Showing posts with label adventures of guy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adventures of guy. Show all posts

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Re-Inventing Oneself as a Writer

There are writers who absolutely write the same book not just twice but many times over, no question of it. Like actors, there are many different types of writers. Some are one-book wonders that have a single title come out of the blue to take top honors, awards, bestseller status, but for most of us, we write one book, two, three, etc. until we find we've written ten, twenty, thirty, etc. Some of us are "serial" writers, our nose to the grindstone not of writing the same book over and over but throwing one adventure after another at the SAME character or ensemble of characters.

I fall into the later category, having created something in the neighborhood of 8 series characters, some of whom have lasted through two books, others eleven, most three and four. My last two novels added on to two series as Titanic 2012 continued my fascination with Inspector Alastair Ransom who had earlier had a trilogy. The book after this was purely for kicks, a horror novel, which continued my desire to work again with my character Dr. Abraham Stroud, archeologist and vampire slayer, a book called Bayou Wulf.

A year ago Ransom and Stroud were both "dead" characters according to the 'rules' of traditional publishing, but as a re-invented author, now an Independent Author thanks to Amazon's Kindle store, I can ressurect Ransom and Stroud and any of six other 'dead series characters'....and so I am re-invented anew as an author interested in continuing otherwise dead series. Kindle allows for this.

Even in content, I have taken on a new author personae beyond that of Indie Author....as now with Titanic 2012 complete, I decided to go back to the sea for another seafaring suspense thriller, so am now working on Bismarck 2013, a working title.  You might say I am carving out a new genre -- occult seafaring suspense with science fiction overtones and a good dollop of historical to boot.  OK, not sure what to call these books; perhaps the new label or category should read -- Labeless.

As I am way over-tired, I am goint to let a snippet of Titanic 2012, follwed by a snippet of Bismarck 2013 speak for me here. I am blogging on the "Making of Bismarck 2013  at Dirty Deeds - Advice from a pro  found on Google. Here are the snippets: 


TITANIC 2012

—CURSE of R.M.S. TITANIC—

ONE

Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 3, 1912

Slippage dust choked them. A fine shower of it fluttered about the men like a million black fairies that insisted on entering them. The dark dust created of itself a ghostly, unruly fog. Yet it was so fine, the two wouldn’t have known it was here had not their helmet lights reflected it. The earth around them groaned and stretched as if disturbed from slumber, just awakening. Tim McAffey, one of the two who’d dared enter to inspect the damage wondered why he’d ever become a miner. Then the floating grave ahead of them settled, and he thought of the bonus promised if he did his job. He thought of home and family and food on the table.

“The day ends with little to show,” said mine superintendent McAffey, frustrated and upset. He knew from experience it’d take days if not a week to get the men comfortable enough about this section of the mine to even begin to clean up the mess where some timbers had given way. “Hell, amounts to a sneeze,” he said to the man beside him.

“Minor inconvenience at best,” agreed O’Toole.

@http://tinyurl.com/6753a69

SECOND SNIPPET:
B I S M A R C K 2013

May 5, 1941 aboard the Bismarck, docked in Gotenhafen Bay, Occupied Poland

Adolph Hitler smiled and rocked on his heels, feeling safe, even smug here where the Bismarck had been kept from prying British air patrols—far to the west of where the ship had been built in Hamburg. Here amid multiple land masses, fjords, in the straights between Germany and Sweden.

Hitler felt comfortable here in his 5’10 frame inside his British-made Wellington boots. He smiled and turned his head in all directions from his vantage point on the bridge of the deadliest battleship ever to set sail on the high seas. Her guns were the largest ever assembled on a floating vessel.

Hitler had come aboard with heavy security. There had been yet another recent attempt on his life in Berlin. He had a small army of SS men on all sides of him and four men carrying a crate, a curious wooden crate…something many of the seamen aboard, all lined in rows for the inspection by the Fuehrer, thought interesting. In particular Lt. Commander Ivan Hulsing had noticed the large crate, and he immediately wondered if it had anything to do with the new encryption code machine that Hitler’s top engineers had been working on.

This would make sense. And if so and installed on Bismarck, the admiral and captain of the ship would be deciphering every message sent across the airways between Britain and its allies. Hitler might also ascertain if it was true that the Americans were quietly supplying the British with more than just food and supplies in their so-called humanitarian efforts to back the United Kingdom.

