Hey guys, the offer is closed. Sorry! But you can, of course, still buy the book at Amazon.

So it is read an e-book week or something. And so for today only, until Midnight EST, I make the following offer:

Anyone who emails me [adampknave @ gmail(dot)com] between now and midnight and asks for it, will get the PDF of the entire Strange Angel book. For frees, yo.

What is Strange Angel, you ask?

Susie Sparrow’s life has turned upside down. She’s merged with Ferapont, who says he is an angel, and has dedicated her life to ridding the world of demon possessed people. Unfortunately she is also in High School. Trying to schedule fights around school, hanging out with friends and dinner with the parents might be too much for one girl with large flaming wings to handle. But don’t tell her that. This volume collects all three volumes of the hit novella series as well as the original short story that started it all. As an added bonus it also contains a never before seen end story, exclusive to this volume!

“Strange Angel is fun, scary, gory, action packed, and surprisingly touching… This book is highly recommended for any fans of Buffy or just good, fun, dramatic horror and fantasy.” — D.J. Kirkbride, author of SOULLESS

“Knave’s intense vision is packed with occult thrills. His brutal meditations on the struggle between good and evil create a fast-paced narrative bristling with gothic horror appeal. This dark action series is bound to be popular with fans of the recent surge in horror film.” –John Edward Lawson, author of LAST BURN IN HELL

“And even though I have repeated this time and time again, Knave is one of my favorite writers. His style is intimate and provocative, quietly humorous and always intelligent. He has this amazing ability to make you question everything you believe in, while passing you a beer and telling you a dirty joke. And never was it showcased more then in this series. That’s right, people, Knave has fucking arrived!” -Kelly “Bloodymary” Perry, Horror-Web.com

“If you’ve been missing some Buffy, but want to read something with a unique twist, the Strange Angel series of novellas by Adam P. Knave is a great joyride.” – Adrienne Jones, author of BRINE

So once again it is simple. Email me [adampknave @ gmail(dot)com] and ask for the book and get a shiny PDF in the mail. I’d offer it in other formats if I had it in other formats, but, uhm, I don’t. So this is what I can. Still! Free book! Today only!

Hey guys, the offer is closed. Sorry! But you can, of course, still buy the book at Amazon.

So there’s this bookstore in Red Lodge, Montana. It’s name is, aptly enough, Red Lodge Books. Lemme tell ya about them. See this guy I met, he liked Things Wrong With Me, worked there. And we talked. He’s a pretty cool guy, so that’s good. Always nice to find new cool people to talk to. Well this guy mentioned he worked for a bookstore.

Well I’m a whore so I pointed him at my books. You know how it is. He offered to show them to his boss and maybe they could carry them or something. So I, quite happily, mailed them a book or two all nice and signed and hoped that even if they didn’t carry them they would like them. Running a bookstore is not easy. There’re less and less people buying books all the time. Thin margins and the like. So not wanting to carry more books makes an amount of sense to me. I certainly wouldn’t have taken it personally.

Turns out they liked the books. Further turned out they wanted to stock them. So yes, if you go to Red Lodge, stop by the bookstore and buy a book. Mine, someone else’s, I don’t care. But supporting local, non-chain bookstores is an awesome thing to do. And the place looks pretty spiffy.

Anyway, Halloween is coming in a few weeks and like most stores Red Lodge Books has a Halloween display. Lemme show it to you:

See that? Front and center? Yah, that’s my horror short story collection. I only ever wrote horror in short story form and don’t do it now but I did and I’m proud of the stores in that volume. And these cats dig it. They dig what I did enough to put some unknown fucker front and center, surrounded by things like World War Z. And I can’t appreciate that enough. So thanks, guys.

And the rest of you, quite seriously, support a non-chain bookstore if you can. And if you’re anywhere near Red Lodge go in, buy a book and tell them that they’re awesome.

Spent the weekend in Ohio. Nice place, really. Come for the food, stay for the crippling depression.

————–

Got an awesome review of Strange Angel (which you can order here in StoryisStory.com:

I wound up reading Adam Knave’s Strange Angel twice: this is a complex, ambitious book. It’s a rare book that I read twice in a row: I needed that, for this, to get my head all the way around it.

