Blog Archives

J.M. Griffin: The Esposito Series

6/25/2013

Today, guest author J.M. Griffin is stopping by to share about the new box set containing the first three books in the Esposito Series.

About the Esposito Series Box Set:

By day, Lavinia (Vinnie) Esposito is a criminal justice instructor at a college in Rhode Island. By night Vinnie is an amateur sleuth, solving murders while trying to avoid getting yelled at by her Italian father, her hunky protective boyfriend Marcus Richmond, and her sexy upstairs tenant, the mysterious Aaron Grant.

For Love of Livvy (Book 1)
Vinnie investigates the death of her beloved aunt, and a mysterious box is left on her doorstep.

Dirty Trouble (Book 2)
Someone is stalking Vinnie and that’s just the beginning of her troubles.

Dead Wrong (Book 3)
Vinnie is out to save her brother from being framed after a valuable painting is stolen.

Excerpt:

An oversized van idled up behind the patrol car and the trooper glanced back. Two men stepped from the vehicle dressed in heavy gear and acknowledged him. He turned to the lead man, mumbled a few words and then stared at me again. If this was an action film, I would have expected Bruce Willis to jump out of the truck announcing he was about to kick someone’s ass. This wasn’t an action film, but a real life situation instead.

The two guys angled through the front gate and hitched their gear as they hauled a peculiar looking lidded barrel toward the front door. By this time, a few neighbors had taken notice of the activities. Several people straggled along the sidewalk across the street to watch.

You’d think it was a freakin’ sideshow. I smiled and waved. Nobody responded, they just continued to gawk. A little excitement for them on an otherwise dull Sunday, I guessed. The trooper stood aside and watched the crowd, but said nothing.

The overdressed bomb guys corralled the box between them. With delicate finesse they lifted and stowed it into the metal container, loaded it into the truck and drove off. I stared in disbelief. Hell, I wanted to know what was in the package. I had a right to know, didn’t I?

The trooper turned to leave and I stepped forward.

“Uh, I’d like to know what’s in the box, if it’s not too much to ask.” My hand snuck up to my hip as my cocky Italian attitude slid into place.

Tall and Curious stiffened at my tone and turned to stare at me. It seemed he wasn’t used to being spoken to in this manner, which wasn’t any big surprise. Women tend to respond differently to men in uniform, especially a man such as this luscious creature. Well, not this chick. I teach guys like him all year long and the “I’m so wonderful” thing gets old fast.

“I’ll be sure to let you know, Miss Esposito. If we have any questions, you’ll hear from us right away.”

I gawked a moment and my eyes narrowed. His opened wide in contrast and he waited, his body tense. Maybe he thought I’d pitch myself off the steps onto his perfectly toned frame and pummel the daylights out of him or something. It was a thought, but I really wanted to know what was in the package. Besides, his muscles were bigger than mine.

In an effort to change tactics rather than be handcuffed and dragged off to jail, I smiled and spoke in as nice a manner as I could muster.

“I’d appreciate any information you could give me officer, since the package was left in such an alarming way. Should I call headquarters tomorrow?”

His look narrowed. I suspected he was unsure of where this was headed. There was a moment’s hesitation before he answered the question.

“Sure, that would be a good idea.” He gave a nod of the stiff brimmed campaign hat that covered cropped brown hair.

“All right then. I’ll call the colonel first thing.” My voice remained light and sweet, and the smile was charming, at least I hoped it was.

The colonel runs a strict police force and is a tough disciplinarian with an intense dislike for any impropriety, implied or otherwise. I’d gleaned that much from the cops in my criminal justice classes.

A tight lipped smile crossed his face. I figured he couldn’t decide whether I really knew the colonel or if this was a ploy. To be truthful, I lied by omission. I hadn’t said I knew the colonel, I just said I’d give him a call.

“That won’t be necessary ma’am. As soon as there’s any information, I’ll get in touch with you.” With a nod of his head, he turned and left.

Don’t you hate that ma’am thing? It makes me feel old. I know I’m thirty-something, but really.

