A Little Housekeeping and a BIG Announcement

Although I've been trying to fly under the radar about it until tomorrow, certain parties have decided to call me out for the lack of updates to the 2013 Hundie Challenge this past month.  There IS a reason for this, and no, it is not that I have slackened my reading pace.  Much.

There are a lot of moving parts to this post so I'm just going to keep it as brief as possible.  First, I have some big, exciting news, which is this:

I'M HAVING A NOVEL PUBLISHED THIS YEAR!

Yes, long-term fans of the blog may remember my 2009 NaNo entry, BRAINEATER JONES.  After four years of elbow grease and plenty of fat kickbacks to publishing types, I've finally found a home for everyone's favorite Zomb-I, PI, a great up-and-coming press in Raleigh, NC called Red Adept Publishing.

So, here's the part where this impacts the 2013 Hundie Challenge.  The authors at Red Adept are an extraordinarily supportive and tight-knit community.  I'd really like to help them promote their books the way they've been helping me promote mine.  However, it would be unethical (and I think illegal in some states) to pimp a book which you have not read, just as professors are legally obliged to read a book before displaying it in their offices.

Here's the deal: I HAVE been reading in May, but what I've been reading are books from the exemplary Red Adept collection.  I've been hemming and hawing about whether I could fit this reading in IN ADDITION to the 2013 Hundie Challenge, but after a month of trying, I've decided it's not possible.  I still think 100 novels in a year may be possible, but 113 or so may be pushing the limit.

So, I'm going to cheat a little bit.  Here's the deal: I've looked over everything I wrote when I laid down the gauntlet to take up this challenge, and there's nothing strictly PROHIBITING me from putting the Red Adept books in my Suggestion Box to get to 100.  It's a little against the SPIRIT of reading 100 classics, although you could argue that these are all future classics.  (At least, that's what my content editor told me about my manuscript.)  You could also argue, though, that if someone had just PUT these books in my Suggestion Box I would be free to read them.

Whatever.  I'm not going to worry too much about it.  A hundred books is a hundred books as far as I'm concerned; the same amount of work is going into it either way.  Except now it's just 87 classics from the Modern Library List and 13 from my publisher.  I'm sure you'll all register your feelings of betrayal and impotent rage in the comments below anyway.  (I, personally, will give one free signed copy of BRAINEATER JONES to whoever comes up with the best pun comparing me to Judas Iscariot.)

So, all that being said, the last moving part of this blog post is, again, an ethical dilemma.  Since I have a professional, and, in some cases, a personal relationship with these authors, it would be quite a conflict of interest for me to review any of their books.  I'm not even giving them stars on Amazon; that's bad juju.  So, anyway, in lieu of my usual video reviews, for the RAP books I will simply be posting informational links.

So, long story short, every Monday for the next thirteen weeks, in lieu of your beloved video reviews of horrible, horrible anglocentric classics, you will instead be getting links to great, exciting modern books of every stripe.  Lucky youses!

There you go.  There's the deal with May and going forward.  Feel free to let the flamewar below commence...now.