Little Graveyard shipping Feb. 19

I got an e-mail from Roy at Bad Moon Books today, letting me know that Little Graveyard on the Prairie has shipped from the printer. He’ll have copies on Feb. 18 and will be shipping them out to customers the next day.

Have you ordered yours?

It isn’t too late to get one of these limited edition hardcover novellas. What, you need some blurbage to help you open the wallet? Okay.

Horror Drive-in says: Little Graveyard on the Prairie takes place in Oklahoma, the state that Steven Wedel calls his home. He seems to know the land he describes in intimate detail. It’s in his blood, apparently. I sense a personal kinship between the writer and the soil in the story. The soil in Little Graveyard on the Prairie is richly described, but as another good writer once noted, “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier”. In Wedel’s story, the land is barren and the soil of the lead character’s heart is also dead.

Bookotron.com said: ‘Little Graveyard on the Prairie’ begins with one of those nice heartrending scenes that could either be in a Hallmark movie or a horror movie. Harley Shaw is having reality problems, but they’re the least of his problems. With his family gone, his hopes for big money from Big Oil down the toilet, Harley’s made the unwise decision to turn his little family farm into an “all natural” graveyard. The consequences will be far more immediate than heartrending.

Kim Paffenroth said it is, “A touching tale of pain and madness. Wedel’s voice is one of the most intelligent and moving I’ve read lately, and I’m now looking forard to many more such works by him.” (By the way, Kim’s new book Dying to Live: Life Sentence is something you gotta get. It’s the sequel to Dying to Live, one of the best zombie novels ever.)

FearZone called it “…moving, chilling, and rather stunning…” adding “Little Graveyard on the Prairie is yet another fine offering from Bad Moon Books, and further evidence that Steven E. Wedel is a truly gifted author whose works should be on the TBR lists of all serious readers.” FearZone also listed the book on it’s “Favorite Fears of 2008” list.

Trust me, this is what your sweetheart wants for Valentine’s Day.

Random Randomness

If I insult you, then have to explain the insult to you, does it still count as an insult?

Mark Tyree has written an amazing review of Little Graveyard on the Prairie. However, it isn’t public yet, so I can’t point you to it. It’ll be at Horror World next month, though. He compares my little book to the works of Gary Braunbeck and John Little, though.

Work on all fiction has ground to a halt. Again. Too many student essays to read. Why, why, why can’t they understand they have to cite sources, use quotes and do a bibliography in a research essay? Hello. Research? Now I have a box of contest entries to read, too. Oh, I’ll make time for the writing again next week.

I’ve been dragging my English IV class (the same that attempted the essays) through Macbeth for the past week or so. I hate Shakespeare. Oh, I could read some of his plays on my own, but teaching his plays to inner city kids is a nightmare. When those kids are seniors in their last semester of high school … it’s even worse. Getting them to focus on anything school related is almost impossible. Maybe it’d be better if I wasn’t so apathetic about it, but … sheesh, I just don’t like Shakespeare. We’re getting him out of the way early so we can spend several weeks on Old English and Norse mythology.

I have discovered that I love audio books. I’m doing a unit I call Boom and Bust in my AP classes. They’re reading The Great Gatsby and will follow that up with The Grapes of Wrath. Because I’m also reading Grendel, I went and got the audio book of Gatsby. It was hard at first because I kept wanting to look at the page and follow along, but eventually I really got into it. I didn’t even like Gatsby when I read it in high school, but I loved it this time. Now I’m listening to Grapes and it’s so nice to be able to go around doing various things and have the book poured into my mind. And this one … one of my absolute favorite books (a fact that surprises many, considering its socialist message). I suspect I’ll be visiting the library’s audio book section a lot, as there are a lot of classics I’ve been wanting to read and never found the time for.

Back into the forest

This one is for the writers. Or anyone more organized than me, I guess. I’m in a bit of a quandary. I seem to be having an affair on The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. I’m 35,000 words into it, which means I’m more than halfway done since it’s a young adult novel. But the werewolves have called me back to the forest. All weekend I’ve been switching between Girls and Nadia’s Children, the new Werewolf Saga book. I will literary end a sentence in one manuscript and go to the other one. I have never had success working on two major projects, but right now neither seems to be suffering, probably because they are very, very different. I know some of you do multiple books at a time. How do you do it?

Here’s the bigger thing, though. I’m having a heck of a time keeping my characters straight. Girls has been such a long project, put on hold for the super secret project and ignored for the day job, etc., that I’ve simply forgotten some of the characters’ names. With The Werewolf Saga, there are just so freakin’ many names to remember now that I’m up to the fifth book, that I can’t keep them all straight. How do you do it? I would like to create a database where I could search by various criteria, but I have no idea how to create that. When I wrote Shara I kept a handwritten list of characters for reference, but I didn’t do that with Ulrik and now I’m really wishing I had. Any suggestions for keeping all these people organized for easy recall?

For those interested, I’ve only done about 6,000 words of Nadia’s Children. Two new characters have been introduced, but one of those was already killed. He was like a Star Trek character in the Red Shirt of Death.