Tag Archives: blood feud: the saga of pandora zwieback book 1

Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 E-book Now at Lower Price

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With Blood Reign: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 2 scheduled for release this May, we here at The ’Warp thought it would be the perfect time to make the first Pan novel available to a wider readership. Makes sense, right?

Therefore, we’ve lowered the price of all digital versions of Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1—PDF, ePub, and .prc (Kindle compatible)—from $3.99 to just $2.99!

You can download the lower-priced Blood Feud from the Kindle store at Amazon.com, the NOOK Book Store at Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore, the Sony Reader Store, and Kobo, the SWC stores at Smashwords and DriveThru Fiction, or directly from the StarWarp Concepts webstore. Just visit the Blood Feud product page at StarWarp Concepts for all the links.

If you’ve been reluctant to pick up Pan’s first literary appearance, or know someone who’d love to meet our resident Goth adventuress, there’s no better time than right now to do so!

YA Wants More Zwieback

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The popularity of our favorite Goth adventuress continues to grow! Add yet another positive review of Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1 to the list, this time from Heather M. Riley and her review blog, Want My YA:

“From the first page I was hard pressed to put Blood Feud down…. My only complaint is that I don’t have book 2 in front of me so I can find out what happens next. I need to know!”

Read the entire review by going here.

It’s a Global Pan-demic!

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Chalk up another positive review of Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, this one courtesy of newly minted Pan-atic Abby Flores and her review blog, Bookshelf Confessions:

“Blood Feud is packed with comedy, horror, romance, paranormal urban fantasy, gothic themes and lots of hunting adventure that would surely bury its story on your mind. One of the best books I’ve read in paranormal urban fantasy.”

Since Abby is based in the Philippines, this obviously means that the Power of Zwieback can now be felt clear across the world!  😉

Read the entire review by clicking on the Bookshelf Confessions logo.

Boston Comic Con is This Weekend!

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The 2012 Boston Comic Con is being held April 21–22 at the Hynes Convention Center, in the Back Bay area of Boston, Massachusetts. With a nurses convention, the Yankees playing the Red Sox, and the 100th anniversary celebration of the Red Sox’ baseball home, Fenway Park, all going on at the same time, it’s gonna be one insanely busy weekend in Beantown!

Regardless, you’ll find me in the BCC Artists’ Alley at Table 106 (AA106), manning the StarWarp Concepts post; just look for the Pandora Zwieback banner. On sale will be copies of Blood Feud, Carmilla, A Princess of Mars, and The Bob Larkin Sketchbook, as well as the Official Pandora Zwieback T-shirt. I’ll also be handing out Pandora Zwieback bookmarks—while supplies last, of course.

Boston Comic Con runs from 10 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. The Hynes Convention Center is located at 900 Boylston Street.

For more information, head over to the Boston Comic Con Web site. Just click on the logo up top. Hope to see you at the show!

New York Comic Book Marketplace Tomorrow

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The 2012 New York Comic Book Marketplace is being held this coming Saturday, March 31, at the Penn Plaza Pavilion at the Hotel Pennsylvania, in Manhattan (across 7th Avenue from Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden). Stan “The Man” Lee is the guest of honor—but more important, StarWarp Concepts will be there, too!

You’ll find us in Artists’Alley; just look for the Pandora Zwieback banner. On sale will be copies of Blood Feud, Carmilla, A Princess of Mars, and The Bob Larkin Sketchbook, as well as the Official Pandora Zwieback T-shirt. I’ll also be handing out Pandora Zwieback bookmarks—while supplies last, of course.

The New York Comic Book Marketplace runs from 10 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on March 31, and admission is $10. The Hotel Pennsylvania is located at 401 Seventh Avenue, between 32nd and 33rd Streets.

For more information, head over to the NYCBM Web site.

StarWarp Concepts’ 2012 Convention Season Starts This Weekend

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The annual gathering of the Institute of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction—hosted by Blood Moon Rising magazine—is being held this coming Saturday, March 24, at the main branch of the Queens Public Library, in Flushing (just a few blocks from Main Street—the final stop on the #7 train—and smack in the middle of the borough’s own Chinatown). Not only will I be manning the StarWarp Concepts table, but I’ll be doing my first public reading of Blood Feud. (Now that’s terrifying!)

