Saturday, October 12, 2024

My NYC Big Book Award for Best Horror of the Year - DEATH OF HEAVEN, & Video Book Trailers

Right off, two links:

Press release: Author JZ Murdock receives national recognition for Death of Heaven (cover title as, Death of heaven) through the NYC BIG BOOK AWARD® for Horror!

My author profile page for my books on Amazon. This includes my ebooks and audiobooks (also on Audible.com). Also Smashwords for only ebooks.

First up, congrats to winners of the Horror category:

Some NYC Big Book Award (a part of the Independent Press Awards) winners in the Horror category from over the years:

OK, here we go...

Back in 2012, I was asked to adapt a novelist's book to screenplay. That was Dark of kNight by TL Mitchell. That led to another adaptation of her friend's book, Mitchell was starting her own publishing company. She pulled her books from her publisher and got to work. But she wouldn't publish my works. I found that frustrating. She turned me onto Cal Miller at Zilyon Publishing and he published my first book, Anthology of Evil, a collection of all my initial, original short horror and sci fi fiction. 

I took all my short stories I thought could stand alone and put them in that book. Originally I put all my short stories into that book at nearly 1,000 pages. But he said, "Uh, thanks, but maybe cut that by half?" So I did and he published it.

But I had a bunch of other stories left over so I put them in a second book. I thought I might make it into a portmanteau novel of sorts. Frame those stories and build another book within the book in a kind of meta book surrounding the book. How to tie that all together. This is something I've always excelled at. In college and later in various positions at corporations.

I had been a senior technical writer on various high-end, high-tech IT teams around the Pacific Northwest. I worked at US West Technologies, Holland American Cruise Lines, just missed out on a job at McCaw Cellular, and kept turning down a job at some place called Network Data Expresss (NDEX, or NDEx) which I finally took a job with after 5.5 months out of work during a period in the Pacific Northwest that experienced massive layoffs in high tech.


So I created my book, Death of Heaven in 2012 and Cal published that book also. I thought the cover was interesting but I thought it was too light. I had wanted a more hyperreal format of graphics, but when you get offered by an incredible artist to do you cover, you say, Thank you! Also, didn't need the "By" but we learned as we created, just the author name. 

Also, you can buy his art on Redbubble, which includes my book cover art and his art from over his amazing career. The image above is from his Redbubble profile

He made a banner like that for my book...

Three of the Tiny Colony "Gods" from Death of heaven

Then in 2014, my friend I worked at the same company with, Kurt Giambatiani (who wrote some of my favorite books in his "Fallen Cloud" series of revisionist history where Native Americans rode dinosaurs that terrified the horses of the US Army...where Custer never died at Little Big Horn but became President of the United States and his son joined the US Army...this is a great series of fun books. I highly recommend them. Kurt has moved on from that series. Check him out: K. R. A. Giambastiani.

Anyway, his wife Ilene had helped edit his books so I took a chance and asked and she decided to edit my book. We had a great time. She worked from their home in north Seattle, while I worked from my home in Suquamish, Washington, just a Bainbridge Island ride away from downtown Seattle, where both Kurt and I worked in the same building over by the 9th Avenue Seattle light rail (subway).

In 2014, I published a revised version of Death of Heaven. It was interesting as once he sent me this version he said he didn't know what he was thinking about the lighter cover version. 

In 2013 I had gotten into making book video trailers of my books. I broke out some of the short stories and made ebooks out of them. I also eventually made some audiobooks of them. After I retired and moved to Bremerton, I got my friend Tom to read my audiobooks. 

After a couple of years, after having made a short film ("The Rapping" an Edgar Allen Poe reference from his poem, The Raven), I moved to my current location about a mile from my last house. I made a new film, "Gumdrop", a short horror. Tom was the lead.

It's now years later after health problems since catching COVID-19 in February 2020 before we knew what it was, having caught it twice again. In 2022 I made another film, a filmic poem/WWI documentary that's now won about 63 international film festival awards.

I had retired in 2016 to write and turn my writings into films. I've done that. What I hadn't done until I got into the film festival circuit and got used to applying for and winning many awards, I thought about my books/writings. So last year I submitted things for book awards. And this year I won the 2024 New York City Big Book Award for Death of heaven. I've written about that title before.

Originally I got the title from my son who in his senior year of high school produced a CD of his own music he engineered at school. I liked the title of one and he said I could use it for my book. When my younger brother, an artist, who has done all my book covers, redid my cover for the 2nd edition, he left the "h" in "Heaven" lowercase.

 Somehow we didn't notice it and when we did, I realized it actually fit the book and the stories within. So you will see my title in various places as either "Death of Heaven" the correct format for entities like Amazon (you can't use a loser case in a title), or "Death of heaven", as it now is on the book cover with a special font my brother made just for this book. 

The lowercase "h" made sense to me as, well... you'd have to read the book to understand why that is. But it makes total sense, other than and outside of the rules of grammar that require it be capitalized. But writing is also art and as a poem can not just be in a stanza form but also printed on the page in a form to mimic the meaning within the poem. As in a "concrete poem" or a "shape poem". 

I've had a weird relationship with poetry. In the late 80s I tried unsuccessfully to create a magazine and in the tenets of the magazine, no poetry was allowed. I'd taken poetry at university and learned a lot. I think my feelings had to do with pretentiousness. My 2022 documentary film is a "filmic poem", something I learned about in my first college cinema class.

I wrote a poem around 2014 on the topic of Maurice Ravel and his composition, "Bolero" (which I explain more on elsewhere). I researched him and that song and learned a lot. Like he had been in WWI in a way that Hemmingway had. I researched and rewrote it over the years and even had a professional poet read it and comment. 

I used that poem in my film as a centerpiece to exemplify the horror of war and I hired two French-speaking actors to do the speaking parts in the film. As I composed the film, I altered the poem, and back and forth over 6 months while I was recuperating slowly, painfully slowly from Long Covid. 

In 2013 I made a bunch of book trailer videos as I detail in my blog back then: New JZ Murdock Video Book Trailers (for reference, I include the links in that below). I remade one for the 2nd edition of Death of heaven in 2014,

2024 NYC Big Book Awards / Death of heaven page

Now that I've won a book award, I thought I'd use the videos. What the heck, right? They were a lot of work, regardless how they may now be viewed.

And so here they are...

I now have more I would like to share with you. I hope you find them intriguing. If you would like to keep track of my channel, go to: TheJZMurdock on YouTube.

UPDATE 1/18/2013: Before I get to the fiction video book trailers (book trailer videos?), I have just created two new ones for a couple of my non-fiction articles:

Synesthesia, and the Need for More Information - Video Book Trailer
This article is free and also included in:

Some Notes on Field Theory, Albert's Mind and the Status Quo - Video Book Trailer

Okay then, here are my fiction trailers:

Books
Anthology of Evil - Video Book Trailer

Death of Heaven - Video Book Trailer

Novella

Andrew - Video Book Trailer (this is at the end of "Anthology of Evil" and now there is a 2 volume sequel to that, this is also the origination story of Death of heaven).

Short Story ebooks

EarVu - Video Book Trailer

Gumdrop City - Video Book Trailer

In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear - Video Book Trailer

Japheth, Ishvi and The Light - Video Book Trailer

Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer to a Question He Knever Knew - Video Book Trailer

Sarah - Video Book Trailer

Simon's Beautiful Thought - Video Book Trailer

The Mea Culpa Document of London - Video Book Trailer

That it, that's all I've got for now.

Cheers! Sláinte!

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