Jason Anspach's Blog, page 7

One of my goals when I first started writing was to get on Hank Garner’s Author Stories Podcast.

I’m happy to say that I’ve joined guests the likes of Nick Cole, Kevin G. Summers, Ernest Cline, R.A. Salvatore, Hugh Howey, & Michael Bunker.

Hank & I talk a lot about ’til Death, writing, family, creativity, and more. Give this great show a listen, especially if you never have before.

Listen Now

The post Achievement Unlocked: Author Stories Podcast appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

 

Exciting News!
Sam’s story continues in…

’til Death: Second Impressions

I’m so excited to tell you about the release of my latest book, ’til Death: Second Impressions. This book was so much fun to write and readers who enjoyed the nifty-fifties paranormal fun of the first book will be glad to find more of the same. It’s on sale over at amazon for .99 cents, but just for a limited time!

Here’s the cover!

Wisecracking Private Detective Sam Rockwell is running for his life, but that doesn’t keep him from taking the case of a Return who’s slipped past Heaven’s radar and overstayed his time on earth. Together with his fiancé, Amelia, Sam brawls and dances, his way through San Francisco to unravel a zany mysterywhere nothing is what it seems at first blush.

The laughs and silver screen thrills of Jason Anspach’s signature 1950s Cold War tale of Hollywood noire are back in this madcap sequel as Sam and Amelia return once again to right wrongs, solve crimes, send the dead off to their proper eternity, and maybe, set a date for their wedding! The Maltese Falcon meets It’s a Mad Mad Mad world in this smart and witty paranormal romp.

“With witty humor and vivid pen strokes, Mr. Anspach invented a new genre: hardboiled with a heart.”  – E.E. Giorgi, award-winning author of Chimeras.

“International intrigue! Supernatural sleuthing! Sam Rockwell and his fiancee, the intrepid Amelia, are on the case again. In this sequel to his first ’til Death novel, Anspach brings something truly original to the detective noire genre.” – Chris Pourteau, author of The Serenity Strain: Stormbreak

“I found myself being pulled into the story and losing track of time. I always look forward to where Jason takes us next.” – Preston Leigh, creator of The Leighgendarium: Shining a Light on Indie Publishing

Get Yours Now

Psst! Haven’t read ’til Death?

To celebrate the release of ’til Death: Second Impressions, I’ve lowered the price of the original ’til Death down to .99 cents for the next seven days. You can get two great books for less than a cup of coffee (depending on where you shop for coffee).

 

Buy Now

The post ’til Death: Second Impressions appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

If you missed it, I did an interview with M.S. Corley over at LiteraryOutlaws.com.

Mike Corley illustrated the cover for ’til Death, and I wasn’t joking when I said that the cover sold some copies of the book by itself. People have straight up told me that’s the reason they picked it up.

Once upon a time, I was sure that I would either move to San Diego and write and pencil my own comics for Image or get work as a Disney animator (which, interestingly enough, was a goal of Corley’s too). My skill set never reached that level, but it was a lot of fun to talk with someone who has broken on through to the other side.

From marketing to editing, design, cover art, blurbs, reviews, there is just SO MUCH that goes into writing a book. I hope the outlaw talk with M.S. Corley is as interesting and fun to listen to as it was to record.

The post Judging Books by their Covers appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be co-hosting a brand new podcast called Literary Outlaws with my pal, Kevin G. Summers, author of The Man Who Shot John Wilkes Booth & Legendarium.

If you’re a fan of my voice (which I hate, because who doesn’t hate the sound of their own voice?) then you’ve heard me regularly on SciFi Writers Playing Old School D&D and occasional on Live at the Benbow Inn? Why so much podcasting. Well, I’ve been blessed to meet some truly amazing writers since I released ’til Death in July. Talking to them is a blast, and listeners seem to agree.

Well, it turns out that an organic farmer and Star Trek author from Virginia named Kevin G. Summers and I have a surprising amount of things in common. He’s the perfect co-host for a new podcast about writing and living as a Literary Outlaw.

Listen to the Podcast

Like outlaw stories? Give Ledge Town a read!

The post Podcasting as Literary Outlaws appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

A Writer’s Reflection: How D&D Was and Still is a Creative Breeding Ground

With age comes, if not wisdom, hindsight. I can see now that when I was a youth, I had an abundance of spare time. I wasted a LOT of it. On a given Saturday, I might head over to my friend Randy McClain’s place and we’d spend the day swapping baseball cards, playing Spellfire, and then holding night long D&D sessions in a tent in his backyard.

