Mouthful of Feathers E-book Is Out. Hypno-Toad Says Buy...

Apologies for the complete lack of blog activity lately. It's been a hectic past few weeks, and probably will remain so for at least the remainder of 2013, so blog content might be a little scarce in the short-term future. Between familial obligations and a new self-pubbed writing project I've just started working on, I just haven't had much time to either write on my own blog or read and/or comment on anyone else's.

I did, however, want to let everyone know that the much-anticipated and most-excellent Mouthful of Feathers: Upland in the West e-book is now available on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Kobo Books. I've read it, and it's good, really good, despite having a piker like myself in the TOC.

I think you'll enjoy it immensely, and it's cheap entertainment to boot. Look at it this way: You can spend $4.99 on a cup of coffee at Starbucks, a useless app for your smartphone that you don't need and will never use, a fifth of "Kentucky Wonder" whiskey (preferred by three out of four professional blood plasma-selling alcoholics), a traditional hook-and-bullet rag or eighty-odd pages of thoughtful, honest, ad-and-agenda-free prose. 

Which of those options vying for your fiver will stick with you the longest, be the best value? Let's review: The coffee is overpriced, tastes like burnt tires, makes you jittery, and you'll just piss it out within the hour, anyway. The app is just going to make it easier for the NSA-corporate-industrial complex to track your movements. The whiskey? Well, if I'm being completely honest the whiskey's not a bad way to spend five bucks, but you'll regret it when you wake up and find that you've gone colorblind. The hook-'n-boolit mag? Not gonna find writing like this there.

But spend five bucks on MOF, and you'll get...well, I can't really tell you what value you'll get out of it, can I? We're all different, of course, and you may not like what I wrote, or what some of the other contributors wrote. You may think it sucks, that it's boring or pretentious or shitty. That is the beauty of subjective taste.

But I can tell you what you won't get out of it: You won't get dishonesty. You won't get fraudulence. You won't get slick marketing copy or carefully orchestrated press events disguised as honest adventure. You won't get any "How-to" or "Where To" or even much "Why To" except maybe the kind of  intimate, personal "Why To" that speaks to the individual rather than that all that crappy, contrived, calculated, carefully rehearsed and utterly alike cornpone sentiment spouted by all those camo-swaddled talking head celebrity clones. You won't get one lick of SEO-optimized twaddle. You won't get one Listicle. Not one! You won't get one story pre-approved in some editorial budget meeting in accordance with the results of the latest market survey or focus group trend data. You won't get any "Special XX-Hunting Issue!" complete with advertising tie-ins, sponsored content and glowing reviews for products of value only to those who have been trained from birth to covet the means rather than the end.

Nope, there's none of that.  All there is, and all you're gonna get from this endeavor, is the end result of a few disparate, scattered people with something to say being asked to write a story they think might be worth reading. And that is, literally, the entire extent of MOF's editorial direction: story. Just story. And I think that's pretty damn cool. So go buy the damn thing, already. Purchase a copy now, because it's the right thing to do. Go ahead, buy it. Buy it now. You need to buy it. In fact, it's imperative that you buy it now. I insist you buy it now. Even Hypno-Toad says "Buy It Now" and it's not a good idea to resist Hypno-Toad, not a good idea at all...