On sale will be copies of Blood Feud, Carmilla, A Princess of Mars, and The Bob Larkin Sketchbook, as well as the Official Pandora Zwieback T-shirt. I’ll also be handing out Pandora Zwieback bookmarks—while supplies last, of course. The print version of the free Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0 introductory comic won’t be available, unfortunately—I’ve burned through its 3,000-copy run (so where are the sales?!). At the moment, I’m still debating whether or not to go back to press (three thousand 16-page, full-color freebies don’t come cheap, after all).

After this weekend, on March 31st The ’Warp will be appearing at the New York Comic Book Marketplace—more details on that next week—and then in April we’ll be heading back to Beantown for the Boston Comic Con. For us, the 2012 convention season has officially begun! Check out the Events listing for all our upcoming appearances and come out and see us, if you get the chance.

The Institute of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction runs from noon to 5:00 p.m. on March 24, and admission is free. The Queens Library is located at 41-17 Main Street, in Flushing.

For more information, head over to the Blood Moon Rising Web site.

Writing: Musical Influences: “Fiend Club”

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So, picking up where we left off in the February 27th post, we’ve been discussing influences on the writing of the first Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud. Last time I talked about how the Horrorpops song “MissFit” became Pan’s anthem. Now we get to the introduction of her gothy friends.

There’s a scene in chapter 21 in which Pan and her friends do a little song-and-dance number for videographer Tim Merrick (whose day job is working as an assistant to David Zwieback, owner of the storefront museum Renfield’s House of Horrors and Mystical Antiquities). When I started writing that scene, the first horror-related tune that popped into my head was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” A classic 1980s pop hit, with a good beat and lyrics, and Vincent Price rapping—what better song for Pan to launch into?

Yeah, okay, it was too easy a musical choice, and way too mainstream a tune for Goths, but I was trying to find a way to make a transition between a scene in Renfield’s, during which Pan has lovingly bullied her father into retrieving her makeup kit from his car, and the dance number on the museum’s basement steps. As originally written, it went like this:

The door swung shut behind him, and Pan turned to face Tim. He looked highly amused. “What?”

Tim shrugged. “Just couldn’t help noticing you got him trained well.”

“Of course.” Pan flashed a wicked grin. “And now, Timothy,” she intoned in her deepest, most ominous voice, “at last you know the true power of being Daddy’s Little Girl…”

*          *          *

“ ’Cause this is Thrillllerrrrr!” Pan wailed, head thrown back, as she and the crew sang along with Michael Jackson and danced on the steps leading to the museum’s basement floor.

In movie terminology, I saw the transition as a smash cut: an abrupt jump from one scene to the next—in this case, everyday Pan giving her best sinister smile instantly changing into glammed-up Pan singing her heart out as the “camera” pulls back to show her and her friends on the stairs. (If you’ve been following these posts, you already know how I tend to “see” the scenes I write in cinematic angles.)

But then one night I downloaded the latest episode of Rue Morgue Radio (a great online, F-bomb-loaded radio-style show that stopped broadcasting in January 2012 after seven years, but you should definitely check out their archives). One of the first songs that the host, Tomb Dragomir, played was a track from the Misfits’ 1999 album Famous Monsters: “Fiend Club”—and I suddenly realized that Pan & Co. had a much better song to perform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5TgEU4f_eY

We won’t pretend that this is the end
We’re not losers all of the time
We march and we fall
We’re one and for all
It’s just evil all of the time
All the time

We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
Not you! Not you!

You dress so messed up
Your hair is too long
But I’m changing it all of the time
We march and we fall
We’re one and for all
It’s just evil all of the time
All the time
Evil all the time

We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
Not you! Not you!

Evil all the time

We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
We are the fiend club
Not you! Not you!

We are the fiend club

Not exactly a song you can choreograph a dance number to—well, not unless it includes a lot of violent head banging—but I thought, what a great anthem that would make for Pan and her friends: united in their weirdness, and proud of it. So, out went the King of Pop and in came a far more appropriate band (who are horror fans themselves).

FYI: The actual Fiend Club is the Misfits’ fan club. You can find it here.

