Tag Archive: anthology
ONLY 6 MORE DAYS UNTIL…
– 26 tales that span 150 years
– Stories of love, laughter, tears, wonder, hope, growth and wonder
– Kindle $3.99/Trade Paperback $15.99
-Pre-Orders are available now at:
And now a sneak peek…
“The Snowman”
December 2014
by Helen Krummenacker
A chilly December evening was made cozy not only by the fireplace, but the scents of vanilla, cinnamon, and ginger from baking in the kitchen. Marissa turned the radio to a station playing all Christmas music. Isabella was excited even beyond the average child at Christmas time, for this was her first Christmas tree, her first time seeing fairy lights, and even the radio was a novelty for her. She would sit on the sofa, stare at the tree and get up again every few minutes to better distribute the ornaments for color balance and even presentation.
Marissa and Lisa were helping Nathan with paper chains, a decoration he remembered from his childhood. The girls were using a ladder to reach high, but Nathan took care of sites out of their reach. Otto, having recently surrendered the kitchen to Penny, who was making a couple of her own favorite treats, had started to show Richard how to wire pine and holly into swags to place around. “So ‘Boughs of holly’ are just branches done up to decorate the place?”
“Yes. Deck and decorate have the same word as a root.”
“Ain’t that something. I always wondered about that song. Especially the gay apparel.”
“That meant jolly, bright colored, festive.”
“And that makes ‘Johnny Comes Marching Home’ a lot better,” Richard laughed. The professor was all right by him. Strange and a little weird how he treated the boss like a kid sometimes, but when he was around, you always felt a little bit smarter.
Just then, a new tune came on the radio. “Frosty the snowman, was a jolly, happy soul–”
“Turn that off!” Otto snapped. Isabella looked at him in shock a moment before heading to the radio and pushing the big circle button she’d learned made these new electric things go on or off. “I’m sorry… I just do not like that song,” he explained, suddenly aware that everyone was watching him, puzzled by his uncharacteristic change of mood. “I really do not like it. You would not like it, either, if you knew how dangerous that snowman could have actually become.”
“Wait, Frosty was real?” Marissa asked skeptically.
“There are more things on heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” quoted Otto, then sighed. “Yes. Frosty was real, and he was the result of my missing an important detail and behaving carelessly.”
“Story time!” Lisa called out.
“Oh, yes, we have to hear about this,” Marissa added.
“Really?” Otto asked, as if surprised by the attention.
“Even I haven’t heard this one,” said Nathan, “and it sounds like a doozy.”
Otto took a seat on the sofa, next to Isabella, and the others gathered around. Richard kept at it with the greenery, but still cocked an ear and moved so he could see Otto’s face and gestures. Taking a deep breath, the professor began to tell the tale in a rich, melodic voice…
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****COMING DECEMBER 1st, THE LATEST INSTALLMENT OF THE PARA-EARTH SERIES****
Twenty-five stories, spanning 150 years…
“The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home” introduced a new cast of characters to the Para-Earth Series. This anthology answers and raises questions about their backstories and relationships.
What otherworldly threats has the Professor dealt with? How did Nathan’s altered self affect his service in the Civil War? What other mysteries linger on Nathan’s estate? What did a German like the Professor do during WWII? Who are some of the other people Nathan has met over his unnaturally long life? Are Nathan and the Professor the only ones who’ve had close encounters with Para-Earth beings?
These and more, including the return of certain characters from “The Bridge” or “The Ship” will be explored within these pages.
KINDLE PRE-ORDERS BEING TAKEN NOW AT THE LINK BELOW:
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And I’m back, sort of.
Okay, I’m still a bit unwell, but finally on the mend. In the meantime let’s continue with that discussion about some of the things I learned putting together our first anthology.
First off it was somewhat easier than creating an entire novel. With a novel you have to keep track of so many things like character development, interactions, subplots, pace of the story, etc. Now with an anthology, you still have a lot of stories to contend with but each one is self-contained and has its own beginning and end. You don’t have to be worried about how they fit into the main tale. Plus you can have a greater variety of characters and give each tale a flavor all its own. Sounds pretty easy so far right? Well, here’s where things started to get a little more complicated for me.
