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I had the pleasure of speaking with Court Lewis, host of American Variety Radio on select public-radio stations, about storm chasing and my novel “Funnel Vision” for a show that will air starting this week. Catch it at 8:30 p.m. this Thursday on WETS 89.5 FM (Tri-Cities, Tennessee); at 7:30 a.m. Sunday on WFIT 89.5 FM (Melbourne, Florida); at 4:30 p.m. Sunday on WMFE 90.7 FM (Orlando, Florida) and 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 15, on WQCS 88.9 FM (Fort Pierce, Florida). Or you can always catch it in the archives online after it airs.

If you missed me on Nerdy@30 on Blog Talk Radio, listen here. That was a lot of fun, too. Host Marcus Kastler lives in Kansas, so he has firsthand knowledge of severe storms.

I had a great time today chatting with UCF students in online classes. Great questions. My madly typing fingers got a great workout. Does your group need a speaker, or would your book club like to discuss ‘Funnel Vision’? Let me know.

My paperback has joined the Kindle edition on Amazon… hooray! Want a copy of this storm-chasing adventure novel? Help Funnel Vision stir up a tornado in Amazon’s rankings on Tuesday by buying your copy then! The ebook is just $2.99; the paperback list price is $14.95. Don’t have a Kindle? The Kindle ebook reader app is free on multiple devices, including your iPhone, iPad and Android. Thanks and happy chasing!

WHERE TO BUY

On Amazon: Funnel Vision Kindle edition  | Funnel Vision paperback

Also on B&N Nook | Smashwords | Coming soon to iBooks/iTunes

Read more about the book …

And in case you missed the book trailer:

I was wondering if the giveaway of ‘Funnel Vision’ had gone live yet on Goodreads, and holy cow, has it ever! I’m grateful for the requests and look forward to sending the five books out when the giveaway period ends Jan. 30. The Goodreads gods determine the lucky winners in all giveaways.

Here’s more stormy fun. I’ve just uploaded to YouTube a video I did almost five years ago, featuring 10 years of storms packed into 10 minutes. There’s a smattering of hail, lightning, storm structure and tornadoes, including several time-lapse clips and music.

Book trailers are so much fun to make. It’s like the very best version of your book, or the idealized, one-minute version. Actually, if you really did it like Hollywood, you’d probably have multiples … one that emphasizes the action (this one kind of does), one that emphasizes the romance, one that emphasizes the emotional personal stories … you’re getting it. Anyway, here it is. The trailer includes several snippets from storm-chasing video I’ve shot over the years. I’ll be publishing Funnel Vision later this month.

… Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my novel

I used to review a lot of books, mostly for The Sun in Baltimore, a newspaper I worked for in the 1990s. I loved books, still do, and I was surrounded by smart, inspiring writers. Among them were richly talented critics and reporters who were or have become famous for their novels, including Stephen Hunter and Laura Lippman. For a few months, I was actually interim book review editor at The Sun, while the new editor was formulating his vision. I was handed that task – in addition to an editing job I was already doing – when I told my boss that being a book review editor was my dream job at the paper. It turns out, it wasn’t.

There was a huge backlog of books that hadn’t been considered and a tsunami of books pouring into the office. It was overwhelming, and I didn’t spend my time reading novels over hot cocoa and doughnuts. I spent my time organizing the deluge, prioritizing reviews, and saying no to publicity people. Despite what was probably considered, at the time, generous book-review space – space almost unheard of now in most newspapers – we probably reviewed less than 15 books each week, even including occasional roundup reviews of five or six titles. I wrote some of those, too.

From this experience, I understood that even books published by the big houses, even books written by people I’d actually heard of, wouldn’t necessarily get reviewed. Self-published books were simply never, ever considered for review, and for good reasons. One, there were too many “legitimate,” vetted books up for consideration; and two, most of the self-pubbed books were terrible.

Fast-forward to the last few years, when I worked at a newspaper in Florida and wrote about, among many other things, books and authors. We gave self-published books a mention, because there were so many local writers putting them out. Some of them were certainly worth the publicity they got; in fact, a few of them merited feature stories for their intriguing topics, interesting authors or writing pedigree. But the truth is, a lot of self-published books are still pretty bad. Some people publish in a vacuum, without doing their research, without the benefit of a critique group, without investing in good design, without understanding anything about the industry. They are, in their own eyes, Published Authors, a title I’ve long desired but wanted to get the hard way.

As my editor during an early internship told me a few thousand years ago, “Don’t you know? Every journalist has a novel in their bottom drawer.” I was one of them. The first one I wrote was pretty awful. The second one was fun and captured the zeitgeist of the time it was written, but I gave up too soon on publication after a handful of rejections. In the interim, I started chasing storms, and then, I started writing Funnel Vision, a novel about storm chasers.

I had tremendously valuable input from a critique group, and I got the novel into a state where I was ready to submit it to agents. I did. A lot. Some asked to see chapters. A few asked to see the whole thing. But no one said yes, and I grew weary of rejection, again. I believed in my novel, but it is a bit of a genre-bender – an adventure story with humor, drama and romance – and a novel like that seemed unlikely to find a home with a publisher who wants a shelf label, who wants a novel of a type that’s already been successful.