About the author:

As a humorous, cozy mystery writer, J.M. adds a touch of romance to every story. She believes in fairies, doesn't believe in coincidence, and feels life is what you make it. Believe in yourself and look at the positive, not the negative, to bring about success. AND. . .never stop trying.

J.M. lives in rural New England with her husband and two very mysterious cats.

Visit her on Facebook, Twitter, her website, or her blog. You can find the Esposito Series box set at Lachesis Publishing.

J.M. will be awarding Tea and Chip Nuts to three randomly drawn commenters at the end of her blog tour, so make sure to leave a comment for your chance to win.

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Kevin Bufton: Isolation and Horror

6/23/2013

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Today, guest author Kevin Bufton is here to promote his new release, Cake, a short dystopian horror. Thanks so much for stopping by today, Kevin. Take it away!

Kevin Bufton: Hello, and welcome to the sixth stop on my Piece of Cake Blog Tour. I’d like to thank Leigh, for giving me this opportunity to promote my debut novella, Cake, which was released earlier this week.

Over the course of this tour, I have talked about my writing career to date, obstacles that I have had to overcome in the penning of the novella, what happiness means to me, and how I can correlate that with the dark and odious things I write about, and how I manage to stay focussed on my writing. It has been hard going – indeed, the promotion of the book has been much harder than the actual writing of it, if only because I’m not happy talking about myself. However, this very reticence segues neatly into the topic Leigh has suggested for me – isolation, which happens to be one of the themes of the book.

Isolation can be a terrible thing, whether it is self-imposed, or enforced upon us by other people. Human beings are social creatures by our very nature and, whether we choose to admit or not, we are hard-wired to crave interaction with one another. Prolonged periods of separation from the rest of the human race have been shown to lead to all manner of mental aberrations, since we use other people as a mirror, a way to take stock of ourselves.

However, as much as interaction with other people is an important – nay, an essential – part of life, isolation has its perks too.

I’m a writer. More specifically, I’m a writer of horror, and other dark fiction, which means that isolation is of great importance to me.

As a writer, I cannot work when there are other people in the room with me. It find it a physical impossibility, rather like someone in a public toilet, suffering from a case of shy bladder. It doesn’t matter how quiet they are, or how still they are being, they are intruding on my writing space. If I had money to fritter away on such an enterprise, I would rent my own office, and, having kissed my wife and kids a fond farewell in the morning, spend all day, every day in there, with both phone and internet disconnected, just so I can write without anything approaching an interruption.

As it is, I spend my day surrounded by people – strangers, colleagues, friends, family – which, is all well and good, but what I really desire is for that zen place, where I can empty my mind of the need to be conversational, or emotionally supportive, or in any way a functioning human being. The cliché of the hipster, sat in his local Starbucks, diligently typing his stream-of-consciousness in full few of that coffee shop’s patrons is so alien to me. I am currently writing a collaborative novel with American horror author, Roger Perry and, if I’m being honest, the only reason I agreed to it, aside from the fact that he makes for a very gifted writing partner, is that we have the entirety of the Atlantic Ocean separating us whilst we do the actual writing. If we were attempting this in the traditional manner – the pair of us sat in a room together – I’m pretty sure one or the other of us would have been on the run from the authorities by this point.

That’s my own little psychosis, fairly well documented there, and I don’t think I need take up any more of you time with this sort of armchair analysis. The only reason I brought it up, is because of the sort of stuff that I write – horror. You see, at its heart, the horror genre is all about isolation.

No, really.

When we consider horror, what truly scares us is not the zombie, or the vampire or the werewolf, but the idea of facing whatever creature it might be alone. Not only are we alone in the physical sense (deaths in horror novels and movies are rarely group affairs – the unhappy band of protagonists are normally picked off one-by-one, having been singled out from the group), but also emotionally. Almost every horror book will have that scene where the main character must face the very real fact that not only are they being stalking by some sort of maniacal root vegetable (it could happen!) but that nobody will believe them when they tell them – not family, not friends, and especially not the authorities.

