SEPTEMBER UPDATE!

Wow, wow, wow, I have been busy busy this month, writing my heart out, posting all sorts of cool projects and working on lots more! In addition, I have this week slashed the prices on ALL of my books, and, with the exception of my brand new YA sequel Happy Birthday to Me Again, everything of mine is just 99 cents for a limited time!!

So what's new??

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME AGAIN, the continuation of the Cameron / Liesel story that wraps up this Christmas with the third and final installment Happy Birthday to You, is finally on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Noble for just $2.99! This time, Cameron starts aging backward, and Liesel disappears, making it seem impossible that he will survive. Happy Birthday to Me Again is a funny, surprising thrill ride of a book, and I hope all of you who enjoyed the first book will enjoy this second one!

Happy Birthday to Me Again on Amazon

SIX SCARY STORIES is a short but sweet little collection of mine, six stories I've written over the past year that all share the same genre--horror! These chilling stories feature psychotic mothers, vengeful ex-lovers, spider monsters, and knife wielding mannequins. Lots of fun stuff here. Six Scary Stories is on sale for the month of October for just 99 cents!!

Six Scary Stories on Amazon (Just 99 Cents)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME is a must-read for anyone who wants to check out the sequel. While in many ways Happy Birthday to Me Again works as a stand-alone novel, it's really more fun if you check out the first installment beforehand. In the first book the lead character Cameron Martin starts aging a whole year of his life with each passing day, and he's only in high school! To mark the release of the sequel, I have temporarily lowered the price of Happy Birthday to Me to just 99 cents!

Happy Birthday to Me on Amazon (Just 99 Cents)

TOWNHOUSE is the evil overweight uncle of Six Scary Stories!! If you enjoy my short story collection, you'll love my debut horror novel, which tells the story of an engaged young couple who move into a North Hollywood townhouse, only to discover that someone in the complex is not what he or she seems. It's a spooky, suspenseful novel that in the end... just may make you lose your lunch! For the month of October, and in celebration of the upcoming Halloween holiday, I have lowered the price of Townhouse to just 99 cents!

Townhouse on Amazon (Just 99 Cents)

SLATE, my debut novel, may feel all alone in the corner there. Townhouse has its evil horror nephew Six Scary Stories, and my YA debut Happy Birthday to Me now has a brother in Happy Birthday to Me Again. But Slate is getting her evil twin sister this November... that's right... my top secret novella project is a semi follow up to Slate entitled Christmas in Maui: A Very Merry Slate Novella!! This novella, which will be about 25,000 to 30,000 words, takes place between the end of Chapter 44 and that six-months-later epilogue. I'm about halfway done and it's a lot of fun, particularly for those who enjoyed Slate, which, like my other works, has just been lowered to 99 cents!

Slate on Amazon (Just 99 Cents)

So let's see... we have my Slate novella coming in early November, a special short story coming in mid November, and Happy Birthday to You, the final book in the Birthday trilogy, coming in early to mid December, just in time for Christmas. And this November I start writing my newest novel, which will kick off not a horror trilogy for teens, but a horror SERIES for teens. Think The X-Files crossed with R.L. Stine's Fear Street series... this one's going to be a ton of fun! The first book's title? The Vampire Underground. It's coming... in Spring 2012!

So how's that for an update? Happy reading, everyone!!

Happy Birthday to Me Again is Live on Amazon!!!

My fourth novel and YA sequel Happy Birthday to Me Again is now officially live on Amazon for just $2.99 for an ebook copy! Look for the third and final book of the trilogy around Christmas, but for now, pick up a copy of the hilarious, terrifying, and very much surprising second chapter Happy Birthday to Me Again! I promise you won't be disappointed!!

Buy Happy Birthday to Me Again on Amazon for just $2.99!

Six Scary Stories Debuts on Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

I've been working day and night getting my YA sequel Happy Birthday to Me Again ready for launch this coming weekend, but I've also been tinkering with another project the last few weeks, and I thought it would be fun to release it just days before my new novel!

