Showing posts with label giveaway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label giveaway. Show all posts

Saturday, October 12, 2024

Undawnted Presents: Paul Kane and Joseph Carrabis for WordCrafter's Midnight Garden Anthology



About Midnight Garden: Where Dark Tales Grow

17 authors bring you 21 magnificent dark tales. Stories of magic, monsters and mayhem. Tales of murder and madness which will make your skin crawl. These are the tales that explore your darkest Midnight Garden... if you dare.

Purchase Link: https://books2read.com.

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Midnight Garden Anthology Giveaway

Three lucky winners will receive a digital copy of Midnight Garden in a random drawing following the tour. All you have to do to enter is follow the tour and leave a comment at each stop that you visit.

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Paul Kane's Drip Feed

Inspiration for “Drip Feed” by Paul Kane

I had so much fun writing ‘The White Lady’ for Kaye’s previous anthology, Midnight Roost, that when the opportunity to write something else for the next one in the series cropped up, I put my thinking cap on about another one.

‘Drip Feed’ is sort of the spiritual cousin to a story I wrote over a decade ago now, called ‘Rag & Bone’ – or at least the beginning of it is. First published in The Butterfly Man from PS Publishing, that one got picked up for Best New Horror so I’ve been trying to think of how to do something similar for a while now (although the two stories ended up being nothing alike really).

‘Rag & Bone’ begins with the main character hanging around in what he thinks is a serial killer’s lair, which is the conclusion Daniele in ‘Drip Feed’ also leaps to here. Both have twists about what’s actually going on, of course – it’s never as simple as just a ‘serial killer’ in one of my horrors – but in this case it was sort of influenced by the surge in spiking people’s drinks these days. We saw something about it on breakfast TV and I figured it would be appropriate in this tale.

There are bits that are nods to certain movies, and if you read ‘Drip Feed’ you’ll understand what those are and why I can’t mention them; Daniele herself has seen the films and although she can’t remember the titles, you’ll get where she’s coming from, or at least I hope you will.

I wanted to do a tale this time that offers a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, instead of that just being a train coming to run you over. There’s a glimmer at any rate, and that won’t spoil it for those of you who haven’t read it yet, because that’s not the full story by long chalk. The ending I think will still surprise you, as indeed it does Daniele. 

It’s enjoyable sometimes to do a piece that’s self-contained. Something which, although a back history is hinted at, doesn’t contain huge amounts of mythology or whatever that you need to know. Just a beginning, middle and end. I also like doing stories that are circular, though I’m not entirely sure this one is. We definitely leave it in a place where things are going to continue on, but then that’s most tales anyway isn’t it – unless you end the world that is (and I’ve done that a few times too). 

So sit back and read Daniele’s struggles to overcome her obstacles – her background, if not her predicament, are similar to mine; though in art and writing, rather than acting. Things are tough out there, and the only way to get through life is to become tougher. 

If you can, that is.

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About Paul Kane

Paul Kane is the award-winning (including the British Fantasy Society’s Legends of FantasyCon Award 2022), bestselling author and editor of over a hundred and fifty books – such as the Arrowhead trilogy (gathered in the sellout Hooded Man omnibus), Hellbound Hearts, Wonderland (a Shirley Jackson Award finalist) and Pain Cages (an Amazon #1 bestseller). His non-fiction books include The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy and Voices in the Dark. He has been a Guest at many conventions, as well as being a panellist at FantasyCon and the World Fantasy Convention, and a fiction judge at the Sci-Fi London festival. A former British Fantasy Society Special Publications Editor, he has also served as co-chair for the UK chapter of The Horror Writers Association and co-chaired ChillerCon UK in May 2022. His work has been optioned and adapted for the big and small screen, including for US network primetime television and as the feature film Sacrifice starring Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, You’re Next, Suitable Flesh). His audio work includes the full cast drama adaptation of The Hellbound Heart for Bafflegab, starring Alice Lowe (Prevenge), and the Robin of Sherwood adventure The Red Lord for Spiteful Puppet/ITV. He has also contributed to the Warhammer 40k universe for Games Workshop. Paul’s latest novels are the sequels to RED – Blood RED & Deep RED (aka The RED Trilogy) – the award-winning hit Sherlock Holmes & the Servants of Hell, Before (an Amazon Top 5 dark fantasy bestseller), Arcana, The Storm and The Gemini Effect. In addition he writes thrillers for HQ/HarperCollins as PL Kane: the sellout novels Her Last Secret, Her Husband’s Grave and The Family Lie. Paul lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife Marie O’Regan. Find out more at his site www.shadow-writer.co.uk which has featured Guest Writers such as Stephen King, Catriona Ward, Dean Koontz, Olivie Blake and Guillermo del Toro. 

