THE WALKING WORM Advanced Review Copies, My Next Show, Screenplay Done
Reviews on Goodreads, blogs, YouTube, etc. greatly appreciated. I will also be attending ConPossible 2025, I've finished a full-length movie script, and I'm on a virtual comics panel
As I’ve mentioned in previous emails, The Walking Worm — the second sequel to my first novel The Thing in the Woods — is available for pre-order on Amazon and various other retailers. Here’s the Goodreads page. It will formally premiere Feb. 5, 2025.
Now that my Kickstarter backers have got their copies ahead of everybody else as promised, the plan is promotion. If anybody is interested in an electronic advance review copy (eARC), reply to this email or email me directly at mquinn1984@gmail.com. I’ve got e-books in .epub format (the current Amazon Kindle e-book format, which I believe other e-readers use as well) and in the old-school .mobi format too. If I send someone an eARC, it would be much appreciated if they reviewed it online somewhere — Goodreads would be awesome, as would personal blogs, YouTube or TikTok channels, etc. It would be best to wait until the book is available to purchase or, if one does it earlier, to include the pre-order link.
(In the interest of not getting my Kindle Direct Publishing account nuked — Amazon can be remarkably nasty about free copies in exchange for reviews — keep eARC reviews off Amazon for now. Amazon interprets reviews-for-copies as review-buying, even though I don’t expect a review as an obligation for receiving an eARC.)
It’s best to have read the first two books in the series before you read this one. If you’re interested in eARCs for The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion, just ask. If you’re not interested in reviewing yourself but know someone who might be, it would be awesome if you could get them in touch with me.
Facebook Video: Con-Tinual, Beyond The Big Two
Fellow Atlanta author Bobby Nash and I were on a video about comics produced outside the Big Two (i.e. Marvel and DC) hosted by the online virtual convention Con-Tinual.
Here’s the Facebook link, since it hasn’t been posted on their YouTube page.
Enjoy!
My Next Show: ConPossible 2025
The next show I will be attending is ConPossible 2025 in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. The event will take place February 7-9 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place in Duluth, just northeast of Atlanta proper.
In addition to having my earlier books available for purchase, this will be the formal premiere of The Walking Worm. If you want to purchase a signed copy, this will be your first chance to get it. I also have a copy of Barbarians: From Conan To He-Man, a lavishly illustrated history of 1980s sword-and-sorcery films, I’m reselling. According to the convention website, if you just want to shop, you can get passes to the vendor hall and the Author and Artist Alleys for $5.
Screenplay Based On My Short Story “Coil Gun” Completed
Over my Christmas break from school, I completed a feature-length screenplay based on my short story “Coil Gun.” Most of it was already written, but I put it aside in favor of more urgent and more immediately profitable book projects. However, I listened to a couple episodes of The Ankler podcast, and apparently Hollywood has been buying a lot of “naked scripts” (unsolicited scripts not associated with IPs, existing franchises, attached actors or directors, etc.) in 2024.
(Hopefully this means the long drought of few original stories and lots of remakes and sequels will be coming to an end in the next year or two.)
This is probably going to be a more difficult sell — “Coil Gun” is set in my “Apartheid Superpower” fictional universe and the first “comps” (a pitch consisting of comparative titles) that came to my mind was “Lethal Weapon II meets The Day After.” Although the Apple+ series For All Mankind and Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle show alternate history dealing with well-known topics like the Space Race and World War II can be profitable at the streaming level, evil (white) South Africans and nuclear fears are something that would have been timely when I was a little kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, not now. Perhaps a better “comps” would be “Lethal Weapon II meets For All Mankind” or “the nuclear war from The Man In The High Castle if the good guys win.”
Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and streaming services are always in need of content. I might give some script contests a spin first before trying to find an agent.