Author: David Antrobus

Born in Manchester, England, author David Antrobus currently lives in British Columbia. David also edits and writes in many styles and genres, from nonfiction to dark fantasy. He worked for twenty years with abused teens. You can also find David at his blog and at his Amazon author page.

Taking Your Pulse – A BookPulse Tutorial

Quick heads up: Since I only uploaded my one book, I didn’t anticipate a problem with this. Apparently, you can’t upload more than one book unless you have a separate Facebook page for each one. This is important information BookPulse might want to place front and centre, just sayin’.

There are some things I am extremely lazy about. Unfortunately, one of those things tends to be self-promotion. I am not good at it and have no great love for it. Actually, it’s worse than that: I actively dislike it. But we’re constantly told (let’s be honest, “harangued” might be a better word) that it’s an essential part of the writer’s toolkit… and not only independent writers but those poor captives of the publishing industry, the traditional writers, too. I kid, of course: we are all brothers and sisters of The Mighty Word, and “Kumbaya” sounds exactly the same when sung by my gruel-spattered co-minions as it does in the lofty yet slightly sterile halls of Simon & Schuster… although the soft moans of existential despair accompanying the former can be a little disconcerting.

But I digress. As I tend to do. Probably because I can already feel the ennui descending as my main topic looms like a grey, haunted, driverless engine on a fog-blanketed night.

So. Once in a while, I break out of my truculent, indolent recalcitrance and stumble on something potentially useful to our collective writerly aspirations. (Apparently, I also break out the Thesaurus.) Continue reading “Taking Your Pulse – A BookPulse Tutorial”

Entitled – The Encore

[Mr. Antrobus is not available this week, so we’ve found some chick to write his post for him. Enjoy. – The Editors]

Oh my god, okay, so there’s this thing, right? Did you hear? There are these people, just ordinary people like you and me except they got lucky because there’s this revolution going on and people are bulldozing the libraries all across America right now and taking apart those Barns’n’No-Bull stores or whatever they’re called, which is, ha, funny, because it’s like that saying about locking the barn door after… anyway, I gotta tell you this, it’s so cool, and you’ll never believe it, but back to these lucky folks, one of them is called Joe Konehead and there’s even this really young chick named Amanda Hawking (I think she’s the little sister of that handicapped spacegeek with the creepy computer voice), and they heard about this new book revolution, only they’re not books, they’re eBooks and, oh my god, LOL, this is so amazing, you gotta keep listening. So they made, like, more money than Jesus at a Casino thanks to these iKindles and MaxiPads and all the other eReaders that all these big companies are now making especially for the eBooks, and you know, here’s the thing, you can now go sell your eBooks on them since it’s so easy, anyone can do it… Continue reading “Entitled – The Encore”

Off The Hook

You’ve probably already heard that wonderfully creepy urban tale about a teenage boy and girl making out in a car in some Lovers Lane in Anytown, USA, and how the boy starts telling the girl of the “Hook Murders” in the area, whereby amorous teens are being killed by an insane, escaped killer with a hook for a hand. Perhaps not the smartest move on the boy’s part, as his girlfriend gets all distracted by fear, going from initial anxiety to eventual near-hysteria, resisting his advances and demanding they leave that instant. Which he eventually does. He’s all bummed, they bicker on the way back, arrive at her place, she jumps out, slams the door…. and screams. He runs around to her side of the vehicle…. and sees what she sees: a single bloody hook dangling from the door handle.

Creeped out? Good, because I am, and a good haunting is no fun alone. Continue reading “Off The Hook”

Fear and Loathing No More

Long before the interwebs dubbed them “epic fails”, I used to collect such stories in the dimly-lit, ironic laugh-a-thon I call my “mind”. Like the bank robber who wrote his holdup note on the back of an envelope that not only displayed his own name and address clearly and almost heartbreakingly, but also that of his parole officer, upper left corner, return address. Then… he left the envelope. Or a different guy—surely related via some spectacular yet hitherto undiscovered boneheadedness gene—who held up the teller with a rifle… but left the cork plugged proudly and prominently in the end of his painfully-obvious-to-everyone toy firearm.

Anyway, that’s a trip down Fail Boulevard. And highly amusing as that journey undoubtedly is, I want to explore another part of town: Success Street. Success. Even the word itself sounds like it tastes good (cf: succinct, succumb, succour, succulent). Yeah. Did I ever mention how much I love words? So much so I want to eat them. With bacon. And chocolate-dipped seahorse roe.

But I digress.

Look, without further ado, here are seven awesome ways to totally guarantee your writing success. Continue reading “Fear and Loathing No More”