Ketchup

Indeed, it's true. I've joined the revolution. Blogger and Blogspot were getting freaky, so we've upgraded my blog to Wordpress.

You can find all future entries at www.jverse.com/blog

See you there!

Labels: Jeff Carlson's new blog, new url, Wordpress

Good news from overseas today. My Czech publisher BBArt has bought Plague Zone, which can be interpreted to mean their edition of Plague Year ("Rok Pandemie") is doing well, which is no wonder. Look at love they're giving this book!

You have to click on the image and enlarge it to truly appreciate the line-up, but, first of all, they've got the book in their catalogues as a mainstream thriller, a decision of which I greatly approve. Secondly, what excellent company to keep! Cussler, Koontz, Carlson, Rollins. Bwah ha ha ha. Wow. If all of my publishers were so tantalizingly tasty, I'd be a gazillionaire.

Labels: BBArt, Czech rights, PLAGUE ZONE

No, not porno books... Book porn! For people who love books! It's an entirely different thing, man. ;)

I've had a pile of these pix sitting on my desktop since December and January and it's time to clean 'em up. Meanwhile, I've gotta say, it's stuff like this that warms my heart during those long lonely days at my laptop. Go, Penguin.

Labels: Barnes Noble, Book Porn, PLAGUE ZONE, World's Biggest Book Store

My dad is 66 and buys his own shoes, but apparently the dad in this story saw a little harder living than mine:

I took my Dad to the mall the other day to buy some new shoes (he is 66). We decided to grab a bite at the food court.

I noticed he was watching a teenager sitting next to him.

The teenager had spiked hair in all different colors - green, red, orange, and blue. My dad kept staring at her. The teenager kept looking and would find my Dad staring every time. When the teenager had had enough, she sarcastically asked: “What's the matter old man, never done anything wild in your life?”

In classic style he responded without batting an eyelid: “Got stoned once and screwed a peacock. I was just wondering if you were my daughter."

Classy, right? :)

For those of you still amped up about the NFL Draft and missing that hard-hitting Sunday action, here's a highlight reel of my nephew, Double Threat Trent, #51, who plays both defensive end and left tackle, thus laying waste to opponents on both sides of the ball... That's him kneeling on the lineman's head in the placeholder photo from YouTube.



If you see some moves you like or have advice, please jump onto Trent's YouTube page and leave a ranking or a comment.

Meanwhile, back in science fiction land, the ever-innovative Kevin J. Anderson wrote to me this week to brag that his new book trailer is cooler than my book trailer -- and he didn't even have to clump around in the snow to do it. That's an inside joke, since Kevin is a notorious hiker who's knocked off every 14,000 foot peak in Colorado. This is not a man afraid of snow. But maybe he is afraid of being whacked in the head with a shovel. I mean, who isn't?

The point is that his video isn't just a video. It's MTV, man! In tandem with the first title in his new Terra Incognita series, Kevin had an album come out featuring singers from Dream Theater, Asia, Saga, and the violinist from Kansas. This video is for the second book and the second CD:



These albums are produced by ProgRock Records, which paid for the artists, the recording sessions, mastering, and manufacturing. Kevin and his wife Rebecca wrote all the lyrics. He also wrote a connecting story for each CD as companions to the Terra Incognita series, which come with the CDs in nifty booklets.

Kevin's got a world of goodies on his web site at www.wordfire.com. You can also preorder the second CD on www.progrockrecords.com (you get a free signed manuscript page) and the first CD is available in stores, on Amazon, on iTunes, etc.

See? And I thought I was cutting edge.

Labels: book CDs, book trailers, YouTube madness

Okay, so we've got a fun laundry list of developments this week:

1) If you live in the Bay Area, I have a local book signing on Friday, May 21st, starting at 7pm at Bay Books in Concord. We'll be answering any questions you have about the Plague Year trilogy like "What really happened to Andrew Dutchess?" as well as peeling back the lid on my Secret New Big Thriller Novel. Be there or be triangular.

