Tag Archives: ebook

Jack of Diamonds + Love & Other Stunts

UPDATE: I added “Fire in the Disco” to my little jukebox.

Fire in the Disco

A short post today, first up being my newest rendition of a very old song called “Jack of Diamonds.”

In case the embed below doesn’t work, here’s the youtube link.

Now here’s a piece of art by my pal the actor Gary Warner Kent. It’s called “Tusitala,” and starts with the line: “I Thought I Saw Jesus This Morning.” I love this and I think you’ll love it too.

Here’s the youtube link in case the embed below doesn’t work.

Next you should check out the film project on Gary Kent called “Love & Other Stunts” which is in the fundraising mode now on indieGoGo.com. Check it out here and I think you will be glad you did. It’s a real worthy artistic-type cause.

Gary Warner Kent, Love & Other Stunts, actor, biopic, documentary, indiegogo, Grave Digger Blues

Gary Kent, tough guy, cool cat

The pitch starts off thusly:

The most interesting man in the world

I was at a writing conference in the late ’90s when I met a white-haired hustler with a Burt Reynolds mustache and a knowing grin. He introduced himself as Gary Kent and told me about a cult biker film he’d starred in called Satan’s Sadists. That night I tracked down a copy of the film and watched it, then I tracked down Gary and wrote a couple of articles about his unique film career doubling Jack Nicholson and Robert Vaughan, and staging stunts and special effects sequences for notable directors Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, Richard Rush, Al Adamson and Don Coscarelli for movies including Hell’s Angels On Wheels, Psych-out, Targets, Bubba Ho-tep, and the noir Westerns The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind.

Also check out Gary’s blog. I happened to meet Gary Kent at a screening of “The Cockfighter,” a Monte Hellman film starring Warren Oates and also the late Charles Willeford, who wrote the book and the screenplay, and is one of my favorite writers. This screening also included a showing of one of Hellman’s other films, I forget which one, but it was fabulous. So, anyway, if you meet a real hip guy at a real hip film with all these other associations of cool, you remember. But Gary is a memorable guy who has led an interesting life anyway.

By the way, I hope you viewed yesterday’s post. It includes a video of another blues song I’ve been working on (“High Water Everywhere Part 2″ by Charley Patton) and an admonition for all of you not to buy GRAVE DIGGER BLUES if you feel that you are not hip enough for it, because in fact, it might be TOO WEIRD for you. I’m always looking out for you, see?

enhanced ibook, ipad, novel for iPad, Jesse Sublett, noir, pulp fiction, Kindle, crime fiction for Kindle

GRAVE DIGGER BLUES may in fact be too weird for you. Maybe you’d rather listen to Celine Dion and wear elephant plaid to your high school reunion.

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ME & MARGARET ATWOOD

jesse sublett, noir, hardboiled, Margaret Atwood

A collage I made with Mata Hari (left) meeting Margaret Atwood (right)

The digital era has given birth to a brave new world for publishing, but who cares about them, what we really care about here are the authors. Some of us are doing great, and a great many of us are, well, wondering what it might take to sell a few books, maybe even quit that detested day job. This thing, which is given many collective names, including E-books, E-publishing, Kindle, Nook, iBook, and so forth, seems to herald a world of new opportunities for some of us writers who have so far not hit The Big Pay Day.

Let’s not get too cynical just yet. Some e-authors out there have tasted success, but it’s still a tough business to get a break in. Even with the help of Twitter, where e-authors can Tweet “Buy my new Kindle novel on Amazon for free…” every five minutes. Or more. I rarely tweet anything like, for example, “Buy the fabulous Blues Deluxe Edition of GRAVE DIGGER BLUES for iPad on iTunes now, or you’re a hopeless nerd” or “Buy GRAVE DIGGER BLUES on Kindle, with its super-weird novella + more than 100 great, sexy photos & graphics right now or DIE,” more than two, maybe three times a day.

jesse sublett, noir, hardboiled, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, who has 367,000 Twitter followers, retweeted me, who has somewhat fewer follower.

Back on December 27, Lois alerted me to this story on NPR that might help me get a leg up on the e-book world market. She heard Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author of best-selling novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, and others, being interviewed about her new novel, Postitron, which is being serialized on byliner.com. By logging onto Byliner, which is free, readers can download new short stories and chapters of serial novels to their digital nightstand to read later, and can also read blogs from various big-name authors and other literary news. Margaret has embraced the new model with a bear-hug, it seems. She’s also got a project on Wattpad called Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, written collaboratively with Naomi Alderman.

And during this interview, Margaret said that she even retweets authors who send her the URL of their own novels. I found this hard to believe, but Lois assured me that that’s what Margaret said. I found the interview, listened again, and sure enough, that’s what she said. So I tweeted Margaret Atwood, who happens to have 367,000+ followers (and I have a somewhat smaller number) and she did it. She retweeted my tweet.

jesse sublett, noir, blues, crime fiction

Thank you, Margaret. She is pretty hip, after all. I mean, check out this graphic on her Twitter page.

Margaret Atwood as Madonna, or vice versa? Jesse Sublett

Margaret Atwood channels her inner Madonna, or is it the other way around?

