Where Weston Makes Hooch

So I made my own hooch.

I know. Some of you aren't surprised. After all, what redneck can't make a little moonshine?

But I've since left my days of redneckery (redneckedness?) behind. I'm no longer that mountain boy fresh out of the forest doing the by-golly-Jesus at the world. I've been places. I've done things. And ever since my wife and I went to Naples, we've had a love for lemoncello.

Me in Italy circa 2008

But those of you who were thinking moonshine aren't far off. See, lemoncello to the Eye-talians is hooch. Every mom and pop store, every family, every restaurant makes their own. Some is sweet enough to crack your teeth. Some is strong enough to put you on your ass. No two places make it the same.

Well, I've been wanting to make this for some time now.

We recently had a killer Eye-talian restaurant open in Sierra Vista called Cafe Mimosa. They are the real Neopolitan deal. Vickie and Wendall Gilbert have just a terrific thing going. They also make their on hooch. So I asked for the recipe. Now, Vickie treats that thing like it's part of the crown jewels, and holds it closer than Colonel Sanders does his fifteen herbs and spices. But you see, Vickie has a penchant for zombies. She likes to read horror. So picture me laughing as I asked for the recipe.

And I got it.

And you know what? It's pathetically simple. I just substituted 100 proof vodka for the base instead of everclear-- that's too strong for this little man.

Recipe:

20-30 Lemons, zested only. No pulp, juice or plith
4 cups simple syrup
1.5 liters of 100 proof vodka

Put in container, cover and steep for ten days.  And this is what you get.

I used to make Meade in this bad boy

I couldn't find any cheese clothe, so I got a strainer with

holes so small, I couldn't drag a gnats ass through one

I triple filtered it to get out all the goo.

Then using a ladle (after I spilled), I began filling what I could.

And this is the result. See that golden color of liquid sunshine?

One glass for me.

Ahhh!

And because I'm rolling in the lemoncello right now, I think I'll make a lemoncello buerre blanc for my salmon this evening.

Ahh.

Yum.

Burp.

NPR and Edits and The Loup Garou Kid

This has been a big week. On Tuesday, my son drove down to spend a few days. I haven't seen him for six months, and with deploying to Afghanistan in November, I might not see him for another year. So it was very special to have him down. Wednesday was my 47th Birthday. I engorged myself in seafood at a local sushi bar, especially loving the Hamachi Kama, or Grilled Yellowtail Cheek.

Of course, also on my birthday I was given a present by St. Martin's Press-- 400 pages of copy edits for SEAL Team 666. This came with a style sheet, a list of questions and a manuscript marked up with enough pencil marks, I thought a blind man had had an epileptic seizure.  You never would have known I'd had three previous edits. Whomever is working for St. Martin's is on top of it. He or she caught some previously missed inconsistencies, as well as smoothed some prose that got broken from all the insertions and deletions from previous edits. I'm about half way through. I need to have it back to them by Wednesday, so I have to get cracking.

While doing edits yesterday, I was called by Arizona Public Media, the state National Public Radio Station. Mark McLemore, host of Arizona Spotlight, wanted to run an interview we'd previously conducted. He had some follow up and framing questions and we spoke for about forty minutes. It was a very pleasant interruption. I'm writing this blog after having heard the first broadcast. I'm becoming more accustomed to hearing my voice on the radio. I actually think I sounded semi-intelligent, if not partially intellectual. The interview can be found here (or there is a link here to follow).

Last week saw shipment of The Loup Garou Kid to collectors. I didn't want this to get lost in all the hooplah of summer. The Loup Garou Kid finishes the story started by Vampire Outlaw of the Milky Way, and continued in Lord of the Lash. This is the final tale of our young epileptic hero, Jimmy Kinder. He gets to meet the characters in real life he thought only lived in his mind. This is a fine finish to the trilogy. I especially like the cover. It represents a Boris Vallejo-themed pose, while giving nods to the characters love of comic books and Saturday morning cartoons.

If you have a hankering, there are still a few copies of this limited edition, signed and numbered chapbook left.

Blaze of Glory Contest Winners!

Elvis has spoken!

First a review of the contest. Here are the rules:



Here's the BLUF: The first ten people to review Blaze of Glory on Amazon or Barnes and Nobles will have the opportunity to win the signed, limited, leather-bound hardback copy, valued at $50. I'm including four runner up prizes, as well, signed copies of the Burning Effigy Press novella and Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Long Fiction, Redemption Roadshow. That gives you a 1 in 2 chance of winning. That's fifty/fifty. Better than the lottery and you know how much money you spend on the lottery with a microscopic chance of winning. Here you win when you read the book -- everything else is gravy.

