Beautiful, Mysterious and Bizarre: M/M Urban Fantasy by Jordan Castillo Price
JCP News
Issue 15 - March 15, 2009
C O N T E N T S
I'M ON TWITTER - AND THOUGHTS ON #QUERYFAIL
I was worried that Twitter would turn out to be a total time-suck, but so far I'm thinking it's fine. It's actually easier to follow than Yahoo and Google groups, where it seems so many people paste one-word responses to emails without trimming them, and leave you scrolling, scrolling, scrolling to try and figure out where the heck the content actually is. (And it turns out it was only them saying, Congratulations! or ROFL or something like that on top of a hundred lines of untrimmed email 5 replies deep. A pet peeve of mine.)
There was some recent blah-blah on Twitter called #queryfail, where agents tweeted reasons why they were rejecting queries. Potentially useful for authors, I guess. But it turned into a "let's mock clueless newbies" fest -- not all the agents, but some of them, who I suspect were probably prone to think it's cool to be snarky, anyway. My dayjob boss thinks this, so I'm especially sensitive to it.
Watching #queryfail devolve was also a good learning experience for an author. Shows you who you can skip in your next round of queries, unless you like your mistakes to beheld up for public ridicule. Smacks too much of grade school gym class to me -- and face it, we've all got a learning curve. We don't automatically know how to do things perfectly, and not all of us have mentors we can ask.
I comfort myself by imagining that the nastiest of snarksters took a jab at an author who turns out to be the next Rowling or King ten years from now.
Anyway, Twitter's not all snark and vinegar. The majority of it is just fun and minutae. You can follow me on Twitter here. I promise not to hold you up for public mockery if you write to me.
C'mon. I know you want to find out riveting things about my day-to-day life, such as when I open up the new bag of cat treats.
Jordan on the Web
Catch-all Site: JordanCastilloPrice. com
Official Channeling Morpheus Site
Packing Heat: Erotica Writing Tips and Techniques
From Zero Hour
"The room at the end of the hallway was empty of everything but machines. Ernest coughed a few more times, and the sound was lost amid the swelling of gears turning, and a hollow whooshing noise he couldn't place."
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Is it spring yet?
I asked my Yahoo Group what they'd like to see more of in the newsletter, and the biggest request was character interviews! Jacob Marks from PsyCop has volunteered to be first. (Imagine him overcoming his innate shyness and stepping up to the plate. Ahem.)
If you've got questions for my other characters, send them to me privately at Jordan (at) PsyCop.com.
Click here for Jacob's interview. There are some spoilers for Camp Hell, so be warned.
And thanks for all your continued kind words and support--I really appreciate your emails!
xxoo
Jordan
Hooray, it's here in paperback! Camp Hell is available both at CreateSpace and at Amazon
If you're ordering from outside the United States, I think CreateSpace might be the best way to go. Because Camp Hell is printed through digital print-on-demand (POD) technology, it's not yet available directly through Amazons other than US. You'd think it would be a piece of cake to send a digital file and print it, but I gather there isn't any compatable equipment worldwide just yet. Hopefully, if POD turns out to be a moneymaker, we'll see more standardization one day soon.
Free PsyCop Short Thaw Goes Multi-Format
Now that I've started reading ebooks on my iPod Touch, I'm a lot more interested in making books available in multiple formats so they can be read on a wider variety of devices. I'm experimenting with the site Smashwords.com by putting up some of my freebies that were previously available only as PDF or to read online. Thaw was the first. It's still free. And now you can grab it in epub, mobi, and a few other file types.
Kindle and Blackberry owners, grab the mobi file. Mobipocket makes a free mobi reader for the Blackberry, Palm and other devices. I even prefer reading from within the free Mobi Reader on my PC to reading PDFs, because the text is scaleable and flowable.
iPod Touch/iPhone owners, download Stanza from the app store, then go to the Smashwords store from within Stanza. From there, you can download Thaw directly on your iThing.
