Emerald Coast checks in with a new review

A new review of Fixer is up today from reviewer Brenda Shoffner, who has some nice things to say:

…But then scientists who were experimenting with time start turning up dead one by one. And Bain is recruited to help find out what is going on. The answer kind of blew my mind, in a good way.

The review is available here

I live less than five miles from the finish line of the Boston Marathon, so it’s embarrassing to admit that the attacks had almost no tangible impact on me.  I don’t watch the race– I have for the past 25 years now held a job in an industry (banking) that does not take Patriot Day off– and I didn’t know anyone who was at the blast.  (Aside from a high school classmate of mine.)  Basically, it screwed up my bike commute, which would have gone through the crime scene.

I’m not saying I had no sympathy or empathy for the people wounded and killed, I’m just saying it was hard to feel like this was happening to anyone around me because even though it was, I didn’t have any personal connection to it.

Lockdown

And then came Friday, when Watertown was put on house arrest and everyone in the metropolitan area was told to stay where they were for the foreseeable future.

On the one hand this seemed extreme.  On the other hand, there was an armed 19 year old throwing bombs at law enforcement, jacking cars and running over family members to escape custody, so who knew what could happen?  Nineteen year olds are scary enough, frankly, but the ones who manage to combine terrorism with MarioKart can also be wildly unpredictable.

I had no problem, then, with the idea that maybe none of us should go outside for a little while.

Watertown

This is when it hit home for the first time how up-close this all really was, because the denouement of the Marathon bombing was going to be taking place in Watertown involving a couple of kids from Cambridge.  I grew up in Watertown, and I live in Cambridge, and so I spent the day playing How-Is-This-Directly-Connected-To-Me Bingo.

This game began when I learned that my mother–who still lives in my childhood home–was only four blocks from where the shootout-involving-actual-bombs ended up.  She could smell gunpowder in the air and heard the gunshots, and had to make sure she was dressed for when the SWAT team showed up to search her house.

Six degrees

It just got crazier from there.

• Police closed down the entire town and set up camp in front of the Arsenal Mall, which I drive past daily because wife Deb‘s employer is across the street from it.  Her building was in view in some shots.  A few blocks down is the gym I go to and the Panera Bread I wrote about 1/3 of my last novel in, and where I was the night before until 9 PM.
• A little further past that is the School Street intersection, on the other side of which is the apartment where Deb lived back when we were dating.  The firefight happened a block off of School Street.
• For a good part of the day police had a house surrounded that was one block from where a woman who babysat my sister and I used to live.  I rode my bike past it routinely on my way to the mall, and a little ways further down was a bar called Donahue’s, where I often spend my Friday nights.
• When the bomber fled the shootout he ended up on Franklin Street.  I played with a kid who lived on Franklin.  We used to play army in the small wooded area behind his house.  It was scrub brush, really, that I guess the town owned and didn’t know what to do with once the train stopped going through, and I only mention it because reports came that police were searching a “small wooded area” in Watertown, and since there are maybe two of those in the 8 sq. mile town, this was probably it.
• Cameras spent the day showing the world places I spent my entire life, basically: the block where the Friendly’s I worked at used to be; the section of Coolidge Square that has the pizza I grew up eating (which is consequently the best pizza I know of, because isn’t that always the case?); here a diner, there a cemetery fence, and so on.

Cambridge

And then they started bringing Cambridge into it.  We knew the name of the street they lived on before we knew their names, so the observation that the street was only a few blocks from the high school was only something to note in passing.  We do not live near said street, so that was okay.  But then the names came up, and the ages, and it turned out my kids both went to school with the at-large MarioKart terrorist bomber.

And that hit home: this happened here, in the middle of my life and the lives of my family.  And it was still happening.

Aftermath

It’s over now, thank goodness, except for the part where we all get to decide as a group why it happened, and we’re never going to be coming to any consensus on that.

When the name of the at-large suspect was learned, every media outlet in the country that wasn’t actively tailing a police officer spent the day looking for the angle.  The angle would be how to reduce the bombers to something that we can all make sense of, and the best way to do that was to find someone who could give them a thing that was different, that stood out or somehow made it possible for all of us to say, if we had only not ignored THAT this never would have happened.

So they worked as hard as they could to find people that grew up with these kids.  Now I happen to be friends with a few of my children’s friends (on Facebook, and only because I am the cool adult you hear about sometimes) so I got to see them complain about media contact.  There is a girl who lives across the street from us who was contacted via Facebook for an interview after which they showed up at her front door, even though she declined all requests.

Why?  Because she had nothing to say.  She had nothing to say because there wasn’t any one thing.  There was no angle.

We’re still going to hear a lot of this.  They were refugees from Chechen, so maybe we shouldn’t let refugees in any more.  Except, okay, the youngest was nine when he came here and he lived here for an entire decade before this happened.  If you want to blame his upbringing on how he decided to bomb people one day, Cambridge had a larger influence than Chechen did on the man he became.  Go ahead and add Cambridge residents to no-fly lists and see how far you get.

They were also white, which is extremely confusing for a lot of people.  They were U.S. citizens.  At least one of them was a Muslim so good lord knows that’s going to be coming up, logic be damned.

No answers

I don’t think there will be an explanation that satisfies anybody, not really.  I think at the end of all this their behavior will track more closely to the behavior of a school shooter than a fanatical terrorist.  This is not to say that what they did was not an act of terrorism– it certainly was– only that maybe there isn’t a huge difference between the psychological profile of a school shooter and a suicide bomber.

This will not stop us from looking.  Because as long as we can find a thing that explains this all away it’s easier to accept than the idea that sometimes the kid who lives next door to you goes wrong, and on even rarer occasions that kid goes very, very wrong.  And there’s no way to predict or prevent that from happening.

Alas, the Fixer tour is over, but that doesn’t mean the reviews stop coming in!  Today, a great one:

Fixer is a thrilling sci-fi novel by author Gene Doucette. Using the theory that time is not linear, the author skillfully crafts a book where the present and future all blend into one.

