Nearly twice as long as The Blood That Bonds, Blood Hunt picks up several months after the first book left off, and finds Two back in New York City, searching for vampires so that she can rejoin their ranks. The book contains more characters, more locations, and more points of view than TBTB did, while also delving deeper into  characters’ personalities, motivations, and desires. It also explains a lot more about the four primary vampire races, and about the political structure of the vampire world.

Of course, along with all of this there’s a lot of darkness, violence, sex, drugs and booze, topped off with healthy quantities of sweet, sweet profanity. This is, after all, a II AM Book!

Blood Hunt costs $2.99 for the eBook and is currently available for Kindle (US/UK/DE), Nook, iPad/iPhone/iPod and other major eReaders (via Smashwords). It will soon be available at the Sony, Kobo and Diesel eBook stores, but if you’re impatient, the Smashwords  EPUB version will work with both Sony and Kobo readers.

Blood Hunt was simultaneously released in print. You can order a copy from CreateSpace or, if you want, you can order a signed copy direct from me. The print copy is $11.99 either way, and I will ship signed copies to anywhere in the world (just choose the appropriate shipping option).

For full information, please visit the new Blood Hunt website – http://iiamtrilogy.com/bloodhunt

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” is a complex novel that at, over the course of its reading, left me at times enthralled and at other times enraged. I think that’s a good thing, but if you ask me tomorrow, I may have changed my mind again.

What I can say about the book is that it’s a sweeping sci-fi/fantasy epic that fits very nicely into a long and proud tradition of novels in which their author gleefully destroys most of humanity and then sets about telling us what happens in the aftermath. I’ve seen it compared to Stephen King’s The Stand, and the comparisons are warranted. There is a long and utterly engrossing set-up to the end of the world, which eventually happens with remarkable speed. King spent more time dealing with the actual apocalypse part of his post-apocalyptic world than Cronin does, but considering the heft of the book as it is, it’s perhaps for the best that Cronin literally skips over the 90 years or so between “when the bad stuff happens” and when the story picks back up.

The similarities continue throughout. There’s a group of traveling friends, and not one but two old, black ladies who like to talk about God. There’s a pregnancy and a divorce of sorts. There’s a bad guy who is drawing others to him. There’s a big showdown at the end and a pronounced denoument. Throught the book, people die. Most of them die badly. There’s a lot of The Stand in here, yes. But to call the book a copy or even highly derivative would be an outright lie. It stands as its own work, one with is intriguing and exciting, pulse-pounding at times, sad or uplifting at others. There are characters to hate and love, although I never found myself hating and loving them quite so much as I have with some other books.

As a fellow author of “vampire books” (though my vampires are apples to Cronin’s oranges), I love what he’s done with the myth. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book, give or take, are nearly flawless. Cronin paints a portrait of a near-future United States that is hyper realistic, bound up in protocol inspired by fear over continued terrorist attacks, with states mistrusting each other and the federal government operating in many clandestine ways to get what it wants. You can SEE this world, you can feel it, because it’s not so improbable. You become caught up in the story and the characters immediately, and you spend much of the time waiting for The Virals (as they become known) to break lose. You know it’s coming and that it’s going to be bad. Cronin doesn’t disappoint here.

To say that the story shifts gears at this point is an understatement. It’s something more akin to parking the car, getting out, and switching to an entirely different vehicle. Yes, it still takes place in the same world, with the same problems and even a few of the same characters, but in the 90-year shift the story also moves more out of the realm of Science Fiction and into that of Fantasy. I don’t have an inherent problem with this, but I did find the shift jarring. I also found the sudden introduction of more than a dozen new characters a bit overwhelming at first, though in the end you figure out who’s who, and you are properly outraged at the times you’re supposed to be, when the heroes are being held up by people who don’t understand that, damn it, they’re the heroes and they’re right.

The problems I had with the book, the things that threw me out of reading mode and made me frustrated, all happened in the second half and were mostly small issues. For one thing, Cronin is guilty of the extremely modern belief that all human beings immediately lose whoever they were before, at the moment they hear they are having a baby (or in extreme cases, at the moment of the baby’s birth), and instead become dedicated only to the existence of that child. For another, I’m tired of old women who love God. I don’t find any comfort in the idea of predestination or “God’s Will” and I don’t find characters who do to be particularly sympathetic.

