My friend (and fellow writer) T.L. (Tony) Hines has a new book out called The Unseen. Here’s a teaser on the plot:

Urban explorer Lucas Freund is a loner, but he’s never alone. From secret hiding places, he peers into the lives of others–watching them while they work, while they commute, while they sip their morning coffee. He is a master at remaining silent and unseen in his carefully constructed world as an invisible observer.

Anyone can be watched. No one is safe. And the most terrifying secrets of all remain Unseen.

It sounds like a great read. But there’s something else he’s doing, as a way to promote the novel, that I find fascinating. It’s called “The Unseen Pages Project.” Tony has sent out one laminated page of his novel to several hundred volunteers, who will then place these pages with a note in any public place they want. Whoever finds the pages can take them, read them, and place them somewhere else–and then drop a note to Tony at his website telling him about their experience for a chance to win some great prizes.

Neat promo idea–and it makes me very curious to see where these pages end up, who reads them, and what the readers say. You can find out more at his website: http://www.tlhines.com. Take a look!

Oh, and by the way, Tony’s a great writer, so the next time you’re in a bookstore (or right now online, for that matter), check out Waking Lazarus, The Dead Whisper On, or The Unseen. They’re well worth your time.

As I sit here waiting for the biopsy results on a particularly scary mole removed from my arm, I write to ask for your help. Not for me, but for millions of people in the fight of their lives. It’s time to step up and make a difference.

A few of you may know about a double tragedy I suffered during my childhood, but most do not. When I was eight years old, my mother was diagnosed with an advanced stage of ovarian cancer. A short time later, my father was killed in a freak automobile accident, leaving my mother alone to care for two young children and battle a terrifying disease, with no hope for a cure.

My mother never let anything destroy her remarkable spirit. When I was only 4, she and my father left a comfortable existence in Seattle and drove to Maine with nothing but a Volkswagen full of their personal belongings. They were looking for something different in their lives. My father set up shop as a small-town lawyer while my mother, a former teacher, learned to build passive solar houses. Then she built our home, from the ground up, with her own two hands.

I tell you this to illustrate her incredible strength and determination. She lived another five years after my father’s death, four years longer than her doctors predicted, astonishing everyone. But even she could not beat this disease forever, and when I was thirteen, she passed away peacefully with her family at her side.

I cannot express how devastating this was to me. It has taken me many years to begin to face those days from an adult’s perspective. The simple fact is, an experience like this damages a child in ways that are permanent and life-changing.

My mother loved the arts, and always encouraged me to draw and write as much as possible. Her enthusiasm and support made me want to become a writer, which brings me to where I stand today. If you’re reading this you probably know that Bloodstone, my first published novel, was released this week in paperback by Leisure Books. It is (I hope) a fun, scary read full of ghosts and demons and possession and old, long-buried family secrets. But there are also many references to cancer in the novel. I didn’t do this intentionally, but it crept in from my subconscious all the same. I guess it was also an exorcism of sorts for me.

Millions of families have been devastated by cancer. Many children are left alone to cope with overwhelming feelings of anger, sadness and guilt when their parents pass away, as I was. Many children are, themselves, suffering from the disease.

I want to make a difference in these children’s lives. With this in mind, I have decided to donate the profits I earn from Bloodstone—every penny—to the American Cancer Society, in my mother Pamela Kenyon’s name.

But that’s nowhere near enough. Which brings me to you. I’m asking you to do something, right now, today, to join me in this fight. Go to the American Cancer Society online at www.cancer.org, or use this direct link:

www.cancer.org/docroot/DON/DON_1_Donate_Online_Now.asp?from=hpglobal

and make an online donation to ACS. Small or large, it doesn’t matter. Just don’t wait: go RIGHT NOW. It will only take a moment, but if we work together, a few minutes and a few dollars will make all the difference in the world to so many people.

Maybe one of your own loved ones. Maybe even you.