Six Scary Stories features six of my short horror stories written in the last year, and two in the collection have never before been published! These stories of the macabre involve obsessive fans, homicidal mannequins, vengeful ex-lovers, and much, much more. The short story collection, only available for eBook download, is available for just $2.99 for a limited time!

Six Scary Stories at Amazon


Six Scary Stories at Barnes & Noble

The First Chapter of Happy Birthday to Me Again!

With just a few days to go before the launch of my fourth novel, the sequel to my YA debut Happy Birthday to Me, I thought I'd give you all a little treat today... the first chapter of the book! Take a look below!

The nightmare was real. Again.

I crawled up the steep, scary mountain, trying to keep breathing, trying to keep my eyes open, the rain pelting down against the ground and splashing wet mud against my terrified face. I could hear the thunder exploding with fury above me, the lights in the sky signifying an impending apocalypse.

Worst of all, my diaper was giving me serious irritation on my butt cheeks.

My name is Cameron Martin. It’s Wednesday, April nineteenth.

And I’m a one-year-old.

Last year an unimaginable curse took hold of my body, causing me to age an entire year of my life with each passing day. For the last three months of my senior year of high school, I aged from seventeen to eighty-five, turning back to normal magically, and thankfully, just in time to see my high school graduation. In March of last year, I thought I had all the time in the world. In June I realized how precious life can be, and from then on I made a promise to myself to not waste a single second.

To make matters more complicated, the girl I fell in love with during those tumultuous three months turned out to be the girl who inflicted the evil curse upon me in the first place. My girlfriend is a witch, and a vastly powerful one at that. I knew by the time I started dating her that she had otherworldly powers, but I didn’t find out until nearly a year later just what this girlfriend of mine was capable of. Her name’s Liesel. And she’s the best, worst thing that ever happened to me.

It’s been nearly a year since Liesel cured me in that dark, depressing hospital room, nearly a year since I saw my whole life flash before my eyes. There I was, seventeen years old on the inside, eighty-five and rotting on the outside, waiting to die. But something extraordinary happened to me that night. I didn’t die; I got better. And in June I was finally able to put that horrific episode behind me.

But now, here I am, in the pouring rain, crawling through mud, nearly naked, once again counting the seconds to my death. And unlike last time, when the tiniest bit of hope carried me through to my final moments, tonight, I have no hope. None. There’s nothing she can do for me. There’s nothing he can do for me. And there’s nothing that demonic sorceress above wants more than to see me erased from this planet forever.

I knew tonight was the night I was going to die. But still, I couldn’t give up. 

You have to keep going, I told myself. There was a miracle before. Maybe there can be a miracle again. Come on, Cameron. Move your scrawny little ass.

“MOVE!” I shouted, although something more like “MOOOO” came out of my infant mouth.

I tried to push through the mud faster, but I kept sliding. I tried to kick up with my feet, but that wasn’t helping either. I always wondered why memories from our first few years of life were typically suppressed by the time we hit puberty. I realized now it was because the helplessness we feel under the age of three is the most terrifying feeling in the whole world, more so than loss, more so than pain. The helplessness I’ve felt in the last few hours has been nothing short of debilitating. I feel thankful that my eighteen-year-old mind has stayed in tact these last two weeks, no matter how young I become, but I’m also not happy having these teenaged thoughts in a body reserved for someone whose main concern in life is to cry a lot and crap a lot.

Must keep going…

I was halfway up the mountain by now. It had been mere minutes since she had cast me down the mountain, mere minutes since she assumed I was to be a dead, rotting carcass. But one thing she didn’t know about me is that I fight until the very end. As long as my pudgy, thirty-inch-body kept moving, and as long as oxygen still found its way into my pink, spotless lungs, I knew I’d try my best to stay alive. Kill me now and I’ll stop. Let me keep breathing, and I’ll get to the top of this mountain if it’s the last thing I do.

I figured by the time I reached the peak of the mountain that the rain would start calming down. But it didn’t. The further I climbed, the worse it became; the heavy rain smashed against my head like a tidal wave from Hell. As much I didn’t love the snow in those freezing Reno winter months, I would’ve welcomed a five-minute blizzard recess from this calamitous downpour.

