Author's Spotlight, New Releases

The Hidden Earth Trilogy Finally Concludes!

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I cannot tell you how pleased I am that we have finally published Order of the Chaos, the conclusion of the Hidden Earth trilogy.

The series has had such an odd history.  The first edition, Darkness of the Light, was published by Tor in 2007.  They promised me they would publicize it if I got a pub quote from Neil Gaiman.  I asked, but Neil was too busy, and so the Tor publicity department buried it.  No one knew the book existed.  I went into bookstores throughout Florida (during a vacation) and one had ordered a single copy; no one else got any.   The sales were so pathetic it damaged my career in the long run.

I turned in the sequel, Heights of the Depths, and eighteen months later my editor, Jim Frenkel, still hadn’t gotten around to reading it.  Since the contract stated it had to be published within eighteen months of turning it in, I got the rights back.  Jim pleaded, Jim squawked, and I’m reasonably sure the event blacklisted me at Tor.  On the other hand, Frenkel was eventually fired for sexual harassment.  Make of that what you will.

Crazy 8 published the novel, along with a rerelease of the first title as well.  And now, finally, the third book is ready.

This will be an actual trilogy.  I am not planning to turn this into an endless series.  I had a beginning, middle, and end in mind.  I won’t be turning out volume fourteen years from now.

The paper edition is available now, and the ebook should be available within a few weeks (I’ll announce it again.)

So please kick back and order Order of the Chaos and see how the Damned World finishes.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases, News

Mary Fan Discusses her new novel Flynn Nightsider and the Edge of Evil

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Crazy 8 Press has always been about bringing to you guys—the fans, the lovers of books—original stories that we, the authors, feel passionate about, and are dedicated to ensuring the finished tales remain true to our visions.

One year ago we invited YA and SF/F author Mary Fan to join our band of crazies, and now she’s here with her very first full-length novel under the Crazy 8 banner.

Entitled Flynn Nightsider and the Edge of Evil, Mary’s new book is a YA Dark Fantasy with monsters, magic, and secrets that can remain buried no longer. Sound awesome? To us, too. Here’s what Mary had to say:

Crazy 8 Press: This is your first full-length book with Crazy 8 Press. Why this one?

Mary: First of all, it still feels like I got invited to the cool kids’ table when Y’all let me join Crazy 8 Press last year :-). I originally wrote Edge of Evil way back in 2012, and it got picked up by a small press that same year. However, after five years of production delays and a few forays into self-publishing through other projects, I was ready to take the book indie. Still, there’s a big difference between being independent and being alone. Being independent is liberating. Being alone is scary. So I was thrilled at the chance to put Edge of Evil out with Crazy 8 because it meant I could still have the creative freedom of self-publishing while also being a part of a group.

C8P: We’re thrilled you picked Crazy 8 Press for its debut. The tagline is: Break the enchantments. Find the truth. Ignite the revolution. We’re intrigued. But what’s your book really about?

Mary: @RealisticYAplot actually tweeted a satirical but pretty accurate description of the worldbuilding: Wizards defeat the Dark Lord and use their power to oppress Muggles :-P. Edge of Evil takes place about a century after the Final Battle between the Enchanters – a small minority of humans with magic – and the Lord of the Underworld, who escaped his dark dimension and unleashed monsters upon the world. Theoretically, it ended in victory – the Lord was defeated. Problem was: the monsters were still around, and the Enchanters didn’t want to give up their power. So, using the excuse that they’re the only ones who can protect people from monsters, they set up a totalitarian regime with a rigid caste system that keeps those without magic in the lower classes.

One member of this oppressed majority is a 16-year-old schoolboy named Flynn Nightsider, who’s had it with the Enchanters’ crap. He tries to fight back in his own way – and gets himself in a heap of trouble. But in a twist of fate, a group of underground rebels, which includes a teen monster slayer named Aurelia “the Firedragon” Sun, hears of his plight and mounts a rescue. Flynn joins Aurelia in the fight for freedom, but he soon learns that not all is as it seems…

As the tagline implies, Flynn and Aurelia wind up facing supernatural dangers to uncover the regime’s darkest secrets and fight for freedom.

C8P: Wow. You must have some vivid dreams! What was your inspiration for Edge of Evil?

Mary: It started with the world and was inspired by a few things. One was that I wanted to combine two of my favorite genres: fantasy and dystopia. What would a dystopia look like in a fantasy setting? It also always bothered me that in many more contemporary fantasies, those with magic are the ones with power, and yet are the ones in hiding (Harry Potter, Charmed, Mortal Instruments, etc.). If you could wave a stick and turn people you don’t like into ferrets, wouldn’t you seize control? And lastly, it fascinated/horrified me how so many contemporary dictators got to their positions of power using the rhetoric of freedom and security.