Even if the hero does have a group of fellow believers, you can bet that someone in their group will suggest splitting up at one point or another. It’s a simple plot device, designed to produce two or more groups, separated from one another, thereby making that sense of isolation even more profound. Not only are these six (let’s say) protagonists facing a horde of the undead with no hope of rescue, now they are split up, either by mutual agreement, or some caprice of fate, which means that they are isolated from both civilisation, and the only people who might understand their plight. If the author is a real bastard, he will have one member of that group break an ankle, so that the group has to split up…again! It is storytelling at it’s most simple, and, within the confines of the horror genre, it is one of the writer’s most powerful tools. After all, nobody is afraid of the dark when they’re amongst a group of friends, but when you find yourself on your own…

…that’s a different matter.

About the novella:

In May of 2053, forty years following the Separation of Wirral from the mainland, there is but a handful of people who remember what life was like before.

Geraldine Waters is one of the few.

In a land ruled by gang law, and horrors beyond mortal imagination, Geraldine lives in a perpetual nightmare, from which she knows she will never wake.

Her story is one of hatred and desperation, of living shadows and dying hopes.

It is a story about family...

It is a story about cake.

About the author:

Kevin G. Bufton is a thirty-something father, husband and horror writer, in that approximate order. He lives in Birkenhead, on the Wirral, with his wife and two kids.

He has been writing horror fiction since January 2009, and has been published in magazines, anthologies and on websites, the world over.

Cake marks his debut release as a solo author. Kevin hopes, one day, to be able to scare people for a living. You can find Cake at Amazon and Amazon.uk.

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Attention Nook Readers!

6/22/2013

1 Comment

Cerebral Books's exclusive contract with Amazon has ended, and I'm very happy to announce Myths of Gods and World-Mart are now available on Nook, with Finding Poe set to join them soon. While they're still available on Kindle (direct links on the sidebar to the right), they are no longer available for free at Amazon's lending library. It's a tough trade-off, but one that enables broader availability among e-readers.

Get Myths of Gods on Nook here. Get World-Mart on Nook here.

I hope you enjoy them--and if you do, please make sure to leave a review!

1 Comment

Words from the Grammar Nazi: Parentheticals, Ellipses, and Brackets

6/18/2013

2 Comments

She'll point out every little mistake. She'll scream at you for using comma splices and split infinitives. She has no tolerance for fragments and run-ons. Today, she's taken over the Cerebral Writer, and hate her if you will, she does know her grammar.

Today's lesson: Parentheticals, Ellipses, and Brackets

These grammatical stinkers seem self-explanatory enough: they break up sentences in meaningful ways. Simple, right? While there is some stylistic license to their uses, there are rules to them that every writer should know. Following is the basic break-down:

Parentheticals

Although there are different types of parentheticals, there are also a few different ways to make them. Commas are the standard, although m-dashes and actual parentheses are also acceptable in moderation. So, how do you decide when it is appropriate to veer from the standard?

M-dashes are two dashes placed side-by-side between words (--); if your word processor’s auto-format function is on, this will typically format into one long dash (—). M-dashes are perfect for the parenthetical that needs an extra dramatic flair. Ideally, one uses them the same way one would use commas, basically offsetting nonrestrictive relative clauses, with an opening and closing parenthetical. Nonrestrictive relative clauses contain information that is not necessary to the sentence but adds important details. For example:

The painting, which had taken her a month to complete, was destroyed in the flood.
The painting—which had taken her a month to complete—was destroyed in the flood.

Similarly, if the information comes as an aside, parentheses are also acceptable:

The painting (which had taken her a month to complete) was destroyed in the flood.

However, if the information is a necessary aspect to the sentence, a comma is not appropriate. For example:

The painting that had taken her a month to complete was destroyed in the flood. (Here, “that had taken her a month to complete” helps to define that specific painting and therefore is restrictive and does not take commas.)

M-dashes are also used in screenplays to indicate a slight, dramatic pause in dialogue. As per industry standard, they are never auto-formatted, but they do contain spaces between them and the words on either side. Here is an example:

CHARACTER
Good God -- what the hell happened here?

Used sparingly, one can use m-dashes similarly in prose. They also serve, both in screenplays and prose, to indicate where dialogue is being cut off abruptly.