Read the entire review here

It’s been a great blog tour!  I hope you had a chance to follow it every day.  The last official stop for Fixer is a review at My Reading Lounge.

Have you ever watched one of those movies that leave you sitting on the edge of your seat, wondering if your heart will stop beating before the end? Good thriller movies are like that, but this kind of suspense is extremely rare to be found on written pages.

Well, Fixer has it.

I woke up today to two new excellent reviews for Fixer.  

From reviewer Tracy James Jones:

Though I was somewhat prepared for a mind-boggling adventure, I was by no means ready for where this story would mentally take me.

Read the full review here

From Bookish Things & More:

I do believe Corrigan Bain is my new fave character that Doucette has written.  I used to love Adam from The Immortal books, but nope Corrigan is pretty epic.

Fixer is written in various points of view.  Corrigan’s is the main one, but we are able to see into other characters that effect the events that transpire. It’s an awesome mystery with creepy factor.

Read the full review here

For today’s blog tour stop we get a new review of Fixer at Passion for Pages:

 If it’s the only book you read in 2013  make it Doucette’s. You know you’ve just read a truly amazing book when not only do you finish it feeling more than satisfied but you walk away from it pondering huge questions.

Read the entire review here

The history of Fixer

Today’s blog tour entry is a guest post on the history of Fixer at Manic Readers.

If you want to have a strange experience, write a novel, put it in a box somewhere, and then go back and read it seven years later.  Sure, what I was reading needed an edit, and it had to have some things rearranged a little bit, and it needed a new chapter or two, but as I went along I thought, this is actually really good.

Read the entire entry here

Blog tour bonus

In what amounts to a not-terribly-unusual event, one of the things I wrote for the Fixer blog tour did not end up being used.  This was a guest blog on the subject of my favorite childhood books, and I enjoyed my answer enough to want to share it with all of you anyway…

Favorite Childhood Books

The topic on which I am to write today is, “favorite childhood books,” and I have to admit I found this far more daunting than I probably should have.  Because the first question, of course, is: how far back shall I go?

In a conversation with a friend in which I brought up this post, she suggested, “just say Where the Wild Things Are” because everyone read that, so I must surely have.  And everyone loved it, so I must surely have.  Except I don’t remember reading it.  I’m very sure I did, I just don’t remember.

I do remember reading Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, and that did have an impact on my life so I should maybe start there.  I adored this book, and it made me say, first, “I’m going to be a writer,” and second, “I’m going to be a poet.”  This would be the last time I aspired to be a poet, but the writer thing stuck.

Another favorite was Pogo.  When I was very young my mother needed to go to the Cambridge Public Library regularly for research, and rather than hang out in the kids’ area I’d wander the stacks.  One time there I discovered the Pogo collection, and devoted much too much time to reading all of them.  Pogo, as you know if you are either much older than I am or have access to Wikipedia, was a political commentary comic strip that was pure genius, provided one knew what the politics being commented upon were about.  I didn’t, but I loved the strip anyway.

Then there were the mysteries, beginning with The Hardy Boys.  I remember exactly nothing about the books aside from my having read many of them.  It’s possible the plots from nine or ten are still rattling around in my head somewhere and destined to surface in some hopefully non-plagiaristic form in the future.

After that I graduated to Sherlock Holmes and all the Agatha Christie mysteries.  I much preferred the Christie books over anything Conan Doyle wrote.  I wasn’t yet ten, but something about Sherlock bugged me.  It always struck me that if every mystery could be solved partly because some aspect of something—a brand of tobacco, say—was perfectly, completely unique, then the writer was cheating.  (I feel the same way now about the CSI shows.)  On the other hand, Christie weaved all of the information necessary to solve the mystery into her stories, yet somehow I never could do it before the detective did.  That’s good writing.

I read plenty of fantasy books as well.  A staple was Piers Anthony, who seemed to have an endless supply of quick, easy-to-digest books that were just clever enough to keep me reading.  I of course read Tolkien, but I don’t think I ever loved it, because there’s only so much elf poetry one person can stand.  But I loved a lot of the sword and sorcery brand of writing he inspired.

Maybe the most impactful book I read as a child was one given to me in seventh grade.  We did a secret Santa thing in school, and I was the weird quiet kid who read books a lot, hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, and had head lice that one time a while ago, so naturally the person who got me didn’t know what to do with me other than buy a couple of books and hope for the best.  One of the two books gifted (I forget the second) was Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R Donaldson.  Here’s a tip for people out there with precocious seventh graders looking for a challenging fantasy book: do not give them Lord Foul’s Bane.  Really, just trust me.  I don’t know if it was the scene where a peaceful village of tree-dwelling people were murdered violently or just the fact that the hero character’s first meaningful act was to rape someone, but this book gave me nightmares.

What else?  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of course: everyone read that, right?  Also comic books were pretty big for me.  When I was younger comics were things I found every now and then in a newsstand, but I remember the day that changed.  I was in sixth grade and in Harvard Square when I discovered a store devoted entirely to selling them.  (It’s called The Million Year Picnic, and it’s still there.)  For someone who had never once gotten the chance to read an entire multi-issue storyline—because newsstands don’t carry multiple issues of the same book at the same time—this was a revelation.

From here I would love to get into conversations about horror writers like Stephen King, but to do that I have to redefine childhood as something that includes college.  I can do that, but it probably makes more sense to just tell the very curious among you to look at my GoodReads library.

Today’s review Fixer comes from Fantasy World:

The author offers us an alternation of the past with the present and this seems to be very important for the case. It was great to discover bit by bit about our character and to be able to understand him better.

Read the full review here

New interview

Today’s Fixer blog tour stop is with friend Dorothy, Writer on the Verge, who features an interview with me.  Stop in and see answers to questions like which of my books were the most fun to write, and what question nobody ever asks me.