Awesome! You can read the rest right over here. (Thanks again for the review CB Potts. The review is also on Amazon, please if you do read the book review it there, it helps.)

————–

Grabbed a Red Bull on my way to work today. Except I grabbed a 16oz. Now normally I drink a normal sized 8oz Red Bull. Sometimes if really out of it I might grab a 12. I didn’t mean to grab this thing. It’s huge. I’m sitting here like a gawking hobbit going “It comes in pints?

————–

Also, if you want to have a banner to link to the book with I give you one! Designed by Unrepentant:

Adrienne Jones came up with a concept a while back: McFly Day. That’s the day when you get your new book. See, remember Back to the Future? When George McFly got a big box of his new book and opened them? That was the best day a writer gets. It’s McFly day! I always want that day.

The other day, thanks to Strange Angel (click and order it now, amazon has it on sale for like $10.20!) I got me a McFly day!

So that’s always exciting. Box of books. Hooray! Also congratz to Marianne who had her own McFly day for her book, Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body which is a MUCH longer title.

So hooray for McFly day! The mostest wonderfulest day of the year, and it can happen more than once!

It’s that time! Yes folks, despite odd printer delay, Strange Angel is for sale! You can click the image about or click here or whatever to get your copy.

Susie Sparrow’s life has turned upside down. She’s merged with Ferapont, who says he is an angel, and has dedicated her life to ridding the world of demon possessed people. Unfortunately she is also in High School. Trying to schedule fights around school, hanging out with friends and dinner with the parents might be too much for one girl with large flaming wings to handle. But don’t tell her that. This volume collects all three volumes of the hit novella series as well as the original short story that started it all. As an added bonus it also contains a never before seen end story, exclusive to this volume!

“Strange Angel is fun, scary, gory, action packed, and surprisingly touching… This book is highly recommended for any fans of Buffy or just good, fun, dramatic horror and fantasy.” — D.J. Kirkbride, author of SOULLESS

“Knave’s intense vision is packed with occult thrills. His brutal meditations on the struggle between good and evil create a fast-paced narrative bristling with gothic horror appeal. This dark action series is bound to be popular with fans of the recent surge in horror film.” –John Edward Lawson, author of LAST BURN IN HELL

“And even though I have repeated this time and time again, Knave is one of my favorite writers. His style is intimate and provocative, quietly humorous and always intelligent. He has this amazing ability to make you question everything you believe in, while passing you a beer and telling you a dirty joke. And never was it showcased more then in this series. That’s right, people, Knave has fucking arrived!” -Kelly “Bloodymary” Perry, Horror-Web.com

“If you’ve been missing some Buffy, but want to read something with a unique twist, the Strange Angel series of novellas by Adam P. Knave is a great joyride.” – Adrienne Jones, author of BRINE

This brings, for me, a four year journey to an end. It’s a little odd. But I am also ridiculously proud. So go and grab a copy!

Also, mini-blog-tour is in effect. I know some of you had expressed interest in interviews or reviews or guest blogging. Speak up again if you haven’t heard from me or if you want to now, and we can get that ball rolling!

Strange Angel is available now!

Also! If you have any questions like “Why should I buy this” or “What makes it cool” or anything (that isn’t spoiler-y) ask them and I shall answer them here! And, you know, if you read the story when it was in novella series form and enjoyed it – do me a favor and review it on Amazon? Thanks!

In part one I talked about how the how concept kicked off.

Part two saw me discuss the start of the novella series.

This will wrap everything up.

So yeah Book One was out and getting decent word and I was working on Book Two. Except something in it didn’t click for me. I couldn’t make the plot work quite right anymore and I had also written myself into a corner, to boot. It was a bad week or two there. I spent a lot of time on the phone to friends, bitching about how I just needed to solve these few little problems and everything would be all right.

Except the solution didn’t happen for a while. And then something else did. You see I found a solution to my plot issue, not the corner I wrote myself into. Fixing that plot problem though … well, I had an idea for how to end the series and it needed a pretty big plot left right near the end. I won’t spoil any story here for people who haven’t read the thing yet but it was a biggish left.

