Arturo J Gomez!

and

Victoria!

Congratulations both, a copy of Irregular Creatures is on its way to your email addresses as soon as I can make it work. To everyone else who entered. I’m sorry I can’t give you free stuff, but watch this space as I’ll have more giveaways in the coming weeks/months. **

I liked Irregular Creatures by Chuck Wendig so much I thought I’d give away a copy here. Chuck himself is an estimable human being (beard and all) and offered a second copy to give away.

So if you’d like to be in to win I want you to tell me about the strangest thing you’ve ever seen. I’ll pick one comment to win at random, and one because it’s my favorite.

If you’re prone to wild embellishments, make them entertaining. Just writing “I saw a vampire LOL” does not count as an entry…and will earn you a special place in hell.

So to kick things off I’ll share one of the weirder things that happened to me doing security work:

“One night while I was still working as a doorman for a nightclub, two women walked by my station out front. It had been a cold night and business had been slow. I was hopefull I was going to get to go home early,  there were leftovers in the fridge with my name on them.

Leftovers in mind I was glad to see the wander by me and head off up the street. I’d already flicked my brain back on to ‘scan’ when the closer of the two ladies stopped moving and turned to look at me. She outweighed me be at least a hundred pounds, so  when I saw the gleam in her eye my brain switched from ‘scan’ to ‘uh-oh’.

She turned to her friend, nodded once then turned around an hitched up her skirt.

Sadly, for her, that day was commando day.

For the next twenty seconds or so she proceeded to waggle her strange, misshapen buttocks at me. Grinding back and forth in some bizarre parody of a dance. She finished this routine and pulled the skirt back down again. She turned back to her friend, and again, nodded once.

Neither of them cracked a smile.

As they wandered off down to the main drag, I wondered if this had actually happened or if I’d been in one too many fights and I’d been the recipient of a startlingly disturbing brain injury. I turned to look through the  window at the other bouncer.

He was laughing so hard he could barely breathe. Our few regulars were staring at their drinks like we’d spiked them with LSD.”

It really happened, and try as I might, I can’t resist telling people that story.

So what weird/wonderful/disturbing things have you seen? Let me know in the comments and I’ll draw the free electronic copies of Irregular Creatures in 48 hours. *

*You can read my review of Irregular Creatures here. If you can’t wait and you’d like to buy a copy from Chuck’s website Terrible Minds, you can do so here.

It can be something as profound as getting published or as small as meeting your favorite author. If you’re a writer and you’ve felt lucky, I want to hear about it.

Without further ado:  The The Handbook of the Writer Secret Society review:

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The Handbook of the Writer Secret Society by Carrie Bailey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Handbook of The Writer Secret Society is, not to put too fine a point on it, a secret handbook for writers.

If you write, then you already know how solitary the business of crafting fiction is, it can be very easy to feel like you’re alone against a blank page. What The Handbook of The Writer Secret Society postulates is that not only are you not alone, you’re already a member of a secret cabal of scribblers who lurk in the shadows at parties, people watching for story ideas.

Actually that last part might just be me.

The Handbook of The Writer Secret Society isn’t a how to book. There’s nothing on prose, or character development in there. What it is, is a shot in the arm for anyone who feels their writing confidence flagging, or that they’re the only one out there struggling with their creative impulses.

The writer’s handbook also has some excellent little illustrations in it, which adds to the feeling of the book. Even though at the moment it is e-book only, you can just imagine you’re handling a well loved secret tome that was given to you by a dying man.

I don’t want to give too much of the contents away, as a big part of the joy of reading this book is in discovering the clever ways in which the contributors have crafted a secret society out of whole cloth. With that said, make sure you read the section on writer’s luck twice.

Highly recommended.

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I will pick a winner in 48 hours and that person will get a free PDF version of The Handbook. To  enter just add a comment telling me about your luckiest moment as a writer. Good luck!

I’ll pick a winner at random (possible with the aid of some dice) and they will recieve a PDF copy of Story Structure – Demystified.

If you’d like to read the review of Story Structure – Demystified, it’s right here.

I’ll pick the winner this weekend.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Beth Barany, your copy of Story Structure – Dymystified will wing its way to your inbox in the next few minutes. Thanks to everyone who entered, this is definitely not the last competition I’ll run.