Like a novel, an anthology does need to have a certain feeling of cohesiveness to it. There must be some facet or factor that makes the reader feel like the stories all belong together in that one volume. This is of course fairly easy to do when you’re dealing with a bunch of stories by various authors dealing with the same subject matter. “The Penguin Book of Vampires” is a great example. It contains dozens of authors within its pages with each one using an actual vampire character or a variation on that theme.
Another simple method of dealing with this cohesive problem is to do an anthology that contains works by the same author. One of my favorite authors is the legendary Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer beyond compare.
Throwing a collection of his works together should be easy right? Wrong! While known for his volume of work in the field of science-fiction, Mr. Asimov also wrote mysteries, as well a huge body of non-fiction. So here you have to ask yourself what kind of anthology would you want? Do you want to have a sampling from different areas of his works to showcase just how versatile he was? Or would you rather want to focus on just one genre of his work at a time? Considering the volume of work the man left behind, most anthology creators have chosen the latter. This was especially true when he was still with us.
In the case of his mystery sleuths “The Black Widowers”, the publishers gathered all his published tales with these characters who solve puzzles and mysteries while sitting in a restaurant. The publishers also got Mr. Asimov to create an introduction to each collection (there were 5 all together), as well, but they didn’t stop there. Mr. Asimov provided some brand new tales that had never been published to make each collection more special. Furthermore, he add afterthoughts to every story giving the readers new insights to his characters as well as how he came up with the puzzles.
From there I started looking through the other anthologies by various authors (HP Lovecraft, sci-fi and horror collections) in our personal library to see what was done in those cases. And guess what I discovered, each collection had an Introduction/Preface depending on if the works were all the same author or by various authors. Furthermore, just about every tale in each anthology also had some thoughts at the beginning or end of it talking about the author, or thoughts they’d had on the work. Quite different than just having an “About the Author” at the end of your novel. Naturally we had hour work cut out for us, but there was still the issue of a feeling of connection between the stories. Did we have one or not?
To answer this question I found myself going back to the original source for many of the stories in our anthology, our online blog “The Vampyre Blogs – Private Edition”.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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Last night Helen and I finished the final story for our upcoming anthology!
Thank you! Thank you! You’re all being too kind. But today’s post is not to talk about the anthology itself, as much as what went into making it. How did it differ from writing full-length novels? Was it easier? Was it harder? What was the process like? Where did we get all the stories for it, etc.?
Well, for starters, coming up with a decent number of stories was and wasn’t hard really. Helen had been writing stories long before e-books and well before I tried my hand at penning a tale. I can easily say I learned so much from her earlier attempts at getting published, and let me tell you she got damn close to seeing some of her work in print. But, that’s a tale for another entry.
What I want to say is that I learned a lot about what to expect when I decided to try going the traditional published route. Although in my case, I started shortly after the birth of e-publishing and after 2-3 years of trying to get an agent to represent and hearing over and over again “You’ve got something here, but you crossed several genres and I wouldn’t know what publishing house to try and sell it to.”
You see, at that time (and this still seems to hold true today) publishers don’t like to take risks on unknown authors or mixed genres. They want a straight up “Mystery”, “Thriller”, “Horror”, “Science Fiction”, etc. They’re not keen on trying to sell a book that crosses multiple genres like the Para-Earth Series which we classify as “Paranormal/Sci-Fi”.
Now some of you may be pointing out that they do it more often these days, but most of those authors are well-known like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, J. K. Rowling, etc. who all have proven sales track records.
Anyway, getting back to how our upcoming anthology came to be a reality.
During that 2-3 years I tried to get published the traditional way, more stories were taking shape. New characters and ideas were forming. One of them was vampire I called Nathan Eoghan (pronounced Ewan) Steward. I swore I’d never do a vampire character, unless I could introduce new angle or angles to the character. Yet I still wanted to keep a lot of the traditional trademark strengths and weaknesses people have come and know and recognize.
