ANDREW BISS

Today my new novella A Mouth Full of Ashes became available for purchase on Amazon's Kindle store. The book is something of a departure for me, so I'll be interested to see what sort of reaction it gets. The description is below. If you have a Kindle or Kindle App and would like a free copy, I'm gifting copies to the first 10 people who'd like one. Just send me your email address to info[at]andrewbiss[dot]com. Overview: A young student is brutally raped and murdered. Her parents, Tom and Christine, are now confronted with the daunting task of processing their grief and attempting to come to terms with the horror that befell their child. The paths they take in doing so, however, couldn't be starker in contrast. Christine has withdrawn into a deadened world of suppressed rage and bitterness that has left her incapable of seeing beyond the terrible tragedy that has visited her. Her husband, Tom, on the other hand, has taken the unusual step of publicly ann...

In a few days from now I’ll be releasing my new book “A Mouth Full of Ashes” and I’d like to share with you how this story came about. A couple of years or so ago, I came upon a news story that grabbed my attention in a way that many others don’t. It involved a murder, but of course we read about murder, death, and all manner of tragic events on a daily basis. We read them, lament them, and then move on. This one, however, had a different angle to it that gripped my imagination. In a small town somewhere in the Midwest (I believe) a young pastor was delivering his Sunday sermon to his congregation. A young man with no associations to either the town or the pastor drove into town that morning, walked into the church and shot the pastor dead in the middle of his sermon. It was one of those inexplicable, mindless, random and tragic events that defy reason. The pastor was married and had two young girls who would now grow up without a father. Fast forward just a week or two ...

You know, I almost look back fondly now at the dawn of the cell phone zombies. When they first started popping up on sidewalks/pavements everywhere, I truly thought the decline of civilization had begun in earnest. Every time another of them would pop up, cell phone glued to the head, walking in random circles and speaking at someone on the other end in a voice at least 30 decibels too high, a little part of me died inside. You could even have argued that the cell phone zombies were actually turning me into a zombie. Each time one of those babbling, demented, pigeon-like apparitions appeared, chipping away at yet another layer of polite society, my soul became just a little more calcified. What a difference a few years can make. I now look back upon those times with an affectionate smile, awash as they are in tones of sepia and memories of a simpler way of life. An age of innocence, you might say. Now...now we live in the dreaded age of the text zombie, and this creature is fa...

I'm currently hard at work on my latest book, which has the working title of either "A Mouth Full of Ashes" or "Mouth Full of Ashes", depending on how I feel that day. This has become one of those things that I find enormously burdensome. To include the "A" or not include the "A". I'm currently leaning towards including the "A". But that's right now. It's a difficult book to write in some ways, because - as much as I love and am very connected with the characters and the storyline - it requires me to delve into a very dark place every time I revisit these characters. Coming home after a hard day's work and diving into someone else's personal hell isn't always easy. Maybe I should just turn on the TV and relax with an episode of "The Real Housewives of... Or maybe hell is just a relative term. Incidentally, should hell be capitalized? Heaven always is. And let's face it, they're both pretty big. I...

Author Eloise J. Knapp, the niece of one of my fellow KBers, has put together a little Youtube video entitled " Author's Lament: 5 Emotional Stages of a Bad Review ". She'd asked that it be shared around and I'm more than happy to help do just that as I think it's hilarious and rather brilliant. Yes, negative reviews, 1 star reviews, they are, unfortunately a part of a writer's life. They come with the territory...that territory being the land where you'll never please everybody, no matter how much you wish that were possible. Sometimes, your work will end up in the hands of someone who is not part of your target audience (especially true when doing giveaways or low price promotions), and when that happens...well, it's often not pretty. Here's part of a 1 star review I recently read on Amazon: ""None of the characters were likable, there was no character growth, and it rambled." What was this particular critique aimed at, you ask...

Conventional wisdom (which, from my experience, is usually anything but) has it that writers should write in one genre and stick with it, gradually building an audience who enjoy that particular genre and who will eagerly await each new release, all the while knowing exactly what to expect. And of course, this does work very well indeed for the Stephen Kings and John Grishams of this world. But that same "wisdom" would have it that to do otherwise is sheer folly, confusing your readers at best, angering them at worst, and making brand building nigh impossible. This thought has troubled me in the past, not least because not only have I never written in strictly one genre before, I also don't think I ever could. But I have come to the conclusion that, for me at least, this will not be a problem, despite the dire warnings from above (the above paragraph, that is, not the Almighty). Everything I have ever written or ever will write comes from a point of inspiration that has (...