Vincent Eaton Storyteller

Next novel coming up—”Brussegem, a snug hell”

Vincent Eaton — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:08:34 +0000

My next novel, Brussegem, a snug hell, has spent a long while in the pre-production stage, but (insert moderately shouted hallelujah here) it will be appearing shortly. And it is also a short book.

The delay, if you really want to hear about it, was mainly, as a new-guy, small publishing, media company on the international block, some errors in the production of the very first book (How to Find Yourself) surfaced fairly darn quickly, both in presentation layout and distribution (the second book “Self-Portrait of Someone Else” suffered no production embarrassments). I wanted to ensure everything that followed was professionally accomplished before releasing it. In short, some teething problems, followed by a determination to get it right.

In the meanwhile, I come to my blurb writing, the tiny, catchy synopsis necessary when announcing a book, and with this I have my usual tussle in describing something I have written without sounding like an extended sales letter, or generic book-promo-plot-based-yelping.

But I can tease (says to do so right here in my How To Promote Like a Panting Idiot handbook). Here’s a partial fragment of the cover of the new novel:

And right here is the blurb I’ve been working on to tingle a potential reader’s reading desires:

Brussegem is both a place and a person. But mainly it is a painter. A fully dedicated and fairly isolated American painter living in Europe whose creed is art, and only art.

Until Veronica Weise, the wife of another, seeks his attention, companionship, something artistic, and, if possible, something wild.
But then there’s her baby. And that cat.
The struggle between art and domesticity begins, between an artist who does not want to fall in love, and a woman who does.

Mostly, in this incessant world of promotion and pay-attention-to-me-right-now-I-said-right-now, I plan mainly to post excerpts (both words & audio) of the novel and let people get interested that way. Less hussle and muscle.

Part of my revised plans are to have the novel come out simultaneously as a print book, ebook and audio book. Sometime next month is the actual launch…however, I shall see what reality has in store for me between this moment and that moment.

Thanks for reading this, and for your interest.

Lunch meat & moi

Vincent Eaton — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:39:16 +0000

After purchasing some lunch meat from my local supermarket, and then making a sandwich using its contents, slopping on the appropriate condiments, I paused just before placing it in my mouth and biting down. Thinking, Well, here goes.

My two published novels from 2009 are now available on Kindle

Vincent Eaton — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:31:03 +0000

It’s taken a while but I have my two books up and running as Kindle eboooks, via Amazon, of course.

You can find the “link to Self-Portrait of Someone Else” here.

You can find the link “How to Find Yourself (or a reasonable facsimile)” here.

Pricing is $2.99 from Amazon.com.
(Should insert “What a deal!” and other exclamation marks here.)

Purchasing these outside the USA will be higher than my stated price, as Amazon adds some suspect transfer fees, and as we know, it’s oh so much more expensive to download files in the USA compared to, say, Canada or Belgium. There’s little I can do about it currently, because at this point, it’s Amazon’s way or the highway. It will no doubt remain this way until Amazon, slowly but surely, gets its act together as Kindle distribution centers are established in the rest of world. *see below

Note: my base price stays of $2.99 is the same, no matter what you are charged.

Anyway, if you have a Kindle, you can get my books and have a happier summer, a more expansive life and all in all general all-purpose beatific experiences….

Thanks for reading.

* (Update Aug.6, 2010) I believe I was wrong when I first posted this. I just ran into this:
“…in most EU countries, taxes on e-books are double the taxes on p-books, thanks to a rather bizarre ruling of the European Commission, which decided that the supply of a “book on any physical support comes under supply of goods, whereas the downloading of an e-book is defined as a supply of services. Therefore different VAT rates apply.” This quite clearly means that according to EU bureaucrats, taxation on books should be lower, because they are printed on paper or stored on a DVD, and not because the book is a repository of culture and knowledge. Or to go one step further in this line of reasoning, for European bureaucrats the novels read on paper are culture, but the ones read on Kindle are not. I’m sure Marshall McLuhan would love this way of reasoning as it shows that European bureaucrats are true believers of his dictum that “the medium is the message”. However, in the context of the e-book trade, this puts European e-booksellers in a more difficult position than their American counterparts as they are burdened with higher taxes. “
Link to this article.

1/5 – Rejection Letter—Grafton Books

Vincent Eaton — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:52:53 +0000

Writers are always rejected, or their manuscripts are. This comes under the heading of, Things As They Are. The rejection does not stop, and oddly apologies rarely follow.

Way back when my first novel, “Self-Portrait of Someone Else”, was published by Viking-Penguin, New York, my literary agent at that time, Peter Lampack Literary Agency, set out to sell this self-same manuscript to a number of publishers based in the United Kingdom. It was the next step in my conquering the world.

As the refusals full of praise and regret came in, copies of the letters were kindly forwarded to me. To give equal measures of hope and despair, as these letters contained some of the best reviews/comments this novel ever received.

