The first bricks and mortar shop to stock Exit, Pursued by a Bee is Bluecoat Books in Chester. The shop is perched on top of the ancient Roman and medieval walls that surround the city centre. Their address is 1, City Walls. Please anyone visiting Chester, which is a popular tourist town for folk from all over the world, go visit the shop even if you don’t buy my books there.

Exit is now at Amazon.co.uk presumably because of the third party booksellers that now stock it. Not yet at Barnes & Noble. I have several copies now for signed orders. Anyone who wants a signed copy and lives in the British Isles can have one from me for £12 and only a tiny bit more from the rest of the world. Send me an email via my website. http://geoffnelder.com

I’ve asked the Guardian if Eric Brown can review it. There are good reviews posted already at Bibliophilia forum by ~bintarab http://www.bibliophilia.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=854

Also by Annette Gisby here

Exit on Amazon

Exit, Pursued by a Bee appeared today on the Amazon.com website

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1554045940

 

Books seem to appear there in small bits. So the book image and other information has yet to appear even though buyers could buy it. I wonder how long it will take before other booksellers have their cheaper versions of it there too? I’ve added a captioned image that appears when a reader browses details.

 

It hasn’t appeared on Amazon.co.uk. I’m not sure if that will happen automatically or whether the publisher has to add it there himself.

 

I’ve ordered a bunch of copies to send to professional reviewers and to sell at scifi cons. If you want a signed copy send me an email to geoffnelder AT yahoo DOT com but be prepared to pay £11 to cover p&p.

 

 

Blogged in a blog

Or is that blagged in a blog? It is a funny but pleasant feeling when reading someone’s blog and discovering they’ve written fiction based on a fiction by me! Isn’t that a recursion? In programming a program subroutine that calls itself is recursive. I have a thirst for stories that refer to themselves such that they end up being an integral part of the story. The classic rescursive story travels something like: Man walks into a bar and sees a woman reading a newspaper in which there is a story about a man who walks into a bar. He sees a woman reading a newspaper in which there… you get it. But I seek to write a recursive novella, but that’s another story.

In this case Gladys Hobson, writer and small press publisher, read my Exit, Pursued by a Bee and it must have given her a nightmare! Check her blog here
http://gladyshobson.wordpress.com/
It both tickled me and is flattering. Thanks Gladys!

The magazines from the BSFA, (British Science Fiction Association) arrived today. Usually I stuff them in my bookcase with other unopened mags for when I go on a long train journey but I opened those two today. Yeay, a good review of our Escape Velocity magazine is in Vector mag from Terry Jackman. In Focus is an article written by me entitled: Taking Readers to 11.2 kilometres per second and beyond. 11.2km / sec is the velocity you’d need to escape from Earth and so it is a piece about Escape Velocity mag. The editor Martin McGrath, a brilliant writer as well as editor, made me write the article in exchange for me having an advert for Exit, Pursued by a Bee. So much promo, but this time matched with writing!

My wife is going to York this weekend to teach teachers about rocket science. It’s funny to think people blurt out “it’s not rocket science you know” whereas to my wife, rocket science is easy (she is a physicist) compared to many other aspects of life – such as map reading, choosing outfits, and how to stop me talking on about science fiction.

My daughter sent me a photo of her child yesterday. She hasn’t given birth yet, but doesn’t mind the world knowing that the Nelder genes are to be perpetuated. The ET look alike scan (at 11 weeks) is symbolic of another science fiction fan on his or her way. Yeay again!

On the radio in America!

Kim McDougall, who produced my Exit, Pursued by a Bee video trailer, was on a blogtalk radio yesterday in the USA and mentioned my name and book. Thanks Kim. She talked about trailers on Bookbites for Kids at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bookbitesforkids It’s an interesting topic and my name is about halfway through. It’s fun yet unaccustomed to hear my name being mentioned by American accents thousands of miles away.

Besides being on Youtube and approaching 650 hits >>  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnr-135u84c

Kim has placed it on a community press website I’ve not seen called gather.com

The good news is that DDP are bringing Exit out as a trade paperback shortly, so my local bookshops will be able to sell them. I’ll bring a pile along to the British Fantasy Society FantasyCon in Nottingham in September. I wonder who has a stall for me to share?

It is taking me ages to transcribe Exit as an audio script for Jon Eastwood and his actor friends from the London Bridge Experience to read to a microphone. Every day I do 30 or so pages. Because there is more than one voice I can take the opportunity to morph aspects to make the audio experience exciting. David Blunket MP wants it on his MP3 player. He had my humour thriller, Escaping Reality read to tape by the RNIB and so he must enjoy my writing enough to ask for this one too!

My Left Luggage science fiction is still in the hands of my US Literary agent. He likes the Exit trailer too, and we are contemplating making a trailer to promote Left Luggage to prospective publishers. It shows not just the premise of the book then but that the author is prepared to do some promo.

