August 09, 2008
In Over Her Head - New Music Novel by Elsie Russell - Free Download
In Over Her Head, a cyber-thriller/romance is now available for free download. Seven years in the making, Elsie Russell, my spouse, started writing the book right after 9/11 and is her first novel. It's gotten great reviews from Publisher's Weekly and was a Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semi-finalist, but we've gotten frustrated getting it published. It's just damn near impossible for first novel's to be published now and when it is - they receive no promotion. Then when they are published if they don't sell like crazy, they're taken off the market and the author loses rights to have them re-published. It's just crazy. We decided to go DIY.
In Over Her Head - Free Download Plus Front Cover
If you like the book, you can buy it at Lulu.com and in about 6 weeks at Amazon. After reading several articles about this new download literature environment, and one in particular by Neil Gaiman we decided to give it away for free, with the front cover and hope people like it enough to buy it. I've read it 10 times now and I couldn't put it down every time I read it. Which is pretty weird. But of course, I'm biased. But not really that much...haha!
Synopsis:
The debut of Penny Bell's's groundbreaking musical composition—featuring the use of mysterious extremely low frequency waves—takes a startling and tragic turn when several concert-goers die in their seats during the performance. The once-bright horizons of Penny's career collapse, and she retreats to a dank Soho basement apartment lit only by the glow of computer monitors and electronic synthesizer displays. There, using herself as a guinea pig, she sets out to unlock the secrets of her beautiful and deadly symphonies. But a series of strange coincidences intrude upon her solitary quest. Her apartment is ransacked. Her neighbor, the ethereal erotic performance artist Ulla Nova, disappears after her studio is broken into. And then Ulla's charming and damaged young choreographer appears, and sweeps Penny off to Europe to search for the diva, plunging Penny into a seedy and unfamiliar world of jet set artists and international intrigue.
And I designed the cover. I'm sure some of you guys recognized my crazy graphics!
Here's a brief bio of the author:
Elsie Russell's bohemian upbringing with artist parents in Europe and the states provided much of the material for this novel. Her mother Andrée, a Beaux Arts Graduate, frequented the postwar Paris avant-garde art scene with her photographer brother Robert Déscharnes where she met Alfred Russell, then a rising star abstract expressionist painter, soon married him and had Elsie. Robert Déscharnes went on to become famous for his art books and life-long friendship and collaboration with Salvador Dalí. From the start she was dragged around with the rolled up canvases until deposited for high school in Rome at St. Stephen's, a prep school warehouse for jet set kids where she got a great education with her disaffected aristocratic classmates. Summers were often in Cadaquès, Spain, with her cousins and Dalí and his colorful entourage. Later, while struggling in New York as a painter, she met her spouse Jeff Harrington, Juilliard trained composer and software architect, exposing her to yet another world of dazzling misfits. For more information about Elsie Russell please visit her websites:
Short Stories of Elsie Russell.
Paintings of Elsie Russell.