Bismarck was built to lay waste to such foolishness, to destroy anything that dared to move across the North Atlantic. Her guns could hit a row boat fifteen miles off her bow. Ivan Hulsing began to hear the whispers wafting among the rows of sailors lining the deck, all now curious of the box—a wooden crate marked as oranges, ostensibly a gift for Admrial Lutgens whose love for fresh fruit aboard his ship was legendary.

Hitler’s entourage had first come aboard intent on plying directly to the Admiral’s quarters with the crate. Anyone seeing the strain on the faces of the four men carrying the elongated, coffin-sized crate, must imagine it carried more than oranges. Meanwhile, Captain Lindeman and Admiral Lutgens followed Hitler’s men like a pair of puppies in the great leader’s wake. It appeared Hitler, an oddly shaped, small man, which Ivan realized for the first time, was nearly lost in his leather coat—as if it’d been borrowed from a larger man. Hitler had surrounded himself with men selected for the best in Aryan features: blue-eyed, blond-haired six-foot high soldiers in spanking new military uniform and Nazi insignia-emblazoned caps. Alongside such men, the Fuehrer appeared a perfect foil for such men—as Hitler himself was dark-eyed, dark-haired, little-statured man who seemed weak and lost in his uniform by comparison; a man playing at soldier.

And Hitler was intent on getting that crate tucked away in the Admiral’s possession, in the Admiral’s cabin down from the Captain’s quarters. This took the darkly-clad entourage up several flights of stairs and catwalks facing the bridge. Hidden somewhat amid his entrouage, Hitler’s gait was that of a determined ape chasing a female, an ape with a mission fuck over anything daring to get in his path. Determined first to deposit the gift, before anything to do with inspecting the ship or crew.

Once done with the ‘gifting’, this man determined to rule the Earth, would return to inspect Bismarck and the mariners of this mighty ship. Every sailor aboard, including Ivan Hulsing must maintain attention status while awaiting Hitler’s return to inspect the rows upon rows of sailors, two thousand, lining every deck at every level.

THANK you for dropping by and I do hope you will leave a comment in your wake! 
Rob Walker




Monday, November 17, 2008

My turn! Excerpt

Debra posted her WIP ... what a great idea!! So I'm going to copyright, er, copy her. Here's the beginning of my WIP, "The Adventures of Guy ... to hell and back."

Here goes:

“Did you know that there’s a plastic island in the Pacific Ocean?” Knob asked the checkout girl conversationally.

The girl had multi-colored hair, black lipstick, a bunch of piercings and … until Knob said something to her … a lidded look of boredom.

“Um,” she said, almost startled out of her teenagerism.

“Yeah,” I snickered, sliding a Snickers on the conveyer belt, “Ken and Barbie are its King and Queen.”

Behind me, Thurman was watching a commercial on a small television mounted next to the candy display. “They’ll put a television anywhere nowadays,” he muttered.

Knob looked back at me with the ‘teacher-look’ that he must have picked up during his three years as a college sophomore, “Seriously, Guy. There’s a plastic island about twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific.”

“Um,” the checkout girl shot a nervous glance at the customers beginning to line up.

Thurman tore his eyes from the television and frowned, “A plastic island? I’ve never heard of that.”

“That’s because they don’t want you to know,” Knob said.

“They?”

“Yeah, they.”

“Who’s they?”

“They, are, um…you know…”

“Sir?”

Knob turned back to the Crayola-haired girl, “Yes?”

“Sir. All I needed to know was paper or plastic.”

“Oh, that. Neither. Give me one of those recyclable bags, okay?”

As we pulled away from the grocery store in the Quest Mobile, an old Town Car limo that Knob picked up for five hundred bucks plus a thousand dollars in interest, Thurman asked, “So tell me some more about this plastic island.”

“There’s no plastic island,” I sneered.

Knob navigated around a pothole and shot me a look. Swish, no rim.

After a moment he continued, “Actually, it’s been pretty documented. There’s a huge sludge-like island weighing millions of tons floating in the middle of the Pacific. It’s caused by plastic straws, bottles and other trash that rain washes from the storm drains in California and Japan into the harbors, which then float out to sea collecting where the trade winds converge. The sun’s UV rays break the plastic down into little pieces. Even worse, fish eat the pieces, so it all comes back to us in the form of our food.”

