My book Only Human is out now

Hi everyone,

There is a great new Urban Fantasy that is part action, part romance, part mystery and suspense, and part horror.  It's my novel Only Human.  I hope you take a look, and I hope you enjoy.

I'd love to hear that you think.

-Mike



“Dragons do not cry. They control their emotions. That is what all dragons were taught, but I am now the only one alive to remember this lesson.” 

 

Only Human by Mike Mehalek

Cover Art by Allie Raines
Now for sale at Amazon

What does it mean to be a human? 

Meet Vincent, a most unusual dragon who has been trying to avoid answering that particular question for thousands of years, ever since his kind banished him and forced him to spend the rest of his life as a human. When a new love arrives unexpectedly, Vincent discovers that the only way to find happiness is to revisit his violent past and to confront his uncertain future. Haunting, heart-felt, and sometimes funny, Vincent discovers that even through tragedy, the things we most often try to avoid are those that make us whole.

What others have said

ONLY HUMAN takes you on a journey through Vincent's past lives and loves as he navigates his present incarnation and the darkness that follows him throughout the ages.

-Heidi Ruby Miller, author of Greenshift

There's lots to love about ONLY HUMAN: action, mystery, secrets revealed and redemption. Add to that dragons (who doesn't love dragons?), wicked bad guys and an all-too-human narrator who will win your heart...the strongest element of this book is the love story...This is an epic, timeless story and a small intimate one at the same time. Dip your toe in, I don't think you'll be disappointed. -Jennifer Barnes, editor at Raw Dog Screaming Press
Purchased and enjoying!!...AND I had a dream I was a flying dragon last night! It was awesome! -Amazon Reader
Watch the trailer below

For fun
Who would play the characters in the movie version?

About Me

Mike Mehalek writes fast-paced lyrical books that can be enjoyed with one reading but have enough substance for re-reading. He brings stories to life that demand to be told, regardless of the hopes/dreams/fears/desires of his characters-the Story first-always the Story. 
He'd love for you to visit him at his blog, Writing is Tricky or on Twitter @mikemehalek
If you'd like to join his email list, please email mike.mehalek@gmail.com with like to join in the subject line.

Only Human Appendix excerpt

Below is an excerpt from my novel Only Human.  This selection is from the appendix, written by the character Kevin, describing his observations/hypothesis of dragon microbiology.  It's very different from Chapter One that I posted earlier.  You don't have to know or read any of this to enjoy the story, but I wanted to create and include something like this for readers who might have a thirst to learn a bit more about dragon lore, society, and physiology as it relates to my mythology.

I'd love to see your thoughts
Micro Biology

Only Human

Hello there!

Here is the first chapter to my urban fantasy manuscript Only Human.  I'm sure that there will be tweaks and changes as time goes by, but this is a relatively clean version to give you a feel for the style and form of the story.

You can use the controls to zoom and scroll.

I hope you enjoy.

-Tricky (Mike)

First Chapter 07 02 2012

Hey Kids, Look, There's Big Ben Again: A Real-Life Griswold's Account of His European Vacation (Part I)

Disclaimer:  

For April School Vacation week this year, Rob and I decided--well Rob decided and I cut him a check--to take our very own European vacation Griswold style--hey kids there's Big Ben and Parliament.  Until this trip, I had never been to Europe and the only time I'd been out of the US had been via a cruise ship, which everyone seems to vehemently state doesn't count as leaving the country.  I hadn't even ever been to Canada, so you can imagine how nervous and excited I was.

I don't want to say I was completely ignorant about Europe or anything un-American, but I was nervous because I didn't know nearly as much as I would have liked to (Until about three weeks before the trip, I didn't even realize that my phone had the capability to type a Euro symbol, I reserved that strange symbol for when my friends were being complete €====8s.

And So... 

with the disclaimer out of the way, I thought I'd post bits and pieces of the trip here for your consideration, and as a point of reference for when I'm old and senile and swear I've never been anywhere and stop hiding my stuff and my days as FDR's Secretary of State were the best years of my....but I digress

So Rob searched, planned, bought the tickets, booked the rooms, found our passports, made me pack some bags (the nerve of him), and before I knew it, as if by magic, I found myself at the airport, ticket in hand and ready to depart.

We made last minute calls and we were on our way.

Gettin' There's Half the Fun (Bullsh!t)

We took a night flight where instead of sleeping I, like a dumb-flunk, managed to watch The Dark Night and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows before a brief layover in Iceland--I'm still not sure what an Icelandic Kroner is worth--and then we were back in the air and headed to Paris.