———-

Since I wrote the first part of this story, I received the results of my biopsy. They were negative. I was lucky, but I can’t help thinking of many others right now who are receiving far more frightening results. It’s easy to forget that none of us are alone in this world, and that we are all part of something much larger than ourselves. We need to work together to fight such a powerful enemy. Please share this with family and friends. Encourage them to give. By working together, we can finally wipe cancer off the map forever.

Use the comments field right here to leave your own story or thoughts about the fight against cancer. If you don’t see the comments box, click here.

Bloodstone is now officially out in paperback. To celebrate, I went to my local Barnes and Noble in Chestnut Hill and found 8 copies on the new release shelves! Not buried in the back, or spine out under my name, but right up front and center. Take a look at this photo:

My trip to Borders was not quite so exciting. Two copies, shelved under my name. Tough for anyone to discover those by accident. So I pulled them out and asked the manager if I could sign them, and he said absolutely. They’re now up front with “autographed copy” stickers on them.

I like that much better.

If anyone else sees copies in their local stores, drop a comment here and let me know (if you don’t see a little window for comments, click here. Better yet, snap a photo and email it to me at nate@natekenyon.com, and I’ll put it right up here on the site. Sort of a “Where’s Waldo” for horror fiction. Put yourself in the photo if you like, and if you want me to post your name, let me know that too.

As always, thanks for your support!

It’s been a while since I posted here. Life has been busy lately, but that’s no excuse, I know. However, something happened recently that dragged me back to the keyboard. Something so important, so terrible and outrageous and finally astonishing, that it demanded my attention.

CBS announced that they were canceling Jericho.

I know what you’re thinking. A tv show? A show that aired for one measly season, to mediocre ratings, no less, before it was shown the door? You brought me here for this?

Bear with me for a moment. I don’t have time for much television in my life these days, so when I invest myself in an ongoing series, it had damn well better be good. It had better be riveting, can’t-miss-a-single minute, white-knuckled big-as-life must-see tv.

I’m here to say that yes, Jericho was that good.

Sure, it might have started a little shaky. Things were quiet as the first episode opened, some might even say boring. Jake Green returned to his hometown from a long, tense time away and we felt just as awkward and out of place as he did that first hour or so. As viewers, we stumbled along with the characters as they learned about each other on the fly. Early on I caught a glimpse of a couple of different directions the show might go, and I wasn’t quite sure the writers were going to choose the right one.

In other words, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.

But it didn’t take long before everything changed. They dropped the bombs, you see, and I lived right through it alongside the people from this little fictional mid-western town. I felt the shock, the fear, the adrenaline rush, the sorrow. And then I rallied through the pain as a town sputtered back to life, and families pulled themselves together and decided to stand up and fight. Keep everyone safe from the fallout. Restore power to the town. Find enough food. Keep the peace. Bring back a sense of normalcy to a world gone insane.

I said everything changed, and I meant it. Suddenly I wasn’t a casual viewer having a beer and brushing potato chip crumbs off my lap, one eye on the television and the other on my “to do” list. I was right there with them. Maybe it had something to do with the daily fear we live with in this modern world, when terrorists can fly airplanes into buildings and kill thousands, when we no longer feel safe and secure in the good old U.S.A. Or maybe it was just plain good writing and great tv. But something about this show really hit home. By the end of the second hour, I didn’t want to leave that place and those people: Jake, Eric, their parents, Heather, Dale and Skylar, Stanley and Mimi and Robert Hawkins and family and all the rest. They had come alive for me, and I bought the whole thing, hook, line and sinker.

And that’s what I’m really here to talk about tonight. Indulge me, if you will: I want to talk about good fiction.

For me, it begins and ends with the people. Sure, whether it’s a movie, television show or a novel, without a good story, you don’t have much. But even the best, most action-packed, emotional, tense situation imaginable is nothing without characters for the audience to identify with, to love and to hate equally. We need heroes, we need villains, and we need those who are intensely conflicted and straddle the line between both good and evil.

