I just realized that almost a year ago, in January of ’09, my third novel A Gathering of Doorways came out. To very little fanfare or promotion. Now this was sort of a watershed book for me — I learned a lot in the two and a half years it took me to write, rewrite, redraft, edit, and revise this book.

And the end result, I think, is a pretty cool mix of urban fantasy (though I think of it as rural fantasy, as it takes place out in the country), horror, quest stories, and a mix of the supernatural and just plain weird. It’s also about being a father, and all that entails. It’s a hard book for me to read again…

The reason Doorways (which had the original title of Sixteen Miles from Everywhere, which I still kinda like better) got short shrift from the publisher, marketing-wise, is that the economy chose that moment in time (November ’08 to January ’09) to starts its upeaval, and tiny Prime Books got caught in the middle of it.

My two-book deal with Prime became a one-book deal, which turned out for the best — the second novel I was in the process of writing for Prime became the basis for the webcomic IN MAPS & LEGENDS.

Meanwhile, however, this rural fantasy novel of mine got lost in the shuffle.

In an effort to promote the book a little more, I recently bought some extra copies of A Gathering of Doorways, and I’m going to give away some of them to interested readers.

The only catch is, I want you to read the book, write down your reactions to the novel over at the book’s Amazon.com page (and/or write a blog post about it), and then give the book to someone else to read.

If you think you can handle that — please don’t ask for a copy if you don’t! — I’ll ship you a copy of the book. Just leave me a comment here on this post, or shoot me an email: mjasper at gmail dot com.

By the way, you can’t find Gathering at Prime’s website, but it’s available at the Wildside Press site here. You can also get a copy of my story collection Gunning for the Buddha there as well (in trade paperback or hardcover). Wildside bought out a good bit of Prime’s back catalogue earlier this year.

Any questions? Lemme know! And, as always, thanks for reading!