Dave Bain's blog

Bright, sparkly!

Thu, 03 May 2012 02:40:28 GMT

Shiny new website: "http://DavidBainBooks.com

Also, with said new website, this blog's pretty much defunct.

Lookee there, pard!

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:40:04 GMT

Seems my tale "The Cowboys of Cthulhu" is THE PICK OF THE WEEK at DriveThruFiction.com! Right nice of them fellers to do that!

Hunger Phones

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:46:58 GMT

Went to the midnight show of HUNGER GAMES. Good, appropriately brutal, at times gut-wrenching, with neato special effects and future Oscar winner Lenny Kravitz.

We went an hour early to get good seats. So did a bazillion teenage girls. None of them talked to each other. They sat next to each other in their rows, not talking, waiting for the movie to begin, not talking, playing with their cell phones, not talking. It was eerie.

FOUR STORIES and STREETLIGHTS FILLED WITH FLOWERS to Disappear...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:22:37 GMT

My collections FOUR STORIES and STREETLIGHTS FILLED WITH FLOWERS will disappear *poof!* in early January... (The latter is currently on sale for $.99 at Amazon.)

Island Ghosts is Free at Amazon

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:35:21 GMT

As I type, my action/suspense story, "Island Ghosts", which previously appeared in an anthology of hard-boiled detective stories (even though it doesn't feature a detective) is #3 on the free horror bestseller list at Amazon. (Who ever said genre classifications aren't malleable?) It's also #73 out of ALL free ebooks at the store.

(Actually, the main character is a "slightly psychic" U.S. Marshal who becomes a paranormal detective in future stories, plus there's a hint of ghosts at the end of this tale - and more than a hint in subsequent tales - so Amazon's classification probably applies.)

There are also two more stories out there featuring "Island Ghosts'" protagonist, Will Castleton - "The Bridge" and "Samantha", with another, "Nighteyes" coming in the next week or so.

Nice Review ...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:04:24 GMT

... at Shub-Niggurath's Blog of "A Pleasure to Burn" - one of the stories in my $1.99 ebook collection WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS: TALES FROM GREEN RIVER. Kindle Smashwords

"A Pleasure To Burn: adventures could happen to any fuckin' tabloid hunter. Even meet the ghost of her prey. Rare to read such a complete psychology description of characters in so few pages. It calls for at least a sequel, better many of them."

(Or, if you like, you can get just the story by itself for $.99 - Kindle Smashwords)

Columbia visit

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:00:53 GMT

Had a great time visiting my alma mater, Columbia College Chicago yesterday. Saw a couple of my old profs and sat in on a reading and talk by Wayne Allen Sallee in Mort Castle's horror writing class. Photos below are of three guys in an elevator (l to r - Wayne, Mort, moi) and Wayne reading his Masques story "Rail Rider".

Seven Free Ebooks on Writing!

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:52:10 GMT

Amazon's going nuts with free Kindle ebooks on writing right now.

Story Acceptance!

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:43:03 GMT

Nice to wake up to: My story "Stuckey Makes a Sale" has been accepted to THE INDIANA CRIME ANTHOLOGY 2011!

While the story isn't an excerpt from my crime/horror novel GRAY LAKE, it focuses on a character from the crime side of the book. (You can read the first three chapters of GRAY LAKE over here.)

The anthology's Facebook page.

"Rapidly Self-published Dross"

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:31:02 GMT

If you don’t know who Matthew T. Carpenter is, we’ll get to that in a minute. What’s important for you to know is that, in this age of the Kindle and Nook, he and I see eye-to-eye on “rapidly self-published dross.”

When I see younger writers totally eschewing traditional publishing, eschewing even the small press or any editorial process whatsoever and pumping out a new 3,000-word e-“book” every week, complete with a quickly Photoshopped mess as a cover, I want to take a big, smelly fish and slap them upside the head with it a few times.

For one thing, it’s bad business. When you submit to a small press magazine, your only competition is the rest of the slush pile. When you slap your work up on Smashwords, your competition is … EVERYONE ELSE WITH AN EBOOK. This is why I’m mostly using self-publishing for previously published work (though I admit that might indeed change).