See the whole interview here.

Blog tour continues

Well I hope you’re all too busy now reading that copy of Fixer you picked up over the last two days, but if you have a minute and can tear yourself away, a new review posted this morning as part of the blog tour.

Looking at it as fiction now, this story kept me interested the whole time. I liked how everything was “physically” possible that I had to keep reading to get the full explanation.

Full Review

]]> http://genedoucette.me/2013/03/23/fixer-blog-tour-riviebooks-review/feed/ 2 genedoucette Fixer small blog tour button jpeg http://genedoucette.me/2013/03/22/fixer-review-at-geekdad/ http://genedoucette.me/2013/03/22/fixer-review-at-geekdad/#comments Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:35:03 +0000 genedoucette http://genedoucette.me/?p=2010 ]]> Wired

A new review is up right now from reviewer/novelist Raymond Masters over at Wired.com’s GeekDad.

 All Corrigan is concerned with is fixing the events laid out before him and ensuring the survival of his latest unsuspecting clients. Unfortunately, not everyone can be saved, sometimes there’s a miss. That’s when things start to get real messy. It’s during such times and their aftermath, when Corrigan’s deepest fear begins to creep around him. Is Corrigan Bain, in fact, going insane? Well, that’s part of the fun of the book, right?

Read the full review here

A new interview

For today’s blog tour stop I check in at Cafe Art Space to give an interview.  We talk about things like what the definition of “first” novel is, how the Fixer cover was designed and whether I have any advice for new writers.

Stop over there today to see the whole interview.

The blog tour rolls along with two new Fixer reviews.

From reviewer John M Wills:

Throughout Fixer, the author interjects enough science to make the tale plausible. Additionally, Mr. Doucette adds just the right amount of suspense, mystery, and violence to keep the reader on edge.

Full Review

From reviewer Sherry Gomes:

What I loved about this book was the character of Corrigan. In a world of mostly cookie cutter heroes, Corrigan is unique and fun to read. He’s not perfect. He isn’t smooth and suave. He seems like a guy who could be that new neighbor who just moved in next door, and I like him more than I’ve liked a male lead in a book in a long time.

Full Review

Happy Fixer release day!

It’s finally here!  Fixer is now available for purchase from (most of) your favorite online retailers in e-book and print form.

*applause*

Here are some links for you:

Amazon Kindle edition

Amazon Print edition

IBooks

Barnes & Noble Print edition

Direct from The Writer’s Coffee Shop, Print and E-book

(Note: The Nook edition isn’t listed yet.)

Personal note

I would like to thank everyone involved in getting Fixer to this point.  It has been a very long time.  As I said last night on Tumblr, “Having a new book come out is like watching your baby go out into the world for the first time, provided you kept that baby hidden in your basement for six years first and didn’t tell anybody about them.”

This is pretty accurate, because I finished Fixer at the end of 2005, and didn’t show it to a publisher until 2012.  Why?  That’s a long story, and maybe I’ll tell you sometime.  I’m just glad you’re all here and you finally get a chance to read it.

This leg of the blog tour brings us to Popcorn Reads where we find a lovely new review of Fixer:

You don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to like this mystery, but it will probably help.  You also don’t have to be a geek to enjoy the time distortion elements–no long-winded time/string theory dissertations to wade through but just enough information to make it plausible. I literally couldn’t put this one down, which surprised me.

Read the full review here

Guest article with the Girl-Who-Reads

I also wrote a guest entry for the Girl-Who-Reads website, for her Writer Wednesday.  The subject is “what is my favorite scene in Fixer, and the answer is complicated:

there are a good number of nifty bits of writing I’m really proud of. Like this sentence: “Down the down the down the hall red line to the follow the elevator floor first floor to the follow the red line corridor down the corridor to the set of second set of elevators elev seventh floor seventh floor.”  You have to trust me, this makes complete sense in context.

Read the article here

You can also take a look at Donna’s review of Fixer, which debuted last month, here.

In a summary article of new science fiction for March 2013, reviewer Henry Leon Lazarus had this to say about Fixer:

Gene Doucette has a neat tale about a man born with the ability to see a seconds into the future. Corrigan Bain actually can see generalities about the future well enough to act as a Fixer (paper from The writers coffee Shop Publishing House) and save people from deadly mistakes. FBI agent Maggie Trent had worked with him once before on a bank robbery that would have gone horribly wrong. When a group of physicists working on the theory behind his abilities start getting murdered, she finds him again and discovers an impossible murderer. I don’t want to give this away, but this edge-of-your-seat thriller manages to put the concept in understandable terms, though it will warp the reader’s head. Wow!

Source

]]> http://genedoucette.me/2013/03/19/the-philadelphia-weekly-press/feed/ 1 genedoucette FIXER_Full_Cover_4 http://genedoucette.me/2013/03/19/fixer-blog-tour-guest-blog-for-sarah-aisling/ http://genedoucette.me/2013/03/19/fixer-blog-tour-guest-blog-for-sarah-aisling/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:02:53 +0000 genedoucette http://genedoucette.me/?p=1989 ]]> Today’s stop

For this leg of the tour stop by the review website of Sarah Aisling where I talk about the science of Fixer.  

The complexity of the book itself, along with the invented theories, invites the usual questions like: how did you come up with this?  Or perhaps why did you come up with this, as it makes my head hurt?  Well, I didn’t set out to do that.  It just sort of happened.

Read the entire post here

Fixer press release

Also today, you can take a look at the press release for Fixer put out by The Writer’s Coffee Shop.

A skillful and arresting amalgam of sci-fi, horror, mystery, and romance that early reviewers are heralding as a “must-read,” Fixer defies the traditional conventions of genre fare.

Full Press Release

Today’s stop is a new interview

Day three of the blog tour brings us to the Bargain Bandit website for a new interview with me.  Included in the discussion is how I came up with the idea for Fixer and what I think of time travel stories, and a few other things.

