Shroud Magazine Interview!

Lincoln Crisler interviewed me for Shroud Magazine, which you can read right here:

http://shroudmagazinebookreviews.blogspot.com/2010/07/interview-with-jeff-strand.html

A Guest Blog With Actual Writing Advice?

I just did a guest installment of Ty Schwamberger’s Hellnotes column “Tying Up The Genre,” where I talk about the scariest thing imaginable to an author…rejection!!!

http://hellnotes.com/ty-ing-up-the-genre-the-scariest-thing-imaginable

Stokers 2011 – Be There!

The next Bram Stoker Awards Weekend will be held July 16-19, 2011 in Long Island, New York. Guests include Peter Straub and David Morrell, and the Artist Guest of Honor is the wildly talented Deena Warner.

And, hey, I’ll be emcee of the awards banquet again! You can watch me continue to grow more and more bitter about my own failure to win a Stoker award as I facilitate the process of other people receiving theirs!

Click HERE for the official website.

Nerdapalooza!

This past weekend I went to Nerdapalooza, mostly to beat up nerds, score with hot cheerleaders, and show off my varsity letters. Also to listen to some nerd music. It was two days of musical performances, and as somebody who once enthusiastically drove three hours each way to see The Arrogant Worms play at a library, you can bet that I was going to drive one hour and forty-five minutes each way for two solid days of this kind of stuff.

Nerdapalooza had a great setup, with the action taking place in a large ballroom with stages at each side, so that when one act ended you’d rush to the other side and the next one would begin, keeping things moving at a nice pace, except for the occasional (okay, frequent) bit of technical difficulties! Not every act was of high quality, or even quality, and I only watched about half of them, but there were several that I really enjoyed, starting with…

Devo Spice. “Nerdcore Comedy Hip-Hop,” according to his website. I’m not really a hip-hop kinda guy, but there’s no question that he’s a talented performer, and the songs were catchy and funny. Lest you think that the “nerd” part was inaccurate, one of the songs is about the frustrating life of being an IT guy, with a line that ridicules dumb people who don’t know the difference between an ethernet port and a USB cable. This is nerdy stuff, kids. And it gets into your head…and doesn’t leave…and I may start shouting “Google it yourself!” at people, which can’t be healthy…

George Hrab. Probably the most musically polished act I saw. Very funny songs, but it was the bits between the songs (a hilarious series of political ads about odd and even numbers) which take this into extreme nerd territory. My favorite song was “When I Was Your Age,” even though I don’t like songs about old people where I relate to the old people.

Kirby Krackle. I think that Kirby Krackle is officially a duo, but this was just one guy. I knew his song “Zombie Apocalypse,” (somebody shouted out a request for it, but tragically he didn’t have his ukulele, and you can’t play “Zombie Apocalypse” without a ukulele) but I didn’t know his other work. I would have to classify him as more “geeky” than “nerdy,” but it was a very entertaining show.

Schaffer the Darklord. A dorky little white guy rapping about geeky stuff. The crowd freaking loved him.

Worm Quartet. My favorite show of the weekend. A big, crazed-looking, heavily perspiring gentleman with unruly hair, his lyrics fly by so quickly that you can’t even catch them all, but his songs were the most genuinely funny and most demented of the bunch. I loved them all, but particularly “Great Idea For A Song,” which includes lyrics like “But if only your name rhymed with twisted psychotic slut, I’d have a great idea for a song.” I bought one of his CDs while I was there, but I’ll probably go on an iTunes downloading spree in the near future. (Actually, like Kirby Krackle, I think Worm Quartet is a band who only had one representative at Nerdapalooza, so this was just Worm Solo.)

The only performer whose music I actually owned before the show was The Great Luke Ski, a parody artist much like “Weird Al” Yankovic, who I’m going to see in concert on Sunday (JEALOUS???). Nerd music, of course, is mostly about the references to nerdy stuff, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica or Dr. Who, so his songs based on those shows kind of went over my head. But a song about Disney acquiring the Marvel characters (accompanied by a video with drawings by Luke Ski himself) was laugh-out-loud funny.

And he provided the most hilarious moment of the entire weekend, with a song about being a kid on Christmas morning and the unbearable anticipation of waiting to open your presents because you know–you just know–that there’s an Atari 2600 under the tree! The song, whose refrain is delivered in sheer horror, is “My Parents Bought Me Intellivision!” The song of my own experience would be “My Parents Bought Me Odyssey 2!” but the experience was the same, although the Great Luke Ski, during the course of the song, eventually realizes that his parents were right, and that Intellivision was a superior gaming system to the Atari 2600, whereas there was no such realization with the Odyssey 2, because the Odyssey 2 really sucked.

(Which did not stop me from playing 83,719 hours of Odyssey 2 until we eventually upgraded to ColecoVision.)

Overall, it was a lot of fun, and I’ll almost certainly go back next year. To beat up more nerds.

Dweller. Kindle. Cheap.

Do you own a Kindle? If so (and I apologize if this announcement causes your head to explode with thoughts of this inconceivable awesomeness) then you can get my novel Dweller for the mere scrap of a price of $2.99.

Think about it! If you don’t like the book, you can say “Well, at least I only paid $2.99!” If you love the book, you can say “Holy cow, I received hours of top-notch entertainment for only $2.99! What a miracle of a world we live in!”

If somebody came up to you and said “I’ll give you $2.99 if you let me jab you in the leg with this pushpin,” you’d almost certainly decline, even though the pain would be brief and it wouldn’t really leave a scar. That’s how miniscule $2.99 is! And Dweller is a 2010 release, not some dorky little backlist title where I’m saying “Ah, screw it, this thing has run its course; I might as well dump it for $2.99.”

You know what? You don’t even need a Kindle. Just get the Kindle app for your computer.

$2.99. Right here.

Wolf Hunt – Hardcover Edition

He’s a friendly werewolf! Just look at that smile!

This is the cover (by Frank Wells) of the hardcover edition of WOLF HUNT from Dark Regions Press. Watch for pre-order information soon…

Dark Regions 30% Off Sale!

Dark Regions Press is having a special Fourth of July Weekend sale…30% off everything in the store! (To the best of my knowledge, they do not rip out 30% of the pages.)

That means 30% off the hardcover edition of Dweller, and/or 30% off the paperback edition of Gleefully Macabre Tales (which includes my novella Disposal).

http://www.darkregions.com/products/Dweller-by-Jeff-Strand.html

http://www.darkregions.com/products/Gleefully-Macabre-Tales-by-Jeff-Strand.html

Just add them to your cart, go on a mad shopping spree to check out their other great authors, and enter the coupon code JULY4TH.

Order as much stuff as you want! Hoard copies of Gleefully Macabre Tales to distribute after the apocalypse!