Writing Progress Report: Jan 12, 2015

This week's blog post is going to be a Situation Report regarding all the writing projects I have in various stages of pending, both to give myself a chance to get all the information organized and to give you guys a free peek at what's coming up for me.

Title: Heart of Steel
Genre: Science Fiction Romance
Length: Novel 
Status: To be released February 17, 2015
Summary: When reclusive cyborg Alistair Mechanus meets ER doctor Julia Parker, it is love at first sight--for him. While he eagerly drops his plans for World Conquest to woo her, ten years of solitude have left his social skills badly rusted. When his misguided act of kindness spirals out of control, however, Julia is forced to trust the mad genius with her life, and discovers a more vulnerable side under his armored plating. She has the skills he needs to unlock his forgotten past, but will learning who he used to be come at the cost of his remaining sanity?
Notes: I'm really really excited about this one. Whereas with Sheep's Clothing   I was sort of acting on impulse, this time I planned everything out (...sort of) and actually got some pre-marketing stuff done in the last half of 2014. Now I just need to finish formatting it for publication, which shouldn't take too long. I also plan on having a Goodreads giveaway to further build the buzz starting next week and leading up to the actual release date.

Title: "The Fetch"
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Length: Short Story
Status: Under Consideration
Summary: A young man finds himself pursued by a terrifying monster who believed he has taken something form it. He might not be so happy to give it back once he discovers what it was...
Notes: I'm really hoping to get this one published in a magazine or something. Call me weird, but even as a self-pubbed author I feel like getting something I wrote chosen by a publisher will validate me.

Title: "Siren Song"
Genre: Diesel Punk
Length: Novelette
Status: Under Consideration.
Summary: Raymond Crowe, a Mage living in Manhattan in 1937, investigates reports that a Mundane nightclub owner might be using a dangerous potion to beef up his singing talent, at the risk of driving the singers insane. Crowe must not only get the potion out of the hands of a Mundane who doesn't understand the risks, but also rescue the sister of one of his Mage contacts and find out who was distributing the stuff in the first place.
Notes: This was my first diesel punk story, and I'm sending it off to magazines for the same reason I'm sending off "The Fetch". This one's quite a bit longer and more involved though, and I can easily see using its setting for further works. We'll see how it goes.

Title: Hungry as a Wolf
Genre: Weird Western
Length: Novel
Status: Beta Reading
Summary: In this sequel to last year's Sheep's Clothing, Wolf Cowrie is back, with a dangerous mission that will test him to the limits: the mayor of a mining town in the Dakota Territory has hired him to investigate the disappearance of the gold mine that the town relies upon for its income. First problem: The gold mine in question is in the Black Hills, right in the middle of Sioux country. Second problem: A lone survivor managed to escape whatever befell the mine, only to transform into something undead and craving human flesh. Third problem: The mayor's daughter seems to have taken a shine to Wolf, and Wolf is still recovering from the tragic end of his previous adventure. What's a gunslinger to do in a situation like this?
Notes: Once I finish getting beta reading feedback on this one and subsequently polish it a bit more, I'll be kicking it over to my editor for a thorough second eyeball check. I plan to start a crowdfunding campaign to finance the nuts and bolts, but I'm still vetting the different platforms.

Title: "One Spooky Case"
Genre: Fantasy Mystery
Length: Novella (for now)
Status: Rewriting
Summary: A by-the-books Watchman gets paired up with a Watch necromancer to investigate a girl's murder in the city of Port Vandalar.
Notes: I have a lot of rewriting to do with this, which might very well double its previous length in order to give the story the tension it deserves and a more satisfying climax. After that, it may well be novel-length. Who knows?

Title: Necromancy Will Kill Your Dating Life
Genre: Supernatural YA
Length: Novel
Status: Rewriting
Summary: Tiffany Blackheart is a perky, outgoing high school student who wants what every seventeen-year-old girl wants: good grades, friends, and a boyfriend. Especially a boyfriend. There's just one problem--she's a necromancer. Being able to talk to the dead hasn't done kind things for her social life, and neither will the buildup of spectral activity that's due to peak on Halloween. Finding herself on the eve of finally landing a boyfriend, Tiffany has only a week and a half to figure out what's going on before everything blows up in her face.
Notes: This was my NaNoWriMo novel, and I'm taking a heavy editorial chainsaw to the thing before I let anyone else see it, even my usual beta readers. This is my first YA novel, so I'll need to find some actual teenagers to help me get the details right. High school was a really long time ago...