And if you want to re-read the original review from Bargain Bandit, it’s linked here.

Fixer comes out in four days.  I hope you’re all excited.

Today’s stop: an interview

Stop by Ceillie Reads & Writes for an interview with me on all matters Fixer, writing, and axe-murdering as a career.  Read the entire thing here.

Blog tour day!

Happy Fixer blog tour day!

As you can see from the handy banner on the right, the tour will go from today through March 30th, which brings us right through the official release date of March 21st.

Yaaaay!

I don’t know about you but I’m kind of jazzed to have finally gotten here.  If you want an idea of exactly how jazzed, well, I finished Fixer’s first draft in 2006.

It has been a long wait.

First stop: an excerpt

The first stop on the tour brings us back to My Fiction Nook, where you may recall seeing a review of Fixer posted earlier in the week.

Today an excerpt from the book is being featured.  The section chosen concerns one of the secondary characters in the book and the first time he meets the main character, Corrigan Bain.  You can see the excerpt here.

And also

I got a box last night.  It was full of these things.

New review

One week away from the Fixer and a few days away from the launch of the official blog tour, there’s a new review from My Fiction Nook:

Fixer, the latest offering by Gene Doucette, is written in much the same style as his previous books – witty, snarky and always highly entertaining.

Read the entire review here

As quite a few of you probably know–since quite a few of you readers are also writers or otherwise associated with the publishing industry in some form–Amazon can be kind of a bitch sometimes.  Books don’t get listed in a timely fashion, or they’re in stock but listed as taking 3 weeks to ship, and so on.

What I have right now is a problem with a positive outcome, to wit: the print edition of Fixer is available right now, right here.

Now obviously it would be fantastic if Amazon didn’t flip the switch I imagine they must have somewhere that turns a book from Not Available Yet to In Stock up until the actual release date, which is March 21.  That is what I expect to happen with the e-book, which is also where I expect the bulk of the sales.  But getting it unlisted and then relisted at the right time is just not going to be worth the trouble because, while it’s listed early we at least know it will be listed on March 21st, and that’s a good thing when it comes to Amazon.

So, if you are a person who is inclined to purchase print editions, and you have not already preordered a copy from the publisher (which is cheaper, by the way, and will get you a signed book plate,) and you buy from Amazon, there is no need to wait until the 21st to own a copy of Fixer.  You can buy it right now.

A new interview with me can be found in TWCS‘s monthly newsletter The Daily Grind.  If you can get past a monthly newsletter called “the daily grind” you’ll find me talking about Fixer and my favorite authors and what I’d do if I wasn’t writing.  Fun stuff.

Check it out here

Direct from the publisher

We are four weeks away from Fixer‘s official debut, which means you’re four weeks away from having the book you can pre-order right now sent to you!

Okay, that’s probably the worst pitch I’ve ever written, but it’s the middle of the day, on a Friday, and I’m hitting an afternoon food coma.

Forgive me.

And after you’ve forgiven me, follow this link right here to pre-order your own hard copy of the best book you’ll read this year.

…okay, that was a little better.

Also

If you pre-order a copy I will mail you a signed book plate for it.

Is that cool?  I think that’s pretty cool.

Pre-ordering ebooks

If you happen to be a fan of the electronic book format, you will also find that it is possible to pre-order a copy of the ebook right now from iTunes.

Donna checks in

A new review posted over the weekend, this from the Girl Who Reads, who says:

Fixer did not disappoint. The caliber of writing that fans of Immortal have come to expect of Gene will find it within the pages of Fixer.

Take a look at the entire review here

A new Fixer review rolls in

Some nice words from a Psibabe:

Gene Doucette hasn’t disappointed me yet and is still at the very top of my current list of favorite authors. Do yourself a favor and check out Fixer if you like a book with action, mystery, thrills, science and a dash of romance.

Read the entire review over at GameVortex.

Wish-list

Great news!  Fixer can now be added to your Amazon wish-list!  How cool is that?

CLICK HERE TO ADD

Behold the full cover art for Fixer, back cover text and all.

Isn’t it pretty?

Two reviews

Fixer also collected two new lovely reviews in the past week:

I will say that there are some genuinely creepy scenes in Fixer. The phrase “Don’t let them know you can see them.” is downright chilling in context. There are also some very touching moments, providing a nice balance to the story.

–The Bargain Bandit

Read the full review here

Gene Doucette’s Fixer was intriguing the entire way through, using time jumps to show you the Bain’s background, and it seriously puts a twist on the old war phrase “Kilroy was here” in a slightly terrifying manner.

Read the full Goodreads Review here

Here’s an exciting way to start off the new year: the Immortal audiobook!

Yes that’s right, someone who is not me sat down in a studio and recorded (unabridged) the entire book, and let me tell you: hearing your own written words read back to you is a damned crazy experience.  I recommend it highly, if you ever have the opportunity.

Pushing this from Kind of Awesome into the Deeply Awesome, the book is read by Jeff Steitzer, who is also known as The Voice of Halo.  (I did not know this at casting.  I’ve never even played Halo.  It’s still really cool.)

If you want to hear Jeff read Immortal to you, click here and buy a copy!  I’m listening to it right now…

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 34,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Today I bring to you a quick reminder that I also write screenplays from time to time.  To prove this, here is a link to a review of Parting, a short film made in 2008 and available on Vimeo.  This is a recent review, in case you’re wondering if I’ve been holding out on you.

The script by Gene Doucette is the big winner here. Even on my first time through, I knew that it was leading me somewhere, though I was never quite sure where, but it kept my interest while I puzzled it out.

Read the full review here.

And if you want to see the movie and have some time to spare, you can watch it here.

One day sale

You can purchase copies of Immortal and Hellenic Immortal today on a discount as part of TWCS’s Twelve Days of Christmas sale!