A different type of parenthetical called an appositive as a nominal restatement of the noun it precedes. This one trips up many writers, as it seems natural to create parentheticals out of all nominal restatements. Here’s the simple rule: if the restatement describes the preceding noun in its entirety, it’s an appositive and therefore a parenthetical. If it describes a partial set, it is not an appositive and therefore not a parenthetical. For example:

Tom’s only novel, The Story, is an excellent read. (This is an appositive since Tom has only written one novel and The Story restates “novel” in its entirety, so you must use commas here.)

Poe’s poems “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” are very chilling. (This is not an appositive since Poe has written more than just these two poems, so you must not use commas here.)

The above parentheticals raise another rule issue, which is knowing when it is appropriate to place the period inside or outside a set of parentheses. Here’s the simple rule: if you have a full and complete sentence within the parentheses, capitalize the first word and place the period on the inside; if you have an incomplete sentence that modifies a main clause as an aside, do not capitalize the first word and place the period on the outside. The above serves as examples of the former. Following is an example of the latter:

I love Poe’s poems “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” (although I know some people find them to be a bit too chilling).

Ellipses

Much like parentheticals, ellipses seem fairly self-explanatory: they offer a pause or slight shift in idea where it is not appropriate to split via a period or semicolon. They also serve to show dialogue that trails off (but not dialogue that is abruptly cut off). As far as formatting goes, auto-format will cluster an ellipsis into a single unit. Depending upon where one’s writing is intended, this is not always acceptable. For example, many styles and publishers will require spaces between each of the periods. Either way, it is generally accepted practice to provide a space before and after an ellipsis.

Regardless of any other formatting rules, always use three periods—unless you’re using the ellipsis to trail off the end of a sentence. In this case, you always want to use four periods, with no space between the first period and the last word. For example:

“I’m sorry . . . I just don’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry. . . .”

Brackets

Brackets and parentheses are not interchangeable, although one does want to use brackets on the rare occasion that one would want parentheses within parentheses—in which case the brackets would serve as the innermost set of parentheses.

The most common use for brackets is adding necessary information within quoted, referenced text, typically to replace a pronoun with a proper noun for clarification. Although some will add the bracketed information in addition to the pronoun or otherwise vague text, most formats will require that the brackets actually replace said information. For example, let’s say I’m quoting a reference that uses “he” but I want to make sure those reading my work know I’m talking about Poe:

“He was an exceptional storyteller and poet.”
“[Poe] was an exceptional storyteller and poet.”

Similarly, you can use brackets to alter a quoted word in order to make it fit a lead-in sentence. Let’s say you want to quote the following sentence, “He was an exceptional storyteller and poet,” but you want to use a lead-in sentence. You would want to use brackets to change the capitalization: According to the Generic Almanac, “[h]e was an exceptional storyteller and poet.” You can also use this technique to ensure verb tense agreement within your text. Let’s say you’re writing a piece that is entirely in present tense (such as a paper in MLA style). You might want to change “was” to “is,” and in that case, brackets are also appropriate.

Brackets are also important for quoting material that contains mistakes, ensuring your readers understand said mistakes are those of their quoted authors and not yours. By adding “[sic],” which stands for sic erat scriptum, or “thus was it written,” directly after the mistake, you can ensure your readers understand that you have chosen to keep the quote intact (instead of correcting the misspelled or misused word in brackets), intentionally leaving in the mistake. For example:

According to Generic Almanac, “Rose’s [sic] are the prettiest of all flowers.”

Of course, you can always choose to correct the quote, in which case you’ll want to use brackets as well: “[Roses] are the prettiest of all flowers.”

While you might have readers who also do not know the rules, there is always a chance that editors, agents, or reviewers reading your work will know them (and will judge your work accordingly). If you take the time to know and understand these rules, your writing will be sharper and you will be able to present it to the world with confidence and skill.

Until next time, my pretties! (Insert evil cackle.)

2 Comments

Bruce Hartman: Insanity and THE RULES OF DREAMING

6/14/2013

9 Comments

Today, guest author Bruce Hartman discusses the concept of insanity in literature to promote his new release, The Rules of Dreaming. He'll be giving away a $50 Amazon or B&N gift card to one commenter at the end of his blog tour.

