Attn: Kindle Users - Please Enjoy "Last Tuesday," a horror novella by Mark Wheaton

When Hollywood slows for the summer, it's not like I can stop typing (and John August made it sound so fun/easy with "The Variant"), so I wrote a horror novella entitled "Last Tuesday" and published it to the Amazon Kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Tuesday/d...1818989&sr=8-5

I became fascinated by the novella form when I was part of a package earlier this year to bring Joe Hill's awesome "Voluntary Committal" to the big screen - an adaptation that proved "too ambitious" (me and this producer really, really tried, but the studios weren't having it - the story is fucking great), but hey.

The cover of the book was done by Rahsan Ekedal, my "Cleaners" partner-in-crime and is pretty nifty. The plot description is thus:

"In their early forties, Indiana couple Daniel and Marcie Towne have it all - a nice house in the suburbs, steady income and a great marriage. The only thing missing is children, but they've filled their lives with other things to make up for their inability to conceive. But then one Saturday morning, Daniel realizes that, inexplicably, he can't place the events of the previous Tuesday. What he and Marcie first believe is merely symptomatic of a faulty memory, soon becomes a paranoid journey into murder, missing children and madness..."

Anyway, hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

In case there are other people who are interested in posting stuff to Kindle, here's a great step-by-step of how you can do it yourself that screenwriter John August posted online that's what really inspired me to do mine:

http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/...-for-web-geeks

That said, I actually did NOT do the HTML myself, but used an online service - Joshua Tallent's http://www.kindleformatting.com which - for a novella - cost an hour of work and was pretty quick in the turnaround and, if there were problems with my subsequent upload, I had somebody to e-mail (who I had other questions for along the way, particularly about the size Rahsan should go for with the cover).

Finally, after a day of downloads, here's the truth about the Kindle rankings - one person can download the thing and you jump literally 4,000 places in the rankings. That's expected - you go from nothing to something on a day when others don't get downloaded and you jump.

But then throughout the day, one download here, two downloads there, you just keep jumping up, hour by hour. You realize very quickly that, in fact, it's the same as Barnes & Noble. There are the 99% of books that sit on the shelf and then there are the 1% that everyone's reading whether it's a hard copy or on Kindle.

I think it's great because it places it all on you to sink or swim. I wrote a novel last year a friend is editing and even though I'd had one of the lit people at my agency talk to publishers, I feel - without reservation - that what I actually want to do with it would be better served here (I was planning to publish it under a pseudonym as it's a sexy chick-lit novel).