Bay Books
1669 Willow Pass Road
Concord, CA 94520-2611
925-671-2245


2) My editor at Ace informs me Plague Year has gone to its sixth printing. Yes! Did I know there was a fifth printing? No! They never tell me anything, but I was pleased indeed when she told me this. This book's got a nice set of legs.

Ymmmm. Legs.


3) I've sold my third story to Asimov's and it's a dark and wild story that's more "sci fi" than usual for me with clones, combat suits, and all the usual mayhem of the future. Sheila Williams reports that "Planet of the Sealies" won't appear before the January 2011 issue, which is, like, forever. Heck, it's practically the future. But in the meantime, please let me brag with this butt-whompingly awesome quote from her acceptance letter:

>> I've always enjoyed your writing, but I think it is deepening and growing in its complexity and emotional resonance.

Wow. I love it when they love it!


4) I'm set to make my Estonian debut any time now in the seventh volume of an sf anthology whose title I'm told translates as The Sidereal Time. For those of you out there who are fluent, The Sidereal Time #7 includes both of my "Julie Beauchain" stories as translated by a hilarious genius who grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and, in our correspondence, has regaled me with stranger-than-fiction tales of life under the Soviet boot.

It's outrageously cool to have friends in far places.


5) The first half of the Secret New Big Thriller Novel is done. Yes!


6) Speaking of the Secret New Big Thriller Novel, we also have a new winner for the Name Game Contest whose victory I've yet to post on the official contest page. Nevertheless, David Hoyer of West Virginia will now find himself in one of my upcoming novels -- not a prospect with a high survival rate! Ha. It's amazing anyone wants to enter.

The trick is "David Hoyer" is just too similar in name to one of the Secret New Big Thriller Novel's heroes, ROMEO Agent Drew Haldane, so David has agreed to wait patiently for my next novel. Since this will be something of a wait, unfortunately, I've also decided to award him a cameo appearance in the Secret New Big Thriller Novel as the USS Hoyer, an AEGIS cruiser in the Carrier Strike Group featured in the book.

What!?! ROMEO? Navy ships? Is this some kind of clue?

And so I summon thee, Kellen Squire!


7) Super fan Kellen Squire has written super things about the Plague Year series on Amazon and elsewhere online, although he's gently taken me to task for failing to address the fate of the U.S. Navy during the machine plague. "What happened to those squids!?" he's asked. "They have nuclear and biological warfare protocols that would have allowed them to stay safe inside their ships!"

"Not for eleven months," says I, but that's neither here nor there.

So here it comes, Kellen. One of the major threads in the Secret New Big Thriller features the U.S. Navy at its finest. :)

Labels: Asimov's, foreign sales, Name Game Contest, PLAGUE YEAR, The Secret New Big Thriller

Yes, I'm alive. It's been really busy. The new book is getting sizzling hot and I hope to be able to share more about it soon.

In the meantime, I'm not sure if I fatally scrooched this blog. They told me I needed to "migrate" it to this new url because they were modifying the FTP, whatever that is, so I took a stab at following their step-by-step direction. I thought I'd actually done it. Then I was greeted with this:

We were unable to verify that the migration completed. You can either manually verify that your FTP blog's pages include "rel=canonical" and "meta refresh" by viewing the source code of your pages in your browser.

To which I say, WTF?

All of the comments seem to have vaporized as well. So. If you can read this, let me know? Anybody out there?

Nevertheless, it's tough to be too upset about blooching the blog. Check out this CNN video from Haiti. Whenever I'm feeling stressed about my deadlines or the car needing to go the dealership, whenever I'm grumpy in traffic, stressed, whatever, all I've got to do is look at parts of the world like this.

About a minute into the video, Sean Penn walks up to talk to an Army major in a blue U.N. beret. This officer is my step-brother Brian Woolworth, who was instrumental in schooling me in various matters for the Plague Year novels. I've got a huge amount of respect for honorable madmen like Brian.

What an interesting life it must be in the Special Forces, yes? Chasing drug runners in Columbia. Taking mortar fire in Afghanistan. Chatting it up with Hollywood celebs in the quake-ravaged desolation of Haiti.

All in a day's work.

Labels: CNN, Haiti, U.S. Army Special Forces