Thanks so much for stopping by, Bruce!

My new mystery, THE RULES OF DREAMING, takes place in and around a fictitious private mental hospital in upstate New York. Many of the characters are either patients at the hospital or the psychiatrists who attempt to treat them. “Insanity” or “madness” and its relation to other states of the human psyche is one of the themes of the book. Although I have read widely about psychology and various mental phenomena usually dubbed “mental illness,” I don’t pretend to any expertise in the field and have not attempted a realistic portrayal of what it’s like to suffer from mental illness or be a patient in a mental hospital. The book is undoubtedly open to criticism on that basis by readers attuned to realism. But the book has little or nothing to do with realism. It approaches mental illness in the Romantic/Gothic tradition as a condition of the psyche that is removed from everyday reality but possibly connected with a higher spirit world. That approach itself qualifies as “insanity” by some definitions.

Two of the book’s main characters are described as “schizophrenic,” but I suspect that experts will differ with my use of that term. In fact the narrator, the young psychiatrist Ned Hoffmann, is uncomfortable with this diagnosis which has been placed on Hunter Morgan and his twin sister Antonia:

Everyone at the Institute referred to them as “schizophrenic” because that was the official diagnosis, carried forward on their charts over a seven-year period. But in fact their illnesses bore almost no resemblance to classic schizophrenia or any other recognized form of mental disturbance. Whatever they had, it was unrecognizable, unique, defying classification. This troubled me because it went against all my training and experience up to that time. Patients, I’d been taught, can always be diagnosed—that is, categorized—because they’re not like you and me. They are not normal, healthy individuals with unique personalities that can express themselves in an infinite number of ways. They have illnesses with certain symptoms; there are only a limited number of possibilities. In other words, even if the rest of us are unique, mental patients are not. But here were Hunter and Antonia, who defied medical classification. The lexicon of modern medicine was useless in the face of their individuality. The only thing you could say about them was that they were crazy. Mad. That’s what they were, I told myself privately: Mad.

The young psychiatrist wants to believe in the uniqueness and unclassifiability of each individual’s personality, regardless of whether they’re classified as mentally ill. For this reason he prefers to think of the twins as “mad” rather than to label them with some limiting scientific classification. He is fascinated with them because they seem to inhabit a parallel universe which is meaningful only to themselves. As the story plays out, we learn the reason for the uniqueness of the twins’ illness.

This concept of “madness” fits in nicely with pre-scientific conceptions of mental illness as embodied in Romanticism and other literary conceptions. The madman was seen as a kind of prophet rather than merely a person whose chemistry needed to be adjusted. Much of the story of THE RULES OF DREAMING revolves around The Tales of Hoffmann, the opera by Jacques Offenbach based on stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann. This is a beautiful, fantastic work which is all about the shifting boundary between fantasy and reality.

E.T.A. Hoffmann popularized the Romantic notion of madness as a spiritual state, akin to love and artistic inspiration. Somewhat like the LSD-inspired hippies of the 1960s and their followers, Hoffmann believed (or claimed to believe) in the existence of a “spirit world” accessible through dreams, drugs and music. If all else failed, madness (though not recommended) was another possible means of accessing the spirit world. Hoffmann was enormously influential in France and Germany for a few decades after his death in 1822. Offenbach’s opera portrays him as an alcoholic artist tottering on the edge of madness, tormented by his Muse and haunted by his three “mad loves.” Some recent productions have depicted Hoffmann as an inmate in an old-fashioned lunatic asylum.

If you haven’t seen The Tales of Hoffmann, I would strongly recommend that you watch the surrealistic film version that was made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the 1950s. Powell and Pressburger were British directors who also made The Red Shoes and The Thief of Baghdad. The DVD of The Tales of Hoffmann contains a fascinating commentary by Martin Scorsese, who was strongly influenced by the cinematography. My interest in the film and the opera led to a study of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who is known in the English-speaking world almost entirely through derivative works (The Tales of Hoffmann, Tchaikowsky’s The Nutcracker, Robert Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” Delibes’s Coppélia, Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny”) and the stream of influence that traces back to him (Schumann, Poe, Baudelaire, Dumas, Offenbach, Dostoevsky).

