Two books. .99 cents each.

From May 22 to May 28, my scary-fun novel Invasive Species is on Amazon's countdown deal, meaning that it costs only 99 cents, which is a savings of $200,000 (if you were planning to instead buy a mid-size house in certain areas of the US).

Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FZ6ZMJS

Also, my short story and sundries collection Book by Author is always only 99 cents. Here's some praise for two of the stories contained within:

I received over a hundred entries, which was great, but it took me much longer than expected to read them all. I was overwhelmed by the high quality of the submissions, which made it tough to choose the winner. After weeks of excruciating deliberation, I finally went with the quirkiest entry I received. The fifty dollar prize goes to Mike Mayer for his story “Boundary Line,” a gripping tale of a kidnapping gone horribly wrong. 
-JA Konrath, author of the Jack Daniel Mystery series 

…the editor of BioMedNet's News & Comment section love it so much, she laughed out loud and demanded I tell you she read it to her children during dinner time. 
-Laurie A. Zamprelli Pasiuk, fiction Editor HMS Beagle (in regards to There's More to Life the Biology) 

Find the book here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KDQKX0S

And if you don't like discounts or short stories, you can buy my comic-fantasy novel A Barbarian for Dinner for its normal (though highly reasonable) price. What's the book about? To find out, use this equation: "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" PLUS "One Foot in the Grave" TIMES the classic fantasy genre EQUALS "A Barbarian for Dinner." 

Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Dinner-Mike-Mayer-ebook/dp/B00JVBL404/ref=la_B00KEXRB7I_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400785878&sr=1-2

Who might be interested in Invasive Species, and who might not.

Long(ish) ago, I sent out a query letter to an agent for an earlier version of my Invasive Species novel. This is the reply I got:

--------------------------------------

Dear Mr. Mayer,

I love the title, but this is way, way, way too far-out even for me.  This seems Spider-Man-esque, where the spider bites the guy and he takes on the powers of the spider, which is something that could only happen in a comic book. The whole point about Crichton is that his stuff is based on real science. I do love the fact that you've got slime-molds in a prominent position, though; they are among the Earth's most under-appreciated organisms. In any case, not for me, but thank you for an entertaining e-mail.

Best wishes,

Russ (big-name agent's last name redacted)

--------------------------------------

It's a nice reply. And he's right. The book is over the top.

But that's what I was going for.

I do sort of  take issue with the "based on real science" comment, though. My stuff is based on real science. Everything in Invasive Species was inspired by some discovery or by some way that nature works. Like Crichton, I mined the discovers of "real science" and tried to use them in clever and interesting ways to tell a story.

So what's the difference? Crichton takes a more conservative approach in all this, and so his stories may seem more believable. But, and I mean this in the kindest way possible, his stories don't reflect "real science" any better Spider-man's tale. Wrong is wrong when it comes to science, but being right about science is not the point when it comes to telling a story. Your goal is not to write about science in an accurate way. What you're trying to do, I think, is to show the reader, who may be interested in science, that, hey, maybe you can see where I'm pulling the idea out of and isn't it cool how I'm playing with it?

Besides, who doesn't like Spider-man?

Han Shot First! -- Revisions after publishing

I just finished re-editing my book Invasive Species. The new version will soon appear on Amazon. Now, yes, the book has already been published and people have already bought it, and so the book has been committed to the public consciousness. But, damn it, more than a few errors had somehow crept into the “final” text, and I felt they needed to be stamped out.

The idea was to only fix the shaky grammar, but to otherwise NOT change the text. I swore to be ultra-conservative about this. After all, everyone knows what happens when you try to change a “final” work of art (or piece of entertainment, as the case may be). It never goes well. Never! It’s like a law of the universe. If your first effort was good enough to “be” something, then, by law of averages, if you try to change it, the changes will most likely make worse. Once a work of art is out there, it becomes a part of the fabric of the universe, and so (hyperbole alert) to revise a “final” work of art is to, in effect, change history itself! And if history can be changed so easily, what will become of our future? Remember -- Han Shot First! Or did he? No, not any longer! Memories have been tampered with, and childhoods have been destroyed.  

Yeah, but what if changing something truly does make it better.

