Jim Gavin's Blog

Just as a reminder, I'll be a guest at CONtraflow this weekend. Here's a list of the panels I'll be on:

How to Write Your First Novel, Friday, 1pm, Event 1 The Art of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Saturday, 11am, Panel Room 4 American South as a Setting in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Sunday, 10am Event 2 Skeptics vs. Believers, Sunday, 2pm, Panel Room 2
Or you could also find it here. I really like that feature, nice job by the con organizers.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Who the fuck am I to...

Jim (35) and Chicken (9 mos.) at World Horror Con 2013 in New Orleans

Coincidentally I was going to make a post about the next convention I'll be going to. I'll be a guest at CONtraflow New Orleans the first weekend in October. The picture above is from the last one I went to. Bringing your tiny baby to a con is not such a great idea if your wife likes to co-sleep and breastfeed. Everyone slept like crap and as a result by day two I was already exhausted and feeling sick. I didn't do half of...

This was originally going to be a different post about other shit. I can't really do that, though, until I do this.

Norm died Wednesday, 9/9/2015. He was a great guy, probably my biggest fan and I didn't really deserve him.

A proper obituary should be about the decedent, not the guy writing. The problem is that I don't really feel like the guy to do that. So I can only tell my story. Sorry, I guess that's pretty self-centered of me. Let me see how much I can talk about Norm without referring to...

So almost a month ago "Anthony P." wrote me a great review for SMARTASS. Some comments I had on what he wrote:

1. I actually, swear to God, had never read any Leigh Brackett until I was about 3/4 of the way through the book. I want to say I finished the first draft before I'd even heard of this lady. And I'm old enough that I should've already. To be honest I can't completely remember. Anyway, I was glad to be compared to her as she was doing a lot of the stuff I want...

Hadn't checked my KDP reports in a while. It's looking pretty good! After the book bomb hit towards the end of May thanks to all the morons at Ace of Spades, my sales have been pretty consistent - one or two a day since then, with some off days.

I am a little disappointed that I didn't get any more non-US sales. I guess I haven't leveled up enough yet to get the "BIG IN <SOME NON-US COUNTRY>" cheevo. My wife is rooting for Italy. Me, I'd take just about anywhere. Maybe even North Korea....

I should also mention that I've re-formatted HBVK and ARENA as well to bring up the standard. Sorry if you bought a crap copy. Just email me and I'll send you the new version and you can sideload it onto your device (you can't get the new version "officially" without buying it again, sorry).
I don't think I'll be writing any more novellas unless I'm compelled to just for the sake of art. No one seems to want to buy ARENA at $2.99 -- but that's the lowest price I can offer and still get 70%. Dr...

Thanks to all who bought both HBVK and SoM yesterday. For those who aren't aware, on the weekends the well-regarded blog Ace of Spades has lots of non-political threads for people to discuss gardening, cooking, guns, booze, all that kind of stuff. Oh, and books.

I've read the blog for a long time and really enjoy it. It hits that sweet spot of insightful commentary without being stuffy and easy to pin down. Great podcast, too. So the other day I saw their book thread and thought I'...

Sent out some marketing emails tonight. Doing this stuff gives me the agita because no one likes pushy people and no one likes spam and no one likes people who are like BUY MY BOOK BOOK BOOK but I have to try something. Sales on Amazon are OK, better than I expected really but still pretty low -- and I think this new book is revolutionary in a couple of ways.

Why? First, understand that as far as I can tell NO ONE has done a book like this. And I read just about every sword-and-planet I could...

Still "in review" at Amazon -- I just hit the "Publish" button. It should be there by the time you read this. Since I can't provide a direct link, you can find it on my Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00JEVPZEM

More to come, but I'll be working until the weekend and I won't really have time to post. I plan on putting up a sort of "post-mortem" on this book, why I wrote it, what I set out to do, and some other things. Thanks to all who he...

(Trigger warning: this post is self-indulgent).

We had a flash flood recently. Nothing major, but it hit my storage shed hard. Along with some things of my wife's, I lost a bin full of momentos and half of my comic book collection -- the good half, arguably.

The momentos were, as you might imagine, things like certificates I got in grade school for being good at math or "language arts" whatever the hell that is, the keepsake book from my First Communion, things like that.

This wa...