I am no stranger to getting reviews.  I’ve been collecting them– all very lovely, thank you– for a couple of years now.  But they’ve all been for Immortal and Hellenic Immortal and it’s funny, but after a while you just sort of get used to it.  I know that sounds like a horribly, horribly jaded humblebrag, but it’s really true: after a while a new review makes you go, “okay cool” and then you go back to whatever you were doing before.

But Fixer is different, because I really, genuinely do not know how you’re all going to respond to it because it’s a completely different story and premise, and stylistically an utterly different book from what came before.

So I’m always delighted to see good things said about it, which means for a while I’ll probably be posting every new review I can get my hands on, including the GoodReads reviews.

Like this one:

The very smart (bring your whole brain with you), very witty(you’ll want to highlight stuff just like I did) story that Gene Doucette has written is told in a fitting-but-frenzied manner.

Take a second to follow this link and read the whole review.  And while you’re there be sure to sign up for the GoodReads giveaway.

Win a copy of FIXER

If you can’t wait for Fixer to come out in March (and you aren’t on NetGalley) now is your chance to win an Advance Review Copy!*

That’s right, you can own one of the handsome pre-publication editions pictured two months before the book comes out!

How?  Enter this contest right here, that’s how!

*Please note ARC’s are for review purposes, not for resale.  If you win– and I hope you do– please don’t resell and please do review.

TWCS Christmas

The Writer’s Coffee Shop will be offering different books on discount each day leading up to Christmas.  Click on the banner to find out more…

Calling all reviewers

It has been mentioned in this space before, but I would like to reiterate: if you are a reviewer and you would prefer to not wait until March to read my new novel Fixer, it is available right now on NetGalley.

Click on this link here to request a copy

cover design

Here’s something different: a review of the cover art for Immortal.

Excerpt:

The color contrast is great. I like the shades of silver and the way they complement the dark blue suit and tie, and I also like that we can’t see the model’s face. It seems like blue is a pretty common accent color in most covers, but it continues to impress.

See the full review here.

Note that all credit for the cover goes to TWCS’s Megan Dooley.

I have to be honest, I’m not the most patient person in the world when it comes to book releases.  This may be a surprising thing to hear from someone who held onto to three finished novels for between six and eight years, but it’s a different experience, temperamentally, between keeping a book in your back pocket, and having it ready to go with a publication date and everything.

Fixer is very much ready.  It’s been edited to within an inch of my life and the collective lives of the editing team, and it has a lovely cover, so all that’s left is for it to roll out.

In March.

What’s waiting

The reason the book isn’t already out is that media need time to hear about it, get a copy of it, and prepare a review for it.  So while to you or I might not be seeing anything happening, right now there are people reading about it on NetGalley, bloggers getting emails and a larger P.R. machine warming up the engines.  All of which means every now and then a review of a book you can’t buy yet will roll out, leading up to what should be a much larger number of reviews and/or a blog tour coinciding with the March release.

First review

Which leads me to the first early review of Fixer, which popped up a few days ago on GoodReads.

Excerpt:

This book is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I don’t know what I can say about Corrigan Bain that won’t come out like a gushing, fan-girlie mess, but he is imperfectly perfect.

The entire review can be read here.  And if you have an account with GoodReads you can also add it to your to-read list.  Which of course you should.

Christmas is coming

I wanted to take a moment to thank the many, many people who have picked up ebook copies of Immortal and Hellenic Immortal over the past six months or so.  Your enthusiasm has been remarkable, and I can’t wait until next year when you have a chance to read Fixer.

In a slightly less thankful-more-commercial vein, I wanted to point out that both books are now widely and readily available in print format, something that has only occasionally been the case.  In November the publisher dropped the price of both books on their website, which mean you can now pick up copies of each book at a very reasonable cost.

And if you prefer to use Amazon, both Immortal and Hellenic Immortal are on direct sale there.

Why am I mentioning this?  Because a print book can be wrapped up in pretty paper and given to other people. I hear this is a thing people do around this time of year.

Black Friday E-Book Sale

My publisher, The Writer’s Coffee Shop will be having a one-day sale on all of their E-Books, which includes Immortal and Hellenic Immortal.

So if you have not gotten your e-copy of my books, Friday is your chance to download them at a nice price.

And if you have already bought them, take a look at all of the other fantastic books TWCS has for sale!

TWCS Book Shop

Add it to your reading list

Just a quick note to let you know I’ve added Fixer to Goodreads.

Click here to add it to your reading list!

If you have been hanging around my blog for a little while you’ve already heard of Fixer, and possibly also read the preview chapter I posted almost exactly a year ago.  (Note: the chapter has since been ransacked comprehensively by a large team of editors, but it is not substantially different.)  Today I have three new things to share.

Release

First, the tentative publication date, which is March 21, 2013.

This may seem like a long time to wait for a book that has been completely edited already, with a cover design in place and a publisher ready to roll it out, but there is PR to consider.  In the next few weeks the campaign will launch to get Fixer in the hands of reviewers and other media, and people are going to need time to read it and prepare their reviews to roll out in time with the March release.  So if you are not a reviewer, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait anxiously for the 21st to arrive.  Much as I will be.  (And if you are a reviewer, the ARC’s are pending, so drop me a note.)

Cover and summary

You can take a nice long gander at the cover design to my right.  And below is a draft of the book summary.

*   *   *

What would you do if you could see into the future?

As a child, he dreamed of being a superhero. Most people never get to realize their childhood dreams, but Corrigan Bain has come close. He is a fixer. His job is to prevent accidents—to see the future and “fix” things before people get hurt. But the ability to see into the future, however limited, isn’t always so simple. Sometimes not everyone can be saved.

“Don’t let them know you can see them.”

Graduate students from a local university are dying, and former lover and FBI agent Maggie Trent is the only person who believes their deaths aren’t as accidental as they appear. But the truth can only be found in something from Corrigan Bain’s past, and he’s not interested in sharing that past, not even with Maggie.

