Not Quite Christmas, But Close

So, this is a post to promote my holiday story "The Day Before The Day Before Christmas," which is available on Amazon.

This is one of those stories--that I just can't stop writing--about a town with an odd belief or practice: namely, you're not supposed to drink soda on the 22nd of December.*  Visiting Uncle Jake thinks nothing of it, and downs a glass of Diet Coke, but discovers that bad luck befalls those who break this rule, at least according to his nephew and niece.

Yeah, another one of those, but surely not the last.  Feel free to pick up a copy at Amazon AT THIS LINK.

Often, I disparage my own work, because I can see only the flaws, but like "Newfound Fame," which I went through recently to re-format it, I find a lot to like in this story.  Would I go so far as to say that it is good?  Sure, why not?  It's nearly Christmas!

*Yes, Big, I understand that . . . but the entire story takes place the following day.

Don't Look A Dark Gift In The Mouth

Several years ago now, I was feeling nostalgic about the local carnival and city festival in the town where I went to high school, so I wrote a story about it ("Round & Round").  And I enjoyed it so much that I wrote another one ("Try Your Luck") and another one ("Father's Day In August").  Decades went by, and I wrote another one, this one inspired by a handsome douche lamenting that being attractive is what he refers to as, the dark gift.  Be careful what you say around me, or it'll wind up in a story too.

This one isn't really a nostalgia-fest.  Sure, it takes place in 1992, and I mention the music that's playing on the speakers (like I always do), but this one is a more modern story, and not at all based on experiences I had all those years ago.

A teen girl (Nobie), her brother (Grump) and his boyfriend (Eris) go to the Pickle Days festivities, and play a wheel of fortune carnival game.  And what the wheel stops on is something called The Dark Gift.  People like to be center of attention, and everybody wants to be attractive, but be careful what you wish for, kid.   

Check it out HERE.

As far as the cover goes, I tried having A.I. generate me an image of Nobie (basically typing in teenage girl at carnival that everybody loves), and this was the best one it gave me:*

Then I told it a couple more details, like that I wanted her to be dark-haired and that everybody loves her, and it came up with this:

So strange how different--almost opposite--those two girls are.

*The first one I tried created me a girl at a carnival, but in five of the six images, it was the same girl, with a tell-tale mole beneath her left eye.  I don't understand how the program does this--is there an actual girl somewhere that looks like this that it is stealing the image of?--but it's funny how much the image changed when I added "that everybody loves" and the genre).

Final Friday in December

Back in 2020, I wrote a whole series of "Dead & Breakfast" stories, set in the Noble Oaks B&B in Vernon, Idaho*, and one of them was "The Last Friday In December."  As time went by, I recorded the stories, one by one, and put them out for people to buy (or not buy).  But for some reason, I never published "Last Friday," even though I recorded it way back when.**

Anyway, this past week, I had the choice between editing my performance of either "Reply Hazy" or this one, and as I liked this story more, it was what I picked.  And I still like it.

In this one, Mason Bradley gets a phone call, telling him that he can be of use on the night of December 28th, and the caller is clearly not of this world.  He enlists Natalie Whitmore (the other night clerk) to help him, as the ghosts seem to have recruited him to save someone's life.

I know I'm not a good self-promoter, but you can pick up the story HERE.  Thanks.

*I saw this week that there's a Vernon, California (as well as one in British Columbia), but it's not at all related.

**Gino Moretto sent me a cover back in 2021, so I couldn't use lack of a cover as an excuse.  Is that your hand, Gino?

Rish Outcast 286: Q&A 2024 Part 1

Rish answers questions from listeners*, and plugs his next audio collection (buy it here).

Note: Due to unforeseen delays, this episode had to be split in two, and something I refer to at the beginning never actually appears. Sorry, kids. If you discover more disturbing errors, let me know.

*Questions from Rob Broughton, Keith Teklits, even Gino Moretto.

To download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

To support my vain efforts on Patreon, click HERE.

Logo by Gino "Moo & A" Moretto.

Novel Progress (Or Lack Thereof)

My big goal for August was to get my audio production of my novel "Balms & Sears" to sixty percent.  Unfortunately, I'm not going to make it.  

I did record two chapters last week, though, which isn't nothing*, and maybe I'll do one more tonight.  Still, at this point of the month (written back in August), I'm at nineteen percent, with no signs of getting more done.  I did go to the library and formatted the next couple of chapters (they have MS Word there you can use for free), but whoa, I discovered a chapter that was supposed to have gone earlier, and instead of simply snipping it and pasting it early in the narrative, I simply changed a couple of details so it works where it appears.  That sort of thing--it will come as no surprise to you--eats up a lot of writing time.  Sigh.