And it didn’t work where I had it. It would have, in fact, blown up the book and sunk it pretty badly. Right at the end. So I found a way to shift things around and move the left further up. Which had some ripples. Suddenly my plot for Book Two was half-gone and all my notes for Book Three became mostly unusable. I had to go back to the drawing board.

Now remember how these books came out every 6 months? Well there is a bunch of time there for production. The book had to be laid out, proofed and printed and … everything else. But that ate up a large part of the 6 month break. We were already close to the wire.

If I replotted everything I would lose a chunk of time I didn’t have. If I didn’t replot everything I would sink the entire series by being bad at my job. I replotted. I called Vince and warned him and got to work.

I then took a week off my day job and wrote all of Book Two in a single week. Well, except for the first little opening bits. The crushing deadline forced me to just stop thinking and get some work done. Insane, sure, but doable every now and then.

So anyway! The rest of the series came out, pretty much as planned, and we sat and judged it all a worthwhile experiment. Except it felt like a good idea to collect it and release the whole story at once. We decided to wait a while, then had to fit it into his schedule for publication and then deal with a delay or three.

Along the way I decided that beside getting the original short story back into place I would do something for the end. I wanted to give people a reason to consider rebuying this stuff. I thought of a few different stories I could do and tried a bunch of them on for size, but only one actually fit. So I worked it up and slid it into place.

It’s utterly different from the rest of the series, on purpose. Just as, to me, the series is utterly different from the short that it started as.

Still, I spent years working in, thinking about and dealing with Strange Angel and now with this new book out it is done. I’ll miss it, partly, and partly I’ll be glad it’s over. But either way it is a testament to trying new concepts in my storytelling, to having some fun and building characters that you may or may not like but you’ll enjoy.

And it’s almost out, as of this writing. Like – I hear a delay but also hear any day now. Maddening. As soon as it is out I will link it here and so on.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy it.

In part one I talked about how the how concept kicked off. The original short story came out as the introduction to Dark Furies and was titled Strange Angel and that was it. I moved on. I started thinking about what I wanted to tackle next. There were a lot of ideas rattling around in my head and I wasn’t certain where I wanted to go, at all.

Now, I admit part of that mix was a nagging feeling about Susie Sparrow. I felt like she had such a tiny slice of life on the page. Two thousand words isn’t a lot and yet in that time I found myself oddly attached to her. I started to play with finding a story for a character just like her.

A few days later I was on the phone with Vince again. We tended to, especially then, talk at least once a week. We’d go on for long hours into the night about movies and books and cover design and life and just have a good time of it. Sometimes we would even talk work, if there was any.

I asked him, I remember, if maybe he would be interested in contracting a longer form story about Susie. There was something there, and I wanted to be able to chase it. He laughed and told me he had been thinking the same thing. It turned out that my short little story had sparked the same resonance in him that it has for me. So he was more than happy to ask me to write him something else.

But what?

Well we had an epically long conversation (I remember I still had a house phone then, a cordless, and I killed that battery and switched to my cell and eventually killed that battery.) wherein we both plotted out some of the rough bones of the story. It’s why the eventual product does list him as co-plotter. He brought a lot to the table, ideas he always wanted to see played with that suddenly fit perfectly into this madcap concept we were building.

But the truth it, outside of a few raw concepts (which, again, I adore and never would have found on my own) and two scenes in the eventual product, we didn’t plot any story. We just found really interesting directions to go, some back story and some world building. It’s plot, and it is critical. But what happened was my fault.

See, we agreed that, since he still wanted to play with that smaller page count format (see Part One and the Olson twin novels) that instead of one novel I would write the book as a series of three novellas.

I came up with a basic plot and sold it to him as a story with a ton of action and explosions and I remember using the phrase “like dinosaurs with jetpacks fighting school busses with missiles” more than once. This thing was going to be “full of explodo” as I kept promising.

Except when I got down to work on it – it wasn’t. Now don’t get me wrong, the story has a lot of action, but the majority of it became a character drama. Susie was an interesting character to take out of the box and play with, and I found myself having too much fun doing that in Book One to really remember to blow someone up every ten pages or so.

