My First Podcast

Richard Prosch, over at Six-Gun Justice, recently asked me a few questions about writing and reading. It's mostly western related, but not all. We talk about a variety of topics, and get into the books I've written lately for Wolfpack Publishing. This was my very first experience with a podcast but Richard made it easy and I really enjoyed it. 

Richard is a fine writer himself. I've probably read 85 percent of what he's written, and have particularly loved his Dan Spalding Mystery series, which I collect. Check his work out on Amazon. 

As for my books that we talk about on the podcast, here are the links below: 

As Charles Allen Gramlich: The Talera series. 

As Tyler Boone (westerns): The Scarred One: Killing Trail: 

As A. W. Hart: The Wine of Violence: 

As always, thanks for visiting!

Killing Trail: Print Edition

Well, finally something worth reporting here on the blog. For almost a year I've been planning on publishing a print version of my western short story collection, Killing Trail. I published this on Kindle and Nook several years ago but finally used Create Space to produce a print version. You'll probably recognize the cover image. Lana took this picture of me at the local Flatwoods nature preserve. Not a great cover image but it fit and I thought, "what the heck."

I dispensed with the "Charles Gramlich, Writing as Tyler Boone," subtitle and just put the pseudonym here, but everything is explained inside. I plan on more westerns under this name. Here is the back cover blurb (with the link):

RIDE INTO DANGER! Killing Trail is a collection of western short stories written in the action & adventure tradition of such authors as Louis L’Amour, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard. It contains:

Killing Trail: When they dumped Angela Cody on Lane Holland’s ranch she was scant moments from death. She managed to speak only a few words but those were enough to make Lane strap on his guns and ride out on a deadly hunt.

Showdown at Wild Briar: Accused of a murder he didn’t commit, Josh Allen Boone rode a long way from his Wild Briar Ranch. Now he’s coming home, and the real killers are waiting for him with a rope.

Powder Burn: They said Davy Bonner’s luck had run out and they ambushed him along a dark road. But luck or no, Davy wasn’t going down without a fight.

Once Upon a Time with the Dead: For the gray raiders, death was an old friend.

The work also includes two nonfiction essays, one about Louis L’Amour and another about the real Wild West.

The price listed on this is $6.99, but if anyone wants a signed copy you can let me know and I'll order some myself for that purpose. It should be a buck or so cheaper. Not completely sure how much cheaper.

Harmland in Print

I originally did the ebook version of Harmland: dark tales, back in 2012. It was over 21,000 words but I didn’t feel—at the time—that was long enough for a print version. However, David Cranmer, over at Beat to a Pulp has shown what can be done with some really nice packaging at shorter lengths using a smaller size paperback format. I finally decided to go for it and Harmland is now available as a print book on Amazon for $6.99.

I used CreateSpace for the book and was a bit frustrated because they had changed everything since the last time I put up a book. I found the previous time very easy but this one was a pain. Still, Harlmand is up now, and while I’m not overly thrilled with the cover and cover fonts, I still think it’s pretty cool. I hope you’ll check it out.

This is a collection of noir and horror stories. Some of the contents are: "Whiskey, Guns, and Sin," "The Finest Cut," "The Grey Inside," "The Toad," and a modern Cthulhu Mythos tale called "The Vivarium."

Next up will be a print version of Killing Trail, my western collection. Coming soon.

Good News, Bad News

Well, there's a little writing news I can share for a blog post. Not all good, not all bad. And none of it horrible.

To get the bad news out of the way, I finished an SF story at the end of last year that I think is one of the best I've ever done. The title is "Electric Love 'N Blue." I decided to try Asimov's SF Magazine with it, about the biggest market there is in SF. I got the form rejection email today. A rejection was expected but still disappointing. It would have been nice. The story will get sent out again this weekend to another market. I believe it will sell.

I actually got a rejection on a different story on January 1, 2015, so the year started out grandly. My feelings weren't badly hurt but I kind of thought maybe, if you are a magazine, you want to send our rejections on December 30/31 of one year, or at least wait until the 3rd or 4th of the new year. Who wants to get that kind of bad news on the first day of a "bright" new year?

For the good news, a blogger by the name of Col Colman put up a review of my western collection, "Killing Trail." I've never met Col but he must surely be a fellow of refined taste. For evidence of that judgement, I offer the fact that he liked my work. If you get a chance, check out his review. I certainly appreciated it. Thanks, Col.

Thanks also go to Prashant C. Trikannad for this good news because Mr. Colman first heard about "Killing Trail" on Prashant's blog. You hear about the role of "word of mouth" in the fortunes of a writer, but you don't often get to see such a clear result of that. Thanks, Prashant.

