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Author Archives: Kristopher Kelly

Daily Words: How Long Does it Take for iTunes to Approve My eBook? I’ll Tell You …

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October 12, 2011
I Held My Breath as Long as I Could
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It took them 9 days in my case. And that was AFTER I jumped through the hoops of creating a new Apple ID, buying my own block of ISBNs (which I’ll be lucky if I ever use up), and struggled through a day of format wars with their fussy epub validation process. But now I have a book on the iBookstore … which will have a rating just as soon as I meet the minimum number of required ratings to have them actually display a rating.

I’d still be unrated on Barnes and Noble and Amazon if I were waiting to get over five reviews.

Sometime soon, the physical paperback version should be available on Amazon (and elsewhere? that part is murky to me; I signed up for an many channels as I could on CreateSpace.com, so who knows where this thing is available now). For now, it’s available through the link on the sidebar on CreateSpace’s estore. This is a better place to buy it from in terms of getting money directly to me; Amazon’s store lops another 3 bucks off my take.

Should be getting my own box of books soon. Looking forward to it. I’ve dreamed of opening a box of my own books for so long … if only it meant I was actually validated. Still waiting for the first review from someone I don’t know …

Review: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

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October 8, 2011
Book Reviews
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The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How can you tell if you, or someone you know, is a psychopath? Reading Jon Ronson’s superbly entertaining exploration into the way we catalog each other and the benefits and dangers inherent in affixing labels to people, I found myself doing exactly what Ronson describes himself doing the first time he picked up the DSM-IV–I started diagnosing myself and worrying about the contents of my own head. Luckily, by the conclusion, I felt reassured that I was probably fine, but the question remains: if I can’t be sure about myself, how easy is it to be sure about someone else? And what’s the cost of being wrong?

Ronson’s stories and the portraits he presents of the people he interviewed are quite compelling reading. There’s Tony, who is stuck in an institution for violent psychopaths but maintains he isn’t insane and that he claimed to be so only to escape his jail sentence. The trouble is no one believes him, because psychopaths apparently never want to admit they’re insane, too. Then there’s the former CEO of Sunbeam, who may have had a bit too easy of a time firing people, and a man goaded into coming up with insane sexual fantasies by an undercover police officer hellbent on proving he’s a murderer.

As a librarian with a professional interest in the idiosyncrasies of the cataloguing process, I was fascinated to read the chapter detailing the history of the DSM itself. While I don’t follow Ronson all the way down his path, I am overall sympathetic to the point that all systems of categorization are flawed, the people behind them often full of strange prejudice (just look at Melvin Dewey! that guy was a total jerk!), and the application of any given taxonomy to the complicated stuff of life is never an exact science.

But make no mistake — this book is fun reading. I was engrossed and fascinated the whole time, and I adored the enthusiasm and open-mindedness of Ronson himself.

This is some well done pop nonfiction, and I’m definitely going to read The Men Who Stare at Goats. Highly recommend this one.

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Review: American Horror Story

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October 8, 2011
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“Don’t make me kill you again.”

When the pilot episode of American Horror Story opened with a shot of another creepy house behind another creepy gate, I braced myself for a boring hour of television. While I loved the promos, I was almost certain they wouldn’t deliver on their promise. I could not have been more wrong. If this show, created by Glee co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, stays as good as its first episode, I am going to have a new obsession.

The story is a perennial favorite: a family, looking for a fresh start, moves into a house with a troubled past, hijinks ensue. Any story of this kind lives or dies by the strength of its cast, and it’s here that American Horror Story really shines. There’s a creepy daughter next door, Adelaide (Jamie Brewer), who likes to walk into the house and tell people they’re going to die, but there’s also her mom, Constance (Jessica Lange) who’s even creepier overbearing nature masked by southern courtesy recalls a bit of Ruth Gordon’s character in Rosemary’s Baby. Add to these two the (literally) two-faced housekeeper, played by Frances Conroy, and the delightfully earnest and psychotic Tate, who in one scene writes ‘TAINT’ on a chalkboard for no apparent reason, and I was having a blast even before the Rubber Man showed up. While I have yet to warm to Dylan McDermott’s acting skills or his philandering character Ben, I already adore the other two members of the family, Connie Britton’s Vivian and Taissa Farmiga’s Violet.