So I set up a dystopian fantasy world where those with magic used their power to take control and used the rhetoric of freedom from fear and security from monsters to keep it. And then came my main character, Flynn, who’s a combination of fantasy and dystopian protagonists. On the fantasy side, I sent him on a Hero’s Journey-type arc (but threw a major wrench into it – no spoilers though!). On the dystopian side, I had him start out as a powerless cog in the system who’s itching to get out.

Once I had my character and my world, the plot kind of started unraveling on its own… Oh, and then there’s Aurelia. With her, I just wanted to write a kickass heroine (who has her own story arc and doesn’t just exist to support the male hero). With all these monsters and all these magic-wielding folks saying they’re the only ones who can fight them, I loved the idea of a teen girl who could take down the beasts with zero magic, which would be a seeming disadvantage in this world.

C8P: Your books tend to focus on characters who initially start out believing they’re without hope, or, at the very least, feel oppressed in a dystopian society, with no clear-cut path forward. But then they learn that there’s a fire in their belly — and sometimes power — they hadn’t known was even there. Is this wish fulfillment, is there a larger theme you’re after, or do you just like to see evil get kicked in the head?

Hah! Well, I do love seeing evil get kicked in the head :-P. I always loved stories about the ordinary becoming extraordinary, the unlikely heroes who are forced by circumstances to rise up and who heed the call. It’s classic storytelling (again with the Hero’s Journey), and I think it’s a fairly universally appealing theme. With most of my stories, I start with the world-building, and then look at this world and throw a spotlight on a seemingly random ordinary person who just happens to be there when things go wrong. It’s fun getting to develop them as characters and have them face their fears despite their apparent disadvantages. In the case of Flynn, I thought about who the lowest person in this world’s hierarchy would be—an orphan kid with zero family, zero money, zero magic, zero combat skills, and zero rights—and shoved him into the spotlight. Poor guy.

C8P: Without giving anything away, will we be seeing more of Flynn Nightsider?

Mary: Absolutely! Edge of Evil is the first in a planned trilogy. If all goes according to plan, Book 2 should come out late 2019 or early 2020.

C8P: Any chance you’ll be making appearances where lucky readers can get their copies signed?

Mary: Yup! I’ll definitely be at Shore Leave in July, Gen Con in August, and Chessiecon in November! Might also have a few more appearances in the works – check my website (www.MaryFan.com) for updates!

Flynn Nightsider and the Edge of Evil is available in e-book, paperback, and hardback!

Author's Spotlight

One Hundred Stories

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“Smooth Talk” (Saturday, August 19, 2017) My father Sidney with a model at the Lincoln Terrace Camera Club

Here’s a little cautionary tale from the life of one of the Crazy 8 Press crew. Don’t worry, it’s not too long, you won’t learn anything of lasting value, and it’s illustrated with cool old black and white photos of New York City and old bums, and it has a link to free content. Who doesn’t like free content, right?

# # #

Today, I posted my one hundredth and final flash fiction story (well, really only ninety-nine of them are mine) on Tumblr, all written in the last one hundred and five days. (Click me! Click me! You can find all one hundred stories right here…or click on the pictures to go directly to those stories!)

Every morning since June 1, I awoke to a stack of old black and white photographs and a self-imposed task, the meeting of which only I had any reason to care about. No, I take that back. Even I didn’t have any real reason to care about meeting this ridiculous story-a-day deadline I’d inflicted upon myself, but once I got started, it was hard to stop.

What happened was, I was looking for some way in which to showcase some of the photographs taken in and around New York City more than two-thirds of a century ago by my father, Sidney (1921-1992). Sidney picked up a camera shortly after World War II, joined a bunch of camera clubs and photography organizations, learned how to process and print his own film, and over the course of the next decade and a half, took thousands of pictures.

“No Reservation” (Tuesday, August 29, 2017)

One of his favorite subjects was the area of lower Manhattan known as the Bowery, then a rough neighborhood overshadowed by the Third Avenue elevated subway line. The Bowery was, according to a 1919 magazine article, “filled with employment agencies, cheap clothing and knickknack stores, cheap moving-picture shows, cheap lodging-houses, cheap eating-houses, cheap saloons,” with a reputation as the city’s “Skid Row.” The Bowery was little changed in 1950, an age in which there were no sympathetic synonyms for the vagrant population he recorded with his camera.

“Life Support” (Sunday, August 6, 2017)

I’ve been looking at many of these photographs for my entire life. I’ve had a half dozen framed photos hanging in my home for decades, but it wasn’t until recently that I was able to gather them all in one place and look at the body of his work.

Now, show the non-writer type a photograph and their response is usually to the photograph, such as its subject matter, it’s location or composition, or the way light and shadow play against one another.

Not the writer, though. The first thing we do is zero in on the faces or the way someone is standing and think, “I wonder what his story is?” A picture, whether it’s a posed or a candid shot, is a moment frozen in time that can capture something of the heart and mind of its subject, making it worth the proverbial “thousand words.”

