NEWFANGLED DEATH released!

NEWFANGLED DEATH now available in eBook ($2.99 USD) and print ($6.99 USD)! Please visit the newly opened www.derekachoy.com to see your buying options and read an excerpt!

Description: A volume of sad/strange/silly stories featuring weirdos and sweethearts, immobile birds and neglectful planets, all flavoured with a loving dash of death.

Post Mortem!

After copies of the print version of Newfangled Death arrive for me to approve, we're ready to go! Ideally this will be 1-2 weeks and there will be no glaring errors that stealth bomb me.

The final page count is 54. Here's the description from the back cover:

Sad/strange/silly stories featuring weirdos and sweethearts, immobile birds and neglectful planets, all flavoured with a loving dash of death.

The eBook version will be available for $2.99 at Amazon.com (Kindle MOBI) and Smashwords.com (ePUB, Kindle MOBI, and PDF). Eventually it will spread to other stores like iBooks and Kobo as well.

Physical copies will be available for $6.99 at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (and other Euro Amazons) and Lulu.com. Sadly, I'm not able to list on Amazon.ca for fellow Canadians, but Lulu ships from Ontario if you live here at least.

I went crazy several times during the writing of this project! I'm glad I'm pursuing one of the few professions where lack of sanity is a prerequisite, however.

Next up, work has already begun on a volume of poetry! I think I've warned you already, but it won't be very meter/rhyme-heavy as I've stuck to in the past. You'll get ample free samples from this one though, to see if it's to your tastes. More details as I write!

Fresh Price of Bel Air

Good news! Newfangled Death—my little collection of stories—is near complete (for real this time) and should be available for everyone to purchase or ignore (or both!) in the coming weeks. New development: print editions will be available as well, for a few more bucks! They will be kind of skinny books, but they will love you all the same.

But, bad news, I've run into a minor dilemma, and I was hoping for some input from you guys.

I was planning on a $1 price point for the eBook version. That doesn't have to change, but here's why it became an issue:

- Amazon discourages any price below $2.99 by plummeting the royalty rates down.
- Apparently there are a lot of negative associations with $1 works (flooded "bargain bin" sentiment)
- For the amount of work and time involved, I need to price future releases of this length at at least $2.99 for any hope of ever supporting myself. Will people be upset to pay more for the same length of work?

And to be totally up front, the length of this work is approximately 55-65 pages the size of an average book.

I was considering the following:

- Stick to $1 this time.
- Make it free for the first day! Then price it $2.99.
- Make it $1 for a week or month, then bump it up to $2.99.
- Give it all up and become a blind jazz musician.

Any of those would be fine with me. What do you think?

Getting there

Sometimes I wish I could crumple up my monitor like paper and throw it in a wastebasket. Yes! This is an update about the short fiction collection, which has proved to be much more time consuming than I thought it would be, especially for a project of relatively short length.

Thing is, I'm learning how to write better prose as I go, and I keep having to rework the broken little babies that seemed perfectly healthy the other day. I've also had to toss some out, bring in some new ones, and just flail madly at my keyboard in general.

I won't pretend to know when it'll be done anymore, but I hope it's soon. As fun/agonizing as this has been, I'm dying to move on. Next project will be a volume of poetry—a medium I'm much more comfortable with!

Let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
be
okay.

Okay?

Easter Legs

Grab bag blog! (Grab blag?)

First: Happy Easter! Just like Jesus, I had a dream the other day that my cousin was dating Rosie O'Donnell. She rode a tricycle. I'm pretty sure it was actually a glimpse into an alternate dimension and/or heaven.

*

From "You Are Not So Smart" by David McRaney:

"Bargh conducted a study in which Caucasian participants sat down at a computer to fill out boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or Caucasian men flashed on the screen for 13 milliseconds, faster than the participants could consciously process. 

Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning. Those exposed to the images of the African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw Caucasian faces.

Even though they didn't believe themselves to be racist or harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual."

*

Still plugging away at the stories I'm writing, but they're coming along. The trouble is, I'm getting reacquainted with writing prose as I go along and keep spotting new problems that I would've missed before. This is good, but is also slowing things down. Still want to get them out this month.

And I think I need to start that obligatory dance with social media if I want to take this seriously, so expect at least a Twitter feed and Facebook page to haunt as you please.

*

Jaw-and-entire-face-dropping performance of "The Bad In Each Other" by Feist at the 2012 Junos. Awesome big finish!

*

Question: Do you have any tried and true methods for thwarting the procrastination monster? A simple but effective one for me has been flicking the wi-fi switch off on my laptop. At the very least it makes me think twice about what I'm going to be using the net for.

Recalculating

Sometimes you just don't know where it is till you get there, uh huh? Huh uh. Uh.

The newerfangled Newfangled Death -- that poetry collection I was supposed to be working on -- has mutated  several times and undergone extensive stem cell therapy since I last spoke of it. But like the mighty Frieza, I believe it's found its final form and is ready to fight suddenly blonde people.

So yeah, it's now a collection of short stories! And a couple poem/short story cross-breeds. Some are short, some are long, but all of them will love you equally. There's an overarching theme of death, but it ain't all doom and gloom. If you're familiar at all with the black humour and sad-smiles I seem to gravitate towards, this stuff shouldn't be too scary.

Looking at a total length of 7000-ish words. Still $1 price tag for eReaders or computer reading. I'd suspect early April somewhere. No foolin'! Print editions to come later, compiling a few of these kinda volumes -- probably both at Lulu and Amazon.

Now I need to run off and be a sickly recluse again. It's one of the perks of being a writer.

Newfangled Death

...that's what I'm working on now! It's the tentative name of a mini-collection of new poetry -- both free verse and rhyming -- coming in a month or so to all eReaders and PC/Mac/whatever. It'll be $1 USD and have probably 20-30 poems depending on how their lengths unfold. But no illustrations this time around, because of compatibility with eReaders and because I'd like to take a more direct route to your brain now anyway, if you'll kindly creak open your skull.

And for people who like physical books, the current plan is to release three or four digital collections like this fella and then make a print anthology of them available on Amazon.com. Somewhere under $10 I'm hoping. Somewhere within the year I'm hoping. Shipping may not be great for outside the states (that includes me!) but I'll explore other options as well.

So, I'll keep you updated on that. I'd be thrilled to sell anything at all really, with no self-deprecation intended. I'm glad there are some people who already follow what I do, but this is uphill territory regardless.

In the meantime, I spent a good juicy chunk of February writing a short story for a contest in the Toronto Star, a newspaper around here. When my girlfriend and I went to drop it off (on deadline day, naturally), the box was stuffed full of envelopes. One was even inexplicably housed in a hamster cage by the reception desk. The competition was streaming in and out the door, and while they looked like nice people, let's hope hope they are all awful writers.

I have mixed feelings about the story I wrote, which ended up being a kind of fairy tale somehow, but it's done and it was fun to flail madly at a deadline again.

Oh,

and a week ago, my sister's cat vomited a rubber band.

It was kind of cute.