The show itself is unnerving; I’m never entirely sure what is going to happen next, and there’s never long to wait between the creepy moments. American Horror Story sets out to spook and entertain us, and I appreciate its commitment to those goals and the earnest delight the creators seem to take in pursuing them. This is a show made for people who like scary stories made by people who love scary stories. There’s also wit and sexiness and misbehavior–although maybe a few too many shots of Dylan McDermott’s naked butt. You can’t win them all.

There were a few logical problems (psychotics, I’m learning, are not curable, and it seems like Ben at one point suggests he has cured some in the past; after what I’ve seen in the first episode, I would move out of the house; there is no way the school bully would go to the house of the girl she’s bullying, especially without backup), but aren’t there always? For now, I’m choosing to give these a pass.

I hope the show stays this strong. I am already looking forward to next week.

 

Daily Words: On Reaching the Bottom of the Kindle Top 100 Short Story Market

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October 7, 2011
I Held My Breath as Long as I Could, News and Events
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Kindle Paid Short Story -- Top 100!

Well, it has been an emotional week for me. I’m not going to lie. The image here is the highlight: my book actually reached the Top 100 in the Kindle paid short stories list. I was one spot behind Mary Higgins Clark.

And just ahead of Spank Romance Stories.

Seeing that was a real treat. But better than that was the reaction from friends and family, who called and emailed and texted to let me know how they were finding the stories. It wasn’t all good; one sharp-eyed reader wanted to know how the man with no hands can caress a face. Pretty good question. I envisioned him doing so with one of the pulpy heads, but … I could’ve written that a little better.

Opinion is almost universal that the first story is a strange choice for the lead-off position. Fair enough. I did consider starting the collection with “Radiation,” but … I wanted to start with a shorter piece. I just thought it would be more fun and set the tone better.

In other terrible news, I also found out after I published this collection that Chuck Palahniuk’s new book Damned is going to feature a young girl who finds herself unexpectedly trapped in Hell. Yep. That’s right. That is a near-perfect description of the plot of “Esther’s Prayer,” a short story I wrote originally on this site in February under the title “At Night in the Cottage.” Guess I’ll have to take back some of those things I said about Stephen King’s Under the Dome being too similar in plot to The Simpsons movie. Also looked it up, and it looks like, even if I did publish first, he talked about his book and what it was about in 2010.

I’ve been scooped not only by a pro, but by one I am a fan of. Kind of a bummer.

Chuck P., if you read this, I promise not to be upset by this bump of hands in the popcorn bucket of story ideas if you aren’t. I swear, I did not hear that story from you; it’s based on a dream I had earlier this year. I expect when I read your book, I’ll find your version vastly different than mine, anyway. You say you went Judy Blume/Breakfast Club, and I think that’s pretty different from what I did. Maybe there’s room for two girl-in-Hell stories in this world. Here’s hoping.

A few notes on distribution: iTunes still has yet to publish the book (what gives, man?), no copies have yet sold on Barnes & Noble, and my Kindle version is unsearchable by category, which pretty much makes it unfindable. But I’m hoping these problems work themselves out eventually. I’m prepping a physical copy to be published in the coming weeks, so readers who prefer something they can hold need not be left behind.

But as far as those of you who are reading this now and have purchased it, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU! This week has been a far bigger success than I expected.

Thank you all for being awesome and reading my book!!!!

Feel free to comment away below and let me know what you liked and didn’t like. I want to hear it all!

(also, if you have read it already, review it on GoodReads.com or Amazon or wherever! say whatever you like, I don’t care; be honest! I love seeing reviews appear!)

Review: Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah

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October 6, 2011
Book Reviews
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Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah
Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah by Mike Mignola

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A friend suggested I read this after reading some of my stories, and I can see why. The character designs are wonderfully weird, from the Prime Minister to the guy who never puts his feet on the ground to the medium with the creepy mask–not to mention Jenny herself and the excellent scene where she is found in the giant mass of fish-guts–there is some real imagination here.

The story feels rushed. I wish they had more time to explore, but even as short as this book is, it was rich enough in fun ideas to be worth the journey.

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Daily Words: Formating My Book for Kindle, Nook, and iTunes iBookstore

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October 2, 2011
I Held My Breath as Long as I Could
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I Held My Breath as Long as I Could

I Held My Breath as Long as I Could

What a week. Some ups and downs, doubts and terrors, euphoria and depression. But today, I woke up and said, “I’m done editing this bastard! Time to submit!”

