Good evening, steady readers. Hope everyone’s having a great week; my own has been crammed with updates, marketing, and writing. Writer’s dream, right? It’s actually kind of a relief to think of writing an ordinary update/entry, but here we are. First, just a reminder that my latest book Room 3 is out there, and I mean way out there. Heh. Seriously, if you like sci-fi, paranormal, urban fantasy…anything like that, I do think you’d enjoy it. Basically, I’m saying that I believe in the book and hope that others will eventually come to recognize what’s on the page.
In the meantime, I’m having a giveaway, because it’s what the cool kids are doing. If you want to get to the meat of this post, just scroll down until you see this bad boy: =====. Then you’ll know you’re past the icky promotional nonsense.
I’m offering a special 2-for-1 deal and giveaway. Here’s how it works:
- Purchase Room 3 between now and Midnight on November 18th on any qualifying site. Really, I’m happy with anything, even through this site.
- Send me an email at crimnos@gmail.com with the receipt and/or screenshot of the receipt.
- Indicate your preferred eBook format and preferred eBook (The Corridors of the Dead, The Kayson Cycle, or The Station).
- I’ll send you a copy of that eBook for free! I’ll also give you two entries into a drawing for a $25 Amazon gift card. Pretty straightforward, right?
Now, where do you get it? Why, I’m glad you asked…
- Smashwords is my current favored e-store for purchase, just because you can get it in so many formats with such little fuss. I’m offering a 10% off discount if you purchase it through Smashwords, in fact; use PL77Y as your coupon code at checkout and you can knock a little off of the price.
- I’m sure many of you are looking for the Kindle version, and you find it at Amazon. Go go go!!
- Barnes and Noble also offers the print edition and the Nook version, if that’s your cup of tea. I can’t offer you a discount there, but you’re welcome to check it out.
- You can also purchase signed and unsigned print editions through my site.
- The print edition is also available on Amazon and Createspace.
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So anyway, tonight I’m on the cusp of finishing the first draft of a story that I mentioned awhile back called Passage of the Mad God. I originally wrote the story back in 2004 and serialized it on the Something Awful forums (http://forums.somethingawful.com) in an effort to elicit some feedback.
Let’s just say I didn’t like what I got, and I never did it again. Thing is, eight years on, I dusted it off because I thought the premise itself was so appealing and so close to my heart that I just had to take another shot. You know what? Those *assholes* had the temerity to be right all that time ago. Damnedest thing, right? I was not ready.
Am I today? Well, I like to think so, and I hope that you read the story when it’s finished and out in the wild next year. Today, though, I’d like to talk a little bit about that “mad god” in the title. His name is Viracocha, and he’s based on this guy:
Now, according to the Incas, this dude was the founder of civilization itself.
According to “History of the Incas” by Pedro Sarmiento De Gamboa, “The natives of this land affirm that in the beginning, and before this world was created, there was a being called Viracocha. He created a dark world without sun, moon or stars. Owing to this creation he was named Viracocha Pachayachachi, which means “Creator of all things.” And when he had created the world he formed a race of giants of disproportioned greatness painted and sculptured, to see whether it would be well to make real men of that size. He then created men in his likeness as they are now; and they lived in darkness.” The strange thing is that he appeared across many of the mesoamerican cultures of the time, and many thought that he resembled an African more than any native of the Americas.
Now how tantalizing does that sound? I had happened across this story back then (and some theories that he represented an ancient alien astronaut), and wondered – if this guy had truly wandered the land and been so long-lived, where might he be now? What would happen to someone with so much power who was reduced to being essentially a dusty relic in the modern age?
Somehow that idea blended with another idea. When I was a child, we used to sled on a hill just outside of town. A local farmer owned the hill, and he’d clear the animals out of the field and off the hill so that we could do our thing on snow days. One day I remember coming across this large hole in the side of the hill, its sides covered in concrete. Now in retrospect it’s easy to see that this was likely some sort of drainage system to keep rain from puddling in the field at the bottom of the hill, but at the time I became convinced that the farm had something greater underneath it.
Combine those two and…well, it’s not so hard to imagine an 11-year-old with a hyperactive imagination running into an ancient god under a hill. That is the essence of the original story “The Tunnel” and runs even stronger through the new version, Passage of the Mad God.
In keeping with the Room 3 contest, anybody else have these kind of memories from when they were a kid? Did any of you wonder what might be hidden underground or in an abandoned house, just out of reach? I’d love to hear it.