Socials: Facebook, X (@PaulKaneShadow), Instagram (@paul.kane.376) and Bluesky (@paulkane.bsky.social)

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Reading from Midnight Garden

“Grande Ture” by Joseph Carrabis
https://youtu.be/iOKyI0fG9Qg.

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About Joseph Carrabis

Joseph Carrabis told stories to anyone who would listen starting in childhood, wrote his first stories in grade school, and started getting paid for his writing in 1978. He’s been everything from a long-haul trucker to a Chief Research Scientist and holds patents covering mathematics, anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. After patenting a technology which he created in his basement and creating an international company, he retired from corporate life and now he spends his time writing fiction based on his experiences. His work appears regularly in several anthologies and his own published novels. You can learn more about him at https://josephcarrabis.com.

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Midnight Garden Tour Schedule

Monday – October 7 – M.J. Mallon: Interview & Reading (The Seagull Man) – Writing to be Read
Tuesday – October 8 – Danaeka Scrimshaw: Guest Post (“Fae Game”) & Denise Aparo: Reading “Jack Moon & the Vanishing Book” – Roberta Writes
Wednesday – October 9 – Joseph Carabis: Reading (“The Last Drop”) & Guest Post (“Striders”) – Paul Martz
Thursday – October 10 – Paul Martz: Reading & Guest Post (“The Blackest Ink”) – Writing to be Read
Friday – October 11 – Molly Ertel: Inspiration Reading (“Antipenultimate”) & Abe Margel: Guest Post (My Balance) – Kyrosmagica
Saturday – October 12 – Paul Kane: Guest Post (“Drip Feed”) &a Joseph Carrabis: Guest Post (Grande Ture) – Undawnted
Sunday – October 13 – DL Mullan: Guest Post (Kurst) & Ell Rodman: Guest Post (The Drummer) - BookPlaces
Monday – October 14 – Joseph Carrabis: Reading (The Exchange) & Guest Post (The Tomb) – Writing to be Read


Thursday, March 14, 2024

Undawnted Presents: a WordCrafter Blog Tour for Northtown Angelus by Robert T. White

On the path of great resistance, Raimo Jarvi, private investigator, searches for answers. Northtown authorities no only lack those answers, but empathy. Without anyone to turn to, P.I. Jarvi tries to discover what really happened to Johnny Dillon for his widow, Cora. With an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, will Raimo Jarvi succeed where others have failed? 

If you like crime-drama and private investigators, then Northtown Angelus is for you. Enjoy the dynamic characters and plot lines in this novel. 
 
Robert T. White offers readers an adventure of the mind and senses with his writing style. 
 
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Style in Crime Fiction, What Value?
Robert White

There are some words in the English-speaking world that can still stop conversation cold. Murder, Kill, Rape—to name three. Unfortunately, given the prominence of vulgarities in our society from top to bottom, one cannot even name the dreaded words that stand-up comedians alone risked using in public without fear of reprisal. The all-too-frequent f-bomb and most racial epithets still have clout but nothing like what they used to possess. Style is one of those ambiguous words that seem to have shed power and meaning rapidly in our time. Like “beauty,” style today is deemed to exist in the eye of the beholder. If you like Linda Fairstein’s or Lisa Scottoline’s fiction, you say that those authors have great style and you can point to the volumes that stretch from one end of a public library’s shelves to the other. “Count ‘em,” you say, and there’s your evidence. Or check the Times bestsellers list and there you find the usual suspects like James Patterson and Clive Cussler. 

At some point the notion of style as being more than personally argumentative becomes necessary if you are to be inclusive in your definition and you find yourself veering helplessly toward the metaphysical. If a physicist hands you a red ball and asks, “What color is it?” and your reply is immediately to say, “Red”; you feel the rightness of your response without demur. If that physicist places the ball in the yard at midnight and asks you the same question, can you so confidently answer “red” when you can’t see anything out there at all? 

That’s the problem with “style,” it seems to me. It becomes personal extremely fast and you are tempted to become overly assertive in your particular defense of the word. No one wants to go on record to say Shakespeare’s has no style. But how far would you get arguing for that lush Elizabethan prose in our slang-riddled, monosyllabic era? Is there a TikTok or Instagram influencer who doesn’t think everything is “awesome”? That word used to be restricted to quaking-before-the-throne-of-God circumstances only. Today it flutters from every teenager’s tongue. Not that word choice and word meanings are the essence of style. (I once read Roland Barthes’ analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine, and I beg you, do not open up that can of structuralist worms.) 

