Random Monday Gaiman Giveaway! Also, yay for small presses!

So I went  to WFC a few weeks back, folks. I haven’t posted a retrospective, and probably won’t, ‘cause people who actually took pictures and had cogent things to say have done better ones. (See Matt MacNish’s and Carolina Valdez Miller’s post for the lovely/incriminating pics, if you’re interested.)

But as many of you know, the guest of honor at WFC was none other than Neil Gaiman himself. He is, it goes without saying, very chill. I shook his hand at breakfast the last day of the con. I did a rather creditable job of not fanboying.

And, as things go around here, O readers, you get to benefit from my wallet-emptying trip to San Diego. How, you ask? Well take a look.

Exhibit A: Free Books

Exhibit B: A Free, SIGNED Book

See, I managed to get my hands on a signed hardback copy of American Gods. It’s not personalized or anything, because if it had been, it’d have been made out to L.K. Gardner-Griffie, whose nametag I heisted in order to be allowed into the signing. There was this great, semi-awkward moment when Neil looked at me, then looked at my nametag (with it’s sparkly purple bat stickers and hyphenated last name), and a microsecond of silence ensued. I filled it with, “You don’t have to personalize it. I'll be giving it as a gift.”

Then I smiled winningly. I think he bought it.

That’s a good thing, though, since now I can give the book away to one of you, and you can tell a similar story to all your friends and relations, and make yourself look daring and edgy and hip and such. Basically, all the things I wasn’t in that moment.

Oh, and I’m not giving away the vodka. That was just for decoration. Sorry.

So how do you win this lovely, little prize pack? Well, I may have prevaricated when I captioned those photographs as “free” books, because they’re not, technically, going to be free. But since I’m typing this up on Small Business Saturday, I thought I’d get in the spirit by making it Small Press Saturday as well (with the giveaway on Monday, natch). Cool, huh?

Therefore, to win the following:

• AMERICAN GODS, by Neil Gaiman (signed hardback, 10th Anniversary Edition, mint condition)
• NEVERWHERE, by Neil Gaiman (paperback, I-read-it condition)
• GOOD OMENS, by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (paperback, I-read-it condition)
• SURPRISE RANDOM BOOK FROM MY BOOKSHELVES, by Someone-or-Other (probably paperback, I-read-it condition)

you must buy, or have bought, a copy of one of the following books:

• TANGLED TIDES, by Karen Amanda Hooper (Rhemalda Publishing)
  • buy from Rhemalda’s bookstore
  • buy from Amazon
  • buy from Barnes & Noble
• MONARCH, by Michelle Davidson Argyle (Rhemalda Publishing)
  • buy from Rhemalda’s bookstore
  • buy from Amazon
  • buy from Barnes & Noble
• SEED, by Rob Ziegler (Night Shade Books)
• buy from Amazon
• buy from Barnes & Noble
• THE WINDS OF KHALAKOVO, by Bradley P. Beaulieu (Night Shade Books)
• buy from Amazon
• buy from Barnes & Noble
• CTHULHUROTICA, edited by Carrie Cuinn (Dagan Books)
  • buy from Amazon

Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is prove it to me. Email me at simonclarter *AT* gmail.com with whatever you think counts as proof—purchase confirmation screenshot, receipt email, a picture of you holding or passed out on the book, etc.—and I’ll enter you in the drawing to win the Gaiman prize pack.

If you buy more than one? You get more than one entry. Easy, huh?

All in all, I don’t think it’s a bad deal at all. Even if you don’t win, you’ve still supported your friendly neighborhood small press, and that’s got to feel good. Also, you’ll get some good reading, yes?

So go get one of those books, won’t you? Neil’s waiting anxiously to see who wins.

Maybe.

THE FINE PRINT

- Contest ends 12/15/2011

- Open worldwide. Unless you live in Antarctica.

- Sending me vodka won’t help your chances any, but it won’t hurt them either.

- Any pictures you send should be at least marginally clean. Y’know.

- A random number generator will be used to pick the winner.

- If you followed my blog, it’d be nice, but only if you want to. I’m not whoring for followers over here.