Here's why self-publishing still holds a stigma: the slush pile requires craft - ebooks don’t. The slush pile requires the best editing you can muster - ebooks don’t. The slush pile requires the best story you can tell - ebooks don’t. Successfully navigating a course from submission to editorial acceptance to publication builds connections. Tossing an ebook onto Amazon the way my friends and I used to toss pickles off our burgers onto McDonald’s windows doesn’t. Plastering an ebook online feels good, at least until the dismal sales reports start posting... Having someone say they have enough faith in your work to risk their reputation, their time, their hard work and possibly even their livelihood on it feels freaking fantastic - and that feeling generally doesn’t go away, even long after you’ve spent the pittance you were paid.

Now, as for Carpenter, well, he’s my raison d’ etre for the above musings. Carpenter is one of the premier reviewers of Lovecraft mythos fiction. I think that 99.9 percent of the time he’s a great critic.

But…

Go check out his latest Amazon Listmania!, entitled “The Call of Kindlthulu” and you’ll see that he apparently deems my novelette THE COWBOYS OF CTHULHU to be an archetypal example from the tidal wave of “rapidly self-published dross.”

His dozen-word comment on my story is a lesson in the way self-publishing is (still) perceived. As I said, self-publishing doesn’t carry quite the stigma it did back when THE COWBOYS OF CTHULHU was originally written, but you do open yourself up to perceptions that can be largely avoided in traditional publishing venues.

I can imagine Carpenter saw the cover and title and deemed it tossed-off “dross.” THE COWBOYS OF CTHULHU is an entry in a series of “grindhouse novelettes” I wrote in the mid-‘90s and early to mid-‘00s. They were intended to be fun, tongue-in-cheek homages, mashing-up various b-movie genres, their look, their feel, their wonderful flaws. Maybe my attempts in that direction were successful, maybe not - you decide.

But now one of the best Lovecraftian critics out there has - perhaps offhandedly - dismissed an at least somewhat proven piece, most likley on the basis of it being self-published. (He had slightly kinder words to say about my story “Under an Invisible Shadow” in Miskatonic River Press’s DEAD BUT DREAMING anthology, though I gather my tale’s hardly his favorite in the book.)

Whatever my story’s merits or lack of them, many fall into the trap of presuming everything self-published on Amazon by anyone you haven’t heard of (or don't remember having read) is “rapidly self-published dross.” Most of it is - but certainly not all of it. But, as one reader of an earlier version of this essay (the first version was “rapidly blogged dross”) pointed out, it’s not the reader or reviewer’s duty to look up the history of every story they read. That's true, but I’ll argue that neither should they make presumptive, uniformed statements of dismissal.

All that said, if they've actually read it, Carpenter and other readers are certainly welcome to call my work “dross” - everyone’s entitled to their opinion - but they'd be dead wrong with the “rapidly self-published” part.

Here’s some of the history Carpenter did not need to look up, but from which he might have benefitted: The story is close to a decade old, having been previously published in 2005 in the (admittedly small, indie) AMAZING HEROES II anthology. The anthology is now long out of print, it's publisher having moved on, but, if you care to search, copies of it - and my story - are all over the place on bittorrent sites. I primarily chose to self-publish the story now because, while I feel it’s done its part for me in print, I still want readers to be able to enjoy it.

But all those free pirated pdfs were also on my mind. What of them? Well, ebooks offer me the perfect opportunity to improve and enhance the experience for my readers. I revised the story for the Kindle edition. I added a new ending. I added artwork. I fixed small errors still found in the bittorrent versions. And I had trusted readers - yes, that word is plural - read the story yet again.

For those who don’t know me, I published my first story more than twenty years ago - closer to 25. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. I teach college English. I’ve had significantly more than 100 publications in traditional venues, often in the small press, but also including genre stalwarts like STRANGE HORIZONS and WEIRD TALES and Mort Castle's DOORWAYS. I’ve appeared in mainstream literary publications with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Ray Bradbury and Charles Bukowski. Take a look at my web page and you’ll see I haven’t abandoned print and “traditional” publishing - publishing with real live editors making real, live decisions about my work - in any way, form or manner.

I’m not planning on my writing landing me in a Florida mansion anytime soon - if it does, it will be because it belongs to a wealthy friend, fan or patron. With the $0.33 I’m making from each digital sale of THE COWBOYS OF CTHULHU I might be able to spring for a night of pizza and beer.