And since I'm here, I'll go ahead and post my Exercise Goal progress, instead of making it two posts (I originally wrote this all before, a week ago, but the laptop restarted as I drove back from the cabin and I lost it all (as usual).

So, at least as far as exercise goes, I'm way ahead of the pack.

*Though my "chapters" tend to be so small, they should hardly qualify as such.  I know the rules aren't set in stone, but I probably ought to do that thing where there are only ten or twelve chapters, and each one has several "segments" or sections of the story in them.  But it's too late for me now, son.  Maybe I'll implement that on the next one.

To Save Me From Tears...

If you listened to my last Patreon address*, you may remember that something I vowed to do in July was to put out a story where I didn't wonder if it was at all good in the author's note.  And the tale I chose to achieve that goal was a 2022 holiday tale called "But the Very Next Day..."

It's a story that was intended to be humorous and light, about an office that participates in Wham!ageddon (that contest where people see who can go the longest without hearing Last Christmas by Wham!) and start taking it way too seriously.  But along the way--probably when the first person who failed in the challenge died of a freak accident--I decided to move it away from an amusing story to something heavier and more Suspense/Horror-centric.

Does it work?  Would it have been better with a lighter tone?  Do I write about the same office experience I had in L.A a little (or a lot) too much?  Next year, should I give it to someone better?

Find out HERE.  

And for my Limey brothers, click HERE.

*And if you didn't listen, you're streets ahead.

Even When It's Bad...It's Still Pretty Good

I suppose it's time for me to start doing this again--promoting something that I wrote that you can choose to buy, if only you know it's out there.  Big once challenged me to write a story about my time working at Little Caesar's Pizza, and wrote one of his own, the excellently-named "Little Caesar's Ghost."  So, much, much later, here is mine.

It took me a while to come up with a title for this post.  I wanted to do a play on the word "pizza" or "triangles" or some reference to three-ways, even though the story isn't about that.  I didn't come up with anything great, but it'll do.

This was my original attempt at a cover, before I decided to let a machine handle it.

"Pizza Triangle" was one of the few non-genre stories I've written, trying to stretch myself as a writer.  There aren't any supernatural elements, and barely anything major or explosive goes on in its pages.

And that's a big part of why it took me over a decade to write it.  I had this idea of two best friends working at Little Caesar's Pizza, and how, when a pretty girl is hired, their friendship falls apart.  And that's soooooooooooooooooort of what "Pizza Triangle" is about.   

You can check it out HERE.

A Novel Goal For August

So, one of my goals for July was to start work on publishing one of my completed novels ("When You Need It Most," "Balms & Sears," or "A Sidekick To Miracles"), and I picked Balms--the story about the boy in high school with the power to heal.  I started on it, and got about five chapters recorded.

For August, I set the goal of getting the book 60% finished (which means, getting sixty percent of the book recorded, since I revise and fix typos and do clarifications as I'm narrating--and ostensibly, by the time I read "the end" or the author's note, it should be ready to publish that very day) by the end of the month.  But to figure out where I am, I either need to number all the chapters and find out what sixty percent of that is, or do a page count and determine how many I've gotten through.  Easy, no?

I just sat down and recorded another chapter (and there were good bits in both).  So, right now, the manuscript is 192 pages (it'll expand, believe you me), and after three recording sessions, I'm on page 27.  By my math, that's 14% finished.  Not great, but I originally divided 192 by 27 and got 7 percent, which is worse.

I can do this.

Yes, Another Audio Collection

It's finally here, my next audio collection . . . Volume 5 of "The Audio Fiction of Rish Outfield."  It's available and ready to purchase.

Okay, okay, this isn't the ACTUAL cover, but a mock-up Gino sent me as a test.  Still, it's so good of him to do it that, I did sit down and try to think up a story that could fit that title.  When I came to, I decided it just wasn't worth it, as awesome as that story might be.

So, this one is noteworthy because Big Anklevich recorded an introduction for it.*  Beyond that, it features the following stories:

A Lovely Singing Voice
Palm Reading (Flash Fiction)
Last Lunch At Charburger
Troubled Child
You’ve Got A Friend
Worrywart (Flash Fiction)
Monitored Conversation
Bad Trip
Birthday Boy (Flash Fiction)
Know When To Walk Away, Know When To Run

And, as a twisted bonus, I included the author's notes this time.  I mean, why not?

It's available to purchase AT THIS LINK.  I realize this has taken me longer than The Winds of Winter, but it's finally out there now.  What's an extra three years between friends?

*Though Audible did give me a hard time about that when I initially credited both of us as narrators on the audiobook.  I think something similar happened when he tried to put out a version of "Last Contact," after I had already claimed it as my work.