Title: Heart of Ice
Genre: Fantasy Romance
Length: Novel
Status: Active WIP
Summary: Irina Zimaburya has spent the last six years as the Winter Princess, with her powers over ice and snow making her the ideal living weapon in a war that started when she was twelve. Now, on the eve of peace, Irina must try to remember what it is not to be a weapon, but a woman, and relearn what it is to not be feared during the course of peace negotiations. Prince Heinrich is determined to thaw the newly-crowned Winter Queen's frozen heart, but his true mission is not all that it seems...
Notes: I will freely admit that this was loosely inspired by Frozen, though my heroine has a more messed-up backstory and little to no emotional support. I'm making good progress with the rough draft, though, so I'm overall happy.

So this is the rundown of my current projects. It looks like a lot, but jotting them down like this helps me keep all this stuff straight in my head and make it look like I'm a lot better organized than I usually am. I hope to get them done this year, and I'm confident that I will.

How many projects do you typically have going on at a time? Which one mine are you most looking forward to seeing published? Let me know in the comments!

Handling the Damsel in Distress

The damsel in distress is a very old trope, dating back to Greek mythology and beyond. You have a girl that needs rescuing, and this drives the plot. Simple, right? Well, in modern media the unqualified damsel in distress has become less popular, due to the rise of various shades of action girl and self-rescuing princesses. Even Princess Peach, the quintessential damsel of the Super Mario Brothers games, has taken a role in ensuring her own safety from time to time (though she still gets kidnapped more often than not).

As a result, the modern damsel in distress must be handled very carefully in order to avoid accusations of one-dimensionality, bad writing, or misogynist subtext. However, not every female character can be Xena Warrior Princess and get herself out of a pinch. Let's explore the reasons why a damsel might be put in distress.

• Simple Kidnapping. Yes, this old chestnut. The villain might need to take custody of your impending damsel for a series of reasons, whether it's for financial gain, to force another character's hand, or because the villain has a serious crush on her.
• She Has a Plot Coupon. Some damsels might possess an item (or know how to access it) upon which the plot hinges. This could be a tattoo that happens to show where the thing that everyone's looking for is, it it might be a book with an encoded message that tells how to get to the thing. In either case, get the damsel, and eventually you get the thing.
• She Is a Plot Coupon. The damsel has a certain ability or set of abilities that will allow her to get to the thing, or access the thing herself, or otherwise solve the plot's main problem. Or maybe she's the heir to the kingdom and everyone in the land is squabbling for the right to marry her--and then someone just cuts to the chase and makes off with her. (That someone might not even know she's a plot coupon when the absconding happens, only that she's pretty or important or what have you.)
• She Happened to be Handy. The damsel of convenience in these plots can offer the perfect opportunity to set up epic amounts of ass-kicking if the villain grabbed the wrong damsel out of the crowd. Whether this is foreshadowed before the throw-down happens is entirely up to the writer.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of why a damsel might be in distress, but it covers most of the basics. Of course, now that your damsel is in distress, let's explore reasons that she might not be able to get herself out of distress.

• Physical Restraints. Again, a classic. This might mean she's tied to a rock or locked in a room or tied up on the metaphorical railroad tracks. Barring any established skills as an escape artist, this is often a perfectly valid reason for the damsel to remain in her predicament and need rescuing.
• Geographical Restraints. The next best sting to tying her up is putting her someplace secluded where the hero can't get to her right away. She might be locked at the top of the tallest tower or parked in a stronghold on a secluded island or in the middle of the villain's stronghold with thousands of guards between her and the hero. In many cases, the hero might have to find her to rescue her, and him finding out her location can make up the bulk of the plot.
• Guarded by Something Scary. This could be anything from a trained Bengal tiger to the villain's trusted assistant Moe to a fire-breathing dragon, but in any case the scary thing provides a really healthy incentive to not try to run off.
• Drugged or Hypnotized. If the damsel is not able to properly get her bearings, obviously she can't make a valid effort to get herself free. Part of the plot might be her trying to clear her head and meet the hero in the middle, bot not always.
• Physical or Mental Handicap. This needs to be navigated carefully, lest one be the target of accusations of insensitivity. However, certain neurological conditions can make a damsel of either sex unable to properly defend herself from harm, or even recognize danger. A blind damsel might be able to use her senses to evade the bad guy, but that's still a form of distress.
• She's Naive. DANGER WILL ROBINSON! You better have a really good reason to use this one (like a sheltered upbringing) and it must be handled very carefully lest your prospective damsel be branded an idiot. I know as well as any that there are dingbats and airheads in the real world who wouldn't know a dangerous individual if he pointed a gun at their face, but if this keeps happening repeatedly without her learning her lesson or taking measures to protect herself (that's called character development, for those of you following along at home), eventually the audience is going to brand her an idiot and throw your book against a wall. If your damsel seems to exist solely to have the plot happen to her, you might want to consider heavy rewriting.

