Freebook!!!

Are you looking for a light, refreshing Memorial Day read? Have you been sitting on the fence about acquiring a copy of Rhubarb of your very own? Do you know someone who would love a charming little tale of love, pie, and aliens on Montana's High Plains?

Then Have We Got A Deal For You!

For two days only, Thursday May 24th and Friday May 25th, the Kindle ebook Rhubarb by M.H. Van Keuren will be FREE on Amazon.

You heard right. Free. $0.00. Zip. Nada. Nothing. No shipping. No handling. No hidden fees.

So spread the word and come on down to your local Amazon, for the best value in reading entertainment since Gutenberg figured out the whole thing printing thing.

BUT WAIT, there's more. Inside every copy of Rhubarb is a recipe for the greatest rhubarb pie in the galaxy. And for every friend you tell, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling of having spread a little more good into this crazy, mixed-up world.

What do you have to lose? Act now. Amazon algorithms are standing by.

Kickin' It Old School

...well, not entirely. You'll still have to use the Internet a little. But...

Rhubarb is finally available in print!

You can purchase it directly from Createspace. Or if you don't want to give yet another company all your digits, you can buy it directly from Amazon.

I have had a number of people ask about getting signed copies. So here's what I'm offering. I have ordered a small stack of books and can sell them directly. Send an email to mhvankeuren@gmail.com with your request and a shipping address. I'll invoice you the $14 cover price through PayPal. Because copies have to be printed, shipped to me, and then mailed out to you, I can't promise anything like Amazon's super-duper shipping speed, but you'll get it eventually. If I get more requests than I've anticipated, it may take even longer.

Of course, if you don't order one from me, I'll still be happy to sign your copy next time we see each other.

Thank you all for your encouragement and support.

What's Next?

It’s taken almost six months to the day to take Rhubarb from concept to print. (Yes, the print version is coming…soon…I swear. And it’s a thing of beauty.) It’s been so much fun. I’ve learned a lot and couldn’t be happier with the results.

So—besides the inevitable marketing—what’s next?

Tomorrow, I begin not a new project, but the final major revision on a big novel that’s been in the works for several years. And when I say big, I mean big. The first draft weighed in at over 505,000 words, and thankfully fell in the forest far from where anyone could hear it. I honed it down to about 275,000. A few intrepid beta readers plowed through this version, for which I am very grateful.

Since then, when I haven’t been working on Rhubarb, I’ve been hacking away at the next revision. But through it all, it’s been chipping away at me, teaching me how to write, and it’s been an unforgiving master. I’m hoping for a finely polished word count somewhere between 150,000 and 180,000 words. This is still a sizable novel, but it wouldn’t kill your cat if you dropped it on her.

What’s it about?

It’s the story of a young man disconnected from the ubiquitous virtual world, his robotic lemur with a dark secret, a slacker computer science major who just wants to be a father to his daughter, and the worst disaster in the history of human space colonization. It’s titled Legitimacy, and it’s pretty hard sci-fi set roughly fifty years in the future.

Not every novel can be about dessert.

Blue Bird of Happiness

After much consarnit-ing and get-off-my-lawn-ing, I have finally done and creaked out of my rocking recliner and joined up at the Twitter. They tell me it's how all the kids are keeping in touch these days. Follow me at your peril...

@MHVanKeuren

I'm Done!....Wait. What?

I’ve never been done with a book before. I’ve deleted thousands of first lines. I’ve completed drafts. I’ve even had beta readers wade through a morass of a manuscript that could laughingly be called “ready to read.” (Sorry, folks. Lunch is on me next time you’re in town.) But I’ve never been done done. Finished. Finalized. No more changes. Ready to print.

Until yesterday.

I have finished the editing process for Rhubarb and sent it on to my formatters. I’ll tell you, it’s a very strange sensation.

The three-and-a-half-month editing process consisted of countless read-throughs by me, and probably half again as many by my long-suffering wife and editor, Julie. She read it out loud to our kids. I read it out loud to myself twice. I listened to it read by the Kindle’s handy text-to-speech function. Julie used her own dictation program to go through it a couple of times. (Very handy for finding missing words and such.) Then after all that, Julie and I spent this past weekend together reading it out loud to each other again as we followed along. (We’re still married, and still speaking to each other, so success!) It’s been honed, polished, and tightened to within an inch of its life.

I expected to wake up this morning with nagging, niggling doubts that I’d missed something important, or with regrets that I hadn’t tweaked that one line or played with that scene a little more. But I didn’t. Naïve? Maybe. Is it perfect? No, but near enough. But am I happy? Very.

In this new world of self-distribution, the reality is that I will never be done with Rhubarb—or any subsequent book. It’s only just begun and I can’t wait.

Stay tuned for important, life-changing announcements…you won’t be disappointed. It’s almost Rhubarb season.

The Icing on the Pie

Aliens! Truck Stops! Rhubarb Pie! Oh my! Coming soon to an e-book retailer near you!

I’ve always had this sense that book cover design was a mysterious magical tower to which publishers held the keys and no author was ever allowed across the moat. They knew what arcana sold books. They managed the sorcery, and authors could only look on in distant trepidation and horror. I had long prepared myself to endure this step like a rite of passage.

