Grey Cat Blues

It's been a long time coming. There have been setbacks. There have been annoyances in more than one area. But it's finally (almost) here.

Yes, I'm talking about my next novel!

The story is called Grey Cat Blues, and it will hopefully be available by the end of November on kindle and a bit later in paperback.

Here is the glorious cover supplied by artist extraordinaire Kukuruyo:

Have a summary:

Siege on the Shadow Planet! 

Ex-punk Two Tone is left for dead and his friend is taken. His assailants: men of mud from some place darker than Hell! 

The inscrutable Sarpedon has slithered from the depths to rule a planet that has long abandoned hope for a better tomorrow. With no one to stop his spree of violence, it is only a matter of time before Two Tone’s world is overrun. 

Old friends and a mysterious beauty gather by his side, but are they enough? Is it too late for this dying world? If all cats are grey in the dark, will anyone see the panther stalking its prey? Two Tone will find the answers the best way he knows how—through his fists! 

Grey Cat Blues tells the tale of a distant planet at humanity’s end. In this place, a man must choose between love and hate. And where his choice leads him might not be where he expects . . .

This is a story that takes place in the future on a world that is as cold and distant as the main characters in it. In Grey Cat Blues you get gangs, fights, monsters, horror, noir, love, rock n roll, and good vs evil, all in a crisp 200 pages. My goal from Day One was to make an exciting book that was brisk but able to grab the reader and stick with them like books of old. I like to think I succeeded here.

For an explanation as to why this exists, I have a bit of a tale. Grey Cat Blues is a story I came up with years ago but was never able to get right. I pseudo-released it on amazon as While You Were Dancing, but ended up taking it down because the narrative just didn't work. I pushed it aside and got working on Knights of the End and my short stories, figuring it was best to leave as a failed experiment.

Then I met the Pulp Revolution through the revival of Appendix N. That changed the way I write a good deal.

I began to dive into the old pulp works and they heavily affected how I saw fiction. I finally understood what it was that I liked about stories and what it was I wanted out of them. In turn, it changed my writing by an astronomical degree. My short stories (see the sidebar for examples) were far sharper and more direct and yet had more inside their pages than stories I wrote that were easily ten times the length of when I was struggling to put pen to paper years ago. Things were different.

What began to happen was I kept thinking about that failed story and what the problem was. I began to form a picture in my head about what I wanted to do and how to achieve it. In the middle of some stories I was writing (including my next novel after this, hopefully out early next year) I sat down and began to crank out the story While You Were Dancing was supposed to be. It came out as an entirely new story with no similarities to the original outside of two characters and one scene near the beginning. It came out as the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror/Weird Tale novel Grey Cat Blues. It came out as something I never thought I could write.

This is a story that takes place long after we've left Earth and colonized a distant planet. In a world where fragmentation and alienation are ways of life, only clinging to memories of Earth form any cohesiveness over the people. There is no escape, there is no future, and there is no brighter tomorrow on the shadow planet. It is at this point a darkness arrive from the heart of the Central's shadows and begins to swallow everything whole. With everything against him, how can our hero win? And what awaits him if he does?

And now for some bad news. The only reason I can't give you a direct release date is because one of the people involved in helping me put it out had a relative how attempted suicide. Naturally, this put a break on their progress in aiding me, but I would be appreciated if you could send prayers to their family in this horrid time for them. It would do them some good.

But I don't want to just leave you with grim thoughts. Fiction is meant to keep is looking up when we are down.

I'm proud to finally present this book in complete form from an idea I just couldn't get down properly. Please be sure to check it out and leave a review when it comes out within the month. If there is another book out there like this, I'd like to see it for myself.

If you want action and adventure, this is the book for you. Grey Cat Blues is novel I've been trying my darnedest to get out for ages, and I can easily say that it has been worth the struggle.