Woke up this morning to find Proseuche sitting squarely in the Top 100 on Amazon for Ghost Fiction.
May not seem like much, but, damn, it was a first for me. I’ll take it!
See?
Kinda cool. 🙂
Monthly Archives: August 2014
help Martuk … the Film
Tomorrow. Sunday, the 24th of August. Mark the date. Tie a piece of string around your finger. Set your smartphone alarms. Do whatever you can to remember that date.
Why?
Because that’s when you’re buying my latest book Martuk … the Holy: Proseuche
Here’s the deal: I have a Studio circling the Martuk books, certain they’d transfer fantastically from book to film and, quite possibly, become a very successful tentpole franchise (i.e., a “tentpole” being a somewhat predictable summer moneymaker for the Studio). We’re talking marketing across different platforms: graphic novels, a possible TV series like Game of Thrones, and, of course, the films.
Problem is they need to see if there’s a market for what I do. If there’s an interest.
Now, before you say, Well, wouldn’t they look back at ALL the sales history to get a more accurate idea?, just let ME say that that’s what I thought, too. But I was wrong, or so I learned.
Listen, Studio Execs have enough on their plates without following my sales. They’ll look at THEIR calendars, see the conference call with that Martuk the Holy guy in, like, five minutes or something, and, out of curiosity more than anything, go over and see where the latest book is sitting in the rankings. That’s it.
Their focus is on story, character, who they can cast, who the potential audience is, etc and so on. Who I am and my sales are pretty far down on their list. Because they expect to build buzz around the book. A buzz they’ll orchestrate and control with their own goals and marketing in mind. So it doesn’t need to be a runaway bestseller to compete. It just needs to come to the table with some kind of respectable ranking the morning of our phone call.
And if the author can show he or she’s able to mobilize their social media strength into attention, support, interest and, perhaps, future ticket sales? Even better.
That’s where you come in —
On Sunday, August 24th, buy Proseuche. Head over to Amazon or B&N or what-have-you and One Click that puppy.
Please.
If I can go into this call on Monday the 25th armed with proof that there is, and could continue to be, interest, I could actually lock this deal down.
So, schedule your reminders, set your alarms, and tie those strings around your fingers. Sunday, August 24th.
Ramsey Ketchum Morton Lee
… otherwise known as How to Become a Hybrid in One Fell Swoop. ‘Cause that’s what I am now, kids. Self-published and, with this, traditionally pubbed. Or at least Indie Pubbed.
Learned today that Forever Dark, a short story I wrote, will be in the upcoming edition of Tales from the Lake, Vol. 2, the sequel to the successful Tales from the Lake, Vol. 1 from Crystal Lake Publishing.
Why does this matter? One, because how cool is it to actually be chosen out of all those amazing entries from, no doubt, equally amazing writers.
And, two, I’ll be sharing the pages with the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Jack Ketchum, Lisa Morton and Edward Lee as well as Tim Lebbon, Raven Dane, Rocky Alexander, Jim Goforth, Hal Bodner, Glen Johnson, Steven Savile, Richard Chizmar, Rena Mason, Ben Eads, Aaron Dries and Jan Edwards.
If you don’t know these names, you should.
More details to follow. 🙂
One Hundred Words
Want to know a secret? Something that was kind of a big deal for me over the last month or so as Proseuche launched? A something that made me squee!!!! like a teenage girl front and center at a One Direction concert basking in a shower of boy band sweat? (now THAT’S a squee, I tell ya)
This. Right here. A story told in one hundred words over on the awesomeness that is Hellnotes.
For me, that’s a big f’ing deal and better than any boy band could ever be 🙂
facing the sinister unexpected
From here on out, whenever I’m asked why I insist on combing horror with history, I’m pointing people to this guest post I wrote for the release of Proseuche.
But the humanity of who we are is the same. That’s a constant. The petty thievery of politicians. The lies husbands tell wives, and wives tell husbands. The dreams children dare to dream about their future. The frustration we have with Them, whether that Them is the wealthy or politicians or annoying neighbors.
And the monsters. We can’t forget about the monsters. Even those that look and talk and act like us. Those are the same, too. The fear of the unknown. The pit in the stomach one feels at the sight of a deep, dark shadow. Though separated by millennia, the quiet terror that makes our hearts thump when faced with a sinister unexpected never changes.
This is why horror works so well in a historical context. This is why I’m driven to take my dark fiction out of the comfort of this contemporary Here and Now and toss it to the wolves of 3rd century Antioch or 1st century Jerusalem.
You can read the rest over here. Enjoy! 🙂
Who am I without my ghosts?
Blog tours can be tough.
On the one hand, you’re incredibly grateful for the opportunity to introduce your work to (hopefully) thousands of new eyes. On the other hand, you find yourself navigating the same questions in the same interviews time and time again. Or struggling to convince your tired brain — which is probably still in shock from writing eighty thousand words and then turning right around to edit and rewrite those same eighty thousand words — to come up with an awesome, amazing, incredible Guest Blog Post.
Well, I don’t always hit a homer, but this is one of the few times I swung for the bleachers and won. Here’s an excerpt:
For a moment, I’d forgotten who he was, this Martuk. Had forgotten about his birth in the sun-blasted Zagros mountains one thousand years before Christ. Had forgotten the centuries he’d seen. The bloody chaos he’d caused and the agony he’d endured. Reminded myself that this was a man who’d had a long life, a long immortality, even before something as unremarkable as a cup of coffee even existed.
I gave him a moment. “If I may, why the second book?” I said. “Why Proseuche? Was it something as simple as the story continuing?”
“Nothing’s that simple.” He finished his espresso in one final swallow, his finger raised to order a second. A small nod from me, and a second finger lifted to indicate two. “Writing doesn’t excorcise the ghosts. It emboldens them.”
“So why write?”
A moment of silence followed by a brief shrug. “Who am I without my ghosts? In this world that changes yet remains the same, they are one of my few constants. Their anger, their rage. Their fear and regret and sorrow. These things, I know them. They are familiar. Even here, even now, they walk with me.
“They are amaranthine. A word I now love, by the way,” he said with a grin. “Endless and forever and constant.”
Lesson? When in doubt, take Martuk out for coffee where he’ll most surely talk about Proseuche.
The World I Live In
You know that thing where I talk with SF Signal about the launch of Proseuche and what it’s like to write about an immortal in a genre full of sparkly vampires and stumbling zombies?
Yeah, that. Here’s an excerpt.
I don’t live in a world where sparkly vampires sigh like lovelorn teenagers, their emotional angst all but defanging them.
I don’t live in a world where zombies with endless appetites lurch and stumble, their ends often coming with a surprising thwack of a shovel.
No, where I live is truly monstrous. It’s dark and forbidding. A place where innocent lives have grisly ends and ghosts still sob. The world I live in is one of betrayal and mistrust. Where the line separating enemy from friend is cloudy and constantly shifting. A land where those who walk and talk like you and me share nothing of our humanity. The world of my immortal Martuk (as in “two” with a hard “k” at the end … Martuk) is one where monsters hide in plain sight, and the blood on their hands is steeped in consequence and regret.
Martuk ... the Holy 