A Mad Small Press
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2011.
Okay, I ran late this week, so I’m providing coupons for 2 stories:
Death by Chocolate - DY58W (good through Monday)
The Business That Must Be Conducted in the Dark - EW39P (good through Monday)
If you liked them, consider a) donating or b) writing a review. Heck, consider writing a review if you thought they were bad. Or just meh. Or catch an error. I can update these things, you know.
See the related posts for descriptions of the stories 
Now at Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
Death by Chocolate
She could have everything she ever wanted…except chocolate.
Ellie can’t see it, but she’s a saint. A good girl who takes care of her Grandie at the nursing home, recycles other people’s trash, and worries about getting her loans out on time so she doesn’t inconvenience her customers.
It’s too much for the Devil to resist: is Ellie good, or is she just boring? He makes her a deal. She can be thin, pretty, and immortal…as long as she doesn’t eat chocolate. Ever. If she does, she’s going straight to Hell.
Except Ellie doesn’t like chocolate, so he better find something—or someone—better to tempt her with. Then the bad boy at the top of Ellie’s sexual bucket list appears. Coincidence? Probably not.
Ellie was a good girl, it’s sad to say. A heart full of patience and kindness and love. And the only person she had to slather it on was her Grandie, in the nursing home.
She was there when the Devil found her, at Sunnyside Oaks, on a dark and stormy night in late October, when the leaves skittered like spiders on the sidewalk, and the half-bare branches lashed under the wind, the eerie glow of streetlights flickering like glaring eyes through the icy mist.
Ellie fed Grandie, who sat in one of the big recliner wheelchairs, the kind with a table across the top and cushions from head to toe, to prevent bedsores. It was six; everyone else had eaten and was being rushed to bed by sullen high school kids whose ideas of what was going to happen to them for the rest of their lives got more bitter by the shift. Grandie was down to her go-juice—applesauce and prunes—when the leaves ticking against the windows started to screech against the glass.
The Halloween decorations taped to the insides of the windows shimmered and scowled, their cute pumpkin faces and black kittens in purple hats twisting into the faces of her former classmates, laughing at her, clawing at each other, making bad gestures toward her, murdering the ghosts.
Grandie moaned, and Ellie dropped the plastic cup of go-juice in her lap: her eyes had rolled back into her head, and the whites were bright pink with blood.
“Grandie? Are you all right?”
Coupon coming tomorrow from Smashwords!
Now at Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
The Business That Must Be Conducted in the Dark
Does it bother you to be a slave?
(Warning: Mature Content)
Master Zorac wants Annalise to follow him into the dark, but her programming won’t allow it…until she’s sent to capture him.
Master Zorac opened the closet door, even though it was not time for his next appointment. I blinked several times to indicate my alert status.
“Annalise, does it bother you to be a slave?” I smelled his scent, which had a sour sweat underneath its masculine perfume. Perhaps he wanted to bathe. Or to have sex and then bathe. The light was bright in the hallway, dark in the closet, and my master was little more than a handsome shadow. I smelled him. I smelled him through my skin. His smell was a caress that he didn’t know was running all over my skin. I hoped he wanted sex. “Wouldn’t it be better to be dead? If it meant that others could go free?”
To prepare for a talk at Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference, I’ve been posting things on my regular website about Indy Publishing. It’s a try/fail kind of thing; however, if you’re interested, the articles are here.
I’ve talked about the money I expect to make and about the fact that a LOT of people are pouring into the epublishing world at the moment. I’ll talk about cliffhangers and serials tomorrow: an idea I haven’t tried out yet but will soon.
Please feel free to not treat me like an expert but a researcher down in the tide pools.
I’m going to release Death by Chocolate, a short paranormal romance novel, this week to coincide with the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference; there will be no June release to replace it, unless I get really stupid ambitious.
The new story and DbC should be up tomorrow; look here for weekend coupons.
As always, if you review books and want to review any Wonderland Press books (or if you’re an author and want to trade reviews on something), just drop me an email at publisher@wonderlandpress.com to negotiate copies.
Now at Smashwords, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
This weekend only! Get “Attack of the 50-Foot Sushi Monster” FREE at Smashwords using coupon code SX86U. More sushi than you can shake a stick at!
Attacl of the 50-Foot Sushi Monster
Sometimes Playing with Your Food Can Be Deadly
When Cat holds her birthday party at a sushi restaurant, she doesn’t expect her meal to attack! How can one girl defeat a 50-foot-tall monster made out of raw fish, rice, and seaweed when stuffing her face is not enough?
A hand reached from behind Cat, delivering a sushi roll on its tiny wooden table.
“Ewww!” her friend Marilyn squealed. Other kids laughed or made faces.
Cat rolled her eyes. “Just try it. It’s really good.”
Marilyn shook her head; she’d never eaten sushi before. But Cat was no scaredy-cat. She’d eaten sushi plenty of times.
But this wasn’t what she’d ordered. She’s ordered crab and masago, orange eggs so tiny that they crunched when she ate them—her favorite. Instead, the waiter had brought her a roll in the shape of a doll, with two seaweed-covered legs, strips of sesame seeds and masago on its belly, and avocado arms. The doll scowled at her, tiny pieces of seaweed snipped into a face on top of a piece of tuna.
Maybe that’s what the sushi restaurant made for everybody on their birthdays. She didn’t know.