The bottom line is, if you don’t care who lives or dies, the best story in the world isn’t going to matter.

It’s hard to create memorable characters. The best of them have their own detailed back stories, their own motivations, dreams and nightmares. There’s nothing simple or one-dimensional about them, and who they are can be learned as much by what they say (or what they don’t say), as their actions. That takes a lot of work, and I admire the hell out anyone who succeeds in doing it. I hope I manage to do this in my own fiction, at least the best of it; God knows I try.

Jericho had them in spades, and the bombs dropping gave them a stage to let their emotions show. We got to see what made them tick, and a lot of it wasn’t pretty. But it made for riveting television.

By the end of season one, Jericho had become the one show I could not miss. The season finale was absolutely one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long, long time. The season ended on a cliffhanger, one town pitted against another, neighbor against neighbor, and the death of a major character provided a heart-rending climax that left me with tears in my eyes.

That, my friends, has never happened before in my life. Sure, a movie or two might get me, but a tv show? Never.

So imagine my surprise when CBS announced they were canceling this show. I was shocked, and then angry. How could they leave us like this? With so many unanswered questions? They said ratings were weak. Not enough people watching. I couldn’t believe it. I starting searching for more information, and quickly ended up on the CBS Jericho message boards. Thousands of people were swarming the boards like angry bees. Rallying cries were already cropping up in post after post–how dare they do this to us! How will we know what’s happened to the people? We can’t let them take Jericho from us!

I watched and I read along as an entire community–all online, thousands of people who had never met face to face and yet shared a common interest–began to fight back. I read posting after posting where fans referred to characters on the show as if they were real people, as they vowed to fight for what they believed in and save this little town from destruction. Ratings were down? Well, CBS had damn near killed the show, people said, with a several-weeks long hiatus in the middle of the season. Nielson ratings? Well, they didn’t measure all the fans who were watching Jericho in CBS’s Innertube service and Apple’s iTunes. Surely there were many more fans out there than CBS realized. The answer? Give these fans a voice.

And boy, did they ever.

They began to organize, to make detailed plans about ways to make their voices heard. And then they launched their attack.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the fight to save Jericho by now. The “Nuts for Jericho” effort? It’s been covered in nearly every major news outlet in the country. Over 50,000 pounds of nuts delivered the the CBS offices, and they’re still coming. The “nuts” reference comes from a story the grandfather of one of the main characters told about his experiences in World War Two, where a U.S. general used the phrase to reply to a request for surrender from the Germans. Jake Green used the same phrase in the Jericho season finale, and a buzzword was born that launched an entire campaign.

“Nuts to CBS. Save our show.”

That wasn’t all, of course. For weeks on end, CBS’s main offices were overwhelmed with thousands upon thousands of emails and phone calls. Someone got hold of the cell phone number for one of the main executives, and posted it online. The voicemail box was overrun. Letters poured in. A full page ad was taken out in Variety Magazine, paid for by donations from the fans. Compilations were posted on YouTube. Websites cropped up all over the place: Jericholives.com, savejericho.com, and many more.

And the nuts kept on coming.

Not since Star Trek had anyone seen fan support like this. Through it all, the fans remained civil. They did not threaten or scream, they simply asked that their voices be heard. Bloggers, then larger media outlets began to pick up the story, and it gained critical mass. And the actors who portrayed the characters in Jericho started posting messages to the boards filled with gratitude for the fans’ efforts, all of them repeatedly stating that this set was the most amazing experience they had had as actors. They had bonded while working together, and that bond had clearly shown itself on screen. These messages received hundreds of responses from fans refusing to let their show die.

In a way, the entire effort was a strange echoing of what had been happening on screen. Jericho was fighting for its very life, with a small but dedicated group of citizens who refused to surrender. And so it became in the real world, a group of very different people banding together around a single cause.

Incredibly, CBS began to listen. Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, released a statement saying they were overwhelmed by fans’ responses, and were calling an emergency meeting to try to find a way to provide an ending to the “compelling” story that was Jericho. Rumors of a tv movie or a final online episode to wrap up loose ends began to circulate.