Good For Your Goal

One of the goals I've set for myself in 2024 is to publish my novel "Balms & Sears," a project I started in (I think) 2016 and didn't actually finish until 2022.  But if you're reading this, you know me, and that means you know there's no chance I'll actually achieve it.  To paraphrase Mace Windu, it's just not in my character.

But Big Anklevich, perhaps sensing a tremor in the Force, sent me the completed cover today, which has traditionally been the final step necessary before publishing.

And I think it looks good.  It doesn't EXACTLY convey what I intended--that of a boy who can heal dead or sick animals--but I'd say it's about 87% of what I wanted.  Plus, it's in black and white, and that really works for me, for some reason.

Will this be the last push I need to finally put the book out there?  It, uh, might.  Here's hoping.

The Female Protagonist Speaks!

Boy, this has been a while in coming.  I'm not going to make excuses, except to say that the audiobook version of the "Female Protagonist" collection is finally available.

I feel like I've spoken about this enough, but I see some of the other writers out there, flogging their works like their name is Molly and it's always March the seventeenth, so I can bear to say it once more.  

Once again, the contents of this particular collection are "A Lovely Singing Voice," "Roll With The Changes," "Office Visit," "A Gallon A Day," "Run Away," "Creature Feature," "My Funny Valentine," "Winter Break," and "Remember the Future," and I re-recorded a bunch of Author's Notes for inclusion in the collection (on the off-chance folks enjoy listening to them . . . since you can just hit Skip if you don't).

Plus, it's the only place I'll be releasing my performance of "A Gallon A Day," though I'd love to beg Tena or Renee or somebody to record it for me for an Outcast episode one day.

It's fifty-three audio files, plus the opening and closing titles, and the five minute sample (which I absolutely DIDN'T want to create once I thought I was done, but only took nine or ten more minutes to cobble together*).

It's available HERE on Audible.  See you there?

Of course, if you'd like to buy it for the Kindle, click HERE.  If you prefer a paperback, go HERE.  And for the crazy ones, there's a hardcover available HERE.

And now . . . on to the next one.

*I chose a bit from the end of Chapter 5 of "A Lovely Singing Voice," because you kind of have to arbitrarily pick something, and the moment when Tanissa realizes just what's going on with the neighbor girl is probably a good hook.  Plus, I'm sure I'll release that story in some other way, maybe just another volume of random audio stories, so it's good to have a five minute sample from it I can use.  

Many Covers of Eve

Oh, here's one I haven't plugged.

Back in 2019, for my annual holiday story, I wrote "The Many Faces of Christmas Eve," a tale that--say what you will--at least has a damn clever title.*  This is the one where the guy goes to a holiday dinner with the family of a girl he likes, and discovers that everyone at her parents' table looks just like her.

I put this out a couple of years back, and created my own cover for it, which, as bad as it looks now, was literally the best I could do at the time.

Yikes.

But what I did was, I took a color photo and, no pun intended, bled out all the color except for in the wine glasses.**

Maybe the problem is the Christmas font that I chose (and colored), or the fact that it's square instead of rectangular, but it does look bad.  Perhaps it's just too busy.

So, I asked the program to give me a table set up for Christmas dinner with an alien sitting on it.  But that was just weird--a conceit of the tale is that the main character doesn't realize he's dealing with aliens until late in the story, and doesn't see what they look like till the very end--so I asked for just a table set for a holiday dinner, as well as a spaceship flying by in the window.

It wouldn't comply, so I asked it to do just the table, and then asked it to do just the spaceship.  I figured that, windows being square, I'd be able to simply cut and paste the starship one into the window space of the table one.  It worked fairly well, though Big didn't think it looked very natural there.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.  I had pasted a lamp at the top of the window, to hide that it was a combination of pictures, but I wish there was a way to add the reflection of the lamp in the glass.  Regardless, Big thought it made the top of the cover too busy, so he removed it.  Ah well.

Anyway, here's the new cover, and I gotta say, it's night and effing day compared to the original cover.  The story, I'm sorry to say, is the same as before.  It's available right HERE.

 

*I was reminded to blog about this when I saw a DVD of THE MANY FACES OF EVE at the library yesterday and picked it up, never having watched the movie before.

**Oh, and that bit of parsley or salad or whatever in the corner, for some reason.  Huh.

Missing Bracelet Found!

A year or so back, I posted that I was going to sit down and record "The Case of the Missing Bracelet," but the file was incomplete.  I ended up having to cobble it together from the daily blog posts I was saving to my old laptop, which I wrote at the cabin with no internet.  And by the time I had what I assumed was a complete file, I just went on to the next thing, not recording it at all.