Now, with the novel re-issued under my own imprint, hidden people limited, I thought, in the interests of writerly retro-masochism and in a spirit of fun, I could construct some short videos around five of the rejection letters.

This first one I’m releasing was from Grafton Books. This editor thought I had a heck of future ahead of me. Well, twenty years later, my future came and went and I gave it a friendly wave at it as it passed by. Today my publishing future is pinging about on a different level of hustle and gumption.

If you want to read the actual letter, I put it into a pdf file and it is right here: Grafton Book Rejection Letter

Here’s THE VIDEO LINK! Enjoy. Leave comments on this site just below, or on the YouTube channel.

Thanks for reading.

Oh, and if you never saw my original launch video for this book, CLICK HERE TO VIEW, or the video where I read some real newspaper reviews this novel received, including from the New York Sunday Review of Books, CLICK HERE to view.

Thanks for reading and seeing and coming ’round. VE

P.S. Oh, if, in case, who knows, if you’re not the proud owner of your very own copy, CLICK HERE TO HAVE A CLOSER LOOK, read excerpts, hear audio excerpts, and links to Amazon where the book is available as print and via Kindle….

Links for July 22, 2010

Vincent Eaton — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:12:12 +0000

Here’s something I rarely do, but it’s the summer, and the heat has gotten to me, or something has gotten to me, & so you get this..

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU. Extraordinary, fascinating animation. Boggles the mind how much effort and preparation this must have taken. The creativity speaks utterly for its own astonishing self.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW.

BEING AN AUTHOR, BEING A SCREENWRITER – Nick Harkaway, who has worked in films and published a novel, pretty much gets it spot on with both careers and how one is treated by those in the industries. Most amusing, most accurate.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW.

A LIVE SHOW IS A LIVING THING – Ryan Miller is a storyteller I know and here he pretty much gets it spot concerning the process of creating a story-monologue-performance for an audience, and how it evolves. Ryan’s headed to to the Edinburgh Festival in a few weeks.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW.

“WHO’S ON FIRST” – A classic. From Abbott and Costello. You may need to know a bit about American baseball. And the colorful nicknames they used to give players. While it’s high-standard comedy, it’s also about wordplay and the use of language at a rather sophisticated level. V. funny, and Costello is so spot on with his timing.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW.

Thanks for dropping by.

Cherries on top

Vincent Eaton — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:38:03 +0000

A while back, the cherry tree in my backyard did it blossoms. I did a short video of it: SEE IT HERE.

And now, deeper into the summer, this is what those blossoms foretold: many baskets of cherries, and this is just one of them:

This qucikie, short post is part of my summer “whatever comes up” holiday blog…

Does Max Dix really mean Maximum Dick?

Vincent Eaton — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:37:30 +0000

I post all sorts of things related, all in all, to my writing, videos and voice stuff. And then, on occasion, I check my blog’s statistics. See who’s visiting from what country, and what Key Words are attracting folks (meaning, people who put in specific words to find something specific on the web).

Well, I was shocked, shocked I say, to see one of my simple stories and my award winning play getting lots of hits over the last months, followed by spam dealing with porn. And in the public interest to inform and make you more aware, here’s what got the porn-hungry and the porn’s industry attention where my site’s concerned.

One was my story, Red Ball, about a little girl in a strange world. A two minute read.
(See, a red ball, not porn at all.)

I’m assuming some ragged-ass individuals out there with a high tolerance to pain that may lead to low-level pleasure, type in RED BALL to get something I have not yet sought, nor will seek to investigate further, but I’m going to assume (not being utterly naïve) that Red Ball may be some sort of super-torque strangle on a male’s nether regions that’ll bring him to a higher plane of general all-purpose sexual whoopee!…but my little short-short flash fiction possesses its own contained weirdness, yet without any sexual overtones I know of (damn, has my unconscious libido been working overtime where I can’t see it?).

But now in a sentence above I’ve placed both the terms “little girl” and “red ball” in a single sentence, so I can’t begin to imagine what kind of hit hell I’m exposing myself to now.

Then there’s my play “Max Dix, Zero to Six” that I’ve been blogging about now and then and posting some video excerpts You Can Find Them Here.

No prizes for guessing the porn terms that must overlap here. I don’t think it’s “Zero to Six” that gets the hits. But I’m thinking, and I might just be guessing here, that “Max Dix” is close enough to Maximum Dicks to perk up some metadata bot-seekers as moist palms type this in Google and hope for the big display. Now imagine when they arrive at my videos and wait for the cast to get down and dirty. Yet perhaps, I dream in my lighter moments, some come for porn, some stay for art.

And that’s this day’s porn report from Vincent Eaton dot com. And hello there to anyone typing in Max Dix with Red Balls and getting this. (I sink my head into my lifted shoulders as my site’s hit rate is about to zoom up with all the sex-starved world about to find out I ain’t their desire’s delight. Yet go in peace, and keep zipped up.)