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Reviews, Updated

Updated News:

Prashant, over at Chess, Comics, Crosswords, Books, Music, Cinema, has now put up the review of Killing Trail, and there is an interview with yours truly.  I hope you'll get a chance to drop by and leave a comment. I'll be checking back and forth during the day to answer any questions that folks might have for me.

Also, Aimless Writer (Jeanne) still has her review of Harmland: Dark Tales up over on her blog. I'm very glad to see she enjoyed it. If you'd like, you can read her review here. She has a couple of books of her own available that you should check out.
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New Cover and TOC for Killing Trail

Killing Trail was the first item I self published, back in 2010. This 24,000 word collection of western tales has been among my better sellers, but hasn’t sold much of anything over the last six months.

When I first put the book up, I knew relatively little about formatting an ebook and setting up a clickable table of contents. I’ve decided to reissue the book in an updated version with a clickable TOC. The stories themselves are not changed so if you’ve already bought this book don’t buy it again. In fact, I think Amazon is supposed to let those who bought it know about the update and provide it to them free of charge. I don’t know how that works because I haven’t done this before. But let me know if you have the book and get a notice about the new version. Or if you don’t get a notice and want the clickable TOC version let me know and I can get it to you.

I also uploaded a new cover for the book, which contains the pseudonym, Tyler Boone. I’ve got several more western stories in the planning phase and when I do publish them they’ll go up under the Tyler Boone name.

If you haven’t read the Killing Trail collection already, I hope you’ll give it a look see now. Here’s the link to Amazon. The book is also up for the Nook  but I’ve not yet changed the cover there. Since sales on Nook have been very very very minimal, I’m not sure I’ll bother to make the change.

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Affordable Time Travel At Last

In an interview with this dashing reporter, scientist Charles Gramlich, who described himself as only “half-mad,” spoke at length about his years of dedicated work on the time travel conundrum.  His tinkering with wormholes and string theory led nowhere until, in the summer of 2010, he realized he had been approaching the problem all wrong.  “Physics and engineering can only take you so far,” Gramlich said. “The breakthrough came when I finally grokked that only the ‘mind’ possesses the required energy field necessary to generate  a true temporal distortion. It’s also much cheaper,” he added.

After looking  up about half those words in the dictionary, and after getting Professor Gramlich to explain the rest, your distinguished reporter finally understood.  I immediately took a little jaunt through time with the good Professor, visiting first the old American West, and then leaping far into the future to a planet as yet unknown to current human knowledge. Should you wish to follow in our pioneering footsteps, simply read Killing Trail, by the author Charles Allen Gramlich (no relation), and follow that with Under the Ember Star, by the same author.  Both books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Graham Charleston reporting for the Deerhaven Explicator. Somewhere in and out of time.

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What Do You Think?

Here's a couple of thoughts I'm having that I wonder if I might get feedback on.  First, in regards to Killing Trail, my western collection. Killing Trail was my first effort in self-publishing and I didn't do a clickable table of contents for it. Instead, I indicated the "location" for each individual piece in the TOC. I know how to to do a clickable TOC now so I was wondering whether I should go back and update the file with a better TOC. I'm not changing the stories and I don't want anyone who has already bought the collection to buy it again, but I thought it might be something that would help attract new readers. Sales have gone completely flat for it at this point.

Second, I've accumulated several flash fiction stories that are kind of unclassifiable, which is why they didn't appear in any of my three Borgo/Wildside anthologies. I'm considering self publishing an ebook with these in it. However, I'm not going to publish them, even at 99 cents, unless I can get at least several thousand words worth of material.  And I'd like to have more.  Here's the question. In addition to the unpublished micros that I have, I also have alternate ending versions of some of the previously published ones. I've seen where bands have released alternate versions of songs, so I'm wondering if adding a few alternate ending stories to the collection might sound reasonable, or would this seem like trickery. I almost always include a section about the stories in my anthologies so I would include it here too and indicate the differences between the published versions and alternate versions.

What say you?
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A Drought Breaks

Well, a drought that has lasted over two months finally broke a little yesterday. For the first time since mid-March I actually wrote a new piece of fiction. It was short, a prose poem I'm calling "The Hiss of Angels," and it came with a lot of effort, but it was new and it went down officially on a page. It's not that I haven't had ideas. In fact, the idea for this poem came to me several weeks ago. I've had lots of ideas, have tossed them around in my head, but in the end I just didn't have the drive to get them down. Sometimes it's impossible to escape the thought of, "What's the use?" In the end, of course, there is no "use," other than that I want to do it.