My point is, I have never “rapidly submitted” work over the past 20 years and I don’t “rapidly self-publish.”

Let me say again that I agree with completely with Carpenter (except that I think my work doesn’t apply): "I suppose there is no end to rapidly self-published dross."

It looks like, for now at least, that fact is dragging down some authors who do indeed give a damn about the craft, not the ease of publication - and it’s lifting up many “writers” who don’t. Will readers prove worthy of removing the editorial middleman? Does all cream rise? I’m fascinated to find out. Give it five years or so, and I’ll get back to you.

Livetweeting The Walking Dead #1!

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:32:44 GMT

Probably around 11 p.m. EST, I'll be liveTweeting my reactions to the first episode of THE WALKING DEAD! Follow me here: http://twitter.com/davidbainaa

I've never seen a single ep, but I DVRed the entire series thus far this past Sunday.

Over the next week or two I'll probably do this with all the episodes in order to catch up. (Had a whale of a time last weekend when I did this with the final two episodes of Season 4 of BREAKING BAD!)

THE COWBOYS OF CTHULHU is now available!

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:20:19 GMT

Now available at Amazon and Smashwords:

THE COWBOYS OF CTHULHU: A Wicked Western Grindhouse Novelette - From the pages of the Amazing Heroes anthologies, snake oil salesman Dr. Darius Darke and other "legends" of the Old West are called upon to fight a band of brain-eating bandits in a three-dimensionally-challenged box canyon. Being the long lost chapter of T. H., Thomasma's world-famous biography of "Gentleman" John Brodie (a.k.a. The Demon Duelist) - an infamous piece of "non-fiction" - almost published by Weird Tales Magazine in 1922, this astounding scholarly document from that rugged frontier of Our Fair Country's oft-misrepresented past puts many a historian's squamous quandry to rest!

C Dennis Moore's Prices Are INSANE!!!

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:09:40 GMT

My good buddy C. Dennis Moore has a number of ebooks free for only a few days at Smashwords! Go grab 'em while they're hot (and free)! I'd pick them all up - I mean, they're FREE! - but I particularly recommend TERRIBLE THRILLS and DANCING ON A RAZORBLADE.

EDIT: Link has been fixed!

"A Pleasure to Burn" Hits #1 at Smashwords

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 21:09:11 GMT

I never thought I'd be #1 at anything, but, for the moment at least, my story "A Pleasure to Burn" has hit #1 on the horror charts at Smashwords.com. I'm really humbled and a bit flabbergasted by this. Big thank you to my readers!

Also available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, and Diesel .

Don't forget that you don't need a Kindle, Nook, etc., to read ebooks! For instance, Smashwords allows you to buy ebooks as PDFs - which work on most any computer these days - and you can read any Kindle book on your computer via Kindle for PC!

Indiana Science Fiction Anthology 2011

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:16:16 GMT

The Indiana Science Fiction Anthology edited by James Ward Kirk is now available at Amazon.

It contains my story "I NaKnow You." I wrote this tale of nanotech gone way wrong (in a darkly comic way) in a workshop with Phyllis Eisenstein. Happy to have it in such an impressive collection. I've been in a few publications with James S. Dorr before - he's one of my favorite small press authors - but once again, this only adds to my happiness with this anthology!)

High Fantasy Sword & Sorcery

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:18:37 GMT

As fate would have it, two of my high fantasy/sword and sorcery tales came out at virtually the same time this week!

"The Dreaming Gods" appears in the latest issue of Rite Publishing's totally free and totally awesome pdf D20 (Dungeons and Dragons for you laypeople) magazine PATHWAYS. The story was written at the editor's invitation, and it gave me the opportunity to use a couple images I've been carrying around in my head for well over a decade, maybe closer to two. I never managed to wrap a story around them until editor Dave Paul provided me with some inspirational stuff from Rite to get the juices flowing. I've been focusing on crime and horror, but I love this stuff; there will be more of it...

Whatever further sword and sorcery/epic fantasy I end up writing, some of it will surely feature my characters Shin the Scholar and Skulk the Skull-faced. Over the course of a few years in the mid-'90s, a wonderful genre writer/editor/artist named G.W. Thomas put out several sword and sorcery anthologies under the series title KINGS OF THE NIGHT, named after the first of Robert E. Howard's classic Bran Mak Morn stories. Shin and Skulk had adventures in each of the anthologies - as well as in other publications - and I'm starting to make these stories - usually at least novelette length - available as ebooks.

