Dreams Less Sweet - Last Free day on Amazon

It's the last free day of my Dreams Less Sweet free promo and so, as promised, here are some more pictures from the graphic novel version that is yet to be finished. Once again thanks to Paul Guest for the fab artwork.

You can still download the novella version here  free until midnight 16th May 2013

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IMPORTANT: These are from the graphic version which is not available at this time. The link above is for the novella - text version ONLY. 

Many thanks to everyone who downloads a copy :)

Dreams Less Sweet - Graphic Novel Version

As I mentioned yesterday my novella Dreams Less Sweet is available for Kindle free until the 16th May. You can get it here: http://smarturl.it/dls

Now some time ago I toyed with the idea of making it into a graphic novel as well. I found a wonderful artist called Paul Guest who helped me out. I've unfortunately lost touch with Paul (if you're reading this Paul would be great to hear from you again) but thought readers of the book might like to see some of the early drawings for it.

Today I'm giving you the prologue of the book :)

Prologue Page 1

Prologue Page 2

Prologue Page 3

Title Page

Hope they give you a flavour of what the graphic version would be like.

IMPORTANT: These are from the graphic version which is not available at this time. The link above is for the novella - text version ONLY.

Check back tomorrow for a little more.

Dreams Less Sweet

So my book (actually a novella as it’s about 28,000 words) is on a special promotion for the next few days. Between the 14^th and 16^th May 2013 you can get it for your kindle for the special price of FREE! So you should give it a go as it will only cost you a bit of your precious time and you might really like it. You can get it here: http://smarturl.it/dls that super swanky link will take you to your nearest Amazon shop. If you don’t have a kindle remember you can always read it on your phone, or computer, or iPad or expensive android tablet that you’ve just bought by using the kindle app – here’s a handy link for that too: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000425503

What’s it about? Well I’m glad you asked. 

It’s about if getting your dream life is all it’s cracked up to be…

“Welcome to the land of your dreams, your perfect life, your perfect partner. A world with no worries, no troubling thoughts and the freedom to create your own environment as you truly wish it. That’s what Dream Co™ had promised but living in the reality was so very different.

Kaleb should be living happily ever after in a world where everything you wish for can happen. His wife is a cyborg version of his anima, programmed to meet his every whim, his negative thoughts can be drawn away from him at the end of each day and the world is a beautiful place. But Kaleb is suffering from a deep depression and he doesn't know why. He isn't the only one; this dark depression is fast becoming the biggest national disease. As an employee of the government’s Department of Dreams, it is his job to work out why. 

Watching him from afar are a strange order of monks one of whom, Frater Ra, has been sent to investigate the encroaching darkness and how it conforms to an ancient prophecy which indicates the world will slip into total chaos.

But the Dark is growing in strength and it has a believer in the form of a young woman called Evangeline who is prepared to mother its child and bring about the end of light and order. Through her belief, it can gain a shape and substance and become a living powerful entity.

Do the answers Kaleb is seeking perhaps lie in the outlawed books of psychology and magick? Can he fight the very authorities he is part of and risk destroying his mind in order to find a solution? As the Dark gains shape and form, time is running out and Kaleb has the fate of humankind’s sanity in his hands.”

I wrote it because I wanted to explore how governments ignore the moral questions posed by science, often using it to further their own ends with consequences they cannot control. I wanted to imagine what it would be like to live in a Utopia and play around with how depressing that might actually be.

There are elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction in the story; some people have said it’s a bit like Clive Barker, others like Neil Gaiman or a weird episode of Black Mirror. It’s a bit of all of those perhaps but with a large dose of me in there. There’s a little bit of sex and swearing in there so those who don’t like that sort of thing have been forewarned.

Anyway, did I mention it’s FREE at the moment? Oh I did. Well try it now then. I hope you like it.

Dreaming is easier than writing.

I’ve started writing again and it’s a struggle at the moment. I seem to have found myself writing three books at once – which is just plain greedy. There are three nice ideas, not fully formed but formed as much as I would like them to be at this stage. I like to allow room for manoeuvre so that my characters can get out of hand a bit, rather than planning everything at the beginning. It’s all going swimmingly, except for one thing. They don’t want to be written down. I have pages of notes and every night as I get into bed the books become alive. The characters talk to me and plot problems resolve themselves and I feel all happy and content. I write it all down as notes when I wake up, or turn on my phone in the middle of the night and stab at the keys to get a few notes down before they are whisked away by the vagaries of night. Then I come to my desk the next day and I can’t get it down, it’s slow, so slow.