I also had extreme issue with one decision a primary character makes, late in the novel, not even so much because I didn’t like the decision, but because it’s given barely an ounce of explanation and is a pretty clear setup for a later event. It felt like the character was only doing it because the story needed her to. If you’re going to have the cavalry show up, you need a reason for why it wasn’t there in the first place, and this reason seemed flimsy. The character in question supposedly has her reasons, but they’re never given (or barely so), so the decision she makes seems amazingly arbitrary.

There are a few other moments like this — Cronin kills off a character whose name might as well have been “Obvious Choice” at one point — but I may be stressing the negative too strongly. In the end, the important thing was that whenever I put the book down, I always wanted to pick it up again, and preferably soon. This is the first in a trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the second and third books. They’ll probably frustrate me too, but I bet they’ll be a lot of fun to read while they’re doing it.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is no Orciny … is there?

The City & The City is a somewhat difficult book to start, and it evolves into a difficult book to put down. Somewhere between the two states you come to realize that you understand the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Quoma, despite the fact that Miéville has gone to great lengths to avoid explaining them in clear language.

I appreciated this. A lot. It would be a difficult feat to describe how two cities can occupy the same physical space even if one was simply aiming for abject description. Miéville instead uses the framework of a crime novel to let you come to understand the two cities, not to mention the semi-sinister entity known only as Breach, in an organic manner. In a way, I think this allows the reader to learn at a more measured pace, rather than trying to digest huge lumps of expository information.

The key to enjoying the book is to worry about the murder mystery first, and the cities second. The information you’re looking for will come, by and large, though Miéville chooses to leave great gaps in the reader’s knowledge at times (the narrator is not omniscient, and there are many things that he, and thus the reader, will never truly know). Once I stopped worrying about understanding everything, and instead focused on enjoying the story, my overall appreciation for the book grew.

The story’s climax is suspenseful, and the book ends in pretty much the only way it really could. Many questions are answered, many more are left open, and Inspector Borlu comes to understand the truth about the cities, and about the shadows claimed by each, by both and by neither.

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Yes, this is an actual picture of my actual beer.

Sometimes this blog gets buried underneath all the other crap I have going on in my life, and this past couple of months has definitely been one of those times. I’m a man of many projects, and sometimes I’m so busy working on those projects, I forget to take the time to write about them! Here’s what’s new:

I finished the second draft of Blood Hunt.

Blood Hunt is the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, and the first draft had been hovering over me like the grim specter of death for a couple of years now. I got to 130k words in it, and then just lost the enthusiasm for finishing it, in part because I knew there were major structural errors that needed to be fixed. With the success (so far) of TBTB, it was time to really buckle down and get the thing done. Rather than starting with the first draft, I just restarted the book entirely, rewriting everything (even the stuff I liked), and fixing the issues I had with the original. The finished second draft is 154k long, and I’m currently getting feedback on it from several sources. With that in hand, I should be able to do a final polishing draft and get it out for people to see!

I started brewing my own beer.

Charlotte bought me a book on beer-making for my birthday, and once I read through it, I was anxious to give it a shot. I have one batch done: a nice, if uninspiring brown ale from a kit. I’ve also got one batch bottle-conditioning (my own American Pale Ale recipe), and a third batch in primary fermentation (my own Irish Amber Ale recipe). I’m very excited to try the latter two, because I think they’re going to be bigger, better beers than the one from the kit. In the near future I’m planning on making a Russian Imperial Stout, an American Barley Wine, and maybe a wheat beer as well.

I’m still making cocktails, too.

Got a couple of different ones I’m in the process of perfecting before posting them here. One uses smoky blended scotch (like Jonny Walker Red), and one of them uses three different kinds of rum. Mmmm … rum! I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to distill my own liquor, otherwise I’d strongly consider doing that, too.

