do you like actual facts?

are you a trivia buff? if so, our new book, fill my brain, is right up your alley! 499 pages of facts, quotes, bits of history, statistics, and the kind of snarky asides that you've come to know and love after almost 20 years of elsewhen indoctrination.

celebrate your superiority over the mouth breathers! available as black markings on dead tree guts or as a nearly endless stream of ones and zeroes - we don't care which as long as you buy it!

red is out!

Meet Andi McCarthy, a brilliantly nerdy, ginger teen who plays a mean guitar and walks around with a talking raven named Nevermore on her head. Andi must solve the murder of a beloved cheerleader before a mysterious force damns her family - and, incidentally, her hometown - to Hell, all while being accosted by shoe repair shop spies, Greek vampires, a psychic single mom named Tumblina DuPrey... and Death itself.

fill my brain: now on facebook!

our trivia, quotation, and knowledge blog, fill my brain, is now available as a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/FillMyBrain.

our motto

free music: the almighty dollar

another chrome bones song available as a free download for a limited time. have you been boned?

https://soundcloud.com/chrome-bones/the-almighty-dollar

download 'grimmer' for free

author guy news: amazon is running a special offer on my horror collection 'grimmer'. from 1/26/14 until 1/30/14, it's available as a free download. (if you're a member of amazon prime, you can borrow it any time for free.)

if you don't have a kindle, we've got you covered - just download the free kindle app from itunes or android or wherever.

this edition of 'grimmer' includes a teaser chapter from 'red', my second full-length novel, which will be out at the end of february.

do you like horror, fantasy, or adventure?

do you or someone on your shopping list like horror or fantasy-adventure stories? it's not too late to order 'grimmer', my collection of modern horror, or book one of 'the ring around the rose', my time travel-adventure-fantasy-love story series. each is just 99 cents (and a bargain at any price) at the amazon kindle store for a limited time. just click the link below. David P. Maurer

new noise

i love noise, and pushing the border of what separates it from music. my latest experiments with this can be found at https://soundcloud.com/chrome-bones. take a listen, or don't, as you please. but feed my fish, will ya? the poor buggers are looking pretty thin.

bored? check out my art gallery

'grimmer' now just 99 cents

my writing time has been curtailed by work. as a result, publication of 'red' has been delayed. never fear! to help you get your spook on, for the rest of may, my short story horrorfest, 'grimmer', is just 99 cents on amazon!

who loves ya, baby?

new song: idk

i think this song says what a lot of us think these days: we can't trust our government, banks, churches, or wall street to act in our best interest. so many things have gone wrong that it's all a bit overwhelming, and it seems to spread every day. many of us have given up even trying to make sense of it all, let alone act. others have become polarized by well-paid talking heads on one side or the other who offer truckloads of soundbites and venom, but no real solutions.

i offer the only solutions i know, by now comfortably familiar to my long-term listeners: bonfires & unabashed cannibalism.

available after the jump as a free download for a limited time. bon appetit.

'ring around the rose' on sale

until the end of april, you can purchase 'the ring around the rose' from amazon for just 99 cents u.s. (regularly $2.99 u.s.).

the first in a series, this story falls squarely in the contemporary fantasy/romance genre - quite a departure for me. here's the marketing blurb:

"Marmalades the lives of a sarcastic chain smoker who may or may not be God, an immortal hero with 2nd thoughts, a bag lady who thinks she's a Valkyrie, a dysfunctional Dwarf from Brooklyn, a serial killer wizard, a hotsy totsy princess, and a washed-up plumbing supply salesman to save the world from a trans-dimensional bio-terrorist before climate change, a meteor collision, or bad grammar can end it first."

Buy it quick, before someone makes it into a movie!

what's your most popular story?

as i write this, trophy is my most popular story by sales. (thank you, true believers!) it was also the first written.

crayon sugarsweet and the spooky thing, blue, and frost flowers are tied for second place. revenue-wise, crayon sugarsweet rules the roost, followed closely by grimmer, which hasn't even been out a month yet.

who says horror is dead?

i'm kicking around the idea of an illustrated version of my only-to-date love story slash contemporary fantasy, the ring around the rose, either just before or just after the second book in that series comes out, as much to learn how to do internal illustrations for the kindle as to have an opportunity to paint those terrific characters.

making progress on red, which will be my next book (because the world needs a wisecracking teen drama queen who knows how to handle granny-eating vampires and the ghosts of dead cheerleaders).

