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A new cover for Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People

Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People by Jim Nelson

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After a lot of scratching around in the dirt and a couple of heart-to-hearts with myself, I made the decision to ditch the old cover for Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. That cover attempted to capture the aesthetic of a classic Pee-Chee All-Season Portfolio that’s been doodled up with pencil and ink over the span of a school year. As much as I liked the concept, my artistic skills were simply not up to snuff for the challenge. I was never really satisfied with the final product.

The good news is, I’ve returned to the drawing board and come up with a cover I’m much happier with. The image to the above left is the result of that labor. I’m updating the ebooks on my various distribution channels as we speak. This is one of the great things about ebooks: if you don’t like the cover, you just change it. (For comparison, you can see the old cover in my original release announcement.)

Speaking of Pee-Chee, check out this great Flickr collection of folders marked-up and mutilated decades ago by school kids who were not altogether dissimilar to Gene Harland, the narrator of Edward Teller Dreams. My favorite in the collection? This one referencing Berkeley’s own The Uptones and featuring a ska sprinter taking the lead on the outside. In the 80s, you lived and died by a white pressed shirt and a skinny tie.

Junior High Pee-Chee - Front

Ring in the New Year: FREE ebooks on Kobo and Apple iBooks

A Concordance of One's Life by Jim NelsonFor the next month (or so), my short story collection A Concordance of One’s Life and novella Everywhere Man will be available to download for FREE on Kobo and Apple’s iBooks. That’s right, free, as in no money. Get ’em now:

A Concordance of One’s Life: Kobo / iBooks
Everywhere Man: Kobo / iBooks

Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People by Jim Nelson
While you’re at it, be sure to download my latest novel Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. It’s not quite free but available for the cut-rate bargain of 99 cents on Kobo, iBooks, and Amazon.

(Why aren’t those first two books free on Amazon? Amazon won’t allow me to price my ebooks for anything less than $0.99 without entering into an exclusive arrangement with them, which I won’t do.)

Happy New Year!

UPDATE: I’ve extended the free book giveaway through February. They’re also now available for free on Smashwords (Concordance, Everywhere Man). Grab ’em up, folks.

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Up at The Tusk, “This Shit Ain’t Ever Going to Work”

Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People-10_1410The Tusk has posted a new piece of mine about the tortured history of my new novel Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. A sample:

And how could I forget my friend’s father returning home one afternoon from work, tie loose and hair splayed, bedraggled from wrestling some top-secret problem? Most likely not a problem scientific in nature, but bureaucratic. Thirteen years of age or so, a computer geek-in-training (largely because I wanted to grow up and write video games, unaware that a prerequisite for writing video games is to have never grown up), I was fascinated with the engineering problems these nuclear scientists must have faced every day. Sitting cross-legged on the lime-green living room shag playing Axis & Allies (and losing badly), I asked how his latest project was proceeding.

He leaned down to my ear and whispered: “Jim, this shit ain’t ever going to work.” Then he went to the kitchen and cracked open a beer from the refrigerator. By “this shit” he meant the LLNL’s latest budget-busting project, the Strategic Defense Initiative, a la Star Wars, a system of laser-equipped satellites promised to protect our country from ICBM attack and end the Cold War. You know, that Cold War, the mad weapons race the laboratory at Livermore had enabled and fostered and contributed to over the prior thirty years.

Read the whole thing at The Tusk. And while you’re at it, read Nate Waggoner’s brilliant dissection of how authors’ are learning to burnish their own laurels in today’s world of social media and independent publishing, “On Self-Promotion”.

Announcing Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People

Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People by Jim NelsonIt’s with a great deal of relief I announce the publication of my new novel, Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People.

Yes, relief. I’ve worked on this book for over ten years taking it through six major revisions, including one of Melvillean proportions (the manuscript was too large for Microsoft Word, forcing me to split it into two files). What started as a throwaway line from an unrelated short story—”His father studied thermonuclear reactions. He could explain Nagasaki at the subatomic level”—grew into an undertaking that has consumed a double-digit percentage of my adult life and a fair chunk of personal sanity. I pushed the manuscript aside twice out of resignation, only to return to it years later convinced I could get it across the finish line. Most achingly of all, it received substantial interest from an agent who was patient enough to read three revisions…only to walk away from it, not convinced it was something she could get behind.

No matter. It’s done now. Saying “It feels like a weight has been taken off my shoulders” is too wordy. Strike “It feels like” from that sentence. It’s not a simile. Finally I can see straight, for the first time in over a decade.

Read more & learn how to download
Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People

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The Tusk’s Fiction First Friday: “Roast”

I’m pleased to share that The TEdward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People by Jim Nelsonusk has published an excerpt from my upcoming novel Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People. Titled “Roast”, it’s the novel’s opening chapter and introduction to the narrator, Gene Harland. Here’s the opening grafs:

The Petrenkos were barbecuing people. They barbecued in sweaters and jeans, they barbecued in swimming trunks and bikini tops. The first clear weekend of the year, they rolled their venerable Weber out from its corner in the gardening shed and ratcheted on the attachments. With strips of steak and breasts of chicken arranged on a marble slab, they lit the mesquite and charcoal with a long match and grilled into the sunset.

Devout barbecuing people, the Petrenkos faithfully miniaturized the Great Outdoors in their backyard. It was nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny with candy-striped patio furniture. The kidney-shaped pool was as blue as Tidy Bowl water and the hose-fed slide, a kitsch Niagara Falls. Paths of crushed volcanic rock that stuck to bare feet wound between the tropical and jungly flowering greenery. The only way to leave without appearing desperate was through the patio door next to the grill, a door Ives Petrenko guarded with an oversized barbecue fork.

I’ll announce Barbecuing People‘s release here, of course.

I owe Tusk editors Lizzy Acker and Nate Waggoner (who also illustrated the piece) deep thanks for inviting me to submit this for their site. Read the whole thing!