I came back to add some new information to the book announcement page out front and fill in the gaps to my personal story since it's been about six years since I wrote a new post here. This may go on for a bit, so bear with me.
In 2012, I lost my childhood home and was forced to move into a smaller cozier rental house (suspecting I will never own a house again in my lifetime) that was actually nice (except for the thin outer walls in each room that made it sound like people outside were inside with you). Maintaining that living situation for about 18 months, I was forced again by February 2014 to accept a job (having been forced to quit my last one at a research company's call center due to transportation problems) managing a small business where I would live also (still feels strange to me sometimes doing that after 4-5 years now) by an old high school classmate and former neighbor (we weren't actually close in school - hanging around in different cliques at that age). Realizing that my earliest self-published novel releases in 2011 and 2012 had serious flaws in their manuscripts and self-created cover artwork, I took some painstaking time between 2013 and 2016 to rectify those mistakes and re-release them once revised all over again. I believe the changes were all beneficial (and I announced the re-releases here once the novels were ready from CreateSpace on the website's main page).
Unfortunately, you don't ever get a second chance to make a first impression with readers and the earlier versions and revised versions proved that I believe. Also in that time a contact made with writer Kevin Eads (a law professor and fiction author who writes and lives in sunny Florida) got me a chance to hook up one of my horror-theme novels (started in 2001, put aside for years and then finished by 2009 after a job layoff that November) with small publisher Corvis Nocturnum (Eric Vernor) at Dark Moon Press - hence, The Claws of T'birsk became my first small press long publication later in 2012. Sadly in 2013, Corvus gave me a great idea about a long-standing dilemma of mine - my first completed horror novel from back in 2000 and revised repeated on and off again since 2008 - The Nightmare of Aarontown - was sadly too long to publish at 806 pages in its final draft by Dark Moon or anyone else. He suggested I should break the final manuscript into a roughly equal parts trilogy and it might be considered. I did this in the spring of 2013, and yielded three volumes with the subtitles "A Sinister Homecoming," "A Curtain of Darkness descends" and "A Strange Manifestation upon Juniper Hill." Sadly, we could not come to any agreement on publishing what would have been my first trilogy as I was expected to handle he artwork fees (I was and remain rather financially poor - never having made many royalties on my publications so far). I couldn't pay $200/cover with the artist and still can't receiving SSI every month - more about that later - and only room and board for my job. I also don't know if those three volumes fulfilled my contract obligations from Claws of T'birsk to let Dark Moon see my next two horror novel projects. I also don't know how well T'birsk ever sold.
Revising and re-releasing Worldjumpers, A Legacy of Blood, The Circle of Light and Sister Helena of the Sword between 2014 and 2016, I turned to a new novel (one that was a hybrid fantasy story with horror elements) and my second Jack Petrov Vampire Hunter book A Dark Mirrored Land. Released in early 2018, it sold little and merely added to my growing failures as a self-marketer. Now I am trying to get a long (656-page) short story/novella collection (18 in the volume - 4 novellas and 14 shorter stories) entitled Professor Midnight: Costumed & Masked Mystery Man of Adventure. Once some bugs in the cover are settled with CreateSpace, my pulp fiction costumed adventurer/crime fighter collection will be released there. It is the longest book I've ever self-published. Only one of the stories appeared in a small press anthology ("Seven Years after Midnight") in Jay Faulkner's Powers: A Superhero Anthology and another in my first story collection The Orphaned Stories of John X. Grey (admittedly a desperate effort on my part to get another volume out in the spring of 2013, but I'm still proud of that baker's dozen of rejected tales- the story "One of Our Authors in Missing") which sold a few copies.
Currently, I am writing (or in that case of two partially finished chapters lost in July 2013 to my Acer suffering a hard drive crash) the second volume in the other worlds fantasy Sepharata Saga proposed trilogy - Sister Catherine Versus the Volcano People and have the initial chapter almost fully recreated. The original second one was lost in that crash mentioned above but only half-finished. I have outlines for this volume and the third one (Sister Lara the Redeemer saves the World). God forbid I lose this manuscript again.
My love life remains non-existent and the career I started working upon back in the late summer of 1999 (beginning The Nightmare of Aarontown) and choosing my pen name John X. Grey by the following spring has also failed to materialize by this date.
One interesting side note: I wonder if the writers of a new movie called The Happytime Murders didn't lift elements of its plot and story from my 2012 published short fiction piece "Murder on Poppy Street." I wrote that story in 2011 (along with two Jack Petrov mysteries) for George Wilhite's Static Movement anthology Weird City 3. My story is about a puppet cop trying to solve a series of puppet murders (in a weird world like Sesame Street - which I was mocking by the way - where humans and puppets interacted as though that situation was normal) that were actually being perpetrated by a special hunter-killer human-sized puppet made by the man that invented those living puppets in the first place. I had inside jokes like a Kermit-Miss Piggy like mixed couple being two of the victims, the Poppy Street neighborhood was in a big city's district named Henson, etc. And now it looks like that new Melissa McCarthy movie slated for release on August 24 took some elements of my story idea, except my puppet cop worked alone and had no human partner on the force. Until I write again here, please stay tuned for a long overdue promo for A Dark Mirrored Land and a more timely one for Professor Midnight: Costumed & Masked Mystery Man of Adventure. I'm gone, bye-bye.