gingerbread hasn't sold much, i suspect because it came out just before grimmer, which includes it. (heck, for $2 more, i'd buy grimmer, too - especially since it includes the first chapter of red.) or maybe the world just isn't ready for hansel & gretel as cannibals.

grimmer is out!

grimmer: hot off the virtual presses, available for the kindle and ipad for the nice price of us$2.99.


changed my amazon author photo because my editor suggested my smile is 'too goofy for a horror writer', and that today's fiction buyers (demographic: mostly women) want a dark, dangerous, sexy guy. so, for a limited time, we're including one with each purchase.

more grimmer news

finished the final tale for grimmer, my first short story collection.

in addition to 9 previously published works, it includes sinkhole (a new story), a sneak peek at red (my next novel, which precedes book two of the ring around the rose), plus background on each of the stories.

still working on cover art, but the amazon price will be us$2.99.

technorati and grimmer

in a blatant attempt to grow the brand value of elsewhen returns (ie, help us make enough money to build disney's nautilus as a full-size, working vessel, now that we've obtained the plans), we have cross-pollinated with technorati for both elsewhen returns and Work Iz War.


spread the word, minions! we will only triumph over the mouth breathers if we organize, overcome, and breed like bunnies.


on a side note, i am busy gathering up all of my short stories that have been published for the kindle - plus one new story - into a collection with the working title of grimmer.


in addition to these 10 tales, grimmer will also contain my notes regarding each story's origins, plus a sneak peak at a book in progress. barring alien invasion, i expect grimmer to be available for kindle download by the end of this week.


VDSKEDZ2SY4Q

the epic template tale

so you're curious what my writing is like, but you're not ready to shell out 99 cents to download it from amazon, or maybe you don't have a kindle, kindle fire, or an ipad yet. what do you do? easy: read the first few pages of the work in progress below... just enough to get a taste. then you visit my amazon author page, collect every word i write, buy an old vw bus, learn to tie dye t shirts, and follow me around the country until we all eventually retire to a beautiful island off the coast of costa rica.

see? easy!

this particular story is a bit different for me - it's a comedy/adventure, rather than my typical contemporary fantasy/horror/scifi stuff - and i'm having a great time writing it. it's nice not to have to try and decipher the motivations of extra-dimensional monsters (in the land of nod, frost flowers), mythical creatures (trophy), or sociopathic little girls (crayon sugarsweet and the spooky thing).

=================================

The Epic Template Tale

by d.p.maurer

(Work in Progress)


The Greatest Thief in the World™ stood atop the Thrift Tower, tasting the night wind. His real name was Fernando Sor, after the Corsican guitar wizard, and he was a wizard, too, or at least a magician. He had only one trick, but he did it well: He made things disappear, and reappear somewhere else. When asked his occupation, The Thief said that he was in the transportation business.

If you were a CEO, with your back against the wall and the board of directors circling like sharks, who could provide your competitor's secret marketing plans before they were even off their agency’s drawing boards? If you were an unmentionable government agency, in need of files that detailed the whereabouts of those destined to become victims of regrettable but inevitably fatal accidents, where did your footsteps lead you? If you were a worldwide religious organization with a hankering to get hold of what might or might not prove to be the genetically verifiable corpse of a certain Nazarene carpenter, whom did you call?

Not Fernando Sor.

No - you visited a tiny bookshop in Port Huron, Michigan, called 'Rose Read'. On the bulletin board in the foyer, you pinned a note containing a phone number and the name ‘Mister Sir’. The following day, you received a short, untraceable call from someone who called themselves ‘Mrs. Ma'am’. Mrs. Ma’am inevitably requested a description of the item to be collected, its current location, intended destination, and the all-important deadline.

No one at the bookshop knew anything about these transactions, of course. That had been checked countless times by spies, extremely private detectives, and possibly the Vatican. No one seemed to pay any undue attention to the notes in the foyer, either. Nevertheless, Mrs. Ma’am answered every request like clockwork.

Mrs. Ma’am (who sounded exactly like a man trying to sound like a woman with an English accent and failing miserably) listened carefully. She never interrupted. Most often, she simply said, “Sorry, ducks, I don’t think so,” and that was that. Sometimes - if the request was challenging enough - she named a fee. This was sometimes an object that the client already owned – most often, a priceless item that the client was extremely attached to and had gone to great lengths to keep secret. Fees, of course, were non-negotiable. You didn’t engage the Greatest Thief in the World™ if the price might be too dear.

Then you simply sat back and waited. At the appointed time, you received the requested item, and the stipulated fee disappeared from your possession, as if by magic.