Bottom line is that I need reviews. Yes! Reviews! Those strung together groups of words that talk about your feelings about the content of something you read.
Blaze of Glory is doing awesomely. It's number #1 still in African-American Horror Fiction category and in the top ten of several other categories. And all that without any reviews. But it's time to step up our game.
Buy the novel for $2.99, read it, review it, then drop me a line saying who you are and that you reviewed it.
Jack Ketchum liked it: “BLAZE OF GLORY turns the Monster-Apocalypse subgenre on its gory ear. It’s funny, suspenseful and resolutely quirky, with a great cast of characters.”

My Elvis and he's not looking so happy.
Blaze of Glory is one of his favorites and he
doesn't want to have to stare at the empty
space on the shelf.

 After a long conversation with my animatronic Elvis and a roll of my old 10 Sided Dungeons and Dragons dice, Elvis chose the five winners.  Thanks so much for taking the time to read the book and for all of your just amazing reviews. You didn't have to post all good reviews, although I am happy you did. I would have given you a prize for a bad review too.

The winners are:

1st - Zengal - Winner of the Limited Edition copy of Blaze of Glory
2nd - Troy Knutson - Winner of a signed copy of Redemption Roadshow
3rd - Kevin Starkey- Winner of a signed copy of Redemption Roadshow
4th - Dawn the Glass Bead Maker- Winner of a signed copy of Redemption Roadshow
5th - Larry Meier- Winner of a signed copy of Redemption Roadshow



Please contact me so I can arrange for shipment.

Hollywood Titles and Two Act Movies -- Erg!!!

I'm not hard to please. Give me a decent plot, good actors, and a director who knows what he or she is doing and I'll be happy. Like the rest of the universe, I want a three act structure, or modified for seven acts-- either way, think of it as a good beginning, middle, and end. So when Yvonne and I sat down last night to watch two movies, the one I thought was going to be the best left us groaning.

What'd we see? Chronicle and The Grey.

---SPOILERS--

Chronicle was a much better movie than I thought it was going to be. Although even a blind pygmy could tell the abused boy was going to become a supervillian, you sort of rooted for him in a cringing, Carrie sort of way. My only problem with this flick was the title. Did they pick some random word like the Korean kids are doing with T-shirts? Chronicle? Really? For all I knew, it could have been the life and times of Edward R Murrow.

We had the same problem with the revenge-flick Faster, starring The Rock. It says nothing at all about the movie. Personally, I like both of these a lot, but feel that Hollywood messed up in the naming of them. How do they do this? A focus group? A dart board? A talking dog? "Look, Mr. Scott, the dog said Prometheus."

Chronicle? How about Supervillian? It's not like we didn't know what was going to happen by the fifth minute of the movie.

Faster? How about simply Vengeance!  I mean, come on. This isn't rocket science.

Titles not withstanding, at least those movies had an ending. At least they had three acts.

The Grey is nothing more than a frigid Lady in the Water. Neither of them had a third act.

What happened? Did they run out of money? Did the snow machines break? Did the animatronic wolves demand a raise for poor working conditions?

Or did the director, in an artsy snap-your-fingers-in-a-jazz-club moment, say, this is the perfect ending because it represents the universal fight between man and nature. ::snap snap::

Puh-leeese.

Just give us a fucking ending. Don't have the alpha wolf and Liam Neeson face off and then cut to credits. That's such a cop out.

If you wanted to make that comparison, the better ending would have been to have them chased over a rise, only to discover there's a town there, with lights, and vibrance, etc. Then, later, when Liam is having a drink on the porch, reconsidering the value of life, which he learned during the chase, the alpha walks down main street and snatches him off the porch and pulls him back into the wilderness.

That's a much better ending.

Hell? I could think of better endings all day long. In fact, I'm going to power up my animatronic Elvis and we're going to make a list and send it, Care of GOOD FUCKING MOVIES, HOLLYWOOD, CA

Screw a talking dog. I have Elvis!

What I've been reading...

Where I talk about Middlesex, The Romanian and Just a Geek...

I'd seen Middlesex for quite awhile. I was aware it had won the Pulitzer in 2002. I was also aware it was about androgeny, or intersex. And I also thought it took place in rural England. Although I play with words for a living, I thought the title had more to do with geography than a state of being. But during a recent book signing, while waiting for the hordes of fans to descend upon me, I happened upon a copy of this book and bought it. It was to be my first big summer reading book. And it wasn't at all a let down. In fact, it was terrific.

