Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

Thanks for all your support this year. You guys have made this year awesome. I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season with your loved ones and that you got some sweet presents.

See you all in 2013!

Some of you guys out there might have heard of Star Wars Uncut, a crowdsourced, shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars: A New Hope made entirely of user-submitted 15 second clips.

Well, if you hadn’t heard of it before, you have now. And now the final, polished director’s cut is up on Youtube. I’m part way through it, and it’s insane, surreal, and utterly fantastic. Check it out.

It’s a new year, so it’s time to work out what my writing career holds for me in the next 12 months (or at least until the apocalypse comes). As the years go by, writing is becoming a greater and greater part of my life, yet I still struggle with those ancient twin demons of procrastination and video games. My hope is that by declaring my goals here and making them reasonable and measurable, I’ll be able to stick to them.

1) Finish and publish the next Miles Franco book

2011 saw the publication of The Man Who Crossed Worlds, the first book in my pulp urban fantasy series staring freelance Tunneler Miles Franco. I’ve had a great response so far, and I’m currently waiting on reviews from several excellent book blogs and review sites. I Smell Sheep was first out of the gate, with a 4-star review up now, and an interview coming soon.

But I’m not content to sit around waiting. The next book in the series, tentatively titled The Man Who Walked in Darkness, is underway, with plenty more of Miles’ adventures to follow. Taking place a few months after the events of Worlds, it features a bunch of returning characters as well as several newcomers and an expanded look at Bluegate and the rest of the universe.

2) Finish and publish my superhero novel, Don’t Try to Be a Hero

My attention span is non-existent, so it was always pretty much inevitable that my focus would spread beyond the Miles Franco series. Don’t Try to Be a Hero is set mainly in New Zealand in the late ‘60s, following ex-superheroes Spook and the Carpenter. After the inevitable government restrictions on metahuman activities, Spook and the Carpenter get by doing semi-legal private detective work for whoever’s paying. But their latest investigation into the kidnapping of a boy spirals out of control, putting themselves, their families, and countless innocents in danger. In this world, it doesn’t pay to be a hero.

After reading several parodies and pastiches of the superhero genre, I decided to see if I could play the idea relatively straight while retaining a level of humor. I’m currently around 60,000 words through what I expect will be a fairly hefty 140,000 word novel (although that may get trimmed down in editing). My progress stalled a bit over the Christmas/New Year break, but I think it’s about time I got back on that horse and dig in the spurs.

3) Start and finish another novel

I have no idea what this one’s going to be about. Well, that’s a bit of a lie, I’m pretty sure it will have something to do with goblins. I like goblins. It might end up being novella length, because I kinda want to try writing something between a short story and a full-blown novel. Whatever it is, you can expect it to be the same kind of slightly silly, slightly serious, just-for-fun kind of stuff that I love to write. I don’t want to write things that are going to set the world on fire (it’s warm enough as it is). I want to entertain. And I figure that if I’m not having fun, neither are my readers.

4) Start the third Miles Franco book

Now we’re getting ambitious. I honestly don’t know if I’ll get this far, and I only have a rough outline of the major ideas I want to explore in the book, so I’ve got a lot of work to do. But we’ll see how we go.

5) I will consume stories like they are delicious cakes (and I do loves me some cakes)

This one’s a bit more informal than the others, but it’s still important. Reading books, watching movies and TV shows, playing narrative-driven video games, these things are fuel for writers. How can I write if I don’t know what I enjoy? How can I learn new techniques and ideas without studying the masters? I aim to read widely and eclectically, from as many time periods as I can and across genres and media.

Really, I swear this isn’t just an excuse for me to procrastinate and play more Skyrim .

Conclusions

I have no doubt 2012 will throw all sorts of shit at me to try and stop me from achieving my goals. Life’s a wily son of a bitch like that. But hey, that’s all part of the game, right?

Happy 2012, everyone.

So if you’ve been here before, you might notice things look a bit different. Hopefully everything’s running a bit faster as well. I finally decided to change from my original hosting service because they were so damn slow it was unbearable.

And to make this post not completely pointless, here’s a video of how the fine folks at HISHE.com think X-Men: First Class should have ended. Enjoy.

Seeing your book up for sale is like what I imagine sending your child off to university is like. You’ve raised the little thing since it was a twinkle your eye, put up with its tantrums and dirty diapers, watched it grow from an ugly, mewling humanoid to something that has a consciousness and dreams all of its own.

Then you kick the little bastard out the door into the real world and get back to that life you used to have. Except without it at home, the place seems empty, lonely, and you start to think, Hmmm, it really wouldn’t be too bad to have another one, would it? I’m still young enough, right?

So anyway, my pulpy urban fantasy novel THE MAN WHO CROSSED WORLDS is available now on Amazon. It’ll be a couple of weeks before it’s up on all the other sites, so for everyone else, hold tight. In the meantime, check out the free prequel short story, THE MAN WHO COULDN’T BE BOUGHT. You can download it as a PDF, EPUB, or MOBI.

It’d make my day if you could check out a sample of THE MAN WHO CROSSED WORLDS on Amazon. If you don’t have a Kindle, not a problem. You can download the free Kindle app to your computer, iThing, or Android device and go from there. Check out my page No Ereader? No Problem! for more on that.

Stay classy everyone.

THE MAN WHO CROSSED WORLDS IS AVAILABLE NOW AT:

Amazon.com

Amazon.uk

Amazon.de

Amazon.fr

You know how sometimes you get really busy all of a sudden and little things like reading comics and blogging fall by the wayside?

You know how you keep meaning to come back to it as soon as the busy period has passed?

You know that feeling that you get when it has been so long since you’ve updated your blog that you start to feel guilty about it and so you avoid it even more?

Yeah…

So obviously I’m way behind on reading all of DC’s new number 1s. Most of the comics have a few issues out by now, and I haven’t even finished doing the first 52. That’s what I get for trying to do this during exam periods.

On the bright side, though, my urban fantasy novel THE MAN WHO CROSSED WORLDS is in the final stages of proofing. It should be released in December alongside a prequel short story, THE MAN WHO COULDN”T BE BOUGHT, which will be available free from wherever it can be made free.

Here’s the pitch for THE MAN WHO CROSSED WORLDS. In the coming weeks, look out for more information and excerpts from the book.

Stay classy, everyone.

All freelance Tunneler Miles Franco wants is a bit of freedom and a couple of bucks to rub together. So when the cops haul him downtown for illegally smuggling the natives of another dimension to Earth, he’ll take any chance he can get to stay out of the pen. And funnily enough, the cops have just the job for him.

A mysterious interdimensional drug-smuggler is staking his claim on Miles’ city, and a drug war is about to kick off that will make the city look like the set of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. As a Tunneler, Miles knows all about interdimensional transport, and the cops need his help cutting off the drug lord’s supply before it reaches Earth.

But it doesn’t take long playing police lapdog before Miles realizes this ain’t no ordinary drug he’s dealing with. Snooping around in gang business is a dangerous job in a city where everyone’s on the take and the gangsters play for keeps.

And there are a lot of ways a nosy Tunneler can disappear.

THE MAN WHO CROSSED WORLDS is a heart-pounding, stomach-kicking, noir-drenched urban fantasy novel.

Coming Soon

So brutal, and yet so awesome.

http://www.dorkly.com/moogaloop/noobtube.swf?clip_id=23151&use_node_id=true&fullscreen=1

Poor Chewie. He deserved so much better.