To stop the deaths, Corrigan will have to face up to some old horrors, confront the possibility that he may be going mad, and find a way to stop a killer no one can see.

Corrigan Bain is going insane . . . or is he?

Because there’s something in the future that doesn’t want to be seen. It isn’t human. It’s got a taste for mayhem. And it is very, very angry.

*   *   *

I have a few relatives in the South.  I don’t talk about them all that often, but they’re there, and they live in portions of Louisiana (my mother grew up in Lake Charles) and parts of Texas, and probably a fair number of other places I’m less familiar with.  So when facing the possibility of being stranded in either Austin or Dallas, I was well-covered, as I have a cousin in both locations.

Best spelling error of the weekend

The Austin cousin is named Katie.  Back when I first planned this trip, my mother suggested I contact Katie to let her know I would be in town and also-maybe-I-can-meet-her-for-lunch-or-something.  But I really didn’t think I’d have the time, since most of my three days were fairly well-planned by the publisher already.  And then I got stranded by a hurricane and had almost an entire day of free time.

Various meals

After getting past the necessary, “how did I not know you were in Austin and why are you here?” exchange, Katie and I agreed to meet for lunch on Monday.

“What would you like to eat?” she asked.

“So far I’ve had a burrito, pulled pork, fajitas, a falafel wrap, and Italian food, and I’m supposed to go out to a steak house Monday night.  So maybe whatever’s left?”

We ended up at a place called The Snack Bar, which I’m linking to here so you know where to go if you ever have a hankering for fried Brussels sprouts.  (Note: they were awesome.  Order them.)  I also had something called a Saigon Sub, which I ordered partly because I could recognize only half of the ingredients.  (It was also awesome.)

Katie, in case you’re curious, is winning the “most interesting person in this family award” over me.  Sure, I have the novelist/cyclist/banker thing going on, but that’s not topping physical-therapist/trapeze-artist any time soon.

No I’m not kidding.  She’s planning to run off with the circus someday.

I was not brave enough to eat here

We also discussed the likelihood of my actually leaving Austin on Tuesday, which Katie deemed highly unlikely, because she’d seen all the news stories I’d been ignoring.

Trivia night

My dinner plans ended up being changed from a night out at a steak house to pizza-in-the-lobby because everyone involved was basically exhausted and too worried about the storm to speak politely to the general public.

I was exhausted too despite a nap, but I was notified that Austin is essentially the pollen capital of the world and this made me feel a little better about not feeling so hot.

And Katie was trying to interest me in dinner-and-trivia, which happened to be taking place near the hotel in a bar/restaurant called North by Northwest, and there would be beer and frivolity and so on.  And the trivia event was actually called “Geeks who drink” and who could pass that up?

Geeks who drink

I didn’t agree to go until after I’d wheedled Katie into driving me to the airport the following (very early) morning, which she was happy to do because she fully expected the flight to be canceled.

“Look at the map,” she would say every time we walked past a television set, with all sets running a more or less continuous image of the weather map of Sandy, along with shots of a crane on 57th street that for some reason was going to fall any second.

“Planes fly,” I would counter.  ”We’ll go over all of that and land safely in Boston on the other side.”

“Yeah, you’re not flying tomorrow.”

I nearly bought this

Trivia was a great amount of fun.  I’m more accustomed to the kind of bar trivia known locally as “the sucky kind” where the bar is too crowded, the host isn’t interesting, the questions are canned, and so on.  But this was outdoors under a tent, and the host was a clinically insane person who had a tendency to break out into dance numbers last seen on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.   And the questions were brilliant enough that I was kind of hoping I got held over another week.

(Quote, from all of Katie’s friends, and the host, to me– “Yeah you’re not flying tomorrow.”)

I’m not going to give you a trivia blow-by-blow because I’m pretty sure the only thing less interesting would be my describing how my fantasy team is doing, but I will say that our team– me, Katie and her boyfriend Brent– came in third behind two six-person teams.  So we did well.

Okay there was one question I want to talk about.  It was, “Name the two leads in the movie Prizzi’s Honor.”  I was perfectly happy to know the answer to this (Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner) and could have gone the rest of my life not hearing the next thing the host said, which was, “I know you were all fetuses when the film came out…”

THANKS SO MUCH.

Tuesday on a non-canceled flight

I woke up Tuesday morning to a non-canceled flight to Dallas followed by a non-canceled flight to Boston.  I texted Katie, whose last words to me the night before were, “I expect a text from you in the morning telling me the flight is canceled” with the news that the flight was not canceled.

Not only was it not canceled, it actually happened, on time and everything.

And I swear to God the captain said, as he described the path of the flight home, “There’s a lot of bad weather in New York still, but we’ll be going over all of it.”

There is an entire bar of people in Austin who owe me a beer.

While all of us authory/publishy types were hanging out in downtown Austin on a brisk Saturday, a hurricane you may have heard something about was aiming for the East Coast, and it was shaping up to be an issue for those of us who A: reside on the East Coast, and B: were expecting to be traveling back home any time between Sunday night and Monday.

I had yet to be personally concerned about this because I already had the week off anyway, and besides the airline hadn’t canceled my flight.  In a fit of randomness after getting my ticket I had downloaded the American Airlines app to track my flight, something that three weeks ago was an essentially unnecessary exercise for someone who obsessively memorizes his flight plans already due to a constant fear of missing a flight and being stranded in a terminal and bathing in the public sinks like Tom Hanks did in that movie, but which suddenly made perfect sense.  (Note: I just gave my editors an aneurysm.)  So from Saturday night on through Sunday morning I checked the flight approximately every half hour, and every time it came back as being “On Time”, and I was fine with that because my phone apps had never lied to me before.