But that wasn’t enough for the fans. They demanded a new season, and declared that they wouldn’t stop until they got it. The nuts, calls and emails continued to flood the CBS offices. The story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Days went by without any word. Then, finally, this:

June 6, 2007
To the Fans of Jericho:

P.S. Please stop sending us nuts

Wow, indeed. In the history of television, the number of shows that have been revived after cancellation can be counted on one hand. Fan outrage is not uncommon, and sometimes they go to great lengths to try to save a show. But it almost never works.

Except this time, it did.

So what does all this mean, really? Why take so much time to write about a television show? What’s that got to do with the important things in this world?

The very best fiction is about more than just a story. It has something to say about the world we live in, and even though it might involve monsters, or space ships, or wizards, something essential to the story hits us where we live. The people come to life, we begin to identify with them, and along the way we learn something about ourselves.

Jericho is about survival. It’s about losing all the cell phones and websites and bringing us back to our roots, our neighbors, our families. It’s about celebrating life in the face of the many horrors we see today, from famine to war to the deaths of our loved ones to terrorist plots and nuclear bombs. And it all plays out on the smallest of stages, that all-American mid-western town that doesn’t really exist, and yet echoes thousands of similar small towns across the country.

The very best fiction allows us to face our fears in a comfortable setting, to examine what makes life important and stare down those dark corners and real-life monsters until they don’t frighten us anymore. It gives us heroes and villains, and most importantly it gives us people who try their best to do the right thing, even when they fail. Jericho was particularly good at this, and that was a big reason why it worked.

It remains to be seen how the future will play out; will a summer of reruns, DVD sales and more word of mouth bring enough viewers to the show to keep it alive beyond next season? I’m betting it will. I know I’ll do my part by watching every week and telling everyone I can about the “compelling” story that is Jericho. I’m sure the rest of the rabid fanbase will do the same. They’re fighting for more than just a tv show, you see: they’re fighting for the people they fell in love with along the way, and the town they just won’t let die.

And “nuts” to anyone who tries to stop them.

Check out this incredible contest from International Thriller Writers (ITW)…

************

150 Thrillers!

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The best part? Just by entering you’ll begin receiving the free ITW newsletter, a monthly email newsletter that contains loads of information about upcoming thriller novels, thriller authors and thriller news.

All you have to do is go to www.150Thrillers.com, or email contest@150Thrillers.com before February 15th and sign up to get the free ITW newsletter. That’s it.

Once you’ve subscribed, you’re entered. The winner will be picked randomly from all entrants, and will receive 150 thriller novels from some of the top novelists writing today. Three runner-up entrants will each receive a copy of the 2006 Thriller Anthology, edited by James Patterson. But really, everyone who signs up to receive the ITW newsletter is a winner.

So go on, sign up. You know you want to.

Please note: one entry per person, and, as usual, ITW will not share your email information with anyone.

For further information, contact M.J. Rose at MJRoseAuthor@aol.com.

This is just a quick post to thank everyone who has supported me and the novel, whether it was picking up a copy or asking about it at your local store, passing out bookmarks or pens, sending me a message with your thoughts, or just talking it up with friends and neighbors or online. Every single thing you do makes a tremendous difference, and I can’t thank you all enough. You’re the reason why I write, and if I can help you escape into a good story I’ve done my job, and I’m happy.

Bloodstone is now nearly sold out of its second printing. I hope to have news pretty soon about some exciting new projects, so stay tuned to this space. If anyone would like to help continue to spread the word, or wants new ideas on how best to do so, please drop me a line at nate@natekenyon.con. I’ll be glad to offer suggestions, and send you some free materials to distribute in any way you see fit.

Talk to you soon!

For those of you who frequent the Shocklines.com message boards and shop at the store, you know why I’m writing this. For those who don’t, it’s time you did. Shocklines is simply the best online specialty bookstore in the business, and for one main reason: its owner, Matt Schwartz.