Blood Feud E-Sales: The Post-Mortem

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So, how did StarWarp Concepts do with their $1.00 Blood Feud e-book sale over at Smashwords, during the Read an E-Book Week promotion? Head on over to the SWC blog and read the outcome.

Then come back here later this week, as we get back to discussing the inspirations behind the writing of Pan’s first adventure. It’ll be fiend-tastic!

Writing: What Inspires You?

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“Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s the question every writer has been asked at some point in their career, and one that never has a set single answer.

I addressed a similar question, “What inspires you to write?”, in a recent interview at the book-review blog Fiction Fascination, explaining the genesis of a couple of scenes in Blood Feud, the first Pandora Zwieback novel: Pan sitting out in a rainstorm; how her dad gave her a DVD copy of the not-suitable-for-little-kids movie Watership Down (“But it had bunnies on the cover!”) for her fifth birthday. Writing inspirations can come from almost anywhere—it can be a book you’ve read, a conversation you overheard, a song that played on the radio…

They can even come from observations of the most mundane events. For example: this scene in the 1999 film American Beauty—written by True Blood creator Alan Ball—in which Wes Bentley’s character Ricky Fitts describes videotaping a plastic bag floating in a breeze:

In an interview conducted in 2000, Ball explained that the scene was inspired by “an encounter I had [in the early 1990s] with a plastic bag one day in front of the World Trade Center.”

One of my short stories, “Laundry Day”—about a group of people trapped while doing their wash on the eve of a zombie uprising—got its start from a toy ring that I bought from a gumball machine in a neighborhood Laundromat. What popped into my head when I first saw the machine full of rings was a scene of a guy presenting this crappy, 25-cent jewelry to his girlfriend as a romantic gesture, knowing they’d never have the chance to get married. The “camera” in my head then pulled back to reveal them huddled inside a Laundromat that had its metal security gates pulled down; beyond the gates was a full-on zombie apocalypse. (Yes, a lot of what I “see” when I write involves Hollywood-style cinematography.)

Initially it was going to be a three-page comic book story, with the zombie reveal on the final page. I never got around to writing it, though, and the toy ring (the one you see in the picture) sat in a drawer for a few years. Then, in 2006, I was invited by editor Vincent Sneed to pitch a story for his upcoming zombie anthology, The Dead Walk Again!—and it just so happened I had this toy ring in a drawer to remind me of something…

By the time I finished the story it had taken on a much darker—some have said incredibly nasty—tone. My rationale was that, in a zombie anthology, there’s no surprise in having your tale end with “And then he became a zombie, too!” and a happy ending would seem like a cheat. Thus, the bleaker tone, and an ending that literally took people by surprise—which is exactly the sort of reaction every writer wants from their audience.

(“Laundry Day,” by the way, was reprinted in 2010, in another walking dead anthology: Best New Zombie Tales 2, published by Books of the Dead Press. Warning: it’s not a story—or a book—for younger readers. The stories are gory as hell, and in “Laundry Day” I drop F-bombs so frequently you’d think I picked them up at a discount at Costco.)

Next week, we’ll look at some of the inspirations that worked their way into the first Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud. Feel free to sing along with them…


Chatting About a Goth Adventuress

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Today at the book-review blog Fiction Fascination you’ll find an interview with me, conducted by the site’s owner, Carly. It’s one more part in my ongoing effort to make fans of dark urban fantasies aware of the exciting world of Goth adventuress Pandora Zwieback, starting with her first novel, Blood Feud. And since Carly is a major fan of Ms. Zwieback’s, how could I say no to a chance to talk about her?  😉

Carly and I cover such topics as my favorite books, my personal quirks, and what some of my writing inspirations are (a topic I’ll be discussing further at the Pandora Zwieback blog in the days to come). And then there’s this:

“At some point I became obsessed with a TV show on the Food Network called Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and I’ve been experimenting with recipes. I haven’t killed anyone yet…”

Not expecting a comment like that in an interview about a monster-hunting teen, were you? Hey, it can’t all be about gun-toting vampires and heroic Goth chicks, y’know!  😀

In addition to the interview, we’re giving away a signed copy of Blood Feud (still on sale in print and e-book editions). If you haven’t gotten around to picking up a copy, here’s your chance to get one for free!

Read the interview, and find out more details on the giveaway, by clicking on the Fiction Fascination logo.