Tag: Exciting Press

No Expectations Cover Reveal (with bonus Easter egg)

Posted on by Will

Several months ago, before even the holiday season, Miya Kressin finished her newest novel No Expectations.

I am so sorry you haven’t been able to buy it yet.

Spoiler: it’s so good.

I mean, I knew Miya could write. One need only check out the Asylum Saga to see how well Miya puts words together. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that she’s among the finest prose stylists I’ve ever encountered.

What do I mean by that?

At a word and sentence level, her prose works. And you might say, well, okay, but isn’t that always the case, but no, it’s not. You’ll find a lot of authors whose prose is competent. It gets the job done, keeps the sentences going and the pages turning.

Miya’s words and sentences are something else. Her stories are great, for sure, but there’s an intricacy and craft to her actual writing I find astounding.

With the Asylum Saga, Miya’s prose was working on several levels. Roseen is a complex character with a complex story and complex motivations. There’s a heft to the proceedings; we didn’t call it a Saga for nothing, after all.

In No Expectations, Miya has a ton of fun.

Now don’t get me wrong; I know Miya had fun writing Asylum; I was there for a lot of it, and watched it happen.

But here’s the thing; Miya isn’t just an author I work with. She’s a dear friend of mine, and has been for more than a decade. We met on MySpace and are friends on Facebook, and we’ve played virtual tabletop games and exchanged holiday presents. I’ve never met Miya in person but I know her voice and have heard her laugh.

And that’s what No Expectations is like.

It’s wonderful and funny and entertaining.

It’s also crazy hot and steamy.

Miya sent me a finished draft back in probably October now. I’ll be honest — from August of 2015 through the end of 2016, I was about useless for everything that wasn’t my day job, and even there I feel like I had performed it better in previous years. My wife read it straightaway, so that she could start editing it. There were a couple setbacks there — file losses and transfer weirdness.

And me? Like I said, useless.

But when I was able to start getting back to things, No Expectations was fun. That’s what I was struck by. It’s Miya at her best, great writing and amazing prose and all, but it’s also so much fun. I found myself grinning, laughing. I found myself adoring Julie and aspiring to identify with Reed.

Those names make no sense to you yet, but stay tuned. They’re going to.

Quietude

Posted on by Will

This may be the tenth anniversary of Exciting Press, but I also want to acknowledge that for several months there Exciting Press barely existed at all.

The books haven’t been unavailable. I’d consider Meets Girl the first real Exciting Press book, published in November 2010, and while titles have rolled in and out of availability, that’s been mostly because of experimentation in strategy more than anything else.

But last year . . .

Actually, in the past few years .  . .

On Friday night, I took my wife to a local event the theme of which was attending a prom (and it’s been a solid twenty years since I’ve done anything like that). It’s an annual event, though, and while we were there we considered the previous time we had attended — which I remember very little of except that we left almost immediately after we gained admittance.

While we were filtering in, I got word that my mother was ill. This might have been in 2013 as easily as it might have been in 2014, but I think it was the former. Just a few months after my parents — healthy and happy — had attended my wedding, here in Pittsburgh.

My wife and I left the party, piled into our Hyundai, and powered by Monster energy drinks and not much else drove across the state to New Jersey.

My mom survived that incident. We got to her room in the urgent care unit, and we stuck there for a day or three, and in the end her levels stabilized and she was able to leave.

But in the end . . .

In the end, she passed away in August 2015, and my father passed in May 2016.

It’s been a rough few years for me, which means it’s been a rough few years for Exciting Press. That’s what happens when you’re a nano-press, when you’re working with authors who are more friends than clients, most days.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of loss and a lot of grief, and 2016 was just awful.

So far, I confess I’m not a huge fan of “Hold my beer” 2017 for several reasons, but at the same time, if I can help to be something positive when it seems like positive is critical . . .