While the damsel in distress may have waned in popularity in recent times, she can still be an effective plot point if handled carefully. Just watch out that she doesn't become nothing more than a cardboard cutout with "LOVE INTEREST" written on it in Sharpie and give her motivations of her own, and you will be well on your way to having an interesting, sympathetic damsel.

 And now, for something completely different...

This week's progress report for Sheep's Clothing sales continues my slow and steady trend. Next month I will propose regular book-signings at the St. Louis Bread Company to see if I can do better there with more advertising and an expected crowd, and in October I plan to sell my books at Archon 38!

2.3%

A Modest Request: July Summary

You may recall that at the beginning of July I posted about my minor apartment flood and how it inspired me to try to sell 1000 copies of Sheep's Clothing by July 2015. Well, here's a summary of how I did this month.

Here is what I did:

• Signed up for five free book marketing sites
• Contacted as many book bloggers as I could find who would be even marginally interested in a horror Western
• Sent off seven review copies (plus one to my old college adviser, but that's neither here nor there
• Talked to a lot of people at work
• Contacted a few places near me to discuss the possibility of a book signing event

The results:

• Sold 15 copies of Sheep's Clothing, 14 of which were face-to-face sales.
• One book signing event scheduled for this month.

 It feels kind of anemic, but it was only my first month of this. I want to avoid pay-for-promotion sites as much as I possibly can, as several of them want hundreds of dollars to promote my book, and there are free promotion options for me out there.

My plans for August:

• Attend my book signing, bringing 100 copies of Sheep's Clothing with me. Sell as many as I can.
• Go through this list and post my book to as many of them as I possibly can.
• Post book promos to all the relevant Facebook groups I'm already a part of.

Of course, I'm also moving forward with my other fiction (which is the real key to getting traction with something like this). I'm taking steps to self-publish my SFR novel Heart of Steel, I finished the rough draft of Hungry as a Wolf (the sequel to Sheep's Clothing) this past Friday, and I'm hammering out a fantasy/mystery story entitled One Spooky Case.

Whew! I've got a lot of hard work ahead of me--but it'll be worth it if I can make this goal!

Sales Links

Once again, to make things super-duper easy for you to find, here are links to all the places my book is available for sale:

Amazon Paperback: http://amzn.to/1kkWLR6
Kindle eBook: http://amzn.to/1kDQj80
Barnes and Noble Paperback: http://bit.ly/1srHxel
Subterranean Books: http://bit.ly/1p8ghjO
CreateSpace eStore: http://bit.ly/1kkXguf

Also as a bonus, Sheep's Clothing is available at the St. Louis County Library (and by extension, to any inter-library loan systems they've partnered with).

Link: http://bit.ly/1qVrdEd

And of course, the progress bar:

16 / 1000

Black and White and Shades of Gray

Stories about good vs. evil are a perennial favorite. It's just a thing people have hard-wired into their brains that turn every conflict into Good Guys vs. Bad Guys, Us. vs. Them, Good vs. Evil. Stories of clear-cut morality in the central conflict are easy to understand, and easy to write.

The trouble is that they're hard as hell to write well, mainly because baseline humans don't come in Completely Good or Completely Evil. Trying to make every member of a group completely good or completely evil might work well if a certain tribe or nationality exists for the Good Guys to fight against, but doing this too often can get boring in a big hurry.

Evil goblins. Yawn.

Beautiful, pure-hearted elves. Ho hum.

As my tastes in fiction (and high fantasy in particular) have evolved, I've started finding the appeal in ambiguously gray characters. There's the hero who might do morally dodgy things in the pursuit of a noble goal. There's the villain who started out with the best of intentions, but couldn't stop his slide down the slippery slope of morality. Even Spider-Man realizes the temptations of having superpowers, and Darth Vader started as a good man.