 I also finally got up the energy to check my amazon sales for April and May. One rather strange thing is that "Killing Trail" had been selling a few copies every month since it was published almost two years ago now. But in May that has come to a stop and only "Harvest of War" is still selling anything. I would have thought the audiences for those two books were different. I can understand why "Days of Beer" dropped to zero, since folks buying that would have been only buying something 'from me' essentially. I was hoping "Killing Trail" would continue to have legs. Alas, it looks like not. Of course, I've been doing no promoting for the past couple of months either so that probably had an impact. For some reason, I don't seem to get many word of mouth sales. I could try to figure out why bu the answer might just depress me so I'll leave it be for now.

One thing I have done a lot of is play my Skyrim video game. It's a fantasy quest type game, and I like it a whole lot. It has some interesting writing in it. All throughout the game world you find "books" of various kinds that can be read or used. That's cool. The thing about a video game like this is that it consumes your whole mind while you're playing it, and that keeps you from thinking about other, less pleasant, kinds of things. Writing requires thought, and as soon as you start thinking, the scary stuff can start to creep in. Well enough rambling. Time to visit blogs.

Kindle and Nook Collections

Some folks I know who are self-publishing on Kindle are talking about hundreds of sales for their works a month. (I don’t know any of those folks who are claiming thousands.) I have two self-published titles up on Amazon and Nook, Killing Trail and Days of Beer, and I haven’t come close to that number yet. Sales for Days of Beer have pretty well flatlined, but Killing Trail is still selling a few copies a month.

One thing the folks are saying who are publishing more is that it 1) helps to have more titles available, and 2) it helps if they are all basically in the same genre. I’m never going to be able to pull off the second one. I don’t read in any one genre and I just can’t focus my writing in one. I like stories of all kinds, and I want to write the kinds of stories I like to read. And I don’t want to use three or four different pseudonyms; I’d end up having to tell folks it was me, anyway.

However, I’ve decided that I’m going to put up at least two more ebooks from my own Razored Zen Press in 2012. One of them will not be the erotica collection I was talking about last year. I just decided I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. However, I do have two specific collections in mind that I will try to publish.

The first will be called Whiskey, Guns and Sin. It will be a noir/crime collection. The title story was previously published at Beat to a Pulp, but the ending is completely redone for this collection. The Swampy Jack story, “The Finest Cut” will also be in there. And another story, which I have an idea for but which hasn’t been written yet. I have a cover concept firmly in mind.

The second one will be a “Hauntings” collection. I have one story written for this already, called “Mouth Wet with Rain and Leaves.” There will be at least two more stories but I have to write them first. I have plenty of ideas. I don’t know what the collection title will be yet, but all the stories will deal with hauntings in some way or another. I have a cover idea for this one too, although not as firmly held.

Each of these collections will be shorter in total words than either Killing Trail or Days of Beer, but will contain three stories each and I’ll sell them for .99 cents. I’ll see if this will make any difference in my sales figures on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For those of you who are saying, oh no, not more Gramlich already after Days of Beer in December and In the Language of Scorpions in January, it’s going to be at least a couple of months before “Whiskey” goes up, and quite a bit longer than that before the “Hauntings” collection is ready.

It’s a crazy new world of publishing out there. I haven’t the foggiest what is going to happen. But I'm going to have my stuff in the mix some way or another.
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A Review of Killing Trail, and More

Travis Erwin gives a good mention to Killing Trail over on his blog. I'm glad the book is being so well received. Thanks, Travis.

I recently read a pretty good book myself. It was called Night of the Living Trekkies, and was written by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall. Since this is somewhat of a "gimmick" book, I was afraid it would be awful. But I love Star Trek so I decided to give it a try. It was actually very well done and I enjoyed it very much. I'm very pleased to have been wrong about it.

The book's premise is a zombie outbreak at a Star Trek convention. The key to this kind of thing is good writing and this certainly qualifies. And clearly the authors knew their subjects, both Star Trek and Zombies, and Star Wars to boot. Lots of nice touches, like using episode titles for the chapter titles, and having the dialogue at places reflect the shows.

Kudos to the authors

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Painting, and My Personal West

We've been having some work done on our house for the past couple of days and they are painting in my room, among other things. That's where my computer and internet access are so that's why I haven't been around to the blogs as much. It seems to be completed now so I'm gonna start making some rounds of blogs.

