Blarney Rubble: Cover reveal!

Cover reveal! I had hoped to release it today, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, but the cover will have to do (courtesy of Mike Sottong). With a little "luck," the book will be available very soon. If you'd like an Advance Reader Copy to review, let me know and I'll add you to the list!

Blarney Rubble: Humorous Suspense from Bill Cokas

Can he keep quiet enough to hear destiny calling?

For a local politician in the North Carolina mountains, Frank McCarthy has been remarkably good at keeping his mouth shut. His soft-spoken ways got him elected to the school board and helped him overturn a longstanding zoning policy. At home, though, his wife yearns for more conversation, compliments and compassion. 

After a funeral trip to his ancestral Ireland, with a detour to kiss the Blarney Stone, Frank’s behavior takes a turn for the bizarre. He’s caught on camera groping an intern and his public apology fuels a social media circus when Frank goes way off script. A friend suspects he’s been blessed with the Blarney Stone’s fabled “Gift of Gab.”

Blessing or curse, Frank can’t shut up, and to save his career—and his marriage—he returns to Ireland to confront the Blarney Stone and break its grip on his tongue. There he encounters a demure grieving innkeeper, a patriotic security guard and a scheming grifter who all offer to “help” Frank to complete his quest. Compounding his trouble are a trio of mythical creatures who seem to have sprung to life from the long-forgotten Celtic tales of his youth.

Being Irish has never brought him much luck, but breaking the curse will require Frank to finally embrace his heritage, with all its flaws. Going up against a centuries-old stone calls for rock-hard resolve.


Available in Spring 2016, Blarney Rubble is a fresh, contemporary mix of suspense, relationships and humor in the tradition of Carl Hiaasen, Christopher Moore and Janet Evanovich.

I've (almost) reached the halfway mark!

Now of course, this refers to a first draft, and we're talking ten chapters of a first draft that may ultimately have more than 20 chapters, but that's all I've outlined so far. So this is a very qualified celebration. But it feels like progress nonetheless. As avid readers of this blog know (Lock him up! He's referring to imaginary people!), I was well into (probably halfway, ironically) a middle-grade adventure novel (working title: Opposite Day) when I decided to shelve the whole thing. One day, I might pull it back out, and one day it might actually be shelved in a physical library, but I just wasn't feeling it. I'm not sure if it was the voice, the "reining in" of my normal adult-speak (vocabulary/idioms/cultural references) or the crazy-elaborate dual world I had built that spun out of my control, but I no longer looked forward to opening that file anymore.

Now I'm onto another "humorous suspense," much like my first two novels. Also, like my other two novels, this one takes place partly in Europe–in this case, Ireland. I like to escape when I read, and when I write, and since I don't write sci-fi or fantasy, which necessitate travel into other times or even universes, I satisfy this urge with vicarious tourism. In my plots, the characters always travel for a legitimate reason that's integral to the action–not like in my old ad agency, when we'd try to sell a commercial that took place in an exotic location (think Rice Krispies in Belize) purely to shoot in an exotic location. Without the trip to Greece, Ring of Fire would have made no sense. Without the detour to Germany, Battle Axe would have fallen apart. And now, with [working title here], my main character is compelled to hit the Emerald Isle for reasons critical to his health and his marriage.

I hope to begin posting regularly again soon, and it won't always be about the status of the WIP (work in progress), but I have given myself a loose-but-looming deadline, so one way or another, I'll be writing.

Podcast with Wattpad!

I've done announcer-type work and voiceovers for years as kind of a side job, but I still don't love listening to myself. You, however, are welcome to. This is an interview I did last week with the exceedingly nice Pam from Wattpad, a very popular site for writers to post their work and gain free exposure. I'm bound to Amazon to keep "Ring of Fire" there exclusively for another few weeks, but I posted "Battle Axe" on Wattpad back in March and it's already received over 100,000 "reads." Pam asks me about my background in fiction, cartooning, advertising and whatever else we can think of.

Listen to it here.

Choose Your Friends Carefully

What I mean by that is, if at all possible, during your formative years, become friends with someone who, a few decades later will offer to design your ebook cover as a personal favor. Make sure this person is someone who displays very little aptitude or passion for graphic design at the time, but through hard work and dedication miraculously transforms into a visionary artist and Photoshopper par excellence.

Well, that's what I did, anyway, and look what it got me.

I'm posting a larger cover of my debut novel Ring of Fire here, mainly to give it a place to live so I can send out links. My designer--the multi-talented Mike Sottong--worked with my crude notions of a concept and created what you see here. The plot of Ring of Fire involves a nefarious (and occasionally hilarious) scheme to monitor college student's purchase habits--using hidden cameras--and then exploit them. Where are the cameras? Based on this cover, where do you think? The basis of the ring on the cover was Mike's (and my) actual class ring, from the now-defunct Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville, Maryland.

There are conflicting opinions on whether ebooks even need covers, or if a cover makes a difference. That's a topic for another blog post. However, I'm also making Ring of Fire available as a paperback, and paperbacks need covers. Shamefully, I do judge books by their covers, and I wanted mine to look professional. First impressions and all.

Should you desire a cover for your ebook/paperback, Mike has graciously offered to work with select indie authors at a greatly reduced rate (possibly for free, depending on the terms). Just let me know and I'll hook you up.