Honestly, pure villains or heroes can get boring in a hurry. So you've got a white knight boy scout who always knows the right thing to do and goes around defending the innocent because that's what he does. So you've got an evil lord of evil who wants to use black magic to conquer the world because that's what he does. That might be great for simpler stories, but in complex, overarching epics, that lack of moral ambiguity gets old really quickly.

One of the grayest high fantasy series I've read recently is a Song of Ice and Fire, where you have a lot of factions working at cross purposes to get their own people on the Iron Throne, and very few of them are completely good or evil. You have innocents corrupted in the course of trying to escape horrifying events later. You have people set up as villains in early books, only to be revealed as morally conflicted and redeemable later. The only characters I can name off the top of my head who would fall squarely in the evil category are Cersei Lannister and her son Joffrey. Even then, Cersei is just ambitious and crazy and not as smart as she thinks she is, and Joffrey... well, has Cersei for a mother. And he's, like, twelve.

The best way I've noticed to avoid black-and-white morality in fiction is to get into the heads of both your heroes and your villains. Give the villain a reason for what he does besides LOL I'M EVIL. Maybe he does what he does to prevent something worse than him later on. Give the hero moral quandaries so he's not just LOL I'M THE HERO. Heck, Batman has done more than the Gotham police force to clean up crime, and even his allies (and Batman himself) sometimes question the measures he takes. Superman is the closest to a white knight that the DC universe has, but he has to worry that his superheroing might come back to harm his less-indestructible Earthling loved ones. Being completely good or completely evil should be hard.

Writing nuanced heroes and villains is a good way to add spice to your fiction and make your readers think. Your fans might side with one character or another for various reasons, but at least those reasons won't be exclusively because "he's the hero" or whatever. Writing in shades of gray rather than black and white also makes your story more interesting and enjoyable, and has a high likelihood of enticing your readers back for more.

And now, for something completely different...

Still making progress in my book sales (woohoo!), but I really hope they pick up soon. I'll be at Bookseller's Row at Archon 38 this year, my first time selling stuff at a convention, so feel free to come by if you're in Collinsville, IL the weekend of October 3-5 and pick up a copy!

And my sales progress:

1.3%

I'll be back next week with more ramblings and news! Follow my blog for regular updates!

Things I Wish I Knew About Self-Publishing Before I Started

As I get ready to self-publish my next book, I find myself looking back on the lessons that I have learned from publishing my first--things I wish I'd known the first time around. In hindsight they seem like fairly simple things, but they can mean everything in terms of success.

Let's dive right in, shall we?

Self-Publishing is Hard

It's not hard in the same way traditional publishing is hard--goodness, no. With traditional publishing they hard part is getting past the gatekeeper--usually the lead editor--but once you do, everything is gravy.  They take care of formatting cover art, promotion, and distribution. They have complete control over how much exposure your book gets.

The good news is that a self-pubbed author has complete control over all of this.

This is also the bad news.

Print-on-demand companies like Createspace do ease the pain quite a lot, but you, the author, are still in charge of getting all the different components together. If you don't plan this stuff out ahead of time (see below), you will likely be left scrambling.

Self-Publishing Can Be Expensive

Note that I said "can be" rather than "is". You will find sites all over the internet that offer "author services" that range from copy editing to cover art to formatting, for anywhere from a few hundred dollars to something equivalent to your first-born child. If you're not careful, you might drop a whole load of money into one of these places and get something in return that looks like crap.

Thus, it is imperative that you take the time to shop around. If you're self-publishing, you're not on anyone's schedule but your own. You will have plenty of time to get all your ducks in a row within whatever budget you happen to have.

Pursuant to that...

Plan Ahead

I will be the first to admit that I didn't plan out how I wanted to get Sheep's Clothing out there and in the public eye. I was just so excited by the prospect of getting my book published that I completely forgot about this step. This left me scrambling to get my marketing stuff all set up and to find reviewers that wouldn't cost me hundreds of dollars, and to contact bookstores for events and all that jazz.

It was way more stress than I needed.

Your best best is to plan your marketing about four months before you release your book. This will give you time to create buzz on the various book blogs and in your social media (you do have that, right?) and tell whomever you want to know about your Really Awesome Book Coming Out. It will also allow you time to line up venues for a book release party and for signings after release day. Trying to do all this after release really, really sucks.

In Conclusion

I was young and naive (...this past February) and I've learned some hard lessons since then. I hope to do better with my next self-pubbed book, but I'm sure this will be its own brand of a learning experience as well. The publishing world is always changing and evolving, and as more and more authors start taking the self-pub route, more people will find out additional quirks in the process.

