The Tanglewood Terror…

Excuse me while I briefly veer back on the road of self-promotion. My third novel, The Tanglewood Terror, releases today in hardcover, audiobook, and ebook formats. Mamba Point is also now out in paperback. Time to visit your local bookstore, go to the library, or (at least for the first) download the audio and load [...]

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Betsy Byars Appreciation & Outright Theft

I have often listed Betsy Byars as one of my biggest influences, but sometime after writing Mamba Point I re-read some Byars for the first time since middle school and realized how much Mamba Point was informed by her novels: the lonely hero, his sense of humor, his honesty, and his wont for flashback and [...]

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The Mahar Child

In case you don’t follow my official authorial website, but do enjoy Edgar Rice Burroughs fan fiction, you’ll want to know about The Mahar Child. I added a new section today, which starts on page 7.

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Bourdain’s Liberia

Anthony Bourdain — a traveling chef author celebrity — travelled to Liberia and the show aired this week. There was a lot of excitement among the folks I know who used to live there. A preview of the show was posted to his blog a while back, and some of the exact phrases were used [...]

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The Man With Two Blogs and a Guessing Game

I’m collecting all the Mamba Point release-related stuff over at my main author site, http://www.kurtisscaletta.com/latest-news. This my “everything else” blog, so I won’t be double posting news and reviews and so forth here. But there’s exciting stuff going on, so click on over. Meanwhile, to get back off topic, here’s a video I made today [...]

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Book Trailer for Mamba Point

I asked people on Facebook to send me random pictures and incorporated them all into a book trailer for my second novel. I only allowed myself minimal preparation and one take in iMovie. Special thanks to Ken Burns for the effects.

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New Book Trailer: You Can Help

I’ve been thinking I should put together a book trailer for Mamba Point, but my mamba is a little camera shy and I don’t have appropriate roller skates/skills/hills to act out the best scene in the book. So I decided I would do a narrated PowerPoint slide show, pecha kucha style, where you go through [...]

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Final paiku call, and a reminder of my alter web-ego

1. This is my final call for paikus. If you want a rare collectible (probably not that rare) pika beanie baby, just write a paiku. What’s a paiku? Follow the link. 2. I haven’t been double-posting things that I put as announcements over on the dot com site by also posting them here. If you [...]

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Commercial Break

I never thought I’d post a tennis shoe ad on my site, but this one merits posting. It’s a lovely little video celebrating soccer in Africa.

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In Honor of Pac-Man’s 30th Birthday

The best-known hero of early video games turns 30 today. Because the yella fella figured large in my own transition to young adulthood, so he does in the coming-of-age of Linus Tuttle, the hero of Mamba Point. In honor, here are two short scenes from the final draft — they both made it to the [...]

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