This last was pure theatrics, but it served two important purposes: First, it was part of the mystique that kept clients clamoring for The Thief’s services, and willing to pay whatever he asked. The second reason was more personal:

It was wonderful practice.

Having an item of value was one thing. You might build elaborate security measures around it - seasoned guards, sophisticated electronics and so on - but all that you could do was protect the item from the general possibility of theft. You had no idea if or when someone might decide to steal it, or who would be doing the stealing.

Knowing that an item was going to go missing - from where, by whom, and exactly when - was something else entirely. His clients took up the challenge with gusto, partly to keep their secrets, but mostly because they were the kind of people who believed in retaining everything.

The Thief had learned long ago to conduct all transactions remotely. Many of his clients disapproved of witnesses on general principal, and would have been happy to send any number of assassins to kill him, if they only knew where and who The Thief was.

The Thief respected assassins - he had found reason to solicit their services himself, on occasion, when crossed by a client who really should have known better. None of the assassins that he hired knew that he was The Greatest Thief in the World™, of course. Some of them were even old friends.

One of them was standing directly opposite him now.

His professional name was ©The Mamba. Just like in porn, choosing a cool name was key in the killing business - when you were just starting out, it helped people remember you and, after you built something of a reputation, it helped in setting rates.

©The Mamba's real name was Clarence White. He had begun life as a carpenter's apprentice back during the Vietnam War. When the draft notice came, he had reported for duty and gone through basic training and then found himself in Cambodia with thousands of other clueless teenagers, scared, sweaty, and wide-eyed. For the first couple of weeks, anyway.

The truth was, Clarence was never much of a carpenter, but he soon discovered that he had a natural talent for ejecting people from the game of life. The training provided by the U.S. Army was simply the first step in a life devoted to the craft of killing. Guns, knives, garrotes, poisons, explosives - any method was as good as another, as long as it ended in the patient's demise.

That was the one creepy thing: ©The Mamba called his targets 'patients', as if he were Jack Kevorkian, Doctor Death®. Whenever a corpse lay cooling at his feet, Clarence had a little joke that he told over and over again to clients to let them know that it was time to pay him:

"The operation was a success," he would say, grinning into the phone. "The patient died." No one but Clarence ever laughed, but he always said it, anyway.

"Hello, Clarence," said The Thief. He stood perfectly still.

"Hello, Fred," said ©The Mamba. He stood perfectly still, too. Only his eyes seemed alive. (‘Fred’ was what Clarence always called The Thief. He thought that Fernando sounded gay; Fern even more so. Clarence hated gay men. This had nothing to do with his religion or his sexual identity; he just hated anyone who took attention away from him, especially if they could coordinate colors.)

"Out on a job?" said The Thief.

"You guessed it."

"Me?"

©The Mamba shrugged. He was a big man - big, but fast. This was an unusual combination. Not being aware of it had cost many people their lives.

"You know how it goes," said ©The Mamba. "Nothin’ personal. Job's a job."

"You could have turned it down."

©The Mamba shook his head, grey ponytail streaming in the wind. (He still thought ponytails were cool. What could you do?) "Too much money."

The Thief closed his eyes briefly, sighed. “So you know.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“When that Munch painting got stolen, you said how you would have done it, if you were The Thief. Turned out, that’s exactly how it was done.” He shrugged. “The rest was just waiting for the highest bid.”

"You mind me asking how much?"

"Two million."

"An insult! I'm worth twice that."

"Anybody ever tell you you're an arrogant bastard?"

"Besides you? Only everyone. Is that why you took the job?"

"You know why."

And the thing was, The Thief did. It was the "R" word. The word that had first entered their conversation a few years ago and, as time went on, came to dominate it: Retirement. It was almost an incantation. Take the money and disappear, like Bobby Fischer or D. B. Cooper. Venice, Paris, Costa Rica... the world beckoned.

All it took was One Last Job. The Big Score. Enough to buy a one-way ticket to anonymity, beyond the reach of old enemies and the recriminations of old friends. The less-than-legal version of heaven. The alternative was waiting for the bullet, the bomb, or the dusting of radioactive material under your bed that ended you, because the world was full of people who wanted to do that. It was just a matter of time.

"It's because of what I said about the Twins, isn't it?" said The Thief. ©The Mamba was based in Minneapolis and never missed a game, even if it meant turning down a job. Murder was his occupation, but baseball was his love. The two of them had often gone to games together, if they happened to be on the way to or from a job in the area. In fact, they had just caught a night game together on Tuesday.