Hopefully, if you decide to self-publish, you won't make the same mistakes I did.

Happy writing!

And now, for something completely different...

I've been making decent progress with selling my books this month, though not as much as I'd like. At the beginning of August I'll provide a complete breakdown of what I did in July.

12 / 1000 (1.20%)

Enjoy what you read? Follow my blog for regular updates!

The Fine Art of the Weird Western

I never really expected to write a weird western, right up until I decided to write a vampire story. I didn't want my vampires to be the beautiful elite sexpots that half of everyone was writing these days, and I didn't want them to be anything approaching love interests, like 90% of everyone was writing.

The obvious solution, of course, was to take them out of modern times and write a historical(ish) vampire story.

Then came the hard part: figuring out how to write a weird western.

Writing a weird western doesn't have to be hard. It can be complicated, mind you, because you have historical stuff blended with decidedly non-historical stuff, but if you keep a few elements in mind, you should be on the right track.

The Setting

This is one of two major things that makes a weird western what it is. The area of North America west of the Mississippi was one hell of a place. Nobody setting out to settle there had the least idea what to expect, and they often encountered lots of scary stuff, ranging from the wildlife to the natives to fellow settlers to outlaws who just wanted to kill you and take you stuff because they could. Because it was a great big expanse of unknowns, it lent itself well to ghost stories and legends and tall tales and all sorts of cool stuff.

Of course, if you want to do this properly, you need to do your research. There are lots of nonfiction books floating around that will give you a fair idea of what sorts of things were going on at that time and place, and reading any mainstream western novel will give you a pretty good snapshot of what life was like back then--wild, dangerous, thrilling, and everyone able to kill you. Not everyone was a gunslinger, but pretty much everyone able to walk knew how to use a gun.

Then again, your standard iron won't do much against a vampire, but that's there the horror bits come in.

The Critters

Take a look at the folklore of the day, and you'll find some pretty crazy stories in fairly short order. Shapeshifters, ghosts, boogeymen, vengeful undead of all shades, and that's just what the settlers cooked up. Native American folklore has even crazier stuff, with nature spirits and shapeshifting animals and things that we might call demons that will just eat your face if you don't handle them correctly or just stay the hell out of their territory. Vampires can be found in Native American lore (called Children of Jumlin, not apotamkin, which is a completely different critter), as can serviceable werewolves (not all of which are considered malevolent) and any number of things that roam around in the spirit world.

The Magic

The weird west genre always has some form of magical or supernatural element to it. This distinguishes it from its spiritual cousin, cattle punk, which tends to have science fiction elements like anachronistic tech levels. How you handle the magic and supernatural stuff depends largely on what rules you want to have apply to it. Is this something that anyone can learn (in which case your tale will swiftly become a monster-killing romp), or can only a few people use it, like shamans or whatever other Wild West wizards you want to have roaming around? Does it work well with technology, or not?

Basically, the magic goes hand-in-hand with your critters, because most wild west heroes are going to have to use something unusual to kill your beasties. Emptying a revolver into a vampire is just going to tickle him, but if you have a priest or holy man bless your gun, that's likely to get his attention a lot faster (making the guy with the blessed gun his next target, but that's how it goes). In Sheep's Clothing, my half-skinwalker protagonist Wolf was laid low and nearly killed with a silver dagger, because he's basically a werewolf from a different culture, and that's how werewolves roll.

 Lots of evil critters in folklore are repelled or harmed by good old-fashioned religious items, but that might largely depend on which banes you use on which critters. A Native American beastie might laugh at a brandished crucifix, for example, while a European monster might cheerfully set a Native American totem on fire. A significant chunk of your story might be a Muggle protagonist learning how these things work from a more experienced teacher, just in time for him to unleash hell on the supernatural threat in spades at the climax.

In Conclusion

A weird western, by its very nature, requires the writer to combine a lot of different elements that don't always go together. How much work you put into it and how you combine the different bits will determine what kind of weird western you have when you finish. The only real requirement is that you have a great time writing it, so that your enthusiasm shows in the final product.

And one more thing...