P.S.
((Then again, maybe Maximum Dick means this guy and it’s all gonna get crazy and political here:))

Summertime and the blogging is easy….

Vincent Eaton — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:14:38 +0000

Hi there, whoever you are reading this.

I’ve noted that some blog writing people take breaks over the summer, reducing frequency or simply quit posting material on their blogs. Not me. Oh no. “Buck the trend Eaton”, as I’m known in freaky cults better not mentioned here.

However, I am adjusting for a “summer blog schedule”.

What I’ve been doing—for those not paying close, obedient attention—was releasing audio clips on Mondays, videos on Wednesdays, and short-short stories on Fridays.

My summer schedule is going to be this (until a better idea pops up or I just plain Change My Mind):
One last summer video will be posted this next Wednesday, thereafter random actual written blog posts on what’s up and what’s going on. I’ve had some things on my mind and some on my plate, and what better time to put it out there but during the summer when few are paying attention?

To repeat: look forward to my tossing some thoughts and visions, expectations and plans, onto this blog over July-August, because a guy’s a guy, a writer’s a writer, and a storyteller has stories to tell.

STORY – “I KILL SLUGS” – short-short flash-fiction

Vincent Eaton — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:55:12 +0000

I kill slugs. At night, in the beginning, I placed little bowls of beer embedded in the earth to tempt them to come, like wary animals arriving to sip in the savannah during the depths of darkness. But like unreconstructed AA members, they could not resist as they came to sip, and then sip some more, then more still, until they waded right in, and literally drown in their beer. Next morning, the little pools of beer held a number of floating and semi-sunk oblong corpses.

Snails, too, a couple of them were in there. Not a one of them could hold their liquor.

Still every morning I see my salad gets munched, holes appearing in the leaves. So another plan is formed, more sinister, more immediate. I waited until midnight approached to go hunting. I got my flashlight out but found it held dead batteries, damn, went around the house unloading batteries from remotes and cameras and suchlike discovering I had a house full of half-dead or utterly dead batteries. The flashlight kept its single eye closed. So I got a candle, lit it, not enough power, then a second candle, lit them both, and went into the night.

When I held the candles up to view the immediate territory, weird bendy shadows were cast over the land. But they were there. A transient city of snails and slugs, poking along slimeily, seeking their midnight snacks. I had filled a can deep with water and put it down near my feet. With carefully gloved hand I picked them from the ground, plucked them from the plants, one by one, and plopped them into my bucket to drown, and kept culling, and they kept acoming.

After a bit of capturing and tossing them into my mini-well, I had a look to see how many I had taken care of. Six or eight or an army of them were crawling up back to the rim, wanting life, or more free food. I pulled back three inches, as though under a surprise mini-attack. Naively, had I thought they’d just drown if there was enough water. I lowered a single finger into this world and pushed each one back down and each one was no match for my finger and fell with a tiny splash and a bob but still, still they still came up, crawling back with a zombie’s determination. This midnight raid was turning into something like night the living fucking dead.

So I put a second thought into the matter and and dumped in a dash of chlorine, swished it around in the water, then again poked those slime-balls back in. Again they went plop into the water but this time they curled and met their maker. Each released a little bit of distressed foam.

Pick ‘n’ plop was the main movement and sound thereafter out there in the garden when reasonable men were asleep. I tried pouring some salt on a couple of them and saw their innards sort of catch fire as some different but more raging sort of foam came bubbling up from under their bodies, their inner fluids flushing out.

I killed many during the next three midnights, decimating the local population. Then the following four nights there were no attacks on my small vegetable patch. The lettuce leafs thrived. No nibbles. One never foolishly declares victory in such matters, but the lettuce began to believe in themselves again. Courgette plants spread their leafy wings. Rhubarb went rhubbarbing.

But for those three nights running, with candles and evil intent, I sought and killed slugs and snails which dared assail with mucus mouths my struggling salads. Those nights were like my own little intense slasher-horror film out there in the dead of night. The foam and the bubbling. The single sound of a snail plopping into chlorinated water, that midnight plop a full one-note sound, masking the terminal.

Video: “Big Toe Walkabout” — flash fiction

Vincent Eaton — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:03:19 +0000

…Here’s this popular short-short story, comes in three different forms:

WORDS
My short-short fiction piece, “Big Toe Walkabout” has proven to be popular story.

AUDIO
So after the story appeared, I made it into a Podcast/Audio clip.

VIDEO
Yet, maybe some out there would like to watch this big toe illustration while listening, so now I have made it as a one shot video story.

Yep, stories come in all sorts of packaging around here.

Enjoy, and endure. Thanks for reading, seeing, listening. And leave a comment below! Or in the YouTube comment box–I’ll get it.