In the meantime, Richard Prosch is rerunning his "My Personal West" series of posts. The one he's got up today is a guest post by me that I wrote back when Killing Trail first came out. If you didn't see it then, check it out now. It's HERE.
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Buddies in the Saddle Review

Well, I haven't normally been posting every day but I had to put up a link to Ron Scheer's review of Killing Trail. Ron captured exactly what I hoped to do with those stories. I'm very glad he enjoyed and I sure do appreciate the support. Check it out if you get a chance, at Ron Scheer on Killing Trail

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Howard Days, Novel Spaces, and Killing Trail

It’s almost unheard of these days for me to post two days in a row, but June 11th was the anniversary of Robert E. Howard’s death. Most of you who visit here know who he is. I’ve talked about him plenty of times before. On the 11th, I talked about him again, but this time I did it over at Novel Spaces. I hope you’ll drop by.

And, of course, Killing Trail is indeed up finally as a Nook Book. I’m excited. Here’s the direct link again, in case you missed my shouting yesterday. Thanks all for visiting.

NookBook At Last

Hurray! At least to me. Killing Trail is up as a Nook Book. Same price as over at Amazon for the Kindle. I never found out what the major issue was or even got notice it had been published. But I decided to have a look just in case late last night and there it was.

Here's the link for you "Nookites." Killing Trail

Still no Success

The announcement I'd hoped to make last Friday was that I'd finally gotten Killing Trail uploaded to Barnes & Noble for the Nook. Alas, that still hasn't happened. They claim to be having some trouble verifying my account identity, which has now got me all worried that someone has stolen it. So, what I'd hoped to be something good has not turned out so well. I'll give it a few more days, see if anything happens. If not I'll have to cancel the upload.

The only other thing I have worth mentioning is that I watched the movie Shoot 'Em Up tonight. In it, a man gets involved in trying to save a pregnant woman from a hit man and ends up delivering the baby. The mother is killed and now the guy has to take care of the baby himself while an army of hit men try to kill it. He enlists the aid of a lactating prostitute. And the resulting body count is higher than Commando or Rambo. This had to be the most over-the-top movie I've ever watched, and I loved every minute of it. Totally ridiculous but very well done. I laughed my keister off as one ridiculous but intriguing scene piled on another. I recommend it.
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Tougher Days are Here Again

Grading time is upon me. I’m grading a test now in my Capstone class, and on Monday I’ll have two tests to grade. Senior grades—and most of my students are seniors—are due Tuesday at noon so that means Monday will definitely be a nose to the grindstone kind of day. Probably most of the night too.

In the meantime, It’s been a while since I’ve talked up my own books so I thought I might leave you with some samples from a couple of my available works. Soon I hope to be able to turn my mind to writing some ‘new’ stuff.

Here’s the opening to “Showdown at Wild Briar,” from my Kindle collection Killing Trail. As you might guess, things aren’t going to be as easy as the end of this teaser suggests. In the west, going home ain’t for the faint of heart or the slow of hand.

“You Josh Allen Boone?”

Leaning back in his chair in the Bucket of Blood saloon, a man looked up from under the brim of a battered Stetson. His gray eyes studied the speaker, noted the briar-scarred chaps, the faded red bandana at the neck, beaten smooth and soft with many washings, and the sun-worn face under a sweat-stained hat. A Remington New Model Army .44 rested in a holster high on the man’s right hip. Except for the boots, which were hand-tooled and expensive, the outfit shouted cow puncher.

“Who’s asking?”

“Don’t matter,” the cowboy said. He tossed what looked like a newspaper clipping onto the table beside Josh’s beer. “Figured you’d like to know. A Texas ranger down Brazos way shot a horse thief. One, Terrance Morelli. Seems old Terrance wanted to clear his conscience afore he died. Told about a man name of Frank Caine he’d killed in Wyoming. I believe you knew Frank.”

A tiny smile quirked the corner of Josh Allen’s lips. “Knew him,” Josh agreed. “They say I murdered him.”

“Now they’ll say you didn’t. You can go home.”


*****

Here’s a piece from the collection Midnight in Rosary, also available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This is from a story called “Love in the Time of Cybersex.”

The shapeshifter prowled toward him, as if her bones and muscles weren’t quite human. And they weren’t. Persona vats could grow anything. He’d seen a dragon here last night for sweet sake, though the cost of downloading one’s mind into something like that was astronomically high. But the shifter body was almost standard, and with practice the person inhabiting it could make it change shape. In the lighter gravity of the moon, the werewolf myth could come howling to life.

This shifter was named Smokeheart, a werepanther instead of a wolf, and she hadn’t been here quite long enough to learn how to fully control her body. She remained mostly human, except for pointed and tufted ears and a rampant grace, and a tail as strong and flexible as satin rope. Boone recalled that tail fondly.