That’s what I asked myself halfway through my revisions. Now I think at least 90% of the book suits me fine and should be set in stone. But due to a fiasco I had with a freelance editor, and my self-imposed publishing timeline, I think, in hindsight, that I rushed the publishing of Invasive Species. I think it needed one more read through. There were some unnecessarily wordy sections, several odd grammar choices, and some confusing text that should have been smoothed out.

So, I rewrote those parts.

Now I didn’t make extensive revisions. Plots were not changed. Characters were not rewritten. But whole sentences have been deleted, rearranged, and replaced to make for smooth “better” reading. Unneeded words have been cast aside, and other words were added. There’s something about looking at a text after letting it sit for many months, after you’ve let it “cool off,” that makes you aware of the weirdness and mistakes you should have corrected the first time through, things seem so obvious now but at the time had seemed perfectly fine.

Objectivity, I guess is the keyword, and sometimes you only get that with the passage of time.

So the book is better now. It’s not exactly the same book, but in this age of digital novels, I’m starting to think that revising should be seen as a feature and not a bug. 

Invasive Species updated cover

Updated the cover to my Invasive Species book on Amazon. Added a bit of color and a better font choice.

Pictorial for Invasive Species game

And now here's a pictorial of my game Invasive Speicies: The Game: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/13915471#13915471

Book Out!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand ... the book is out! Check out Invasive Species on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Invasive-Species-Mike-Mayer-ebook/dp/B00FZ6ZMJS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383109913&sr=8-1&keywords=mike+mayer+invasive

Card from the IS game

A card from the full-color version of my Invasive Species game. The text comes straight from the novel: http://www.amazon.com/Invasive-Species-Mike-Mayer-ebook/dp/B00FZ6ZMJS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383109913&sr=8-1&keywords=mike+mayer+invasive  and the colors relate as well:  Red for shed blood, of course. Green features heavily in the eyes of the monsters. And the oily yellow background relates to the invasive slime mold that started it all.

Spin-off game for Invasive Species

Here's where you can find a free print & play spin-off game of my novel Invasive Species, called, strangely enough, Invasive Species: the Game: Invasive Secies: the Game

The description goes something like this:

Auuuuuuuugh! Your publisher is breathing down your neck, so now it's a late-night, caffeine-fueled, rattling-keyboard-pounding race to get the first chapter of your thriller novel Invasive Species finished before he decides to tear up your lucrative contract. Through blind inspiration (drawing cards) and expert cut-and-paste editing (arranging cards on your board), you strive to complete your chapter before it's too late. In the card game Invasive Species, players create a story by using 36 cards that have numbered text showing where each card should go in the story. Each turn, a player draws a card and decides whether he wants to keep it or give it to his opponent. He places any kept cards on his personal board, with the goal of creating an ascending numeral sequence. When the deck runs out, players take turns sliding misplaced cards into their correct positions. The first player to correctly "write" his story wins. Invasive Species is based on the novel of the same name by Mike Mayer.

Invasive Species novel

Cover of my upcoming book

The description I'm considering:

Something's wrong with Maggie's swamp. A volatile life form has invaded the ecosystem and compels everything it touches to adopt its bizarre life cycle. The cells of animals, plants, and even people rupture their bonds and unite with other creatures to give birth to conjoined monsters. These newly-made chimeras consume all they catch, but their relentless appetite is only a prelude to the coming horror. The infecting life cycle demands an even greater transformation, and Maggie fights against it. Life as we knows it hangs in the balance.

Invasive Species an electrifying tale of nature's blind and uncaring need to evolve regardless of what any mere human might have to say about it.   

And some excerpts: 

. . . as water trickled around these strange tumors she realized the heads did not belong to separate animals. These heads belonged to the same body. . . .

. . . "When a foreign organism is released into a new environment, strange and unpredictable things can happen." . . .

. . . Oh God, it was happening again. He felt his cells breaking apart and joining with the cells of the beast that was folded around him. There was no resisting it. New memories flooded in. New thoughts. New desires. . . .

. . . "We may be part of its plan," Maggie said, "but only in the sense a sick person might be part of a bacteria's plan."  

. . . The end of the world was nigh, but it wasn't an end prophesied by Revolutions or predicted by anti-nuclear war activists or climate change doomsayers or soft-spoken astronomers searching the heavens for wayward meteors. This end was planned by billions of years of natural selection. Maggie had a plan as well. . . .

INVASIVE SPECIES by MIKE MAYER​

COMING SOON at AMAZON.