By this time, I had already been blogging for several years and had learned from other writers the concept of giving sneak peeks into upcoming works, and even sharing short stories. This is done to introduce characters and concepts to prospective readers and build a demand for them. So, after creating a vampire character that would fit nicely into our paranormal/sci-fi concept, I began doing short stories with Nathan over on a new blog called “The Vampyre Blogs – Private Edition”. Over the course of 3 years we had a number of tales about Nathan and introduced a number of his friends who appeared with him in “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home”. And we’re still making new stories. And that presented a problem, how many people want to wade through 4-5 years of blog posts to read all those stories? Furthermore, most of those tales are rough 1st drafts and it shows.
During this time, I noticed some of my fellow authors who had created short stories on their blogs were bundling them into anthologies and that got us thinking. With all the stories we’d already created, why couldn’t we create an anthology centered around all those stories on the blog? While it sounded nice and easy, it also didn’t feel completely right to me. While having all those earlier stories put into a more convenient format, shouldn’t we give the readers more? Shouldn’t there be new never before seen stories in the collection? Furthermore, should the stories not be just about Nathan but his friends, and even characters from our first two novels “The Bridge” and “The Ship”?
This led to Helen coming up with the idea of recycling some of her earlier works which were firmly established in the realm of the macabre. With a little reworking and adding scenes, she felt a number of those pieces could easily fit in with our Para-Earth Series, while also giving those unread tales a chance to finally see the light of day.
*Now I want to pause and say one thing. Remember how I told you all, many posts ago, never to toss out your unfinished works, or fragments because you never knew when they might fit into some new idea/concept? This is a perfect example of why you do that. You just never know when that day might come.*
So right there, we had some brand new stories to slip into the anthology. But we didn’t stop there, we went ahead and created several more brand new stories just for the collection itself. The result? One third of the tales appearing in this anthology are completely brand new.
Plus, we also added an afterthought following each story, sharing some of the who, what, where, and how each tale came into existence. We thought it only right to share some of what the writing process can be like and hopefully inspire others to take that next step in whatever creative endeavors they are involved in.
Now, seeing how long this entry is getting and knowing there’s still a lot more to share, I’m going to end this one here. I know I covered a lot of background areas today and haven’t really gotten to more of the technical and details of actually what went into the building of the anthology. But rest assured that will be covered in the next installment.
Until then take care and keep writing everyone.
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First I’d like to thank all the guest bloggers, authors, and reviewers who were so kind to supply our blog with posts. It gave me some much needed time to get some rest and help family members who had suffered a terrible loss. It also allowed us to get back to work on our anthology “The Vampyre Blogs – One Day At a Time” which will be coming out in early October, a perfect time for creepy stories and tales of encounters with strange beings. With only two stories left to be completed and edited, we will soon be lining up Beta-Readers and then doing our final edits.
Work has also been progressing on “The Door” latest full-length novel in the Para-Earth Series, and “The Pass” the first installment in a brand new series co-written with Richard Caminiti.
In the meantime, I have been studying and purchasing the necessary equipment to begin audio-readings. As you can see below I’ve been slowly setting up a “Recording Studio” in our office/guest room.
Now some of you may be asking “Why are you doing this? Don’t you have enough writing to do?” Well the answer is simply, a growing number of people have been telling us that they’d love to get our books but they prefer “Audiobooks” because they don’t always have time to sit and read. Or they lose track of the book they’re reading, etc-etc. This I can believe because I know a number of our co-workers are driving from over the hill from San Jose or Monterey, you name it. Plus, there are a number of folks who always have earbuds on and are not always listening to music.
“Why do it yourselves? Why not hire someone to do the reading and converting them into audiobooks?”
Once more I refer back to a number of folks who’ve actually heard me doing public speaking and reading aloud who insist I should be the one to do the audio-readings. And there are a number of readers who would prefer to hear the words spoken by the one who actually wrote them. This is a preference I share, I love hearing the author bringing their work to life because who understands the story better than they do?
