Meet John Rector over at the Grove

So, if you don't know who this guy over on the left is already, let me introduce you. He's my buddy John Rector. Rector wrote this great novel, the Cold Kiss. The novel has been getting universally great reviews and it's not all smoke and mirrors, folks. The novel's one of my favorites this year and I've been passing on the good word about it to just about anyone who'll listen. (I've even got my 71-year-old mother reading it right now.)

But, before The Cold Kiss, Rector wrote this little book called the Grove. Rector's agent, Allan Guthrie, tried his damnest to sell this noir/horror mash-up, but none of the big dog publishers were bitting, so what Rector decided to do was publish the Grove on Kindle. Well, 60,000 or 70,000 copies later (Okay, it wasn't that much, but it was a lot.) Amazon (who decided to get into the publishing end of the book selling business.) offered to publish the Grove as a "real" paper bound book.

Anyway, the paper bound version of the Grove debuts in November, and Rector recently got his hands on a mess of Advanced readers copies and has decided to do a little contest to give away 10 of them to the reading public. And all you have to do win one of these copies of the Grove is blog it, review it, tweet it, send smoke signals, whatever. Make sure to check out all the details right HERE.

And since I really want a paper copy of the Grove, I figured I'd do my part and repost my review of the Grove from issue#1 of Crimefactory

The Grove is the story of small family farmer Dexter McCary, a shattered man who is separat­ed from his wife, grieving over the death of his daughter, and slowly drinking himself to death out at his remote farm house. On top of all of his other prob­lems, good old Dex also suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and occasional blackouts. He’s usu­ally fine as long he keeps up on his medication; the major prob­lem is that Dex has let his meds lapse since his wife left.
After one of his blackouts Dex awakens to discover that he’s gotten his tractor stuck on a muddy embankment in the middle of his cornfield and while he’s attempting to get the machine unstuck, he injures his hand and goes wandering to a grove in the middle of his fields and discovers the body of a young high school girl.
Since Dex suffered from a black­out the previous night, he pan­ics and believes he may have killed the girl for trespassing on his property.
After the discovery of the body, Dexter’s broken mind really starts to rev up as he begins to haphazardly investigate the girl’s death on the behest of the girl’s “ghost” and preserve the rapidly decaying corpse, and to complicated matters, a piece of pure d white trash discovers Dexter’s dead girlfriend and decides to lean on our mentally incapacitated protagonist.
The Grove is tightly written pure dose of noir. Rector’s writing is as spare and stripped down in the same tradition as such hard-boiled silver age masters as Goodis and Thompson—with a strong dose of modern country noir influence—the major dif­ference being that Rector cre­ates real rapport between Dex­ter and the reader. You can’t help but feel for Dexter’s ten car pile up of a life and the author keeps the emotional ten­sion running high from page one to it’s shocking—albeit under­stated—conclusion.
If you’re new to Kindle or one its many platform friendly in­carnations, you’re going to have a lot of choices on what to download, but make sure to pick up The Grove first for a sure fire, fast paced read.

The Crimefactory blog

So on Friday night as I was making changes on the Crimefactory website and uploading the new issue, I was thinking of a quick blog post to tack on to the site. Usually I put a little more thought into what I'm writing over there (As do Cam and Liam) saying that it's the editorial sounding board for the magazine. Usually we keep things pretty jokey and light hearted over on that end of the site, mostly concentrating on what we're doing to make the magazine better and so on and so forth.

Needless to say, my plate has been on the full side lately and I didn't have anything prepared, so I decided to whip out something about the upcoming Crimefactory anthology. You know, nothing too long, maybe two or three sentences about the contributors and how I was in the thick of editing. But then I switch over to my e-mail because I was expecting our cover image from Liam and what I got instead was an e-mail that went a little something like this:

"Keith, Did you receive my story for the anthology? I sent it over a month ago and haven't heard back from you yet and I would appreciate a response as soon as possible, or I may have to take my submission elsewhere. Sincerely, BLAH BLAH"

Now, if this e-mail was from an actual contributor, I would have jumped right on this and let them know that I had received the story.

The thing is, it wasn't from a contributor. In fact, it wasn't from anyone I even had an association with, it was just from a random person who decided that their short story should be included in an invite only anthology.....

When I read this, I got a little pissed and then I got a little nasty and posted something inappropriate to the site. Luckily, Cam and Liam caught it, e-mailed and told me they thought the blog post was a little on the"Oh, wow, Rawson's finally lost his shit" side (Which, honestly, it was.....I guess I'm pretty lucky to have far more level headed partners than myself.) so I jumped on the site, made the changes and the rest is history.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself,
'Jeez, Rawson, ya fuckin' hot head, it was just one e-mail.....'

The issue, folks, it wasn't just that one e-mail, it's been six in the last three months. Six e-mails with short stories attached to them wanting to be apart of the anthology. Not the magazine, mind you, (And it would have still annoyed me a little that these folks weren't following the clearly stated contributors guidelines, but at the very least I would have responded and told them to follow the submission guidelines and query first like everyone else has to do.) the anthology. And for some reason, the tone of these e-mails, except for one of them, has been so goddamn petulant. As if these stories were simply meant to be apart of the anthology. That their stories had to be included in the list of carefully considered contributors of the first anthology.........But what pissed me off even more were the follow up e-mails.

Jesus, these anomalies were being just plain assholes to me.

But instead of responding to these e-mails and tearing them a new virtual asshole, I simply hit delete, no response.

Don't get me wrong, I get as excited as the next writer when I hear of a print anthology that I might want to be apart of. I'll e-mail the editor about contributor guidelines or to ask if they're looking for outside submissions, but I just wouldn't send a story and then follow up a few weeks later with a shitty e-mail.

So let me give you folks a piece of advice, when you're wanting to be apart of a publication--any publication, whether it be print or electronic--be courteous, be professional, because this tends to leave a greater impression on the editor/publisher.

And remember, if you act like an asshole. the editor will remember.

Also, I want to apologize if I've ever done this to any of the editors/publishers I've submitted to in the past three years. If I've done this, well, you get one punch to my face on the house.

And to Cam and Liam, thanks for making me take down the post.

By the way, folks, don't forget you can find

CRIMEFACTORY ISSUE #4 RIGHT HERE

PS

For our Kindle readers, the edition should be up sometime today, and thanks for your patience.