In spite of spending half her life in hospital out and in patients, travelling there and back and in pain at home, M Kenyon Charboneaux, tutor and writer of horror stories in the USA, took time out to read my Exit, Pursued by a Bee. I am overwhelmed by her review here >> http://geoffnelder.com/kenyon.htm

I am also grateful to an energetic and highly intelligent forum member, who audaciously calls herself ~bintarab (note the tilde), who meticulously nitcombed the text of Exit, Pursued by a Bee recently and passed onto me a list of errors. Some of them were subjective alternative comma usages and capitalization of military ranks, but much was correcting my awful French. Not that Exit is bilingual but I wrote the occasional mon cherie, as spoken by Claude, a French Canadian astronaut, and ~bintarab corrected it to ma cherie. (not sure how to do the accent in here – when I tried a few minutes ago I lost all this text and found myself playing a Lara Croft type game!. The upshot is that I was able to correct a galley proof of Exit, Pursued by a Bee for DDP to create a full-blown trade paperback version instead of the experimental but readable version at Lulu.com. Thanks ~bint!

All this euphoria was grounded this morning with the incoming real life post. I had a rejection for Auditory Crescendo today from Interzone.
Form rejection of the worst kind, IMHO. No explanation, no signature so I don’t know who read it. In the envelope – MY envelope with MY stamp – were adverts for the publishers other mags, the form reject, and another advert and urging for all submitters to buy and read Interzone. No wonder they don’t like responding by email and have only a tiny window for email subs: they use our envelopes and stamps to post their adverts to us. I wouldn’t mind so much but as I said in my query letter, I’ve subscribed to Interzone since it started.

I know for a fact that they are not deluged with submissions and even if they were I’m sure most submitters would prefer to wait another week and have a few words such as, pace too slow in the middle, characters 2D, already received alien abduction story this year, had too many man bites vampire tales…

I know that some editors fear a reprisal in the way of a prolonged discourse but I bet that rarely happens.

At Escape Velocity we always give a couple of sentences feedback with rejections and as a former leche oops, lecturer, I always find something positive to say. After all it takes at least 20 mins to read and consider a short story. It only takes another one minute to write a response, unless I get carried away and do a full crit

I’ve sent it to Asimov’s. Wish it luck.

new excerpt of Exit, Pursued by a Bee

The Double Dragon Publishing store front has an excerpt of Exit, Pursued by a Bee from
chapter one. However, if a reader amazingly remains uncertain, another
excerpt from deeper into the book is available here>>>

I am particularly pleased with that excerpt because it is of Oqmar in his desert cave 20,000 years ago. Already he is dismayed at seeing a small metallic sphere emerge from the floor of his cave, resist being netted, and escape by making a circular chimney through the hill. Oqmar has a paleolithic dog, Kur, with which he has more a meeting of minds than he does with his wife. Together they are astonished to see a stranger appear in their cave. I so enjoyed writing this meeting of ancient and modern man – one of the best bits in the book for me.

Whenever I make time to peep at my blog statistics I am struck by the higher number of hits for Tryfan than for any of my desperate attempts to point people at my books. Tryfan is a fine mountain in Snowdonia and I scaled its summit with the help of John last year. North face, too, with a mighty scramble just to reach the first stile out of the carpark! I often wonder whether all those thousands of mountain climbers seeking expert help and information about Tryfan, find my blog and think what on Earth have we here? Books, who wants science fiction books when they could be reading about mountains?

Even odder are the large hit rates I get for car in hedge. Yes, I encountered a car parked at right angles to the road and neatly into a hedge, but I can’t find it on google any more. Yet plenty of folks somehow hit my blog because I plonked it in here.and now I’ve done it again. More hits. Maybe a car in hedge afficianado will also want to buy my Exit, Pursued by a Bee book or at least glance at the fantastic video trailer for it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnr-135u84c

I still look at it, even though my clicks on it don’t add to the score there. It’s the clip of the animated spheres in orbit that grab me. So uncannily like the ones in my book. They do exactly as in the clip. Anyway they are so hypnotic, dreamy…

A marvelous endorsement to Exit arrived today from a writer who inhabits several forums. Her avatar is ~bintarab. Note the tilde ~ what a lovely name to call a scriggly line. She found a few typos in an early version of Exit and at my request was good enough to read it through again to note exactly where they were. She says this: “Since I read through it a second time to make my list, I pulled out the quotes that interested me enough that I might mention one or two of them in a book review; turns out they’re the witty quips and turns of phrase that were poetic descriptions to me. But for all that lovely humor, I did it again: I nibbled my fingernails from about page 197 on. How stupid — I knew exactly what was going to happen, there’s no justification for nail-biting, no suspense, no tension — but there was! It’s proof to me of how good your story is, Geoff, that you enraptured me even the second time around as I was looking for errors! Makes no sense, but kudos to you for it! Best sci-fi book I’ve read in a loooong while.”

Wow. I want to marry you! I’d have to ask my wife first, just to check she’s OK for multiple wife arrangements.

I am rewriting Exit as an audio script – Double Dragon Publishing is going into audio books and I want Exit to be in there. I know I could read the whole of the book myself and use Audacity to record it with a microphone, but my voice is slow Gloucestershire, and the main voice in the book is Phoenix American young woman! Anyway I bet it will be another work of art when finished. There are still some ebooks left if you want to spend that change from the bus – here