Thankfully, though, the incessant rain only meant one thing: I’m not the only one who’s still putting up a fight.

I puckered my lips and blinked a few times, noticing that my eyesight was going blurry. I could see flashing lights at the top of the mountain, bolts of lightning crashing down from the black, angry sky. I wanted to reach the top, but with every inch further I climbed, the further away the peak of the mountain seemed to get. 

I stopped and turned around, glancing down below to see a flash flood overtaking the adjacent park and parking lot. A lone Volkswagon Beetle drifted down the nature-made river toward the crowded I-5 freeway. It was understandable, and understood, that nobody in Los Angeles would be taking a midnight hike tonight. But here I was, on my hands and knees, crawling up the world’s largest mud pile to see if my beloved was still alive.

If she goes, I go.

“CAMERON!”

It was faint, but noticeable in the distance. I heard my name shouted again, this time more clearly. Most remarkable of all, it wasn’t Liesel.

It can’t be.

I crawled as fast as my puny arms and legs would let me, bypassing the wettest parts of the mud, which by now were slowly forming into a nearly unavoidable mudslide. I wanted to jump up to my feet and run faster than the speed of sound, just bolt with all my might until I reached the top to see once and for all the aftermath of what had been the longest, most unusual, most haunting two weeks of my life.

This from someone who spent three months last year aging into an eighty-five-year-old man.

“CAM!” he shouted. “I’M HERE! I’M HERE!”

“I CAN HEAR YOU!” I shouted back, but what came out of my mouth was “IKEARU!”

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty. I didn’t hear him. He stopped shouting. I wondered for a moment if all the screaming from the other side of the mountain had been a product of my child-like imagination.

I was almost at the top. I could feel the top. I reached my arms out and prepared myself for the final pull.

He finally said something again.

“CAMERON!” he shouted. “WHERE ARE Y—”

A flash of lightning crashed against the mountain just yards in front of me, and the land beneath me started to shake. My legs slipped out from under me, and I lost my grip.

The entire mountainside transformed into a gigantic, terrifying mudslide.

“OH SHIT!” I shouted. That phrase came out normal.

I kicked my feet against the ground, clawed through the mud with my small, pathetic hands, and rolled myself up to the top of the mountain, just in time to see a massive, jaw-dropping mudslide crash down the mountain like an avalanche of destructive chocolate milk.

I took the deepest breath I could, laid back against the top of the mountain, and looked up to see a bolt of lightning headed right for me.

This night’s just gone from worse to a lot worse, I thought.

A few days ago I was eighteen years old. Currently, I’m one. And in a few minutes, I’ll be gone.

Throughout the month of April, I have been de-aging a whole year of my life with each passing day. Last year I had three months to tackle my embarrassing, inexplicable curse. This year, I’ve had less than three weeks. There just hasn’t been enough time.

Time’s all but run out.

“LIESEL! I LOVE YOU!”

I have no idea what escaped my mouth in those final, fleeting moments of my young adult life, but I hoped she could hear me. She had to hear me. After all, what more could I have hoped for in those final breaths than to know that Liesel, in all her glory, would go on, and feel my love… forever.

I exhaled one last time, closed my eyes, and focused my final thought on an image of happier times: Liesel on the mountain bike. She was so fast. So very fast.

In a brief, exhilarating moment, I was transferred back four months to a chilly Christmas Eve, when all was right in the world. 

Happy Birthday to Me Again Synopsis

I'm currently hard at work on the final draft of Happy Birthday to Me Again, and I wanted, finally, as I promised, to unveil the official synopsis of the sequel! Here goes...

Cameron Martin has a huge problem: he’s aging a whole year of his life with each passing day… again!

When Cameron proposes to his beloved witch of a girlfriend Liesel, he thinks life can’t get any better. But when he reluctantly breaks off the engagement just days before the wedding, Liesel angrily unleashes another curse on the unlucky guy, this time making him age backward, from eighteen, all the way to zero!

Making matters worse, Liesel mysteriously disappears, leaving Cameron with no options, except watching himself quickly shrink into a helpless child. Will Liesel be able to save his life again this time? Or will Cameron be stuck in diapers for the rest of eternity? 