The first is "The Pit of Cormair." I'll let the blurb I have up at Amazon speak for itself:

THE PIT OF CORMAIR - Skulk the Skull-faced has wearied of adventuring and sunk into a despair of drink and the drowpsy drug. To save their friend's soul, Shin the Mindmage and Karranna the dwarf drag Skulk along on a quest covering half the Whorld. Along the way to an endless battle at the distant rim of the planet, they fight pirates, ghosts, shamen, bears, unfathomable wizardry and ... themselves. This is the first of several previously published adventures being brought back into "print" for your e-reader.

"The Pit of Cormair" is available for your Kindle here at Amazon or here at Smashwords.com for virtually any other e-reader or as a PDF.

Hey! Also! I nearly forgot! This morning I sent out a free rebooted, revitalized, revamped and re-energized version of my newsletter - my first newsletter in - ulp! - five years, but from here on in it'll be monthly. Sign up and you get access to news and - more importantly - a coupon and free story every month! You can sign up quickly and painlessly right here (it's a Yahoo! group).

Five Free College-Level Writing & Lit Videos

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:46:04 GMT

Five free college-level writing and lit videos

I've only watched the Ray Bradbury one so far, but it's excellent:

Miskatonic River Press' DEAD BUT DREAMING Series

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:24:31 GMT

Hey, everybody! Miskatonic River Press just did me a good turn, so I thought I'd plug DEAD BUT DREAMING again. There are two books in the series, and I'm not exaggerating when I say they're considered by many to be the best modern Lovecraftian collections out there.

You'll find my tale "Under an Invisible Shadow" in the first one, along with the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Darrell Schweitzer, Belle Wilson, Lisa Morton, Stephen Mark Rainey and lots of others.

DBD2 has Donald R. Burleson, Cody Goodfellow, Rick Hautala, Wilum Pugmire, Schweitzer, Don Webb and lots more.

Click on the covers to check them out!

Straight from the Perfesser

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:05:21 GMT

Hey! Go check out my guest post on "Show Don't Tell" at Elizabeth Sogard's ASPIRE AND INSPIRE blog.

You get to see a little of the classroom side of me I don't share around here all that often...

The Kindle: Your Most Valuable Workout Accessory

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:47:57 GMT

Well, I more or less met my challenge of daily blogging for a month. I'm going to slow it down a bit now, but I'm feeling in the zone about blogging again, which was the purpose of the exercise.

Today I want to go on about how much I love my Kindle. Blogs about this and similar devices are ubiquitous these days - though this one on 10 different uses for it opened my eyes even a little wider - so I'll only add a small side note to the cascade.

Yes, I love that my Kindle reads to me. Yes, I love that I can go to my kids' five hour-long swim meet, during which he swims all of three minutes total, and read from 16 different books instead of just one. Yes, I love that my Kindle receives the latest pre-ordered Stephen King story autodelivered while I sleep so I can read it over Labor Day Weekend.

But you know what I really love about my Kindle? The fact that it doesn't fall off the treadmill. My treadmill has this little shelf built into it which is supposedly for holding books and magazines. But magazines tend to slouch in it. And books are too thick for it, they sit sort of sideways with the pages threatening to flop out of the little lip meant to hold them in place, the page slipping a little more out of place as the machine gently bounces with each step while I'm walking, much less jogging or running. Plus it's a small wrestling match just to turn the page.

I just discovered, however, that the Kindle rests nicely in place on the little shelf. It's actually light enough that it doesn't bounce and slip, like the book or magazine. Plus turning the page is just a push of the button that can be worked into the running rhythm instead of what feels like folding origami.

So that's my entry in the "ain't the Kindle great!" genre. I'm not a hardcore exerciser (though I should be), and, really, I'm just getting back into using my treadmill as a treadmill and not a $1,000+ coat hanger - but my advice is to fitness buffs who like to read as they cardio. Spend the $114 and make the Kindle one of your most valuable workout accessories.

Cowboys and Pirates! Oh My!

