People might think something’s wrong with me. I’m blogging twice in one day. How can this be?
Well, I promise not to make it a routine. Whenever I spend too much time on the website, it doesn’t take long for me to feel like the effort I put here would be better off spent writing fiction, especially since with a busy day job at a university and all the challenges that come from raising two kids, time is hard enough to come by as it is. But as I menioned earlier, I’m making a little extra marketing push with the book being published this summer, Ghost Detective. Part of that effort is a short story called “The Haunted Breadbox,” which is not only a prequel to Ghost Detective but was also the inspiration for it. Here’s a little more information:
Myron Vale sees ghosts. One hundred billion of them, to be precise.
In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. In fact, he may just be the only one. His strange ability the result of a gunshot to the head while serving as a Portland police officer, a few years later he recovers to forge a new life as private investigator catering to both the living and the dead.
His biggest problem? He can’t tell them apart.
In this short story prequel to Ghost Detective, the first novel featuring Myron Vale, a house call to an old farmhouse finds Vale investigating the most unlikely of haunted places — a breadbox. What lies inside? It’s not at all what Vale expects.
You can read this story for free right now on this website, or download a free copy in any number of formats over at Smashwords.com — .mobi for the Kindle,.epub for the Nook, even PDF for your computer. It’s also available for 99 cents on Amazon.com if you want to make it easy to download it to your Kindle. At the end of the story is an afterword explaining the origin of the story, which then lead to the novel.
This is another great advantage of indie-publishing. I’ve sold many short stories to magazines and anthologies, but if I tried to do the same with this one, it could take six months to a year just sending it around (with no gaurantee anyone would buy it), and another six months to a year before it was published. Then I’d have to wait another three to six months (an exclusivity period) before I could republish it on my site for free.
By releasing this one now myself, I can get it out before Ghost Detective is published, which hopefully will entice readers to pick up the book. I did this once before, with a short story called “A Plunder By Pilgrims,” which was something of a prequel to The Gray and Guilt Sea, and I know for a fact that many, many readers discovered the novel via that short story.
A novel, by the way, which was published under the name Jack Nolte, and is now being re-released under my own name. More about that soon.