Heaven Sent: a Free Channeling Morpheus Short
It's a fairly short freebie, but I've always really liked this little story. I grew up in cities where houses were either lived in, or they were condemned and torn down. They didn't just sit vacant. Not that I knew of, anyway, or I'm sure we kids would've figured out a way to get inside and play in there!
Contrast that with rural Wisconsin, which isn't very heavily populated. Sometimes, when you drive down winding, isolated country roads, you see houses simply falling in because no one lives there, and no one wants to deal with the property. Some of them are even full of furniture. A friend of mine in a far-flung town has an abandoned house right next door! Of course I convinced her that she and I (and her cousins) needed to go in there, but the floor was caving in and only one of the cousins had the cajones to actually go inside. I suspect there were also racoons lying in wait.
I've always said, "I've got to write something set in an abandoned house someday...." and Heaven Sent is it! Chronologically, the story falls between Manikin and Tainted.
Heaven Sent multi-format ebooks are at Smashwords. Mobile device owners, see the hints for Thaw above!
Find Channeling Morpheus / Sweet Oblivion at Changeling Press.
Zero Hour - Chapter 15
(click here for whole story starting at chapter 1)
Ernest crept into the hallway and listened carefully. Now that he’d scanned the schematics, the walkways and doors and all the other confusing architectural details made more sense. They all fit carefully within a cruciform shape, built around an open, central hub.
Several times he shrank back into the shadows, startled, only to discover that the white figures lurking in the alcoves were not security ops, but only more statues. The hidden inner core of the Diaconate would have been a fascinating place to explore, if Ernest had not needed to continue looking over his shoulder to reassure himself that one of the wide, bristly ops wasn’t trailing him.
Finally he came upon the place that corresponded to the stairwell glyph on the map. Ernest hadn’t realized how grand it would be, with metal rails on either side that had been worked into fantastical shapes, ornamental whorls, as far a he could tell, with no need to absorb solar or conduct electromagnetic energy. And the stairs themselves, some sort of creamy white stone, trodden on by so many feet through the ages that subtle dips had formed in the center of each step.
Ernest descended, stepping only on every other tread, just as Will had taught him, and paused at the bottom to listen for pursuit. He heard nothing. But a red spot several centimeters wide had appeared on the towel that wrapped his throbbing shunt arm.
click here for the rest of chapter 15 (worksafe)
PsyCop Paperbacks:
PsyCop: Property (Paperback, contains Body & Soul and Secrets)
PsyCop: Partners (Paperback, contains Among the Living and Criss Cross)
Camp Hell: A PsyCop Novel
PsyCop Ebooks:
Among the Living - PsyCop Book 1(multi-format ebook)
Criss Cross - PsyCop Book 2 (multi-format ebook)
Body & Soul - PsyCop Book 3 (multi-format ebook)
Secrets - PsyCop Book 4 (multi-format ebook)
Camp Hell - PsyCop Book 5 (multi-format ebook)
Many Happy Returns (PsyCop Short - PDF ebook)
Thaw (PsyCop Short - PDF ebook, or multi-format ebook, FREE!)
Mind Reader (PsyCop Short - PDF ebook, FREE!)
Striking Sparks PsyCop Novelette (multi-format ebook)
Channeling Morpheus/Sweet Oblivion Stories:
Payback (multi-format ebook)
Vertigo (multi-format ebook)
Manikin (multi-format ebook)
Tainted (multi-format ebook)
Rebirth (multi-format ebook)
Brazen (multi-format ebook)
Snare (coming in April)
Heaven Sent: a Channeling Morpheus Short (multi-format ebook)
Other Stories:
Hemovore (coming in July)
Starlight (PDF ebook)
Verdant (multi-format ebook)
The Voice (multi-format ebook)
Kindred Spirits (PDF ebook)
Kindle Editions:
Many Happy Returns
Starlight 
Kindred Spirits
Striking Sparks
Any of the mobi ebooks on JCPBooks.com will also work on the Kindle!
Email me at jordan (at) psycop (dot) com
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JCP News • Jordan Castillo Price • PO Box 153 • Barneveld, WI 53507