The writing reminded me of John Irving in both scope and style. Since I'm a huge John Irving fan, this was delightful. For two weeks, I read the history of the Greek family, their movement to America, their lives in Detroit, and the continuing saga of intersex.

This is a delightful novel. I see why it won the Pulitzer and am happy to have read it.

I picked up The Romanian at the bed and breakfast I stayed at in Valencia, Spain. It had a vivid cover, which initially drew me. On the heels of Middlesex, the subject matter was easily accessible. Basically, it's a (semi-autobiographical) docudrama about a male journalist who becomes emotionally and physically entangled with a Romanian street hustler. It's one of those odd books that I couldn't put down.

The author, Bruce Benderson, won the French literary Priz de Flore, as the only American to win this award designed to recognize youthful authors. It's a pretty frank book, but one that rings true. I highly recommend this one to those who enjoy reading about characters redefining themselves mid-life.

I've become a major Wil Wheaton fan since about mid-May. A nice and pleasant guy, he's the sort I'd hang with if I lived in the same town. I enjoy watching his episodes of Tabletop. I follow his doings occasionally on Twitter. I was even able to say hi to him a few times recently at Phoenix Comicon.

While I was there, I first tried to pick up a copy of this book from The Poisoned Pen, but by the time I got there they were sold out. Then I tried to get a copy from Wil, but I just couldn't make it, because of my own schedule. I was on nine panels...count 'em... NINE.

Anyway, I appreciated his frank (second use in this blog) and honest approach to this book. Some of the insights into TV and Movie land were terrific, as were the behind the scenes with Trekkies. I found myself laughing aloud on several occasions. Yeah. This was a terrific book.



So that's what I've been reading these past few weeks.

What have you been reading?

Have you read these yet? What are your thougts?

On Teaching Writing

Talking with Michael Stackpole at Phoenix Comicon, I realized I was missing an opportunity.

You see, I like to teach. I've taught for a number of years at various military schools. I have a Master of Fine Arts so I conceivably have the creds to teach anywhere. I've even taught an online workshop called the Guerrilla Fiction Writing Workshop (GFWW). Both times I taught it, I had a full house and it was loads of fun. But as I lamented to Mike that I missed teaching, I looked over and saw -- low and behold -- various and sundry CD courses he was selling at his table. 21 Days to a Novel. The Secrets to Writing Fiction. And others. These were courses he'd taught-- is still teaching -- but are also being sold as CD classes, and as it turns out, online. In fact, he was teaching the class at the convention for some nice change.

Just as my friend Mort Castle does at conventions.

And Brian Keene.

And others.

You know, I can see something, but not really see it.

So I'm trying something. I'm seeing if my $99 class can sell for $9.99. GFWW is a pretty innovative approach to writing fiction, using screenwriting techniques and applying them to the preparation and writing of, in this case, a short story.

Here's the link to the class- Guerrilla Fiction Writing Workshop (Guerrilla Fiction Writing Series) Note that if you have Amazon Prime it's free for a short period of time. Nothing beats free. Do me a favor. If you do take advantage of the free sharing, please review it and or 'like' it.

This is a work in progress. I'm not super pleased with the way mobi skewed the internal formats. I'm still tweaking those. Hell, there's so much I don't know. All I do know is that I want to share. I want to teach.

I've already finished a class on Grammar.

I'm also working on a class on texturing the short story.

Next year I've been invited to teach a class at Comiccon next year. Hopefully I'll be back from Afghanistan in time to make it, because it's something I'd definitely like to do.

NOTE: I've since gone back and corrected much of the format errors. This should be a much cleaner version.

Pain... The Final Frontier

So my wife and I got into an argument last night.

In the end, it's not about the argument, but rather what precipitated it.

But for those of you who shop at Walmart and who watch WWE, I'll share with you the highlights.

It goes back when I was in Kindergarten... the first time. I used to get hurt all the time. And when I got hurt, the other kids would laugh. Ever get hurt and have someone laugh at you? It makes you mad, right? If I knew the glory of Samuel L. Jackson cursing when I was five, I would have slaughtered them with my verbiage. But I was four. And I was in pain. So I reacted angrily... sometimes violently.

