First Three Chapters from "Carla" - FREADO Link

New Carla Cover

Click HERE Book Buzzer - Read The Three Opening Chapters of Carla on Flip Book

Old Carla Cover

Cult novel, Carla is an introspective, moody and chilling romance novel with its roots firmly grounded in the work of the great pulp writers of the fifties, particularly Jim Thompson, to whom the book is dedicated. It is a book for adults and for those who have lived through the occasionally bloody battlefields that are the relationships between men and women. The book may also interest those in mixed age relationships (in either role) or those who suffer (or is related to someone who suffers from) Borderline Personality Disorder. Paperback: The paperback in particular is striking looking and with Kindle Match, you can get a FREE e-copy so you never have to bend the cover. It is perfect for coffee tables and bookshelves, with a glorious looking spine. The typeface is an easy reading font and there is plenty of clear cream space. It's an easy, fast paced page turner which doesn't overstay its welcome and leaves, according to reviewers, a lasting imprint on the consciousness. So far, the book has gained 17 5* reviews and a cult following. Comments from people who have read the book appear all over the Net. EVERY single review of Carla, whether the reader likes the theme or not, has commented on the quality of the writing. This second edition has been even further improved by micro-editing and the book raises the Indie standard further. The Carla paperback is an ideal present. Small, compact and able to fit in a clasp bag, it is ideal for Secret Santa, beach holidays, air travel and christmas/birthday gifts. It is also cheap enough to buy as a spontaneous present for someone you like. (Or love). It is suitable for men and women who enjoy good writing and a book which involves the senses. Buy if you like: strong writing, emotion, psychology, pulp fiction with amoral, ambivalent characters; reality fiction; quirky, innovative books; sad romance; black humour and stories within stories. It is set in the beautiful middle English town of Southwell, UK, and interested readers can follow the trail of John and Carla to the footstep. Back matter: Borderline Personality Disorder sufferer and released mental patient, John Dexter, falls in love with Carla, a fresh- faced environmental student and part-time barmaid, the first time he sees her. He should walk away, he knows he should, but he doesn’t. He can’t. And by falling in love, he sets off a chain of events, which are at first, heart-warming and inspirational, and then bleak and horrifying. The origins of Carla, complete with the original cover, may be found here: 

Mark Barry Legendary
"Titchmarsh-Photo"

UK Readers can buy cult novel Carla here - 

US Readers can buy cult novel Carla here - 

Southwell Minster - the model for the Three Steeples Church
which dominates the environment where Carla takes place

Ninety Nine

All the Green Wizard e-books on KINDLE, IPAD  and your laptop KINDLE software, are now, for a limited time only...

!!!!!!!!!99p!!!!!!!!!

and

!!!!!!99c!!!!!!

Carla 

Kid Atomic

The Ritual

Hollywood Shakedown

Ultra Violence

The Illustrated Woman

UK Link

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mark-Barry/e/B008479RWI/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

US Link

http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Barry/e/B008479RWI/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1343569938&sr=8-1

Download the Mini-Green Wizard catalogue or the Independent Paperback Gift Shop Catalogue - to your right for more information. 

Sample chapters of each coming up in the next few days.

7-writer challenge

7-writers get to strut their stuff (The Seven Line Challenge)

The delightful Jenny Worstall has tagged me into the 7-writer challenge. http://www.jennyworstall.webspace.virginmedia.com. 

Here are seven lines from my new horror paperback "The Ritual"  

Concerned at the behaviour of her angry EMO daughter, Jennifer, traditional apple-pie Mum Phillippa seeks out a psychotherapist in the small English town of Wheatley Fields.

"When she started researching the town, Phillippa spent more time researching therapists than she did schools and booked her daughter in at the clinic, sight unseen. No interview. No induction. No inspection. The Euripides Clinic, Wheatley Fields. $215 an hour. Four sessions paid in advance. 10%  premium for credit cards. She paid over the phone, resented the terms: Daylight robbery.Euripides.Those that the gods seek to destroy, they first make mad. (Mark Barry "The Ritual" Green Wizard, P2, 2012)

This is your mission: Go to line 7 on either page 7 or page 77 of your manuscript and do a post with the next 7 lines, then tag 7 people to keep the challenge going*  This a short and savvy way to see what others out there in the blogosphere are writing.

The challenge now passes onto:

Mary Ann Bernal 
Ngaire Victoria Elder 
K-Trina Meador 
Emma Edwards 
Rae Gee 
Suzanne Van Rooyen 
Brenda Perlin

*P7 and P77 of my book are both, weirdly, and in somewhat sinister fashion, Chapter blanks.

New mini Green Wizard Catalogue

Of course, this catalogue is downloadable to your right!!! 

or drop me a line and you can have 

a copy...

E-book sale

From tomorrow, all my books on Kindle will be slashed in price.

$2.99 for US readers

£1.87 for UK readers

With the exception of one more promo, my books will NEVER be offered free again, but at the same time, they will ALWAYS be this price.