What Matt has done has created not just a seamless and satisfying online shopping experience, but an entire community. The Shocklines.com board has become THE place for writers within the horror, mystery and suspense genre to hang out–an Internet cafe of sorts which allows aspiring writers and pros alike to meet, put their feet up and talk about whatever comes to mind. You’ll find big names like Doug Clegg, Tim Lebbon, F. Paul Wilson, Beth Massie, Brian Keene and many others posting there pretty frequently. Threads range from personal announcements to (yikes) political rants to promotion of new work to reviews of the latest releases.

But the key to Shocklines is Matt’s insistence on civility at all times. While many other boards quickly dissolve into name calling and personal attacks, Matt keeps his board clean. That’s not to say that you can’t argue a point, but the arguing is done with respect for others’ opinions. To me, that’s a very important point in this day and age, when it’s all too easy for people to hide behind keyboards and provoke others for no other reason than their own entertainment. It’s a simple thing to be a jerk, and much harder to express your point of view while respecting what others have to say–even if they don’t agree with you.

And what about the store? Well, Matt is focused mainly on horror, both for the casual reader and the collector. There are a lot of items at Shocklines.com that are pretty hard to find elsewhere, and quite a few hidden gems. He’s got a “Guaranteed Good Reads” section that offers a money back guarantee (I’m pleased to say Bloodstone is on the list). There’s free shipping and gift-wrapping too.

So if you haven’t been to Shocklines yet, stop by. Search the store and pick up a few good reads. Check out the message board and see who’s hanging out. Readers, writers, all are welcome. Just check your ego at the door.

Hope to see you there.

This coming Friday, October 13, 2006, is Horror Day. So what does that mean, you ask? Well, it all started with an idea among a few members of the Horror Writers Association of a way to reach out to the world and promote their beloved genre to a wider audience. The idea caught on with a much larger group very quickly, from bloggers to members of the film community to merchandisers. And why not? Friday the 13th, in October, is the perfect hook. And horror hasn’t been this strong in years: horror films are pulling in big bucks at the box office, big publishing houses are rolling out more horror-oriented titles, and small presses are popping up all over the place.

Horror Day is a purely grassroots effort, spread by word of mouth and given focus by the Horror Day MySpace page. There are a lot of neat prizes up for grabs there, for those who come up with the most unique promotional effort around the holiday. I hope you get the chance to stop by and check it out. Who knows? Maybe you’ll come up with the best idea of all, and win something. It’s worth a shot…horror lovers of the world, unite!

Apex Digest, one of the best new sci fi and horror magazines, is in trouble. A number of kind souls have gotten together to set up a raffle to raise money for Jason Sizemore, editor and founder of Apex and general all-around good guy.

There are lots of great prizes–a signed copy of Bloodstone, for instance :)– and it’s only a buck to enter each drawing. The raffle ends Friday, September 29 at midnight.

Check it out! Thanks.

Save Apex Raffle

Well, all the questions have been answered (I think), and I’d like to thank everyone one more time for dropping by. This was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed chatting with you all.

Now it’s time to reveal which names were pulled out of the jar. Up for grabs: a Bloodstone bookbag, a t-shirt, and the grand prize, a signed copy of the manuscript of my brand new novel, The Reach. This one is so new, the contest winner will be one of the very first people to read it after I typed The End.

Drumroll please:

Winner of the Bloodstone bookbag: Laura Emerson
Winner of the T-Shirt–Giane
And the grand prize winner of the manuscript of The Reach: Kristi T

Congratulations to the three winners! I’ll be in touch with them by email. If for some reason I can’t get a response within a few days, I will draw a new name or names from the jar.

For all of you who haven’t had the chance to read through the great questions and answers, here are the links to those pages on my journal:

First Part
Second Part
Third Part
Fourth Part

Thanks again everyone. I hope you stop by to see me again soon. Drop me a line any time, I’d love to hear from you. Happy reading!