Fast forward to last night. We bought a new house with a double-thick pad and a high-end, thick carpet. It was glorious until about three weeks ago. Two words -- static electricity. Not your everyday static electricity, but three inch sparks shooting from every surface to my skin. I can't even walk through a doorway on the second floor without all the hairs on my arms standing at attention. No I've been shocked before, but that's just an ooh. These are all OWs or  even SHITS! Walking from my office to Yvonne's office, which can be only a matter of thirty feet, I commonly get shocked three times... and not even touching anything.

So late last night, after the zombies were heading towards the wall and the Game of Thrones season two ended, Yvonne wanted to know why I was crabby.

And I was crabby.

I attributed it to the shocks.

She tried to act like it was a normal thing.

I differed substantially. Even when she tried to say it shocked her the same way. The fact is it didn't. But my wife is feeling considerable pain. And that was the real reason I was crabby. You see, my wife is hurting and there's nothing I can do about it. She's actually in severe pain. Any of you who saw her at Comicon can vouch for how badly she was hobbling around. My wife, you see, has no more cartilage in her right hip. She's going to have to get it replaced. Until then, her hip and knee is causing her severe pain, to the point that she sits on the couch and gasps.

And here I am being crabby about it.

I know. The thing is I can't help her. I can't fix it. I can't toss her over my shoulder and carry her from place to place, even though I've tried.

What irony! I want to help her because she'd in pain, but end up giving her emotional pain.

I really need to work on being patient and understanding.

This really never was about getting shocked, although I'd love to fix that. It's about Yvonne and mitigating her pain and being there for her and understanding her pain until she has surgery... and then it'll be another hill to climb.

I need to step up my game. If I can write about understanding characters, I need to be able to play one.

I reacted like I had when I was in kindergarten. That was forty-two years ago. You'd think I could have learned something in the intervening years.

This isn't about me. It's about my wife and she needs me.

My Comiccon Catharsis

It wasn't like a face palm followed by a 'doh!'

It wasn't the clouds opening up and a ray of light shining on me as a chorus sang somewhere out of view.

It was a lot more subtle than that.

It just sort of dawned on me as I sat in the Brick restaurant on Saturday night, having dinner with Jeff and David Marriotte, Jordan Summers, and my wife, when Wil Wheaton came in and David gave him a hug.

What is it? you ask.

Hold on. I'll get there.

Some real highlight moments from Phoenix Comiccon 2012 were having drinks with Ed and Matt Asner, meeting comic artist Billy Tucci, spending quality time with Joe Lansdale, learning from my Jedi Master, Mike Stackpole, shaking hands and spending a moment with Wil Wheaton, seeing old friends, panelling, and just watching the costumes go by.

I mean this was almost too much sensory input.

What was also nice was that my father, my nephew, and his friend were able to come up and share in the experience. Not only were they able to partake in the visual feast of the con, but they were able to see the reunion of most of the cast of Star Trek the Next Generation.

I saw quite a few stars as they sat signing, but I didn't bother them. I had my own business and my own fans to contend with.

On second thought, maybe my catharsis happened when I was on a panel with Janni Lee Simner. We were talking about Dystopian and post/pre-apocalyptic themes in fiction and were agreeing with each other more often than not. It was one of those terrific panels where, although I had no idea what I was going to say, I ended up entertaining and partner-teaching with Janni, so that by the end, people came up telling us it was the best panel they'd attended.

You know, I've been hungry for success for a long time. I want to be great. I want to be top shelf. I want to be read, people to love me, and to be as cool as Samuel L. Jackson. But I think somewhere along the way I forgot that one can attain this while being a nice person too.

Maybe I've been too aggressive.

Who me? Mister Army Man? BTAM his own badself? Aggressive?

I mean, I am a nice person. Anyone who knows me knows that. Sometimes I just don't feel as nice as the next guy. Is it that warrior spirit leaking forth? Is it all the KILL KILL KILL training I've had over the years?

Don't hate me because I'm deadly.

But seriously.

I want to be nice like Mike Stackpole and dispense good advice.

I want to be nice like Ed Asner and his son, Matt, who's a spokesman for autism.

I want to be nice like Jordan Summers, who opens her heart to recently found friends.

I want to be nice like James A. Owen, who's eager to share how to both write and draw.

I want to be nice like the Marriottes, David and Jeff (and M.E.), who are just damn nice.

I want to be nice like Janni Lee Simner, who can't possible have a mean corpuscle in her body.

I want to be nice like Wil Wheaton, who seems to me like a terribly nice guy, who bends over backwards to be extra nice.

I just want to be nice.

Leo Derocher coined the famous aphorism back in 1939, Nice Guys Finish Last.

Bullcrappity.