The sushi-doll’s hands, made out of tiny green leaves, seemed to move, but it must have been the wind or something.
The waiter reached over and stuck a candle in a pile of green wasabi and lit it, and the kids and parents around her started to sing Happy Birthday—
Suddenly, the sushi-doll sat up, and everyone screamed, including Cat. The sushi’s head turned back and forth, still scowling at everyone, and its little mouth opened into an O.
“You murderers!” it squeaked. It pushed itself off the wood, bending one knee underneath it, then slowly, wobbly, getting to its feet. “Sushi killers!”
Now at Smashwords.com, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com.
This weekend only! Get “Zombie Girl Invasion” FREE at Smashwords only using coupon code MF89W. Act now; zombies are waiting for your click!
ZOMBIE GIRL INVASION
Neil hates zombies. Neil hates girls. Dang ol’ zombie girl.
Neil hates zombies. Neil hates girls. Bleah. But then the zombies invade, and he has to save the zombie girl from being eaten…by other zombies!
Neil hated zombies. I mean, really hated zombies. If he ever saw a zombie, he would tear the refrigerator off the wall and smash it over the zombie’s head, so it squished out the bottom like a packet of ketchup. Or shoot it with a shotgun, right the head, so its head would explode like a tomato. Or burn it up with a flamethrower, or chop its head off with a samurai sword, or lasers.
It’s okay to kill zombies.
His dad understood that it was okay to kill zombies, as long as it wasn’t too loud, or in church or at school or at the grocery store, and then it was okay to kill zombies as long as you did it quietly. His mom didn’t understand at all, but that was girls for you.
Now at Smashwords.com and Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com.
BUNNY ATTACK
Nibbles Hungers for Revenge
When Marina forgets to feed her vicious pet bunny, Nibbles turns into a terrible monster who eats everything in sight. How can Marina survive? A scary story for seven and up.
Marina once had an evil pet rabbit named Nibbles. Nibbles was a beautiful rabbit, black and silky, but she was kind of scary, too, because every time Marina would try to feed Nibbles, Nibbles would run toward the door of her cage and try to bite her.
Nibbles would try to bite anyone who came too close to her cage. She would take cute sniffs at anyone near her cage, with her nose wiggling open and shut. She was very cute, until someone put their fingers through the cage, and then chomp. Several of Marina’s friends were missing parts of their fingers because Nibbles had bitten them when they came to visit. No one was allowed to visit Marina’s house anymore.
But then Marina forgot to feed Nibbles for two days, and something even worse happened. Nibbles didn’t starve to death or get weak from lack of food, like Marina’s parents warned her. Instead, Nibbles started to grow.
Now at Smashwords.com, Amazon.com, and Barnes and Noble for $2.99.
Treachery. Terrorism. Chocolate.
Captain Ian Halloran, a small-time interstellar chocolate smuggler, insulted research librarian Aoife Cavenaugh’s intelligence as well as her virtue when he tried to fondle her at his own wedding, to her beloved cousin. But that was years ago. Now her cousin’s ghost haunts Aoife, trying to terrify her into finishing the research that Aoife started and Ian stole after she knocked him out and tried to strangle him at the reception.
A chance to give humanity the edge over their alien overlords, the secretive Danavas. A chance to step out of her adventureless life as a dull librarian. A chance to put her cousin’s ghost to rest. A chance to finish strangling that low-life, back-stabbing thief of a cousin-in-law once and for all.
Aoife locked the door to the cottage that served as her office. The fairshopper library trees whispered around her, muttering in unintelligible codes. A leaf dropped in front of her face, hissing data. She ignored it and followed the laboriously winding stone path to the garden exit.
Everything on Tullynally was like that. Too cute. Why nobody could build a library that looked like a damn library, she’d never know. Books that looked like books could exchange information just as easily as books that looked like trees.
Aoife spotted a familiar horse-drawn cab with two brass-handled doors and a rail around the roof for luggage. The cab driver, Angus, pulled to a halt, tipped his threadbare top hat at her, and started to jump down.
Aoife jerked opened the cab door, vaulted in, and latched it behind her. She shouted up, “Don’t bother with the niceties, Angus. Just take me home.”
“Bad day?”
“No. Terrible day.”
“What happened then? Did ye not get funding for yer project?”
Aoife opened the door on Angus’s side and stood on tiptoe to peek up at him. “Angus, ye wouldn’t believe it. They wanted me to turn over all my research without a breath of promise that I’d be the one to finish the project. They never intended to give me funding. I’m too valuable to lose from the library, they said.” She sat down, pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve, and dabbed at her face. She would not start bawling in a cab like a broken-hearted trollop weeping over her lost lover.
Treachery. Terrorism. Chocolate.
Captain Ian Halloran, a small-time interstellar chocolate smuggler, insulted research librarian Aoife Cavenaugh’s intelligence as well as her virtue when he tried to fondle her at his own wedding, to her beloved cousin. But that was years ago. Now her cousin’s ghost haunts Aoife, trying to terrify her into finishing the research that Aoife started and Ian stole after she knocked him out and tried to strangle him at the reception.
A chance to give humanity the edge over their alien overlords, the secretive Danavas. A chance to step out of her adventureless life as a dull librarian. A chance to put her cousin’s ghost to rest. A chance to finish strangling that low-life, back-stabbing thief of a cousin-in-law once and for all.
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