WHITE TIGER Released!

WHITE TIGER Final Cover

In a stellar example of slow and steady wins the race, it took co-author Derek Paterson and I almost six years to finish this book. We laughed, we cried, we cried some more, and in the interim published about a zillion other works before this one was completed.

But hey…such is life.

 At any rate, White Tiger is now available for $3.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords for your reading pleasure. Complete with an ultra-snappy cover designed by Jared Rackler, even. (Fellow writers, use this guy–if for no other reason than he doesn’t cash your checks!)

 

White Tiger is a sexy, fiery thriller that takes place in three countries: China, Japan, and the United States. Full of thrills, chills, gunplay, martial arts, Asian mysticism, corruption, police procedurals, suspense, pathos, high drama, and our patented MV/ASP*, this book is decidedly rated NC-17. (Catholic readers please note: reading this book will not necessitate a trip to confessional.)

 

Here’s the product description:

 

Even Predators Can Be Prey.

International security consultant Jerry Manning has a lucrative sideline: he kills people for the Chinese Mob, so quickly and so effectively using his martial art skills that the Chinese call him the White Tiger, a nickname born out of respect–and fear.

When wealthy Chinese businessman James Lin’s son is brutally murdered in a San Francisco penthouse where he was sexing a beautiful actress, Manning is hired to fly back to the States to help track down the killer. But closely guarded family secrets are reluctantly dragged into the light. Lin’s older son was also recently murdered in Shanghai, with the same M.O., suggesting that the real target was always James Lin, and that the killer is an assassin with skills every bit as deadly as Manning’s.

S.F.P.D. detectives determined to uncover the truth behind the murder are on a crash course with Manning, blocking his view as the elusive assassin slashes her way through Lin’s defenses, intent upon exacting old-fashioned blood vengeance upon her hated victim, whose past crimes have finally caught up with him.

WHITE TIGER is an action/thriller novel of approximately 125,000 words/400 pages.

Revenge is a dish best served bloody!

It’s been a long haul, but it feels good to get this book out in the wild. You can find it at the usual places:

 

White Tiger on Amazon

 

White Tiger on Barnes & Noble

 

White Tiger on Smashwords

 

And while I’m at it, drive by Derek Paterson’s Amazon page and check out his goods. Science fiction and fantasy fans, take note!

 

 On behalf of both of us, Derek and I hope you enjoy the hell out of White Tiger.

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to writing The Rising Horde. McDaniels is having problems with zombies again, but at least this time he has a battalion of special operations forces on hand…

 

*MV/ASP – Massive Violence & Actual Sexual Penetration

Coming Soon: White Tiger

White Tiger Draft Cover

Moving with all the speed of molasses on a cold January day, I’m getting closer to releasing White Tiger, hopefully by the end of the month.

 This book is a little different from my normal fare, in that it’s an international thriller as opposed to a horror book. Additional bonus points are summoned forth due to the adroit assistance of one Derek Paterson, Scottish writer extraordinaire, who lent his urbane humor and ability to create crackling good dialog right off the cuff. Set in Japan, China, and happy San Francisco, this book is a real mover and shaker. It has a little bit of something for everyone: humor, murder, sex, martial arts, gunplay, and pathos, all driven by what the Chinese call yǐ yá huán yá–a tooth for a tooth.

 

Or in plain old fashioned English: Revenge.

 

The writing is a bit on the saucy side, so no teasers just yet, but advance word thus far has been good. The book is still undergoing some body-and-fender work, but as soon as I get it locked and loaded, I’ll let everyone know. I’m aiming to release it during the week of July 25, so stay tuned!

How It Happens: It Starts With…Music!

It’s the same for writers all across the globe. People will ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” And a lot of times, that’s a tough question to answer. For myself, there are a zillion different ways–I can see something in real life that triggers a burst of inspiration, something can come up in a conversation that I latch onto and build upon, I can be motivated to explore something in my writing by reading the newspaper…hell, there have been a fair amount of times when I’ve just closed my eyes and enjoyed a quick “mind movie” that gave me a great idea for a book.

But usually? I catch the fever while listening to music.

Since my father was in the radio business for decades, music was pretty widely available to me in all formats. The old man would bring home tons of albums, and my younger brother and I would spin ’em and give ’em a decent listening-to. It started out as rock or what passed for soft rock in those days: Chicago, Bread, Three Dog Knight, Seals & Crofts, America…you get the idea. My brother continued with that evolution and graduated to Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, and Aerosmith. Me? I unexpectedly played a record of a different kind that my brother thought was hideous, but which struck a chord with me creatively.

That album was Gene Page’s score for the blaxploitation flick Blacula. (Which I just now found on YouTube–pardon me while I have a psychedelic flashback, man.)

Yeah, okay. Not the most awe-inspiring piece of music ever made. But as I listened to the rest of the album, I stumbled onto something that would prove useful to me in later creative endeavors, and it was this one thing: I can really write like a mutha to movie soundtracks. Pink Floyd and Ted Nugent and Todd Rundgren put out great, masterful albums–but they’re only good to listen to while I’m hurtling down the highway at 80+ miles an hour. When I write, I need something that has more variety, but which is grounded in a common element.

What I’m talking about here is thematic unity, where a single theme or a collection of themes reoccur throughout a body of music. Not necessarily in every track–that would be boring–but enough so that the score has been branded with a particular identity, something that lends itself to evoking imagery that I can make use of when plotting out a story. There are times where tracks can help me not only create a scene in my mind, but assist me in blocking it out by providing me with a sense of dramatic timing that’s just plain invaluable. I know many writers who wrestle with things like this, writing and rewriting and rewriting again as they try to figure out the proper tempo for a scene. I have to say, I rarely have that problem. (But of course I can’t spell, so that makes for a more hostile writing environment.)

So after Blacula, I started hunting around the radio station library for more soundtracks. Found some fantastic picks, too: Enter the Dragon by Lalo Schifrin, The Towering Inferno and Earthquake by John Williams, Airport 1975 by John Cacavas, The Hindenburg by David Shire. But when scores like Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the incredible Superman hit the street–John Williams was simply on fire during this run, and especially with Superman–soundtracks and writing were officially going steady.

But then, I discovered Jerry Goldsmith. More eclectic than Williams and Barry and the others, more atonal, able to write music that not just reflected what was happening on the silver screen, Goldsmith grabbed me by the lapels and slapped me silly with tracks from Logan’s Run, Coma, Capricorn One, ALIEN, and of course, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. After I started listening to his stuff regularly, soundtracks and writing skipped the engagement and ran off and got married.

So that’s how my Idea Machine usually gets engaged, from a snippet of music, or from an entire score. It almost always happens to music; for instance, the idea for The Gathering Dead popped into my mind when I was listening to The Haunting, specifically the track “Finally Home” at around the 2:37 mark (how’s that for accuracy). The image it invoked was of some military folks standing on the rooftop of a skyscraper in NYC and looking out over the city…while the streets below was flooded by the hungry dead.

I know some other writerly folks who say this is cheating, that using one medium to jumpstart work in another must break some sort of cardinal rule. I think this is boolsheet, because at the end of the day, I get words on paper–I don’t really suffer from writer’s block, which is just another excuse not to write. But when I find the right tunes, not only can I write, I can crank stuff out until the cows come home. I don’t think my approach is at all atypical.

And hey, guess what? I works for me!