I don't buy it.

All those nice guys I mentioned above are doing quite well for themselves.

Leo Derocher can go suck my -- wait!  I'm a nice guy, now. At least let me try and be nice for an entire blog.

And if I can make it through this blog, then maybe I can be nice a while longer.

I know what you're saying. You're nice, Wes. Don't be so hard on yourself. Maybe nice isn't the word I'm looking for. Maybe it's something else. I just don't know. All I do know is that I'm going to approach life from here on in a little differently. All those nice people I mentioned above? I'm going to try and be nice like them.

Because in this world, it's possible for nice guys to finish first (and gals too).

And now some costumes for your viewing pleasure...

The rest of the pictures can be found here -- there's 305 of them.

Phoenix Comiccon 2012

Viral Video Procrastination - A Writer's Dilemma

There's no end to the extent writers will go to not to write. The internet is at once the best and worst thing that ever happened to the daily life of an author. Forget the porn. Forget eBay. Even forget Facebook for a moment. None of them holds a candle to the power of viral videos. Here I share my five favorite, most often visited and absolutely ridiculous viral videos I can't not watch. Note that these aren't videos of people getting hurt. I can't watch those. These are just funny-stupid things that I enjoy watching when I'm not writing.

In fact, I'm supposed be writing this moment, but instead, I'm writing about not writing... now that's procrastination.

In no particular order...

I'm a Wizard! This is the newest one. There are several parts to this, but this one represents perhaps the best of it. When the girl, who is just so damned happily stoned, discovers that she's a wizard from Hogwarts, the look on her face is just perfect. I think this has less than 100,000 views, so perhaps it's pre-viral.

Odd German Girl Lip Sinking. I kind of feel like a perv when I watch this, but I don't watch because they're hot or cute or whatever. I watch because some weird part of me can't stop. Their names are Lynne and Tessa and they have a whole bunch of lip sincing videos. I don't watch them... just this one. I know. Lock your doors, I'm weird. On an interesting note, here's a video called The Rise and Fall of Lynne and Tessa which tells their story. Yeah. I watched it too. A couple of times.

Sitting on the Toilet. Now this one really disturbs me. I blame my friend Eunice... or was it Rain. Jesus God this is just a horrific video that I can't stop watching. You'll just have to see for yourself. It's only a 43 second video, but if you make it all the way through, you'll feel like it was hours. And oh yeah. If you watch it, that means you have joined me and 61,366,056 of my closest friends who have also watched it. How's that for a club.

Chocolate Rain. I know you've heard and seen this one. It's just so damn weird and cool at the same time. Note that this has over 79 million views.

The Mack Daddy of the All. And last but not least, Numa Numa. This has been seen over 700 million times, has been parodied by South Park and Spongebob, and has been voted as number one viral video by VH1. I have mixed feelings about this. One one hand, I love that the kid is just getting off and synching like mad. But on the other, I always glance at my web camera embedded in my monitor and wonder... are you really on? Is someone watching me?

Watch and enjoy.

But wait... aren't you supposed to be writing?

I know, right? Welcome to the procrastination zone.

No Such Thing as Saturation - eBook Logic

The pre-eminent John Scalzi tweeted a link to an article about writing (because that's what he does) that got me thinking about how eBooks are more of a game changer than I thought they were. For a long time, I've considered eBooks as nothing more than an electronic version of a book. Digital vs textual. Not something that can be grasped by the hand, but something that can be grasped by the mind. But my idea of it was akin to someone looking at a picture of Earth and calling it a circle. By doing so, they miss all the three dimensionality, the fourth dimension of time, and the things scrabbling for existence beneath the layers of polluted clouds.

I recently bought a Kindle Fire and love it!

Chris Meadows of TeleRead, quoting a NY Times article written by Julie Bosman said, “It used to be that once a year was a big deal,” said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. “You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great big hungry maw, and you have to feed it.”

I grok the once a year book thing. I've tried to have them published faster and even established specialty press houses were afraid to saturate the market with a single author-- probably because they were a high end collector market. But the fact is, folks, there is no more such thing as market saturation when it comes to ebook publishing. Readers want to buy more books. When they find an author they like, they're much more apt to shop with their Kindle, Nook, or reader of choice and purchase something else the writer has written. I know because I've done it myself.

