Coming in Early 2014

I am proud to announce the unveiling of my next project, "Ghosts, Monsters and Madmen."

The cover art is set, and the rough draft has been compiled. There is still much to do before I send it out to proofreaders, but the important thing is that a rough draft now exists. 

This anthology will contain a mix of stories previously published by Pill Hill Press, LL Dreamspell, Yours Truly on Amazon KDP, and a couple that are new. It is a blend I hope everybody finds to their liking.

Happy Holidays!

Dreamspell Nightmares Now Available.

Dreamspell Nightmares is now available at Amazon.com. It is published by LL Dreamspell and is $4.79 on the kindle, and $16.95 for a trade paperback. It contains the first short story I ever wrote, titled Designated Driver, and another that I wrote a few months later called Picking Dewberries. It's interesting to see how much my style evolved just between those two stories.

Anyways, Designated Driver is the story of man driving on a lonely highway late at night and finds a wrecked vehicle. A short time later he picks up a strangely silent individual on the side of the road, and drives off in search of help. It isn't long before he realizes that things are not what they should be, and that his trip has just taken a sharp left turn into a very bad place.

Picking Dewberries is the tale of a little family outing as Karin Sellars and her husband and son stop on an obscure dirt road in the back country of south central Texas to pick dewberries. Pretty soon Karin realizes that her husband is missing, and there is a surprising threat from a childhood menace hanging in the trees on the roadside. Now the question is whether or not she can prevent anything else from being on the menu other than dewberries.

Picking Dewberries is also the inspiration for the novel I'm currently working on, and is the temporary prologue until I can go back in and replace it.

Anyways, that's my big announcement for today...other than that I also got into a tug of war with a raccoon over a bag of cookie cutters in my kitchen. But I'll save that for tomorrow's post.

Happy Monday!

Booyah!!!!!

"Under A Racer's Moon" has been accepted by LL Dreamspell for their Dreamspell Nightmare's Anthology. That makes my tenth short story accepted for publication this year.

I have cracked double digits!

And while I am hopefully on pace to achieve my goal of writing twelve short stories in a year this week, this particular milestone was just as important. It was all about making sure that those stories were of a quality worthy of being published.

This feels good folks.

On another note, since replacing Diet Dr. Pepper with regular Dr. Pepper, the shaking in my hands has noticeably subsided. So apparently I am doomed to be fat, but with steadier hands. Oh well.

Oh, and as far as the hat in the dishwasher experiment went . . . my hat is now clean, but somewhat "softer" and floppier than it used to be. I'm not sure a straw hat is supposed to be "soft."

UPDATE: And thus inspired, I finished up my first draft of "Roadkill" a little bit ago. It's still very raw, but I will soon have it ready to print out and send to my proofreaders. Story number 12 is now in the final stages towards being done. Who knows, I may be able to pull a thirteenth out of somewhere before this year is over.

Final Labors

Now that I have input from several different proofreaders, the time has come to collate their advice and corrections and get the story ready for submission. This particular story didn't get a lot of corrections from any of them, so it shouldn't take too long. I hope. I intend to get it fixed and submitted by tonight. Then it's on to the next project.

Whatever that is.

I've got an idea for Pill Hill's Pandora anthology, but it still needs more thought. A couple of other half baked ideas also lurk at the edge of my mind. The interesting thing is that with the submission of "Racer's Moon," I will only need to write only one more story to achieve my goal of twelve stories this year. I actually feel pretty good about that. But I want to make sure that whatever I write measures up to the quality of my other stories, so there can be no hurrying.

Then I can wash my hands of short stories and focus on bigger projects.

Ka-Ching!

L&L Dreamspell has accepted "Closing Time" for inclusion in a future anthology.

Time to get back to writing!