I’d blown my self-imposed deadline by a day. Not so bad.

I’d like to say that the process for submitting to Amazon’s Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store was relatively painless. For those interested, I wrote my novel in Word, saved as an HTML file, then converted to Kindle and EPUB format using Calibre, which is far and away my favorite piece of freeware.

To create a table of contents, I used Calibre’s GUI menu, having set up my Word doc to use H1 and H2 tags for the sections.

Apple’s process … well, let me just say I didn’t expect to spend an entire day troubleshooting this crap.

First of all, there’s the problem that Apple wants you to do one thing; your account can only be linked to app development, or books, or what have you. Easy enough to work around this silly limitation — just create another Apple ID for each thing you want to do — but it is annoying.

While I thought that would be the end of my troubles, it was not. When I clicked ‘Deliver’ in iTunes Producer, I received some not very friendly error messages. A lot of them were of the ‘ERROR ITMS-9000’ variety. It took me nearly a full day to figure out what was happening, so I’m going to share what I did to get my book to finally submit to iTunes.

Basically, iTunes is the fussiest place when it comes to accepting an epub format file. You MUST have a valid file, or it will not be accepted. Apparently, Barnes and Noble and Amazon are more forgiving.

Since I used Calibre, I was at first quite flummoxed. I didn’t know what a valid epub was. The best site I found for telling me what was going wrong was http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/ . They allow you to upload your book and they’ll tell you a billion things wrong with it. Taking this error report, I then had to figure out how to make changes to my ebook without using Calibre. How to do that?

Right click on your book. Choose the path that says ‘Tweak epub’ … then choose ‘Explode epub.’ I know it sounds scary, but it’s okay. It will open a dialog box that shows the files in the epub. Select all and open with your favorite text editor. I used TextMate. You could use notepad or Dreamweaver or whatever you like. Just open the files.

I can only speak to the issues I had, but they were:

1. Path names in ‘content.opf’ and ‘toc.ncx’: My title, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could, includes spaces. Calibre coded these as spaces. To be perfectly valid, you need to find and replace every instance where there is a link to your title with spaces to change the spaces to ‘%20’.

2. Bookmarks leftover from Word: These were hidden and broken and needed to be removed.

3. Some crazy crap Calibre put in the <body> tag … strip all that stuff out. Simple body tags will do.

4. Footnotes trouble: Unnecessary “name=” attribute caused an error. I just removed the “name=” attribute from the anchor tags in my footnotes, and it passed.

And that’s it! My advice is to use the site above to get some useful output, and open the files and do your best.

Good luck!

UPDATE! It’s Alive!!!

You can now purchase my book from Barnes and Noble and Amazon’s ebook stores. Still waiting on that iTunes iBookstore, though ….

For Barnes and Noble and all the Nook people, go here.

Amazon Kindle fans follow this spiffy one:

Daily Words: The Final Week Begins

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September 25, 2011
I Held My Breath as Long as I Could
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I Held My Breath as Long as I Could Cover

Cover Art, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could

Yesterday was a day of doubt spent wondering about this collection. I told myself that I would hit the publish button October 1st, no exceptions, but I really was considering pushing the date back. This morning, I feel a little better, but I still am going to be pushing myself as hard as I can this week.

For one thing, I’d love to get the stories into shape in time to run them through the content analyzing software application I built for Daukherville last year, but that would require altering some of the code to look at I Held My Breath. Still, it could prove worth it to at least run it through once and check the sentences for word repetition and things of that sort.

The second section continues to prove the most challenging. One story in particular, “The Worm, the Road, and the Sun,” runs for 10,000 words, and that proved way too long for Amanda. Not to mention she had some serious criticisms of the piece, which were entirely valid, and that means additional content work. I’d also love to shave 2,000 words off the length of the piece, but I don’t know right now where to make those cuts, especially given the additions it needs. It would really be a shame to not include it, so I’m feeling a bit like a designer on Project Runway, who’s just received a review from Tim Gunn along the lines of, “Kristopher, I have to be a truth teller … I’m a bit disturbed by this. It feels a bit dark. And the LENGTH! Oh my. I’m very worried about this piece.”

Time to make it work.