Having recently purchased a Kindle Fire, one of the things I did right away was add books to it. Some were free, some were impulse and some were ones that really snagged my attention. Nick Cole's Old Man and the Wasteland was one of my first purchases, not only because of the post apocalyptic and Hemingway themes, but also because it had 700 reviews. I wanted to purchase something else from the author, but he's too busy working in the opera in Southern California. I did recently see a book (recommended to me by the Amazon Bot) that I picked up. After a sample read, I immediately picked up the next two eBooks as well, just because they were so good. This is Michael J. Sullivan's first book of his trilogy, Theft of Swords. Even at the outrageous price of $9.99, which I spent three times, I bought these books. Not only are they badass and the perfectly updated homage to Fritz Leiber's Fafhard and the Gray Mouser books, but they were originally self-published through Amazon, then picked up by Orbit, so I had to see what all the hub-bub was about.

It’s not just publishers asking the writers to do more, the Chris Meadow's observation of the NY Time's article goes on to explain, but sometimes authors feel the need to keep busy themselves, just to make sure their name stays out there in the public eye. And since e-books are much more conducive to impulse-buying, having more titles available more often means they’re likely to sell more often to voracious readers who want to read anything they can get their hands on from their favorite authors.

Over the past year I've been publishing my back list with Crossroads Press, as well as an original novel. With one book published, I wasn't doing so well. With two books, also not so well. Now I have about six books with them and the money I receive every month is astonishing. It's certainly not Joe Konrath cash, but it's an income stream that was an impossibility only a few years ago.


Folks read my original eNovel Velvet Dogma and before they are halfway through, look at my inventory of books and buy one or several. We know because of the analytics and because I get emails from readers telling me this. In truth, the more books you have for sale the income increases exponentially.  That is of course if the writing and the packaging is up to par--defined as whatever the reader/buyer believes the professional standard is, based on their own expectations. There are really bad books with hundreds of reviews and really good books with very few.

I've discovered that packaging is almost everything. You'll note the cover of Velvet Dogma. It was my first eBook cover. I bought the art from Danielle Tunstall for what I consider a substantial sum and read everything I could get my eyes on about eBook covers. The book cover won an award, citing the movement of the art, the white space in the framing, and the large enough letters to read when it's a thumbnail. I've since created two more covers: one for Blaze of Glory and the other for Butterfly Winter. And the best thing about it is that Velvet Dogma has already earned me as much money as a standard Leisure Books (formerly of Kensington Books) advance.


In fact, Butterfly Winter is a prime example about packaging. Look at this original cover. Frankly, I don't know what I was thinking. What sort of book do you think this is? Would you believe it's a military thriller? Stop laughing. I know. What WAS I thinking. Cute girl, but there's nothing military or thriller about it. So here's the new cover I've created using creative commons-licensed images and photoshop. We're going to do a relaunch soon and my bet is that this will sell as many copies in the first two weeks as it sold all last year -- 50. Packaging. Everyone who has read Butterfly Winter has emailed me (okay, most everyone). They love it, but it was not what they expected from the cover. At least half of the emails said that the ebook made them cry. So there's no argument that the writing is there and that the story is there, it was all about the packaging. Gonna fix that. Gonna give them what they want.

 And the thing I never anticipated was that I'd be spurred to write more. Readers want more so I have to write more. This is a funny thing. The model used to be that writers wrote, submitted through an agent, and got a book deal, then the publication would slow roll for a year. That still exists. In fact, I do it. I still have my agent selling novels for me. My big book deal with St. Martin's Press is still working. And I write the occasional short story that I send out to markets in the hopes they'll be published. But no longer are those my only options. Now I have a choice, especially, it appears, with short fiction.

Here's what Chris Meadows said about the possibility of short fiction success in eReaders: The difference is that previously they were limited to the available markets for short stories—mostly magazines such as Fantasy & Science Fiction for, well, fantasy and science fiction, or Ellery Queen for mystery. And those could only take a few stories per month, and pay has gotten steadily worse as the market for short story magazines declined. But now the stigma against selling short stories or novellas individually has lessened since e-book sales aren’t constrained by format limitations of physical books, so writers can self-publish short stories on-line inexpensively (and more frequently than entire books).

Blaze of Glory is a short novel at 50K. Butterfly Winter is a novella. I'm going to package several themed stories together and sell them, in addition to several stand alone novellas. I'll send them to my eBook publisher, Crossroads Press, with excellent packaging and competitive pricing, they'll do well, you know why? Because people out there are looking for more Weston Ochse books to read.

The least I can do is provide them what they want.

Weston's eBook Primer

A quick point and click list of my eBooks for all you eBook-o-philiacs! You have all of these, right?

And some anthologies too!!