“Nice monologue, Knob,” I said.

“So we’re eating plastic fish?” Thurman asked.

“I’ve heard about that,” a voice said from the back of the car.

We all would have jumped … but didn’t … mostly because our last dose of caffeine was over an hour ago. That, and it’s kinda hard to jump while sitting in a limo. Instead we just kind of jerked like we’d been carpet shocked.

“Who …?”

“Huh …?”

“What …?”

“It’s me,” the voice said.

“Who’s me?” Knob demanded, viciously yanking the wheel to miss another pothole. His passengers rolled right like marbles in a box.

“Aaagh!”

He swerved again. We marbles rolled to the left.

“Aaagh!”

The car righted itself.

“Me … Seth,” Seth said.

Seth’s my little marble, er, brother. He’s not so bad for a little brother, so we let him hang around.

Knob grinned, “Oh, yeah. I forgot you were in here.”

“I was chilling to my i-Pod,” Seth said.

Another violent swerve and everyone’s marbles rolled again.

“What the heck is it with these pot holes?” Knob grumbled as he fought with the wheel.

“I can tell you about that, too,” Seth said.

“About what?” Knob asked.

“The potholes.”

“What about the potholes?” Thurman asked.

“I know why they’re there,” Seth was busy dialing up a new song on the I-Pod.

“Um, because of freezing and thawing and stuff like that, right?” Knob asked.

“Right. That’s how they happen. But the reason they didn’t get patched up is because patches are made from petroleum products,” Seth said.

“So?” Knob asked.

“So because of the price of oil it’s getting too expensive to fix potholes.”

Knob gave him a look through the rearview mirror, “Where do you learn this stuff?”

Seth shrugged, “Civics class.”

“ I always wanted to take one of those classes,” Knob mused.

“You did take Civics … three times,” I said.

“Oh, no wonder …”


Norm
www.normcowie.com

The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness
The Heat of the Moment
Missing (coming Feb 09)
Fang Face (coming Aug 09)

Monday, November 19, 2007

Who's this Norman Cowie and what's he doing with my name?

So who's this Norman Cowie guy?

I mean, seriously, he's pissing me off. Whatever that means. Um. Whoever made up the statement 'pissing me off'? It makes absolutely no sense at all.

Sure, you can, well ... let's be a bit more delicate here ... anyway, you can 'tinkle' ON something, but you can't tinkle OFF something. That just makes no sense. Why do we use phrases that we don't understand? Jeez, ridiculous. It pisses me o...

Oops.

Anyway, back to this Norman Cowie guy. The nerve of him. Whenever I Google myself ...

What? You never Google yourself?

SSuuurrre you don't. Surely you aren't as crass as me. Of course you don't Google yourself. You probably don't look in a mirror either, right?

Anyway, this is about me, not you. Or more precisely, it's about that guy going around using MY NAME. Sure... it's a great name. Goes all the way back to Scotland. But that doesn't mean I'm going to let someone use it.

Well, there's a ...let's say, rumor ... that I occasionally go up to the little magic 'G' in the corner of my brand new laptop, type in the words ...norm cowie... and wait to see what pops up.

Will it be a new review of one of my books, a mention from another writer, my book being passed from one reader to another on a book swap site, or maybe a shout out from someone on Myspace? The point is, there often is something new and exciting.

So imagine my surprise when I enter 'Norm Cowie' and up pops some a page that has to do with someone using my name ... some Norman Cowie. Apparently he's a professor who was rejected for tenure or something and he's soliciting ground swell support for his tenure.

Hah. I know exactly why he didn't get tenure. it's because he's using SOMEONE ELSE'S NAME! Mine, to be precise. Okay, this sounds insensitive. I'm sorry, I'm sure he deserves tenure.

I was kind of thinking of shooting good old Norm an olive-branch email asking him to maybe just confine his Google tags to 'Norman Cowie,' and I'd take 'Norm Cowie.' So I was plotting my approach... assembling my rationale and arguments ... surely he'd get the sageness of my request ... he'd understand ... after all, with such a wonderful name, I'm sure he's great guy ... right?