Review: The Lottery and Other Stories

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September 23, 2011
Book Reviews
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The Lottery and Other Stories
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read this collection because I think The Haunting of Hill House is one of the greatest horror novels ever written. The twenty-five stories collected here are not exactly horror, but they’re usually dark enough to suggest that even if creepy things aren’t happening in these rooms, horror is never that far down the hall.

“The Lottery” is still probably the best in the collection, although I might prefer “Flower Garden,” which is a nicely nuanced story about racism in a small town. Other standouts include “Elizabeth,” about a woman realizing her disposability to her boss; “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” which is a fantastic bit of quiet cruelty; and “Renegade,” about a woman who is left to deal with a chicken-killing dog.

Almost all the stories here echo “The Lottery” in their depictions of society strangling the individual. Often, there’s a battle between the city and the town, as well, as Jackson writes quite well about people moving from one population density to another. As someone who grew up in a small mill town in Maine and now lives in New York City, I related to a lot of the troubles some of the characters were having.

While the balance of the stories are well-written and evocative, some others fail to have the punch I think Jackson was intending. “Charles,” in particular, was dreadfully predictable. So, a few gentle points off for that and for some of the other shorter pieces that didn’t work so well, but overall a wonderful collection.

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Daily Words: They Want Me To Be One Thing … But I’m Another Thing

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September 16, 2011
I Held My Breath as Long as I Could
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I Held My Breath as Long as I Could Cover

Cover Art, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could

And then there were only two weeks left.

Holy crap. The nerves, oh, the nerves. Was up late last night, finishing reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, a great book, when I found myself amusing myself by reading some of the reviews that were published of Wilde’s book when it came out. Great stuff. The kind of stuff anyone who’s received a critical drubbing would love to read. I wonder how many critics who give a scathing review to something consider what it would be like to end up the kind of critic who panned Dorian Gray. The reviewers who ripped it to shreds seemed both arrogant and ridiculously wrong–what a wonderful combination.

I also appreciate Wilde’s confidence in his own work. The man called his own book a classic. What a guy.

I fear what people might say about me after they read “Doggie-Style.” I might really be in some trouble for that one, but I’ve thought it through and decided there’s no point holding back. Either I do what I do, or I do nothing at all. “Doggie-Style” is a messed up horror story of questionable worth, but it is certainly mine. If there’s such a thing as a “Kris Kelly story,” well, “Doggie-Style” would definitely be one of them. This whole collection drips with my issues. I’m naked on this one. So be it.

Man, oh, man … I really hope people get this stuff.

In other news, to sell an eBook on Apple’s iBookstore, it turns out I couldn’t be registered to sell both apps and ebooks. I had to create a whole new Apple ID to register as an eBook seller.

Apple doesn’t want me to diversify.

Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

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September 16, 2011
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oscar Wilde, defending his own book from its detractors, hailed his own work a classic. I agree. This book is a delight, and certainly one of the best horror novels ever written. Smart, witty, diabolical, and even sometimes charmingly earnest for a book absolutely dripping with irony. The prose is beyond brilliant; Oscar Wilde knew how to turn a phrase. Much of the time, the novel feels like a play, but Wilde’s dialogue, especially that of Lord Henry Wotton, carries these chapters well.

But what a dark journey! A pretty young man wishes on his own portrait that it should age and he should not. And so it happens. Dorian continues living his life–a rather debauched one, it turns out–and the painting suffers all the ill effects. No matter, he locks the hideous thing away and continues on a magnificent downward spiral into doom that leaves no trace.

It is a clever premise, especially as it plays out in scenes such as those when Dorian falls in love with a woman for her success at playing various Shakespearean roles. He falls in love with her as the characters, not as herself. This echoes the earlier love of surface, of Art itself, more than the love of the soul. Funny that Wilde, who was known for being an aesthete early in his life, would paint such a scathing picture of people so in love with Art that it corrupted them completely, but I think there’s more to this book than the simple message that “sin is bad for your soul.” This is a novel of homoerotic betrayal and suppression, where a young man makes a bad choice to chase artifice (Lord Henry, who loves nothing more than to say clever stuff he doesn’t even feel he needs to believe himself) over substance (Basil Hallward, who paints the portrait itself and clearly loves the hell out of Dorian).

More than that, it’s just damn good at being creepy and fiendish. I can see in this everything from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to the stories of Poe to American Psycho to the Last Werewolf. The characters are complex and convincing, the writing is some of the sharpest I’ve ever seen, and the story is a knockout. A great novel!

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