Look for a sample chapter from the book in the coming days, then the official release of Happy Birthday to Me Again soon after!!

The Story Behind A DANGEROUS ROAD

Eighty years ago today my grandmother Barbara Krueger was born, to Weldon and Lolita Emigh. Her dad was a family man, talented golfer, worker in the coffee business, and lover of the California coastline. And even though he never even graduated from high school, Weldon Emigh had a life ambition to write a novel. Throughout the late 1970's, he finally got to work on his book, a romance titled A DANGEROUS ROAD set in Monterey about an adulterous love affair. He finished the book, twenty-seven chapters and 84,000 words in length, in 1980, and spent much of the rest of his life trying to get his debut novel published. He sent it to publishers, time and time again, only to get rejected and denied every single time. He even followed Merv Griffin into a men's bathroom and asked him while peeing if he could help him get his book published. The man tried everything, but alas, his manuscript never saw the light of day. And when Weldon passed away in the summer of 1998, his one and only novel remained just that--an unpublished manuscript.

Growing up, writing my short stories and screenplay in my teen years, I was always intrigued about my great-grandfather's unpublished book. I was the only person in my extended family writing fiction, so I liked the idea that somebody much older than myself had tried to write a book. In 2003 I left for film school and didn't write much material for a while, instead focusing on film criticism and making movies. But in the last two years I returned to my first love, writing fiction, and later this week I'm going to finish my fifth book. Earlier this year I learned the process of how to take your manuscript and self publish it into a physical book for the masses to read, and suddenly I had the ability to take not just my work, but someone else's, and turn it into a published book.

In April, after returning to Reno, I discovered that my grandmother--Weldon's daughter--was going to be turning 80 in late August. I had made a documentary about her husband Ralph for his 80th birthday in 2009, and I wanted to do something equally special for my grandmother. Lo and behold, I discovered that Weldon's novel, only one single manuscript left in existence, was at my uncle and aunt's house across town. I asked to see it, and it was delivered to me in early May. Running about 360 pages in length, the manuscript was a mess. Pages were falling out, much of the typeface was hard to read. I knew, now with my knowledge of self-publishing, that I had to do something with this book, and the timing was perfect, considering my grandma's birthday coming up at the end of August.

So starting the first week of May, I began typing my deceased great-grandfather's words page by page, paragraph by paragraph, to Microsoft Word, typing up about eight pages a day, while I also worked on my fourth and fifth manuscripts. I took a couple of brief breaks, and it ended up taking me a little more than three months to transcribe the entire novel to my own Word document. By early August, I had his entire book on a clean Microsoft Word file, and I set out to create the book cover, and the interior file for the physical book version. Two weeks ago I received the final 252-page book version, and gift-wrapped it for my grandmother's birthday.

On Saturday night we went out for dinner at Garwood's at Lake Tahoe, then went back to our cabin to give my grandma her birthday presents. First she read my card, then she unwrapped the gift, clearly confused as what my gift could possibly be. When she stared down at the cover, and I said, "I published your dad's book," she brought her hand to her face and started to cry. I gave her a big hug and enjoyed this rare, tender moment with my grandmother. She was totally stunned at the gift, and excited to share it with her sister Ellie, who lives in California. A handful of people in the family had tried to continue work on my great-grandfather's book, including my own grandfather at one point, but finally, in 2011, thirteen years after Weldon's death, his novel had seen the light of day as a published book, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and CreateSpace. My great-grandfather's work, twenty-one years after completion, is now in print... forever.

My great-grandfather's book is available in both eBook and Softcover versions. If you're interested in checking it out, feel free to click on any one of the links below...

A DANGEROUS ROAD on Amazon


A DANGEROUS ROAD on Barnes & Noble


A DANGEROUS ROAD on CreateSpace

AUGUST UPDATE!