Long before I saw the Powell/Pressburger film, I had imagined a story about a patient in a mental hospital who sits down at the piano in the patient lounge and flawlessly plays a difficult piece of classical music. Although this usually requires years of training and practice, the patient’s psychiatrist discovers that he has no musical training or experience. So the question I started with is: Where did this music come from? Where does any music come from? Does music come to you as a kind of inspired madness, or does it come from outside the human mind?

When I researched The Tales of Hoffmann and its sources, I recalled the story I’d envisioned years before about the mental patient flawlessly playing a difficult piece of music without the benefit of any musical training or experience. That idea had been Hoffmannesque without my knowing it. THE RULES OF DREAMING took off from there.

Excerpt:

Nicole was nimble and petite and very pretty. No, I take that back—“pretty” doesn’t come close to doing her justice. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, with cascading red hair and a bold, astonished look in her eyes that made her seem at once wild and angelic. But since my profession has liberated society from all of its taboos save one—that a psychiatrist shall not fall in love with his patient—all I could do was listen sympathetically as she pulled herself back together and prepared to return to her studies. I put her on appropriate medications and she began to make progress immediately.

As it happened, Nicole had been in the lounge when Hunter sat down to play the piano...

“Nicole,” I said, “did you hear Hunter playing the piano this afternoon?”

“Yes I did.” She stopped in the doorway, framed in the shadows that darkened the adjoining hall. “It was impressive, wasn’t it?”

“Impressive isn’t the word, when you realize that he’s never had a lesson or even touched a piano before.”

Her smile faded. “That’s uncanny.”

“Do you know what piece of music he was playing?”

“I think I’ve heard it before. One of the German Romantics, I think, maybe Schumann.”

She started through the door, but just before she disappeared into the shadows she turned back around and her eyes caught a sparkle of the afternoon light. “He went mad, you know.”

“Who went mad?”

“Robert Schumann. The composer. Died in an insane asylum.”

About the Novel:

A beautiful opera singer hangs herself on the eve of her debut at the Met. Seven years later the opera she was rehearsing—Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann—begins to take over the lives of her two schizophrenic children, the doctors who treat them and everyone else who crosses their paths, until all are enmeshed in a world of deception and delusion, of madness and ultimately of evil and death. Onto this shadowy stage steps Nicole P., a graduate student who discovers that she too has been assigned a role in the drama. What strange destiny is being worked out in their lives?

About the Author:

Bruce Hartman has been a bookseller, pianist, songwriter and attorney. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia. His previous novel, Perfectly Healthy Man Drops Dead, was published by Salvo Press in 2008.

His novel is available through Amazon.

Bruce will award a $50 Amazon or B&N.com gift card (winner's choice) to one randomly drawn commenter, so be sure to leave a comment for your chance to win. For more chances, follow his entire blog tour and leave a comment at each stop. You can find the list of tour dates here.

9 Comments

Too Bad, So Sad

6/9/2013

1 Comment

I’ve touched upon this before, and with mixed response, but I must have another word on the subject. It never ceases to surprise me when a reader somehow feels cheated when finishing a dystopian novel that ends on a less-than-happy note. I understand that genres evolve to a certain extent, but to base one’s dystopian rubric on what one experiences in reading, say, The Hunger Games, is faulty to say the very least. Let’s take a look at a few of the most influential classics, the dystopias that truly define the genre:

Planet of the Apes: Ulysse escapes Soror with his primitive lover and child, offering the readers hope that all will be well, only to return home to find Earth has become the same hell he escaped. The couple in space who had the message in a bottle—again, hope for the human race—only end up throwing another disturbing monkey wrench into the works (yes, pun fully intended).

The point: Apes merely “ape,” and everything the readers see in the ape society represents humanity’s progress put eternally on hold; we only hold ourselves back, and when we fail to reach our potential, society as a whole pays for our failings.

1984: Lovers Winston and Julia are discovered together by the Thought Police and are taken to the Ministry of Love for torturous, brainwashing “re-education.” They both betray one another during interrogation, and then suffer their greatest fears in Room 101, Winston nearly having his face chewed to ribbons by rats before having the horror differed instead onto Julia. Their love dissolves—actually transforms into contempt—as a result of their experiences, and both re-enter society as selfless drones who live to serve and love “Big Brother.”