As for how soon will any of our books be ready for audio? I’ll simply say that we’re just experimenting with audio-readings at this point. I’m going to try my hand at some classic short stories by others like HP Lovecraft and share them here and on YouTube to get feedback and maybe some tips from those who are more experienced in doing audiobooks. Furthermore, I want to know what it’s like doing audio recordings, who knows it may lead to a new character or even a storyline. After all they say write what you know, and drawing from life is always a much more satisfying for me when I’m creating a story.
Now if any of you are interested in hearing what happens on this little journey, I am planning on sharing in detail what I experience and learn as this adventure continues. I’ll be starting with the equipment and why some of it was chosen in an upcoming entry. And as I said before, I’ll be sharing some of the actual audio recordings for you all to get a taste of what the results are like.
Again some of my first attempts will be short pieces by other authors some which are in the Public Domain. I’m choosing those first because there is a volunteer project called LibriVox which is similar to Project Gutenberg which takes books/stories in Public Domain and are making them available for free here on the internet. However, it’s much easier to reproduce typed words than it is to get audio versions and LibriVox depends on volunteer readers to record and submit works for public enjoyment, especially for those who are blind for instance.
So, that’s all I have to report for now. In the meantime we’ll finish getting the anthology “The Vampyre Blogs – One Day At a Time” ready for release, as well as getting other writing projects closer to finished first drafts.
Until next time, keep writing!
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Guess what?
September has been quite the month for me and Helen. Some of you may remember that about a month ago, my little blue laptop became… ‘unreliable’ to the point I dared not risk any of our stories on it. So it was sent to the wayside, leaving only our desktop (which I could not bring to work of course) and Helen’s laptop which she needs on a daily basis for her online college classes. This put a serious dent in my ability to write or even be online as often as I wished, much less getting much writing done except on weekends.
We also had expenses to take care of, like college books for Helen which took priority over replacing my laptop. Finally, things were looking up just on the eve of my week-long vacation at the beginning of September when illness and car troubles reared their ugly heads and forced us to push the laptop purchase back even further. After getting the car situation squared away (over the course of most of my vacation), our desktop computer joined the little blue laptop by giving up the ghost.
This left us with just Helen’s laptop and my Kindle and little else. Finally about a week ago, our finances were stable enough for us to purchase a refurbished desktop and a refurbished laptop together for about $300.00 (thank you Amazon, you guys are a God-send). However, the delivery time for each computer was about another week or so, which meant I was still cut off from real productivity. This led to a decision about pushing back the release date of our upcoming anthology book. We had hoped to have the book ready for beta-readers by now, but with the delays in writing and the upcoming holidays, finding readers who have the time to even look at the book will be difficult. Furthermore, the earliest we could get the book out would be a week or two before Christmas which is not a good time for indie authors to sell unless they have a huge fan base already. It’s around Christmas the the big publishers make a massive push and getting your own book noticed at this time is a nightmare.
However, early January is an ideal time for new indie books because the holiday obligations are over and people have lots of lovely gift certificate cards they want to use on Amazon, B and N, etc.
With this in mind, we still wanted to catch some of the holiday spirit and have decided to release “The Vampyre Blogs: One Day At A Time” on January 5th, which happens to be Twelfth Night (or the 12th Day of Christmas). This works great for us in a number of ways, especially since the first story in that anthology takes place around New Years Day (or on Twelfth Night itself, Helen has plans for a story that may be finished in time to add to the anthology… we’ll see).
There has been one other thing that forced us to push the release date of the book, namely getting used to the new computers. Since both are refurbished, this means that all programs were erased from the hard drives and one is mostly left with whatever operating system remains. This meant, no MS Office (i. e. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.), very basic Anti-Virus protection, or other special programs a writer might really want/need.
Now, being that we are on a budget decisions had to be made about what to load up onto our new computers. How did we handle that? You’ll find out in our next post, but the word “FREE” figures heavily into the solution.