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:34:21 GMT

Dear Pirate Assholes!

Thank you so much for pirating my story "The Cowboys of Cthulhu" from the Amazing Heroes anthology! It's apparently free at more than 40 different bitTorrent sites across the internetz!

My only copy is - no, was on an ancient dinosaur of a computer which my current printer and wifi and everything no longer support.

BUT!!!

Thanks to your copy, one cut and paste (and an edit of yet-to-be-determined extensiveness), and within a week or two, via Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, etc., it'll start making $$$ for me again.

Meanwhile, anyone who read the story in the past ... God, it's been a decade since it was officially available in even PDF format ... surely did a Google search of my name and wondered until this very day where the hell I went and how they could get a legit copy!

I love free advertising. Please come pirate other stories (for the free ads and just in case my computer blows up and Dropbox bites it or something).

Thanks again,
Dave

The Cowboys of Cthulhu: A Wicked Western Grindhouse Novelette - only $.99 at Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc. From the pages of the Amazing Heroes anthologies, snake oil salesman Dr. Darius Darke and other "legends" of the Old West are called upon to fight a band of brain-eating bandits in a three-dimensionally-challenged box canyon. Being the lost chapter of T. H. Thomasma's world-famous biography of "Gentleman" John Brodie (a.k.a. The Demon Duelist) - an infamous piece of "non-fiction" - and having been reprinted by Weird Tales Magazine in 1922, this astounding scholarly document from that rugged frontier of Our Fair Country's oft-misrepresented past puts many a historian's squamous quandry to rest!

"Alice's Restaurant" Being Witheld From the Masses!

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:54:59 GMT

Dear Amazon and all pertinent bands and record company people:

I do not appreciate it when the best song on the album or the only song I want on the album is the only song which you can not download individually in mp3 format.

The 18-minute original live version of "Alice's Restaurant" is, for me, the only version of "Alice's Restaurant" and I do not want to pay $9.38 for it. Thanks for offering me the 15-minute studio version for only $.89. I'll take a pass. It does not have the bite and joy of the live version.

Haven't you heard that information wants to be free?

But I'll take it at $.99 or thereabouts.

Thanks,
D

Smashwords Smackdown

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:11:04 GMT

I'm thinking about reviving this feature on my blog. For a few weeks earlier this year, I was doing a fairly regular "Smashwords Smackdown" post. But part of me doesn't want to crush any indie spirits - I'm not really mean enough to do this consistently. The benevolent English prof in me wants to avoid the snark and gently prod enemies of the English language (or self-publishing) in the right direction.

I mean, I really love Smashwords.com. It's the true indie haven of the digital publishing world. I revel in the anything goes attitude. I've found so much neat stuff there (and I do and will continue to post about that), but sometimes...

Well, for instance...

HOW TO SURVIVE A RECESSION - This book costs $16.95. For 6,364 words.

I guess that's how this author's going to survive the recession: by having you pay through the nose for tidbits of advice "addressing a wide range of subjects from food to haircuts; exercise to soap-making."

To be fair (sort of), even in the small press print-publishing world, $16.95 for 6,300 words wouldn't be such a great payment - if you were only paid it once, by a publisher. But that price, being paid by each prospective e-reader, just doesn't fly in the indie e-book publishing world.

My Dog's Opinion

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 03:27:26 GMT

If I allowed my dog to get anthropomorphized enough to where he could comment on my opinion, he'd probably be smart enough to join the NRA, buy and learn to use a gun, then shoot me and outrun all the cops ... while wearing this hoodie. And to think, this all started when I was searching the internet for new toys for him....

Casting the Runes/Curse of the Demon

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:48:23 GMT

You know "Casting the Runes" is one of the classic ghost stories ever, right?

And you know this is still one of the creepiest movies ever. Of course you do. You can't get more menace anywhere, especially from a guy wearing a clown nose.

Gads, I could go into detail. You know I could. I could go into detail on how even bad special effects are effective in this particular flick. I could go into detail on how it's effective even though you know the outcome because you've already read the story. (Of course you have!) I could go into detail about any number of M. R. James stories or tell you the tale of how my mentor, Ron Primeau, sent me to talk with a James scholar (in the film department) and how that kind of transformed what I wanted to with my own ghost stories.

But I won't.

Go. Read. Watch.