Oh good, Fizban can cast cleric spells, too. That’s… useful?

The baseball cards are worthless.

I couldn’t begin to tell you how Spellfire worked.

But I’d like to think the time laughing through our adventures playing D&D was well spent. We would generally run two campaigns, a funny one set in Forgotten Realms Where I played a self-hating dwarf who pined to be human and he played a steely cool Ranger. It was the very height of adolescent humor and I can only imagine what Mrs. McClain thought of when she heard our snickering in the backyard.

I imagine she stood frozen in fear, hands clutching her chest in the realization that her son and his friends were tremendous geeks, and this with High School just around the corner. “Oh, cruel world.”

When we wanted to test our chops at something serious, something that could take advantage of the night sky and the general spookiness of being twelve and out of doors, we’d switch to the swirling mists of Ravenloft, and adventure as a pair of Werewolf hunters in the enchanted fur trade.

Now at this point you may be nodding your head in understanding, or rolling your eyes at my admission. “I thought he was cool,” the writer imagines you saying as he fuels his own delusions of grandeur.

Hear me out.

These little sessions did more for my ability to string together coherent plots, navigate different character voices and identities, develop comedic timing, and see a story through multiple perspectives than I ever realized at the time.

But now I see benefits, and its something I actively try to grow with my own sons. Only we play the Star Wars: Age of Rebellion game instead of D&D.

Last year, I landed myself a real sweet gig. Nick Cole cast to play the Bro-inspired Barbarian Barabosa for his podcast, Sci-Fi Writers Playing Old School D&D.

It’s proved to be a hilarious couple of hours every month. It’s driven me to write in the fantasy genre in a novel I’m excited to release later this year. I get to relive the RPG glory days with other seasoned writers. With a family, writing, and a day job, there isn’t a lot of time for these sorts of things any more. This makes makes me appreciate the sessions so much more now than in days gone by when time was a valueless commodity.  I think you might appreciate the show as well.

Give episode one a listen and let me know what you think.

 

 

Oh, and if you like what you see heard… you can read more of my funny side with ’til Death, and the savage Barbarian side with Ledge Town!

The post Getting Creative: Our Old School D&D Podcast appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

I play D&D with a group of Sci-Fi Authors about once a month. It’s a fun time and it gives us a chance to get our inner-Tolkien out. We had a blast in our most recent episode and my character, a barbarian named Barabosa was able to save face following an ogre beat-down by going full MACHO MAN on the champion representing a mountain tribe of goat people.

And then it gets weird.

 

The post Conan Meets Thunderdome appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

Amazon has a new feature that allows associates to embed books via html called Kindle Instant Book Previews.

It’s pretty slick, and I’ve already replaced the books on my homepage with these links since they’re all Amazon exclusives at this point. It’s pretty simple and user-friendly and if you’re an author, like me, or a book reviewer, take advantage. Let’s agree to call Kindle Instant Book Previews Kibpy, pronounced “Kippy” right at the outset. Kibpy shows a book’s cover, a buy button (which you can hide if you’d like), and gives the viewer the option to read a preview of the book wherever you are.

With more and more people using their phones to read and browse the internet, this is a TREMENDOUS tool. If you’re sharing a compelling book, now you have a chance to get a passing reader to get hooked and buy right away. Here’s how to use this great feature:

Find the Button on the Amazon Product Page

This is located in the row of sharing links. Right side, below the purchase options.

Select to Embed as a URL (link) or as HTML

 

Here’s what the code looks like as a URL:

Preview ’til Death Today!

And here’s the HTML embed code:





Don’t Forget to Include your Associates ID

Unlike the shortlink feature, Kibpy doesn’t automatically associate the preview with your Associates ID. While you can leave it blank and have full functionality, you’ll need to supply it manually if you want to earn any referral fees. Click the drop down arrow and type in your ID.  If you don’t know what your associate ID is, go here.

How Big Do You Want Your Kibpy?

You can manually re-size embedded images, but in a nice touch, Amazon lets you choose the Kibpy scale you’d like in a small/medium/large format.

Here’s the breakdown of how this looks:

All in all, I like the system and I’ve converted my site to use it. You can see how well it scales into sidebars and how easily it fits in posts. So give those thirsty readers out there a taste of what you’ve written. If you’re using these on your site, leave a comment so I can see what you did. I’d love to see how people are employing this little nugget. You can see Kibpy’s Home Page Here.

