PINES by Blake Crouch.

This is one you can’t put down (and probably can’t figure out in advance either). Right from the first you feel you’re in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” shoulder to shoulder with the main character FBI agent Ethan Burke. He’s injured, he’s confined to bed in a hospital that’s starting to give him the willies, and he’s got no ID, no phone, no underwear, no shoes, no money, no way out of town, and no one who knows who he is or is willing to believe he is who he says. But he wants to get out of there and he does, spending days wandering around as a wounded fugitive in the very pretty and seemingly very nice town of Wayward Pines trying to figure out what’s going on.

He’s there to find two missing agents. And just about the time he realizes this, PINES veers from “The Twilight Zone” into Shirley Jackson territory and he knows for sure this isn’t a normal reality he’s experiencing. What’s going on?  The town is sheltered between high mountains and all the roads out of it lead right back in. Walking through the woods leads you to an electrified fence with a stark warning “Past this point you will die!”  There are things going on that defy reality.

Keep reading. You’ll be surprised. Thriller, horror novel, mystery, PINES is all of this plus a spoiler genre I won’t identify just to keep you guessing. I was really hooked. 

WHAT I’VE READ THIS WEEK—PINES by Blake Crouch.  Available at  Kindle and other ebook sources, plus as a paperback.

PYANFAR     1996-2012  (probably born 1993) Photo by Gretchen Rix

COMING SOON

TO AN E-BOOK STORE NEAR YOU (plus paperback, too)—

FREE COOKIES AND ALMOST- FREE SKETCHES AT ARMADILLOCON.

We had a real stroke of luck at ArmadilloCon last weekend when a costume vendor wanted to change tables with us and we ended up next to Dead Reckoning comic book artist and writer Danny Allain and his publishing partner Paul Soileau (http://facebook.com/DeadReckoningComic) . Our marketing plan was to give out free cookies created for us by 2Tarts bakery in New Braunfels (http://2tarts.com) to resemble characters in my paranormal western/horror/pulp/action-adventure/alternate history/legendary love story and pseudo science fiction novel ARROYO (http://amzn.com/B0067NCEJ4) . Their marketing plan was to sketch anyone willing to pay $5.00 as a zombie (or to draw anything else you wanted).

Cookies first. We had Daniel cookies. We had Ramona cookies. We had cookies that were supposed to be Sinjin cookies but that didn’t turn out so good (they looked like a certain part of the male anatomy walking on a pair of legs, shall we say). We had the talking cats of Lockhart cookies. We had the Dr. Eugene Clark Library cookies, the flying saucer cookies, the Bigfoot cookies, and ghosts and haunted houses to promote Patrick Kampman’s two books, too (http://patrickkampman.com) . Not expecting to sell copies of  my romance novel The Cowboy’s Baby  at a science fiction convention (but we did, we did!) we did not bring the infamous toilet paper cookies for it.

The cookies worked.

Sketches second.  The two young men with their comic book sitting at the table next to us did sketches of everybody as zombies to attract attention. We didn’t want to be zombies, so we hired Danny Allain to illustrate a scene from each of my novels. Turns out he’s a hell of a good comic book artist.  He gave us a sketch of Ramona laboring in the ARROYO basin with the possessed wooden Indian strapped to her back.  He sketched out the goats fighting over the toilet paper scene with the bull from THE COWBOY’S BABY.  And finally he gave us the Boo Radley dog in the graveyard sketch representing my new mystery novel TALKING TO THE DEAD GUYS.

I don’t think the zombie sketches worked as well as the cookies, but I bet they’ll be remembered and sought out in the future because of them.

Just offhand I’d say that cookies and sketches did a lot better for the bunch of us than bookmarks, key-chains,  fountain pens, pencils and postcards, the usual promotional materials for everyone.  Was it cost effective? Well, no. Those special cookies cost us a bundle, but our goal was to sell my books not to make a lot of money.  The guys?  Well, in our opinion they priced their work too low, but they met a lot of people who’ll remember them.  And we bought their comic book.

The point to all this:  if you are doing a promotional activity, make sure you do something interesting or valuable for your customers (and keep your fingers crossed that you end up next to someone else doing  innovative and interesting things).  And have fun with it.  There are a lot of women who are going to remember those Sinjin cookies.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK—Red Church by Scott Nicholson.  The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block.  Carrie by Stephen King.  Thunderball by Ian Fleming.

Photos by Roxanne Rix and Gretchen Rix.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK—Black Sunday by Thomas Harris.

My books are at 

https://www.amazon.com/author/gretchenrix

THE NEW CRIMSON ROMANCE Spicy novel INFAMOUS by Irene Preston.

Keeps you interested?  Absolutely. INFAMOUS is an I-Can’t-Put-It- Down book.

Has sexy, blood-stirring love scenes?  Of course.  And guaranteed to make you blush at least once.  INFAMOUS is the debut romance novel from Texas writer Irene Preston.

Second chances at love?  That, too.  Bestselling Hollywood tell-all author Jessica Sinclair lives the good life; parties, parties, parties, but that’s not what she really wants. She wants her husband and her adopted daughter back.  And he’s never quite gotten around to divorcing the bane of his existence either, hoping against hope that someday she’ll value the quiet, stable life he offers, never realizing how they’re missing the mark around each other until it’s almost too late.

Short (too short by my reckoning; I wanted it to go on a bit longer), easy to get lost in, and with well-drawn if familiar figures from the headlines of what we imagine Hollywood to be like, INFAMOUS delivers the goods.  The story is compelling, the characters are believable.  If you like short, sexy contemporaries you’ll love this one by Irene Preston.  And more good news, she’s hard at work on another novel about one of the secondary characters here.