Please can someone invent a computer that taps into your thoughts and just types away for you, that would be the best machine ever – well apart from a TARDIS but I don’t think the invention of that is just around the corner. When I was a child I used to watch Tomorrow’s World on TV and I just assumed by the time I got to the age I am now we’d have all these fab gadgets. And we do have fab gadgets now, just not the ones I really wanted. That’s just not fair, I feel cheated that all the promises of flying cars, and dream machines, and the aforementioned thing that can type your thoughts as you think them, just haven’t materialised yet. 

Then I realise that I’ve written quite happily about all that but still haven’t added more words to my novel, or novella or whatever it might be when it finally gets written. I should get back to work. Bother! Time for more coffee then. I raise my cup to all other writers out there struggling with the same thing.

What’s happened to the sitcom?

I really like comedy, have spent many an hour at the Comedy Store in London, been to see many comedians live everywhere from scruffy pubs to Wembley and I do love a good sitcom. Except there isn’t a good sitcom anymore. Not on UK TV anyway.

Oh, you can tell me about Mrs Brown’s Boys if you like but I watched a couple and it didn’t tickle me in the slightest. Yes, I know it’s hugely popular but to me it’s just meh. Last week I watched Ben Elton’s new sitcom on BBC1 The Wright Way. Now Ben Elton isn’t my favourite but he did have a large hand in The Young Ones and Blackadder all those moons ago but this new one was atrocious. You can watch a clip here if you don’t believe me. It’s not just the situation (the sit bit of sitcom) that was dreadful, it didn’t have any com either.

So yesterday there were two new ones on ITV, not a channel I hold out much hope on for comedy, Vicious and The Job Lot. Vicious (clips here) had the fantastic actors Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi who I can usually happily watch all day. Last night I watched them unhappily. Such fine actors but a script that signposted its gags with a huge blaring red light and acting which to call hammy would have been a bit unfair on dead pigs. That’s a no for that one then.

Some ham

So I stuck with ITV for The Job Lot (clips here) and I was much happier, it was pretty good. The sit bit worked, the characters, although exaggerated as in most comedy, were on the right side of believable and, most importantly, it made me laugh. Hurray! It gave me a slight hint of disquiet as I once wrote a pilot for a sitcom many years ago partly set in a Jobcentre and some of the jokes were very similar to the ones we wrote. Don’t worry I don’t think this is anything sinister just coincidence. Our pilot was turned down for being a bit too depressing, being about the unemployed and all. Times do change a bit then! So thumbs up for The Job Lot then, I will be tuning in next week. It isn't the best sitcom ever but it's certainly the best at the moment. I just want more good sitcoms on TV. 

So can anyone suggest anything good? Not Miranda, not a big fan, and certainly not Not Going Out. Anything new that’s like Black Books, Father Ted, The Office, The IT Crowd and so on? Or do we have to just make do with the plethora of comedy quiz shows that we now get?

Incidentally if you do like comedy you might like to try my book The Alien Files now available on kindle, saves you watching the telly. Was that plug subtle enough?

Cries From The Deep

So today I decided I'd give away a freebie. I've just uploaded a short story to scribd. You can download it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/137346686/Cries-From-the-Deep-by-John-Crowdell

Here's a quick description: Richard Jarvie is a psychic investigator, for years now he has been looking for that one medium who he cannot debunk. Today could be the day it all changes. Psychic Jessie Strake has a message just for him, as well as one with a much darker resonance for humanity.
I hope you enjoy it :)

 

Genre-lizations

I like genre fiction – read a lot of it to be honest, sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, crime, police procedurals and so on. So when I write I don’t like to write just one genre. My published books at the moment are sci-fi ish but also contain bits of horror, or fantasy or a dollop of humour. Waiting to be published and/or written I have books that are just fantasy, thrillers, crime and so on. But received wisdom seems to be that you use a different author name for each – but why? I read an interview that Iain Banks write once about wishing he’d never started using the Iain M Banks name for his harder science fiction as it meant some people didn’t read those, when actually they might have got into them if he hadn’t flagged them up with a different name (albeit not a hugely different one).

I personally like Ian Rankin’s books, I love Rebus and I also really enjoyed his Dark Entries graphic novel that he wrote. I didn’t think ‘Oh no Rankin has betrayed me by not writing a police book!’ So my question to other readers is - do you care? Do you mind if a favourite author publishes different genres under the same pen name? Would it put you off?
 
As an indie author I want to dabble and I’d like to take the limited readership that I have with me on those dabblings but of course I don’t want to make people angry with me for doing so. However, if I start using different names that makes a huge difference to my workload as I have to start promoting all those different pseudonyms separately. It’s a conundrum. So I’m throwing the question out there – what do you think?