Despite my frustration, I still didn’t want to own the stigma of being self-published.

Then, as you know if you follow publishing, the world changed. It is changing, incredibly rapidly, and traditional publishing is going through a massive upheaval. E-books’ popularity is growing. There are some major self-publishing success stories. And while I didn’t think I’d be the next Hocking/Konrath/Locke, I finally decided that it might be time to give it a shot. Not only is publishing the Wild West; other books about storm chasers are out there – books I have studiously avoided reading – and I didn’t want the one I wrote five years ago to be irrelevant and overtaken before I even got it out into the world. Besides, as strange as it might sound, I had started writing a sequel.

So I set out upon one more revision. With fresh eyes, I added a couple of scenes. I found out even more about my characters. And I set the wheels in motion: cover, formatting, and all the fun aspects of becoming your own publisher. I believe in this book. Reading it again and again, as I have been in the final phases of getting it ready, I’m enjoying it, too.

I still have fears of being dismissed as part of the self-created slush pile, as some still see self-publishing. I cringed recently when I saw a bookstore employee venting on a Millions post denigrating self-publishing, saying, “Self-published authors are the bane of our existence.” I’m not a “hater” of the industry, as that column implied. I’m not naive. But I have my reasons for making this choice.

Why would a cynical book-critic type self-publish? I have a story to tell, a story I love. Time is ripping by, and the wheels of publishing turn slowly. While I still have fantasies of being the Published Author with the imprimatur of the Official Publishing House on my book, I know now it’s not the only way. And in the current publishing climate, it’s going to be even harder for me to find an Official Publishing House to accept my particular flavor of adult fiction.

I want my story to find readers who enjoy its world as much as I do. I hope they do. Look for Funnel Vision later this month.

I was on the East Coast Monday while beastly tornadoes hit Oklahoma. You may have seen the video of chaser Andy Gabrielson’s car rolling over while chasing one of them. He says the steering locked up, but whatever happened, it happened while he was driving backward at high speed. I’d prefer not to be so close that I have to drive backward to get away from anything! Andy, fortunately, was not badly hurt. Here’s the TornadoVideos.net (Reed Timmer’s crew) video of the incredible tornado, and Andy’s car flipping (at about 1:40).

What did I see yesterday? A pleasant little rainbow over the Atlantic Ocean.

My short documentary film “Chasing Reality” will appear in the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers Festival on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 9-10, at The Oaks theaters in Melbourne, Florida. It’s about the decidedly non-extreme ordeals storm chasers endure to get a glimpse of that elusive tornado.

You can download this month’s Brevard Live magazine, which contains the festival program, or pick it up at local bars and restaurants. There are lots of highlights, from “A Beautiful Belly” on Friday night and the red carpet reception, to a bevy of Florida, horror and short films. The Florida Filmmakers & More showcase Saturday morning at 10 a.m. will feature my movie and several others. Come out to see it! It’s $10 to get into Saturday morning’s program – as well as films and a filmmakers’ roundtable Saturday afternoon – and $60 for an all-access VIP pass to two days of events, including the Friday reception and Saturday night party. It’s a great deal, and all proceeds go to Unconditional Love Inc., a nonprofit HIV patient care center.

It was a long day Saturday of gardening, puttering and a most pleasant party. So when we got home and the sky started sparking around 11 p.m. or so, I was not particularly motivated to chase the lightning. The storms were moving offshore, and the best view would have been from Cape Canaveral or maybe Cocoa Beach. After several minutes of agonizing, I instead drove just down the road to Cocoa’s Riverfront Park and took some shots pointing east toward the storms. The lightning was really far away, but the lights on the water and the S.R. 520 causeway bridge made for an interesting setting. Here’s the best of the bolts, partially obscured by clouds. I cropped this shot to get the framing I wanted.

I took a chance on a wave of lightning storms after dark Monday – they seem to be rare creatures these days – and dashed down the road to Viera with my camera to get out of the rain. It’s amazing how circumstances conspire to deprive you of shots. The bolts were few and far between this night, yet on a relatively quiet road, a car drove in front of me just as one hit. Another strike had its best leg just out of frame. Still another was so bright (and close) that it drastically overexposed the frame and burned itself on my retina for a while. And a perfect shot eluded me during one of the two seconds when the shutter wasn’t open each minute.

Still, as you can see above, I got one. But I also wanted to recount the ones that got away. Even if you think you know how to do this stuff, it’s never easy to get that perfectly framed shot when it comes to lightning. It’s unpredictable.

Earlier Monday, I drove south to check out some storms and saw a lightning bolt hit well ahead of the rain and clouds – one of those bolts from the blue. That’s why the lightning safety folks say, “When thunder roars, go indoors.”

At some point when you’re trying to outrun an outflow boundary – what was a pretty shelf cloud, during the brief glimpse I had of it – you run out of road. At least around here. My pursuit ended at the Atlantic Ocean in Cocoa Beach, but I got shots of the shelf as it pushed out over the sea this evening. The colors were so silver and blue, almost monochromatic, that I converted the image to black and white so the textures would come out.