Book Signing at the Book Loft!

Ladies and gents,

Please join me tomorrow night for a mass author book signing at the famous Book Loft in German Village! From 6 to 8pm, I'll be signing copies of my book, Slideways, along with these other awesome folks:

Denise Verrico
Ren Garcia
Gary Wedlund
Anne Lutz

Come out and see us. We'll be handing out goodie bags!

Context 2012 schedule

Once again, the fine folks at Context have invited me to be a panelist this weekend. Here are the panels I'm part of this year:

Saturday
11:00 Surviving Revisions and Edits With Only a Few Tears
4:00 Books We Read as Kids That Influence Who/What We Are Now
8:00 How Far Can You Go in Writing Before it's Porn?
9:00 Young Adult Fiction: Not for Kids Anymore

I think this is the first time I've had an all-Saturday panel schedule. On the one hand, I like that I have Friday and Sunday free to roam and soak up wisdom from our other attendees. On the other, I have a feeling I'll be feeling pretty rough by 10:00 Saturday night.

Big plus, if you just want to pick up a day pass and come out Saturday, you won't miss any of my panels!

Story Starter Sunday 6/17/12

Time for this week's Story Starter. I'm still recovering from Pride yesterday. Our group had a small float and a section behind for marchers. A couple of friends wanted to ride the float, so I decided to hop on with them. Beats walking two miles in the heat, right? Nope. For future reference, standing inside a reflective metal box in blistering sunlight for an hour and a half is no less miserable than walking in it. But we had a great time.

So, today's Story Starter. Here's what I rolled (please ignore the sideways-ness):

And here's what I came up with:

Tommy Big Oak knows that most people's shadows follow them, not the other way round. But his shadow's always leading the way. When Tommy follows close, he finds a number of mysteries: fish who teach him to open locks, and the secret code on his cell phone that can switch any light on or off, or even a whole city! And when he follows Shadow to the remnants of a fallen star, he finds a bigger mystery--a starlit path from Earth to the Moon.

Anyone else want to give it a go? It's fun!

Story Starter Sunday 6/10/12

So, this past Christmas I got a fun gift from my good friend Brian. They're called Rory's Story Cubes, and they're used for...well, lots of things. Each of the cubes (dice) shows an image, and you try to create a story from the images.

I had decided to use them as an icebreaker brainstorming exercise. Then I figured, why not share the fun? So every Sunday I'll post the arrangement of Story Cubes I've rolled this week, along with my story idea. If you come up with a different, better, funnier, etc., idea, please post it in the comments! And if you manage to get a story published based on a cube arrangement, I'd love to hear about it!

So, without further ado, here's this week's arrangement. I've already formed the cubes into idea clusters, but please don't limit yourself to my pairings:

Okay, so here's my story idea for this week: An elderly optimist who can calculate advanced mathematics using an abacus forms an unlikely friendship with a pessimistic firebug with a compulsion for destroying light bulbs. When they discover the Turtle of Chaos has a scheme to take over the world's postal service, they band together to fight the foe.

What did you come up with?

Blog post and NEWS!

Two bits of news today.

First: The lovely Laura Bickle is hosting me today over at her blog, Salamander's Tales. Please stop by and share your thoughts on the relationship between reading and writing.

Second: As some of you know, my YA fantasy novel Slideways is *now available for sale*. You can purchase the print book at Amazon, B&N, and my publisher's website. You can also purchase the ebook via Smashwords.

Billy Mays Mode: In addition, I have a limited number of copies that you can purchase directly from me! I'll autograph a copy for you, your dog, Ebay, whoever you want. All for the low, low cost of $10 (plus $2 S&H). For details, shoot me an email (listed in my profile) or comment here. Note: supplies are limited, so act fast.

/Billy Mays

Cover Love!

I can finally share the preliminary cover art for Slideways! Here we go:

I love this cover! It illustrates one of my favorite scenes from the book, when Reva first connects with Darlene and discovers the truth about slideways travel. I am totally excited!

Million Short

What a cool idea for a search engine! When you type a search into Million Short, it cuts out the top million most popular sites on the web when pulling results. That way you can see what exists for your topic beyond Wikipedia. The creators describe it as more of a "discovery engine" than a search engine. One of my co-workers said it reminds them of what it was like to search the web around 1999 or so.

You can also adjust the filter so you're only cutting out the top 100,000, with levels down to cutting the top 100. Great time waster if nothing else. Anyone find anything good?