UK readers can get five books for  a tenner. I estimate that's a months worth of reading.

For five of my books, I have never had less than a 5* review. 

Just thought I'd let you know!!

Tellytubbies

November.
NaNoWriMo
300,000 writers.
50,000 words.

I actually thought there was a prize for this, but there isn't, so there is absolutely no point me trying. I have six books out there. One which is 70,000 words and which I wrote in one month - including 42,000 words in a weekend, so I have nothing to prove. So, as the Dragons say when confronted with yet another grovelling wannabe. "I'm Out."

For those of you entering NaNoWriMo - an exercise which seems to me reduces the status of novelist to its lowest common denominator and in doing so reinforces the stereotype that writing is easy and thus worthless - I wish you the best of luck and I look forward to reading the 300,000 works of art which emerge from the exercise with rare enthusiasm.

Oh, and NaNoWriMo reminds me of the fifth Tellytubby. :-) Hence the title.

Love you all. Wiz xx

Green Wizard Rainy Saturday News

The Illustrated Woman is out in paperback, ladies and gentlemen.

*drum roll*

US: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_21?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+illustrated+woman+by+mark+barry&sprefix=The+Illustrated+Woman%2Cstripbooks%2C0

https://www.createspace.com/4026119

American readers - if you are interested in buying TIW in Paperback, please use Cspace! It's much better for my business and costs you nothing extra! Thank you.

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_21?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+illustrated+woman+by+mark+barry&sprefix=The+Illustrated+Woman%2Caps%2C330

So far, it has received mixed reviews. 

E

Though all the readers have found TIW to be a decent read and well written - and beautifully edited by my editor Mary Ann Bernal - the criticism has focused on the sex, which is probably a bit too hard.  

One of my biggest friends in this game couldn't finish it and, for a writer, that's the worst thing. 

My book Hollywood Shakedown was once slaughtered - I mean savaged, muntered, banjaxed and totally destroyed - by a friend of Kelly's and I didn't mind because she read every word. 

For a writer, the qualitative review doesn't matter in my opinion - its whether a piece is read or not, so when my friend wrote to me and said she couldn't finish it, I felt a failure. 

Then this happened again with another close female friend who felt the descriptions were just too hard.

Originally, I wrote this as an urban piece, like Carla, a dark romance-cum-love triangle and then decided to spice it up a bit due to dismal first quarter sales for Green Wizard. 

The spicing up, in retrospect, was probably a mistake, though I will challenge anyone who says the three chapters concerned are not well written. The collective erotica genre in Indielit is often - technically, at least - the skimpiest lode of decent writing and I know the three chapters concerned stand muster.

However, you CAN read The Illustrated Woman without reading the dirty chapters. It won't harm the experience.

___________________________________________________________________________
For a cleaner reading experience, Please avoid the two chapters named after Idomenus and the one named after Ajax
______________________________________

Cuckolding: The Idomenus chapter is a description of the art of Cuckolding and that has also annoyed a couple of readers.

In the US, there is a fascinating and quite scary subculture of older white men who pay well endowed black men to service their wives.

I had never heard of it until I bumped into the practice on Tumbler when I was writing Carla - the chapter with Kenny undergoing Group Therapy.

On many occasions, they film the act. I'm told its an extreme form of swinging. I read about it in a state of astonishment and the notes I made form the crux of the Idomenus chapters.

If you're not interested in that stuff - as two or three of the readers have already found out - it can be a bit of an, er, awkward read.

I do think the story overall passes muster. Its 164 pages long and can be read in a morning over two cups of coffee and a doughnut. If you live in a city, you will recognise much of what goes on and the book covers age old themes. Choices. Decisions. Good guys/Bad guys. Poverty. Hopelessness. Redemption.

And tattoos.

Better still, its £5.99 in the UK and $8.99 in the US in PAPERBACK. (half those prices and less on Kindle).

Ideal Christmas stocking filler material, if you ask me! Just watch the hot stuff.

_____________________________________________________________________

NaNoWriMo: I'm joining in with this, even unofficially. The US National Novel Writing Month. 50k in a month. Anyone who knows me will also know that is what is known as a piece of piss. Any of the great pulp writers of the forties and fifties could do that standing on their heads - with typewriters - if they could keep off the whisky.

My working title. "Love, Nat.": A story of an English teacher who falls in love with a fifteen year old pupil.

Nothing exists so far. I'm off to watch Newmarket and then I'll have 2k tonight. I won't give a blow by blow because its too hard, but I will record the numbers.

Anyway, much more interesting stuff on the Cauldron on Tuesday.

Thanks for listening. Wizx

_____________________________________________________________________
An absolutely fantastic review of The Illustrated Woman by K-Trina Meador, reviewer for the Cross Plains Examiner in Texas and a great friend of the Indielit community.

http://www.examiner.com/review/the-illustrated-woman-by-mark-barry-1