Avaliable at Amazon  and at Barnes and Noble and at  ITunes

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK—Infamous by Irene Preston.  The White Queen by Philippa Gregory.

Novels and short stories by Gretchen Rix are available at 

https://www.amazon.com/author/gretchenrix

$1000.00 first prize. $500.00 second prize. $250.00 third prize. And $250.00 first prize for Junior Contest winners.  All this money and really rad first place trophies, too. Top also-rans get prize ribbons, which are pretty nifty on their own. I want one.

This is the fourth year of the SCARE THE DICKENS OUT OF US ghost story writing contest. The entry fee of $20.00 for the main contest and $5.00 for the Junior contest goes to the Friends of the Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart, Texas, the oldest continuously-in-use library in Texas, and helps pays for its programming.  All of the entry fee money goes to the friends/library; the contest is privately funded and run by volunteers.

Deadline for entries is October 1, 2012. We want ghost stories. Please, put a ghost in the story. As a major character. 5,000 words tops. In English. Typewritten (I guess these days it would be computer printed) on one side of the page only, please.  We’re accepting entries now. Avoid the rush.

Junior Contest is open to ages 12-18. Anyone can enter the main contest, but they have to pay the $20.00 entry fee even if they are 18 years old or younger. This contest is open to all countries, but must be in English. Entry fees from foreign countries (except Canada) are best sent via international money orders. We want original ghost stories written specially for this contest. However, we will not publish them. After the contest you are free to submit to publications or self-publish.

See full rules at http://clarklibraryfriends.com .

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK—Under The Moon’s Shadow by T.L. Haddix.  Pudgygate by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

See my work at 

https://www.amazon.com/author/gretchenrix

PHOTOS BY ROXANNE RIX

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS? 

One famous writer used to say he sent off for them like box-top prizes. I know that some popular and successful writers just take a title and then run with it. There are others who use word association to build a story. And then there are some who want to write about themselves.

I wrote THE COWBOY’S BABY from the title out. Some of it was obvious—cowboy, baby (but if you’ve read TCB you already know it’s not just any old cowboy and it’s a very different sort of baby). But then before I put a single word to paper, I decided my cowboy was going to be Sleeping Beauty. Why?  Because I like these sort of stories and have always wanted to write one.  That’s the only reason why. (Researching Sleeping Beauty tales was interesting. Anyone other than me run into the Anne Rice versions? No comment.)

So, now I had a sex (female) and a problem for her (sleeping? obliviousness?). To make things easier on me, I picked a setting I knew—a gated community with a golf course, swimming pools, lots of nice homes and too many middle class retirees (my parents had lived in such a place). The golf course itself gave me my other main character and one of the pivotal plot lines. At first Ellison Stewart was going to be the golf pro. Again, before I put any words to paper he morphed into the managing director of the whole place, complete with pretty, perky assistant. And since he had the pretty, perky assistant, then Sleeping Beauty had to have the stable, steady, tried and true ranch hand beau. Yes, Sleeping Beauty owns a ranch. This is Texas.

Then all of it just about wrote itself from these few basic ideas. THE COWBOY’S BABY is the only book, the only piece of fiction I’ve written from the title out. Oh, wait. I did do another a very, very long time ago. It was sort of a challenge from Harlan Ellison in an article he wrote. He said no one could write an interesting story called THE CHAIR, and I told myself I could.  I wrote it, but it didn’t work.

Back to THE COWBOY’S BABY and the title. Since I wrote the book entirely from the title, I couldn’t change the title once I was finished. It never occurred to me to look it up and see if there were any more books named THE COWBOY’S BABY. Well, there are quite a few named THE COWBOY’S BABY, but from the covers I can pretty much tell you they aren’t anything like mine. 

So, where do you get your ideas? I got mine from a title and extrapolated a complete story from it. When I found the cowboy I found the Sleeping Beauty idea. When I found the setting I found the hero and the problem that brings the two main characters together for the first time. When I found the hero I found a lot of secondary characters. And when I moved to Lockhart, Texas, I found the cowboy’s baby.

All my novels and short stories can be found at  https://www.amazon.com/author/gretchenrix 

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK—Blossom by Andrew Vachss.

IF YOU LOVE DEAN KOONTZ, YOU’LL LOVE BLAKE AND JORDAN CROUCH and their new thriller EERIE.

EERIE is a haunted house novel for adults, almost impossible to put down. That said, the story turns around on itself at the end, taking us to totally unexpected places. Which is why I’m comparing EERIE to recent Dean Koontz.

Police detective Grant Moreton, never fully recovered from a brutal car accident in his childhood, abruptly finds his estranged sister Paige working out of her house as a high-dollar prostitute for successful businessmen. Businessmen just like some of the men who’ve recently disappeared in the case he is investigating. She doesn’t welcome his return, but once reuinted Grant is bound to the house and its secrets just as she is. They literally cannot walk out the front door to freedom, and it’s killing the girl.

There’s something in her bedroom that won’t let them go at any price. But it’s sending her clients away, more like zombies than living men. Why?

Compelling thriller/horror, EERIE  doesn’t go where you expect. It’s nice to see that in a novel every once in a while. Available in all the usual places:

Amazon Kindle Store  

Barnes and Noble Store

Createspace Store

You can find my books and short stories at https://www.amazon.com/author/gretchenrix . The closest thing I’ve written to this genre is When Gymkhana Smiles.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK— The Old Vengeful by Anthony Price.  Thoroughly Kissed by Kristine Grayson.  Eerie by Blake Crouch and Jordan Crouch.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK—Deadly Games by Lindsay Buroker.

Photos by Roxanne Rix

My novels and short stories can be found at https://www.amazon.com/author/gretchenrix