Until then, take care and keep writing my friends…
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First I’d like to thank everyone who took advantage of my “Hobbit Birthday” party. Over 30 copies of “The Vampyre Blogs – Coming Home” were snatched up. While I would’ve loved to have seen triple digits, I’m not going to complain. The book got into more readers hands and that is always a good thing in my opinion. Hopefully, this will lead to some more reviews. Sadly, Nathan and company have been stuck in the single digits as far as reviews go on Amazon, with absolutely none on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.
So I’m going to offer everyone who is interested the opportunity to get a free copy of the book (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, PDF, even paperback) in exchange for a fair and honest review. Reviews are important to bringing a book to a wider audience. We all know that whenever we think about purchasing a book or almost anything these days, we check online to see what kind of rating the item has.
Naturally, I’d love to see a lot of 4 and 5 star reviews, but I leave that up to the reviewers. I ask for honest and I mean it. If you found the book wasn’t to your taste and you don’t wish to leave a review, just let me know so I’m not left in limbo wondering what happened. The only thing I ask is that the reading and the review be done within 2 months of you getting the book. If by chance you volunteer and life gets in the way, again just let me know. Life happens to all of us including yours truly, so no worries. Just stay in touch is all I ask.
So if anyone wishes to be a reviewer, please e-mail me at:
allan.krummenacker@gmail.com
Please include your name, e-mail address, and what book format you want and I’ll be in touch with you shortly.
On another note…
I’m happy to announce that there will be an anthology involving my vampyre and friends, which will be released this December. This volume will contain ‘select’ short stories from my other blog “The Vampyre Blogs – Private Edition” (link: https://thevampyreblogs.wordpress.com/). The reason for this is that I’ve been told by a number of people that they find it hard scrolling through a bunch of old blog entries to find the short stories, even though they really want to read them. And since that blog is over two and a half years old, I know there’s a lot of stuff to wade through.
However, the anthology will not just contain stories from here, we are including 4-5 brand new stories just for the collection, which will NOT be reproduced here. They will only be found within the pages of the anthology itself. The total number of tales to appear in this first anthology has yet to be decided so stay tuned for more details.
In other news:
Book 2 of the Vampyre Blogs is now officially under way.
At this time “The Vampyre Blogs – Family Ties” release date should be early October 2018 (which is why I’m releasing the anthology in the meantime, so as not to leave you all high and dry without anything new). The story will take place two weeks after the conclusion of the first novel and will open with Nathan’s return, along with new trouble brewing.
The presence of Isabella will raise new questions and concerns for all who dwell under his roof, while an unscrupulous developer tries to influence the upcoming town council elections so he can get his hands on 1000+ acres of land Nathan’s home stands on. Then there’s Marisa’s father. Are the cancer treatments he’s receiving really helping or will Nathan have to undergo a procedure that could leave him more vulnerable than ever to an attack from an old foe he believed had been vanquished?
Finally, “The Door” which has been plagued by numerous starts and stops has been growing and is coming along very nicely. This book continues the saga of Alex, Veronica, Julie and Cassandra and will wrap up several lingering story fragments including who the mysterious white-haired man is that has been stalking Cassandra for the last year. It will also reveal why the ghostly Brandon has watched over the heiress all these years, as well as introduce some new characters who will play a pivotal role in the entire Para-Earth Series in the future.
So as you can see there’s a lot going on in the writing department for me and I hope the results will please and intrigue you all.
Until next time, stay tuned to this blog and keep writing.
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Book review time again. Today I wanted to share with you my review on what I consider one of THE best collections of vampire stories ever compiled. It covers some of the earliest vampire tales known and finishes with more modern ones from the 1980’s. With the many takes on vampires we see these days from Anne Rice to Stephanie Meyer, I thought it might be interesting for you all to check out some other takes on the vampire genre done by other authors over the decades. So without further ado, allow me to introduce you all to…
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF VAMPIRE STORIES is one of the best anthologies I’ve ever found. Part of the reason is that it covers authors who’ve touched on this subject as far back as 1816 and goes up to 1984. There are a number of familiar names in this book like Clark Ashton Smith, Sheridan Le Fanu, Tanith Lee, and August Derleth to name just a few. But what fascinates me the most is seeing how the vampire legend is explored. We meet the legendary “Varney The Vampire”, the seductive and dangerous “Carmilla”, as well as Stoker’s missing chapter from Dracula which was released as a short story several years after the novel itself was published. I understand in some later printings, it was put back into the novel where it belonged. Alas my copy of Dracula is one of the ones without it, so finding this missing chapter in this collection was a treat for me.