Well rested

Sunday was the day we all got to sleep in, which was really nice after an extremely long Saturday that went on into Saturday night and a massive dinner at an upscale Mexican restaurant that served fajitas buffet style for us.  (And no, I have never seen the words “upscale” and “Mexican restaurant” next to one another before either.)  I’ve seen photos of this evening, and in all of them I have my elbows on the table and I am leaning forward looking like I’m paying attention to some manner of conversation, but I think the truth is I was just trying to hold myself up so I didn’t fall asleep face-forward in my fajita.  I was thus very happy that we weren’t obligated to be anywhere until 10 AM Sunday, on account of the book festival not starting until 11 AM, on account of this was Texas and there is church.

I arrived in the lobby at 10 AM and was immediately greeted by Suzy Duffy, she of Wellesley Wives and current resident of Wellesley, MA., who had this to say:

“Gene did you check your flight? Jen’s flight was canceled and you’re going tomorrow yah?  We’re going to the airport now to try and get on a flight before they closetheairportsareyoucomingwe’releavingnOWYOUSHOULDCHECKOUTANDCOMEWITHUS.”

And that is how the most serene portion of my weekend ended.

Still on schedule

But according to my little American Airlines app my flight was still a go, so even though the weather maps indicated that a bunch of colors were about to be spilled all over the thirteen colonies, I was prepared to accept that my airline thought it could do it.  Plus, I was pretty sure I couldn’t pack in under thirty seconds.

So I went to the book festival instead with everyone, and proceeded to be the least communicative person in the greater Austin area for the next three hours.  Because sometime shortly after Noon the flight from Dallas to Boston was indeed canceled, so after spending the first hour checking every few minutes I spent the subsequent 1.75 hours on hold to reschedule the flight.

To my vast surprise, I was able to secure a Tuesday morning flight, exactly 24 hours later than my canceled one.  Surprising, because as far as anyone knew Hurricane Sandy would still be having some kind of impact on Tuesday.  Even the woman who rescheduled it parsed this with, “we have some Tuesday morning flights that aren’t canceled yet.”

Sunday bookselling

The actual highlight of my day was probably during my half hour at the book signing table.  I was the last scheduled author on both days, and you can interpret that however you want.  I’m choosing to think of the other authors as my opening act, while it’s probably more accurate to say that I was put at the end because there would be fewer people left to offend at that time of day.

Four high school girls drifted into my approximate orbit about midway through the scheduled time, with two hovering in the foreground and two in the background, obsessively evading eye contact with all living entities that were not also high school girls, as high school girls are wont to do.

I carnival-barked the closer two over, as one of them appeared to be nominally curious, and then tossed some random details about the books at them in case something might penetrate.  The most curious of the pair picked up Immortal and read the back cover, while her friend kept her eye on me in case I attacked suddenly.

I continued with my clearly-being-ignored description until the one with the book in her hand said to her friend, “Did you read this?  This sounds really good!“

So they pooled together their money and negotiated a joint ownership arrangement, I signed the book, and the herd walked away, hopefully to lovingly pass around their one copy of Immortal for many weeks hence.

And now I have to consider what I might do with a fandom consisting of teenage girls.  What will be the scope of my powers?  Someone contact John Green for me.

PART FOUR

I don’t sleep well my first night in a strange bed.  It doesn’t seem to matter how comfortable or strange that bed happens to be, nor how tired I am.  (This was an especially large problem the two times I had to go on television.)  So my not getting into the bed properly until 11:30, while probably not a great idea given the long Saturday I was facing, wasn’t really that big a deal because I was likely not sleeping much anyway.

But what really didn’t help was the people trying to get into the room.

I kept hearing noises in the hallway from someone who was having trouble opening their hotel room door, and it took a while before I realized I was actually hearing someone attempting to open my door.  (Kids, always deadbolt the door.  It deactivates the key card reader.)  This went on for several minutes, then stopped, then started again, and eventually I went to the door and peered through the peephole to confirm that yes, there was someone there, and they wanted my room.

I called the front desk, but nobody answered.  This was likely because one of the people in the hallway was the guy from the front desk, who couldn’t figure out why the room door key wasn’t working.

But they went away.  And then ten minutes later maintenance arrived.  I expect all he was told was that someone in room 331 was having a problem with the door lock, and with nobody in the hallway he did what most people would do– and what nobody else had tried so far– and knocked on the door.

When I explained to him that the lock on the door worked perfectly, it’s just that there’s already a person in the room, he went away.

Ten minutes later the phone rang.

“Hi this is the front desk.  I have a funny little problem.  I just assigned that room, and I was wondering who you might be.”

I was probably not getting any sleep anyway, but the following day when people asked why I looked so tired, this was the reason I gave.

Saturday: Texans buy books once a year

Okay, so you know, the Texas Book Festival is insanely crowded because apparently this is when Texas comes out and buys their books.  Some very quick observations:

• If you name your publishing house The Writer’s Coffee Shop people will come, but they will be expecting there to be coffee
• “This is the company that first published Fifty Shades of Grey” is a surprisingly effective way to get people to walk away from you
• Every fifth person in the world has an idea for a book, and they’d like to talk about it
• Actually overheard: “So, what’s the difference between fiction and non-fiction? I’ve always wondered.”
• Successful ways to get people to come to your table include shouting “I am an author, don’t be afraid!  Come closer!“
• When you are the only existing evidence that a publishing house also publishes books by men you always have to be ready for someone to point at you from across a crowded tent

Red shirts and stripping

Each of us was issued a red polo shirt to be worn on Saturday with the name of the company on the front and the “The publisher that dared to go there…” on the back.  And even though it was clearly a woman’s shirt (the buttons were backwards) I dutifully wore mine along with everyone else, guaranteeing that if the Klingons attacked we would all die before the commercial break.

We were also informed that it would not be necessary to wear the shirts again on Sunday, which is only reasonable given none of us would have the opportunity to launder them.  The cowboys sitting at the table next to us overheard part of this, which is how I ended up agreeing to go topless for a bunch of Texans who were suddenly extremely regretful about having made such a suggestion in the first place.