This map shows Icelandair's flight which we saw while waiting in Reykjavik. When I saw it, delirious as I was from lack of sleep, I wasn't sure if it was my eyes or if the map really was all fun-house mirror looking.  Turns out the world is round and so this is how the Earth looks if you are from Iceland.  I particularly like how Boston looks due East of Florida, while Florida itself looks like it's situated itself in cold waters similar to Maine (that's a joke) 

Where did we go, what did we do after leaving Reykjavik  What did I learn, if anything?  Stay tuned.  More to come... 

You can now follow me on Twitter.  Don't fall for impostors.

Atypical Book Review: The Star Rover, Jack London AND how it teaches writing style

I read "a lot" this year--more than I usually can read in a year.  Last fall, I sold my car and started taking public transportation to work, and I've found that sometimes the thing I look forward to most after a long day in the office is the commute home.

And it's certainly given me some insights as to who I am as a writer and my writing style.  So for the first book, I thought to review here, I've picked The Star Rover written by Jack London and published in 1915, which taught me that writing style is more than word choice.

The Star Rover is perhaps one of the least known, "out-of-character" books by Jack London.  It's not something you'd expect to see from the person who wrote White Fang and Call of the Wild, at least on the surface.  It is a story of a university professor on death row for murder, who finds himself in a state of solitary confinement, bound in something similar to what we'd consider a straitjacket.  To escape the confines, he trains his mind to convince his body that it is dead, and as a result, his mind is able to leave his body and travel into his past lives.  These previous lives are framed together through the prison story.

The writing itself felt dense, and it took me the better part of a month to get through it.  The writing style seemed to be much more complicated than the directness of the other works I read by him ("To Build a Fire" comes to mind).  Despite the denseness, the writing itself was beautiful.  London was able to create well developed worlds in a tight space, and was able to keep me wondering where he was leading me.

Despite the different feel to sentence structure and introducing the element of astral projection, The Star Rover felt like Jack London.  Each tale, including the main story--the prison story--is filled with adventure, suspense, hope, despair, and ultimately death--all elements you find in London's other works...and this intrigued me...

It intrigued me because, until I read The Star Rover, my interpretation of style was more closely defined by the arrangement of words an author chooses.  e.e. cummuings plays around with capitalization, Cormac McCarthy does not use quotation marks for dialogue or an apostrophe for words like "don't."  What The Star Rover taught me as an "early in his career writer" is that style is also determined not only by words but also by the big picture, those global, recurring themes, that an author chooses to explore in writing.

Take Stephen King, for example--most people consider him a horror writer, but the most of his stories--and all of the ones that resonate with me and stay with me long after I finish--explore the concept of love.

In summation, as a writer, we have a style--and getting to learn that style is part of the fun of writing.  When looking for your own style, don't be locked into thinking "my audience expects me to write a certain way."  Tell the story, but remember to be true to it.  Something about it has captured your interest, and it's most likely one of those global themes and your perception of those themes, that makes it your style, that makes it your.

Mike Mehalek AKA Tricky AKA Trickywriter is back from the dead

Hi everyone,

Seems like I've been on hiatus from the blogging world for quite some time. That is because I have been!

The last entry I had on  livejournal, dated April,  10, 2008, was one of those silly online quizzes--the end result of that particular quiz determined what would appear on my tombstone.  Ironically, I died from the online world and a few people may  have had concerns that I died in the "real world too."
Well like Lazarus, I'm back among the living, with a new outlook, a new home, a new hobby or two and a new hope for humanity.  I've been writing (maybe even publishing a few small things here and there) and reading the way I should have been reading all along as a person who identifies himself as a writer.

So what better way to demonstrate this celebration than with a blog?  Not just any blog, a better blog--I'm not sure I completely even knew what blogging was back when I started--a writer's blog.

Granted, there are probably millions of writing blogs in some shape or form--a quick Google search
returned "about 69,000,000 results (0.29 seconds)--so I've attempted to make mine different from those.

The focus will be to discuss areas of interests for writers who feel that they have moved beyond the realm of amateur but have not quite made the break into the business.  I am a jack-of-all-trades-type and my blog will certainly have that feel to it.  Topics will include book reviews, snippets of writing history, random trivia--great for writing and also winning Stump! Trivia--and any other topics that tickle-my-fancy from what is happening in the industry to interviews discussions with fellow writers.
 
Most importantly, this blog is to remind you that you are not alone in the often lonely road to publication.

Thanks for talking the time to stop by!  Come back and visit!  We'll chat soon.

-Tricky (AKA Mike Mehalek)