"You watch; they'll take the pennant this spring," said ©The Mamba, but he didn't smile. "I lied, before. It’s five million."

"You're just saying that to make me feel better."

"Actually not. I said two million to keep you from getting a big head. As if it could get any bigger.”

Five million dollars. It was insane, that number.

"Who hates me that much?" The Thief wondered.

"Can't tell you that."

"Even though you're going to kill me? That hardly seems fair."

"Sorry. You know the rules."

Rule One: Never give up a client’s name, even when the death of the one doing the asking is imminent. In case of wires, in case of unplanned events, unfortunate accidents, or the ever popular one-in-a-million chance.

"Do they know who I am?" asked The Thief.

"I'm hurt that you’d even ask," said ©The Mamba. He took a step. The Thief stepped back.

Rule Two: Never do groundwork for anyone who might follow. This was a kind of insurance; it helped discourage one's employers from seeking others’ services. And in the case of unplanned events that included your own death, it was an unsubtle “Fuck you!” to the competition. Let them do their own work, let them take their own chances; that was part of the game.

"You're right; I'm sorry," said The Thief, glancing quickly around. "You know I have nothing but respect for you."

©The Mamba grunted, but his expression softened.

"You could turn your back," he suggested. "I could do it really quick. You wouldn't feel a thing."

"Funny - I was just about to ask you the same thing," said The Thief. "I'm on a bit of a tight schedule."

"Better make other plans," said ©The Mamba. He hesitated. "Mind if I ask you something? Professional secret?"

"The man comes to kill me and asks for favors. I blame the schools."

"It would mean a lot to me."

The Thief glanced at his watch. It seemed to have stopped. Twelve thousand dollars wasted. He shrugged. "Ask."

"I figured out the thing with the note. You read'em from across the street, right?"

The Thief nodded and smiled sadly, the magician giving up his tricks. "The Starbucks. I have a high-definition camera hidden in its sign, pointed at the bookshop, wireless. What else?"

"How do you - you know..."

"Collect?"

Nod.

"I can't tell you that."

"I promise not to tell anybody. You won't be doing it any more, anyway. How could it hurt?"

The Thief glanced at his watch again. Did the second hand twitch? For twelve thousand dollars, the damned thing should glow in the fucking dark.

"Clarence, I really don't think I should."

"Fred, how long we been friends for?"

The Thief sighed. "Long time. A record, for me. Six years, seven months, four days, and…” Another peek at the watch. “…eleven minutes. Right up until I put the Havadoc™ in your beer."

There was a long pause. “What?”

The Thief nodded. "That's the secret, Clarence. I do it beforehand, and think of a way to keep them from finding out until it's time. I've read your mail and listened to your calls since the day we met. Tuesday night, Progressive Field, when you went to go take a leak during the seventh inning stretch, I poisoned your beer."

"How long have I…" said ©The Mamba, and toppled like a tree.

"That long," said The Thief. He looked down at his friend's corpse; his face looked old, old, old. And then he got on with it because, as his late friend used to say, a job was a job.

work iz war

i've launched a new business blog to share and discuss 30 years of observations & personal philosophy developed in & around various organizations. some of it is quite blunt, some will seem like common sense... sometimes it's even funny. i hope that all of it is helpful.

i know, i know... there are a ton of business magazines & blogs out there, but they miss the fundamental things that most organizations get wrong, like how much chocolate to keep around, exactly, and what to do when a salesperson comes to you with a "special situation".

work iz war is a business blog for the rest of us: people who are just starting out, or run a small business, or never went to business school, or who inherit their business, plus poor schmucks who just want to make their companies pleasant enough to want to go to every day, and that will last at least until they retire.

gingerbread

"In a future where everyone is frozen, starving, or both, a young brother and sister set out to find safety and food, but return home profoundly altered… and with a taste for human flesh. (No, this is not yet-another-zombie story. It’s an end-of-the-world-via-cannibalism story. Jeesh.)"

that's the marketing blurb for gingerbread, my 10th amazon kindle story, which is currently available for download for just 99 cents. (if you belong to amazon prime or your local library has amazon lending, you can even read it for free.)

'3 little pork recipes' available for download

"A dark re-telling of the three little pigs fable with political, business, and social policy lessons and an interesting twist… plus the promised (and quite tasty) pork recipes."

that's the marketing blurb for my latest kindle story, 3 little pork recipes, now available for download on amazon.com. my wife, tracy, supplied the included recipes. (if you saw how much i look like falstaff, you would immediately understand that she is a cook of considerable skill.)

best of all, it's just 99 cents!