I’m setting up and designing cwbuecheler.com

This blog, and many of its associated sub-pages, are going to move there. Writing will be found at writing.cwbuecheler.com and my web portfolio and resume will be found at web.cwbuecheler.com. You’ll be able to easily tab between all three sections with a handy masthead. This is an effort to consolidate my many and varied projects and hobbies under one roof, while making it clear which stuff is a professional offering and which isn’t (at least until I start selling beer, I guess).

Project Fatass

I kind of stopped posting about project fatass since I was basically just sitting at 213 lbs each week. Well, I got my shit together, started eating better, started going to the gym, and I’m currently down from an Indianapolis max of 217 to an Indianapolis min of 194, and dropping. I’ve also put on a bit of muscle and improved my stamina. Yay!

Other Stuff

Still working on Dart Publishing, about to begin the second draft of The Broken God Machine, still publicizing The Blood That Bonds (fairly big news on that coming soon), still playing video games, and still somehow finding time to spend with my wife!

More updates coming once I get this new design finished up. Hoping to put in a lot of hours on that this weekend.

Yes, that’s right. For the second time in my life, I decided to join in and try to write a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. I succeeded, hitting 50k on the 28th, and as of this post I’m over 53k. What’s pretty amazing is that I missed four days at the beginning of the month due to my New York trip, and three more over the course of the month due to preexisting social obligations. So I actually wrote 50,129 words in just 21 days, which is an average of 2,387 words per day … which is a lot! Big thanks to my lovely wife for keeping me on track and spending a lot of weekend mornings at the local coffee shop with me.

I think the story’s actually pretty good, too … definitely worth a second draft. It’s about a young girl who is attacked by a werewolf but manages to kill it and is subsequently recruited into a school of monster hunters. You can read an excerpt over at my NaNoWriMo Page if you’d like.

Unfortunately, all the writing and paperwork (not to mention Thanksgiving and our one-year wedding anniversary!) hasn’t left me a whole lot of time for other activities, like updating this blog or promoting The Blood That Bonds. Both of these things will be addressed in December, although I’m also going to try to keep writing on a regular basis, AND we’re celebrating Christmas in LA FRANCE this year, so there will be traveling and such getting in the way as well.

There’s just not enough time in the day, week, month and year, you know?

Much ado has been made over the current “vampire trend” and its potential longevity. People are curious: why and how have vampires become so popular? What has caused them to capture the fancy of the mainstream public after years of being appreciated mainly by fans of the horror genre? The answer to that question lies in the slow move from terror to sympathy that people have made over the past few decades, due in large part to the efforts of many authors, screenwriters, directors, and other artists.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, vampires were the bad guys. Remember those days? Dracula bending menacingly over a delirious Lucy Westenra; Kurt Barlow and his servant Mr. Straker slowly bringing the town of Salem’s Lot to ruin; Keifer Sutherland and his cronies menacing Corey Haim’s family … vampires were nearly always portrayed as voracious, evil killers …

If you’re interested in reading the rest, you can find it at Reading with a Bite. I think it’s a pretty solid essay, and of course I get to plug my book, The Blood That Bonds, as well! Thanks very much to Lindsay for the opportunity.

Oh, and the control to turn off the music that starts when the site loads is over on the right, a little bit down the page. ;)

]]> http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 16 http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/07/29/the-blood-that-bonds-news/ http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/07/29/the-blood-that-bonds-news/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:51:26 +0000 chris http://www.cwbuecheler.com/?p=1365 Continue reading →]]> As some of you may know, but most of you don’t, The Blood That Bonds just spent a year in submission over at St. Martins Press. The editor to whom I had sent it recently got back to me, and they unfortunately won’t be buying the book – the basic gist was “you can certainly write, but it was a little dark for me.” So that’s a bit of a bummer, but I’m not angry or anything … this is how the print industry works; you have to find the right editor and publisher for your work, and it can be a difficult and time-consuming process just to get your voice heard over the crowd, let alone by the right people.