So how do we get such a critical term away from the flotsam and jetsam of criteria that issue from personal subjectivity? Not for the sake of mere semantics but to get a better understanding of why certain writers from the dilettantish drabble writer through the pedantic critics and scholars with their weighty tomes to the writers we read for pleasure in all genres. There’s no yardstick I know of that applies in all cases and situations. 

A better way to start is by example. I recently came across a passage in Martin Cruz Smith’s Havana Bay who described the sluggish water flowing beneath a Moscow bridge in turgid brown folds. The imagery of that brief, incisive description stopped me short and it stays with me, even though I can’t quote the exact words he used. I remember savoring it before continuing. In fact, it’s a rare page of his in any novel that doesn’t have at least one example of that kind of striking blend of the familiar grappled to the exotic in such a way you know exactly where you are in time and space. Does that move the plot? Not incrementally but it holds you in the author’s grasp and, unlike so many bestsellers we could all name, doesn’t allow you to wander off to the next sentence or skip like a goat to keep the plot moving in your head. Less is more.

Smith’s ability to toss a passing glance like that, one of many taken by the seeing-eye narrator, held me in its grip throughout the novel and every one of his Renko books. The accretion of those diamond-sharp images hits some chord in the neocortex, or wherever delight comes into contact with cognition, that enables me to pass a value judgment: Damn, I say to myself, this guy is good . . . But assessing the great from the good and the good from the mediocre isn’t as formulaic as I and other readers would like it to be. There are so few descriptive references to Arkady Renko that you could cut-and-paste them in a paragraph: he’s too thin, smokes like a chimney, is dismissed by cretins and his enemies too easily, loves with passion. It’s not him we need; it’s the mind behind him. 

So, to sum up with a fatuous cliché, we know what we like, we say, to our opponents who champion other writers or, worse, are blind to the greatness in style we see so plainly. Shakespeare certainly had that, even though his contemporary Ben Jonson, who claimed to love him ”this side of idolatry,” wished his greater contemporary had revised “a thousand times” when told Shakespeare never revised a line of his plays. He didn’t like Shakespeare’s mixing of clowns and kings. He had a “magic touch” but he lacked “art.” 

When we talk about the contemporary murder mystery, we are talking more clowns than kings. But if “art” is to be equated with “style,” how can anyone claim that the best writers in the genre do not have it because they deal mainly with clowns/murderers? Of course, murderers can be well-spoken, possess degrees from an ivy league college, but those are minor features of killers and victims alike unless you insist on an all-egalitarian approach of killers, victims, and gumshoes alike. 

I can’t settle the argument but I can offer three criteria for a definition of good contemporary style across the board. My first criterion is simple: a writer can’t use ten words when one or two suffice. Second, a writer cannot violate the boundaries he or she establishes at the outset that include point of view’s restrictions on mind-hopping. 


When I first began reading the Henning Mankell series, I thought the translator had taken too much Ambien at night. Then I got hooked on the catalog of the mundane and the seemingly trivial. I couldn’t wait to grab my next Wallander volume from the shelves. My knowledge of Nordic crime-fiction writers is too thin to allow a comparison other than a brief contrast with the grim landscape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. (Note to David Fincher, director of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Casting Daniel Craig was not breaking a rule to avoid the awkward; it sacrificed verisimilitude for the bottom line.) Two hugely different styles albeit in translation from one language. 

Which brings me to that third rule about greatness in style, something I lifted from a freshman handbook on composition, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. simple word title: Style. It offered rules for everything in good writing and concluded with this rule, which I’m paraphrasing: “Break any rule rather than say something awkward.” It seems to me that the best writers know exactly where and when to break rules, when to follow them, and to do so in a way that creates their own unique signature as writers. Of one thing I am sure, no writer writes not to be read, no matter how skimpy, precious, or elitist the readership. All writers need it the way fish need oxygen passed through their gills. When I ran this essay through the grammar checker, it told me to eliminate a couple uses of “very,” which I did. I did, however, draw the line at ejecting “flotsam and jetsam” for the substituted “miscellaneous items.” There’s a hill I’ll die on. Jonson was right about Shakespeare: he had the magic touch. He could make you see a red ball in a black night.

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Giveaway

Each stop where you leave a comment,

you get another chance to win one of five digital copies,

and one signed print copy of Northtown Angelus.

