Breaking News on Grind Joint; Noir at the Bar Baltimore

Relative quiet here has masked lots of activity on the Grind Joint front. To wit:

· An audio book, read by Mike Dennis, will be available through Amazon, audible.com, and iTunes, hopefully within the next week. Mike’s done a hell of a job, making subtle differences in the accents and inflections in a book with a shit ton of speaking parts, and, best of all, lets the reader decide what’s exciting and what isn’t. I’d never worked on an audio book before, and the process was enlightening. More details will be provided as the launch approaches.

(By the way, Mike’s a fine writer his own self. His work has appeared on more than one of my year end lists, with Setup on Front Street and the short story, “The Session” standing out for me. Check him out in more detail on his blog, http://mikedennisnoir.com.)

· A lot of people have asked when the e-book for Grind Joint will be available. (All right, two people have asked; one asked twice. “A lot” can mean different things to different people.) I now have an answer: soon. By “soon,” I mean by the end of the month. Weather permitting. (I have no idea why weather would not permit the publication of an e-book, but it sounds like something I could ascribe tardiness to, as the weather is entirely out of my control, thus leaving me blameless should the date slip.) Right now I have only the formatting to do, and am waiting on a cover design to be finalized. The good news is, it’s not one of those “the e-book is damn near as expensive as the print version.” Price for Kindle will be $3.99.

Kieran Shea, Nik Korpon, and Steve Weddle hosted Baltimore’s first Noir at the Bar at Slainte on Thames Street last Sunday. Weather held down the crowd a bit, but the writers who were able to make it were worth a snowy slog: Rob Hart and Todd Robinson (both drove all the way from New York, then back that night so Todd could work a double on Monday), Merry Jones, Jon McGoran, Art Taylor, Dennis Tafoya, Jen Conley, and Jeff Alphin displayed the wide variety of what crime fiction and noir are capable of though grit and humor and a severed penis in a jar. The Godfather of N@B, Peter Rozovsky, made the trip from Philadelphia to lend his imprimatur. This was the first such slam The Beloved Spouse and I have been able to attend; it will not be the last.