Well it's been a little slow on the blog this month, but that's just because I've been working harder on ever, on the final draft of Happy Birthday to Me 2 and the first draft of Happy Birthday to Me 3. I've been spending as much time in the world of Cameron, Liesel, Kimber, and Wesley, as I have in my own world! It's hard to believe that in less than two weeks I will be finished with the first draft of Happy Birthday to Me 3, since I've been writing these characters for nearly two years now. But I'm excited to release Books 2 & 3 of my Birthday trilogy, and ready as ever to read reader's responses!

Here are the updates on all my writing projects I've been working on...

SLATE: I've gone back and forth on giving my debut novel the subtitle "The Salacious Story of a Hollywood Casting Director" because I think what's unique about this novel is that a casting director is the protagonist, and unless someone tells me differently, I believe this is the first novel ever written with a casting director in the lead role. Right now it's just "Slate" though! Only $2.99 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

SLATE on Amazon

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (Birthday Trilogy, Book 1): My debut young adult novel has received wonderful reviews from readers and book bloggers all over the world and is still receiving 4 and 5 star reviews on Goodreads as recently as two days ago. It's been thrilling for me to see all the good responses, since I've put so much time and energy into continuing the story with the two sequels. Obviously if you didn't care for Book 1, you're not going to read Books 2 & 3. But for those of you excited to see the story continue, I've got not one but two exciting adventures awaiting for you! The first installment is $2.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble but I will be cutting the price down to 99 cents in mid-September, so watch for that! Also, an awesome book blog tour is coming in September, so I'll have more on that in the coming weeks!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME on Amazon

TOWNHOUSE: A TALE OF TERROR: Just like with Slate, I've been going back and forth on subtitling my debut horror novel "A Tale of Terror" mostly because I want people to know this is a terrifying thrill ride of a book, not a book about townhouse architecture. So it's currently "A Tale of Terror" on Amazon right now, and I think I'll keep it that way, because it does have a nice ring to it, with the three T's. It's been a lot of fun these last two weeks following the Book Lovin' Bitches book blog tour of this novel, where it has been reviewed on seven different blogs (all positive, yay!). While this will be my only adult horror title for awhile, there definitely will be more horror fiction coming from me very, very soon...

TOWNHOUSE on Amazon

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME AGAIN (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2): I've been working on this follow-up to Happy Birthday to Me almost daily for the last few months and I've finally begun working on the final draft, although most of my time in the last month has been devoted to working on the first draft of the third book. Happy Birthday to Me Again is similar to the first book in that Cameron suffers another aging disease, except this time he has to figure out how to survive when Liesel is unexpectedly kidnapped. This second installment introduces a villain who will play a major part in the second and third books! The book will be available for $2.99 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as early as Friday, September 16th, and no later than Monday, September 26th! Get ready! It's coming!

TOP SECRET NOVELLA PROJECT: I've only written about 5,000 words of this novella, but I'm going to set aside a week at the end of September to write the rest of it. It'll be probably 25,000 to 30,000 words in length, and it continues the storyline of one of my three novels. If you've read my books, you can probably guess which one it is, and I'll be revealing more about this one in October.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU (Birthday Trilogy, Book 3): The third and final installment of the Birthday trilogy is the book I always hoped it would be... it's kind of like two books in one, and in November / December, when I release this final installment, you'll see why. It's definitely the biggest tearjerker of anything I've written, and it takes the main characters into very scary and dark places. It's also very unlike the first two books of the trilogy, and it also might be my strongest work to date. I have about 25,000 more words to write in the first draft, and then revisions will begin in September!

HORROR TRILOGY FOR TEENS: My YA trilogy for 2011 is the Happy Birthday to Me trilogy, and my YA trilogy for 2012 is going to be more horror-centric, with a good mix of comedy, romance, and suspense, and in a little over a week I'm taking a two-day field trip to a California ghost town to start doing research!! I'll be starting the first draft of the first book of my new trilogy later this year, but the work has already begun!

So there you have it... my August update about all my novels I'm working tirelessly on. I can't wait to hear what you all think of Happy Birthday to Me Again, my fourth novel, my first sequel, and my next big novel release! I'll be back in September with another update, along with the official synopsis of my new book, as well as all the information you need on the release of the new book itself! Next month... the Happy Birthday to Me story continues!!