First and foremost, BEGGARS WOULD RIDE is now available and out in the world for your purchasing pleasure! Pre-orders have been sent out and, for everyone else, here’s a bunch of helpful links:
Amazon
Goodreads
Google Play
Smashwords
It should also be available to order from your local bookstore, though that might take another couple weeks.
I have a very love/hate relationship with this book. Not for any quality reasons, mind you – I actually really like it once I can get past myself – but because I initially wrote BEGGARS WOULD RIDE with the express purpose of landing an agent. That didn’t happen, for reasons I will never actually know – though I can certainly guess.
Any time I talked about BWR online or volunteered it for a pitch contest, there was a lot of positive reader response, but not so much from agents and editors. The “problem,” as it’s been explained to me (by other agents looking at other books), is that while my books are very good and well-written, and as much as agents/editors like them as readers themselves, no one knows what to do with them. How to sell them. And I get that. As anyone who’s read the EXPONENTIAL APOCALYPSE books would almost certainly agree, I don’t write simple books. Even this one – arguably the most straightforward and mainstream thing I’ve ever written – is kind of like three or four separate arcs strung together. There’s the ROMEO & JULIET part, the THEM! and STAGECOACH part, and then the finale. I’m having a hell of a time trying to get people engaged with it myself. Love and monsters and anti-authoritarian propaganda and a lot of Springsteen references certainly seems universal to me, but maybe I’m wrong.
In other news, I talked to Joel Hodgson about the new season of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 for Den of Geek. It was a lot of fun, and definitely the biggest celebrity I’ve spoken to professionally, in a non-background-actor capacity. My brother was really stoked, too. MST3K – and bad movies, more generally – were a big part of our formative years.
I’m getting tired, so I think that’s it. BEGGARS WOULD RIDE has taken up a lot of my time recently, and I guess I have to find something else to do now? CULT OF THE LAMB, it is!