- I wish Neil Gaiman would stop drunk texting me.

Tangled Tides Launch Party!

I choose Sirens!

But you kind of knew I would, didn’t you, O readers?

Er…you’d probably like to know what I’m talking about, then, eh?

See, the lovely Karen Amanda Hooper’s debut novel releases today, and by way of helping her celebrate this momentous event, a group of us are choosing sides in the war between the merfolk and the selkies that features prominently in the novel.

Yeah, I know. Sirens aren’t technically part of the war. But they’re in the novel, and are hawt, so of course I chose them. Also, I wrote a flash fiction piece about a siren this year and placed it in an antho, so I have a soft spot in my heart for the boat-wrecking vixens.

Anywho, how about some details on the novel? Here we are, then:

The Blurb

Yara Jones doesn’t believe in sea monsters—until she becomes one.

When a hurricane hits her island home and she wakes up with fins, Yara finds herself tangled up in an underwater world of mysterious merfolk and secretive selkies. Both sides believe Yara can save them by fulfilling a broken promise and opening the sealed gateway to their realm, but they are battling over how it should be done. The selkies want to take her life. The merfolk want something far more precious.

Treygan, the stormy-eyed merman who turned Yara mer, will stop at nothing and sacrifice everything to protect his people—until he falls for Yara. The tides turn as Yara fights to save herself, hundreds of sea creatures, and the merman who has her heart. She could lose her soul in the process—or she might open the gateway to a love that’s deeper than the oceans.

The Links

Karen’s Author Website

Karen’s Blog

Tangled Tides at Amazon

TT at Barnes & Noble

TT at the Rhemalda bookstore

TT on Goodreads

The Pretteh

And there you have it, folks: Karen’s debut novel, on the shelves today! Swing by her blog and wish her a happy release day, won’t you? Or say hello on the Twitter. It’d make her day, I just know it.

So congratulations, Karen, on your debut novel realease! I couldn’t be happier for you, m’dear.

Now I’m off to see if those sirens are as hot as I hope they are. :)

Cheers!

Who’s up for doing a good deed today?

I know, I know. “Simon,” you’re saying, “you’d trample an infant to get to the 50% Black Friday vodka discounts. What’s with the talking about good deeds?”

Well, they’re not my good deeds, are they? They’re someone else’s. So I can talk about them. Loophole. Duh.

And the good-deeder in question? None other than my lovely, longtime friend Carolina Valdez Miller. C’mon. Is anyone surprised? You all knew she was saintly already. (Really, it’s a wonder she hangs around, virtually or otherwise, with a reprobate like me.)

See, she’s had it a little rough in the ol’ net-o-sphere recently, what with getting hacked and locked out of All The Social Media by some douchebags of such epic douchebaggery that they make standard-issue douchebags look like mere jerks. And what sucks most is that she has this good-deedery that she really could use some help with, and wasn’t able to blog about it until today.

She’s going on a medical mission to Haiti. Remember it? Earthquake a year or so ago? Crushing poverty? Cholera epidemics? She’s going there. As a volunteer.

Go read about it. Like, now. You really don’t have to come back here.

But if you do happen to wander back, or if you finish this post before clicking over, I urge you to do what you can to help her. You don’t have to donate money, though seriously, that’d be fantastic. But at the very least, could you help spread the word?

Link her up on the Twitters, on the Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, and anywhere else you might maintain an online presence. Everything helps.

Friends, we write fiction because, on some level, we want to connect with readers, to affect other people’s minds and lives with our stories. Carol’s taking it a step farther. She’s going right to where the need is greatest.

Help her out, won’t you?

Thanks.

One step at a time will get you there

Since I’ve started running, friends, I’ve found my perception of distance has changed somewhat. There’s something about the ability to cover good distances on foot, in not-so-great amounts of time, that makes everything seem…closer, somehow.

See, if you hop in your car for a four-mile drive through a residential neighborhood with stop signs and lights, it can seem like that four miles takes forever to cover. We might find ourselves saying things like, “If I were on the highway, this would only take four minutes! And why the hell is this idiot doing BELOW THE SPEED LIMIT!?” 