But more than a year later, I sat down and got the work done, which didn't seem like so much work when it's something I care about, and the story is out and available.  It's another Lost & Found series story, and while it's the least consequential one, it at least let me catch up with Will Choner and Beth Vance ("...and the rest," as the song goes) for a bit, enough that I followed it up with a longer, more significant story, which I ought to put out soon.*

In this story, a sexy fellow student asks Bethany Reilly to have Treasures Regained track down her missing bracelet.  She may not be on the up and up, but of course Will Choner still goes after it.

I am loathe to promote my own stuff (when I get to Hell, I will probably be assigned as a publicist to someone like Justin Bieber or Kid Rock or Kanye West, and I dread that as much as the whole fire and brimstone and verbally-abusive demons aspect of the afterlife), but feel free to go to THIS LINK and grab a copy of it.  Or don't . . . some bracelets weren't meant to be found.

*But probably won't.

Another Day, Another Gallon

A couple of years ago, I read an article about a woman who drank a gallon of water a day for an entire month.  It totally changed her life for the better, and in the end, she threw water (for lack of a better term) on the whole thing by proclaiming she was glad the month was over and she'd never have to drink water again.

It pissed me off enough to write this story, "A Gallon A Day," which is available o'er on Amazon.  It gives the month-long blog posts of Catherine Reilly, who tries drinking a gallon of water, as difficult as it is, every day for the month of April.  And it really does change her life . . . in increasingly impressive ways.*  I'm not sure how successful the story is, but it was really fun putting myself in the shoes of a made-up stranger for thirty-one fake blog entries, something I'd enjoy trying again one day.  Check out the story HERE!

P.S. I did record an audio version of this one, but though it's quite well done, it'll only be available in the Female Protagonist audio collection, available soon.

*I originally was going to write it from a male point-of-view (to make it less like a copy/parody of the actual woman's experience), but feared it would grow tiresome after having sex with eight to twelve co-workers, strangers, and supermodels throughout.  I still wonder how different that would have been from the woman's perspective.

Everyone Needs A Friend, Even In Paradise

Years ago, I wrote a story for a contest called "Friends In Paradise," and it wasn't until this past month that someone mentioned what a terrible title that is.  I was unable to come up with something better in 2011, and you know, that's how it'll have to stay for today.

But I didn't ever publish it in text form (at least not that I have a cover for), so when I got it out and dusted it off to include in my collection "Female Protagonist," I started thinking about what I would want as a cover for it.

Basically, a little girl smiling at or playing with a bunch of bugs, preferably on a Hawaiian beach.  And the program gave me images like this one:

There was a more horrible one it gave me, but I'll save it for a night when I'd rather not get any sleep.

I like this one: the girl is prettier than necessary, but the wasps look like wasps,
she looks happy . . . except for what is she holding?

Anyway, after a lot of tug o'war, I got a cover that I liked, and Big made it look professional(ish).

If you haven't read the story, grab it RIGHT HERE.  Bzzzzz.

Only Real On Paper

One of you keeps suggesting I create a physical copy of one (or all) of my books.  I have fought, screaming, weeping, and filling my diaper the whole time.

But no more.

As you know, Clob, Big has been putting out hard copies of his books, and told me that, since he's in the middle of a publishing whirlwind lately, if I sent him one of mine, he'd do the formatting of it for me, for the bargain price of a free copy.

Having physical copies of my work hasn't seemed to be a priority for me, even though there was at least one guaranteed sale.*  

Not only did Keith buy one, but he took a selfie to announce that he'd bought one!

Well, I had just published "Female Protagonist," which was an eighty thousand-word project, which seems like a good size for a paperback, so I sent it Big's way.  And it turned out to be much more of a process than I expected, to the point where my ego hesitates to ask Big to do another one for me.  But hey, it was very generous of him to do this, and I ought to order a few copies to sell along with action figures throughout the rest of the year, or send to the people who have crossed me in the recent past.

To my surprise, Amazon asked me what I wanted the book to cost (you see, in Audible, it doesn't ask, it just stamps an arbitrary cost on there, depending on how many hours it is), and I honestly didn't know.  Maybe it's too much, maybe it's not enough.

You can buy it HERE . . . if you like your books physical, and your protagonists female.

P.S. Big messaged me today, saying I had priced the collection so low I would only make a buck or so on each copy sold, but when I initially made it available for sale, I looked to see what his collection was going for, and marked mine slightly higher than his.  Turned out, I was marking my physical copy slightly higher than his digital one.  Whoops.

*I used to print out a copy of every screenplay I wrote, as soon as I finished a new draft, so I could have a copy on my shelf.  But a few years later, I took them down and used the backs to print shipping labels on.  I just had no need for a physical copy of my own work, you know?