Bearing that in mind, I thought I should up my game and try to return the favor, so I created the graphic collage that appears at the top of this post, showing the great World War I courtesan and suspected spy Mata Hari meeting Margaret Atwood, the best-selling Canadian author who retweeted my tweet about Grave Digger Blues, which, by the way, you can try a free sample and then perhaps buy (complete with 100+ photos & graphics, a blues soundtrack, select audio chapters + some video) for your iPad on the iTunes/iBookstore, or for Kindle and oodles of other devices on Amazon (novella + 100+ photos & graphics), or the $.99 Bare Bones version (text only, no photos or music) at Smashwords.

So I figured it would be the gentlemanly thing to go ahead and show my appreciation by creating this modest and admittedly rather crude (I don’t have Photoshop, just Apple Preview) collage of two real interesting women. I tweeted the image to Margaret a couple of weeks ago, so I should be hearing from her soon, hopefully around the same time I get the new sales reports showing just how much her retweet did for sales of GRAVE DIGGER BLUES…. the hippest hardboiled apocalyptic detective and jazz novella that’s ever challenged you to… dig it.

Have I mentioned that we’ll be plugging this baby with an E-Book Meet Up at SXSW 2013?

enhanced ibook, ipad, novel for iPad, Jesse Sublett, noir, pulp fiction, Kindle, crime fiction for Kindle

GRAVE DIGGER BLUES may in fact be too weird for you. Maybe you’d rather listen to Celine Dion and wear elephant plaid to your high school reunion.

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Filed under Books & other writing by Jesse Sublett, eBooks, Grave Digger Blues, NOIR & TRUE CRIME, SXSW, SXSW interactive

Heavy on the boobs

 

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson

Your faithful Blue Xmas correspondent, a k a, the Author & Musician, Jesse Sublett


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GRAVE DIGGER BLUES, mind blowing pulp fiction

“Jesse Sublett dazzles in his latest offering, a surreal noir escapade for the Kindle and iPad called The Gravedigger’s Blues.  Sublett composed the work using iAuthor which enabled him to embed paintings, collages, photographs and several songs in the iPad version. It makes for a rich, multi-media, multi-sensory experience.

When you open the book you come face to face with a video of the bluesman in dark glasses and a houndstooth coat, singing a mysterious, melancholic tune. The video adds an element of intimacy to the reading experience. We’re all familiar with the standard author photo. Now imagine the photo come to life, and set to music. It’s very cool. There are several other audio-only jazzy-blues songs included in the book which help to set the mood. I particularly liked The Headless Supermodel, a humorous, hip skewering of L.A. vacuity.

Sublett is a gifted visual artist. He includes several photo collages in this work. They are strange, unsettling compositions. I may never recover from the gothic horror of Dick Cheney in drag.  Sublett’s paintings have a modernist feel. They are bright, intense things heavy on the boobs.

This e-book is a goody-bag of delights. I found it hard to read the book straight through, but perhaps it isn’t meant to be read that way. Dip into the book, here and there. Hear some songs, see some art and read the book, in sections, to enjoy this wonderful prose stylist, letting loose, experimenting with and stretching the bounds of this exciting new medium- the enhanced e-book.” — Kate Walker, writer, book & music reviews blog

 

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson, Daniel Woodrell

President of the Ex Girlfriends Club.

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson, Rocky Schenck

She’s too good for you.

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson, Jon Dee Graham, Austin

Why do we dream what we dream?

The above blurb is from an advance copy of Kate Walker’s review of GRAVE DIGGER BLUES for her wordpress blog, and I’m delighted not only by her comments but by the notion of being written about on the same site which writes seriously about Katy Perry (I’ve been a fan ever since the first dose of ear candy from her reached out from the radio and grabbed me) and Daniel Woodrell, the acknowledged master of that sub-genre of crime fiction called country noir.

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson, Reed Farrel Coleman

Things she does to drive me crazy

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson, Daniel Woodrell

She said sex was like pizza.

BIG DEAL, XMAS STEAL: To encourage readers to check out GRAVE DIGGER BLUES, all 3 of my Martin Fender novels, plus the short story Moral Hazard, are free in the Amazon Kindle Store through December 26. Alternately, of course, you could do whatever you want to do a Amazon and then quickly go to the Apple iBookstore and get a free sample of the Blues Deluxe Edition for iPad of GRAVE DIGGER BLUES, with music, video and audio chapters, which, sadly, Kindle does not have the technical capacity to deliver. Nor, sadly, do over 99% of my rival authors.

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson

October Eve.

Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson, Michael Connelly

Delfina next morning.

Jesse Sublett, James McMurtry, Grave Digger Blues, crime fiction, noir, pulp fiction, Denis Johnson,

Jade Honey.

Due to an epic case of Apple OS X corruption on my trusty-not-rusty MacBook Pro, the past week has been one of rebuild-and-restore here at Grave Digger Blues, Incorporated, and I have not been able to finish a new political blog post for my Secession Chronicle page or our cousin, the mighty OpEdNews.com site.

Obviously, as a blatant attempt to keep you returning to this page, I’m offering a selection of original images here, including a few of the aforementioned “heavy on the boobs” original images from moi, your favorite noir author and surrealist blues troubadour. Also this recently discovered video link on Hulu, by which you can enjoy the Biography episode: ATTILA, SCOURGE OF GOD, which I wrote for Biography A&E a few years back. It’s a fairly low budget piece of nonfiction television, but quite informative, I think, and the show was well-received. I’ll write a few notes about it later, in this same space.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS
from Jesse Sublett, your faithful blues & noir correspondent

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Filed under Books & other writing by Jesse Sublett, Grave Digger Blues, MY ART BLOG, NOIR & TRUE CRIME