First off, I would like to congratulate the three winners from the blog contest. The winner of the signed Undead Tales 2 book was Beth Lunkenheimer and the two winners that will appear in some upcoming projects were Ashley Smith and Mark Duvall. I’ve already filled Mark in on his role and he is very excited to be hunting and killing some zombies. I’m sorry about the delay in posting the winners here (they were posted on the Facebook page), but life has been hectic around here. In fact, my life is going so wonderful I’ve had to trade in my usual rum, whiskey, or beer for the glass of milk pictured next to here. I will say that it is in a glass from a brewery, so I’m still representing!
In the past few weeks, the writing world exploded with the situation regarding Undead Press and new author Mandy DeGeit. I will not rehash the situation here, but if you want to read about what happens when an anthology editor goes above and beyond editing without the author’s approval, click here to go to her blog and catch up on the bad situation.
I almost fell prey to the same guy. I submitted a story to the same book trying to be in the same anthology as Mandy and my other friend Wesley Southard (link over in author links page). The story was quickly accepted and I told Mandy we’d be sharing a TOC. Well, that was until I received the contract. First, it read like it was written by a third grader and some of the points in it were really bad (like a cut of any future movie options even if the rights have reverted back to the author). I didn’t care, I wanted to be in the anthology with my friends. Then we started a rather nasty back and forth about the signature on the contract where the publisher acted like a complete unprofessional ass-hat. First off, the story I sent in sucked and I knew it, but it was the only finished thing I had (it was the first non-flash story I ever wrote). When the publisher became insulting over how the signature looked, I pulled the story and went on with my life. Looking back, I never should have even tried to sell the crappy story and secondly, once I read the contract, I should have walked then instead of trying to continue. I learned to read the contract carefully. I learned to get something besides a copy of the publisher’s self-published drivel for my work. Hey, I live and I learn. I have myself to rely on and I try to do the right thing. I learned my lessons.
Now to help Mandy, the unaltered version of her story “She Makes Me Smile” is now on Kindle. 50% of what the book earns will go toward paying the anthology authors $25 for their story and the rest is going into a fund to hire a lawyer that will look into Undead Press/Living Dead Press/Open Casket Press contracts with the purpose of returning all rights back to the authors that have dealt with those presses. So go click here to help support the cause.
Now I must get back to some editing on some short stories and work on the novel. Editing has begun on In Memoriam and I’ll keep you posted. The milk is calling so,
Goodnight…