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Killing Trail is a collection of western stories and some nonfiction stuff about the west. The stories were most strongly influenced by Louis L’Amour. Since this is a self-published book, it’s exactly as I want it to be. Now, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing the readers will have to say.

Midnight in Rosary is a collection of mostly vampire stories with some werewolf stuff thrown in. It’s also got a fair amount of erotica in the mix.

Thanks for listening!
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Ebook News

Well, sooner than I had thought it might happen, two of my books have been released by Borgo/Wildside as ebooks for both the Nook and the Kindle. This is Swords of Talera and Bitter Steel. The rest will eventually follow, although dates for that are unknown. A couple of folks have asked me particularly about the Nook versions so I thought I'd put up the links today.

Swords of Talera for the Nook

Bitter Steel for the Nook

Both Swords of Talera and Bitter Steel for Kindle:


Killing Trail is, of course, still available on Kindle, although not on the Nook as of yet.


Cold in the Light is also available in ebook from Google Books.
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A SEASON OF LOSS

You see a lot of retrospectus posts these days on the blogs. It’s natural and I rather enjoy them. Usually I like to do one myself, and I guess this is such a post, but this year it’s a little harder. There are things I don’t want to look back on, losses that I’ve had a hard time dealing with.

In March my mom died, after a really tough few months of illness, hospitalization, and pain. While attending her funeral I came down with the flu and it lingered for well over a week. Physical exhaustion. Mental exhaustion. I had them both. It’s still hard to believe I’ll never speak to her alive again.

Then came more loss. In July, my brother-in-law, Roger, died. He had several pretty bad weeks with brain cancer before he passed. I wasn’t there for it, although the family kept me informed of what was happening. And then came the third loss. In November, my stepfather, Ray, passed. He didn’t suffer as long as mom or Roger. And in such times you find yourself thankful for small favors.

Such things do not make for a good year. For anyone. And they linger; they ache. Like an arthritic limb. But the year was certainly not all about loss. It wasn’t primarily about loss. I have Lana and Josh. Their love is wonderful. I have a job I enjoy and not a lot of money worries. I live in a great house with trees on three sides and a yard full of birds and other critters. I ate well in 2010. I bought and read many good books, often by friends.

My writing did not go as well as I’d hoped. Certainly I didn’t get much new work done. I started two novels and both came to screeching halts. However, I did complete some projects that were close to my heart. I self-published Killing Trail and am rather proud of it, although sales have been modest. I also completed two collections of my short stories for Borgo Press. One was a collection of vampire fiction, Midnight in Rosary, and the other horror, In the Language of Scorpions. “Midnight” has been turned in but Borgo is setting up ebook versions of older books so new publications are on the back burner. I’m hoping 2011 will see both books in print.

In the end, I cannot be sad to see 2010 go. It will not be remembered with joy, as I remember 2007 for my marriage to Lana, for how we settled into our current woodsy home, and for the publication of the Talera novels. I know I’m looking forward to 2011; I’m hoping for better things. But 2010 did remind me of what is important in life. It reminded me that love and family are the reasons why I’m here. I can live with that.
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Rip Through Time

Some breaking news. I revealed something about the secret project I worked on this past summer in a previous post. It was a serial time travel story conceived by David Cranmer and executed by several guest writers, including me. The first installment of “A Rip Through Time” is now up online at Beat to a Pulp. This opening segment is by Chris F. Holm, so I hope you’ll check it out. My piece follows Chris’s in the story sequence. I had a lot of fun with my part, and from what Chris says here he had a lot of fun as well.

In other news, I’ve been kindlizing some old pulp stories, Doc Savage and The Shadow, for listening to on my Kindle while I make my commute to school. A problem was that the Kindle’s volume output was not enough to overcome the travel noise at much above 40 MPH. I first hooked up a set of speakers to the Kindle and used a cigarette lighter plug-in to power the whole thing, but this was pretty awkward and still didn’t produce enough volume to cover all contingencies. I finally bit the bullet and went to Mobile One on Saturday and had them put in a new radio/CD player for me with an auxiliary port, which I can plug the Kindle into directly so that it plays through my radio speakers. This is working out well. My 2005 Scion didn’t come with an auxiliary port, and I was needing a new CD player anyway so I killed two birds with one stone.

And speaking of Kindle and ebooks, sales have fallen off dramatically, (shall I say, precipitously), on my western collection, Killing Trail, so if you are hungry for some shoot outs and shoot-em-ups, please give the collection a try.


And for a final note for today, The Lovely Lana is running a contest over at her blog where you can pick up one of her great photos. Check it out.
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