Here's a tiny progress update on my goal of selling 1000 copies of Sheep's Clothing:

7 / 1000 (0.70%)

Obscure Genres, Explained

As you browse the fiction categories of Amazon, you probably notice that a lot of the stuff has been sorted into neat categories: Horror, science fiction, romance, mainstream, whatever. Then there are those that people might not be familiar with, genres who are an actual thing, but might be a subset of one of the big categories or (gasp) a mix of two or more. You might have heard about these and wondered what the hell they're all about, because otherwise they're intermixed with the Big Categories and otherwise really damn hard to search for. Here is my humble attempt to explain them to you.

The "Lit"s

• Chick Lit: Let's start with one of the lighter ones. Chick lit is a relatively modern genre focusing on modern womanhood, generally through a filter of humor. It typically features a female protagonist whose womanhood is the central focus of the plot. In other words, a chick flick in book form. 
• Examples: Bridget Jones' Diary, The Devil Wears Prada.
• Misery Lit: And of course, way over at the other end of the idealism/cynicism scale is Misery Lit. This is supposedly biographical literature focusing on the protagonist overcoming trauma or abuse of many different kinds, to offer a literary catharsis for others who has suffered abuse. This genre has been rife with hoaxes (believed and confirmed alike), but regardless, if you can read one of these books without losing your faith in humanity, you have no soul. 
• Examples: A Child Called It.
• Boomer Lit: Boomer lit focuses on protagonists from the baby boomer generation. It typically explores all the elements of an aging population, but is also prepared to challenge the stereotypes that go along with it.
• Examples: The Hot Flash Club.

The "Punk"s

• Bio Punk: Bio Punk mixes organic technology and genetic engineering with the science of an earlier time. This was actually fairly popular in early science fiction as the smart guys were learning how the human body worked, and it's carried through to modern works as well
• Examples: Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Cattle Punk: Cattle Punk is to the Western what Steampunk (below) is to the Victorian setting. Imagine a Western novel with robotic horses, rayguns, and a gunslinger with a mechanical eye, and you've got a fair idea of what Cattle Punk is all about.
• Examples: Wild Wild West (movie)
• Clock Punk: Clock Punk is old-school Steam Punk. Yes, I know Steam Punk is old-school already, but this is even older-school--like pre-Industrial Revolution. Replace steam power with clockwork, applied to the same general results. Imagine the sort of crazy shit that Leonardo da Vinci might be up to if he had the ability, and you've got Clock Punk
• Examples: Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• Cyber Punk: This is the big one that launched a dozen sub-genres. Cyber Punk added the grittiness of the underclasses to what had previously been the shiny, chromey futurism of contemporary science fiction. In Cyber Punk you have underground hackers railing against The Man with the aid of cybernetic implants that let them do neat things like mentally interface with a computer.
• Examples: Half of everything by William Gibson.
• Diesel Punk: With the dawning of the Twentieth Century came the Industrial Revolution (yay!), mass manufacturing (yay!), and a little thing called World War One (boo!). Diesel punk does funky things with internal combustion engines and electricity, making for an interesting sort of Zeerust (that is, things that would be futuristic if they weren't set in the past).
• Examples: Bio Shock, Captain America: The First Avenger
• Steam Punk: This is the big one: Steam-powered gizmos in a Victorian setting. Imagine if steam, not electricity, were the medium to catapult humanity into a new age of technology, producing wonders like automata and other man-made servants of that type, alongside terrors like advanced war machines running roughshod over a world that isn't ready to counter them. Steam Punk covers not only literature, but film, music, comic books, and a fashion subculture, and strangely side-steps all the unpleasant issues of Victorian morality and gender roles
• Examples: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Other Stuff

• Weird Western: Where Cattle Punk is a science fiction take on the Western Genre, the Weird Western is more fantasy or horror. The frontier of that era was paved with ghost stories and legends, both from the settlers and the Native Americans, and the Weird Western works on the conceit that some of them are real.
• Examples: Desperadoes, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sheep's Clothing
• Bizarro Fiction: Hoo boy. Bizarro fiction is one of those genres where either you get it, or you don't. And the trouble with getting it is finding it half the time. Bizarro fiction typically takes place in a dreamlike parallel world where bizarre stuff is commonplace, and it works on its own logic that generally only makes sense if you just sit back and roll with it. Imagine if a novel dropped acid. The fun part is searching for these books, because some of the titles are downright profane.
• Examples: Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, The Ass Goblins of Auchwitz (... Told ya.)

Now, this is by no means a comprehensive list of the more obscure genres out there, but hopefully it will offer some help in figuring out what the hell is meant by these terms. I may make another post of this sort if my readers need help figuring out other subgenres.