I’m not giving up on my dream of print publication for The Blood That Bonds, or my other work. I’ve wanted to have a book published since I was eleven years old, and there’s no reason to stop trying until it happens or I’m dead. However, I’ve decided to use the skills I possess that other authors perhaps don’t in order to help the people who might want to read it, find it. There are a lot of people out there who’ve written a vampire book … but how many of them are professional web designers and developers with over a decade of experience? Probably not too many. Why not leverage those abilities to take a route less-traveled to getting the book out there and noticed?

Which is why I registered TheBloodThatBonds.com and have spent my free time creating an entire website to promote the upcoming free release of the novel, in eBook formats (PDF, Kindle, iPhone and more), to whomever wants it. The site’s not quite done yet and is still locked down under a username and password, which is why I didn’t link it, but it’s very close to finished and I anticipate it will launch in mid-August. I’m really excited about this project, as I think it’s a chance to get my writing out to a much wider audience than it’s previously seen (I’ll be doing heavy promotion of the site and the book, trying to get blogs and sites all over the internet to link it, review it, etc). Hopefully some of that audience will be people with ties to the print industry who might want to publish the book in print … but if not, hey, at least people will be reading, and that’s the goal, right?

It’s time to get this thing out there. :)

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m going to go ahead and guess that my review of Twilight is going to sway neither the book’s legion of fans, nor its serious detractors. In all honesty, I’m kind of torn about reviewing the book at all. Its first-person protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl, and the book is very clearly angled at girls in their early-to-mid teens. I am a thirty-two year-old man, and thus am not exactly what one would call the target demographic.

I read the book because my wife advised me to, because I am author who is trying to get his vampire novel published, and she rightly figured that it couldn’t hurt to check out the book, and see what it does well. There ARE things that it does well, despite what some negative reviews might say. There are also many things that didn’t work for me, but may be right for the target audience. Then there are a few things that I think it does legitimately poorly … we’ll get to those.

So. What I liked:

I think — and again, I was never a girl, so I can’t be sure — that it does a good job of expressing the all-consuming strength of a young woman’s first love. Bella’s absolute obsession with Edward is driven home over and over (to the point of tedium for me). Less well-explained is why Edward feels so strongly for her, other than that she smells good, but you still at least get a strong sense of his desire both to love her and to chomp down on her neck, which creates some fun dramatic tension.

I also liked that each vampire had a special little power of their own, something they brought with them from their human lives. I thought the book got stronger as it went along, with the last sixty pages or so of the book, not counting the epilogue, being legitimately exciting and fun to read.

What I didn’t like:

The first 350 pages of the book are nearly a straight teen romance novel, and the first 100 pages or so are brutal even accepting that fact. There’s absolutely nothing happening, action-wise. Bella comes off as bitchy and unlikable. The writing is stilted and hasn’t yet found any sort of voice other than said bitchiness (few sentences have anything resembling stylistic flair). Again, this improves as the book goes on, almost as if Meyer is becoming more comfortable with her characters and the world she’s creating.

I also felt that Edward was too perfect. I realize the novel is more a romance than it is anything else, and this is a common approach to romance novels, but it makes him a less-likable character because basically his only flaw is that he can’t accept that he’s in love and just deal with it. I don’t mind him being gorgeous, or powerful, or intelligent, or charming, or witty, or sensual, or telepathic, or even some combination of these things, but all of them together create a character so flawless he’s hard to relate to.

The epilogue is hard to believe. I find it midly improbable that Bella’s dad would be easily forgiving of either She or Edward after what he had to go through. Also, Bella returns right back to being oblivious and kind of bitchy, as if she’s learned essentially nothing from her experience. I was hoping for a bit of character growth for both of the leads, but there’s little to be seen.

Overall, I think the book does a decent if unspectacular job of conveying a fairly typical first love story with a rather important twist. The last sixty pages or so, where the real meat of the action is, are better than the rest of the book. I have no plans to read the other three in the series, so I went ahead and read their synopses on the internet, and doing so basically reconfirmed that I’m not interested enough to read more. It seems, though, like Meyer understands her audience and has put together a series which they clearly enjoy.

If you’re old enough to drink — and not an aspiring author of vampire novels who likes to keep abreast of what’s happening in that genre — Twilight’s not terrible … but it’s probably not the right book for you.

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