The post How to Use Kindle Instant Book Previews appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

Firefly is one of my favorite shows. You probably remember how it turned out – a great show that everyone loved, but was canceled before it had a chance to achieve mainstream greatness. I worked on a project through much of 2015 that should be considered the literary equivalent of Firefly. That project, of course, is Apocalypse Weird.

An abandoned Red King webcomic was in the works. I illustrated this rough sketch.

Initially, I was brought on to the Apocalypse Weird project as a writer and assigned Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Toward the end, I was made Director of Marketing. We had a lot of fun, immense struggles, and some great ideas that came just a few days and dollars too late.

One of our final projects was an ambitious one: The authors involved in the project would collaborate to write a full length novel in the first three weeks of November as a part of NaNoWriMo. The final week would belong to our AMAZING editor, Ellen Campbell, who would finish in enough time to marry up the words with a cover and write, edit, & release a NaNoWriMo novel by December 1st.

I led off, locked myself in my house, and wrote 5,000 words on November 1st. On day two the bad news came: the project couldn’t afford to continue.

That first chapter has since become a short story called Ledge Town, available to my newsletter subscribers for free.

That’s what’s so wonderful about Indie Publishing compared to Network Television. When Firefly was canceled, that was it. Fans of the show like me were stuck wondering what could have been.

With Apocalypse Weird, the story continues. Below is a list of the talented writers involved in the project and how you as a reader & fan can follow up and make sure you find out what happens next!

Jason Anspach – I mentioned my free short story, right?
Nick Cole – will continue the 12-book Wyrd saga that began with The Red King. Sign up for his newsletter to stay informed.
Winter is still coming for Kevin G. Summers. His followup to The Bleak December is in the works. Track it here.
E.E. Giorgi has an Immunity sequel scheduled for late next year. Follow her here.
Chris Pourteau’s sequel to The Serenity Strain, titled Ironheart is finished and should release soon.He’ll make the announcement here.
Forbes West was scheduled to release his sequel to Medium Talent called Bad Dream Man. The book will launch soon, so check his website!
David Bruns is continuing the terror he began in Asia with Seal Bearer. Follow him at davidbruns.com.
Our amazing editor, Ellen Campbell, can be followed here. You’ll find some new Apocalypse Weird and other great stuff by keeping track of Ellen!
Ed Gosney has bad things planned for Ohio. Strange Change is coming.
Michael Bunker hopes to continue the Texocalypse story line. www.michaelbunker.com
Jon Frater swears that The Taste Makers *will* destroy Manhattan!http://jonfrater.thirdscribe.com
The White Dragon will take flight. If you would like to know when and how, join Stefan Bolz’s newsletter atwww.stefanbolz.thirdscribe.com.
Kim Wells hopes to have a sequel to Hoodoopocalypse started in early 2016. Follow her progress at www.kimwells.net.
Jennifer Ellis has a follow up to her original five novel, Reversal. Here’s how to make sure you read it!
Bob Williams‘ debut novel, Music City Macabre, is out. You can read it for free by signing up for his newsletter
Steve Statham has a fantastic sequel to Texocalypse Now waiting to be published. You don’t want to miss Fight For the Night! 
Philip Harris has four free books for you plus news about Siren’s Call, his scheduled contribution to AW. 
Eamon Ambrose over atEamoTheGeek.com plans to announce any Apocalypse Weird related indie release!

And that’s it. Let’s see if Apocalypse Weird ever gets that nice follow-up movie like Serenity!

The post Apocalypse Weird: The Browncoats of Publishing appeared first on JasonAnspach.com.

You know that scene in a movie, the really compelling one that keeps you on the edge of your seat? Yeah, that’s the one. Okay, now think of the times when you’ve been captivated by that scene and someone else enters the room and starts asking you what’s going on and you have to shush them because what’s playing out before you is soooooo good.

Eamon Ambrose drops you right in the middle of that scene, and you will shush your own mind as it asks, “what’s that about?” “Oh, cool, but I wonder…” You will shush yourself because as much as you want to know what happened before, everything you’re reading is crafted so wonderfully by Ambrose that you find yourself pulled in more, and more, and more, until you reach that spectacular ending, let out the breath you didn’t realize you were holding in and say… “Man, that was good.”

Grab a copy of Zero Hour over at the ‘zon for $0.99

I’m running a giveaway for a signed copy of ’til Death. The drawing closes on October 3rd!

Goodreads Book Giveaway


’til Death
by Jason Anspach

Giveaway ends October 03, 2015.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Can’t wait for the contest to end? Grab a copy today on amazon!

$0.99