I’m in the middle of a “blog tour.” The idea is that I write things–guest posts on any topic I like, answers to interview questions, or posts from the perspectives of characters from Burning the Middle Ground–or the blog reviews me, or the blog puts up an excerpt from the novel–and for about a month, one blog after another shows off something related to my work. I’m almost halfway done, and it’s way fun. And people I’ve never heard of are liking my Facebook author page (if you haven’t done that, please do!), so maybe it’s working. Unlike with big presses, people aren’t hearing about BTMG all at once… it’s a slow build… if it builds anywhere (that’s up to you; please, share this post!). Here’s the halfway recap.Click on the image to get to the blog.

1. Read 2 Review: Guest Character Post by Sara Cox

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Sara, a minor character in this book (but I have plans for her, mwah-ha-ha), shares her opinions on protagonist Ronald and fellow antagonists Mike and Jake. Then she briefly gives her own perspective on Ronald’s visitation by the ghost of 10-year-old Fran McCullough.

2. Readings Sunshine: Book Review

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I chose an image of the synopsis in English, but the page is in Portuguese first–I’d love to have a multilingual, multinational readership! Scroll down from this synopsis and see magical words like “I recommend it to everyone who likes horror stories and dark fantasy.”

3. Spellbindings: A Guest Post on Building Horror/Fantasy Worlds

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Burning the Middle Ground is written to stand alone, but it’s part of a world I’ve been building for more than a decade. Little pieces like this one come closer to showing you how big that world has gotten than the glimpses you get in the novel… which, like I said, stands alone, but is intended as the first of a trilogy that gradually brings the details I’ve built in stories’ backgrounds into the foreground for epic confrontation.

4.Beagle Book Space: Tour Spotlight

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It’s quasi-osmotic: puppy goodness leeches into book goodness.

5. SpecMusicMuse: Review

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This guy is a sharp reader and says great stuff about my work. He also doesn’t like the fact that I’ve structured it how I do–with a significant backward time leap for part two before I resume the present-day action in part three–but for the most part, I feel warm and fuzzy, particularly since he’s right about the middle and end tying into the much larger universe.

5. Workaday Reads: Guest Post

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So this is one of the guest posts by me, rather than by a character, and it addresses a question I often get–I’m a film professor, so is my writing cinematic? The answer of course, is both yes and no. Interestingly, I address exactly why I do the thing that SpecMusicMuse didn’t like… but of course I wrote this guest post before seeing that review. Small mental world, eh?

And that’s all for now. Coming soon: a guest post about why I think the smartest people like horror, a character post by Winston Beecher about the McCullough Tragedy and Brian McCullough in particular, an interview, and more reviews. Keep reading!

By Andrew

L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. Coming soon from Nightmare Press, his surreal novel Noir Falling is sure to blow some minds. His latest novel, The Middle Reaches, is a serialized epic of weird horror and dark fantasy on Amazon Kindle Vella. Also in 2024, he released Records of the Hightower Massacre, an LGBTQ+ horror novella co-authored with Maeva Wunn, which imagines a near-future dystopia where anti-queer hate runs a program to "correct" deviants. Stains of Atrocity, his newest collection of stories, goes to uncomfortable psychological and visceral extremes. Other published works include novels Crazy Time, Burning the Middle Ground, and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written 35 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives in North Hollywood, California.

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