In 2012, I lost my childhood home and was forced to move into a smaller cozier rental house (suspecting I will never own a house again in my lifetime) that was actually nice (except for the thin outer walls in each room that made it sound like people outside were inside with you). Maintaining that living situation for about 18 months, I was forced again by February 2014 to accept a job (having been forced to quit my last one at a research company's call center due to transportation problems) managing a small business where I would live also (still feels strange to me sometimes doing that after 4-5 years now) by an old high school classmate and former neighbor (we weren't actually close in school - hanging around in different cliques at that age). Realizing that my earliest self-published novel releases in 2011 and 2012 had serious flaws in their manuscripts and self-created cover artwork, I took some painstaking time between 2013 and 2016 to rectify those mistakes and re-release them once revised all over again. I believe the changes were all beneficial (and I announced the re-releases here once the novels were ready from CreateSpace on the website's main page).
Unfortunately, you don't ever get a second chance to make a first impression with readers and the earlier versions and revised versions proved that I believe. Also in that time a contact made with writer Kevin Eads (a law professor and fiction author who writes and lives in sunny Florida) got me a chance to hook up one of my horror-theme novels (started in 2001, put aside for years and then finished by 2009 after a job layoff that November) with small publisher Corvis Nocturnum (Eric Vernor) at Dark Moon Press - hence, The Claws of T'birsk became my first small press long publication later in 2012. Sadly in 2013, Corvus gave me a great idea about a long-standing dilemma of mine - my first completed horror novel from back in 2000 and revised repeated on and off again since 2008 - The Nightmare of Aarontown - was sadly too long to publish at 806 pages in its final draft by Dark Moon or anyone else. He suggested I should break the final manuscript into a roughly equal parts trilogy and it might be considered. I did this in the spring of 2013, and yielded three volumes with the subtitles "A Sinister Homecoming," "A Curtain of Darkness descends" and "A Strange Manifestation upon Juniper Hill." Sadly, we could not come to any agreement on publishing what would have been my first trilogy as I was expected to handle he artwork fees (I was and remain rather financially poor - never having made many royalties on my publications so far). I couldn't pay $200/cover with the artist and still can't receiving SSI every month - more about that later - and only room and board for my job. I also don't know if those three volumes fulfilled my contract obligations from Claws of T'birsk to let Dark Moon see my next two horror novel projects. I also don't know how well T'birsk ever sold.
Revising and re-releasing Worldjumpers, A Legacy of Blood, The Circle of Light and Sister Helena of the Sword between 2014 and 2016, I turned to a new novel (one that was a hybrid fantasy story with horror elements) and my second Jack Petrov Vampire Hunter book A Dark Mirrored Land. Released in early 2018, it sold little and merely added to my growing failures as a self-marketer. Now I am trying to get a long (656-page) short story/novella collection (18 in the volume - 4 novellas and 14 shorter stories) entitled Professor Midnight: Costumed & Masked Mystery Man of Adventure. Once some bugs in the cover are settled with CreateSpace, my pulp fiction costumed adventurer/crime fighter collection will be released there. It is the longest book I've ever self-published. Only one of the stories appeared in a small press anthology ("Seven Years after Midnight") in Jay Faulkner's Powers: A Superhero Anthology and another in my first story collection The Orphaned Stories of John X. Grey (admittedly a desperate effort on my part to get another volume out in the spring of 2013, but I'm still proud of that baker's dozen of rejected tales- the story "One of Our Authors in Missing") which sold a few copies.
Currently, I am writing (or in that case of two partially finished chapters lost in July 2013 to my Acer suffering a hard drive crash) the second volume in the other worlds fantasy Sepharata Saga proposed trilogy - Sister Catherine Versus the Volcano People and have the initial chapter almost fully recreated. The original second one was lost in that crash mentioned above but only half-finished. I have outlines for this volume and the third one (Sister Lara the Redeemer saves the World). God forbid I lose this manuscript again.
My love life remains non-existent and the career I started working upon back in the late summer of 1999 (beginning The Nightmare of Aarontown) and choosing my pen name John X. Grey by the following spring has also failed to materialize by this date.
One interesting side note: I wonder if the writers of a new movie called The Happytime Murders didn't lift elements of its plot and story from my 2012 published short fiction piece "Murder on Poppy Street." I wrote that story in 2011 (along with two Jack Petrov mysteries) for George Wilhite's Static Movement anthology Weird City 3. My story is about a puppet cop trying to solve a series of puppet murders (in a weird world like Sesame Street - which I was mocking by the way - where humans and puppets interacted as though that situation was normal) that were actually being perpetrated by a special hunter-killer human-sized puppet made by the man that invented those living puppets in the first place. I had inside jokes like a Kermit-Miss Piggy like mixed couple being two of the victims, the Poppy Street neighborhood was in a big city's district named Henson, etc. And now it looks like that new Melissa McCarthy movie slated for release on August 24 took some elements of my story idea, except my puppet cop worked alone and had no human partner on the force. Until I write again here, please stay tuned for a long overdue promo for A Dark Mirrored Land and a more timely one for Professor Midnight: Costumed & Masked Mystery Man of Adventure. I'm gone, bye-bye.