Kevin Harkness

City of Demons is being released on Wednesday, July 25, 2012.  I am doing a number of guest blogs and interviews on book blog and review sites, which I will list soon.  You can pre-order copies at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and several other places mentioned on the Tyche Book site.

Tyche Books will let you download a three-chapter excerpt of my novel if you subscribe to their e-newsletter.  Since this lets you know about all the other cool books they are publishing, it’s worth trying.

They have also arranged several blogs and interviews for me, so stay tuned.

Well, the process is almost at an end.  Margaret Curelas sent me a draft of the layout to read over.  It had those amazing illustrations by Galen Dara and wondrous additions like an ISBN and legal warnings.  The cover art by Malcolm McClinton wasn’t in the file, but there is a preview of it on the Tyche website.  I didn’t find any typos.  Mind you, since I probably put them there in the first place, I didn’t expect to.

I did find many, many, many adjectives that could have been cut.  Sigh.  The truth that I told my students over the years is still true: you don’t work on something until it’s perfect; you work on it until you can’t stand to look at it anymore, or until the deadline looms and then you send it off.

Thank God for editors.

Ray Bradbury, noted speculative fiction writer, passed away recently at 91 years of age.  A long and productive life, though I still feel cheated now that he is gone.  He was a giant in my reading youth, and I remember discovering a very large world through his stories.  They scared me, saddened me, made me braver, more cautious, more curious, and most of all, more sympathetic to the human condition.  This last was what Bradbury was really interested in, humanity.  He put his characters in the strangest situations: several poor men sharing one beautiful suit, explorers encountering a malevolent, abandoned Martian city, a house filled with recreations of Poe’s stories, a man rebuilding torn-down movie sets, and many, many more.  In all these scenarios, the characters had to face the unexpected as humans, not as cardboard cut-out heroes and villains.  His people were real.  They demanded an emotional response.  Bradbury could make you weep for the loneliness of an isolated farm wife.  He could make you despise a tyrannical movie producer.  He could keep you awake at night wondering about the darkness and what it held.  He took you to impossible places, and each lyrical sentence made you believe in the impossibilities he portrayed.  His stories – with their common themes of obsession, justice, and fate – will last a very long time.

Oh, I will miss having him in the world, a writer of note – no, composer of mortal symphonies.  Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.

When I started writing (my fourth career), I found that I was expected to maintain a cyber-presence – something with more virtual heft than my anemic Facebook page.  I’ve created a bio and a brief history of my published or soon to be published works.

I hope to add to these first attempts very soon.