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Author Bio

Robert T. White writes from Northeastern Ohio. He has published several crime, noir, hardboiled novels and genre stories in various magazines and anthologies. He’s been nominated for a Derringer. “Inside Man,” a crime story, was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. His second hardboiled p.i. series (after the Thomas Haftmann mysteries begun in 2011 with Haftmann's Rules) features Raimo Jarvi in Northtown Eclipse (Fahrenheit Press, 2018) and Northtown Blitz (2020). British website Murder, Mayhem & More cited When You Run with Wolves (rpt. 2018) as a finalist for Top Ten Crime Books of 2018 and Perfect Killer in 2019. “If I Let You Get Me” was selected for the Bouchercon 2019 anthology and The Russian Heist (Moonshine Cove, 2019), another crime thriller, was selected by Thriller Magazine as winner of its Best Novel category. "Out of Breath" and Other Stories is a mixed collection of mainstream and noir fiction (Red Giant Press, 2013). 

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Undawnted's DL Mullan can be booked for your online Blog Tour, Book Event, Book Review (w/ARC), Interview, Writing Conference, or Genre Convention. Ms. Mullan has years of experience in public speaking, readings, presentations, events, and tours.

Book a quality author and presenter with Undawnted: Bookings online form
 


Monday, October 24, 2022

Undawnted Presents: WordCrafter Blog Tour, Joseph Carrabis's Marianne for Visions Anthology

Summary

This short story is about the final stages of life. It's not a coming of age story; it's a coming to the end story.

How do you envision your last days? Marianne answers this question by how her mind starts to slip into fantasies. Marianne tries to balance her mental decline, her other medical issues, and her daughter's concerns with an analytical perspective, sarcasm, and defensiveness. All modes to deflect and shield her from others imposing their will upon her as she withers away.

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Review

The short story Marianne by Joseph Carrabis addresses the fears that each human endures as they draw closer to the end of their lives. The elderly Marianne is confined to a wheelchair, knowing that her prognosis is grim, yet her mind is sharp. She sharpens her wit by foiling the plans of her daughter, Rose, and when that is not enough to satiate her suspicions, she antagonizes the younger woman with airplane tickets to euthanasia-friendly Oregon... to visit her sister, of course.

What Marianne does not see is the perspective of Rose. Her daughter is witnessing her mother's mental decline and is helpless to do anything about it. She is pushed away and treated like a gold digger.

In converse, the daughter is more wrapped up in her stress of being a caretaker than to enjoy the last days with her mother. Rose’s relationship is complicated by her mother’s disgruntled attitude, finances, medical and legal appointments. Rose appears to have little power and is reminded of her insignificance, to the point where Rose visits her mother only once per day.

The narrative asks the reader: which view of the situation is correct? Each character sees the other as a hostile combatant, instead of as family. A true-to-life situation as the older and the younger women become at odds, both afraid to address the real issues of their relationship and what Marianne’s death would mean to them both. As these circumstances often yield two struggling individuals, who are unable to communicate with each other, because their emotions are dominated by ego instead of compassion.  

The story, Marianne, shows how a situation can lead people down the path of ungratefulness. Ungrateful to have a caring daughter who takes care of Marianne. Ungrateful for the time Rose has left with her mother.

The reader is not only taken on a journey of this complicated relationship, but also navigates its audience through the collapsing mind of Marianne herself. A good read that asks many hard questions. In the end, the reader is to decide what it all meant. If being at odds with a failing loved one has meaning at all.

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Purchase 

To read, Marianne, purchase Visions anthology here: https://books2read.com/u/49Lk28.

 

Giveaway 
Five digital copies will be given away in a random drawing at the end of the tour. Each stop visited earns an entry. Let me know you were there by leaving a comment.     

To Enter the Giveaway... go to Writing to be Read and leave a Comment.

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Joseph Carrabis told stories to anyone who would listen, starting in childhood, wrote his first stories in grade school and started getting paid for his writing in 1978. He's been everything from a long-haul trucker to a Chief Research Scientist and holds patents covering mathematics, anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. After patenting a technology which he created in his basement and creating an international company, he retired from corporate life and now he spends his time writing fiction based on his experiences. His work appears regularly in several anthologies and his own published novels. You can learn more about him at https://josephcarrabis.com and find much of his work at http://nlb.pub/amazon.

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Undawnted's DL Mullan, can be booked for your online Blog Tour, Book Event, Book Review (w/ARC), Interview, Writing Conference, or Genre Convention. Ms. Mullan has years of experience in public speaking, readings, presentations, events, and tours.

Book a quality author and presenter with Undawnted: Bookings online form
 

 

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