Not that we can ever know what was actually going on in their minds at the moment the shutter snapped and captured them for all time. But we can certainly see the raw, base emotion in their eyes and expressions and that’s all a writer really needs to get started.

“His Lucky Day” (Thursday, June 1, 2017)

Looking through the photos, I started to see the stories in many of them. The first story, “His Lucky Day,” written and posted on June 1, just about leapt out at me, a tiny moment in time, of significance to no one but the lucky man himself. Not every story came so easily; some photos I looked at every day for weeks or months until they revealed their stories to me. Others started off going in one direction, only to take a sharp turn somewhere along the way and become something altogether different. But all of them brought me back to a time and place that still bore a resemblance to the New York I remember as a little boy, even if the Third Avenue Elevated line was gone before I was born.

Among the stash of photographs are countless family snapshots, candid and posed, and shots of my father and his friends, clowning around on the street or in front of the neighborhood candy store. I started to include those in my story-a-day series, featuring my parents, brother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, even myself in one story, based on a picture of me with my great-grandmother.

“September 1955” (Saturday, June 24, 2017) Three-month old me with my great-grandmother, Becky Kupperberg

There are about a dozen photos for which I wrote a haiku or used a one-liner to satisfy my daily quota (because some days, I just needed a break!), but the one hundred flash fiction stories (some are more “flash” than others) based on one hundred photographs clock in at around 34,000 words, including the five hundred words of the one hundredth and final photo flash fiction story, a piece of memoir written by my father for a writing class he took during his retirement years, “Whistling in the Dark.”

“Whistling in the Dark” (Wednesday, September 13, 2017)

I thought it only proper Sidney should have the last word and picture.

Photographs by Sidney Kupperberg

© Paul Kupperberg

Author's Spotlight, DuckBob, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: DuckBob: Killer Service

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“DuckBob: Killer Service” by Aaron Rosenberg is the wackiest (and final) tale of the bunch, wherein good ole DuckBob Spinowitz and his sexy gal pal Mary find their lives in peril thanks to a miscommunication between DuckBob and the funky new gadget he bought for home his home entertainment unit. Who knew that a mail-order gift to self could be so deadly?

To find out how—or if—DuckBob gets out of this one, here’s an early look:

DuckBob: Killer Service

By Aaron Rosenberg

“DuckBob—get down, my love!” Mary shouts as she hurdles the couch in an amazing display of beauty and grace—yes, I stop to admire her form, even in the midst of all this chaos—and dives behind it. The couch, ever helpful, rises and solidifies into a small shield wall to protect her.

It always did like her more.

For my part, I duck—yeah, ha ha, never heard that one before, only been ten years since the little gray aliens most people just call Grays abducted and altered me, you think in all that time no one’s ever made a “quack” at me before?—as something small, flat, circular, and silvery goes whizzing past right where my neck had been.

“Hey!” I shout, straightening back up and glaring at the room in general. “Was that my Rockford Files soundtrack? Do you have any idea how hard it is to come by one of those? That took me weeks of searching, and an entire hour of listening to the vendor’s sob story about the death of vinyl!”

A second CD shoots toward me—The Best of Johnny Mathis,

I think, so I’m a little less upset about that one—and I quickly dive to the ground, thrusting my arms out in push-up position to keep from slamming my bill against the floor. See, Tall, I do work out when given the right motivation! A whole bunch more silvery discs follow, racing overhead to imbed themselves in the couch, the wall, and anything else in their path.

Why oh why did I ever think it would be so awesomely cool to buy the seventy-six-disc changer?

“Knock it off, Iris!” I bellow from my forced-exercise pose.

“That is what I am endeavoring to accomplish,” her perfectly modulated voice replies from all around me. Which was always creepy to begin with, and is twice as bad now that she’s literally trying to kill me.

You just can’t find good help these days.

It all started the day before. And, as usual, I didn’t really have anyone to blame but myself.

“Check this out!” I told Mary as I returned to bed holding the mail—a handful of bills (it’s amazing that you can literally go to the ends of the universe—or its center, anyway, since the Matrix is here at the Galactic Core—and deliberately not leave a forwarding address but somehow they always find you. Especially medical bills—I’m convinced that most physicians’ assistants should really moonlight as bounty hunters, if they aren’t already. Nobody would escape them! Especially if they’ve ever gone in for elective surgery), a bunch of ads, two fast-food menus (one for Langnock’s Sweet and Sour Stir-fried Mineral Balls, which I order from sometimes as much so I can giggle over the name as because I love the food), a letter from the local Galactic Neighborhood Association (which always has at least one reference to “that glittering pink monstrosity in our midst.” Hey, what can I say, I live in a show home.)—and a small box from Tek R Us, delivered by the UPS (Universal Postal Service, what else?). I dropped all the rest at the foot of the bed and clambered back onto the mattress cradling the box like it held my child.

Which, in a way, I guess I did.

To read the rest of “DuckBob: Killer Service” click here.

Crazy Good Stories