Now, do I think the book failed because it didn’t have enough action? Not at all. The action it did have was denser and tighter and the character beats were large and carried the reader through. I think it was a great success, actually. But I know Vince expected something very different from our talks.

So I finished Book One and it got good reviews and sold a decent amount and I had the bones of books two and three in front of me. See, this series was going to be a 70+ page novella every 6 months for 18 months. As soon as I finished one I had to leap into the next. Not crushing or deadly, it just meant I never got a chance to really stop.

Well, except … but that’s for next time.

So with Strange Angel coming out soon I feel the desire to talk about the project. To look back and really get into what went on there, in my head. It will have very few spoilers, this isn’t about plot, but instead about where I was and what I was thinking, how it all came about. That sort of thing.

“Do you ever read the Olson twins’ books?” Vince asked me. We were outside during Balticon. It must have been late 2004. The sun was shining down and I stood there and gaped at the man like he had just ripped off his face and revealed himself to be an alien.

“What? No, huh? What? UNCLEAN!” was close to what I must have said, loudly, while taking a step back. Then I laughed. This was Vince. Sometimes Vince asks these questions.

It turned out that he was asking because he had seen a few and noticed they were bringing back a format he liked. A small package book, maybe 27 thousand words long, about 70 or 80 pages, but still cut to the 8.5×5.5 inch spec he used for books. Old novella style, really. We both had a fondness for them. I remember buying a Haldeman short novella as a solo thing once, back in the day, from Village Comics when it shared space with the Science Fiction Bookstore (yes that was its name). Anyway we both told stories about the format, things we loved and why we wanted it back. Yeah, we’re nerds. You see why I love having the guy publish my stuff, right?

After a while though Vince shrugged and told me that he wanted to do a new anthology and he needed an intro story. He loved doing intros that were short, like two thousand word long, stories. He asked me to do it. I was honored. I hadn’t sold that many stories by then and being asked to do the kick-off to an entire anthology was awesome.

There were, however, conditions.

* The main character had to be named some form of Susan Sparrow. Susan Sparrow was the name some author had used to co-write the Dawn of the Dead novelization with Romero. Vince had a thing.

* The story had to include this Sparrow woman in a school, somehow.

* It should be horror, really, like the anthology.

* The Sparrow woman should have powers.

* It had to end with the line “On with the show,” somehow, because Vince wanted that last line to be a theme for his anthology openings.

* I had 2,000 words max to get everything done.

* The story had to be titled Strange Angel.

Of course I said yes. I didn’t think on it, just took a few notes and gleefully went off to my doom. I got home and sat down to figure this out. I wasn’t sure how to achieve any of this, much less all of it at once. Some was easy. Susan Sparrow became Susie Sparrow in my head very quickly. Make her a teen, she’s in school, wham! easy. Powers? Strange Angel? I didn’t know how to tie it all together.

I remember I sat on the floor, playing with the cat, while thinking for about an hour. Just sitting there, grumbling to myself about how everything fit together. Until I found the answers and the story made perfect sense. It’s fun working under odd constraints. I find it freeing, actually. It lets my brain fill a shape instead of having to work out a shape and then fill it.

Well, I wrote it, Vince agreed it was what he wanted, and it shoed up as the intro to Dark Furies (and for the last time, that’s Furies as in Greek Fury, not furries) and that was, as they say, that.

I wrote a nice, clean, short short story with a character I came to enjoy. Susie Sparrow was … spunky. She had a sense of humor and a resignation to the idea that sometimes bad things have to happen. Not that those things didn’t touch her and she was made of stone, but rather simply that – like it or not – bad shit happened. I tried to give her weight with it, a touch of cynicism to go with her age (about 16) and anger, but mostly a child’s anger not an adults – for the most part because when you’re 16 anger is a bit of both depending – and a sense of strange humor. The powers I slid in with, what I thought, a nice twist and turned everything into a much less straight forward event while making it utterly straight forward. Just those little games you play as an author.

Still! The story was done. Strange Angel was written, edited, accepted and published and the journey was over…

Except I really liked Susie Sparrow, and we still had that format that we liked a lot, the one the Olson’s used. Obviously something had to be done … but that’s for another day’s thoughts.