up for sale — Strangeness in the Proportion (published by White Wolf). Just tickle the beautiful corpse below:
Boy meets girl.
Boy looses girl.
Boy gets girl back…
…one piece at a time.
To answer a few questions about the book:
· The PDF sells for $4.99. The e-reader formats are not available yet (e-pub, kindle, etc.), but if people get the PDF at DriveThruFiction, those formats will be free for customers once available – they’ll appear as additional downloads.
· Print on demand is on the way, though I don’t know a date or price just yet (stay tuned!).
· Once all of the are formats are sorted out, the ebooks will be available at storefronts like Amazon, B&N, and the like.
And finally, in celebrating Vampire the Masquerade’s 20th anniversary, I have an essay over at FlamesRising.com about how I met the Masquerade. Warning: contains gore, slashers, and me as a grade school boy.
It’s been a long road and a surreal day. I’ve heard a few people, in retrospect, say that Vampire and World of Darkness fandom has been something more than gaming fandom, almost like the fandom for a favorite band. I feel like my favorite band asked me up on stage to play a few sets with them. Rock on.
Writing a novel is the agony of going against every hard-wired stitch of the cross-hatched, multi-billion-year-evolved survival instinct programming of immediate gratification. Writing a haiku, by comparison, is the bliss of being that much closer to the primal, monkey-brained drive that says, “Yes, I want to eat that snake’s head. I want to eat it now!”
I had recent occasion to experience both. I placed in a novel contest and a haiku contest.
Strangeness in the Proportion
Several years ago, I won a novel contest. Between the then and the now, on and off, I worked on various drafts of this novel with the publisher (White Wolf Games) and my editor, James Lowder. It was hard. Really hard. Nearly busted my brain a few times. Nothing for respect for anyone that has gone through this process.
This winter, my big hunk of scrawling became available. My mutant child is all ready for company. It’s called Strangeness in the Proportion. It is available, currently, as a 17 part serial over at White Wolf’s site.
It’s received some nice comments so far. I will definitely feed it an extra bucket of fish heads tonight.
Poe Haiku
In my convalescence, as I strained foreign objects out of my liquid brains and funneled it back up my nose (using reversed Egyptian techniques), I wrote something much smaller, entering a contest calling for Edgar Allen Poe themed haiku. It was bliss. A quick burst of creativity, pen scratching, emailing, and then input and accolades.
Thirty-two pearly I-love-you-nots. So in love, I can’t hear the screams
Whisper on your shoulder. You know my name. Just two beats of horror Per Verse.
The Eight Chained Ourangoutangs! Dwarf love conquers all, And smells of burnt hair.
“And I held illimitable dominion over all.” Applause. Red Death sits. Black Death begins.
They made a mistake T’was sharp senses, not madness The heart beats. It waits.
I thank the practice I’ve received from lots of recent twitter-story (short stories in 140 characters) writing. Both forms call for the same discipline in implied story (to be discussed in an upcoming post).
The Present Bias
The human current human brain really isn’t any different than the one that sat in the skulls of our grandaddies n’ mommies who hunted mastodon. That brain still has trouble with the concept of the future. It’s predisposed to the now. That is the Present Bias. Big projects like novels go against that. So when is it worth transcending? When is it worth playing to the strengths of the now (and taking glorious 4th…er…half of 4th)?
Growing pains in the skull, right along the faultiness of the suture-cracks, that’s what you have to look forward too, but the agony is just a reminder that you are on to something better, bigger, if only can keep your focus and—
Mmmmm…snake brains…
Google Me…No One’s Looking…
While we’re on the subject of places stained by my ink, let me list some other places that still feature my writing (as a way of assessing myself in the new year, a time to make resolutions of transcending snake brain mastication).
Over at the This Endless Present (an online publication dedicated to dreams), you can read about a nightmare I had (it’s in the first part of the 3rd issue). I don’t know whether to call the piece fiction, or what I should do with it. I woke up, during my first month in Norway, and jotted it all down, as fast as I could go, before I could forget. I don’t normally have nightmares (especially ones that follow so vivid a narrative). I like it though. There was no overactive self-editor, as I was half asleep. I just wrote.
I have an article on the joys of audio fiction up at KillerWorks.com.
And still (Still!) I have a short story up at BloodlustUK.com, titled “Varmints”. It is the first thing I ever had published. Be gentle.
These days, my daytime gig is writing video game dialogue and story. For the last year and a half, I’ve worked for Funcom (in Norway and now in Montreal). I write for the Age of Conan MMO, mostly in the Rise of the Godslayer expansion, and on some upcoming material.
Very recently, I’ve been playing with an idea for an anthropamorphic animal story, but not a kids story. I think it has its roots in childhood viewings of the The Secret of NIMH and Watership Down.
That evil rabbit haunted my boyhood as much as any movie monster.
Joshua Alan Doetsch 