Or maybe that’s just me.

But when you run, when you lose yourself in the rhythm of your footsteps and measured breaths, time and distance seem to blur a little. That four miles fraught with vehicular interruptions, when you run it early in the morning, is now a free and clear path for your feet. It’s a half-hour’s light jog.

I first noticed this in San Diego a couple weeks ago, when I was there for World Fantasy Convention. (No, I didn’t do a post on that. Yes, I may yet. What? I procrastinate! Or perendinate, as the case may be. Sue me.)
When I woke that first morning in California I was still on East Coast time, so naturally it was at 4 am. I tried, I really tried to get back to sleep, but after an hour I gave up, got up, dressed, and went for a light breakfast before my run. 

The hotel was four miles from the Pacific Ocean, a straight shot, essentially. I decided I wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. So four miles there and back it was. Off I went.

The first leg was fairly easy. It was cool, but clear (aren’t all fall mornings like that in San Diego?), and the air felt richer, somehow, than what I’m used to. And after I’d wiggled my fingers in the ocean and collected a few shells to bring back for the kids, I headed back to the hotel.

Now, as you might assume, the run back is always a bit harder than the way out, so when I crested a small hill and saw the hotel towers in the distance, perhaps a mile and a half away, I got this sinking feeling of holy-crap-that’s-so-far-my-legs-are-going-to-drop-the-hell-off!

I swear it looked farther away than this....

What do you do at this point? What can you do but keep running?

So I did.

And despite how far away that hotel looked, I put one foot in front of the other, took one breath at a time, and in no time flat, I was jogging back through the hotel grounds toward my room. It hadn’t been that far at all. It just looked it.

You can see where I’m going with this, right?

As with running, so with writing. 

Right now I’m struggling to finish a novella, with an expected 25k or so wordcount. But it doesn’t have to be so hard to finish, does it? Focusing on how far away 25k is won’t help anything. What will help is simply writing the words down, one after another, following the story to its (bleak, depressing, apocalyptic) conclusion (hey, it’s me—what did you expect?).

That’s how I’ll get there. One step at a time, one word at a time. The thing is to keep the legs going, keep the words flowing, and trust that, if you persist, push through, eventually you’ll reach that destination.
So that’s what I’ll do.

That’s how the magic happens.

Write on, friends.

I don’t write happy endings.

You heard me right: I don’t write happy endings. I just don’t. It’ s not me. It’s not, quite frankly, how I see the world.

I’ll explain.

I know there are stories out there of people overcoming insurmountable odds to reunite with their lost loves/families/pets/computer games. I know there are high school sweethearts in the world who’ve stayed happily married for 60 years. And I know that, every once in a while, the good guys actually win.

But I don’t give a shit.

It’s probably a character flaw.

The thing is, in the stories I write, I’m not seeking resolution. I have absolutely no interest in bringing everything to a neat conclusion. My characters are always in process, never complete, never satisfied. Even if they get what they think they want, it’s not going to be what they expected or hoped for. Because that’s how life is, in my experience.

It’s messy. It’s complicated. We make major decisions with incomplete information, never really knowing, really knowing whether we’ve chosen the right thing. Every silver lining has a cloud. There’s a yin to every yang.

I’m about to choke on cliches.

My point is, in fiction, what calls to me isn’t the happy-ending, oh-god-that’s-just-so-right shite that ends up as Lifetime movies. In real life, people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or vice versa. Love isn’t, actually, enough. Sometimes conflict—internal or external—is the only constant.

So I write about that.

And so did most of the authors in the Western canon. (Shakespeare, anyone? Dostoyevsky? Hemingway? Woolf?)

Hell, I don’t have to like that this is the way things are. But it sure does make things interesting for the ol’ fiction. Because people hurt. They make daily choices between bad and worse. They stumble in the dark, and sometimes the only glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. Sacrifice isn’t always noble.

Here’s your happy ending.

That’s what I know. It’s what speaks to me.

It’s what I write.

Deal.