Towel Day 2012

“A towel, (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

My deep admiration for Douglas Adams is no secret. (Link here if you have only just crawled blinking and confused from a cave.) Those who know me very well might know that the first possession I would rescue from my burning house is my signed edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Those who know me inordinately well know that nearly every night of my life, I’ve gone to sleep listening to recordings of the Hitchhiker’s radio shows.

This morning, a couple of new Amazon reviews compared my writing and Rhubarb to DA and THGTTG. I fully, and shamelessly, claim him as an influence. But it got me thinking. What is it about Douglas Adams that I admire so much?

I was introduced to DA in the eighth grade by new friends in a new town, who thrust his books into my hands flabbergasted that I’d never even heard of him. (Hipster moment: I read DA back when his trilogy had only three books.) So is my admiration simply nostalgia—that I spent my most embarrassing emotionally formative years comforting myself by reading and rereading those books? Nah. It’s got to be more.

I do admire his writing style. He’s concise. (A sentence construction and paragraph design and planning skill, often related to proper word selection, that I have often neglected in the recent past.) He took big risks with his writing and never shied away from absurdity; yet somehow always seemed to make a salient point. (See almost any quote from Marvin the Paranoid Android.) I admire his work ethic. (“I love deadlines,” he famously said. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”) And I have learned to enjoy a good soak in the tub now and then. (What better use for a towel?)

Do I admire his later work in the cause of endangered species? Is it his ability to blend true satire and speculative fiction to lampoon everyone and everything? (“To boldly split infinitives that no man has split before…”) Do I admire his willingness to wade into any and every medium that would have him—radio, novels, comics, nonfiction, television, computer games, Hollywood, theater? That the Guide is ostensibly the inspiration for Wikipedia? It’s impossible to put a finger on a single thing.

During the production of the notoriously horrible BBC television series of Hitchhiker’s, a bit actor called in sick, so Douglas stepped in to replace him. This wasn’t unusual; he played other bit extra parts in the series, and had appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But on this particular day, Douglas Adams stepped in front of the camera, and on action promptly waded naked, and towel-less, into the ocean.

That’s the kind of author I’d like to be.

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?