The first 2 installments in this collection: “Fragment of a Novel” (1816) and “The Vampyre” (1819) were of particular interest to me since their creation were the direct result of a bet made between the poet Percy Shelley, his wife Mary, Lord Byron and John Polidori. The four were spending a summer together and during a particularly boring rainy night they all agreed to a little contest. Each was to create a full length horror story within a certain amount of time. These 2 stories were the entries by Byron and Polidori respectively. Neither is fully finished. In fact Mary Shelley was the only one to complete her story the legendary “Frankenstein”.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” is another brilliant piece in this collection. Published in 1872, it predates Stoker’s more famous “Dracula” by a few decades. Considered a ‘lesbian’ vampire story since both the victims and the antagonist are women. But it’s here where we really find one of the first demonstrations of the sensuous behavior that has been built upon by so many modern writers of vampire fiction. Yet, it is not love or real affection. I’ll quote a passage from the story so you can see what I mean.
“…the vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling passion
of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and
stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will
never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim.
But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement
of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases
it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to
its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast…”
So here we see that alluring nature that is so eroticized these days. But clearly in this passage we see that clearly there is no real affection for the victim at all. It’s fascinating to see how one idea is singled out and made romantic, while the consequences are ignored these days. However, I cannot criticize modern writers for this. Every author wants to put a different spin on an old legend and this can be seen throughout this collection.
We have “Luella Miller” by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman in 1902. No blood letting here, but the title character definitely has a kind of vampiric nature, willing or otherwise. She is almost a sympathetic character in some ways.
Later we find C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau” in 1933, where the author takes us on a science fiction journey to another planet where we meet a vampire-like being, who also shares some resemblance to the legendary Medusa of ancient Greece.
There’s also the legendary Fritz Lieber’s offering “The Girl With The Hungry Eyes” from 1949. Or August Derleth’s 1939 “Drifting Snow” where we meet a pair of Snow Vampires.
For almost a century authors have been putting their own spin on this famous myth and many will continue for years to come, myself included.
I give this collection a full 5 STAR rating and highly recommend it to any fan of the genre.
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Greetings everyone. I wish to make a couple of announcements.
First, after careful consideration and evaluating where things are at, I’ve decided to aim for releasing the book in time for June. This way people can enjoy it as part of their Summer reading.
As a result of this decision I’m declaring the Kickstarter a failure and ended. Mind you, I am not angry or upset by this. In fact I think it may be a blessing in disguise. I will have more time to rework the book and possibly have some Beta-testers read it to get a better idea how my unpaid team and I do at getting it edited as best we can. If there still seem to be a lot of problems, then I may try another Kickstarter or find another way to raise the money for a professional editor.
I’d like to take this moment to thank everyone who did pledge to the Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was not going to succeed, but I do appreciate your belief in me and your support.
Remember “THE SHIP” is still coming. I am not giving up on it. I’m just giving myself more time and breathing space to get it in the best shape possible. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks.
ALSO: I will be appearing in an anthology being printed over in England soon, so I’ll keep you all appraised about that as I hear more on that front.
On a final note, I will also be releasing another book later this year. “THE VAMPYRE BLOGS” which is destined for a Christmas release, since that will be the time frame of the story. In the meantime, you can read entries by the characters on my blog that is dedicated to that novel. Keep in mind, the entries you read online will NOT be appearing in the novel. They are merely to help prospective readers become a little more familiar with the characters and their histories, before the book comes out. After all, I can only fit so much into one book. (grin)
Thanks for your attention and support. Take care and keep writing everyone.
Musings Of Two Creative Minds 