Anyway, I was composing my email, and out of habit did a quick Google ... and what did I discover? There's another Norman Cowie out there!! What the heck??!

It just ... tinkles ... me off!

Norm

www.normcowie.com (NOT www.normancowie.com!)
The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness

Monday, July 16, 2007

Fleas

What do fleas have to do with writing? Nothing, right?

Wrong!

If you have fleas in your house, you want them OUT!

Arrgh!

You'll do whatever you have to, be it washing all of your bedding, clothes, bathing a sullen rabbit and two frantically struggling and slippery cats, bombing your basement with flea bomb, vacuuming every inch of your house including the curtains and furniture, spraying lethal stuff all over everything ...

... all the time you feel like you can feel critters crawling on you, and your skin twitches like a horse disrupting a fly.

And then, after the dust settles, you sit in your now stinky house, exhausted and flea-ed, er, ticked off, and wonder...

... just wonder ...

... well, you don't wonder anything.

Because you're too tired, and you want to go to sleep, and you hope that the extermination was successful, because if not, you do it all again in few days.

So back to my question. What do fleas have to do with writing?

Well, not really anything with writing, but definitely something with not writing. Because if you gots fleas in your castle, you'll do whatever you have to to get rid of them, be it missing the baseball game, forgoing your walk, or blogging your blog.

Going to bed now.

Norm

The Adventures of Guy, written by a guy (probably)
and just out, The Next Adventures of Guy, more wackiness
www.normcowie.com

Monday, July 9, 2007

The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness

(pop)

Howdy, I just popped in with some exciting news. I'm a published author now!

Woo-hoo!

Wait ...

...um...

I forgot. I was already a published author.

So now I'm a published ... er, ... another published, um ...

Okay, enough of that. There's an easier way to say it. My second book is out!!!

Woo-hoo!

Yippee!

My new book, The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness, is the sequel to its awesomely-reviewed prequel, The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably).

Fun stuff! Comes with the Dr. Pepper Warning (as in don't drink a carbonated beverage when reading).

You can read excerpts of both books on my website www.normcowie.com.

I'm feeling good.

Gotta go!

(pop)


Norm
www.normcowie.com
The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness

Monday, May 28, 2007

Domain NameTheft

It's Memorial Day, and I'm sitting outside working on the edits for my upcoming book, The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness.

It's a gorgeous day ... though I'm sticking to the shade so glare won't make it impossible to read the screen. Dont'cha love laptops? Anyway, I just posted a blog on Book Place, but I think the message is important enough to 'cross blog.' Especially since one of our own Acme Authors was involved.

Because of writer's conferences and such, I have met hundreds of writers, and gotten to know some of them better over drinks or at author fests. Still, though, there are thousands and thousands of writers in the various genres. So how surprising is it to hear the same story from two of the few that I know a little better? The story?

That of domain-theft.

This isn't really my story, but you have to hear it. One of the writers from the Mystery Writers of America posted a message on our Chat Board that someone had somehow swiped her domain name ... which was simply her name. It wasn't because the thief shared the same name, he wanted it and simply took it. She actually tracked down the jerk, and his explanation was that he 'collects' writer's domain names.

Yeah, you heard me, er, read me. He collects them!

She managed to get it back from him after pleading that her professional success depends on people being able to find her, and this is best done by having a website named after her. It ended up costing her nothing but a period of absolute panic.

Her message prompted a series of alarmed postings, and one more horrible tale:

Another writer told how his had been swiped, too, but when he contacted the perpetrator, he was told he could have it back ... for a price. The person who took it did so simply for monetary purposes. This writer told him to just keep it, and he simply changed his domain name. Hopefully later, the thief will let his illegitimate ownership lapse and the writer can get it back if he wants it.

My domain name is named after me, too, www.normcowie.com, in the hopes that the millions of people (I hope) who hear of me can find me. But every year or so, I get a mailing from a domain-naming company that offers to 'renew' my domain name for me. The first time I received this, I frantically contacted my web page company who assured me that they do this for me as a part of my contract with them.

So the word is, my friend writers, is 'writer beware.' There are people out there who want to make money without working for it. And they don't always do it at gunpoint.

Norm
The Adventures of Guy ... written by a guy (probably)
and coming soon, The Next Adventures of Guy ... more wackiness