Hey, I’ll take one for the team.

PART THREE

I am not the sort of person that instinctively takes photographs, possibly because I am not currently the sort of person who has a phone that takes decent photographs.  For most of my life my chosen method of archiving events has been to write about them.  For instance, I have few photos of my children when they were very young, but I wrote humor columns about them regularly for posterity, and so when my body was found people would understand what had killed me.

I therefore have very few photos of my own to share from the trip this past weekend to Austin, Texas for the Texas Book Festival.  (I’ll share what I have.)  But I do have some stories to tell, and this may take more than one blog post.

Friday night: Chuy’s

While I was en route to Austin I was contacted by fellow TWCS writer S L Scott asking if I was interested in joining her and some of the other writers while the staff dinner was going on.

This presented a few problems because,

1. I did not know there was a staff dinner
2. I did not know what night the staff dinner was and therefore what night Susie Scott was talking about
3. I wasn’t even going to be on the ground until 7:30, provided she was even talking about Friday night at all.

So I bought a couple of hours of Wifi on the flight to sort this all out.  I learned it was indeed Friday being discussed; the restaurant in question was to be a place called “Chuy’s”; the restaurant was “near the hotel”; Everyone was meeting there at 8 PM.

There was no way I was going to be there by 8 PM given my arrival time and the distance between the airport and the hotel, but since the hotel didn’t have a restaurant it was still my best opportunity to obtain some manner of food, so I told her I would be late and that I’d go to the hotel and then walk to the restaurant.

“You can’t walk to the restaurant”, she responded.

From the festival: company is changing its name to The Writer’s Coffees Hop

Evidently, “near the hotel”, in Texas, means, “not near the hotel” in every other place in the world aside from possibly Los Angeles, which may consider itself “near Texas” for all I know.

She offered to drive me to the hotel if I took the cab directly to the restaurant, and that seemed like an okay idea.

And then I had to tell the cab driver where I was going, and all sorts of wrong happened.

Pronunciation

Okay, so you probably aren’t me, and you probably see the word “chuy’s” and know how to pronounce it so that other people know what you’re talking about.  I see that word and pronounce it as follows:

CHOY’S

The cab driver had never heard of choy’s.  He called his dispatcher, who had likewise never heard of it.  They called another person, and took the spelling I had given them, spoke in whatever language they were all speaking for a while, and then he hung up, turned and looked at me, and said:

“CHEWY’S!”

That he’d heard of.

Next problem: Chuy’s is a chain, so I needed to tell him which one I was going to.  ”The one near this hotel,” giving him the address of the hotel.

“Which one?” he repeated.

“The one a mile away from the hotel.”

“Which one?”

There is more than one Chuy’s within a mile of the hotel.  Because again, it’s a chain.

He decided he was sure he knew which one they’d be at, and took me to that one, and promised to wait for me to go inside and find them, and if they weren’t there he’d just take me to the other one.

Next problem: I didn’t know what anyone I was meeting looked like.  So I walked around this incredibly busy restaurant hoping someone at a table somewhere would stand up and identify me.

This did not happen.  And Susie Scott had not responded with a reply to my texted request for the restaurant address, so I was ready to give up and head back to the hotel, and maybe find a pizza place that delivered.  And then, six blocks from the hotel, she sent the address.

“That’s where we just were,” the cab driver informed me.

So anyway, it all worked out.  She came outside and greeted the only person getting out of a cab on the assumption that it was me. (It was.)  And I got to meet Lissa Bryan, T M Franklin, Suzy Duffy, and Ally Jean, and there was tequila and gigantic burritos and all was good.

And somewhere in Austin is a cab driver who will never stop telling the story of the guy who didn’t know how to pronounce Chuy’s.

PART TWO

As I’m currently sitting at home waiting for time to run off on the clock so I can grab my already-packed bags and head for the airport, I thought I’d take a moment to get caught up on Tumblr.

Kidding!  Tumblr’s been down for going on two hours now.

Instead, I wanted to bring up a point I meant to mention in yesterday’s announcement regarding paperback book pricing.

Amazon is weird

I am probably the last person who should be complaining about Amazon, because their consistent unprovoked promoting of Immortal and Hellenic Immortal–as ebooks–has been simply huge for sales.  But they’re a bit wonky when it comes to paperback selling.  At the moment both books are listed as available from them with the following legend: “Usually ships within 1 to 3 weeks.”

This is simply untrue.  Books ordered direct from Amazon will take 3 to 4 days, but (I’m told) the availability legend won’t change until books are ordered.  Which is massively ironic given books won’t be ordered as long as the legend says what it says.

So if you want print copies, and you want to order them directly from Amazon, don’t worry about that wait time.  It’s not correct.

Or you can just head over to Barnes & Noble, where it says it’ll ship in 24 hours.

As I get ready for my weekend in Austin I would like to call your attention to this press release from earlier today:

The publishing house that brought you “Fifty Shades of Grey” announces better quality and lower priced books for loyal customers

To summarize, the per-book cost for print editions of Immortal and Hellenic Immortal is coming down.  Look for this price reduction (it is not, alas, retroactive, if you’ve already bought a copy) reflected first on the TWCS website starting in November, and eventually in the prices of copies sold by other vendors.  And soon, copies will be available in brick-and-mortar stores and all will be right in the world.

About Austin

I will be doing my best to keep updating everyone on my trip to Austin, but those updates will likely not be here, simply because I won’t have time to tap out a long blog entry.  What I will be updating regularly is Twitter (@genedoucette) and Tumblr (The Incredibly Unnecessary Gene Doucette Tumblr).  If you do not already follow me in those places and yet have Twitter and/or Tumblr accounts, I recommend you jump aboard.

And of course if you are going to be in Austin this weekend, look me up at the Writer’s Coffee Shop table, or otherwise wandering around the city looking confused and sunburned.