THIRTY DAYS OF KINDLE SCOUT – DAY 11

HEY GANG – Happy Valentine’s Day.

But enough about all of you folks – LET’S TALK ABOUT ME! I just hit my twelfth campaign day with eight straight days of Hot and Trending – that’s 197 hours of H&T and 745 campaign views and I am beginning to get a little bit nervous.

Which is stupid – but also human – so there you go.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the problem that some folks seemed to be having with HeadTalker. Some folks had been reporting that the views from HeadTalker were NOT showing up on Kindle Scout.

Well, at first I thought that made a lot of sense – but then I looked into it a little bit deeper. I contacted Nolan Thompson – one of the founders of HeadTalker and did a little bit of investigative reporting.

The way he explained it to me was this – Once a person’s HeadTalker campaign has ended and the message is shared, your clicks wouldn’t come from HeadTalker. They would come from the social networks that your message is shared on. Therefore, if someone clicks your short link on Facebook, they are considered Facebook traffic.

Which makes perfect sense to me. I just hadn’t thought of it that way in the first place. All I knew was that I was looking at my Kindle Scout Campaign page and it was listing all kinds of Facebook and WordPress and kboards views – but NO HeadTalker views.

My goof, totally.

Anyway, now that I have straightened all that out I just want to say THANK YOU to all of you wonderful folks who have shared and tweeted out this blog and who have nominated KELPIE DREAMS. Without all of your help I would be nothing more than some dude with way-too-much beard rattling out bad jokes upon an unread blog page.

 

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PLEASE HELP ME win a Kindle Scout publishing contract by nominating my book and you can earn a FREE Kindle copy of my newest novel KELPIE DREAMS if the book is selected.

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

 

 

HARD SOUP

Every year for Valentine’s Day Maritime author A.F. Stewart hosts a BLOODY VALENTINE event gathering an assortment of slightly twisted authors who post their fiction and/or poetry all in the name of celebrating love.

This year’s theme is BAD LOVE.

I am taking part in this event and will be posting a piece of short fiction.

And a recipe…

COME and join the BLOODY VALENTINE HORROR EVENT!

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Hard Soup

I have marinated the meat in the best red wine I could afford, five days now, with garlic onion and bay leaf and a little stick of cinnamon, lots of cracked black pepper, and lots of aching tears.

On the fifth day I rubbed it with olive oil and browned it well in a hot pan.  I kissed it for luck.

Crane was right, it tasted bitter.

I carried the meat ceremoniously to a black metal roasting pan that I had beaten with a hammer into the rough shape of a coffin.  I browned a sliced onion in the pan, added more tears, and a little butter for flavor.

Then I deglazed the fry pan with a bit of the marinade, stirring and scraping the caked-on bits from the pan, swilling it into the juice for more flavor.

I poured the contents into the coffin-roaster, covering the meat just a little over half way.  I stuck the coffin-roaster into a slow oven, set to three hundred degrees.  Nice and slow, everything took time, let the hurting leak on out.

I added the insecticide last.

I served the meal in a valentine shaped bowl, bought especially for the occasion.  I set her body in her chair across the table from me.  The freezer kept her when I could not.  Her chest hung open like a secret treasure box.  She had a smile on her face. I’d placed it there, a finishing touch before placing her in the freezer.

Finishing nails.

Then I spooned it up.  Bitter, it tasted bitter, but no worse than finding your wife in bed with your best friend.

Heart meat is hard, unless you cook it properly.

I ate it up, every last drop.

I bit my lip until the gag reflex stopped working, and then I waited to die.

If I had timed it right, they would find us together before she thawed.  A frozen tableau, two hearts, one broken in my chest and one well braised in my belly.

Well done.  Well done.

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This story, HARD SOUP, appears in my e-book collection of dark love stories BAD VALENTINES TWO – which is available today on Kindle for only 99 cents.

 

BUT – just because I love you – why don’t you pick up a free digital copy of my e-book BAD VALENTINES: THREE TWISTED LOVE STORIES today only on Kindle!

PLEASE HELP ME win a Kindle Scout publishing contract by nominating my book and you can earn a FREE Kindle copy of my newest novel KELPIE DREAMS if the book is selected.

Wow – that’s three PSA’s (Public STEVE-VERNON Announcements) in a row. I think that might be a world record!

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

 

Bloody Valentines and More!

Every year for Valentine’s Day Maritime author A.F. Stewart hosts a BLOODY VALENTINE event gathering an assortment of slightly twisted authors who post their fiction and/or poetry all in the name of celebrating love.

This year’s theme is BAD LOVE.

I am taking part in this event and will be posting a piece of short fiction.

And a recipe…

Welcome to Avalon

The Bloody Valentine Horror Event Starts Tomorrow!

We have a great line-up of featured author guests

Clarissa Johal
Ash Krafton
Nick Paschall
Miracle Austin
John Linwood Grant
Debbie Christiana
Steve Vernon
And me,  A. F. Stewart

And, as this is an open event, there will be more great writers popping in and out all day!

Plus, we have giveaways and free books!

So be sure to join us us on the dark side of love!

For my part I’ll be posting some short drabbles, flash fiction and poetry on Facebook, but I’ll also have a story, Miss Lonely Hearts, posting here tomorrow. As well, I’ll be giving away my novella, Gothic Cavalcade, for free during the event.

So, come party with the writers as they celebrate the rejected lovers, the spurned spouses, and the generally lovelorn. It is a festival of everything anti-valentine and down with romance.

Bad Love…

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