In the world of big publishing, the author, especially a first-timer like me, gets absolutely no—yes, you read that correctly—no input on the cover at all. But you know what? I can walk into a bookstore (“What’s that?” the kids ask) or browse Amazon and I can see what grabs my eye and begs me to read more. And so can designers. As e-reader independent publishing is fast breaking down the separation between authors and readers, it’s creating an environment where the tower has been unlocked and designers have been set free from their dungeons. Authors and designers can now work together, and at reasonable costs authors can afford to be experimental, perhaps create more than one cover, and be faster and more flexible than any publisher ever could be. (Thanks also to Moore’s law for all the cheap computing!)

This is all easy for me to say now, because I haven’t sold book one. But my first foray into the world of book cover design has been an enormously painless one. With fantastic results.

Honestly, I don’t know how exactly I found StreetlightGraphics—a little Googling, reading a few author blogs—but I immediately liked their company. Tabatha and Glendon Haddix have been great to work with. They’ve set up services just for independent authors. (She's an author herself.) They’re relatively new at this, but their portfolio had a professional look in a variety of different styles and genres. And after going through the process, I can at last recommend them without reservation.

I had a few ideas about the cover when I started but nothing concrete, but Streetlight started with a questionnaire and ran with it from there. I really tried not to direct the ideas from the outset because I wanted to see what they would do with it. But either I did direct, or they “got it” at once, because they came out of the gate right on track. Once we got going, they were very responsive with major changes and nitpicky details.

Will “Rhubarb” sell with this cover? Can’t answer that yet. But I’d pick it up. Aliens? Truck stops? Rhubarb pie? What’s not to love?

Swimming Pool Maintenance

When I quit my day job, I knew conceptually that I would have to revise my writing before it would be publishable. I pushed this ugly fact to the back of my thoughts like a midlife crisis victim ignores the warnings that his fancy new car will require $300 oil changes and replacement parts air-mailed on dry ice. Or what’s the adage? The second-best day of your life is the day you buy your boat; the best day is the day you sell it. I have never owned a luxury automobile or any boat that wasn’t inflatable, and perhaps the main reason (besides a persistent absence of wealth) is that I generally heed the warnings. I fear money pits and avoid time sucks—even if the rewards may be partly luxurious. In short, I enjoy having a relatively maintenance-free life.

That’s why I hope to never own a swimming pool.

During the spring of my sophomore year of high school, I was hired by a neighbor to take care of his spectacular in-ground swimming pool—spectacular at least by the standards of a small Oregon logging town. I brought no special expertise to the job, just a need for cash. This neighbor, a doctor—a specialist of some variety that allowed him and his family to be on nearly permanent vacation—was seldom home. I was to check the water quality daily, put in the proper chemicals, clean the filters, skim the leaves and debris off the surface, and in general keep it ready to dive into if anyone ever came home and cared to dive into it. I met this doctor at his pumphouse/cabana one fine spring day, and he explained everything.

(I suppose the lesson I should have taken away from this is that I should have gone to med school. But I digress.)

At first it was a cinch. Each day, the little test vials would turn the exact shades of purple or orange they were supposed to. I’d drop fresh tablets of chemical into the filters as the old ones dissolved. I’d dutifully skim out the dead bugs and untangle the hose of the little vacuum that prowled the bottom. I was Pool Boy: loyal, competent, and trustworthy enough to never invite friends over to swim while the owner was out of town.

Summer came. I began to notice that the pH colors were just a little bit off from where they should have been. So I’d stand in a different light and declare them close enough. The surface skimming was a never-ending and thankless task, as the doctor’s house backed up to a wooded hillside. But worst of all, I noticed a certain green tinge—a layer of algae growing on the walls and floor. The doctor had not explained about algae. So I added more chemicals, and then a little more. This made the pH colors very angry but had no noticeable effect on the algae. This bright green scum was my Kryptonite.

For two weeks I fiddled with the chemical mixture, laboring in vain to banish the scum and to return the water to pristine balance, hoping every day that the doctor would not return. I found a brush attachment for the skimmer pole in the pumphouse and added scrubbing the walls to my daily regimen. But the unwieldy pole provided little leverage against the stuck-on menace and was, at the same time, too short to reach much of the bottom. There was only one thing to do. I donned my swimsuit and lowered myself into the heavily treated, unheated water, brush in hand. I scrubbed the heck out of that pool, coming up every few seconds for air. When I couldn’t stand any more, I shivered on the side and beheld a bizarre patchwork of green—a signed and dated monument to my incompetence.

I was not hired back the next season.

When I decided to write novels, I essentially bought a pool. Sure, I love to swim in my pool on hot days and soak up Vitamin D on the deck. And I’m planning to have people over for a pool party any day now. But there is no such thing as a professional maintenance contract for this pool. I had to hire a 15-year-old kid who’s learning the hard way how to balance the chemicals, how to keep the leaves out, and how to keep the algae from taking over. But he’s starting to get the hang of it.

I’ve found revising to be as satisfying as writing the first draft, if not more so. Sure, it can be difficult and tedious to scrub the scum away, but the luxurious end result makes all the effort worthwhile.

And maybe if I do it well enough, I’ll be able to afford a reallynice car.