Dear friends:

Every once in a while, I get an e-mail from Inkshares with the subject line “You’re Selling Books.” Opening those e-mails is like opening a long awaited present. Those e-mails mean that a bookstore has decided to take a chance on my novel, and it will be carrying one or several copies of The Catcher’s Trap.

The first thing I do when I get those e-mails is googling the bookstore,  finding out where is located and then sending them a thank you tweet for taking a chance with a new author.

So far six independent bookstores will be carrying my book: A. C. Vroman, in Pasadena, Ca. Common Good Books, in St. Paul MN. Tattered Cover in Denver CO. Prairie Lights Book, in IOWA City IA, Mysterious Galaxy Books, in San Diego CA and Flyleaf Book, in Chapel Hill NC.

There are over sixteen hundred independent bookstores in the U.S. It would be a dream come true if all of them carry my book, but, in the meantime, I’m thankful for those 6.

Hopefully, a bookstore in my home state of Connecticut will take a chance on me.

I also dream about taking a road trip and visiting every single one of the bookstores carrying my book. So far my map looks like this:

My trip would cover 4 thousand miles and it will take 61 hours of driving. If I’m lucky, and readers love my book as much as I do, many other stops will be added. Maybe I’ll have to take a year off to cover them all. An author can dream, right?

 Have a wonderful weekend!

Greetings Squad!

As one of the top ten in the Video Game contest I was asked to answer two questions for the Inkshares/Nerdist blog. I’ve been waiting to send out this update until that posted because I wanted to talk a little bit more about it.

The questions were “What was the first video game whose narrative captured your imagination?” and “How has the introduction of literary elements…improved video gaming?”.  You can find my answers in the requested 200 words or less on the blog at http://blog.inkshares.com/

If you’ll indulge me what I want to do here is use a few more words to talk about the games that came before “narrative”. I put that word in quotes because I think there are different types of narrative. There is the story in the game and there is the story OF the game. I think the narrative of the early games was actually behind the scenes, in the making of the games.

When I started writing “Stage Clear” my inspiration was the limited storylines (i.e. Invaders from Space!) and the mechanics of the gameplay. What I’ve ended up with is something much more though. I realized that more than anything my story has been shaped by the people, the technology, and changes in the video game industry during its first two decades. While the book is science fiction its plot elements are inspired by video game history. And I think that’s kind of cool.

I’m not sure what sub-genre that would be though. It doesn’t match the Goodreads definition of historical science fiction. Historically inspired science fiction? Recent history inspired plot science fiction? RHIPSF? Hmm, gonna have to work on that…

PT