The point: If we submit to group thought, essentially allowing others to think for us, and do not exercise our rights as individual human beings, we will lose all that makes humanity so exceptional and diverse.

Cat’s Cradle: Ice-nine, a frozen chemical that turns all liquid it comes into contact with into more ice-nine (which stays frozen even in high temperatures), falls into the ocean via the crash of a plane containing the frozen body of a dictator who had committed suicide by ingesting the chemical, and all of the oceans in the world freeze over, ensuring the extinction of virtually all life on the planet.

The point: The most selfish and ignorant of humankind will be the downfall of us all.

My point: There is a reason many of my works end in tragedy, and sometimes it takes a little brainpower to figure out why. I know some people read to escape and some people read to think, but those in need of escapism have no place picking up the good majority of dystopian works. When I read reviews that show contempt for the dark ending in my dystopia, all I can think of is, You obviously have not read enough to know what you’re talking about. Go back to your YA dystopia, the sugar-coated kind, and leave the real literature to the big kids. And, should you decide to pick up a novel that follows the classic dystopian trope, don’t complain if you leave without that warm and fuzzy feeling. It’s meant to stimulate your brain, not fulfill your escapist needs.

It's blunt and it's not nice, but it's also true.

1 Comment

D.J. Williams: THE DISILLUSIONED

6/7/2013

14 Comments

Today, author D.J. Williams is here to promote his new release, The Disillusioned. He will be giving away a $30 Amazon gift card to one random poster following the tour. For more chances to win, check out the rest of the tour here.

About the Novel:

A mother’s suicide threatens to destroy a family legacy. Her sons, Sam and Daniel, are forced to leave their comfortable worlds behind and search for a woman they believe can unlock the secrets that have remained hidden. They are propelled into separate journeys from Los Angeles to the heart of the Zambezi where they are forced to confront a man known as Die Duiwel, the Devil. On their adventures they will find themselves in a place where death is one breath away, where thousands of children are disappearing into the darkness, and where the woman they are searching for is on the hunt for revenge. When they stand face-to-face with the forgotten slaves of Africa they will fight to redeem what has been lost.

“A fast-paced mystery…you won’t put it down until you’ve unlocked the secrets and lies to find the truth.”
-- Judith McCreary, Co-Executive Producer Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds, & CSI

“Riveting...an indelible picture painted with suspense.”
-- Mitch Kruse, Author of Restoration Road

“An engrossing tale…makes you think about the world we live in and your place in it.”
-- Tony Guerrero, Founder of F.A.C.T. Alliance: Fight Against Child Trafficking

Excerpt:

Drops of rain turned into a torrential downpour as Danny and Sam stood drenched at the edge of a deep hole and a fresh mound of dirt. The casket had already been lowered into the ground, evident by the arm of a crane hovering overhead. A groundskeeper kept his distance a few yards away, careful to allow the boys their final goodbye.

A week ago they were living their own life, far removed from the darkness that had stolen their mother. One shouldered the guilt of a tarnished legacy while the other grew increasingly restless to return to his isolated world.

Danny was still reeling from his face to face with Bowman. How were they going to pay back the money? Where was the money? Why was it stolen in the first place? Should they even do anything, since neither was legally liable? He needed answers.

A wave of anger flushed over Danny as he thought of all his family had lost. Thousands of sermons preached by a man who now seemed as addicted to the almighty dollar as the people who passed the offering plate. He knew his father kept secrets, but nothing had prepared him for the news Bowman planted on him.

About the author:

With the DNA of a world traveler, Williams was born in Hong Kong, has ventured into the jungles of the Amazon, the bush of Africa, and the slums of the Far East, to share stories of those who are overcoming incredible odds. He is the co-author of Restoration Road with Mitch Kruse and has produced and directed over 140 television episodes syndicated on NBC, ABC, FOX and various cable networks worldwide. Currently, he lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife.

For more about D.J. and his works, stop by his website or follow him on Twitter.

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